He was kind enough to let me share this video of his set:

The guy’s good, huh? You can catch him on Twitter at @chethinks, and on Tumblr here.

Thanks to a lot of awesome help from Creaghead and Co., that’s about to change.

Starting February 7th, we’ll be cock-rocking the NPR crowd with the And I Am Not Lying live show at Union Hall on the first Tuesday of every month. Doors are at 8, show’s at 8:30 and tickets ain’t but ten tiny dollars for the finest comedy, storytelling, burlesque sideshow you’re going to get anywhere.

Be honest with yourself: stuff like this is part of the reason you moved here. It’s worth a headache at work on Wednesday.

You can buy tickets here if you’re into that already.

We pulled together this cool trailer about it, too. It may be NSFW, depending on your job:

I wanted to start this show for a very, very good reason. I’m doing this thing so that I don’t go completely numb, and I’m trying to bring as many people back to life as I can right along with us.

I spend a lot of time hunched over a glowing rectangle starting and mediating petty squabbles about nothing, breathing shallowly through my mouth and reading tweets about television. I’ve been doing it for years. When I’m not getting paid to do it I sit around my apartment in my underpants and do it for free, apparently.

Everyone does.

Sometimes I think we’re all using computers to row this numbing boat towards a black wall of depressing distraction. I want to do my part to get as many people into one room and feeling something great together for a little while. And maybe if we get together often enough and pool our collective energies into something funny and weird, we can live a little outside of our bottomless pockets filled with lotus petals.

The entire purpose of life is to get as excited as possible. I’m so, so excited to have a reason to hose the town down with excitement once a month. So it’s like a Mobius strip of recursive excitement for me.

Sometimes storytelling shows can get a little sweater-vesty, comedy shows can be too bitter and detached, and burlesque too much, all in a go. This way we can cross-pollinate the best of the best and no matter what, if you’re not into what you’re seeing you can see something else really soon.

I want this thing to be a rock show without instruments, to just cram an entire aircraft carrier’s worth of fun into the basement of Union Hall. So far, we’ve been doing pretty okay on that front, I think.

D.Billy and I collaborated on this cool poster (I think it’s cool, anyway) to announce the residency:

You’ll note that the show on February 7th features:

Comedy from Ophira Eisenberg
Burlesque by The World Famous *BOB*
Nerdcore Rap by Schaffer the Darklord

in addition to burlesque from Cyndi Freeman
and storytelling by Brad Lawrence, Cyndi Freeman and Jeff Simmermon (me.)
**UPDATE**
We have just added bullwhip and lasso artist Chris McDaniel to the show!

Brad and I will co-host as always, and tickets are ten bucks — again, you can get them here.

psychedelic stand‐up show … a visceral experience from the downtown comedy underground. Accomplished thinkers, authors, poets, and artists join Barris and his band to become one seamless, improvised comedy freak show.”

I caught the sold-out show at Union Hall last Saturday. What I could see of it was really, really awesome, when I could see around a pillar. Everything sounded great, though.

Reggie Watts dropped in at the last minute and did a hilarious set, improvising all kinds of hilarious music and completely surreal standup that made perfect sense and told right-on truths as long as you didn’t listen too closely. If you did, you’d realize he was riffing on the kind of played-out onstage cliches you hear from most hip-hop and rock ‘n roll stage banter.

Here’s a pretty sweet clip. In it, Reggie Watts covers Maroon 5′s “Moves Like Jagger,” freestyles and improvises, and raps like the lead singer of a Cookie Monster death metal band:

Reggie Watts – Touching Songs Improv – Heart Of Darkness – 1.7.12 from Karmalize Productions on Vimeo.

In this clip, Reggie, Greg Barris and the Forgiveness improve a long jam about slack friends, vampires, teen smoking and more:

Reggie Watts & The Forgiveness – Improv Jam – Heart Of Darkness – 1.7.12 from Karmalize Productions on Vimeo.

Both clips were shot and edited by Alex Gaylon of Karmalize Productions.

We had to have her put to sleep today. She was sixteen or seventeen – when you get a dog from the pound, their age is always sort of vague. She had rheumatoid arthritis in her back legs and a dense, growing mass in the bone of her right front leg. Her right front paw has touched the ground about fifteen times since Thanksgiving. She was deaf and starting to lose her eyesight, and my parents have had to give her morphine to keep the pain back for the last week or so. It was time.

That doesn’t mean this doesn’t completely suck, though.

When we got her from the pound, they told us that she had likely been abused in her previous home, but she didn’t have any behavior problems that they could see. She just cringed when she heard people yelling and got a little weird about dinnertime. When we took her into the isolation pen to sort of test her out or whatever, she climbed into my lap and whimpered and licked my hand. How can you ignore something like that?

