comedy, Depressed

Burn Victim: A Joke.!?;

The other day I burned my finger pulling a muffin out of the toaster. I only touched the muffin, but the muffin was so hot that it created a large blister of burning on my thumb. I’m not going to talk anymore about how I fingered a hot muffin because I have important other things to talk about. I thought this was the worst pain I could deal with because I am a large festering bag of unable to deal with pain.

Yesterday I went to Coney Island for the Mermaid Parade. That’s right – Mermaid Parade. I usually hate parades. This was awesome. I am now literally in the worst pain someone can be in though because I am also a festering bag of stupid unpreparedness. My face is bright red, my arms are bright red, and my dick is bright red too because I comfort myself and distract myself from pain with pleasure.

Why am I writing this? Because I wanted to give you the context under which I could make a bunch of inappropriate or stupid jokes about my situation.

1. I can’t imagine anyone who has a worse life than me. At least those people in Darfur can’t get sunburned.

2. This is the most apeeling my arms have ever been. Because I have very little muscle mass and the skin on my arms is peeling.

3. I’m in so much pain that I leave a trail of tears wherever I go – like a redskin.

4. I hated rednecks so much in high school, but now I stand in redfaced embarrassment because I am one of them. Because I’m poor.

5. Here’s a love poem. Roses are red, I’m more red, why do roses get all the credit for being red? Have you seen me lately? I’m really red! I’m way redder than roses. This is bullshit, stop talking about roses, use me in your love poems!!

comedy, Depressed, Indignant, race

Fuck the Boring and Pretentious

My dad is now 63. I am now tired.

As I am my father’s son, I begin wondering what will happen over the next forty years that will lead me to owning a vaguely successful health food store. I do not look to be on that path, but I also know that is where I will end up. I have to. Maybe the series of accidental demolitions of bridges that I have set aflame will force me off to the woods where I will attempt to drag in some hip urban fad into this sleepy town because I miss the life of culture. Maybe thats the path I will follow. He had the first espresso machine and vegan microwave patties on my island. I’ll have the first storytelling and feminist burlesque show in Incorporated Township #6, Iowa.

There was a professor in college who hated me. I took a class outside of my two regular disciplines of math and theater because I was going through a phase of being interested in African American history. He was a moron. We had very similar beliefs politically – both thought socialism shouldn’t be perceived as some silly idealistic fantasy, wanted to have constant discussions about gender and racial identity, but he hated me. He hated me because he didn’t like the way I brought up topics in class. When I wanted to discuss something that was possibly problematic, I would throw out a theory that I wasn’t sure if I believed or not and asked that we discussed it. This is how I had been taught to analyze in mathematics. Follow a path until you find that it is not the right path and then you are allowed to turn around and start over. Even theater was about analyzing characters, both good and bad, and sometimes this meant that a character you originally thought was good was bad or somewhere in between.

He wanted me to have lengthy internal discussions and research before I said anything. It was his way of maintaining his importance in society. As a professor of an intellectually interesting but completely useless discipline, he was attempting to force his usefulness by demanding that people listen to him not only to hear the amazing amount of information his mind had amassed, but also to form their opinions because he must have better opinions as someone who had spent a lot of time and money studying.

I wrote a paper comparing Chris Rock and August Wilson, using 90s mockumentary CB4 as my main evidence. He hated this. It was a good paper. It was a paper that was well researched and well conceived. He hated it because it compared Chris Rock, a man who was some stupid comedian, to August Wilson, who was one of the most brilliant minds of the 20th century.

It was pure pretension that led him to dislike my paper, dislike me, and be a white guy who wore African beads despite referring to African Musical Ensemble as a minstrel show. Pretension is comedy’s biggest enemy. I overheard this same professor once explaining to someone how there was a giant dinosaur in the Mall of America who was playing in front of these kids and how this was just another form of capitalist propaganda. I couldn’t agree with him any more. He said it with a serious tone because he demanded to be taken seriously. How do you not see the hilarity of that situation? It’s a giant stuffed dinosaur telling kids how to shop! That sketch writes itself. Comedy is not the absence of importance, comedy is the explanation of what’s important in a way that can be palatable to discuss. Comedy is not demanding that you be seen as important, intelligent, and god’s gift to humanity but instead focus on the actual issue at hand. Comedy is humility. Comedy is the opposite of pretension.

