On
New Year’s Day, I saw a cockroach on my bathroom sink.I couldn’t squish it. It wasn’t where I could
just run the water and send it on its way.I didn’t want it roaming around my mess, and I certainly didn’t want it
populating in my apartment.So I grabbed
a glass candle holder nearby and placed it on top of the roach to trap it.There was an air bubble, so it didn’t get
squished.I didn’t deal with it at all but
remembered not to move the candle.
Days later, my best friend visited.I asked him to deal with the cockroach for
me.He said it moved when he lifted the
glass.He took it with toilet paper and
flushed it down the toilet.Later when I
was cleaning the sink, I saw traces of roach poop where the roach had been
trapped.Its last few days were spent
trapped and shitting.At the promise of
freedom, it was killed and flushed.
I felt badly about that.Killing it when I first saw it would have
been the more decent thing to do.
Yes, I felt badly about that. Some days are like that for me.
Today's blog was supposed to be about oxymorons. I was inspired when I read, "Good Monday, Everyone!" on someone's Facebook wall and thought, "Well, hey! Good Monday is an oxymoron as Good and Monday are opposites! Why don't I write about all of the moronic oxies in my life!"
But as the best laid plans of mice and men often go astray, today's blog brought to you by Oxymorons was not to be.
As it turns out, my son, Ethan, whacked his head last Wednesday on a desk in school and ended up with a slight concussion. He was out of school for the rest of the week returning today. I was informed that he exhibited confusion (more than normal) at school, so the doctor thought it best to have his head checked (I've been saying that for slightly over a decade) at the ER... just as a precaution. JUST AS A PRECAUTION! Try telling that to his already jittery grandmother ... somebody please get her a few glasses of Dubonnet before we get home to calm her down.
So here we are waiting...waiting...waiting...in Hackensack. Who needs a house out in Hackensack? I'll tell you who, Billy Joel. No ONE! I just need to get home to cook dinner, write my lesson plans, write a new set, let the dog out for an overdue crap and I NEED THE CHIPMUNK MOVIE THAT'S PLAYING OVER AND OVER AND OVER IN THIS ER TO BREAK...PERMANENTLY! And I need my kid to be o.k.
Good Monday, Everyone! I say that with love and oxymoronic affection.
Here's how we are amusing the waiting room patrons as we patiently (get it... double entendre) await our turn...
P.S. Ethan was just asked by the medical student what he ate today. Ethan replied, "Well, I didn't finish my breakfast before school so I only had one waffle and for lunch I had the chips with ground beef. OH! But wait. I didn't eat the cheese because it was hard and disgusting."
By Lisa Harmon *Within reason. Results not typical. Please check with your doctor before deciding to be NOT ANGRY. Discontinue use if diarrhea, vomiting or rash occurs. If you have an erection for more than four hours, you're a hack. As long as I can remember, I've spent all my time trying to be NOT ANGRY! And while it is so good to be angry when I'm doing stand-up or writing my blog, being angry all the time is kind of a rotten lifestyle choice! But for me, it is hard to be NOT ANGRY! It seems like the only way for me to be NOT ANGRY is to avoid the things that make me angry.** **Including but not limited to:
Grape jelly
Poodles (standard)
Poodles (mini)
My family
My friends
The NYC subway
Mayor Bloomberg - thank you for extending my life so I can hate you for three extra years!
DIY furniture (yeah, right)
Software upgrades (I reiterate, yeah, right)
Google
The flavor vanilla (artificial and natural)
Shoes with ankle straps (I'm short enough dammit!)
People on the train that: fart, clip their nails, and/or eat moo shu pork
Religion
Fat clothes that all have patterns like tablecloths - I'm fat, not blind, jackass!
Poodles (toy)
Government
Yeast infections
Alternate side of the street parking
That overly-cutesy teddy bear from the Snuggle ads
Birkenstocks, Crocs AND Uggs
Old magazines at the doctor's office
When people say envelope with the French pronunciation
Rice cakes (its not food - WAKE UP!)
Even though I may be a ticking time-bomb, through avoidance of the above "triggers" I am sometimes able to extend my NOT ANGRY periods to hours and even days! To further enhance the illusion of mental stability, I also hang around with a bunch of young, angry comics. In that context, I seem like the very picture of mental health! So to sum up, if you want to be NOT ANGRY, or you just want to appear to be NOT ANGRY (to meet girls/avoid being involuntarily committed/adopt a baby/whatever your personal goal) follow my simple plan: avoid your triggers, relax as much as possible and continue to count your blessings. Save your anger for the stage*** or some other creative endeavor. That seems like the only way you can mention it without sounding like a big whiny ahole anyway! ***Please add punchlines first. I hate listening to ranting, unfunny comics. Especially when it is me!
