Christmas.  Ugh.

Don’t get me wrong.  I love the baby Jesus.  I love the work he did as an adult and the impact he had on fashion:  mullets, Birkenstocks, casual housewear.  I am not a fan, however, of this behemoth of a stressful holiday he created.  That’s a bad, bad baby Jesus!

First of all, I’m the youngest of 3 boys, and my two older brothers are both Doctors.  One is an MD in the ER and the other one is a tenured Professor.  They are also both married.  And they are married to, that’s right, fuckin’ Doctors.  To make matters worse, they each had children… IN wedlock of all things.  What is this? 1952?!

My brothers actually have  2 children each.  Spaced out nice and evenly so that these small people range from ages 2 to 5.  Plop! Plop!… Plop! Plop!  Way to sync it up, Dawes boys!

So, of course, they will be carting their little boobins with them from their respective homes to attend the Dawes Christmas holiday Toyotathon extravaganza!

My parents, since they pretty much sacrificed everything in their life for their children LOVVVVVVVVVVVVE to show off their offspring and their grandchildren so they will RSVP for about 14 holiday parties (hosted, of course, by people we hate) and drag the entire family along.

The introductions my dad give will go a little something exactly like this:

“Oh hey, Bob — meet my family!  This is Dr. Dawes, Dr. Dawes, their babies Ella and Hannah; Dr. Dawes, Dr. Dawes, their babies Mikey and Topher; and, oh yeah, this is….uh, Bill.  He’s, uh… single… but he’s NOT gay… apparently….”

(Insert sound effect of a cricket riding a tumbleweed through creaky western doors.)

My dad will think that’s funny and laugh at his own joke like George Lopez, while near strangers will look at him and me with a mixture of confusion and pity.

Inevitably, some wigged woman fossil in the back of the party will intimately whisper to an adjacent fossil that perhaps I am, indeed, “gay” since I’m not married and I don’t have children and what other possible conclusion could one come to?

I can handle provincial rumors, but guess what?  That’s just walking past the wreath on the front door.  The coughcough “party” hasn’t even started yet and I’m looking to spike the Eggnog with strychnine.

Even though I will try to busy myself with pigs in a blanket and try to talk about football with penis-laden partiers, without fail I will find myself wedged into a corner by an old “family friend,” some ancient witch wafting that perfect amalgam of Vidal Sassoon hairspray, cheap perfume, Virginia Slims, and bright pink lipstick wax — a scent I affectionately call “Eau de white trash” — that will send me on a Proustian wave of revulsion where I linger on vague memories of being touched inappropriately by my babysitter.

After a couple of bullshit starter questions, family friend will inevitably slide in the following Christmas chestnut with sweet, faux-innocence:  “So Bill, when are YOU going to get married?”  Her smile will stretch her hot pink lipstick taut across newly fitted dentures in the unwitting appearance of a snarling drag queen.

I will desperately want to say something like:  “When are you going to die?” but I won’t.  In actuality, I will say:  “I’m not really thinking about marriage right now.”

She will respond with:  “Aren’t you getting a little old NOT to be married?”

I will want to say:  “Aren’t you getting a little old to NOT be dead?”

But instead, my response will be of the ”It’s not really my focus right now.  I’m just trying to establish myself a little more before I think about that” blahblahblah variety.

She will make a sound that means nothing to the untrained ear, but will actually mean “YOU ARE A FAILURE AT LIFE!”

She will take a deep breath and then launch into some Dickensian story about how her and her husband were impoverished when they got married, but their love and commitment to each other made it easier, and now they own the fourth largest used VW dealership in Prince George’s County, not to mention THE largest beanie baby collection in the tri-state area.  Most days, they are even able to successfully fend off thoughts of suicide.  Most days.

Then, family friend will mention her 27 granchildren and ask me if I want to see pictures.  Of course, that’s rhetorical, because she will have already produced the 200 pics out of her Costco handbag.  And I will have to feign interest in looking at people and babies that I don’t know or give a shit about.

I will want to say “Hey, instead of me looking at all these pictures, how about I just Google ‘baby pictures.’  It will have about the exact same fucking effect.”

I will then be extremely tempted to tell her that I do, technically, have children, and that they are all currently a vital part of America’s commitment to stem cell research.  Come on, just to see her expression!  Just to see how well high-brow abortion jokes go over in the blue-hair retirement home crowd in conservative northern Virginia. (guess: poorly.)

I will escape from her just in time to get pinioned by a slightly younger woman who wants to poke fun at my playboy image in the family.  ”Hey, Billy (that’s right, they still call me ‘Billy’), why can’t you find some nice woman that you want to be monogamous with?”

I’ll say:  “Um, because I have Attention Deficit Disorder and a fully functioning PENIS?… Any more questions?”

Okay, I might actually say that one.  I mean, why not?

Soon, the family will make the requisite amount of eye-rolling cues with each other and the whole Dawes clan will pack into the mini-van and sojourn to the nearest Episcopal Church, because dad feels the guilt of the Lord coming on this Christmas something fierce.

As we arrive, churchgoers will stare at us with that arrogant and passive-aggressive look that says:  “I know your type…you come to church once a year to feel better about yourself, but baby Jesus knows better and you will rot in hell for eternity because of it.”   They will briefly cover that expression with a pinched smile and say:  “Welcome to Church of the Apostles! Merry Christmas!”

I will make sure to sit next to my brother Jim in the pew so that I can try to do things to make him laugh.  For instance, I know the program will say “MASS” on it somewhere.  During the sermon,  I will cover the “M” with my index finger so it just says “ASS.”  Then I will nudge my brother because this is comedy gold and God invented comedy anyway, so it’s not blasphemy, right?  Jim will giggle because he loves me, but he will also feel sorry for me that my comedy hasn’t really progressed since the 8th grade.

Okay, more like the 4th grade.

This year, we might get into a giggling fit about all the fun words our fingers can make.  My dad will glare at us and shake his head with that “Not in the House of the Lord!” look.  This will probably just make us giggle more, and might even inspire me to find a word that can be finger-covered to make “BUTT” or, if I’m really lucky, “FART.”  Hmmmmm, what hymn has “farther” in it?…

If I can’t find those gems, when we sing the song where there is “GAY APPAREL,” I will do something soooooo gay, but something that only my brother can see.  Maybe it will be jazz hands, a hip move, or “Double Dream Hands” choreography.

I will get annoyed that I never know when to stand during the Eucharist and I will consciously chart the burgeoning roll of fat creeping over my Christmas pants every time I sit back in the pew. When I kneel, my back will be uncomfortable, so I will stick my ass out and arch to stretch it a little.  That move is often fart-inducing, so my brother is most likely screwed.  Again.

When church is over after the little manger play (with a real donkey!) and communion (free booze!), we will all go home and play Christmas music and look at each other.  Without fail, one of us will say “Let’s just open all the presents tonight!”  There will be a slight debate, but everyone will concede out of sheer boredom and also to drown out the 42nd replaying of “Little Drummer Boy” from the grainy record player.

I will get 3 sweaters, 2 self-help books, and an iTunes gift certificate for $25.  The self-help books will have subtly helpful titles like “Hey, quit being such a fuckin’ loser and get a real job is from Mars and Women are from Venus!”

That night, I will go to sleep alone in my childhood bed and think about family.  I will then think about all the poor children out there with NO families at all.

I will be incredibly jealous of them.

Kidding…. Love you, mom and dad.

Merry Christmas!!!

In the world of the stand-up comedian, there is an all too common phenomenon known as the “Heckler.”

Although the word “Heckler” sounds very specific, it is a blanket term that covers a huge range of people who — for myriad and dubious reasons– vocalize their thoughts during a comic’s set and often (but not always) end up ruining it. I’ve seen full shows completely taken over by a “Heckliner ™.”

Joe Rogan once said that the ONE thing hecklers have in common is that they are all “douchebags.” This is a little reductionist, but it makes sense that Joe Rogan would say that, because he himself is a douchebag. (Kidding! He’s brilliant and, more importantly, tough, which is why I’m now backpedaling.)

The problem with Rogan’s comment is that there isn’t just a generic, garden-variety heckler “prototype.” Different people heckle for many sundry reasons, so lumping them all together into one giant “device for vaginal irrigation” results in stand-up comics grossly mishandling situations that are, potentially, easily dealt with.

While these are some archetypes I have first-hand and unfortunate experience with, the truth is there are infinite variations on the heckler schematic and, after a few years, I have begun to learn how to appropriately deal with only a few of them.

With that in mind, let’s slightly alter Rogan’s theory and agree that a heckler does, in some way, always want to make a comic feel less important.

So, newbie comics and interested parties, let’s start with the general and good news about handling this:

You have electricity on your side! Tada!

When said electricity is properly functioning between a microphone and amplifiers, a well-placed “shutthefuckup” can do wonders in quelling the heckler’s quest to make you feel less. “Shutthefuckup” can often be followed by subsequent “shutthefuckup”’s but if you find that 5 or 6 “shutthefuckup”’s later, you’re still having a tete a tete giving you agita, you either need to Good Will Hunting verbally lacerate the individual (good luck!) or you need to get them kicked out of the room.

I’m not a fan of customers getting thrown out. Usually they’re just blitzed on over-priced Appletinis and their new consciousness has magically revealed to them the unfathomable depths of their self-hatred. After they drunkenly roil around in their douchey souls for a minute or two, they look up and see the comic say something, perhaps, not funny or corny or offensive. That is when they may slur out a “You suck!” or “You’re not funny!” or “Get off the stage!” or, my personal favorite, “Go and die, you rape-baby!” You’d be amazed at some of the gems of original phraseology that get produced after a two-drink minimum.

To that end, in a very scientific fashion, I’m going to go through a short list of “heckler” types in order to better understand how to appropriately deal with these, uh, these… well, these fucking douchebags.

1. THE HELPFUL HECKLER

The most benign type of “heckler” is the “helpful heckler” (the double H), who thinks that your joke needs a tag or, perhaps, the audience needs further elucidation of what your joke means. The double H is usually easy to deal with, because they are with you in spirit, and it’s really not their fault that their mommy told them that their stupid opinions in life matter. Often, the male hh is wearing pleated pants, or is one creaky step on the DNA double-helix staircase away from being retarded. Happy drunks make the best double H’s. Think George Bush.

Since they are ostensibly on your side, smile at them and keep them on your side while you try to get them to find a place of respite. Using the hacky, “Ladies and gentlemen, have you met my dad?” makes them feel included and might help steer them towards Shutthefuckup Land.

2. THE MY FIRST BEER HECKLER

The next difficultly level up from that is the “my first beer heckler.” The MFB heckler is usually a younger person, perhaps a college student, or a shut-in housewife who is on a rare evening away from her mewling, virus-laden children. Whatever the case may be, the bottom line is that they don’t know how to handle their liquor. You can often dismantle them by gently getting the audience on your side against them. In a pinch, use the following obvious and pat line: “Awww, I remember my first beer.”