I am a professional bridge burner. All of this burnings have occurred because I refused to stop making jokes just because I was discussing something serious. Jokes help me get to the deeper truth. The jokes are typically at my own expense or at least taking our beliefs to the extreme so that we can see the absurdity of both our points of view. Others are stubborn. Others refuse to acknowledge any mistake they might have made. Others are pretentious.

Maybe I will follow in my dad’s footsteps. I’ll follow them in that I will have a group of people who hate me, and I will have a group of people who like me a lot. This will be divided along the lines of who understands my form of communication (aka: people with a good sense of humor). I’m comfortable with that.

Depressed

Kicking Me While I’m Down

I can’t think.

Guilt becomes such a powerful numbing agent when used incorrectly. Guilt can be so helpful – it can motivate a person to do right, to make up for doing wrong, but when done wrong guilt causes numbness. Part of the reason for my desires for a world made up entirely of my clones is to have a world full of people who feel as consistently guilty as I do. The thing is, that this guilt that helps push forward society is only helpful when the feeler of said guilt understands what they feel guilty about – when they can change something in their life to relieve that guilt. When one has no comprehension of what they feel guilty for, then one obsesses about it – can’t think of anything but what you could do to make yourself feel less guilty.

This utopian world of people who are not just like me but are me would be a world of guiltful creatures, but they would also be self aware – so self aware that whatever they saw/heard/felt/did that made them feel so guilty, they would know what steps to take to attempt an undoing.

When I was 6 I slapped my dad. I was having a bad day and he tried to cheer me up by racing me down the driveway, but he didn’t let me win. When he finished and turned around to pick me up and congratulate me on getting 2nd place out of two people, I slapped him. He was supposed to let me win because he was my dad and I was having a shitty day. He wasn’t supposed to kick me when I was down. I still feel guilty about it.

Everytime my dad and I argue over the fact htat he tries to force me to take his advice on what to do with my career despite the fact that he knows nothing about what to do, I remember that event and feel guilty and tell him he’s right and I’m sorry.

I feel so guilty about it because it was a bout of anger, and anger is so purposefully out of character for me. It doesn’t befit me because I decided it is an unproductive emotion. Here guilt causes you to find ways to right the wrongs of the world, anger causes you to cause enough wrongs that you don’t have to be the only one who’s been wronged. As we all know, an eye for an eye makes a world full of people mis-accused of masturbating too much.

Since the slapping incident, I’ve only had one time where I let my anger get the best of me and I slapped again, and I still feel so guilty about that incident that I don’t want to talk about it. That’s untrue. I had another slapping incident I just forgot about. I once slapped a girl for making fun of my best friend for liking her, or something like that, I honestly don’t remember because I blacked out because of guilt. I have no recollection of the event or the following 30 minutes despite not being on any substances.

I am numb to these events. I cannot comprehend their existence and therefore when I think about them my mind finds it impossible to focus on anything else, and I begin to feel like yelling. I believe that this is guilt without self awareness – this is anger. Anger is the reaction to being unable to comprehend your own guilt.

Maybe this is my own obsession with guilt attempting to relate all emotions to the one my whiteness and Jewishness have combined to make my only emotion, but maybe there is some validity to this. Maybe all feelings are just different manifestations of guilt.

Depression is simply self-obsessive guilt – guilt that your life isn’t what you wanted it to be and you aren’t taking the necessary steps to improve it.

Happiness is when all guilt is resolved.

Lust is just guilt that you haven’t worked hard enough to please your genitalia.

Fear is anticipated guilt.

Nervous is the same with an understanding that the guilt you are about to feel is pretty trivial.

Drunk is just guilt manifested into action.

If all feelings are just one stage of guilt or another, then we can force these emotions to become the productive emotion of guilt. Transform any emotion you have into guilt. Then we can finally have a world full of neurotic self-obsessed blogger/comedians who believe that they somehow figured out the key to life. Doesn’t that sound fun?!

No?

Look I’m depressed, and I want to feel guilty for forcing you into my life.

