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.

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

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.

Here’s a thing about me: every single time I get a new opportunity in comedy, I treat it like some type of massive hurdle, that the Gods of Life and Laughter are preparing to judge me. So I had psyched myself out to the point that I almost hyperventilated before going in front of a very relaxed, very kind group of people that were just looking for others with whom to have fun. I went in for my “audition” with a really stupid idea, that I thankfully changed my mind about, literally, as I had my hand on the door. I had stuffed my pants with tube socks. But I had taken over a dozen pair and stuffed my pants, so it looked like I had a small child in my pants, or the most sever hernia ever. I think I planned on treating it like it wasn’t a big deal, and then acting like a sock promoter that didn’t have any place else to put my giveaways. GUH. I unstuffed my pants, ran back to the car, and threw the socks inside. After meeting and talking with everyone for about 10 minutes, they asked me to start coming around for some improv. That was it. They were just looking for people that would be fun, and I fit the bill. They were a well-known group in western PA, called The Cellar Dwellers, despite performing ABOVE a bowling alley.

On my way home, I realized my crotch itched, because I still had a pair of tube socks in my pants the entire time I was meeting with these people. SIGH.

The Dwellers were (mostly) a good group of guys who were doing some fun stuff, and helped teach me the basic tenants of improv: specifically, YES AND. I took that one to heart. Larry Phyllis, one of the funniest goddamn people I’ve ever met, was kind enough to suffer through some of the most awful things I’ve ever pooped onto a stage. He helped me work up from “disgustipating” to “almost acceptable.” The improv was fun, but what I wanted a piece of was the other thing they were doing: sketch shows. These guys were writing a sketch show every 2 months and touring it around the area, and I really wanted to start working at sketch. I had helped write a sketch show in college that was much more successful than we’d ever expected it to be. Before the first night, we had said we’d be elated if 300 people came over the course of the 3 night run to see it. Well over 900 came out, and we received glowing reviews. It was such an amazing feeling, and I’d wanted to work at sketch since then. After building it up way too much in my own head, I finally asked if I could be a part of that side. Then I hit the type of wall I always expected from one of the members.

This guy, who I’ll call Guy, was horribly insecure, and had actually run off several people from the group with his ego and pompousness. He’s the kind of guy that, if any type of person of notoriety came to the area, he’d be sure to be around them and try to be seen by others being around them. I didn’t know that when I came to the theater one night and pitched a bunch of sketches. Of the dozen I pitched, there were 4 that I thought were really solid, and two that I was really proud of. To this day, the two I liked I think were still great ideas. He dismissed them with an eye roll, going so far as to say they were all terrible, then coming up with a sketch on his own about farting that he thought was hilarious, and I thought was pretty juvenile. Thanks again to Larry, though, I was in on the sketch side, but Guy was immediately on my red flag list.

I want to say here that I have no problem with the collaborative process. Some of my best work has come from collaboration. It’s only helped to strengthen my writing, and how to expand off a single idea. I love bouncing stand up material off other comedians, asking for help about how to push a joke further, where else it can go. What I have a problem with, is people leading with their ego. This felt like that type of situation. I could have been Bob Odenkirk pitching scripts, and he would have shot them down because they weren’t his.

We entered in to our first show with several fun scripts in tow. The show had an incredibly punny title, as was the wont of the group, that I’d never cared for, but the name of the show wasn’t the point. These guys were already more experienced at writing sketch, and I was ready to learn. James Catullo, one of the most quietly, intelligently hilarious people I’ve known, was always great for pointers, as was Little Mike, the guy I THOUGHT I may have problems with when we started. It’s funny; Little Mike and I couldn’t have been more opposite politically, but anytime I was hanging out with him, on or off stage, I had a blast. We’d always just keep our politics on the shelf. At first, I bristled at this because HOW WAS I GOING TO BE ABLE TO MAKE FUN OF BUSH WITH THIS CLOWN AROUND, but we found plenty of other things to make fun of together.

So during the writing process of the show, Guy disappeared with a few of the scripts, luckily none of mine, and rewrote them without any input from the writers, or even informing anyone that he was doing this. For the most part, he made them pretty hacky, and I remember a few tense moments where Guy had to be told what COLLABORATING meant, and even more tenseness when he didn’t want to listen.

Despite our first two sketch productions going well, it was quickly becoming apparent that I couldn’t work with Guy. His attitude, ego, and scene hijacking all completely clashed with what I wanted out of comedy. They were the only game in town, so I kept ignoring things he said or did because I wanted my stuff put up, and I wanted to be in other people’s sketches. I loved it. This baffled me too, because I never understood how someone who liked a lot of the same things I liked, who seemed to want the same things I wanted, could be such a jerkoff. I thought jerks only showed up in day jobs, or as jocks in high school movies? No such luck. I guess that was the lesson I learned there. Eventually, it got to a point for me where I couldn’t separate the person (who was okay…sometimes), and the comedian, who I couldn’t stand. After 3 full productions, and writing scripts for a fourth production, I was out. I withdrew pretty completely from the group because of it, which I still kinda regret. Doing improv on their tiny little theater on Friday nights was so much fun. I used to get genuinely excited at work thinking about performing with them that night. I would probably be a much better improviser at this point if I’d stuck with them, but c’est la vie.