After you embarrass the MFB, he or she will (if you’re doing your job right) usually be told to shutthefuckup by their friends, the audience, and sometimes, by their own conscience. Even in their intoxicated stupor, they tend to shy away from too much humiliation. Once they decide to shut up, they often go into the bathroom to puke their face off and the show goes back to normal.

3. THE STONER

The same rules apply to #2, except stoned people don’t feel embarrassment and are often convinced they are thinking on an elevated plane. Whereas drunk people lament “I’m fucked up!”, stoners think “Oh, I get it now!” Luckily, weed makes people passive and stupid, so crack a few jokes about getting the munchies and how pot should be legalized, and they’ll love you. This may not work for stoned black men. (See #5)

4. THE DRUNK SEA DONKEY or THE SNOOKI

After that, it gets tricky. The MFB and double H will often combine with other unseemly and gauche character traits to create a hybrid monster that becomes much more unwieldy. For example, the aggressive, big-boned, drunk sea donkey who was told she was “pretty” growing up is a staple at any comedy club. She is convinced every guy ever, including you onstage, wants to rape her, but deep down hates herself and has serious fears of her true sea donkeyism. See “Snooki” from JERSEY SHORE for a textbook case.

Luckily, the Snooki is easily disarmed, simply by giving her a compliment about her looks. “Wow, you have beautiful eyes” will ALWAYS work better than punching a Snooki in her face. Resist the temptation to go after her with your words, too. Fat, I mean big-boned, women, are very loud and can often trump your electricity.

And, no matter what she says, stay away from the ‘C’- word. I know, I know, it rolls trippingly off the tongue and tastes like an 18 year-old Scotch on your lips, but its utterance will make you lose an audience quicker than a “Friends” spin-off or Colin Quinn on Broadway.

If you can’t resist because the woman is so damn ‘C’- worthy, a veritable ‘C’- monster, don’t fret too much about letting loose. In general, when upset, the Snooki tends to leave the room and flirt with the hundreds of guys that desperately want to have sex with her via text.  ;)

5. THE DRUNK ANGRY AFRICAN-AMERICAN MAN

The next level of difficulty past the “Snooki” or the “DSD” (drunk sea donkey), is the drunk, angry African-American man or the “DAAAM!” Often the DAAAM hates you the second you get onstage because you’re white and/or not Chris Rock. If ignoring the heckling of a DAAAM! doesn’t work, often the best policy is to go at them guns ablazin’. Ask them about prison, child support, or tell them they look like a “Broke-ass (insert name of famous black man or woman here)!!!”

Although this may seem counterintuitive, particularly as a white man who has been culturally trained to be terrified of blacks, the DAAAM! – more than any heckler in the handbook – will ease off if you don’t show fear. Since fear is honestly one of the major ingredients of racism, showing no fear is a way of acknowledging equality. And if, in showing no fear, you actually make the DAAAM! crack up, you will have earned his respect. If THAT doesn’t abate the heckling, perhaps crack a joke about how ginormous black men’s penises are. They love that, plus it’s based on scientific fact.

6. THE SUPERGAY

One of the most difficult things to deal with is the bitchy gay man who apparently feels entitled to sibilantly scream every worthless judgment that darts through his clouded cortex. As Perez Hilton’s bizarre staying power might suggest, these guys are hard to get to shutthefuckup. You will have to combine all your skills from the previous 5 archetypes in order to deal with the SG in the context of an audience.

You will need to compliment them, go at them, tell them they’re pretty, tell them to shutthefuckup, but you will ultimately need to get them to laugh if you want peace. The Supergay is one of the hardest strains of “heckler” because they truly don’t care how awful they come across. They’ve been ridiculed their whole lives and they also handle penises in their rectums, so the words of a comic have little effect. And if you use the “F”- word, again, you are going to get less laughs than a TBS talk show or Michael Richards at The Apollo.

On second thought, always kick out the Supergay at the first sign of trouble. Their only soft spot is their asshole, and a comedy club is not the place to deal with that.

7. THE WORST HECKLER OF ALL!!!

Of course, the worst heckler of all is YOU and your own judgment of what you’re doing. Giving yourself a fucking break, you asshole, it’s not that big a deal. Don’t let that weird inner voice get you down because you’re not doing important, original material about your family or politics. Yawn! Either way, you’re not saving lives and you’re not changing the world. You’re basically telling dick jokes to strangers. Wooohooo!

Guess what? You got balls for getting up there, my friend, and it’s a privilege few people on the planet get to experience. So relax, have fun, and most importantly, tell that little voice inside you to SHUTTHEFUCKUP!

I hope this helps.

Bill

I’m about to open in a Broadway play called “Lombardi” and, even though I’m not the lead in the show, the publicity firm recently let me be a part of the show’s “press junket.” When I had first heard about this opportunity, my initial reaction was: “What the fuck is a junket?”

Webster’s dictionary defines a “junket” as a “festive social affair” or a “delicious treat,” but I’m not sure that’s an apt description for what happens at one of these thingamabobs.

So, for the uninformed (and by the way, if don’t know what a “press junket” is, it probably just means you experienced normal cognitive development growing up and now have like a grown-up job and stuff), here is my rundown of a fairly typical “press junket”…..

The first thing you have to do that morning is something rare and crazy for an actor: you have to wake up! That’s right! It’s not even noon yet and you have to actually put on pants. If you’re feeling extra ambitious because you read “The Secret” that week, maybe you even put on underwear.

After getting up at the crack of 9am, you walk to a strange address and then find your way to the back of a nondescript room, where there are tables with coffee, bagels, and donuts. At this point, you feel pretty Goddamned special, so you silently declare jihad on the girls who ignored you in high school.

Speaking of uninterested girls, your next step usually involves sitting down next to an inordinately attractive make-up lady with whom you try your best not to sexually harass, lest the New York Jets try to recruit you.

As you sit awkwardly close to said make-up lady cross-legged, she purposely highlights all of your flaws and physical insecurities by artificially correcting them.

“Your eyes look bloodshot. Are you tired?” she says.

“Yeah, super late night!” you lie. In your head, you’re thinking ‘Shit, I got my Richie Cunningham 8 hours sleep and I STILL look an extra in “Cool Runnings?!”‘

Then she spurts a preternaturally blue liquid into your eyes, which (ironically) is supposed to make them “extra white.” In fact, the drops just burn the jelly inside of your eyeballs, which makes you pop them open bigger to get oxygen.

“See how you look more awake?” she says with a smirk.

Then she says “Do you want me to touch up your eyebrows?” which is code for “Do you want to look like an idiot with your current situation or do you want me to fill in your brows?”

You say “sure” because she is hot and you give way to the opinion of any woman who is out of your league. You learned that since birth because you are a tool that needs constant validation.

“Ummmm, I’m going to just put a little color on your lashes,” she then says. This means you have the lashes of an Albino boy with lupus and, unless you want to look like a beady-eyed Canadian on “South Park,” you better let her shellack you with her Sephora brush.

After that, she says “I’m going to put some gloss on your lips” (i.e., you don’t want to look like a desiccated corpse, do you?).

She then smiles and pushes her chair back which means “fuck off and please don’t ask for my number,” at which point the hair gal beckons you over to another station. The hair gal is ALSO hot, but edgier, and with Asian tattoos on risque body parts. The tattoos are very inspiring and spiritual, which of course means she was molested as a child. The hair girl is always a sexual deviant and both of you know it.

She starts with: “How do you want your hair?”

Again, what she is actually saying is: “There is no discernible style in your cowlicky mop, so please give me an inkling about what to do. And, oh yeah, you’re starting to bald, fuckface, so do you want a full or just a partial comb over?”

She does your hair to look like Justin Bieber because she is clearly a freak and a pedophile.

You stand up without hitting on her (you haven’t had your coffee yet) and you go over to the free pastry station because it’s a perk and it makes you feel fancy. You see the crullers and donuts and eclairs and you say “nononono” for 4 to 5 minutes until you go “Okay, I’ll have just one for energy,” at which point you immediately shove 3 into your gullet like a starving pelican. 2 minutes after that, your bowels brace for eminent diarrhea.

Then you look in the mirror and notice that the “casual, yet elegant” attire you were requested to wear doesn’t quite fit the bill anymore because it has powdered sugar and muffin crumbs on it. Plus, you left your shirt in the dryer too long and it has now shrunk to a size GAY, so the front of your shirt keeps creeping up past your belly button and you constantly have to pull it down and tuck it into your pants. You got an indifferent public to impress, after all!

The junket is always running late and now you’re starting to crash hard from the sugar inhalation. You start shaking your head like a trucker that’s been on the road for 14 hours straight, although in fact you’ve only been awake for 58 minutes.

You ask an assistant for a “Coke,” again feeling fancy at how much power you have.

You wait for your Coke while you have fits of narcolepsy. Right when you’re in the middle of a burp-yawn-stretch-shart, you are suddenly called to walk out in front of a throng of cameras and photographers.

So you sashay, Coke-less, out in front of some logo-laden wallpaper and a motley crew of photogs snaps pictures. You put on a phony smile, and then you start to wonder about whether or not you should do an open mouth or closed mouth smile. You think about it a lot and so you end up doing both simultaneously, so in essence, you look like a dying carp. This makes you feel silly.

Then you start to panic, slightly, about what the fuck you should do with your hands! I mean, they’re there and they’re undeniable and they indicate SOMETHING, don’t they?! So you put both of your hands on your hips which makes you feel like Clark Kent at a urinal, so you let them drop by your side, and then you feel like you’re doing a production of summer stock Shakespeare, so you then make the mistake of putting them in your pockets, which makes you look like a douche who doesn’t care about the junket. So you end up doing a weird variation of the “I’m a little teapot” stance, which works perfectly with your size gay t-shirt.

The photographers snap away and call your name, bossily, sometimes angrily, and you, discombobulated, whip your head around to catch the disparate voices. No matter where you look, they keep yelling at you and snapping pics, but they don’t really give a shit because you’re not Lindsay Lohan.

Then you get wheeled around to different interview stations, where stylish people stand with microphones and ask you insanely intricate questions about your project. Little did you know that when you were cast as a lowly actor in the project that you’d have to give a PhD-worthy oral defense. Hopefully, you studied up like an Asian, because you have to do a dissertation on the script to an online reporter reading from a cue card.

So you start the first sentence very confidently with an erudite SAT word or two locked and loaded, but then about two clauses in, you lose confidence. At this point, your eyeballs start darting around in the air to find some life raft of logic that will help save you from the clusterfuck that just stumbled forth out of your mouth.

Now that you’re not making any real sense, the interviewer’s eyes will glaze over and he or she will just leave the microphone by your lips hoping that, someday, you will eventually just shut the fuck up. Since you lost all cogency in your speech, you will most likely finish your inane answer with the following phrase: “Yeah, so you know, it’s interesting….”

Immediately after this, you will look at the interviewer with big French waif eyes as if to say, “Please move on to the next question before I make an even bigger ass of myself.”

