I am home for the first time since early February. Drove like a fleeing suspect 26 hours from St. Louis to get here and slept thru half of the time I will stay. I'm not complaining although I could. I like to complain. I like being miserable.
Notes from a wonderfully miserable three months -
St Lucie, Florida.
Jay Kirschner - or Jay Scribner as he will be known - flew from his trappings in Florida to celebrate his 50th birthday at my show in Tyson's Corner, VA.
He's an attorney. He has that kind of money and most of it is yours.
Drunk conversation leads to drunken emails and next thing I have agreed to perform at his house a few weeks down the road. In his living room. I couldn't find a reason this was not a very good idea.
Mr. Kirshner is a stout Jew - barrel-bodied with a penchent for sweatshirts with the sleeves cut off, leaving large holes to view his torso. He lives in a cul-du-sac in a gated community and keeps a small boat on the swamp-lake aside his house. I picture alligators waiting by the shore in the middle of the night like stray cats, waiting to see if Daddy will bring home another rolled-up area rug.
Jay's friends are mostly all in the same profession and now they are all in the same living room getting drunk on a Wednesday and looking at me. They are cops and they are prosecutors and they are defense lawyers, like Jay. I am looking back at them and imagining their clients in jail, clients with visions of their attorney hard at work - like Tom Cruise in 'A Few Good Men' - straining through the night to find that one clue, loophole or strand of DNA that will set them free at last.
The client would be dead wrong. His attorneys were pie-eyed, New Year's drunk at 8:45 and, after proving too wobbly-headed to listen to my show without constant interruption, are now following me and the rest down the cul-du-sac to go Christmas carolling in April.
"You want the truth? You can't handle the truth! The truth is I was so fucked up last night I puked in your case file."
I was out of my squash as well and as much as I promised I wouldn't, I eventually saw fit to tell a female cop and a prosecuter how I felt about the whole darn system. The cop had been my friend on the surface and didn't fall away until the end when I explained my theory on why it's perfectly okay to shoot a pig in the face in certain circumstances. (See Deadbeat Hero bonus footage)
You'd expect a lot worse from this night. You'd imagine that this crowd combined with my act and no witnesses on private property could have been far worse. But I had a great time and most of them did too, from what was remembered.
These folks are the hardest lot to offend. Lawyers, cops and judges will let you call 'em names all day and react no differently than a white guy does when you call him a honkey. He still has all the power. No need to be upset. Same with these folks. Why would they get angry when they own us?
It wasn't until I was on my way out that I realized I'd referred to Jay Kirshner throughout the show as Jay Scribner. I don't know why. But rather than look like a dick, I will call him Scribner from now on, as though it must be some inside joke that nobody gets.
I've retained Mr. Scribner on non-traditional terms and he's since proven a trusted collaborator when consulted on many projects even when not within his usual field.
Should you find yourself in Florida and in some trouble with John Law, contact Jay at his website
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Our Lawyer: |
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Kirschner & Garland, P.A. |
Ask for "Mr Scribner". I'm sure he will give you what sounds like an excellent deal.
Austin, TX
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This picture - on a postcard with a pro-life screed on the reverse - found its way into my hands after a show at Club Deville. Evidently, it's intent is to disgust you and scare you away from having an abortion. Evidently, you've never seen a picture of childbirth. Make it natural childbirth and add audio and we'll see which one scares you to what decision. |
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At the bottom, Chet Kilgore leaves his address and phone number, along with his website www.antiabortionsigns.com - in case you want to order more of these precious cards. The back describes how "shockingly painful" the fetus' death had been. Chet doesn't say how he knows that it was a painful death. I assume he just assumes. I would assume the opposite. I cramp up sleeping on a loveseat when I'm drunk. Nine long months in the "trying-to-blow-myself" position makes you believe nature anesthetizes you or you'd see more fetal suicide. Let's not mention the claustrophobic. *shivers* |
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Not only does Chet give his home number - this isn't the kind of business that requires a storefront with lots of foot traffic - but Chet answers that phone when you drunk dial! That's Christianity right there!
But I assumed that Chet has heard it all at this point so, for creativity's sake, I went the other way - kinda.
I chastised Chester violently by accusing him of being the "worst type of child pornographer known to man!".
As he stuttered, I reminded him that this picture was "a human being, not some piece of flesh" and that to show naked pictures of it was "attracting the worst type of child predator - pre-term, necrophiliac child molesters who are masturbating like Satanic apes at these murdered children's pictures!"
Mr. Kilgore sputtered like a cunt-fart, unable to tell me how this is anything but child pornography - obviously he can't say its not a child - and keeps falling back to his well-rehearsed arguments about how many unborn lives these pictures save. I question his motives for wanting these children to be born so badly - you know, him being a child pornographer and all.
I so wish I would have taped it.
So far as I know, Chet Kilgore is still taking calls in case you want to order more. Whatever your reason for wanting these pictures.
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Chet Kilgore |
I don't know if you can order specific types or if you can choose what position it poses in but maybe you could ask.
I wouldn't suggest you record it or even send me a recording to post here. I wouldn't suggest that since I woke up my attorney Mr. Scribner in the middle of the night to inquire. He said I shouldn't go and suggest you call and pant like a horse while you ask when boy fetuses develop ding-dongs or if a fetus can feel a spanking with a hairbrush. So I haven't.
