Death, Gender, Lonely, Math, Media, My favorites, race, Socialism

In Which I Qualitate/Quantitate

Don’t read this until you are ready to READ this. By that I mean, click on all links. You don’t have to read them, but they are an important part of the narrative. But do read the last link. It is the most important and is a news story and provides context.

c) I’m pretty sure that everything I think has been thought before.

That is simultaneously comforting and terrifying.

Often times our world is misled by what we think we think though. We then suffer under the great injustice that is our own misconceptions of ourselves. Specifically, the fact that 4 million more people watch Modern Family than The Middle. Both shows analyze the changing definition of the American dream, but one does it through shallow analysis of obvious xenophobia and one does it through thoughtful revelations about the inhumanity inherent in a capitalist society that refuses to empathize with struggle. Modern Family is a person who has not listened’s analysis, The Middle is someone who paid attention’s analysis.

1. I have had arguments with three people who have stated their frustration with the Occupy Wall Street Movement. Each of them went like this:
Them: “I agree with what they’re saying, I just don’t know what they’re saying.”
Me: “Have you been down to Zuccotti Park?”
Them: “No” and a bunch of more words that don’t matter.

2. I have a belief that Taylor Swift is doing the more harm to American society than Lady Gaga – specifically that Taylor Swift is doing the most harm and Lady Gaga is doing the most negative harm (negative used in the mathematical sense). This belief is challenged often. Typically those conversations go like this:
Me: “Don’t ask, don’t tell would have been repealed 3 years earlier if it weren’t for Taylor Swift.”
Them: “That’s ridiculous” They’re right “Lady Gaga isn’t even saying anything. She’s just the same mindless pop that we’ve had forever.”
Me: “Have you heard her new album?”
Them: “Um..” and a bunch of defensive lies about how they have an appropriate sample size that don’t matter.

2. Frankie Heck – Patricia Heaton’s character on The Middle is a true hero of the Michael Moore union version of socialism. She is a lighthouse that shines light through all the cracks in the American Dream. Hard work equals hard work, but having money equals having money. Surrounding her is pain and suffering that is solely the gift of a desire for things she is told she deserves. And yet this could all be solved with a simple sharing of some wealth. It doesn’t need to be opportunity because we don’t all need to the freedom to try. We need the freedom to succeed. And success is not defined by being in the 1%. Then only 1% of us, necessarily succeed. I aim for 100%.

I like to play a game called turn concepts into rants for socialism in as few sentences as possible.

Death, Lonely, My favorites

My Hour in Union Square – Diversity; Happiness; Misuse of Punctuation?

First there was the man who looked like he could play my father in a movie. He didn’t look like my dad, but if I were in a movie they would cast this white haired jewfroed hippie with the sensible sneakers and the monochromatic windbreaker on as my dad. Next to him was the hardcore Irishman. Tattoos were on his knuckles, but if it were possible, I’m sure tattoos would be on his heart. Two brothers sat next to him. They cared for each other ~ They would die for each other -: I’m pretty sure one was mentally handicapped. They were hugging now, but you could tell they have a history of fighting when times get tough. But when times aren’t tough, they love each other better than other people do. Next bench down, communicating off and on with the larger group were two broskies – one black, one white: handshaking and laughing at how they were so awesome. Everyone enjoyed their presence too. Every once in a while this group of joyous public park patrons was visited by a middle aged black woman getting off her job that involved a bag that was close to being a briefcase and an unstable 35 year old conspiracy theorist.

The one thing that brought them together on this would-be-dreary day:

Heroin.

Mostly their conversation consisted of comparing track marks.

comedy, Death

Hypocrisy is Still Fun

Thanks to Scott for bringing this to my attention. I think that thinking about death is sooo funny.

It’s your last joke/prank – you trick people into thinking that you are still alive, but you’re dead!

This is really just a way to advertise my show that is happening tonight that is about death, but also to talk briefly about how much I think crying and laughing are similar.

They are the only two tangible embodiments of emotion we display. The rest is all people inferring. They are the only two that are obvious and guttural. That you can’t stop even if you try. I stopped doing theater because I wasn’t causing enough people to cry or laugh. Because people kept telling me that that wasn’t the point. That you could just think. But I didn’t want the audience to passively be approached and asked: “hey, do you mind thinking, now?” No. I wanted to throat fuck them with things they didn’t want to deal with. Actively demand that they react.

I like writing entries where I do the opposite of what I’m saying is good.

Come see my show to see me do what I say and not as I do.

Death, My favorites, Nostalgia

I Hate Age – Specifically Having More of It

As I waited for my parents to get back from their journey to the airport buffet, the child behind me didn’t have to wait alone while his parents made him watch the bags. Mostly because he was 4 years old and his parents couldn’t legally or morally leave him alone.