You promise to do better for the next interview and, for a second, you actually do. Until the donut starts coming up on you and you notice that the interviewer is staring at your eyebrows with a quizzical gaze. 14 minutes in, you have lost all confidence, and all you really want to do is hide in a broom closet and fart donut dust.

But, indeed, all you CAN do for the next 45 minutes – as you go from interview to interview – is clench your buttocks and hope and pray that you don’t accidentally utter something stupid like “Hey, I like to beat children to death with puppies!”

Finally, it’s over…. You have done 10 different interviews and have had your picture taken over 100 times. Weeks later, you look for proof of the junket online using the search engine called “Google.com.” You will never find shit.

Oh well.

At least you don’t have to Google “junket” anymore….

For some reason that now eludes me I decided to max out my Capitalone credit card with a trip to New Zealand.  I couldn’t afford it; there was no overpowering urge to go; I didn’t need to throw a omnipotent ring into a lava pit; and I certainly didn’t know anyone there, except for one ex-pat Kiwi who sort of hated my guts.

The sheer irresponsibility/stupidity of it all became the single most viable reason for the trip.  Every time I told someone that I wanted to go to New Zealand, they always had the same question:  “Why would you go to New Zealand?”  My standard reply was “I’ve always wanted to fuck a Hobbit.”  The REAL answer from the bottom of my soul (which I never told anyone) seemed almost more embarrassing:  “No good reason.”

“Hey, this makes no goddamn sense… so what am I waiting for?”

The one thing in my favor was the fact that one of the biggest comedy bookers in New Zealand, Scott Banks, seemed to think that my specific brand of dick jokes would work amongst a group of drunk Kiwis.  The money that I made with him would pay me just enough to keep my “No Hassles” card under the limit (hopefully).  That is, unless I wanted to buy something extravagant in Auckland, like meals.

Before I could live like a shitty homeless person in the NZ, I had to be in the air for 12 shitty hours on an economy middle seat sandwiched between a young “aromatic” German and Jabba-the-Hut’ian Kansan, baby attached.  As the Kraut was wafting new, yet undiscovered strains of body odor into my trenchant nostrils, the infant looked at his mother and wailed.  I can’t say I blame him. (note to reader: During the flight, I did discover something worse than my predicament, and that was the movie “Cop Out.”  If you haven’t seen it, I recommend taking a dump and staring at it for 90 minutes instead.)

I had grandiose plans to read and write on the flight but the dulcet hum of the 747 engine lulled my brain waves into a frequency capable of only three things:  watching crappy movies, eating, and farting uncontrollably.  On occasion, I was able to manipulate my sphincter muscles well enough to fart silently, but for the most part, I just let ‘em rip.  I even alternated which butt cheek I would elevate just to be fair to my adoring fans.  Take that, Wichita!  Take that, Hitler Youth!

Even though the ginormous Kansan immediately to my right keep putting her pink polyester turtleneck sweater over her chins and nose to avoid the stench, she was, alas, left without any empirical evidence that my colon was the culprit.  Blended with the smell of wool blankets and cheap coffee, the smell almost hybridized into something possibly… good?  Mmmm, is it lunch time already, Air New Zealand?!

I landed safely in a fog-laden Auckland and found myself out by the taxi stand a mere 2 and a half hours later.  You wouldn’t think that immigration and customs would be such a rigamarole in New Zealand, but apparently the Kiwis are deathly afraid Yankees are going to smuggle in a banana that will fuck up the entire eco-system of the North Island.  There were cryptic questions and searches and bio-scans and many threatening signs around the airport implying that a fruit and vegetable in your luggage will get you in serious trouble. One illustrated panel might show a hapless Yankee nonchalantly bouncing along with a rutabaga in his rucksack, and the next might show a half-naked Maori snapping his neck.

I finally got into a taxi, and traveled to my hotel in Ponsonby, a quaint neighborhood that looks like a midwestern American town in the 50’s.  And by that, I mean, not crowded and not a black person in sight. Even my non-homegrown presence didn’t go unnoticed. I felt like DiCaprio’s subconscious in “Inception.” Everywhere I went, people looked at me with quizzical or slightly annoyed expressions, particularly when I talked or screamed “Yeehaw! I’m from the States, bitches!”

My first set in New Zealand was straight away that night and I was in panic mode.  I hadn’t come up with ONE local joke and apparently all my fun stereotypes about being Down Under applied to Aussies, not Kiwis.  Boomerangs, Koalas, fighting, even baby-snatching dingos.

I knew I could pull out something cheap like, “I hear you guys don’t count sheep to go to sleep because it’s way too expensive to clean down comforters,” but I really wanted to immerse myself in the actual Kiwi culture.  So I found a Starbucks, pulled out my iPad and Googled “Pop Culture New Zealand.” Google responded with “DID YOU MEAN Pop Culture United States?”  Google can be such a dick sometimes.

For some reason, I couldn’t seem to find anything funny enough to put in my act.  Hmmm… I noticed that the buses said, “Sorry, not in service,” which I found hysterical in that the buses were actually apologizing to people.  In New York City, I believe the digital readout would read “Shit ain’t working, mothafucka, so suck my mothafucking bus-dick” or  something along those lines.  Not funny enough.

I sat and looked at people and imagined but I was drawing a blank.  A midget waddled by and I realized that in a town this tiny, he was probably known simply as “The Midget.”  Not funny enough to bring up, was it?  The insecurities crept in and perched their silent haunches on my shoulders.  Bill, maybe you’re just not funny enough…

Come showtime, I found myself inordinately nervous.  This gig was, by no means, a gig that would further my career.  As a matter of fact, it was antithetical to anything career-oriented.  Unlike the Los Angeles Laugh Factory, there wasn’t the possibility that Adam Sandler was there looking for someone to join the Happy Madison team.  Most of the comics at the club didn’t know my name or care, and I didn’t have a single person I knew in the burgeoning crowd of 200 to watch potential demise.  Still, my hand was shaking as I sipped my vodka.

The 7 other comics crowding the green room all seemed cordial enough, although I couldn’t help but feel a little of the “who the fuck is this asshole?” vibe despite the broad smiles and lilting accent.

Another aspect of the night rattling my nerves was the fact that I was the emcee, so I had to start the show and establish a rapport with the audience before anyone else.  And sober Kiwis can be a brutal bunch, I’d heard.

I sat down, took a deep exhale, and decided to go out and let the audience dictate the direction of my set.  It would be just like home, just like –

“Welcome everybody! And here’s your host, Bill Dawes!”

WTF?! THAT WAS MY INTRO?!  I almost spit out my Absolut.

In New Zealand, there is something called the “Tall Poppy Syndrome.”  Although it’s universally a pejorative term to describe the bizarre way Kiwis and Aussies punish the successful, they have sort of co-opted it into a positive mantra about staying modest.

But, for me, on my first night in Auckland, this modest intro meant was I was sitting on a couch with my hand down my underpants adjusting my ballsack and I was supposed to be onstage.  No house rules, no announcement about a drink minimum, no “Sex and the City” reference, and no hullaballoo about an “international headliner” coming to the stage.  It was simply “Welcome everybody! And here’s your host, Bill Dawes!”

By the time I removed my hand from my drawers (nuts still askew), got up from the couch, put down my drink, raced down the steps and then onto the stage to the location of the mic stand, the smattering of applause had already petered down to one sarcastic slow clap by a Neil Young-looking old dude in the corner by the toilets.  His syncopated clap seemed to serve, already, as the first heckle of the night.

Because life is hilarious, I went to the mic stand to adjust it, and it separated into two pieces.  More specifically, it became undone at the middle hinge, so I had to focus and guide it back in the bottom half of the stand…. at which point, the top part began to slowly sank down until it stopped at crotch level.  It looked like my twisted up testes were about to make a speech.  (“Get better underwear!” they would have screamed).

I decided to run with it:  “My balls will now sing the national anthem.”  Cricket.  Luckily, I wasn’t on the microphone, so not many people were able to hear my first dud of a joke.

I quickly pulled up on the mic stand to my face, and it slowly slid back down.

“It’s like a…. bike pump or something,” I said, hoping to elicit a knowing and commiserative laugh from the crowd.  Instead, there was silence and a lonely man fumbling with a mike stand onstage.  Cricket riding a tumbleweed.

I pumped the stand up and down a couple of times, positive that the utter lack of response to my comment was a lack of strong visual. I even pushed up and down harder to show them that, hey, look guys, It really looks like I’m trying to inflate a bicycle tire, doesn’t it?!  The tumbleweed-riding cricket was now coming through a creaky western door into an empty bar.

I looked up and smiled.

“Hi!”

Usually, my dimply face can elicit a few chuckles of pity or isn’t-he-cuteness or something, but all I could see was a sea of folded arms and blank expressions.  That, and the glow from the bar in the back illuminating the face of Scott Banks, the owner of the Classic and the Godfather of all stand-up in New Zealand.  He booked me having never seen me perform live before.  And here I was, destroying his mic stand and making a large group of paying customers comically uncomfortable.

“So… he didn’t give me an intro or anything… but I’m from the United States!”  That was my first sentence to a New Zealand crowd.   I’m not sure what I was expecting, but I CAN say I was expecting… something.  Anything.  Even a jovial “boo!”  The shrill silence and awkward apathy, I must say, threw me.  A distant vulture was now circling over the cricket, which has now died of boredom.

“Well… I guess fuck me, huh?” I said, my catawampus testicles growing a little.

Then I heard it.  The faintest of chuckles.  One person in the back, then a few more.  Uncomfortable, yes, but it was all that I needed.  I just need to know that someone in the audience would laugh.  That’s it.

“It’s good to be here in Southern Australia,” I said, having never said or thought the sentence before.  The chuckles merged with some moans and “ooooohs.”  Perfect.

“What’s wrong?  Should I have said Southeastern Australia?  Sorry, I’m American, I’m not very good at geography.  But who cares, we make cool shit — enjoy your iPhones. And yes I mean you, hot Kiwi texting with one right now in the front row.”

“I’m not Kiwi, I’m from the Philippines.”

“Well, you’re still hot.  As a matter of fact, I think the best looking women in the planet are Philippina women.  They’re gorgeous… but they have huge cocks.”

The girl immediately put down her iPhone and stared at me, slack-jawed.  Who cares?  Because the few chuckles and moans were replaced with and topped by a small amount of gut laughs.  The collective audience reaction hovered precariously between amused and offended.

“Don’t be offended, men like prostitutes.  Hookers and sluts, they love ‘em.  You didn’t get the memo?  They do.  But I’m not here to talk about Australian girls….”

The chuckles and gut laughs coalesced into some claps.  The jokes were cheap and easy, and I was maybe pandering a bit.  But some arms unfolded, some smiles cracked, and I hadn’t even said a word of my act.

“So, yeah, I’m from America, and I’m about to do a show on Broadway….”

Sometimes, after 7 and a half years, your mouth can bullshit it’s way into a room and charm the silence.

Sometimes, after all that time honing a skill, you are holding a microphone on a foreign stage in front of 200 strangers and you sort of realize that you have become pretty good at this thing, this strange thing, which is your job.

