blogging

Roseola

Guess it’s about time I post one of those blog posts about how it’s hard to keep up with posting on my blog. I’m not saying that blogging is as hard as, say, being a doctor. But it probably is. Doctors get paid rather handsomely for their doctoring, and when they are doctoring they probably don’t have a voice in their heads saying, “Really? Doctoring? Shouldn’t you be looking for a job?” So in that respect, maintaining a blog really is harder than being a medical doctor. 

I’ve started several blogs in my day. Sometimes after just one post, I’ll think, “What the hell was I thinking with this blog? I’m so embarrassed! Oh dear!!” And I’ll stop it. I once started a blog called Sleepability. It was just going to be write-ups on the best albums to sleep to. I still think that’s not a bad idea for a blog, but for whatever reason I couldn’t commit and the blog itself entered a permanent slumber after just three posts.

I won’t let that happen to this blog, which is easier to stick with anyway because it’s just me talking about what’s going on in my life. But sometimes even that’s hard.

Here’s what’s going on. I am sitting on our couch next to Jen who is watching her new show, Shetland. It’s a murder mystery set in I think northern Scotland. Jen’s birthday is tomorrow. I want her to have a really nice day but it is largely out of my hands. She has not taken the day off work so that’s eight hours of her birthday I won’t be able to account for. But afterwards I think we’re gonna go see Jojo Rabbit. It is nominated for Best Picture at the upcoming Oscars. Most of the Oscar nominees are such odd choices. I see people are mad Uncut Gems was shut out. I’m mad that Uncut Gems was shut out of Australian movie theaters. I still haven’t seen that shit. It’ll be on Netflix by the end of the month, but I wanted to see it in a theater! I remember what a wild experience it was watching Good Time in the theater and I wanted more of that feeling, but I’ll never have it because I moved to Australia. Folks, I’m tellin’ ya, moving countries is rough! 

Jen started work last week and Olive started daycare. Olive was sent home from daycare on her second day with a full body rash. It was on her butt and everything! I took her to a doctor. He was awkward with her. He told me, “Well if she just started daycare than we’re gonna be seeing you a lot in the next six months.” I thought, Buddy, what makes you think you’ll be our regular guy? Jen conferenced in from work. I put her on speakerphone. The doc didn’t like that. “This isn’t very practical,” he whined. Screw you, pal. You’ll never inspect my daughter’s little buttcheeks again. Or mine. 

The second doctor came to our house. In Melbourne you can call this service, 13SICK, if it’s after hours and they’ll send a doctor to your house. He just comes right over, like he’s your best friend. It’s an incredible service. And best of all, it’s completely free. For as much as Australia seems like hell lately with all the fires, it is in many ways utopian compared to the United States. Free healthcare. No guns allowed. “Tapping” credit cards instead of swiping them. It’s unreal.

Neither of those doctors diagnosed Olive with roseola. And I gave them both the in to say, “Yeah, probably roseola.” But they just said, “Well, it’s not really roseola. I mean, you can’t quite call it roseola. There are a buncha rashes out there that it could be. If it were roseola, that shit would be fuckin’ everywhere.” 

But a couple nights ago Olive projectile vomited like a sorority girl. A sorority girl who hasn’t partied in a long time but has now just been dumped by a guy she was really super into so decides to party harder than she ever has and is now paying the price big time. We called 13SICK again. Why not? It costs nothing! A different doctor came, and this time we were told, “Okay that shit’s definitely roseola. Nothing you can do about that, really… bye.”

Scotch and Campbell’s Chunky Roast Chicken & Vegetable Soup is the best dinner to eat at 11pm after finally getting your daughter to sleep for the night!

Scotch and Campbell’s Chunky Roast Chicken & Vegetable Soup is the best dinner to eat at 11pm after finally getting your daughter to sleep for the night!

Parenting never stops. It makes it so hard to do things. And when your kid’s sick, forget it. According to Reader’s Digest, nine out of ten new parents quit updating their blogs before their child’s first birthday. That’s some sad shit. 

Olive was up until after 11pm last night. But then she slept through the night, and many parents don’t have that even with healthy kids, so we can’t complain. And I’ve been here on the couch with Jen for over an hour, and Olive’s been quiet, and Jen made such a good dinner for us, and it’s a beautiful night. We’ll probably go to sleep soon. I haven’t fallen asleep to an album in many years, but if I were going to, I guess I’d pick The Trinity Session by Cowboy Junkies, which you can read about on www.sleepability.tumblr.com. Happy birthday, Jen!!!

My Friend Bryson

“Living in Brooklyn was great. We don't regret moving.

Maybe I'll be creative again.

Or maybe, I've been putting creativity into my life for this past half-decade. Maybe, I don't need to hold my breath until the next time I'm given a microphone and a full room's attention.

Maybe being a better person is a form of creation. Much more creative than a tight five.”