Her name on her cage at the pound was Sandy, which is also my mom’s first name. We asked my mom if she wanted us to change the dog’s name, and she knelt to pet her and rub her ears for a minute, looking into her huge brown eyes. Then she stood up and said “you know, I really think she’s been through enough. And if you all talk to me in the same tone of voice you’d talk to a dog, and I can’t tell the difference, we have at least two other problems that are much more important.”

Every single time I entered my parents’ house after that, Sandy exploded all over me like a furry avalanche, thumping her tail and emitting this high-pitched whiny squeal. Her tail would bang into the banister and hit the floor hard enough to hurt, but it never seemed to bother her when I came home. I took her running in the field by my folks’ house, and she kept up with me on the sprints for many years, her face split in a massive dog grin. When we got home she’d drink her entire water bowl, maybe knock back an inch or two of toilet water and then pass out in front of the air conditioner.

Then at night, when I’d finally go to bed, I’d find her lying on whatever bed I was supposed to be staying on. She slept next to me every chance she got. Here she is, last Christmas. She slipped away while Maggie and I were hanging out with my parents by the tree, and helped herself to the end of my bed on the floor of my sister’s old room:

My dad’s eyesight has faded a lot in the last several years, and he can’t drive anymore. He’s in good shape around the house, but outside of that, it can be touch-and-go. Over the last several years, when my mom’s been out running errands, taking care of my grandmother, going to church or whatever else, my dad’s largely been at home in a darkened room.

By choice, but still. Sandy always stayed with him and kept him company, and they got really, really close.

He’s taking this pretty hard.

My dad and I watch a lot of movies together when I’m home. It’s all strictly classic badass canon: Eastwood Westerns, certain Coen Brothers movies like True Grit and No Country for Old Men. Sometimes we would just watch the part in “Witness” where Harrison Ford is dressed like an Amish guy and whips some bullying tourist ass over and over again.

You know the drill. Sandy always joined us. Here’s a photo of a couple of old dogs watching rough frontier justice in what I believe was “The Outlaw Josey Wales”:

Apart from greeting me at the door, hanging out with my Dad and going for walks with my parents, one of Sandy’s other favorite things was to eat fresh corn on the cob:

When I came home for Christmas this year, she still managed to leap up and speed-hobble to the door, whining and thwacking her tail around. She nearly slipped and fell on her face, but she squealed and whined and for a minute there, I thought her legs weren’t so bad. “That’s the fastest she’s moved in months,” my mom said. “She always does this for you, though.”

Sandy never forgot to call us back, forgot anyone’s birthday or showed up half-drunk to a party and perpetrated some bullshit drama she should have outgrown back in college. We never had to make excuses for her, never got disappointed by her, never had to put up with her stupid boyfriends or low self-esteem or periodic flakeouts. She was never late to anything important and never found a cooler group of friends to go hang out with instead of us lame-os who had always been around.

All Sandy asked for was regular exercise, regular food, a chew-bone in the morning and regular patting and belly scratches. And in exchange she gave us her whole life, a tremendous amount of love, loyalty and affection that never diminished and never even flickered for a second. Everything she did, she did consistently, with the same amount of feeling. She gave me that same greeting every time I walked in the door whether I’d been gone for one day or nine months. She never held anything against me. And she couldn’t even tell when I was leaving.

Whenever I left my parents’ place I’d gather my luggage by the front door and get my coat handy before going to the airport. Then I’d find her and get down on the floor to give her a long hug and kiss her just behind her ears. I’ll never forget that scent, or the feeling of that soft angel-white hair against my nose, upper lip and chin.

I’d stroke her ears and beard and say goodbye, and she never had any idea. Not the first time I left, and not the last time I left, right after Christmas, even though I laid there with her for half an hour, until I could finally stop sobbing. I knew this was close for her, and I knew that was it. We don’t always get to say goodbye to the people or animals we love the most.

But that doesn’t make it suck any less when we get a chance to do it, either.

Friends kind of drift as you get older. A lot of my best friends have small kids now, and they’re (understandably) not available like they used to be. Other friends carry their own baggage that gets increasingly more difficult to tolerate. And as time passes, you start to realize that all you have in common with some people is a shared past, and have very, very different ideas of what a good future looks like.

Today, my family did the right thing by the most solid family friend we’ve got – my parents steeled themselves and ended Sandy’s severe suffering. But we lost someone who loved us all for the greatest reasons of all: because we were good to her, and we were simply there and available to receive her considerable love.

Whenever I remember Sandy, I’ll always remember all of this, and one more thing. When she was younger, she used to love to go out into the yard in the evening and look out at the neighborhood. She’d stand on her back legs and balance on her elbows, lifting her nose to smell the delicate scents of the night waking up.