Sometimes, you discover there IS a reason you are there.  That it is, indeed, a good reason.

Then you smile at the uncomfortable relationship between a man onstage with a microphone and a random group of fellow travelers.  And when you do, you show your dimply face.  And they laugh at it.

Because, now, and finally, they are on your side.

Hamsters.

There is a part of me that thinks “fuck hamsters.”  They’re frail, they don’t give a shit about you and you can’t really pet them.  They’re hair balls with lungs.  And their death permutations are more intricate than a museum of Medieval torture dungeons.

Hamsters teach us about loving, but, more importantly, they teach us about loss.  With each fateful trip to the mall pet shop, it begins with a fluttering heart and promises of grown-up responsibility;  and it ends, inevitably, with a furry bite-size tragedy on your hands.  In the case of Mary, that was quite literally the case.

Mary was my favorite hamster.  She was a shock of white and butterscotch, with a little detail of dark brown by her haunches.  To me, she was fluffier than the rest.  But, even better, she was a total bad-ass.  She was the alpha hamster, snapping her teeth into the necks of any other hamster, male or female, that dare get in her fuckin’ way in the Habi-trail.  I remember being mesmerized watching other hamsters flee in the other direction when they met her beady little eyes on the other end of the tube.

The only other hamster that was cuter was Ted, who was a puffy gray thing with little white ringlets around his eyes.  Ted was more docile and you could actually pick him up and he would sit there in the nook of your hand, like “What’s up?  Check out my nose wiggle!” without moving.  That was my brother Jim’s hamster.  I pretended, as well as I could, not to be jealous about how super cute Ted was.

One day, Jim took Ted outside to show a friend and, on the way back, he dropped the gray poofball on the red brick walkway leading to our front door.  Oops.  He quickly scooped Ted back up, escorted him back inside, plopped him onto the cedar chips inside the aquarium, and Ted feebly knocked about for a few minutes in the rodent turds and alfalfa pellets.  Then Ted went to stare into the corner like the Blair Witch Project, his nose went still, and he never moved again.

I wanted to be sad, but my jealousy gene has always been in a battle with my compassionate nature for dominion of my soul. So I cycled from feeling sad to “hahaha” to feeling guilty about the perverted triumph I felt to reveling in the triumph to double sadness of my feeling of ironic triumph.

Luckily, guilt has mostly been a prison bitch to my to ego, so after about 5 hours I landed safely and squarely on “Fuck you, Jim, Mary is alive!  She will never die! HAHAHAHAHA!”

In my head, Mary WAS immortal.  Other shitty hamsters and guinea pigs would run around like cracked-out dipshits and keel over in a coupla months, but Mary was a solider.  She was already over a year old and she would bite the furry fuck out of anything in her way.  I was convinced that I could release her into the wild and she would find a way to forage for her own food, rats be damned!

One time, I was playing with Mary in my deluxe Fisher Price duplex housing unit with Roger Daniero, the neighborhood douchenozzle.

For some reason, I wanted to pretend that Mary lived inside the house and I wanted to look in through the window on the second floor and see her doing seemingly human things.  Yes, in my 6 year old head, that struck me as inordinately cool and YES, it IS remarkable I didn’t turn out to be gay.

Roger wanted to keep the Fisher Price house wide open at the hinge and just have Mary chill out in the kitchen on the ground floor.  Fuck no, Mary ain’t no typical woman!  She’s already barefoot, she doesn’t have to be in the kitchen, Roger, you sexist prick!

An argument ensued about where and how Mary should be located, but she was my fuckin’ hamster, so I picked up her fluffy lil gangster torso and placed her on the second floor, right on top of the cartoon illustrated rug.

I began to close the unit, so I could peep Mary through the window looking eerily human.  “Look, she’s standing by a dresser, just like a person!” I imagined myself saying.  My mind was brimming with the voyeuristic possibilities.

As I was shutting the house, Roger made a last ditch effort to thwart my awesome plan.  He thrust his arm between the two halves so they wouldn’t come together.  Mary skidded into the corner with the jolt.

“Cut it out, Roger!”  I said.

“That’s stupid to have her upstairs like that!”  Roger contended.

“No, it’s not!  It’s stupid to have her just sitting there with the house open on the bottom floor.  We can look at her through the window!”

“It’s just a window.”

“You’re the window!”

(I was 6, fuckfaces, that was cutting-edge insult technology at the time).

I pushed Roger away and shut the house with a crisp plastic snap.  I won.  Finally.

“Now the cool part, Roger, we can look through the window and see what she does.”  I guess at 6 I was just in the inchoate stages of discovering my inner peeping Tom.  I peered in and saw Mary on the rug — just like I had expected!  How cool is that!  People can ALSO be found on rugs, I thought triumphantly!

I looked closer and noticed that Mary’s shock of white fluff didn’t appear to have the same markings I was used to….

I looked through the kitchen window on the first floor…. No….

Calmly, I stood up, briskly walked up the stairs from the basement to the bathroom on the upper floor, rolled a swath of toilet paper around my fist and slowly marched back down.

With the calm precision of a military surgeon, I unclasped the house and spread its halves back to its original open position.  With one the hand swaddled in Charmin, I picked up Mary’s head, which had left a red stamp on the cartoon illustrated brown ceramic kitchen tile on the bottom floor.  With the other hand, I rolled Mary’s torso from the second floor onto the mass of white tissue.

Somehow, the Fisher Price property had managed to fully decapitate Mary.  It was like some perverse magic trick.

Tada.

Using the full extent of my medical expertise, I again picked up her little head and tried to mash it up against the body, hoping that her very existence might snap back into place like a jigsaw puzzle.  Maybe the blood would stick her parts back together somehow, I thought.  It was logical to my 1st grade brain.

Roger stared at me slack-jawed as I expeditiously took  the reconstituted hamster up two flights of stairs to my father, who was in the process of running a bridge tourney with a large group of friends.

“Dad… Dad…” I said quietly.

I wasn’t crying or screaming.  I had a sense of purpose and, like all medical dramas on TV, time was of the essence, man!

My dad turned to me with a beer in his hand, looking askance at the bloody, white, and tan rodent composite in my open palms.

“Dad…”

At this point, my composure melted and I shuddered out what I wanted to say through a soggy burst of anime-style cartoon tears.  My shoulders violently heaved in a way that only a 6 year old’s can, the rhythm of my soft bones shaking the snot out of my glistening nostrils.

“Dad… can you fix her?”

I don’t remember how my dad looked or what he said.  I was hyperventilating and 6 and my dad was Superman and gave me food whenever my stomach growled and I never saw him swear or fall down or get mad.  He was tall and had thick oily brown hair that always smelled like Brut and leather goods.  He was a freakin’ superhero… as dads mostly are when you’re 6, I guess.

It never occurred to me, for a second, that my dad wouldn’t be able to fix Mary.

Playing along (in retrospect), he took the makeshift operating table from my supinated palms, and said “Everything is going to be okay.”

He was, as he has always been in my life, calm and gentle, as put his hand on my shoulder and walked away, presumably to find more space to “fix” Mary.

Later, he told me that there was nothing he could do, but that we should give her a proper burial to honor her.  In other words, for once we weren’t gonna flush a hamster down the toilet.  We had a proper burial, with a little shovel and a flower and everything.  I think my dad, never the talker, even said a prayer.  I remember looking at him with a mixture of thankfulness for such a beautiful service, and suspicion, for not being cool enough to save Mary.

Recently, I had to make the decision to move back to NYC from LA.  It was a daunting task that was stressing the shit out of me, and my dad — at almost 70 years old — drove up to the Hollywood hills to help me move.

His hair is near-white now.  He has a bad back and is still hunched.  Instead of cologne and cowhide, my dad now smells mostly like museum dust and fart.  He is clearly many years removed from my childhood image of him as some sort of Superman.

But again, in a moment of crisis, he was there for me, calm and gentle as he has always been in my life, cleaning up after my shit, telling me in my panic that “Everything is going to be okay.”

So, thanks dad, I know you read this.  And I want you to know that despite your inability to fix my fuckin’ hamster almost 3 decades ago, I actually do think that you’re a superhero.

I love you.

Happy Father’s Day.

Sometimes you get on stage and you become Buddha.

You become 100 percent, completely ensconced in the present. You are acutely aware of your senses. You are alive.

In short, you go blank.

You only notice the bright lights, the unique pastiche of audience members — the biracial couple on your left, the old man with the arms folded and catawampus toupee on your right. The smell of the room, like museum dust. The part of your brain that schemes and formulates collapses in on itself like the edge of some Einsteinian Universe, and what remains is some sort of cerebral dial-up modem whirr.

You become completely fuckin’ lost and clueless. You are having this moment during a packed show with a skeptical booker boring holes into your face…

You are breathing, Budda-like, in silence…

This sort of thing happens to everybody, doesn’t it?

It happened to me as an actor once.

I was doing a hit Off-Broadway show, the second act of which began with a lengthy monologue by my character that was ostensibly supposed to fill the audience in on what has transpired over the course of the past 6 months, when they were, in fact, whimsically pissing and powdering in the bathrooms during the 15 minute intermission.

Act 2 began with all of the actors at the foot of the stage looking out into the audience in a solemn row, hands formally in front of their balls, in what I like to call the “fig leaf” position. Starting at the front lip of the stage staring into the audience always made me think of the musical “Rent” (and no, not because it was unrealistic and stupid) because the second act of that show began in a similar fashion, except instead of a monologue about things Victorian and British, they all wore uber-hip, multi-colored scarfs and tried to sing to like black people. Unless they were already black, then they tried to sing like “REAL” black people. (sorry Jesse Martin).

Jokingly, and only during rehearsals, I would bust out with a shitaceous vibrato: “525,600 miiiiiiinutes, 525,000 moments of joy!” (If you don’t know this song from “Rent,” congratulations on not being gay).

Not unlike “Rent,” my play (called “Gross Indecency” and about Oscar Wilde, the Michael Jordan of fags) became a huge, and surprising, hit. So much so that we got into the routine of nightly scrutinizing the audience to see if we could spot the inevitable Celebrity Du Jour.

It was a veritable Who’s Who of What the Fucks? Faye Dunaway would be in the same audience as Marilyn Manson. Natasha Richardson and Liam Neeson came the same night as sweet and horny Dr. Ruth. Howard Stern and either Carol Channing or a cardboard cut-out of Carol Channing showed up. David Mamet was there one night one row away from David Bowie.

What made the celebrity sightings extra surreal was the fact that, as cast members, much of our material was direct address, meaning we didn’t have the typical fourth wall. That is, we looked directly into the eyeballs of our audience members to talk about whatever shit was going down in Merry ol’ England as well as whatever our respective characters were thinking or feeling (kind of like “Jersey Shore” talking head confessionals but live and with more brain cells). We had literally gotten used to the idea of staring into famous faces and saying our script.