“Let’s tell the funniest jokes!”

Despite our 20 year age difference we wanted the same thing.

“What did the parrot say to the banana!?”

What? What? Holy shit, please tell me!

“The um… he… um said.. um… You’re not a banana!”

Fuck me! Yes! You are correct in laughing hysterically at your own joke and your mom is a dumb bitch for saying “oh that’s just silly.” “Just” is the worst word.

“Knock, knock.”

OMG, you have more?! Please, continue.. I mean, I have a book of knock, knock jokes at home, but I’m sure yours are better, oh.. Look at me. I’m rambling.. I mean: Who the fuck is there?

“Dinosaur!”

Good start. I agree with your methods. Don’t think of an ending, just think of the coolest word you can say and then more cool words will come.

“You have to say ‘Dinosaur who?’!”

Oh, right. Dinosaur who?

“Dinosaur… um… on top of your head!”

Exactly! Perfect!

Oh, shit. Now your stupid Swedish dad wants to tell a joke.

“What did the one tomato say to the other tomato that got run over and squashed by the truck”

Holy shit, could you use any more unnecessary words. And we get it, something about how ketchup sounds like catch up.. oh, you’re actually going to finish this joke.

“C’mon, let’s go, ketchup.”

Ugh, you fucked up the punch line too. You said ketchup with the wrong intonation and it really didn’t make sense. Wait. Stop laughing. Your jokes were better than your dad’s. Don’t laugh at that. Don’t give him the satisfaction.

“What did the one tomato say to the two tomatoes that were squashed and run over?!”

Yes, good idea. Show up your dad by increasing the number of tomatoes. Show up daddy!

“C’mon, let’s go!”

Perfect! Antijoke! Undidjoke! Perfect joke!

No! Stop explaining to him what he did wrong. He didn’t do anything wrong. He only did right things. You were wrong. His joke was better.

He was having fun and isn’t fun all that we should be living for? That wasn’t rhetorical. I want it to be rhetorical.

Later I saw two adults walking past a toy store. One toy had fallen out of a bin and made its way to the floor. The first adult accidentally kicked the toy. It started to sing. For a brief moment a smile crept over her eyes, but her mouth stayed in surprised disgust. “Ew, toys” it said, lying. She had a chance to kick the toy again. A chance to have fun again.

She didn’t.

I wanted to yell out “Let’s tell the funniest joke!”

I didn’t.

Attention Whoring, Death

Please Don’t Defend Me

It makes sense that death has been on my mind. I haven’t seen sunlight for more than 2 hours at a time in over a week and two of the people I hang out with most are over 90. God, their lives seem depressing to me.

They can barely see, can barely hear, can barely walk, and need to take naps all the time. PLUS they don’t have the internet! What kind of hell do they live in?

Death is the most frightening concept to me because I will stop being able to control the attention I’m getting. Death is like publishing something that you have no ability to defend or discuss afterward. People are going to interpret your life however they want without you getting to say: “No wait, you didn’t get it! That was supposed to be that way!”

What being around death has taught me though is that old age is gonna suck too. My grandmother died when I was 12 after a long battle with the most hilarious disease in the world – Alzheimer’s. It was the grandma that I am with now who told me she was dead. She comforted me. Now she is forgetting the thing she just told me and asking me to read pictures that she thinks are words, and once again, it is very funny.

In Swedish the word for fun and funny are the same so sometimes someone well ask me: “Well, is it funny being in New York?”

On her 90th birthday party I sat next to her best friend from middle school. This woman can’t hear anything and speaks no English. Our conversation consisted of her telling me something, me telling her my name, her telling me something, and me asking if she needed help, and her telling me something. I’m sure it was interesting, but at the time it was very dull. Old people have lots of stories, and I’m already very good at making stories out of my life, imagine how interesting I’m going to be when I’m old. By “interesting I’m going to be,” I mean “little I’m going to let others talk.”

I worry though that I won’t have that same fervor for speaking when I am that old, and that scares me. A flight of stairs may disable my grandmother for a day, and fervor takes energy. If I don’t have energy, will I be able to care that much about making people care about me?

I don’t want to get old. I don’t want to die. I wanna live forever with a lot of energy. Now I understand why people work out.

comedy, Death, Depressed

Depression and Death’s Hilarity

I love Garfield minus Garfield. It’s one of my favorite websites. I recognize that it is a simple concept with sometimes very overdone jokes, but c’mon:

Watching a medium of comedy used for simply depressing ends is hilarious. It’s because expectations are thwarted and comedy is about surprise. I love surprises for the most part. I love surprise nights of misadventures, I love surprise parties.