The air would be full of honeysuckle and moonflowers, and she’d catch notes of opossums, neighbor dogs, atoms of who knows what else swirling through the air. Her tail would quiver and she’d just drink in this huge, swirling invisible tapestry, and sometimes let out a few barks just to let that coming darkness know she was there, and she wasn’t scared of anything.

I’ll always remember that about her — curious and alive, standing up against the night. She was fearless and in love with the smells of whatever was coming, and totally at peace with the advancing darkness settling all around her.

You know, there’s an awful lot of cancer going around. I’m not sure that it’s not catching.

Or, you know how people used to smoke cigarettes with asbestos filters and X-ray their feet at the shoe store to see if they had a good fit? I think we’re doing something like that right now, something our grandkids are going to find so shocking and appalling when we tell them about it. They’re going to say “well of COURSE you all had cancer.”

Maybe it’s plastics.

A friend of mine got diagnosed with breast cancer last week. And before that, other friends and other friends. The words that follow are for anyone that’s been diagnosed with cancer and is really, really freaking out about it. That should cover pretty much anyone that’s been diagnosed with cancer, period.

I’ve just found myself emailing versions of what follows out to a number of people recently, and I thought maybe I’d put it out here so strangers could read this and share it.

Here it goes:

_______________

Welcome to the club.

There is this really surreal, beautiful thing that is about to happen to you now: you are going to discover how incredibly caring, patient, and understanding the people in your life really are. It’s nothing short of incredible.

People at the periphery of your life will move towards the center and you are about to just be rocked by the kindness of the universe itself, expressed through strangers and friends alike. You will be stunned that so much benevolent energy has been thrumming around you the entire time that you’ve been here, just kind of grumping your way to work and back home again.

You are about to feel very small, in a very good way. You will be dwarfed by the accidental unconditional love that is everywhere, all the time.

You are also about to hear a lot of INCREDIBLY stupid shit from strangers and well-meaning friends. Some people may tell you that you should have been getting kale enemas, others that yoga will reverse everything all the way back to the Holocaust.

These people don’t mean to blame you for enjoying the odd sausage with a whiskey chaser. They’re just people who have spent very, very little time expressing the deep and profound emotions that your illness will stir up in them. Consequently, they are going to do a bad job of it when it’s time to say something meaningful.

Some people, people that you might think are good friends may not be able to handle this at all, and may totally flake out. It’s not about you, though. It’s their ability to handle frailty, illness, and mortality.

I was so, so touched by all the love and support that I got from family and friends — but especially by people I only knew at the surface. The people that couldn’t handle eventually came back. Or they didn’t, and I still don’t miss them.

Other people are going to tell you that you’re so brave and strong, that you’re holding up so well. They will tell you this even if you are literally spitting your teeth out on to the sidewalk in front of them. It’s going to feel very, very surreal. Most things will for while.

And you might resent people for commenting on your braveness when inside it feels like you are falling apart.

Like it or not, you have been shoved into the circle of strength.

Here’s the secret: all you do is all you can do. You’re totally allowed to fall on the floor, cry, be scared, whatever. But eventually you run out of that, too. Eventually you take a little nap and the tears dry up. Then you just go to your doctor’s appointments.

Bravery isn’t being fearless. Fearlessness is idiocy. It’s why they recruit Marines so young.

Being brave means being scared as hell and doing what you’ve got to do anyway.

It’s going to the doctor and doing what they tell you. Maggie (my girlfriend, a cancer survivor as well) always said this, from the day I met her: “Everyone’s going to die somehow. Cancer patients just have more reliable information.”

Don’t beat yourself up for being scared, don’t be afraid to be afraid. Just make sure you do everything anyway.

I got a lot of credit from other people for being all strong, but really, I wasn’t. I was a fucking WRECK for about a year. I’m sitting in my office with my door shut and just bawling as I write this. I cry a lot more now, in general. Not necessarily because I’m sad. Mostly I am trying to just let myself feel my feelings, and sometimes they get really, really intense.

If you want my advice, don’t even try not to be a wreck. Just do whatever, let the waves rock your tiny boat. It’s when people use their oars to fight the ocean that they really embarrass themselves.

I don’t pretend to actually know what it really means to live. Anyone who tells you that with confidence is selling a subscription to a natural food magazine where everyone on the cover smiles smugly. What I do know is this: I feel more connected with my own feelings and the people around me than I ever did before.

Given the choice, I can’t say that I’d be willing to trade that back.