One night, someone took a pre-peek into the crowd and saw that Meryl Streep, the legend herself, was in attendance. She was a definite personal upgrade for me, but consciously I really didn’t care that much. (Foreshadowing alert: notice my use of the phrase “consciously.”)

At one point that evening, putting on my eye-liner and staring into the mirror for the 259th time before the curtain opened, I remember joking to my fellow cast members, “How funny would it be if I opened the 2nd act with the song from “Rent” in front of Dame Streep?” Everyone chuckled slightly, seemingly not as bemused by the idea as I was.

Then I said something odd. Something that has, on some level, begun an excavation of the intricacies of my own neural wiring that exists even today.

“What if I just totally forgot my lines!” I said. I laughed hysterically at the idea. What a silly thought. That’s impossible. I could say these lines backwards. Ha!

Foreshadowing alert #2.

I wasn’t really aware of it at the time, but, as I am now FULLY and completely aware, the subconscious brain is an evil bitch. And it loves nothing more than to fuck up your life.

Don’t believe it?

Next time you want to delete the phone number of someone you have recently decided you hate (a liar, an ex, your grandmother), take a quick peeksie at the number before you do it. Your brain will industrial-strength laser tattoo those 9 digits into the forefront of your frontal lobe — GUARANTEED!!!

SUBCONSCIOUS: “You want to forget your ex, Bill? Of couse you do! Well, don’t think of the number 2134531882. Don’t! Just don’t think of 2134531882. I mean, why the fuck would you ever think of 2134531882 ever? That’s retarded! Let’s make a Schoolhouse Rock rhyme of the number in order to remind you of the number you need to forget….”

To point, your brain is a fucking asshole.

Ergo, if you throw down the gauntlet on your subconscious mind and say “You will never forget your lines,” it will indubitably try (subconsciously… confusing, huh?) to prove you wrong.

The house lights began to dim as the stage lights brightened.

We walked out to our marks downstage to begin the 2nd act. The lights — SHOMP — came up to full intensity until their buzzy white noise filled the 400-seat theatre. I was at my mark, fig-leafed. I was healthy, I was cute and 24 years old. I was word-perfect with the monologue…

I opened my mouth and couldn’t remember the very first word for some reason.

What’s that first word?… If I could only remember THAT, I thought, then I could do the rest no problem….

I stood there and stared out into the bright Off-Broadway lights, which then seemed excessively harsh, like Gestapo FIND-A-JEW spotlights. I could see particles of dust floating in the photons like living things traveling home. They were methodical in their state of entropy. The first person coughed, his body wordlessly asking if there has been some mistake. The only other sound, the hum of the AC.

In my silence, the vague blonde aura and hawkish nose of Streep was hazily edging itself in around the periphery of my sight line. A pair of fat legs under a red skirt in the 2nd row aisle crossed and uncrossed. The distinct crinkle of a yellow Playbill sounded like the explosion of a banned 4th of July firework in Church. Subtly, my cast members started to get restless….

I opened my mouth to speak and closed it again.

I stood there frigid, jaw clenching reflexively, wondering just one thing. Just one… What the fuck is the very first word of the second fucking act….

“525,600?” No, that’s not it.

The second cough erupted from a man with two chins fighting for supremacy.

A mysterious part of my body suddenly awoke and injected a shot of pure adrenaline into my bloodstream, dilating my eyes, quickening my heart rate. Sheer panic was beginning it’s descent into every fiber of my being.

The third cough.

Finally, a deeper, more Delphian part of my soul told me to “Just breathe.” This esoteric part assured me “If you just breathe Bill, your consciousness will unfurl again and simple Newtonian Physics will take over your universe again. Oh yeah, and don’t be such a bitch, Bill!”

So I began to breathe deep tantric breaths. At this point, I noticed two things: one, that CLEARLY, I had not been breathing at all and may brain was enjoying the fresh supply of oxygen. Number two, the cast members immediately to my left and right had frozen in a bizarre mirror exercise of terror. Clearly, they could sense my psychological demise and they were ransacking archives of their brains for escape routes or a way to save the night.

Farther down the flank, the actors seemed just curious. One of them casually turned to his right with a casual look of “Uh, hey, yeah, what the everliving fucktits is goin’ on centerstage?”

I took another breath, waiting for the world to come into crystalline and pristine focus, wherein the monologue would wend itself fluidly through my lips. Instead, in the moment as Buddha… lights. Crinkles. Crossing and uncrossing. Coughing fits and murmurs now…

“Oscar,” I began, stating the name of the protagonist, hoping it would spark everything else. Nope.

So I began to paraphrase. For those of you not familiar with the term, I just began to say shit that sort of made sense about what may or may not have happened in those 6 hypothetical months that needed to be covered.

I started again, “Oscar was a mess…. He was being sued left and right and his creditors were simply not…. not having it…. at all!”

What the fuck was I even saying?!

Everyone in the cast looked at me like I just peeled my face off and I was now Nicholas Cage instead of John Travolta (horrible John Woo movie reference? check!)

And like day 2 of a herpes outbreak… It got worse.

Not only was I speaking words that were supposed to make sense to the audience, but my speech also had verbal cues for the other actors’ lines and actions as well. In other words, my lines were supposed to be used as choreography for the other 6 actors’ interweaving motions onstage.

So my metaphysical meltdown meant that the audience didn’t know what story was being told, and the other actors had no idea what to say or where to move. Even the lighting cues were screwed. My semi-panic attack turned a high-profile Off-Broadway show with Meryl Streep in the audience into a sloppy “Duck Soup” Marx Brothers’ routine. We just needed a banana peel onstage to make my life complete.

We all looked at each other saucer-eyed with terror as I stumbled around like a marionette with a broken string. Somehow, amazingly, I garbled through some consonant clusterfucks until I recognize what could be landing point, at which point I exited the stage, beet-red and buzzing like I had just chugged a pint of viagra-laced vodka. When I got offstage, I laughed and presented my shaking and open palms to the gods, as if to say “How the fuck did that happen to my mind!”

I recovered and finished the play with great aplomb and composure. I was back on track. It was just a temporary brain abeyance.

Not so fast. The 2nd act brain fart, nay, brain diarrhea, continued for 3 more shows. And then, as quickly and as mysteriously as it started, it stopped. I did the play for another 5 months and never had that parietal paralysis happened again. Ever.

Until tonight at this gig in Hawaii…..

I’m only noticing the bright lights, the unique pastiche of audience members — the biracial couple on your left, the old man with the arms folded and catawampus toupee on your right. The smell of the room, like museum dust. The part of my brain that schemes and formulates is collapsing in on itself like the edge of some Einsteinian Universe, and what remains seems to be some sort of cerebal dial-up modem whirr.

I become completely fuckin’ lost and clueless. I am having this moment during a packed show with a skeptical booker boring holes into my face… I am breathing, Budda-like, in silence…

This bitchy, stern-faced booker at SHARKY’S in Honolulu had given me shit about my time slot earlier and now I see her hawkish nose edging into my periphery. I had done 90 minutes the night before, but I can’t remember my first fucking joke.

What’s just one joke I know?

Then I remember… that I am now a comic. I can say whatever the fuck I want.

“Wow, these lights are bright. These are like Gestapo, FIND-A-JEW spotlights! I can’t see shit!”

I’m telling the truth, but people are laughing. I’m lost, though….

“I don’t know what the fuck to talk about right now.”

I am utterly confused. And people see that. They are laughing hysterically.

One mean-looking guy with a bald head and flowery shirt is guffawing exceptionally hard.

“Wow, you look brutal, but your shirt is so flowery. It’s like your face is saying “FUCK YOU!” but your shirt is saying “FUCK ME!”

The laughs double in intensity.

I am still lost. I still don’t have a plan. But, as I begin to breathe normally, I realize my “lines” don’t matter. At all.

Because, now, I am a comic.

Now, I am a fucking Buddhist.

So suck it, Meryl.

Skydiving has never been on my “bucket list.” If anything, it’s been on my “shit list,” since I’m so sick of friends of mine prescribing it as some sort of magical cure-all for all of life’s woes.

Whenever I meet some faux-alpha male who smirks about his 1,000th jump, I can’t help but wishing a tree branch snags his nylon and he partially splatters on his 1,001 drop. “Whatever, you trust fund baby! You pay people to jump out of a plane! Big deal! Just because I don’t do it, doesn’t make me a fucking pussy! IT DOESN’T!”

At about the point when I was starting to question whether or not I was, indeed, vagina-laden, my friend Rita Roy — who would wax like Walk Whitman about the miraculous, universe expanding, mushroom trip of a “life-changer” skydiving is — had a horrendous, bone-splintering accident and almost died doing it.

Apparently, Rita was on her 15th jump or something and got caught up in the beauty of planet Earth that was hurtling towards her, and so — with a big, blissed-out smile on her face — she missed the checkpoint to pull the cord. Awwwww, she thought, look at the glorious bounty of Mother Nature!…. Whoops!

I asked her how that was possible. She said it was actually quite easy, that it was “the equivalent of spacing out and running a stop sign.” I thought about it for a moment and then assured her that no, she was just retarded. (I strongly suspect Rita had been texting during it, but I digress).

Rita lived because of some new fancy failsafe that automatically opens the chute if you “forget” to do it manually. Basically, it was invented for pantywaists who pass out, not spiritual thrill junkies who think each dive is a tantric fuck session with the essence of Krishna, but all the same, it saved Rita’s life. Now, despite severe injuries, she’s fine. Well, at least fine enough with the help of multiple pain pills and booze — the breakfast of champions!

I mean, it sucks for her, but it reaffirmed my belief that skydiving is a stupid activity for bored, white adrenaline-whores who need something absurd to fill up the void in their souls.

“I’m perfectly fine with the gaping hole in my soul, thank you very much!” I said to the mirror during my daily affirmations.

Two weeks ago, my good friend Cat was in town for a day. We were thinking of things to do and I flippantly mentioned skydiving. Surprisingly, she took to the idea like a teen to bj’s. Like most ideas that involve effort, I said “I’ll look into it” and then proceeded not to. This time, however, Cat followed up and forced a list of phone numbers on me.

The first number I called, some older woman with a twang answered. It sounded like I was inadvertently patched through to a double-wide in the Appalachian mountains. You could feel the lack of teeth in the timbre of her voice. She mentioned a reasonable price and offered a time that fit perfectly with my schedule. FUCK! …. Okay, fine, I’ll make a reservation, but that’s okay, it’ll be too windy or something else will come up. I mean, it’s just a reservation. Nothing solid. Right?

The next afternoon, I found myself driving to Camarillo Airport, wondering what the bejesus I was doing.

When we arrived to the address at the diminutive airport, it seemed barren. Nobody was around and all the planes appeared to be grounded. I meandered around and yelled “Hello” a lot, like I was in some bad 80’s horror flick and there was a heavy-breathing POV shot through some nearby bushes. It was windy so they closed it down, I thought triumphantly.

Finally, a cop appeared on the premises.

“Excuse me, do you know where the skydiving is?” I asked.