The thing that this group did was pull me out of the funk I had been in for a while. With all the personal issues going on at home preventing me from getting on stage to do stand-up, they were a great outlet for me, keeping my comedy brain flexing instead of going to mush. Despite any crap I went through, I will always be grateful for that.

Thankfully, as I was leaving there, I had gotten a temp job near Pittsburgh, which required a lot of driving, and a shitload of gas money, but it got me back near the city, and jumping in to the most fun part of my journey at that point, hanging out with my friends Lauren and Felicia, doing as much stand-up as possible.

*I didn’t think I was going to be able to say much about The Dwellers without saying TOO much, but here we are 1500 words later. This is another good stopping point, just past year 2. We’ll be back with more next week. Have a great weekend.*

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.

I took the stage for the very first time in October of 1999, during Penn State’s East Halls Talent Competition. Like most talent competitions, this meant “a bunch of singer/songwriters.” And me. If you ever feel like you want to do comedy, but keep chickening out, here’s my advice: hire Rob Griffiths to come over and force you to do it. Standing in front of the sign-up list, after passing it and discussing it for weeks, he dropped the gauntlet: “You can either write your own name on the paper, or I can do it for you.” To protect my dignity, I wrote my own name.

The night of the show, I specifically remember being so nervouse that my vision blurred a few times. Lucky for me, my sense of responsibility and my secret lust for danger and instability far outweigh my fear. I had written the themes and keywords of my jokes on the back of my hand, and the sweat had smeared some of them past recognition. I thought I was going to die, in front of 300 people eating or waiting for food at The Big Onion. I did my first joke, which I believe was something terrible about Penn State instituting a course in Pimpology. I must have thought it was REALLY funny, as I later repurposed it for an article in the school humor magazine a year later. When I finished the joke, a table of 12 people sitting directly in front of me got up and walked out. This was entirely visible to everyone around, since their table was slightly elevated, and thus, they blocked people’s view of me during their exit. At that point I knew that, no matter what, nothing would ever happen on stage that was worse than that. I birthed my very first comedic thoughts in front of hundreds of strangers, and in a very public display, a dozen said “No thank you,” got up, and went home. It helped me relax.

So flash forward: post-grad, living at home with my mother (aka LIVING THE DREAM), I called and put myself on the list for the Improv open mic night. My mother was in the audience that night, and I remember ordering her a Mike’s Hard Lemonade from the stage to either make up for a joke about my childhood, or to thank her for being there. Either way, I remember the important part: the alcohol.

The material I performed was adequate for someone who’s set the game to “child” difficulty. I felt good after getting off the stage, adrenaline still rushing as I checked my notebook to see if I had done every joke I’d planned. Somewhere, I have a notebook with this material. Also still lurking in my mom’s apartment, I’m sure, are scraps upon scraps upon scraps of paper with bits, notes, and ideas. If there was something to write on, it was written upon. Recipes, seed planting instructions, napkins, menus…I think I even ripped off part of a greasy box of KFC to write something down and kept it for a very long time. Sadly, the bit had a shorter shelf life than the cardboard’s.

Soon after I was doing 1-2 sets a week, and man, did that feel good. The only problem with all of the performing I was doing was a) in my head, I knew I wasn’t very good yet, and b) most gigs required about an hour of travel. That can be difficult when you don’t own a car, and your only methods of transport are your mother’s 12-year-old Plymouth Acclaim with 125,000 miles on it, or borrowing your dad’s 18-year-old Lincoln Towncar, a behemoth of a vehicle that spilled every fluid inside of it at any chance, and couldn’t be driven over 50 because of the cracked cylinder heads in the engine. Wow, I’m writing this as if my worst times are behind me, and meanwhile I haven’t been gainfully employed in 4 months. Career trajectory, or patterns of life? Jesus, kill me now.

Anyhow, soldiering on is what my dreams called for, and soldier on I did, until a downturn in my mother’s health and a lack of a car of my own prevented me from doing more than 3 sets over a 7 month period. I won’t go in to too much detail, but I still don’t know how the fuck I – or we – survived then. My dad played a big part in helping my mom meet her rent, and I handled all the bills in the apartment while my mom slowly fell apart. Trying to help with that while working 40 hours at a $9.00/hour job meant something had to give, and that something was comedy. This was easily the most depressed, darkest place I had ever been in my life. Reminding myself about what a shithead I was even now makes me a little uncomfortable. You know what I thought I was going to be doing 6 months after graduating college? Living in New York, trying to do comedy. You know what I WAS doing 6 months after graduating college? Working at my 5-year-old summer job, in the winter, taking care of my mother, broke, with no idea of how to make anything happen for myself. Luckily, I fell in with a good group of people that were having some fun doing improv, which helped me get back into comedy and out of the funk I was in.

*This is a good breaking point. Tomorrow, I’ll post about how The Cellar Dwellers helped keep my head in the game, and taught me that no matter what field you go in to, there are going to be fucking douchebags.*