Something I’ve noticed in July is how many comedians decided to add me as a friend in July. People I book regularly now, folks I talk to and put on stage and work to make visible and awesome – we became friends in July. If nothing else, that serves to remind me that the big stuff that happens always starts off small; sometimes someone clicks “add” and then we’re all on stage together and laughing until we can’t stop.
Speaking of comedy: I put up a new storytelling show called Hook, which was all about music and stories and it was a moderate success. World of Hurt continued with “Return Engagement,” and I acted on stage again, and it’s apparently something I enjoy doing. I put up a musical comedy show at Johnny D’s as a way to honor Keytar Bear, a local busker who performs in a full on bear costume who got beat up for no reason. That became something of a turning point show: a lot of people came to my night because Keytar Bear is popular, and a lot of those people just kept on coming. My little comedy night had forged its own identity and it just kept doing it. Comedy, America!, the show I produced and co-created with my comedy partner Allen, came to its rousing and sold-out finale, and it ending left a void I was desperate to fill.
I decided, late in the month, to stop thinking of comedy as a hobby, as something I dabble in. It became obvious midway through the year that it was actually a calling, something I was as fully invested in as my writing. Like my writing, it was a passion that didn’t pay much, but I was going to keep doing it anyway. Because I loved it. I keep loving it.
I kept writing. Panic Town had caught hold. At first, I was frustrated because I found I could only write at night and only about 1,500 words a day. Then I was pushing myself to 2,000. Then 3,000. One day I wrote 7,500 words without breaking a sweat. The book decided it wanted to live, that was all. It wanted to live and thrive and be real. And who was I to stand in its way?
On the writing topic: I found all the fanfiction I wrote. All of it. The angsty slash. The genfic. The bonkers wingfic. I threw it all up on a page called The Kevidence and called it good. I was fully invested in owning my fiction again for the first time in a long time. The year before, I’d written my first novel in four years, My Agent of Chaos, and it was a troubled and troubling book that was sort of oddly constructed and was mainly just me masturbating about my adolescence (unlike all my other novels, ha ha ha), but it broke through a wall and now we were on the other side of that wall. I wrote poetry. Or songs. I never know which is which.
My pop culture loves hit some milestones; this doesn’t seem personal, but only if you know how deeply entrenched in my life the stuff I love is. Born in the USA turned 30 and I wrote a series of posts about my Top 20 Springsteen albums. Also I listened to Born in the USA on a continuous loop for about seven hours. One of those things you learn as you get older is that just because something is lunatic popular doesn’t mean you can’t have your own intense personal reactions to it. Also, Archie died. Not the Universe-1 Archie, but the alternate future Archie from Life With Archie, which actually hit me harder because that was the one I earnestly loved the most. Of course, everyone on the internet sent me their condolences (or, sometimes, just confused shrugs wondering why Archie was still a thing, because that’s cool), but it was another one of those headline-grabbers that everyone was aware of, but which actually hit me pretty hard. I wrote a whole thing about it, because I was getting used to writing everything out again.
And I turned 39.
For my birthday, I booked a screening room at my friend Tom’s theater and screened a couple of movies: John Carpenter’s Christine and the MST3K episode “Werewolf.” My friend Jeff came down from New York for his first hangout in Boston with me, and we did Rocky Horror (because that’s something I do with my New York and New Jersey friends, pretty much always), and the day he arrived, I rode my bike (my bike!) to the local Super Fancy Cheesemonger and bought a hundred dollars worth of artisan cheese, because I’m weird. In the theater, I set it all out on tables and labeled it and there was tupelo honey and cherry jam and, like, raisins. A whole passel of friends came, some I didn’t expect, and they heckled Christine, which I was apparently perfectly okay with. My friend Paul had sent me some panniers for my bike (my bike!) and I made use of them pretty constantly. Jeff and my buddy Dennis lost it at “Werewolf,” and Shawn didn’t leave in the middle of things, even though he was clearly not into MST3K. We make sacrifices for each other’s birthdays, sweetie.
The next day, I took Jeff to Chameleon and I got me engraved: for my final tattoo with John, I got myself a Disney Cruise Line tattoo. Yes, it’s a corporate logo and that’s a little weird … but I got it because taking a cruise with Jeff the year before had been so fun and relaxing and thrilling for me, and I like tattoos that commemorate my friends and the great times we have together. Plus, because it was John’s last tattoo with me, it was sort of a bittersweet bon voyage. He played me Springsteen. That was good.
I spent a lot of bike rides listening to the song “Team,” by Lorde, but performed by Postmodern Jukebox with Puddles Pity Party, a nearly seven foot baritone sad clown. It’s supposed to be sort of ironic; a sort of swinging, jazzy version of Lorde’s dark pop, but that’s not how I took it. I rode that bike down Mass Ave, the wind in my face, my music turned to the precise volume where I can totally hear the road sounds but I can still rock out. My bike rides were almost always solitary, but I was often going from one place alone to another place with people. Whether it was from Starbucks to ImprovBoston, or to rehearsal, or to Rocky Horror, or to meet Shawn for comics, I was usually going to a place with people who liked me and who welcomed my presence. It began to strike me that I had a life all over the city, places I could go where people knew me and thought well of me. I was a buddy, a booker, a host, and a producer; a director and a brother and a fan. And I wasn’t alone. I didn’t have to be alone unless I wanted to be.
Did I want to be? Yeah, still, sometimes. And I was learning to be okay with that, too. That impulse to not always be surrounded by people, even as I was learning that I could be surrounded by people, any time I wanted to be. The hardest thing in this world is discovering people like you … and that it’s okay to be okay with knowing that, instead of always having to make them prove it.
Trying. I was trying. And succeeding more than I thought I would way back in January, when everything fell apart. Success is hard, though. You can’t coast. It’s not the endgame. You have to keep working at it. I kept working at it.
I keep working at it.
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