“Sure. It’s right there!” he said, as he pointed up to the sky.

I looked up for a nanosecond until I realized I was a fucking moron. He stood smiling with the success of his joke for about 3 seconds too long before he finally offered:

“Just kidding. Haha. Yeah, just cut through that restaurant and you can find it on the far end of the tarmac. It’s a brown plane.”

Cut through the restaurant? That sounds really on the up and up. At one point Cat remarked that I was “unusally quiet.” I told her it was because she’s a shitty female driver and that she made me car sick. In truth, I usually get “unusually quiet” when I’m contemplating my imminent death.

We cut through the cafe and looked around at all the pristine white planes on the tarmac. I couldn’t locate a “brown” one, so I asked a Mexican mechanic tinkering on a nearby cessna.

“Do you know donde the skydiving facility is?” I said, in perfect Spanglish.

The Mexican pointed towards the opposite end of the tarmac and then chuckled. Why the hell are you laughing, Jorge? I was too nervous to ask, so I crossed the runway, crossing myself the whole time.

And then I saw it. The plane I was going to jump out of.

The Carlos Mencia hack joke response to someone’s declaration of wishing to sky dive is often the following:

“Why would you ever jump out of a perfectly good plane?”

That’s a cute response. Unfortunately, it seemed frighteningly in apropos after I got a peeksie at the mottled brown Cracker Jack toy of a plane that lay on the lot in front of me like a giant turd. It looked like an evil Transformer had taken a dump on the runway. And now this Decepticon doo-doo was beginning to rust.

I crept up to the taped-on windows and peered inside. The silvery duct tape was frayed wherever it was applied, giving the impression that the whole contraption was going to precipitously unfurl and collapse like some ACME product Wile E. Coyote might get hoodwinked into purchasing. The chocolate pleather seats inside were ripped and creme-colored foam stuffing seemed to be squeezing out at every right angle. The interior beige paint was chipped and everything smelled like spiders, kerosene, and old pennies.

It was like a rape dungeon with wings.

I half-expected to see a naked girl in the corner of the cockpit shivering and crying for “mommy.”

I looked towards the entrance to the office near the plane and couldn’t help but notice that the “Skydiving facility” was actually an “UPHOLSTERY STORE/SKYDIVING” facility. I’m not precisely sure why that freaked me the fuck out, but it most definitely did.

Undaunted, I walked in, announced my arrival to the crew, and plunked down my Capitalone “NO HASSLES” card like I was ordering a cheesecake. I was surprisingly halycon… well, except for one strange development….

I had been home for hours, feeling fine. But, for some reason, the second I walked into the UPHOLSTERY/SKYDIVING facilty, my ass launched into protest. Although my digestive tract had been perfectly content all day, suddenly my sphincter started spurting out staccato farts. It was as if my asshole was desperately trying to tell me something.

Even in the strict onomatopoeic sense, the flatulence sounded like my asshole had launched into an angry litany of blubbery “Noooo’s” that wouldn’t stop. I found myself wandering around the small building, trying to adroitly boomerang the farts far away from me every time I made a swift 180 degree turn.

Brandon, one of the ‘jumpers’ — a jovial, heavyset, frat-guy type — got my gear and put me in a crotch harness that felt like a summer camp Atomic Wedgie. It compacted my balls and taint, which unfortunately, did nothing to stem the sputter of methane rocketing out of my bowels; which, in turn, caused Brandon to give me a sideways look that implied, “Bro, I know what’s going on and I won’t bring it up, but fuuuuuuck, get a grip.” Brandon opted to take Cat up instead (later admitting he knew I was ‘busting ass’ and wanted to avoid it by taking her).

Before I could say “Rolaids,” I was strapped and brought back outside to board the alleged “plane.” Brandon proudly announced that the nickname of the plane was the “TURD BIRD.” Everyone seemed to find that hilarious…. except me, of course.

The pilot came out of the office and boarded the plane with Chuck Taylors, baggy corduroys, and a Shaggy-from-Scooby Doo hairdo. ZOINKS, our pilot is A FUCKING STONER, my head screamed! It didn’t help my confidence that our jump was occurring only slightly after 4:20pm.

I instantly thought of the movie “Fandango,” when Judd Nelson goes up in a similarly slipshod prop/death-trap plane and the burnout pilot says “It’s better to die like this than in some senseless tragedy!” and proffers Judd a joint at 10 thousand feet. When Judd jumps, it turns out the stoner pilot had inadvertently packed Judd’s bag with dirty laundry instead of an actual parachute. The first cord Judd pulls releases a stream of soiled t-shirts and underwear. I couldn’t help but picture some mix-up in the “UPHOLSTERY/SKY DIVING” facility wherein my cord is tugged and out floats rich Corinthean leather all around me as I plummet to my demise, sheer terror making me unable to enjoy the delicious irony of my death.

Suddnely, my jumper appeared next to the plane with a crisp smack on the shoulder. He was stretching and trim and wearing pipe-lined short shorts, like he had just jogged a 10K in 1978. He smiled broadly, seeming smugly Evangelical. We then all crawled into the turd, Cat and I both cuddling up against our respective jumpers. Short shorts sidled up behind me and engaged straps and clips until we were connected like “Avatar” smurfs.

“Back up against me!” short shorts said in my ear as the “TURD BIRD” stubbornly sputtered to life. You could hear the rubber bands groan as the propeller beat against the choppy air. I tried to back up, but apparently it wasn’t good enough.

“NO, REALLY BACK UP ALL THE WAY AGAINST ME!!!” he yelled louder as the rattling increased and the plane began to take flight.

It suddenly dawned on me that “TANDEM SKYDIVE” is basically the “PRISON RAPE” of sky dive! And, of course, I would be playing the role of the Rapee. I had no choice in the matter. As prison bitch from the top bunk, I had to do everything he told me. I felt like screaming, “Just take the cigarettes!”

Finally, we spooned in a way that was satisfying with short shorts, and we sat in stony silence as the plane bumpily began its climb to 10,000 feet. He lazily draped an arm around my waist at one point. Ugh. I looked at his macho altimeter. He was the alpha male here, in control of everything. All I could do was breathe and try my best not to fart into his balls.

My face must have looked like I just had a staring contest with a Gorgon, because Brandon, strapped up with Cat, pointed and laughed at me and asked me, too loudly, if I was “okay.”

I nodded but found that my Adam’s Apple had temporarily disconnected from my voice box, so any sound I wished to emit was still buffering….

I guess Brandon found my state of paralysis hilarious, because he then decided it was time to try his hand at some standup comedy.

“Hey Bill,” Brandon said, “Whatever you do, just don’t fuck with the duct tape.” Brandon then began fucking with the duct tape. “Bro, if you pull too hard, the wings will come off… AGAIN! Hahahaha! We don’t call this piece of shit the TURD BIRD for nothing!”

I nodded and grinned toothlessly. For some reason, Brandon thought this was an invitation for more psychological torture.

“Hey, Bill,” Brandon started again, with his disarmingly jovial demeanor, “What’s the difference between a golfer and a sky diver?”

He then looked at me for an answer to, what I assumed, was a rhetorical question. My Adam’s Apple tried to shimmy down my neck to allow a modicum of air to vibrate my constricted vocals into phonation, but to no avail.

Instead, I just gaped silently like a carp to cue Brandon to continue.

“A GOLFER GOES ‘THWACK!’… ‘SHIT!’…. AND A SKYDIVER GOES ‘SHIT!’… ‘THWACK!’”

He then guffawed, his amiable face caked in flaky wind burn.

Fuck, that’s a good joke, I thought. A grammatical mirror reverse that is still dark and funny. I realized then that I will never be able to write as good as a joke book in the 80’s. Damn.

The plane began to level out, and, with only a nudge of warning, my jumper began to open the door…. and my world became very present….

WHOOOOOOOSH! Suddenly, the door opens, shattering the stillness of the sacrophagus. It feels like smelling salts or an injection of pure adrenaline in my Achilles’ Tendon, Keith Moon style. The wind fills my nostrils. I slide the goggles down over my eyes and feel a confusing chemical cocktail coursing through my veins.

Unlike most people, I don’t shake or hyperventilate or talk like at coked-out Persian in a night club when I’m terror-stricken. My reaction is quite the antithesis. I find that my body and thoughts go into some slo-mo Matrix “bullet speed” realm. It’s almost like I step a half-foot away and look at everything with a sort of Taoist neutrality.

I hold up my hand and look at it. It is surprisingly still. There’s the duct tape curling around the edges of the open door like a wild loose comma. There’s a man behind me rattling off a safety harnass checklist. The sky is blue behind us. The plane motor sounds dry and angry, like an octegenarian farting as he runs down stairs. The pilot wears corduroys. The sky is blue with smears of white. Duct tape peeling off. My hand is still.

“It’s better to die like this than in some senseless tragedy!” I think to myself. I know I am nervous, but only as a concept. I don’t really feel much.

I feel myself, without any effort on my part, moving to the open door. The wind funneling into my ears is drowning out any reflexive part of me that might resist the puppeteering of my limbs I am experiencing.

“THROW YOUR LEGS OUT!” short shorts screams.

Like a crippled war vet, I yank at my pants to move my legs to the edge. I look down and notice one of my shoelaces is unlaced and flapping. I rack focus to the earth about 10,000 feet below, gridded up like a gray electronic circuit with buttons.

The man, once effeminate, is steering and pushing me with steadfast assurance. I exhale consciously and look at the maze-like squares and silos on earth. And then another slight push. We are in free fall. Tumbling in the sky. I am clueless as I flip and trust this man with short shorts, who literally has my life in his hands.

Like a choreographed dance, our bodies suddenly catch the air like a wind sock. A tap on the shoulder cues me to stretch my arms wide. I see the earth coming at me quickly, yet seemingly and remarkably stagnant. It’s the mythical moment of Terminal velocity. My face surely is flapping around like a Shar Pei puppy, but all I am aware of is wind and distant grids and white noise. He takes my arm and moves it a little, causing us to horizontally pirouette. I feel like Lois Lane to his Superman….

Then SHOOOOOOP! The chute opens abruptly and the moment of disconnect is over. We are now sinking slowly down as the harness tugs at my armpits. Ahhhh, I sigh a breath of relief… It is over… or so I thought….

For some reason that utterly baffles me, my jumper feels that I want to twirl and twirl like a ballet dancer now. He keeps telling me to pull down on the opposing levers in order to cantilever the chute in different directions. My colon is about to declare jihad on and through my asshole, so I stop pulling, opting for a quiet descent instead.

But my jumper decides he wants to spin more. I forgot to tell him earlier to not to fucking do that because spinning around like a retard in a rumpus room makes me projectile vomit. He starts yelling “WHEEEEEEE!” as he wheels the chute around more and more.

I connect my voice box back together long enough to scream, “I’m going to PUKE!”

“YOU LIKE THE VIEW?” he shoots back, misunderstanding me. “WHEEEEEEE!!!!”

“NO, DUDE, I’M GOING TO FUCKIN’ PUKE!!! PUKE, not VIEW!”

