Greatest Mother Fucker
Last year, I sat down to write my year out in mid-December. Things were going swell. 2013 was a banner year for me. My sketch team was tops. I finished my first novel in four years after taking a hiatus to focus on nonfiction. I was working three jobs – one of which was paying me absurd gobs of money that allowed me to bank trips to Disney and Athens and make everyone’s Christmas insanely good, and one of which allowed me to write reviews of books I’d have read anyway. I had a comedy night I built from the ground up in a dive bar, and had begun actually getting some pretty great talent in. I was gaining a reputation for being a nice guy in the world of comedy, something I didn’t know was rare. It’s not that I didn’t think my life was unbreakable – nothing is unbreakable – but every indication was that things were going to keep getting better. I had no reason to doubt that.
Then things got worse. Then things got much worse. Then things got worse than that.
It’s mid-December again, and I have to preface this twelve-part study of my 2014 by saying that there are bright spots, and that there are some truly amazing, fantastic things that happened this year. And the baseline is great, too: Shawn and I are still together and very much in love. I have my day job. Mostly my friends are still my friends, with relationships that deepened and grew roots. We still have a home and both my parents are alive. I know what my blessings are. I haven’t forgotten them.
Last year’s posts were titled, “The Best Year of My Life,” and it really was. I wouldn’t go so far as to say 2014 was the worst year of my life – not in a life that contains beatings and junkies and the movie Reign of Fire – but holy hell was it a challenge.
And the thing is, it started out so nice. I got invited to perform at 100 First Jokes, which was particularly gratifying because I’m not really known for being a standup comic. (The joke I told, a risqué thing about child abuse and Freud, didn’t get laughs so much as uncomfortable groans; win?) I did something called Whole Night Out, where I went to go see my two favorite Saturday night comedy shows – Mainstage and Face Off – then went out to Rocky Horror, THEN went to MIT, where they were showing MST3K: The Movie at 4:00 AM. I listened to the song “GMF” – for “greatest motherfucker” – by John Grant, and I felt like the kind of the world. I put the whole thing on Vine and I hashtagged things and it was great.
Then things got sour.
There’s a Warren Zevon song called, “The Indifference of Heaven,” and one of the lines goes, “I had a girl / now she’s gone / she left town / the town burned down.” It’s so devastating it’s almost funny, but it wasn’t the funny part I kept returning to when that dive bar at which I booked and hosted comedy had a fire, then water damage because of the fire, then the owner had a stroke, then they lost their liquor license, all in like two weeks. It’s one of those moments where you feel just so terrible for the person directly affected … and feel so guilty for being all, “Why did this happen to me?” But I couldn’t stop feeling it. My comedy night was just taking off and things were going well, and now this.
Such predicaments I must forge ahead: I spent a week feeling sorry for myself. Then I wrote to the owners of a new bar called Johnny D’s Uptown and said, “Hi, do you want a weekly comedy hour? I do comedy.” And almost immediately they said, “Um, yes. When do you want to start?” So that worked out. I had my first show at the end of the month and it’s only gotten bigger and better and more awesome. And people still think I’m a nice guy.
Of course, my comedy life can’t just be unbumpy. For three years, I’d been directing a sketch team called Duct Tape Revolution. I had big plans. We were gonna spend the year doing festivals, and then we were going to set our sights on television. Fail or succeed, the fact that we were doing great sketch comedy and always improving was the point.
Then the group imploded. Shit happened. Shit kept happening. Personalities clashed, rash decisions were made, everyone was unhappy. Everything fell to pieces and I had no way of putting them back together. Well, not yet, at least. Not yet.
My favorite actor, Philip Seymor Hoffman, died. I got sick. Like really sick. Like not leaving the couch for three days sick. I had to take time off from my second job, the one that paid so much, to recover. I hate taking time off. I got back to work feeling slightly better and slightly more rested, and that’s when they told me they were letting me go. Apparently, when you temp at a place longer than three months, you have to either go full time or get let go. Or something. I don’t know. All I know is I was making serious bank for five months, and then I wasn’t. At all. It happened overnight. One day I’m rolling in cash and laughing it up with my favorite comedy friends, and then I’m broke and my group is gone and, as an added bonus, my doctor informed me that I had developed a sensitivity to gluten. To gluten.
She left town. The town burned down. It’s funny until it’s you.
Well, at least I still had my freelance reviewing job at FEARnet.com, right? Right!? THIS IS FORESHADOWING.
I have some really, really great memories of this year. Big stuff and little stuff moved me, changed me. I made discoveries, both internally and out there in the world. I made friends. It was in no way all bad. But sweet goddamn, did it start that way.
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