I love all surprises except surprise death. That shit frightens me. My biggest fear is drive by shootings despite the fact that I have spent most of my life in rural Maine and St. Paul, Minnesota. Drive by shootings are frightening because despite their rarity, the awfulness of them is so awful that their expected value of awfuality is awful. It’s a multiplication thing, don’t worry about it. I am obviously very frightened of death because it means the end of life, but the idea that it ends with no reason is really the scary part. And in a drive by there might as well have been no reason because I will never know the identity of my killer and I will just die alone with no idea of why. And that makes me sad.

I want to cry in the third panel of my life.

Death, Indignant, My favorites, Nostalgia

Mature Death

Two things were said at work today that made me laugh out loud (or lorfl as the kids are saying).

One was by a customer as she was discussing the validity of giving her 2 year old soymilk: “I think my kid will drink anything white and creamy.”

One was said by a coworker: “My muffin is too big and dry.” (She’s 18)

There was one sleepover in high school where my friends and I made a pact that we would never stop thinking farts were funny. Farts are funny. They aren’t the funniest thing in the world, but ignoring the humor in the fact that you just made a musical sound by blowing poop particles out of your body is annoying and stupid.

Maturity is a dumb concept. Maturity is what people who don’t have fun claim they have instead. Maturity doesn’t really exist. These are my three feelings on maturity. Maturity isn’t a social construct and that is part of the problem. There is no real definition of maturity that we can all follow – instead we each have our own definitions that we hold others to. Some people define maturity as getting a stable job and place to live, some as doing lots of drugs, some as having a good relationship with your parents. All of these are the right definition .. for each person individually – you cannot force someone into your little box of maturity.

Plus, striving for maturity is stupid. Why? Why would you want to aspire towards death. The only commonly recognized definition of maturity is that you have more of it as you get older, so wanting maturity is the same as wanting to be old – wanting to be closer to death. Fuck death. Fuck being close to death. Fuck maturity.

I tend to see people defining maturity as them overcoming the struggles they dealt with during puberty. When I was going through puberty, I kept telling myself that it would all be over and I would be happy soon. In other words, my problem was that I lied to myself a lot as a child. Therefore I think of maturity as being honest and being willing to admit defeat. My penchant for childish jokes tends to get me in trouble when I teach children because I am supposed to be a “role model.”

I am being a role model for children. Because I don’t want to be mature. Because I don’t want to die. Children shouldn’t have to want to die. They should want to drink my semen.

comedy, Death, Gender, My favorites

The Rule of Three, Transitions, and Death

Candy and medicine are flavored the same. This is why two people can taste the same thing and one can say “eww this tastes like medicine” and the other can say “yum this tastes like candy.” The distinction is only based on preconceptions.

Example: A dude tastes a drink – it is pink: “Ewww. This tastes like medicine.”

Example: A guy who loves claiming his open-mindedness tastes a fruit beer that has an emphasis on the fruit part – “Yum, this tastes like candy.”

Example: My dad tastes a piece of vegan bark/bread that he thinks all of my friends should try – “Wow, this tastes like candy and steak. You would love this.”

My dad is an lovable dope mixed with an angry indignant mixed with a lot of homemade tofu. He’s who I both look forward to becoming and who I desperately fear becoming. All of this comes out best when he calls me with questions on “his facebook.” Questions like:

“Who’s this person on my facebook? How’d they write all this stuff on my facebook?”

“How come your friends are always playing with my facebook?”

“This woman wants to be friends with me, but I don’t like her. What do I do?”

The last one is a reasonable facebook concern. I recently was thinking about friendship requests from people who need not request friendship and wrote this:

“Adding you to the audience of my blog so that I can know when you release a new hot track for free is not us being worth uncomfortably connected after you go through a shitty breakup with my friend who I am not quite close enough with to indignantly defriend you through claims of loyalty.”

Loyalty is silly. I like support. I like to support others who I am friends with and I like when my friends support me, but forced support is obnoxious. I don’t want someone supporting me who doesn’t want to support me. I recently supported a friend who would definitely qualify as someone whose boyfriends I will not friend for fear of the last sentence becoming true. Between songs this happened:

Person A (singer): “I’m gonna play this little diddy.”

Person B (audience member): “You’re a little diddy.”

(silence)

Person A: (Tunes guitar)

Person B: “In a good way.”

Me: Fuck you. First off you are horribly unclever. Had you been insulting I wouldn’t have said that because at least insults demand a certain level of cleverness, but you weren’t at all. This brings me to point #2. What is the good way of being a little diddy, and more importantly, what is the bad way that you feel came through so clearly that you had to apologize for your horrible indiscretion.

There are no quotation marks around my line because I am the gender neutral definition of a pussy.