2013 is galloping away like a perp from an old lady push-in.
I missed all the comedy holiday parties and spent innumerable hours this week mentally re-creating party by party the competitive banter, and alcohol infused groping. And that's just what I wanted to do to the club managers, bookers and industry machers. Speaking of influential, note to Jeffrey Gurian: it's a shanda what I did to you in my mind this week!
What else did I do this week? I saw two great period movies. Lincoln and Django Unchained. Lincoln and Django are period movies, because, like a period they are full of pain and blood. I was so into the movie Lincoln, I totally missed recognizing Private Harold Green was played by one of my favorite actors, Colman Domingo
He's a writer, singer, dancer, actor, and all around phenomenal talent. Ever since I first saw him at the Public Theater in Passing Strange, Colman has been on my bucket list to direct (because I'm a serious award winning theater director* when not on a comedy mic cracking wise) but I'd settle for acting with him on a sitcom or police procedural show. Colman, call me!
When he first appeared on screen in Django, Samuel Jackson scared the crap out of me. In his tour de force performance he channels the infamous Boondocks animated character...
Uncle Ruckus
Django Unchained, what can I say that can't be said with buckets of bullets and blood? I laughed, I cried, I gasped and guffawed.through this wild ride sprung from the mind of Quentin Tarantino. I just don't understand the shock at racial epithets, the surprise at historical inaccuracy, and the controversy regarding the unfettered violence. For crying out loud! Well there was a lot of that in the movie too, but it IS a Quentin Tarantino flick, Django is a stylized piece offering a cornucopia of his signature Tarantino excesses. You don't go to the hardware store for cotton balls!
Things are pretty crazy these days, the fiscal cliff, mass shootings, subway deaths and worst of all, my social media addiction. That monkey on my back has ramped up to crystal meth proportions, minus the slenderizing weight loss. Email, my gateway drug, satisfied me for more than a decade. Then I toyed with facebook and chipped linkedin. Now I mainline twitter and just this week sniffed tumblr. Who knows what's next, podcasts, vlogging? There's no end to it!!!
So Dear Reader** if you, like me, need electronic platform rehab, or feel your life is a Tarantino movie I offer the following...
* 8 PM Fri. Jan. 25th FREE presentation of Oil and Water by Robert Chafe I'm directing in Unknown Country at the Workshop Theater Company 312 W. 36th St. 4th fl
** I'd like to thank my three loyal readers for their support during my first year of blogging. If you are addicted turn on a buddy.
Sorry I missed writing my blentry last week. I discovered, via a Facebook post, that a friend of mine from grad school had committed suicide, and I was lost for words. I should have written anyway. I should have talked about all those weird feelings and sadness and regretting that I had not reached out to him more often - as if reaching out might have possibly saved him from hanging himself - but I did not. Instead, I just stared into space for long moments and thought about what it takes to get the tools together to take one's life, and the moments immediately before unconsciousness takes over, and what it does to the people who discover your lifeless body, no note left behind.
I thought about the taboo of talking of such a thing in a comedy set. I almost brought it up when I last performed. But something else took over, and I made funny without mentioning my now-dead friend Bryan. I wanted to try to find something real to share with the audience (I almost always talk about my life as it unfolds, as I don't have a traditional 'joke' act,) but I had no pithy summary or dark humor to view the suicide yet. I guess I still don't. Bryan would likely have laughed at my attempts to make the horror into material. Maybe. Maybe he would have given me a long hug afterwards. He was very sweet and loving. He was also easy to make laugh, and had a great big mouth, and a loud voice (perfect for the stage - he was a talented actor,) and he once came to my tiny basement apartment while we were in grad school and confessed that he had a crush on me. I had to tell him that I loved him as a friend but that I could not return his affection.
It takes bravery to tell a person that you are in love them when you have no idea if they might feel the same. You are risking your heart, your pride, your ego, your appetite. And if the object of your affection does not feel the same, what then? You cannot fight that. You cannot make someone fall in love with you. You just have to swallow all those feelings and walk away, tail between your legs, and act as if you are okay with the status quo. It makes you sick inside.
I know that my not being in love with Bryan is not what made him hang himself twenty years later. But I do know that those feelings don't just disappear. I know that it takes new love or a great role or some powerful distraction to shove those feelings to a little box in your heart and keep the lid on. Maybe he had too many little boxes of unrequited love for his heart to hold. Maybe he was just tired of fighting his bouts of epilepsy and depression. Maybe he felt so alone and useless that he thought being dead would affect very few. Maybe he did not think about the effects of his hanging, he just wanted to stop struggling with everything - money, health, family, career, the unknown. He did not say. He just decided to do it one Saturday when he was alone at home. Did he think about what to wear? Did he play Grateful Dead, his favorite band? Did he talk out loud to himself as he crafted the noose? Did he have visions of his life as he took his last breaths?