—Bryson Turner, May 4 2019

I think about Bryson and his blog every time I think about writing a post. Is my blog like his? Am I like him? God, I hate the word blog. It’s not a cooler thing to call it than weblog. From here on, Bryson’s weblog will be referred to by the name Bryson gave to it and has stuck with all these years: The Comedy Hajj. “Hajj” like the Islamic pilgrimage (I just looked that up). Calling your online journal The Comedy Hajj is just so Bryson. He is not Muslim. Or maybe he is by now.

The Comedy Hajj is a very different weblog from mine, from any that I’ve read. Most of the time, a person starts one of these things in an attempt to communicate clearly with an intended audience. The Comedy Hajj, to me, reads as a diary that is not meant to be read or understood by anyone but Bryson. I don’t know if I should even be telling you about it. Might be a huge betrayal of Bryson’s trust. Often, his posts read as cryptic poems. Information on his life is scant. One typical sentence reads, “Meeting on Tuesday with the owner.” The owner of what? And what is the purpose of this meeting? In Bryson’s world, you fill in the blanks.

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Bryson was my friend, and a comedian, and maybe still is a practicing comedian. There are passing references to comedy in TCH, beyond the name. He clearly still thinks about comedy a fair amount. But although I am an avid reader of his posts, I know very little about Bryson’s current life. What does he do for a living? Unclear, though he does say his job provides “meaning and challenge.” I know he loves his wife and their two kids. For the life of me I can’t find any posts about their births. They just showed up. 

I became aware of Bryson when I was just starting out in comedy. I’d been obsessively reading websites like “The Comic’s Comic.” Bryson was featured on that site for winning Funniest Person in Austin. Soon after that I saw him at an open mic in Michigan, where he was visiting for a festival. I thought he came off dickish onstage, and that he was being blatantly rude to my friend Adam Sokol (he wasn’t, Adam insists). 

A few years later I’d moved to New York, and so had Bryson. I got to know him, and he was nothing like the arrogant asshole I’d pegged him as. He was kind, open-hearted, and as insecure as anyone else. He had big questions on his mind, and always came up with weird answers to them. 

The first time I booked him on the weekly show I had with Adam and Nate, he didn’t show up or reply to my messages inquiring where he was. When I saw him next in person, he said he had just been laying in bed, sad. I almost respected it. I knew what it was like to feel too down to go out and do comedy, and, rude as it was to do a no-call-no-show, it made me like Bryson more. 

He came to visit me at my Starbucks job once. He knew how that job made me feel. We sat at a table and talked through my lunch break. He said, “I know you probably feel like you’ll never get out of this job. But you will.” It meant a lot to me, hearing that. He also said Eytan Kurland was the next Bill Burr. If you know who Eytan Kurland is, well, he did not become the next Bill Burr (all due respect to Eytan). With Bryson, it was always a cup of wisdom with a spoonful of what the fuck is this guy talking about? 

Over the next couple of years, Bryson’s ideas about What Comedy Is became further and further out, and the younger comics who followed him into the Madness were off-putting to me. One in particular did not smell great. Bryson posted something on Facebook about his new personal rules for comedy. “A conversation counts as a set” was one. I at first thought he meant a conversation from the stage. Like, if he wanted to spend his couple of minutes onstage at the creek talking to another comic who was waiting to get up, he could count that as a set. Made sense! But he meant a regular everyday conversation, with anyone. If he spoke to a person for a couple minutes during his day, that was a set, and he would not need to do any stage time.

Soon enough, he started to drift away, doing fewer sets (not sure how many conversations he had during this period). I heard a rumor that he was pursuing a professional basketball career, that he was sincerely trying to get into the NBA. One of the last times I saw him do comedy in New York was at a large cafe in Park Slope, where he hosted a show with two other guys. One of the bartenders there became his wife. I think she had a kid. Now they have another kid. In his blog she is often referred to as “Butterfly Starfish.” They now live in Virginia Beach. 

I never stopped looking up to Bryson. Even as I questioned everything he posited about comedy and life, I listened intently to what he had to say. He was an example for me of how to get through depressions, how to cope with failure, how to be more open. I do wish he’d be more open on The Comedy Hajj, be a little clearer about what’s going on in his life, how he feels about it, about stepping away from comedy and immersing himself in domesticity. I need the example. I look up to him still.

And often, he does provide clarity, like in the quote at the top of this post. Does he believe what he said there? Will Bryson come back to comedy? So many comics just stop. Much of the time, it makes sense for them to stop. But Bryson is way too weird, too unique, to just hang it up and work at a desk the rest of his life, isn’t he? Aren’t I? Or maybe a stable, predictable, “normal” life really is the most creative thing for him to do now. God, that’s so Bryson to stop being creative, and claim that he’s more creative than ever. And it’s so me to say, “You’re on to something there, Bryson.”

That said, I’d still like to see him do a tight five, which, knowing Bryson, would quickly turn into a very loose twenty or thirty.