Exactly one year ago today, at this very moment, I was going through the hardest and most difficult thing I’ve ever had to experience.

I was watching my dad die after being the person to make the decision to pull him off life support.

If I were in a gang, would that count towards a teardrop tattoo under my eye?

My dad and I didn’t always see eye-to-eye; in fact, we fought a lot. There were times when we went a few months without speaking. That whole time passed around 2004, when I realized that I needed to let go of all the bullshit from the past that I held on to (you moved out! you’re seeing some other woman! you have terrible fashion sense!) and just accept him for who he was. Our relationship was, in my opinion, great after that. If not great, then much, MUCH healthier.

As I get older, and find myself in situations I didn’t want to be in, I understand some of his actions a bit more. He would get mad when I’d came to him for money when I was in college, which I realize now not because I needed it, but that he didn’t always have it. He just didn’t know where to focus that energy.

When he hid a lot of stuff he did with the woman he was seeing for several years from my brother and I (I mean going to movies and taking trips, you pervs), only to find out in roundabout ways what he was up to, he thought he was protecting Phil and myself. He just didn’t know that was doing more harm than good.

When he would get mad at minorities, I realize…well, no, that was just him being rude.

He worked his ass off to get sober and stay sober for 24 years after his addiction almost cost him his job and his career. It’s ironic that 12 Steps saved his life, then falling down 12 steps ended it.

He was blunt, sloppy, self-loathing, intelligent, fiercely loyal, goofy, recovering from addiction, button pushing, loving, emotional, scary, comforting, heroic, cowardly, honest, lying, scared, fearless, giving, and frugal. He was a handsome man that let himself go. He was a vain man who was too angry with himself to take care of himself.

He would have been 57 next Thursday, July 29. He passed one week before his birthday. Because he and I shared a love of pizza, our family had it on his birthday last year, and decided that July 29 will henceforth and forevermore be known as Pizza Day. If you remember next Thursday, try to grab a slice, then call your parents. Talk with your mouth full. They love that.

My dad didn’t know his father, some bastard named Chuck Cauley from Chicago who drove trucks (yes, if you were related to him and stumble upon this, consider this sentence an open invitation to get in contact with me. I want to meet you, even though I think your grandfather/father/whatever is a douche. I bet you’re alright.). Chuck rolled in to town for the last time when my dad was 5 (1958), and then never came back. Maybe that’s why I like Tim Riggins on Friday Night Lights so much.

I’m about now at the moment in time where, one year ago, he took his last breath. When you make the decision to pull someone off life support, you don’t get to ask them if you made the right decision. You don’t get to find out if they’re one of those .05% cases where the person wakes up years later and is Robin Williams. You have to live with it. Based on the facts we had at hand, I think we made the awful, right decision. He crowed at me time and again through his life that he NEVER wanted to be on extended life support. Like, there were times when he made me repeat it to him. I think he’s where I get my obsession with death.

I miss him fiercely. What’s scarier than the hurt, though, is the idea that I may forget what he sounded like. I see him occasionally in my dreams, and he sounds the same. I fear the day I see him in a dream and his voice has been replaced with Dr. Zoidberg’s.

After he passed, I sat in what must be shock, a complete fugue state where I couldn’t do anything but stare into the distance and breathe. Voices sounded like they came from underwater. Everything had a soft edge to it. If I ever have a conversation with Glenn Beck, I now know how to cope with it.

We went downstairs, and I dealt with the valet parking ticket. The woman behind the counter informed me that we owed $23 for parking. I looked her in the eyes and said this:

“Is there any discount for a family that just had to watch their dad die?”

She silently stamped the ticket and passed it back, no questions asked.

It was the day before my girlfriend’s birthday. Happy birthday Danielle! The perfume we got you is called Stink of Death.

We drove off into the evening, into the rain, into the rest of our lives.

My improv group Thank You, Robot is celebrating our 3rd anniversary as a team this week here:

Each day this week I will be talking about a different member of the group, and why I love them as performers. Today: Seth Lind.

I want you to think of something really strange and funny to say. Something off-the-wall. Got it? It’s still not as clever or creative as whatever Seth will come up with the next time he opens his mouth.

Seth once spent a month doing undercover work in the 1930s as a zoot suit salesman to make his olde-tymey characters more believable.

Seth loves introducing high concepts to the stage, but he doesn’t just abandon them. Most people want to drop some type of clever bomb on their scene partners and the audience, then panic and back off, leaving everyone with a limp scene about the aftermath of a cool thing that happened. Seth knows how to not only knock you back with the way his mind works, but also is fully capable of pulling you in to the world he created. He once made me a sorority girl, and himself a dragon, and made me give him a blowjob on stage. Not only did it work and make sense, but it was hilarious.

I get both excited and intimidated to be on stage with him, because I literally never know what’s going to come out of his mouth next. He often starts his characters with some type of physicality, and if his shoulders hunch, or he shifts his body weight down slightly before he opens his mouth, prepare yourself to see and hear something you have never seen or heard before. Seriously, his physicality is awesome. Dude finds ways to make standing still look interesting. He may be my favorite member of the team to sit back and watch from the back line, because I am always surprised, and always laughing when he is performing.

Regardless of how offbeat his characters can be, they’re always honest. He’s versatile, too. He is perfectly capable of playing an incredible straight man, reacting in real and honest ways to whatever bullshit you (meaning ME) might spew out. He isn’t odd for odd’s sake; in fact, there is always a logic to how he is behaving in scenes. That’s what pulls you in, and it’s what makes you want to see more.