Don’t kick me while I’m down. I might slap back.

Depressed, Hungry

Depression Chips

I don’t buy enough food to support a depression. As I’ve stated before I do not seek hierarchy in my emotions and therefore am prone to bouts of depression, existential angst, and fearful running away. I do most of these with a smile on my face because I am aware that this means I am living correctly. The problem is that these bouts, however non normative they may be, are still supplemented with the typical lethargy and hunger that is associated with depression. Considering how lazy I am in my normal life and how desperately I constantly seek food, this means I become a mindless, moveless, eating machine.

The problem is that I live on restaurant row and work in a restaurant and my kitchen has flooded multiple times with the sewage of the entire apartment building. I don’t buy many groceries. When I lived in Maine, I had a basement full of outdated healthfood snacks that I would bring into my recliner chair to comfort me in my time of upper class white guilt, but now I have no chips to keep my mouth in constant motion, and I have no sleeves of cookies to magically disappear during the time it takes a sitcom to finish because I forget to buy snacks.

Snacks are more important than we pretend they are. If I could just eat snacks and not eat meals, I would. Especially if there were dipping sauces.

There was a summer where I lived next to a Super America. Super America is the convenience store of the midwest that offers you chili if you push a button. I loved SA. I used to go there for donuts and come away with a sandwich, cheese and ranch dipping sauces and three different bags of chips. The best part about that was not finishing all the chips. Tomorrow, when you are playing mariokart and don’t want to leave the house, you don’t have to because you have bags of opened doritos lining every part of the house.

I need to buy more chips and leave them in secret hiding places all around the house. That would keep me going through this depression. It also might bring me friends in the form of rodents. YAY!

Depressed, Lonely

Hugpocrisy

I love the internet because you get to keep a constant timeline of everything you do. Your browser is a robot that constantly memorizes all of your activity so that you feel as though everything you do is worth noting – everything you do is important.

I wanted to go check out the Huffington Post today. In order to do this I typically type h, u, f, and then click enter because my browser is so smart that it knows where I want to go. Because I wasn’t dilly dallying on my way there, I typed h, u, g and then hit enter. I have google chrome as my browser so by typing those three letters and hitting enter I had just googled the word “hug.” This is very embarrassing. What’s more embarrassing is that every time I attempt to revisit the liberal blog of news, I am reminded that I wanted to look for hugs online. I hope no one else wants to check out Arianna Huffington’s brain child and then assumes that I was so desperately lonely that I looked for the comfort of arms wrapped around my body through a computer.

Anyway, I spent a couple hours looking at google image results for hugs and they are depressing. God, what losers. So many people just posting pictures of hugging each other for the world to see, as if their love of each other is so great that others should look upon it and say “man, that’s what I want in my life.” I can’t believe those losers that would waste their time doing … My life is awful.

Depressed, My favorites, Selfish

Feelings on Feelings

I feel like I am constantly defending myself against the lies I propagate against myself. The most common of which is that I am an emotional robot. This both couldn’t be further from the truth and is exactly the truth.

In heated conversation my roommate questioned why I spend a majority of my day watching videos of people I disagree with. He said: “you do it just to make you angry.” Of course. What’s wrong with anger?

We as humans have so many emotions that we are allowed to feel. Why would we present a hierarchy of ones we should feel and ones we shouldn’t? So often we strive for happiness or contentedness or bliss or comfort or whatever bullshit word you want to describe your feeling of fitting in when anger, sadness, hopelessness, and frustration typically cause the greatest moments in history. Was Ghandi happy? Did MLK Jr. feel content? If they had looked for happiness in their lives they never would have acheived the amazing things they acheived.

I’m not advocating a society of murderous yelling instigators of argument, but rather an understanding that in order to live a full life you must feel the full range of emotions. The key is to understand that they are all fleeting and we, as humans, also have the power to move on quickly, but moving on does not mean not feeling. It simply means not dwelling.

comedy, Depressed, Indignant, Lonely, My favorites, Selfish

Stop Loving Eachother

When I was in high school there was a kid in the theater department who was very popular. I didn’t like him much. It wasn’t jealousy over the good roles he got despite being a mediocre actor or the fact that people enjoyed his presence – a feeling that is quite foreign to me. It was because he constantly used self-deprecation for evil. He wasn’t the only one, he was just the best at it.

