Tuesday, December 30, 2014

Trying to Be Okay In a Year That Isn’t: 2014 in Review (October / Shake It Off)

Food poisoning? To start October off right? You betcha!

At this point, I was taking bad news and maladies as a matter of course. But maybe, in retrospect, it was the best way to start the month, because everything got better from there. Like, a lot better. It was as if my October was airlifted in from another, better year, right when I needed it the most.

Ongoing good stuff: Johnny D’s Comedy Presents was now, somewhat incongruously, an actual thing. Like an event people come to. I started getting superfans, folks who would come every week to see the show, no matter who was on it or what show it was. Stand-ups consistently told me I ran a really fun show and that everyone had such a good time there. By now, my name was a bit of a calling card for good production. I’d done Comedy, America!, Johnny D’s was where it was, and I used to do Sketchhaus at ImprovBoston.

Used to, because I gave up on it at the end of the prior year after two years of success. Another guy, Jake, picked it up and went in a lot of directions I wouldn’t have thought to go in – some I liked, some I didn’t like, at least at first. Then in October, he abruptly announced he was leaving for greener pastures in warmer states. I approached the powers that be at ImprovBoston to see if I could get my old job back. A job that takes a lot of time and energy and doesn’t pay, but something in me was desperate to be at the head of this show again. Sketch in Boston is always a little bit fragile, and it’s always in flux. I wanted to be at the head of things. I wanted to put myself in the thick of it and see if I could put my own mark on it, like I was trying to put my mark on standup and storytelling elsewhere.

I got it. My creative life was in the rebuilding, and it felt great.

One of the things I got handed was another go at Super Gay Comedy Fun Time, a show I’d done the year before to rampant success during Pride Week but had been delayed till November. No big deal … and that in itself was a big deal. I had friends in sketch, storytelling, standup, and improv now. I could book anyone. I rounded up groups and individuals and I gave them places and everyone seemed thrilled at the prospect. More importantly, ticket sales happened almost at once. I was positioning my Super Gay Comedy Fun Time to be an Event, and people were responding to it in kind. At the same time, the new major stage show that Allen and I were launching, The ImprovBoston Holiday Spectacular, had begun rehearsals. The theater side of things was ramping up, and mostly it felt like I was coming back to something that had been missing for a long time. I realized somewhere in the midst of all this that that had been part of my sadness in 2014: stepping away from sketch had caused a void in me. I didn’t know that would happen, or that the void would sustain itself. Now that void was closing, and I was starting to feel whole again.

The first Sketchhaus show happened … and it sold out. Then the second one happened, and that sold out. Not back a month and I was already winning back the small world I’d once ruled. Did I feel vindicated? Yeah, I did. I was good at this. I’d known my whole life I was good at one thing – writing – so to discover this late in the game that I was good at something else was nothing short of a revelation.

I got clearance from Cemetery Dance to expand my chapterbook Chart of Darkness into a real book and got to work at once. Here, again, was something else I’d missed: hardcore research I could spin into words. Nonfiction is slow and hard, but there are so many rewards. Pure research is its own reward – something that was never true in high school but was absolutely true now.

Speaking of writing: I was gearing up for National Novel Writing Month as much as I could. I had the idea in my head – it was a concept I’d been trying to write as a screenplay in my early 20s called Things Have Changed. I was never going to write the screenplay, I’d come to understand, but there was no reason I couldn’t put the cinematic first scene into a novel that would become a lot more internal. I was in the manner of exploring my inside world more and more with my novels, and Things Have Changed would be no exception. I built an outline and waited.

I was also waiting on an agent. I’d sent out a chunk of Roller Disco Saturday Night to a real New York Agent, and she wrote back to me and told me she’d like to see more of the book. That was over two months ago and I’m positive now that nothing will come of this path, but it was one of my best days in October and nothing subsequent is going to change that.

The trips happened: New York City at the Beacon to see my last Drive-By Truckers show of the year. The Beacon doesn’t have a rail, and you weren’t supposed to leave your seat, but I still saw my friends and had fun. Me and Marty, Duncan, Mark, and Jeff didn’t get to Rocky Horror because I forgot that October is sell-out month at Rocky. It was cool. I hung out with my buddies and it was awesome. I had picklebacks for the first time, lost at Tetris to Marty, and found ways to relax.

The end of the month came and I made good on my promise to show my sweetie a good time for our 15th anniversary, which had happened way back in February. His hand had healed enough for him to actually have fun again, and we boarded a plane to Walt Disney World. I know, sometimes, the place overwhelms me and I get in my head about having a good time that my brain works against itself. But this time, I was with my Shawn, and it was the Food and Wine fest, and my buddy Robert was there, and it was nothing but a fantastic time. It’s so rare that I’m completely at ease with myself, and for those five days in Florida, I was. That was cause enough for celebration.

I resist a lot of “generic pop” when it’s happening, only to have it to sublimate my consciousness and own me. It happened with “Roar,” by Katie Perry at the start of the year, and that song ended up being one that made my dedication to standing up for myself in the face of adversity. And then there Shawn and I were in the airport, and Taylor Swift’s “Shake It Off” was playing, and my big thought was that I could do that if I wanted to. I could brush off all the bullshit that had been clogging my life up this whole year and work against being dragged down by it. Yes. That. And when I got home, the new Stephen King book, Revival, was waiting for me, so right there, it seemed my new dedication was working. I could believe the worst was over. I could believe that the rest of 2014 would be smooth sailing.

…I mean, it wasn’t entirely true, but why not let me have my terrific month?

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