If I had to sum him up in three words, they’d be: madgenius (yes, one word), honest, hilarious.

If I had to describe Seth in three songs, they would be these (right click to save):
The Dirtbombs – Chains of Love
Against Me! – Up The Cuts
The Avett Brothers – Kick Drum Heart

My improv group Thank You, Robot is celebrating our 3rd anniversary as a team this week here:

Each day this week I will be talking about a different member of the group, and why I love them as performers. Today: Chris Scott.

I have been very lucky.

For all the bitching and whining I do about my life, I do understand the areas in which I have been actually hit with the luck stick and been allowed to be a part of something special. One of those places has been improv. About 3 and a half years ago I met some of the best performers I’ve ever had the privilege of taking the stage with. To have been lucky enough to be swept up in their madness and allowed to be a member of what became Thank You, Robot was one of the best gifts I’ve ever been given. These guys have been some of my closest friends in comedy. We’ve all pushed each other, and helped each other grow, made each other more confident as performers, and more daring as an ensemble. A lot of people that try to do comedy either go at it alone or fall in with petty people who have NO ONE’s best interests at heart. I’m proud to say that neither has ever been the case with this group, especially not Chris Scott.

Chris, serving up gifts even when he’s NOT on stage.

Chris has an amazing energy on stage, like a spring constantly extending and recoiling. He is capable of creating reserved, thoughtful characters that have the type of insight you THINK you have until you actually try to play like him and realize you don’t. On the flipside, he can also be a bounding ball of energy, screaming and hollering and exploding with emotion. My favorite characters to see him play are pompous assholes that are so confident in their meager skillset that you sit on the edge of your seat waiting for their world to fall apart around them. I believe Will Farrell and Adam McKay call that character type the “mediocre man.”

None of this means anything, though, if it doesn’t make SENSE, and that’s something that Chris makes happen when he steps out. He sees the stage like he’s not on it, knowing what needs to be clarified, and what needs to be blown out. Then, he serves up the simplest moves that not only make the scene make sense to YOU as a performer on stage, but to the audience as well. Kids, if you ever want to perform with someone that will make YOU look like a genius on stage, call Chris.

The only time I’m ever uncomfortable onstage is when I’m performing with people who hesitate, and that is something that Chris has NEVER done. He is balls out, unafraid, and revels in whatever is taking place at the moment. He shares the POV that I do – if you’re gonna do something onstage, SELL IT. This thinking has actually found us making out for reals on stage in more than one show (you’re welcome, ladies). It has also, however, found him doing scenes where he is unafraid to break down emotionally, to actually be a vulnerable character, which most people have trouble doing because you have to make yourself a lot more open than most are comfortable with.

If I had to sum him up in three words, they’d be: fearless, committed, and honest.

If I had to sum him up in three songs, they’d be these ones (right click to save):
Fang Island – Daisy
Alphabeat – Fascination
Los Campesinos – This Is How You Spell “HAHAHA, We Destroyed The Hopes And Dreams Of A Generation Of Faux-Romantics”

Visit Chris on the web:
twangofthevoid.blogspot.com
chrisreblogs.tumblr.com
obamarama.tumblr.com

*This is continuing a series of me looking back at how I got to be where I am, what I went through, and where I’m going. It’s terribly navel-gazing, so feel free to skip if it doesn’t interest you.*

By early 2004, I had completely immersed myself in the “adult experience,” as I like to call it. By that I mean “I realized that sometimes the things you want to do seem impossible to achieve, so let’s get drunk and be aimless.” I never had a HUGE problem with where I grew up. Suburban western Pennsylvania was pretty devoid of culture, and that forced my friends and I to go out and find it. We would go on journey’s around the tri-state area to find rare movies, see shows, and meet different people. It felt like a safe place to come back to during summers in college. We had a nice house, I had some money in my pocket, and all seemed well because I had friends around me.

The problem with coming back home after college, I quickly realized, is that I was one of very few people that did so. So many of my friends had moved on to different parts of the country, my mom had downgraded to an apartment (from other issues), and now here I was, still at the same job I had in college. The glaring boringness of my area was brought into pretty clear view, and I hated it. My fun came from my friends, not home, and now I didn’t know where I was.

Then I saw an ad in the paper for a theater group looking for people to do improv, and I jumped in.

*NOTE: I’m breaking this into parts, to make for less one-time reading, and to make it look like I’m really updating. This is also pretty self-indulgent, but I tend to reflect and reevaluate when I hit milestones like this. Anyway, let’s begin.*

Earlier this month, I passed the 6 year mark of chasing comedy as a career goal. Two weeks after graduating from college in 2003, after doing stand-up about 6 times in college, I went to the Pittsburgh Improv for an open mic night with the specific goal of that being the jump-off point, the very first step in what I knew would be a very, VERY long road. Herein, I’ll be looking back at what I’ve done, what I should have done, where I am, and what I still need to do.

All through my life, I knew I wanted to be an entertainer, but I didn’t really know how to do that or what it entailed. To be honest, I still barely know. I denied that a lot, because I grew up in an area where people didn’t do “entertainment industry” as a career choice. Beaver County wasn’t a place where dreams grew, it was a place where dreams rusted out, then you got someone pregnant and eventually taught yourself to hide your seething animosity for your own place in life. It wasn’t until I was hanging out with a girlfriend in college that I said I wanted to be a comedian, and she turned to me and said “yeah, I can totally see that.” That was all the validation I needed, because she’d trusted me enough to let me fuck her, so I knew she believed in me.