He was the Darth Vader to my Luke Skywalker in terms of self deprecating jokes.

When I say for evil, I mean in order to feel better. Let me back up and explain myself. Self deprecation is a beautiful form of comedy in which you are able to make others laugh at without feeling bad because they know that you are okay with the fact that you are being laughed at – it’s laughing at without the side affect of guilt. It can be used for evil though. It can be used with the desired affect of pity instead of hilarity. I don’t want anybody to feel bad for me (Let me finish my rant against this other dude before I go back and explain that because I know that everybody who has seen me perform has just made a loud noise of confusion and anger at the screen as if their audible indignance will change the path of the rest of this predetermined post). Every self-deprecating joke that this guy made was immediately followed by a compliment by someone attempting to disagree with his self-hatred.

We’ve all heard the basic example of “I’m so fat” – “No you’re not!?!?!!?”

This guy was self aware and knew how to point out the things that defined himself (A power I respect), but he used this power to demand compliments from others. I use this same power to demand that people hate me and like laughing at me. I’m just a selfless humanitarian in the world of comedy.

Let me go back to explaining how I’m not asking for pity or sympathy. Yes, many audience members ooh and aww at my antics. Yes, I force guilt upon my audience for my shitty situation in life. I also love myself far too much for anybody else to love me. There is only so much love that a person can take in, and I have given myself all that I need. I can’t remember the last time I was complimented without the complimenter expressing deep surprise that I’m halfway decent at anything I do.

Now, let’s be clear about what I’m suggesting so that I can both point out and clarify my hypocrisy. I’m not asking that people feel bad for me that nobody treats me with respect, instead I want you all to treat everybody else with as little respect as me. Nobody deserves respect, maybe then they’d learn to respect themselves.

Depressed, Lonely, My favorites, Pathetic

Alliterations and Depression

It’s fascinating to me how many words can start with “s” and sound completely different. My shoe was a sponge for slush. Though I was only permitted two hours of sleep before my day started with squeezing lemonade and making lattes, I was now laboriously marching through slush toward my prospective client who needed to learn long division. My eyes were heavy, but my sponge shoes were heavier as each step found me in a puddle of what I’m sure the Inuit have a word for but I do not. Somehow the threading that kept my moccasin like payless shoes that I bought because there lack of shoelaces seemed like less work than the opposite was expanding and letting in full chunks of snowy ice that immediately melted with the heat of my sweat.

The hour subway ride I had just spent melting had left a puddle underneath where my feet had been, and though I had had Vonnegut to keep me company, I was psyched for the opportunity for a friend that was warmer. A friend that was indoors. I was hoping indoors was my friend.

6:30 this day had started after the last day had ended at 4:30 with a drunken friend proclaiming that a journey for sandwiches was more rewarding than the quick nap I was trying to take before work. I forced myself down the half block to my cafe through a downpour of raindrops the size of a barely pubescent boy’s testicles. Every 40th raindrop was different. Every 40th raindrop was a snowflake. Still disgustingly sized, but falling slower as it liked to take into account the air around it’s demands for it to move slightly back and forth. Below me was a clean sidewalk, but one that knew that soon this surreal mix of snow and rain would turn it into a horrid puddle of depression.

I was now in Bushwick, far from my side of Brooklyn finding each piece of ground I stepped on less sturdy than expected. Men’s size 10 indents followed behind me in the slushy mix of Seasonal Affective Disorder tangibly realized. I had to pee. I stopped in at an autobody shop to call my soon to be client and to release my penis to the wild world of a toilet.

“So where exactly is this apartment building?” I asked on my bipolar phone which decides to cut out as often as I want to use it.

Her description made no sense. There was no Popeye’s. There was only this Napa.

“I’m on Rockaway Blvd.”

“Your supposed to be on Rockaway Beach Blvd.”

