Good advice

I absolutely hate big gatherings of family and family friends. The reason for this is that I always end up having to tell some old friend of my parents that I'm a comic/actor, and then I have to explain why that's what I am, and then I have to explain how successful/unsuccessful I am at the moment, and then, best part here, they always feel the need to give advice. And when I say advice, I mean last night at my family's sedar (ask your Jewish friends) some old friend of my dad's looked me right in the eye and said, not joking, "You know what you should do? You should do the Letterman show. That's really good for comics."
Really? I should do Letterman? Damn, I hadn't even thought of that! I mean, Letterman actually called me last week but I had to turn him down cause I was doing an open mike at a bar and I thought that was more important. Wow, thanks for the tip, I'll get right on it.
I also enjoy when people feel the need to tell me it's a hard business. "Oh, you're an actor? Well, you know, it's really tough to make it in that field. A lot of actors struggle." Tough? What the hell are you talking about? I turn on the tv every day and see actors who are rich! Are you suggesting that's not going to happen for me by next week? Fool! You know nothing!

Damn

I went to the Hoover Dam once. I was on a road-trip cross-country with two of my best buds, and we went across the Hoover. The thing that got us was the lack of security. A cop stopped each car individually and said "hi, are you here to blow up the dam?" And we said "no" and he said "okay" and that was it. That's kinda fucked up. I mean, that's an important place, it should be secure. Granted, if it was really secure than my friends and I would have been complaining about how long it took to get through.

That's all scary and stuff, but here's the real point: Do you think that when beavers see man-made dams it affects their self-esteem? I mean, that's what beavers do, they build dams. It's basically their lives, their nature. Without dam building they're just gophers who learned how to swim. You gotta wonder if they see humans come along and make something so far beyond anything they could do, and that's in their field of fucking expertiese, are they just like "damn, now I feel like my life's a waste."

I wonder what beavers taste like. Having absolutely no idea, I'm just gonna assume they taste kind of like rabbit. I had rabbit once. It was good. Tasted kind of like chicken. So maybe beavers taste like chicken. And chicken tastes absolutely nothing like beef. The point is I kinda want a steak right about now.

Politics, and other things of which I know nothing.

I'm a democrat. In a lot of ways I'm pretty liberal. I met a guy at a party who's a Republican. And I really mean that, he works for the Party. So we were getting drunk and I, as a liberal, made some crack, and then he made some crack, and then everybody else at the table with us, who all knew him better than me, saw we were about to argue and got up and left. Now, I knew right away I was gonna lose this argument, and I told him so. It's not that I thought he could change my beliefs, it's that I am rather uninformed. I don't keep up with things enough and those I do read about I don't entirely get, economics and such. So the problem here is that we have vastly different beliefs, but he knows things and I don't, so his arguments are "facts and facts and figures and facts," and my arguments are "Bush is a dick!" I mean, as right as I may be, I'm not gonna come off the smarter one.
I've seen him since, and hung out, he's a good guy, just a republican, that's all.
Met another yesterday, an old friend that I haven't seen for a while, we got together for lunch since we recently discovered we live in the same area again. She's a republican now, too. But she's what you may call "compassionate," I guess. She things gay people are okay, things like that.
Got me thinking. Does "repuclican" actually mean "I hate gay people and poor people and people who don't believe in Jesus?" No. No, it doesn't. Republican, from what I remember of high school social studies class, means small government. It means less restrictions on people, low taxes, more independence. It's just that a lot of the people high up in that area, and certainly the most vocal ones, are anti-gay, yay Jesus, things like that.
Republican does not mean Jerry Falwell. It's just that Jerry Falwell is a republican, and it gets equated that way in a lot of our minds. He's loud, he's vocal, he spouts his views that many of us hate and we go "goddamit, I hate that there are still people who think like that and they run so much of the damn country."
And yes, I know that Falwell isn't a politician, but come on, when you think conservative republicans you think of people like him.

Admit it, even those of you who are liberal still want lower taxes every now and then.

See, this is why the two-party system ain't all that fucking great. It's because you put yourself on one side and there's only one other and it's too easy to look at that one other and say "goddamit, those people are all assholes!"

Take that, Florida!

So winter's about over, seems like. Well, that's good, now we can go with the warm-weather cock-tease that is early spring.

Every winter, as I walk the streets desperately looking for something to fill the empty, meaningless void of my life, I see people sleeping under blankets out in the cold and my heart goes out to them. I think about their pain, homeless and hungry, and I always wonder: why don't they migrate?
Yes, folks. That's right. Homeless people should migrate. The birds have the right idea: if you live outdoors all the time, and you know it's about to get very very cold, be somewhere else when it happens. Head down south. See some sights. Go where it's warm and then those that are left will actually be able to be taken care of by the blanket drives. I figure every winter there's gotta be a collection of homeless people in Tampa gathered around a store-front looking a television, seeing something on the news about homeless people up north and they're thinkg "what the hell are you doing up there? It's cold! It's not like you didn't know it was gonna get cold, it does that every year!"
Now, I know what you're saying. How do they get there? Well, they walk. Maybe hitch-hike a bit. Starting in, say, September, when it starts to get a little chilly, start heading down. Don't have to go all the way to Florida, just get about half-way, a little more, find a spot you don't mind so much and hole up for the winter. If you really miss the city up north that you're from, then in March or April start heading back and it'll be warm by the time you get there. And you know what's great about that? Since you're travelling all the time, you're not just a bum any more, now you're ... a Wanderer! One who Walks the Earth, like Samuel L. Jackson at the end of Pulp Fiction. Without the afro or, you know, the guns. I hope. Wanderers with guns we definitely don't need.
Of course, what if this catches on? What if all the homeless do decide to migrate down south every winter? Some will stay there, maybe many. Florida will become the state of Old People and Bums. Take that, Florida! I send to you the Eleventh Plague: waves of wandering vagrants!