I stare and smoke and think of all these things. I want to tell the man I love that I love him. But I am afraid to say it first. I am afraid to have my heart break again. I am sick inside with unsaid things. But I know that I will not take my life if my heart breaks. I am struggling with so many things - career, money, messes I've made that I have not dealt with, constant worry, anxiety, self-loathing, shame, all of it - but I have eternal hope that keeps me moving forward. I also have a psychiatrist who sees me for free and gives me free samples of medications and most importantly, a loving family and amazing friends who lift me up no matter how low I sink.
I don't know how brave I am. Especially lately. Just getting through daily life in New York City is a fucking fight. I may find it within me to finally grab my guy and say the words "I love you." I wish I had been able to say it to Bryan when he needed it most - as a friend, reaching out to let him know that he had reasons to keep moving forward. We all need to hear it. It's such a weirdly human condition, this need for love. We survive so much, but then have this aching longing within us to connect with another human being and mean something to them. I ache. I hope. I live. I love. It hurts.
And the beat goes on. Goddamnit.
-hmg
Truckin' got my chips cashed in
Keep truckin' like the doodah man
Together, more or less in line
Just keep truckin' on
Arrows of neon and flashing marquees out on Main Street
Chicago, New York, Detroit and its all the same street
Your typical city involved in a typical daydream
Hang it up and see what tomorrow brings
Dallas got a soft machine
Houston too close to New Orleans
New York got the ways and means
But just won't let you be
Most of the cats that you meet on the street speak of true love
Most of the time they're sitting and crying at home
One of these days they know they gotta get going
Out of the door and into the street all alone
Truckin' like the doodah man
Once told me "Gotta play your hand
Sometimes the cards ain't worth a dime
If you don't lay them down"
Sometimes the lights all shining on me
Other times I can barely see
Lately it occurs to me
What a long strange trip it's been
What in the world ever became of sweet Jane?
She lost her sparkle you know she isn't the same
Living on reds and vitamin C and cocaine
All her friends can say is ain't it a shame
Truckin' up to Buffalo
Been thinking you got to mellow slow
Takes time, you pick a place to go
Just keep truckin' on
Sitting and staring out of the hotel window
Got a tip they're gonna kick the door in again
Like to get some sleep before I travel
But if you got a warrant I guess you're gonna come in
Busted down on Bourbon Street
Set up like a bowling pin
Knocked down, it gets to wearing thin
They just won't let you be
You're sick of hanging around, you'd like to travel
Get tired of travelling you want to settle down
I guess they can't revoke your soul for trying
Get out of the door, light out and look all around
Sometimes the lights all shining on me
Other times I can barely see
Lately it occurs to me
What a long strange trip it's been
Truckin' I'm a going home
Whoa, whoa, baby, back where I belong
Back home, sit down and patch my bones
And get back truckin' on
I know every family has secrets.The healthier the family, the less there are
secrets.Ours is of the other variety.The kind of great pretending to make things
look a certain way no matter for whom it causes pain.
Though I was told that my aunt passed, and I responded and
wanted to know when the funeral would be, I was not told when and where my aunt’s
funeral was until it was over.This was no accident.It is consistent with a cousin attempting to
discredit me with the Bronx Council on the Arts and even risking her/his own
license to do it.S/he didn’t like what
I wrote of my autobiography in progress.It may be more than s/he can handle as that cousin is from the protected
end of the family.Instead of beginning
to realize the emotional horror that took place for many of us at the other end
of the family, this person followed the family tradition of deciding the
truth-teller is crazy.Here’s the very
sad and disturbing part.This person is
a therapist of sorts.
My need to be at the funeral was not factored in, I’m
sure.Anytime I have anything to do with
the family I was born into, who I naturally loved, I go through so much that
requires healing time.
I wanted to believe I was going to celebrate New Year’s Eve
in a festive way for the first time in several years, and I put the word
out.I want to thank Mindy Levokove,
Anne Leighton, and Jackie Sheeler for welcoming me to join in their New Year’s
plans.They were all different and
appealing, but I ended up choosing to stay home with my furry boy, Luigi.
In terms of loving and handsome and emotionally reliable, he
takes the cake.
I had expected to feel differently than I did.It was okay.I’ll aim for better than okay for next time.
There’s much I want to say of the past year in terms of
highs and lows, but my heart is a bit too heavy right now.For a She
So Funny blogger, I haven’t been funny in a while.I am grateful to be part of this group of
seven who, for the most part, are also real people with full existences and not
the joke machines some think comics are, even some other comics.We are fortunate when we can find the funny
in not so funny circumstances.When we
can make others laugh with it, we’ve turned pain into art.