The two are an hour apart by subway and I wasn’t making another trek through this slush of sadness. Instead I screamed. I left Napa, felt the cold raindrops of snowish substance on my face and I screamed. I dragged my sixty pound shoes sixteen blocks back to the c train so that I could enjoy the cold comfort of typeface masquerading as my best friend. My book wouldn’t leave me. My book wouldn’t lead me out into a tundra of wet only to tell me that I was in the wrong place. My book was there for me.

I got back home ready to take a nap but realized I had to go out again. My friend had just woke up and once again he suggested sandwiches. I obliged.

Depressed, Horny, Lazy, Lonely

My Dad the Wingman

We sat in the largest Whole Foods my parents had ever seen. One full city block, two floors high of health foods. A girl came by and asked where the bathroom was. I directed her. My dad commented on her cuteness. I bashfully looked away hoping that by not pointing my eyes at the situation it would make it disappear.

Then it was my turn to go to the bathroom. I got back to my father now talking up the girl whose cuteness was previously determined explaining to her that I was a prolifically performing comedian. We had started this day by having a conversation about how my inability to hold onto a relationship for more than a month was completely my fault, not the many girls who have decided that my sexual inadequacies are too numerous to overcome my comedic abilities.

Swiftly he passes off the conversation to me explaining that I have a show tomorrow and that she’s a singer and in grad school for social work (aka she’s artsy and smart H2$, aren’t you into that?). She was nice and cute and fun, but that’s barely the point.

I went to my comedy show (OF WHICH I HAVE ANOTHER ONE TONIGHT!!!!!!) and afterwards our comedy troupe was approached by nearly every one of the rest of the comedians for good classic comedy convo. That entire sentence was a lie. The other half of my comedy troupe was approached by every member of the comedy community (who just happens to be all male) and flirted with hard core. I don’t have that kind of approachability. I can’t feign that ability to approach either. I stay alone in my quiet, quite little world of thoughts that pertain mainly to how I can make a funny joke about the fact that my life is terrible.

For me to pick up a lady, I need my dad there. For my partner, she needs to be there. One of these involves a lot more planning and work. I’m lazy though, so I think I’ll stick with my self-deprecating thoughts. They involve less movement. And people. And I don’t really like people. I guess I should be happy with my lack of approachability, at least I don’t have to talk to you people.

Death, Depressed

Subway Writing 3

This is a double feature. Before we begin I want to share a sentence I wrote without any context that I just found: “I live with broken things.”

Though age 52 another woman thought her to look not a day over 45. The mistake was supposedly flattering, but she knew it didn’t mean she was attractive. At age 24 she had celebrated her little sister’s 21st by escaping to a local pub. Her newly legal sister had to force her ID on the barkeep, while our protagonist was asked and analyzed by the same man, because the legality of her presence at this establishment was in question. After the embarrassment of her seeming to be a lawbreaker as opposed to the mentor she desired to appear as to her younger sister, she then wasn’t able to show off any skills of seduction either.

Her family liked meals together and didn’t mind the extra weight that came with those meals. She had the unluckiest metabolism of her family of fatties. Nobody made her feel bad about her weight. Nobody except the world that thought she looked like a perfect piece of veal – young and plump.

Too bad we don’t love people the way we love food.

His throat hoarse from a full day of howling on the subways, he once again perched himself against a pole and strummed his out of tune guitar and attempted to make his voice heard over the rickety train wheels. His fingers were hard with callouses that pretented bleeding and his forehead was sweaty with sweat that prevented the overheating of a person who was vastly overweight and had decided physical exertion should be a constant in his life. He scurried from train to train, half panting half regurgitating sound from a throat rawer than any WWE fan’s dreams. He on the other hand was a part of nobody’s dreams.

My thoughts: I have always been self conscious about my weight, though in a way that was not relatable to anyone else. Therefore sometimes I try to imagine my life if I were fat, just to see the differences. There are differences, and the stigma attached to my weight issues does not compare to the stigma for the chunkariffic, but it’s interesting to me nonetheless. I also obviously like looking at people who have wasted their lives. The idea that I get to a point in my life where death is looming and yet I have accomplished nothing is an idea that keeps me up at night and striving to accomplish things. It is both my biggest fear and my biggest motivator; the best and worst thing in my life. These sad subway souls are the most important pieces of my life.

Nisse Greenberg

Category Archives: Depressed