“Ohhh,” he says, seemingly crestfallen. “Well, bro, if you puke, please puke on your shirt. I don’t want to get any on me! Seriously!” he says.

“I won’t puke if you go down gently,” I manage. I am not puking, but I KNOW that if I do puke, I will most certainly do my best to puke upwards into this face and nostrils.

We sway down, pukeless, and I land hard in a grass field with completely uninterested migrant workers only a few yards away. “Crazy gringos!” they are probably thinking as they pick away….

And they would be right….

************************************

POSTSCRIPT

A couple of weeks have passed since my sky diving experience.

Am I glad I did it?

Of course. It was cool and unique and I highly recommend it. Despite the ribbing in the blog, the people at the Camarillo SKYDIVING/UPHOLSTERY facility were amazing, and I wouldn’t have wanted to have my first jump with anybody else (short shorts included).

Brandon has come to see me perform at the Laugh Factory twice already, and, in exchange, I’ll get a discount when, and if, I go back. I might even fix the interior of my Honda Civic while I’m at it.

The thing that is nagging me is all the stuff I had heard leading up to the dive….

Am I a new man now?

Am I now one of those annoying converts that preaches that the miracle of existence can only truly be experienced through the wonders of free fall? Did it change my life?

Well… fuck no.

I still have taxes, I still have annoying text-fights with girls I know in LA (what did she write? CAPS LOCK! IT’S ON NOW, BITCH!), and my penis is stubbornly holding at its locked-in size. My mind doesn’t seem more open … nor have I been gifted with extra powers or experience points like it’s some RPG video game.

In retrospect, It’s just a thing to do in life. Like other things.

Big deal….

That being said, if you don’t do it, guess what:

you’re a fucking pussy.

A few years ago, my friend Jamie Kennedy made a cool documentary called “Heckler.” One of the major tenets of the movie is that the internet has basically become a conduit for hateful Asperger’s syndrome-y misanthropes to biliously and anonymously trash comics/writers/actors/filmmakers from the safety of their mom’s basement.

There IS a certain sanctity in the form of “heckle” where you have the ability to confront your nemesis. For example, if you’re performing in Tennessee and some fat drunk in the back yells “You suck!”, you can say something clever in return like “I don’t go to where you work and knock the cock out of your mouth!” which, in turn, might make the redneck next to that person say something like “Don’t you talk to my sister like that, you son of a bitch!” at which point you could say something erudite such as “Sorry if I offended your girlfriend, you toothless bucket of rancid trailer meat!”

It’s not an IDEAL set, by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s real and visceral and very present whenever a heckle happens live and in person. However, the brand of critique bred by the internet most closely resembles the splenetic scrawlings of public-bathroom-crappers who etch their hatred into walls for any and all anonymous future crappers. Hateful and pointless.

Even if you can accept the fact that many critics feel that their role as a social arbiter helps steer the cultural dialogue in a more positive direction, I’m hard pressed to find the reason why some e-critique would call Jamie Kennedy “a rape baby” based on one of his movies.

Beyond this, it is no small coincidence that the dipshit calling him a “rape baby” is at his Mac, not in his face.

Recently, I found myself attacked in much the same way: personally, unprovoked, and without the capability of being able to punch him in the face holes. He remained and remains an Internet Cipher… well, until I found him on Facebook….

As a gmail email account holder (don’t be jealous, people), Google has been trying to push different social networking opportunities on me. First they inundated me with Google Wave (pun alert!) and recently, without asking, they made me a member of Google Buzz.

I noticed that about 8 or 9 friends of mine were on Google Buzz, but I never thought about it. It just seemed like it wasn’t getting any traction as a “social networking” tool.

So, I wrote the following fake letter for my Google Buzz friends to see:

“Dear Google Buzz,

I’m sorry that you have failed.

Nobody really gives a shit about you, Google Buzz. They just don’t. I don’t know why, but the whole Buzz thing isn’t working. My advice would be to stick with your day job, Google. Buzz? It’s like giving Clay Aiken a hip, spiky hairdo — he’s still a gay hick.

Just stick to being Google, dude! I mean you’re already a fucking verb, bro, don’t overreach. A verb. Stop and smell the e-roses I guess is my point.

Bill

1 person liked this - Chris Griffin”

Oh well, 1 person, my friend Chris Griffin, liked it. I only had a few friends so any response was fine.

However, an employee of “Google Buzz” named Corey Russell somehow had access to my Buzz (creepy as shit) and wrote the following:

“Corey Russell:

Google Buzz actually has nothing to do with Google Wave FYI. Also, the slang ‘improper’ use of the word google is actually a verb, but the proper usage of the word Google, is a noun. But be ignorant if you want, bro.”

Uh… who is this guy and how/why the fuck is he reading what I wrote to my friends on Google Buzz? I decided to pursue a bit further…

“Bill Dawes:

“Bro”…. no shit Google is a noun. A proper noun, at that. You can even use it for Scrabble now!

I just meant to say that it’s so huge it has actually become a verb. I was making a joke. Basically saying you’re like the “Kleenex” to every other search engine’s “facial tissue.” I mean, I would die happy if people said, “I Bill Dawes’d this girl last night…”

If you didn’t get that joke, then you need a humor chip lodged into your cerebellum… and please don’t come back and tell me the cerebellum isn’t the “proper” part of the brain responsible for discerning the nature of funny.

p.s. I know I have two NAZI references in these messages, but I assure you some of my best friends are black.”

“Corey Russell:

Facebook is okay, and so is twitter, but this is our approach at Google. Nothing wrong with trying! We’re not successful yet, but soon it will be.

Maybe you should educate yourself a bit more for what Google Buzz is before you talk about it.” (and then he posted a link to some great article about the wonders of Google Buzz)

Oh, and as a side note. I have invites left for Google Wave. I’d be more than happy to give you one so you could try it out, bro.

“Bill Dawes:

Bro again?  Really?

Honestly, I can’t wait to NOT try Google Wave. Please send me the invite so I can proceed to NOT open it!

And the link to the Google Buzz info is irrelevant. I think the name “Google Buzz” is the problem. It’s like “I went drinking at an internet cafe and got a total Google Buzz!” Eh.

Bill”

“Corey Russell:

Wow, that’s stupid. What is your argument? You state that you want Google to stay the same, but then in the next sentence, you also told it not to be another Hitler. Well… Which is it, you idiot?!”

“Bill Dawes:

Before we go any further and I get mad…. Do you have Aspergers? It ties into the humor chip question. I’m seriously asking.”

“Corey Russell:

Jesus, the point I was trying to make is, you need to actually give something like this a shot before you start to compare it to ‘Facebook’, or ‘Twitter’.

Google Buzz is not meant to be, in any way shape or form, another twitter. I agree that Google is kind of monopolizing the whole entire internet as we know it, but they’re only doing this because they want to make the internet a better place for receiving and sharing information. There is nothing evil about that. (By the way, thats what Google Buzz is for. Not posting 160 character ‘I just took a shit’ posts.)

As far as the whole Google being a verb joke. That was stupid. Wasn’t funny, and just made you look like an uneducated prick. You seem to be quite insistent that I get some chip implanted in my brain to help me recognize your shitty, non-humourous jokes. Why should I? So I can be just like you? Wow, my life dream. You’ve discovered it. Congrats mate. Maybe you should just focus on getting your very own brain, asshole!”

NOW: If you notice, Corey Russell has called me an “uneducated prick,” an “idiot,” and “an asshole.” It seems to me that he’s not really getting my humor….

So I decide to redouble my efforts in the yuk-yuk department.

“Bill Dawes:

You’re right, scratch the humor chip implant. That was dumb. YOU need to get off the computer and get laid.

Calling me an “uneducated prick” for saying Google is a “verb” doesn’t even make sense, Corey Russell. I’m not even sure why your panties keep twisting up into your balloon knot over that one. I mean, were you molested by a “verb” as a young child? Was your Priest’s name a verb?

I mean, I simply say “Hey Google, you’re a verb,” and you go, “HOW THE FUCK DARE YOU CALL GOOGLE A VERB! GOOGLE IS A FUCKING NOUN GODDAMMIT! YOU IGNORANT MOTHERFUCKER! AHHHHH! IF WE WERE IN A VIRTUAL FANTASY WORLD LIKE ‘WORLD OF WARCRAFT’ I WOULD FUCKING SMITE YOU WITH THE SWORD OF 1000 DEATHS! YOU MAKE ME SO GODDAMN ANGRY, HUMAN!!!!!”

Bill Dawes”

“Corey Russell:

Mr. Dawes, you are once again showing me how completely stupid you are. You are taking this discussion way too seriously. You can’t come up with an argument, and assume I live in a fantasy world and play ‘world of warcraft’. Never once touched the game! In fact, I don’t even really like video games that much! Way to go buddy! Judging someone that you haven’t even met!

I’ll have you know that most of my time is spent with multiple friends, and actually working to earn my money and not leaching off of my parents like you do! See how that sounds when I throw out an assumption based on the little information I actually know about you? Pretty stupid right? Ha!

You seem like an uneducated fool, and unless you can come up with an actual argument that makes sense, you shouldn’t talk. As far as the comments about my father never loving me… really brilliant. Trust me, he loves me! Wow, you’ve really tugged on my emotional strings…How will I ever recover!?

And, oh yeah, shut the fuck up. ;)”

OKAY, clearly my attempt at humor failed. It felt sort of like my first 2 years of comedy.

What do I do? Give up? Try a different tack?

I decide to take the high road….

“Bill Dawes:

The reality is, people use the internet mostly to find creative ways to jerk off. Don’t get mad at me! Get mad at God. He gave us pee-pees and boy, do we love to show them to strangers! (p.s. enjoy the attachment on this email. I gotta admit, the angle is flattering!)

That’s why I think, next time at a board meeting, you should pitch “Google Jerk.”

Honestly, I don’t want money for the idea. Like everyone at Google, I’m not remotely interested in money. I just really want the internet to be a better place for receiving and sharing information.

Call me and let me bitch slap like the bitch you are. I’m waiting…”

Alas, Corey never called. And he blocked me on Facebook.  Awwww….Oh well….

Shortly after, I got an email of “sincere apology” from an executive at Google, saying that Corey’s actions were grounds for dismissal. I told him that Corey shouldn’t be fired because, in fact, I got a blog out of it.

Plus, I told the guy, Google Buzz fucking blows, it’d only be doing him a favor.

I can’t tell if dating in your thirties sucks or if dating in Los Angeles sucks.

Or if dating in your thirties in Los Angeles sucks. Or if dating in your thirties in Los Angeles with a facebook account sucks. Or dating just sucks.

Whatever the case may be, elements in my love life seem to be galvanizing into a perfect storm of Hoover-vac suckiness.

When I was in New York in my twenties (in retrospect) my love life was at least interesting. Sometimes, said love life may have bordered on the bipolar, perhaps even psychopathic, but at least there was a modicum of passion.