Thanks, Mr. Scribs!
Funny Post-script - If you Google Image search 'Chet Kilgore' - you get the same picture of the dead fetus. Maybe this is more than just a little personal for Chet.
Omaha. Somewhere in Middle America.
Three plump and fleshy-faced girls sit up against the glass of an oversized aquarium at the Shark Club. It's ladies night. The dj is pumping out Bon Jovi's "I'll Be There For You" and the three chemo-cherubic gals all mouth the words to themselves.
I am shuffling from 11 weeks straight and most of the year in total on the road. And as much as tonight I say I hate the business, a hard reality hits when I realize that without comedy, women like this who I now sit and silently mock wouldn't even have me to wipe shit from their shoes.
Evil pimp, aren't you, comedy?
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Brendon Walsh [ myspace.com/brendonwalsh ] found this out the hard and fun way in South Dakota at a dance club similar to this. He's doing his patented dance - high kicks with a clap under the raised leg and then a turning salute - kick, clap, kick, clap, salute to the left, salute to the right - and then he returns to the bar. As you can imagine, people in dance clubs don't find this amusing nor did the girl next to him at the bar. A slow song now starts and Brendon - fresh from his kick and salute number - turns to her and jokingly says "Oh, a slow song! Do you wanna dance?" "I wouldn't dance with you if you paid me, you ugly fuck." |
This is why I never go to dance clubs. This is why I didn't enjoy doing Girls Gone Wild. Always the same useless fucks who employ hair gel and hip-hugging jeans as prosthesis for personality and relentless top-volume music to cover up for the obvious lack of anything interesting to say.
Walsh is a goof and South Dakota dance clubs don't cater to goofy. He says one thing and gets told he's an ugly fuck by someone who probably wistfully mouths the words to Bon Jovi songs.
Walsh is also drunk and after a stunned beat he throws his drink in her cunt face.
Real American Hero.
The comedy club staff is there to make sure he gets out alive and quickly an army gathers fast to defend her honor and later impregnate her. "Don't bow up on me, you fucking hayseed" he tells one as he's pulled out the door, knowing he'd get killed otherwise. You won't see that shit on 'The Comedians of Comedy'.
I love to hate these gigs, this woeful, flappy mid-section of the country. Their only source of pride comes from pegging another nearby locality as something worse and hoping you make fun of it. In Omaha, a rumpled beast of a woman at my shoe, stage-right, interrupts my bashing of the city and tries to steer my jokes to the "real" shithole - Council Bluffs.
Council Bluffs - "Counciltucky" they call it and the joke never gets old - is right across the Missouri River in Iowa and that's where the "real" podunks stay.
She scoffs when I break the news that it's all exactly the same shithole. I explain to her that if she had a baby and it's mutant head tore out of her, shredding her perineum and leaving her with one gaping, septic hole, that she could draw an imaginary line across the middle and tell me one part is her snatch and the other her asshole but to be inside, no one would be able to tell the difference.
By chance, I end up staying nights off in Counciltucky the next week and the only difference I could see was the future of Omaha and of the dance club girls with the pork-meat countenance.
In Omaha, my crowd was in their 20's and 30's. In Council Bluffs, I am at the riverboat casino and the people range from 50 to so explodingly fat as to make species more the question than age. I do not call someone fat to insult them. Fat is a description, not an epithet. The people in this casino were unquestionably the most obscenely obese gigantasaurs ever to stampede me.
Lumbering cows, backs arched as if they could balance 330 pounds of gutmeat with mere shoulder blades. This is nearly everbody and the place ain't empty. The buffet had a sign that people were limited to a two hour stay and that people who stayed from one meal into the next would be charged in full for both.
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They were forced to put a sign up. I wanted to ask someone if this had been an actual problem - lard-hoarders squatting and homesteading their double-wide booths until the hash browns get switched out for gravy and mashed - but I could never find an employee alone without a fat person within earshot. Seven hours on 'Let It Ride' without at least one carnival buffalo bellyed up to the table and still out of arms reach. How a pit boss could be surrounded daily by these voluminous garbage lockers and still - with a straight face - put seven chairs at one table - is preposterous. |
I am in no way making fun of people with weight problems.
Mind you, I don't think myself in any way as attractively fit nor do I doubt that I could fit into the same cud field with these same plus-size mammels were it not for my diet of cigarettes and caffiene as a base for evening alcohol. I am likely even less healthy than many of these pigs. If you were to hold my ass in your hand while blindfolded, you'd wonder how many children this poor, hairy woman had birthed back in her youth.
I only wonder why people crave things that will kill us. Why do we not instinctually stay away from fried foods, have a genetic predisposition for water over Coke, find states of rest more enticing than running like dogs. Not to mention inhaling smoke or putting needles in your arms. Why does raw broccoli never, under any circumstances, seem appealing when everything we are warned against is like a buglight? No other species seems to be intrinsically suicidal.
No other species seems so deservant.
The reason I've been able to work so many non-comedy club venues and have so much fun is because a lot of you have emailed and had a place to do a gig. It's been that easy.
"Hey Doug - I have a bar in Carbunkle, Wyoming. Do you wanna do a gig here?"
And when I can route it in, I do. These gigs have been more fun than most of the shit I've done in the last ten years. Thanks and keep em coming.doug@dougstanhope.com