Mitch

Okay, so, I didn't really intend to unsult the Pope in any way, I'm sorry, I just think stuff like that sometimes. I understand he was a good guy, did good things, and was loved by millions, I guess it's just that any time major religion is concerned, weird thought pop up.

On another note, Mitch Hedberg is dead. If you don't know, Mitch was one of the best working comics around. The guy was about as big as a comic can be without being a huge mainstream hit. He was a favorite of other comics everywhere, but the average non-comic regular guy just didn't really know him. I don't know as much of his stuff as I'd like to, but what I've heard I love. I never saw him live.
After graduating college, my two best friends and I took a month-long drive across the country, just to see what we could see. My dad let us take his car, cause he's cool like that, and it had that XM Satelite Radio thing. If you can get your hands on that, I highly recommend it. The best feature (to me, at least) is this one station that plays nothing but clips of stand-up comics. We listened to that station across entire states, and whenever Mitch Hedberg came on we turned the volume up.

Here's one for the fallen homie.
Shit, now I have to clean whisky off the rug.

So Terri Schiavo is dead, and now the pope is being fed through a tube in his nose. Yeah, yeah, I think that's kinda gross, too. Okay, wait, I'm breathing deep and gathering my thoughts and thanking god nobody really knows about this blog except for people I know and would probably say this upcoming stuff too, anyway.
First off, glad Schiavo is dead. No, asshole, doesn't mean I like the idea of people dying who've never actually cut me off on the highway, I just mean she was fucking BRAIN-DEAD and that's a pretty good time to call it quits. If you're one of those people who manage to think that living as a turnip is better than dying while at the same time claiming to believe in heaven, well then, I mean, wow. I'm not going to be able to convince you of anything, you just go on back to finding ways to make people miserable in the name of Jesus. Go ahead, I'm not stopping you.
On to the Pope. I don't want to offend anybody. I mean, I understand I might and I'll live with that. Here's the thing. I'm not Catholic, so I don't fully get the full-on Pope deal, I guess, but my understanding is that he's God's personal go-to guy here on earth. Am I right? Okay, so if he's been getting as sick as he's been getting, basically playing ring-and-run with Death's Door every few months, isn't that supposed to maybe be, I don't know, a sign? I mean, if you believe God might take a hand in every day life, and maybe save a person or two, then wouldn't the Pope be Mr. Saved-By-God when he needed it? I mean, if he's meant by God to live then shouldn't he not be dying? I don't mean to shit on the guy, I really don't, but the thing that gets me on this is the double-standards. For example, gay people or drug users get sick, and there you go it's God striking them down. Jerry Falwell or the Pope gets sick and holy shit but God couldn't mean for that to happen, right?
I guess the other issue is how do you have major religion along with major medicine? At what point does keeping someone alive switch from doing the right thing to playing God? They say killing Terri Schiavo was playing God, I say no it wasn't, keeping her alive when she was supposed to be dead was playing God. At what point does it stop being "saving a life" and start being "not letting Fate happen." If you believe in Fate. And if you don't then you probably don't believe in God, in which case you wouldn't really care about all this, anyway.
Oh, hell, I don't know. I'm a non-practicing Jew, I'm ignorant of all your ways. I also ramble.

What's a better way to die?

So apparantly Indonesia got hit by an earthquake yesterday, killing hundreds of people. Don't worry, I'm not about to poke fun at earthquake victims, safe and secure on the wonderfully still east coast though I may be. But then today on the metro (that's what we call the subway in DC) there was some lady sitting in front of me with her two kids, and she looked at the paper and I heard her say "Oh, an earthquake. For a second there I got really nervous, thought it was another tsunami."

...

Well, yes. Thank God. I was nervous there for a second, too. Thank God it was just a huge earthquake and now we can all relax again. I'm sure all those people trapped under rubble are just sending little "thank you" notes right up to heaven for the fact that it wasn't a tsunami. A typical one might read something like this:

Dear God,
I have always had a fear of the water. I mean it, ever since I was six years old and my dog Mr. Barky drowned, I just have never been able to go swimming, not even in a kiddy pool. Now, consciously I've always known the odds of my father holding me down in the bathtub like he did to Mr. Barky are pretty slim, I mean it's not like I ever pee on the rug any more (after the example he set I learned very quickly), but subconsiously I've just never been able to get that fear out of me. So when I read about that tsunami in Asia, I suddenly had a new level to that fear. Now I knew that even if I weren't actually right at the beach, the water still might be able to come and get me. It's been terrible for me since then, Lord. I jump at everything, always afraid that the terrible terrible water is finally coming for me. This morning, as I started to feel the first little bits of rumbling, I thought "oh God, please don't let the water come get me. Anything but that." I was trembling, curled up in a little ball on the floor, wondering if the water would kill me quick and mercifully. I almost peed my pants, but of course certain conditioning never goes away. But Lord, you answered my prayer. The water stayed away. The ground shook and buildings toppled down, but except for the spray from broken pipelines there was no water anywhere, certainly not the dreadful pull of an angry sea. Now, as I lay here sweetly nestled under half a ton of earth and debris, I can't help but think of how blessed I am, that you would take care of me in such a way.
Thank you Lord,
Little Timmy



Yes, I understand that a tsunami would be worse than an earthquake. Yes, I get the fear of something much bigger than what happened, and that a tsunami would cause much more death than the earthquake did. I'm just a little amused by the idea of saying "whew, an earthquake."