Of course there isn’t really a gender neutral definition of a pussy. Which is too bad. I would like to see there exist one before I die, but there won’t. We can’t forget the past and we can’t stop using pussy as a term to describe vagina. All of these short pieces were things I wrote on a folder I was carrying around one day. They all relate to death.

a) Candy and medicine are the things you have as a child and a dying person respectively. It seems as though the longer we strive to look at things as candy the longer we will not be a dying person.

b) I don’t want to become my dad because that means I’m closer to being a dying person.

c) That audience member wasted so much of my time as I had to complain in my head about her. I am so much closer to being a dying person because of her.

Okay, so maybe they don’t all relate to death that well, but I am definitely scared of being a dying person.

Death, Depressed, Lazy

6:30 AM Death

I am writing this at 6:30am. It is not because I had some crazy all night party of funtimes and magicfarts – in fact I ditched the opportunity to party after someone else’s fantastic show in order to go to sleep and get up in time for work. Work that was supposed to start at 6:30am. Work that I didn’t have to go to until 12:00pm because I had switched shifts. So, now I’m back home with another five hours of day that I won’t be able to fall asleep during.

Why do I spend so much of the time I’m awake attempting to fall asleep? It’s such a waste. There is literally nothing less productive. It’s like you are saying, I’m going to attempt and fail to do nothing. Doing nothing is at least a thing. Doing nothing is relaxing, but trying to force yourself asleep is a complete waste of everything. And it never works. You just sit there waiting until your body doesn’t want to do awake anymore, and all the methods that don’t involve physically altering the chemicals in your body do nothing because anything else involves thinking, which is counter to sleeping. It’s like yelling yourself into a meditative state – it doesn’t make sense.

Life is so short, yet so much of it is spent doing things that are stupid and worthless. Life is stupid and worthless.

When I can’t get to sleep, it’s usually because I’m having intense (though intensely boring) conversations with myself. They are annoying conversations where one person is trying to be absurd and the other person is annoyed because none of the absurd jokes that the first person is making are funny and therefore not worth keeping me awake over and then a third person comes in and tells them both to quiet down because they are all trying to sleep right now. It’s a horrible conversation to listen to, but it’s what I use to try to and fail to put me to sleep. I always want to be awake because I need to do so much before I die and being asleep just puts you closer to death without accomplishment. My multiple personality disorder (aka: vivid imagination) is keeping me awake though because all of the people in my head want to stay awake as much as possible too. The probability of all of the voices in my head wanting to sleep at the same time is so absurdly minuscule that I could compare it to the size of my dick and people who hadn’t heard much comedy would laugh because they would understand that to be a self-deprecating joke that they were comfortable agreeing with because it had no basis on their actual judgement of the person’s worth as they would never have to see if the joke had an element of truth to it.

What do I do with that time awake anyway? Play video games and hulu.

Ugh.

Life is so short, yet so much of it I spend doing things that are stupid and worthless. I am stupid and worthless.

Death, Lazy

StoryDeath

My toilet is broken in that it refuses to drain water out of it. In the 9 months I’ve lived in this apartment, we’ve been flooded 5 times – 3 of them with sewage. I’m leaving next month, as are my roommates (to different places) and we’ve given up trying to fix the constant barrage of water related problems, so we now use our toilet like a pee holding bucket. If I have to take a shit, I go to a local restaurant. This morning I pissed into the shower and then took a shower just to clean that up.

I better not die soon.

I can’t be at this point in my life when it ends. This is the part that I get to reminisce about. I need time to reminisce. Right now I am too close to my terrible life to laugh about it. I want to laugh about it. Since I always assume the worst, I also assume that I am going to die today which means that I either have to change the way my life is run so that I begin reminiscing soon, or I can just reminisce while doing these awful things. Option 2 is easier.

This is what the future-past is. The future-past is living your life so that in the future you can look on your past fondly. It is not about doing the thing that is most enjoyable at the moment, in fact it typically is the opposite because the most interesting moments of your life to look back on are usually the worst. I’m just so good at living in the future-past that I can do it all in one moment. I think this is what blogging has done to people like me. I can tell a story about how I piss in my shower and poop in restaurants and that makes it okay that I do those things because at least I’m capitalizing on that shit right away. It’s like instant-memoirs. You get to live both the terrible life that caused your memoirs to be interesting and the good life of writing about your life for others simultaneously. Living in the future-past means you are constantly stuck in the present.

Did that blow your mind?

It didn’t blow mine either. I’m just so scared of death that I try to live all parts of my life at once. I guess that’s why I have three jobs and just applied to two more, but I won’t work at any of them more than 18 hrs a week.

Nisse Greenberg

Category Archives: Death