Don’t get me wrong: there is a whole heap o’ drama to be had dating girls in LA, but it tends to border on the boring.

In short, dating here in La is “dratarded.” It’s dramatic… but retarded. Girls here get hyper-pissed over things like facebook updates and the fact that you didn’t respond properly or enough to a text.

Here’s an ACTUAL STRING OF TEXTS between me and someone I dated briefly:

“Why didn’t u text me back?”

“Uh… because u just texted me that u were going swimming at the beach.”

“Pls just acknowledge my text next time! :(”

“Okay. Next time, when u go swimming, please go out deeper. :)”

What? I wanted to see if she could break her record!

Maybe my memory is sweetened and water-logged with Red Bull/Vodka from those nostalgic New York 9/11 years, but I seem to recall my love life in NYC as active and fun and fertile (oops!) and, dare I say, romantic. It was akin to a 1930’s Errol Flynn swashbuckler, compared to the 1950’s French foreign film marathon of ennui that is ‘Dating in Los Angeles.’

After many dates and near misses, I think I finally figured out the problem. And here it is: women.

Let me explain…

It seems that women in LA fall into only 3 categories. These categories represent the spectrum of dating options; or the types of women that a man such as myself (look who got upgraded from man-boy!) comes across or, rather, comes all over in Los Angeles (forgive me, that last bit was corny and nasty, but it was hovering there like a fluttering toss from a Raiders’ quarterback, I had to knock it down!).

The first type of woman in LA is the one who is in total denial. Over everything, particularly her age.

She shops at FOREVER 21, buys cremes and antioxidants by the wholesale crate, and when the mere subject of age comes up, she says something like, “Age is nothing but a number? Who cares? What difference does my age make? I hate all mention of time and numbers and even clocks!”

Hmmmm…. I feel like I’ve heard that before. Who else I’ve heard that from? Oh yeah, every woman in LA over thirty ever.

I like older women, so I went out with a 38 year old woman who was very beautiful …online.

When she showed up at the sushi restaurant, it appeared as if she had declared JIHAD on facial expression. I can’t say what combo of corrective surgeries she had, but her face began to assume that leonine “THUNDERCATS HO!” countenance that seems to be stuck on the visages of so many of the Hollywood enhanced.

Anyway, this girl was LA fit and tall, but I can’t say she had a “Butterface.” She had a “I CAN’T BELIEVE IT’S NOT BUTTER face.”

Everything was tucked and stapled and peeled. Her face looked like a newborn baby trying to squeeze out of the womb. “Waaaaaaaah!!!! Hey, I’m 29!!! Wahhhhh! I can’t blink, do you have eye drops? Wahhhhh!!!”

She couldn’t even fully close her mouth because her lips were so inflated and stretched back. She had this little roadrunner tongue flicking out every once in a while keeping her lips moist. And then she had these fake, physics-defying cartoon balloon boobies — or, as I call them, BALLOOBIES. These monstrosities would take 2 seconds to follow her. Every time she turned a corner, they would wallop around and seem to chase after her. “MEEP MEEP!”

So I’m putting it in her, right….

Come on, I can’t be too picky — I just moved here!

Anybang, I wasn’t really into it but I was giving it a College try. At one point, I realized her face kind of looked like one of those rubber sex dolls. I couldn’t really tell if she was enjoying herself at all because her expression never changed.

“Is that sound a good “Ooooo”or a bad “Ooooo?” Blink twice for good….”

Every once in a while, just to be safe, I had to put my fingers on her aorta to make sure there was a pulse. (There was.)

The second option for dating are the women who are painfully aware of their age and feel that their biological clock is ticking louder than an egg timer. They are keeping a lid on their obsession (kind of like the Natasha Beddingfield song “Babies”…. so what, I own it on iTUNES, that shit is catchy!), but they are officially, and unequivocally, freaking out about getting older.

When I first moved to Los Angeles, I had my best girl friend Cali (www.calinorton.com) set me up on a blind date. This woman was in her mid-thirties. She was talented and smart and sexy and we hit it off right away. We went to a party, had some drinks, did some dancing. I rocked the ‘Robot.’ So far, so good.

After a break in the music and after one too many cocktails on her part, she said “I have to tell you: I wanna be pregnant by the end of the year!”

First date!?

I took a sip of my drink and said, “Can’t we just enjoy this Christmas party?”

Okay, that last bit was a joke. It was last February, but it may as well have been New Year’s!

Honestly, what did she think my reaction was gonna be?

“What are we doing drinking Appletinis getting to know each other? Let’s go back to your place, take off those granny panties and try to fertilize that dried up egg, Betty White! … what’s your last name again?”

In reality, what I said was, “That’s a beautiful thing.” That’s all my mouth could muster.

Unfortunately my penis heard what she said too. He took that as a cue to retract backwards into my intestines.

He was like, “What the hell did she say? Dude, I’m outta here…. I’ll be hanging out with the colon if you need me - come with me testicles - I’ll see you later on Chatroulette, Bill!” And then he disappeared in a puff of baby powder.

The THIRD option is dating women/girls in their 20’s.

I used to see guys in their thirties dating girls in their early twenties and think “What a ….CREEP!” Now I’m in my thirties, I see it, and I think “What a… GOOD IDEA!”

Young girls are just so easy to please! You can drive ‘em to Tijuana and they’re like “Wow, I’ve never been overseas before!”

Older women are impossible to please.

“Hey, Sally, I really want to make you cum.”

“You do? Well here’s the instruction manual, if you refer to page 347 in the chapter on clitoral stimulation, it will show you the proper rotation and psi needed to please me….”

Plus, young girls can teach me things like how to use a computer and webchat. “Baby, can you help me change my Facebook settings?” And, according to a new book, a ‘blow job is the new good night kiss” with the current generation of young girls. Dr. Phil has a problem with this because, apparently, he isn’t a fan of awesomeness.

Plus, younger women are game for anything. “Hey, Jenna, wanna put on X-MEN outfits and bang in the park tonight?”

“Sure why not? I’ve never done THAT before. Can I be STORM? Just make sure I’m back in time for homeroom!”

Okay, the truth is, despite everything I say and write, I want love and nothing is cooler to me than a long, beautiful relationship like the one my parents, Dave and Suzy Dawes, have. They’ve been together for over 40 years and my mom still looks at my dad and says things like “Isn’t your dad cute?” Awwww.

They have shared everything. And that is love. And that is life.

Honestly, I don’t want to be one of those Hollywood stereotypes. I don’t want to be 60 and marry a 40 year old. That’s so cliche!

No… I wanna be 40 and marry a 20 year old.

That’s much better.

Right?

Am I white trash?

And if so, am I proud?

When you grow up poor and go to public schools, you don’t consider the possibility that you might be white trash.  Mostly because there is always someone white trashier than you.  

I’d like to think I’m NOT actually white trash. I’m mixed: half-white, half-trash — my mom is from the South and my dad has teeth. But looking back at my childhood, I realize much of it had some dubious trash trappings.

Yes, I dipped occasionally, but I never had the worn white denim ring on the outside of my back jeans pocket from the perpetual Skoal can.

Yes, it was public school, but it was also very PROGRESSIVE — we were mainlining retards in my high school by the meaty fistful.

As a matter of fact, Virginia public schools were teeming with retards when I was there. Listen: I know “retards” isn’t PC, but I’m talking “Down’s Syndrome” kids — if anyone can truly capture the comic essence of the word “retard,” it’s these drooling, straight-banged bastards (why do they ALWAYS have the same haircut?).

Like most Down’s Syndrome kids, I never once got my hair cut by a ‘professional’ until my senior year of high school (in this case, a ‘Supercuts’ technician). Up until then, my dad cut my hair. “Bowl cut” isn’t a figure of speech, people– a “bowl cut” is when someone puts a bowl on the head and cuts the hair around it.

Unfortunately for me, my dad would put the bowl on my head facing up, so all I’d have would be a little tuft of hair sticking out the top of my skull like a “Freaks” pinhead. (That last bit was a joke).

Shopping with my dad was another cue that perhaps I was trash or at least trash-adjacent. Department stores were the worst — not because dad was poor, but because he was poor AND tried to play it off like he was ‘frugal.’ I literally thought that there was a brand name called “SLIGHTLY IRREGULAR.” My dad would buy my SI underpants (we called them SI’s for short) by the bulk. And then I’d have to wear imitation corduroy jeans called TUFFSKINS that felt like polyester cardboard which was being continually lit on fire right in the vicinity of the scrotal sac.

Between the TS’s (as I called them) and the slightly irregular undies, I’d spend the entire day doing the “work the wedgie out” walk. People at school thought I had scoliosis. Or spina bifida, if the TS’s were freshly out of the laundry.

ALL I wanted in life was to be rich — and that meant having a real designer shirt! Like Izod or Polo. I’d get polo-’style’ shirts instead — which would be shit like a horse with no one on it. My mom got the clever idea to sew Alligators on Izod-style shirts. The first time I donned one, I went to school all arrogant until someone pointed out that the Alligator was facing the wrong way. I tried to convince people it was their new “greater than” line, but it was actually “equal to” beatings on the playground.

Remarkably, despite this, my parents successfully tricked me and my two brothers into thinking that we were middle class.   When your high school experience involves — at least bi-weekly — watching big black ballers get in fistfights with “Joey the Retard” in the cafeteria and LOSE (DS kids are as strong as PCP-addled Orangutans), it’s easy to forget about mundane things like exactly what rung you are on the socioeconomic ladder.

One day, I finally saved up enough money to buy my own designer piece and I got a “members only” jacket. It was like summer and hot, but I still wore that thing to class every day for a week. I would hear things like: “Dude, that style is so dead,” “More like ‘Only Member’” and “Fag.” I cried and cried. I’m telling you, kids can be so mean in college. 
 
As it turns out, it wasn’t until I became ensconced in the Ivory towers of Princeton University that I learned I was, in fact, poor white trash from Virginia.  
 
My freshman year at Princeton is when I first found out how completely uncouth, unfashionable, uncultured, and unPRINCETONy I actually was.  At first, I was angry at my parents for not teaching me how to be refined and shit — like what a hand towel is; which are the proper utensils to use for eatin’; and what ‘manners’ are.

But after 4 years of going there and after 3 subsequent years of dating a trust fund girl from the LIPPER financial family,  I finally got my chance to be RICH… by proxy, at least.

And I realized something profound that changed my life: rich people, in general, suck enormous amounts of cock — figuratively speaking, of course. Specifically, the East-Hampton-wall-street-posing-$5000-worth-of-makeup-nose-job-for-their-sweet-sixteen-having-to-cover-up-their-genetic-inbreeding-spoiled-acting-Prozac-gulping-therapist-obsessing-breakfast nook-eating-deluded-wrongly-entitled-group-of-talentless-and-stupid-bratty-fucknut TYPES.

Wow, did I type that out loud? I seem bitter, huh? Well, for the record, I dumped her. White trash - 1. Legacy family - 0.

So I guess maybe in retrospect, I am White Trash and Proud.