The New Jerusalem

Pseudopud

I can't believe I just did that. I hate the word "pud". My natural revulsion by (from?) most curse words appears to have been stripped from my by popular consensus: My need to percieve myself as hep and racy displaces all of my aesthetic senses. Well, makes sense, that's how Old Navy stays in business.

Thank you, I'll be here all week.

But, also, it's a pun. A lame pun. But, oddly, I think it's called for. Just bare with me, gentle reader, wait for the catharsis that'll never come because I have no natural sense of narrative.

Yok, so last night I went out to an unpaid gig at a bar in Sebastapol, CA. To my european and subsaharan african fans, sebastapol CA shares little with its crimean cousin save a profound sense of saddness and the harbored remains of at least a few communists. It's up in sonoma county, so has that whole hick town/hippy refuge dichotomy. Lots'o'Yoga parlors. Anywhoo, it was unpaid, i got in contact with the booker from a craigslist ad. This was, probably a mistake. If online sex has taught me anything, it's that the internet is filled with potential, but none of that potential is actually worth driving an hour.

So I thought I was running late, hurrying to this place in Sebastapol, eschewing even the Roehnert Park In'n'Out (I realize the Atkins Diet, like Marxism, is a dream too perfect to be practical, but I'm in love enough with the dream that I do my best to try to believe its lies.)

So I get there at 8:15, and the host isn't even there yet. Wa-wa-waaaa. He was supposed to give us a) Free Liquor, b) Dinner, and c) tolls. likelihood of seeing any of them seemed low.

The other comics were already there. One was a guy I'd seen around SF. Pretty experienced, as I understood it, was in the Laugh Riots a coupla years ago, a regular at Cobb's before it's temporary departure for Avalon. Let's call him "Captain Ron". Not because he in any way resembles Kurt Russell or his delightful seafaring creation, but because it's the first name that came to me. Thank god i will never be allowed to make or name a child.

So Captain Ron talked to me and blah blah he hates all the SF open mics except the Mock. An opinion I understand well enough. The others were a new kid from Santa Cruz who, I must note, was possessed of a tawny loveliness seemingly plucked from a William Beckford novel or one of T. E. Lawrence's masturbatory fantasies. I wanted to pet him real hard.

And there was a girl who eventually became a drunk girl.

The host was one of those guys who is close enough to being a bro that he dresses like a bro, but dorky enough looking that he fails to pull it off. Sad. The set up was a bar complete with pool tables, drunk people, and a sign that said "Oprah Author's Drink at Jasper's". As I dazzled at the sheer number of apostrophes used in the sign, I immediately knew it was indicative of the literary quality of O's book club authors. I really think they should also have to put a sign under it that specifies that the sign is not in any way refering to Jonathan Franzen.

Ok, so the host did show, he must have, because i described him above. the dinner he had for us: a cold pizza. Dude, Dr. Atkins died for my ketosis, I can't eat pizza.

The show finally began at around 930. First up the host... who did about 30 seconds of material then introduced the first comic. Yes, it was going to be a night of pure professionalism, I could tell already. Poor pretty. Damn, i know i just started a paragraph, but I really need to do it again to properly emphasize the plight of poor Mike, the first comic, poor, beautiful, mike.

Poor stupid mike. Like, it's not the fault of the criminally attractive that they believe they're funny when no empirical evidence supports this finding. See, they go through life bedecked in a loveliness that cures all ills. I mean, who needs to be funny when they've got a net of eyes and cheekbones with which to capture prey. "But Guy," You say, "That only explains why Mike who should be Porn wasn't funny, not why he THINKS he's funny." Well, gentle reader, I can only assume that the world so longs to favor the likes of mike that his however rude attempts at jocularity have been met with unearned if emphatic approbation and laughter. It is even true that the mere presence of one who is quite viscerally attractive has been known to create such a tension as any excuse to laugh is fully entertained. Why, on a corollary note, just days ago a petitioner for a political movement i don't support (he was gathering signatures against the Recall effort. while i don't look forward to a Governor Kindergarten Kop more than anyone else, I do so enjoy political drama) but I signed without question. Why? He had very nice biceps. VERY nice. And when people with very nice biceps ask me to do things, I comply. I wonder if that's how Hitler rounded up the gay guys for the camps: Just sent around a bunch of really HOT Nazis, and the faggots did whatever they asked.

So point is, Mike sucked so long and hard I really should have given him $150 at the end of his efforts. Then me.

By this point the audience was quite uninterested in comedy. the front of the bar was entirely oblivious. chatting and playing pool. In my naivetee, i still thought "hey guy, do well, make a good impression on Captain Ron, maybe you can get work. You remember work, right, it's that thing lots of people who aren't you are getting."

So I did a set. A sassing the audience, loud, pounding set. It didn't all take, but it got all the pool-playing, drunk people looking in the same direction, acclimated to the idea of comedy, and on a nice footing for the person to follow me. I finished, sat down. Captain Ron leaned over and said "subtle".

Now, beloved reader, it took me a good minute to realize if he was being sarcastic or not. To quote Jackie Beat, I'd long believed I put the 'b' in subtle. Then I realized Captain Ron, mistaking texture for text, had failed to really note the contents of my mouth. He saw himself as smart and subtle, and had decided to counterpose me as "what's wrong with comedy."

The beauty of structuralism is that like all good academic theories, it's TRITE. The simplicity of dichotomies saves us all that time we normally use thinking.

In conclusion, Captain Ron's attempt at a subtle set to the drunken hicks failed miserably, but I was only slightly able to enjoy it. His intellectual inclinations were made very clear as he referenced *gasp* sartre. Yeah, we've got a mensa member on our hands. oh, then he told a joke about haiku, and said his favorite haiku author was Basho. Yes, that astoundingly obscure haiku author basho. And my favorite type of catsup is heinz.

You know, Dr. Prof. Captain Ron, maybe some of us know a bit of european philosophy and japanese poetry, but we put it in the back pocket when we're in bars in sebastapol and our job is to entertain the crowd. He, and the woman before him, spend much time chastising the crowd for not paying attention. Um, dude, they're not there to cater to you. Your job is to entertain them, and if you're failing so hard they have to make thier own entertainments, it's your own damned fault.

I don't care anymore, i just wanted to finish this so i could go to lunch.