Now, aside from being a spectacularly talented musician, Joe is also one of my favorite human beings on the planet. In 1998, before we actually knew any-damn-thing about one another, Joe dragged me up onstage with him at the Old Main Inn in Fredonia NY, and asked — nay, told — me to play drums on a song of his that I had heard maybe once before. It somehow worked out not-too-terribly, and I’ve the honor of playing with him off and on for the past thirteen years. Nine times out of ten, one of us has just gotten into the town where the other one lives, and we have ZERO rehearsal time. And just like at the Old Main, it kinda works anyway. If nothing else, I have more fun playing with Joe than doing just about anything else. I would be super stoked to see Problematical Animals on many of your playlists in a couple of months, and trust me, you’ll be glad it’s there too.


As promised at the top of this post, here are some tracks and performance videos of Joe in action, to give you a kind of cross-section of his ouevre. Enjoy, and please help support this guy!

Link: HELP FUND & PREORDER PROBLEMATICAL ANIMALS ON KICKSTARTER.

That’s where I keep running into her.

When she performed at our show at Union Hall in Brooklyn, she brought a terrifying heat. She grunted and yelped and when she beat the floor with her breakaway dress and the kind of bra that can NEVER come off fast enough, she did it with an intensity that you just kinda recognize after a while. It’s one part Cramps and one part playground and one hundred percent the spirit of ROCK.

She’s going to be performing with us in Philadelphia and Washington, DC in the very beginning of November. Which is, sweet JESUS, next week!

To learn more about the DC show, go here.
To buy tickets to the DC show, visit this link: And I Am Not Lying: A Night of Storytelling, Comedy, and Burlesque

And to get a taste of what kind of an act Runaround Sue has, watch the video below. Tassels and their contents do fly freely here, so it may not be safe for work:

Wasn’t that just wonderful? My family’s minister reads this blog. He’s pretty great that way, to be honest, and I’m glad to consider him a friend. I’m also glad that maybe Sue and I made him sweat a little much.

It’s going to be me (Jeff Simmermon) as a storyteller, along with And I Am Not Lying members Cyndi Freeman and Brad Lawrence, along with additional burlesque by Runaround Sue and Cyndi Freeman as Cherry Pitz. Tickets are $12, show starts at 8PM.

You can get those tickets here: And I Am Not Lying: A Night of Storytelling, Comedy, and Burlesque

This is a cool trailer that our generous, warm and talented friend Tracy Rowland cut together for us. If you happen to write a blog or want to shout it out loud on any sort of social platform that you fancy, do please go right ahead:

And I honestly cannot believe that I just standing here in my office, typing this like it’s the most normal thing in the world.

We used to sneak off to the Black Cat in high school and college all the time, to pretty much see everybody. It was the beacon on the hill, the magnet in the big city that produced Bad Brains, Fugazi, Nation of Ulysses and God knows how many other bands — many of which contained my friends that I secretly admired but never told because I was so jealous — and sucked me right up there. I hung out there all the time in the years that I lived in DC, and now I’m thrilled and terrified to be a tiny part of the continuum that made me.

Imagine if you ate at incredible potlucks for your entire life, full of incredible, nourishing delicious everything you could possibly imagine and then found all these new things you didn’t ever know existed but blew your mind apart all the same.

When it comes your turn to put a dish on the table, you just really hope it doesn’t make people barf on the walls, is all I’m saying.

I am nervous enough to barf on the walls right now. I started this blog in Washington, DC as well, and it’s going to be a pretty weird homecoming.

I made this fun little flyer to promote the show, too. Just go right ahead and post that on your social platforms as well:

I sure hope you folks can make it.

Check out Matt’s wares and grab a few things if you’re so inclined. Who knows? Your contribution could help give a homeless kitten the chance to grow up to be an astronaut.
LINK: Ex-Boyfriend Collection’s SPCA Animal Fundraiser

That’s the justice system for you. They tried to break him, tried to get him to plead guilty to crimes he didn’t commit, and he stood strong. Now he’s out and I couldn’t be happier about it.

We have been writing back and forth like teenaged lovers at two different boarding schools since sometime around Halloween. As happy as I am that Tim is out, I am going to miss writing so often. I looked forward to opening his letters at my office. I’d shut my door and read them over and over throughout the day, keeping them in my pocket until I got home at night.

He’d send me little stuff from time to time, stuff that showed he was thinking about me — stuff that showed he was keeping his soul alive, too. He said it was okay to share some of these here, and I will be over the next few months.

I was supposed to be the one keeping Tim’s spirits up, but the picture and letter below really made me smile. My friend Xeni coined the term “unicorn chaser,” and I doubt she’s seen one as bittersweet as this one.

Before reading, you should know this: Tim actually did used to hammer a pen up his nose and make drawings for all takers on the streets of San Francisco. Trust me, it’ll make sense later.

(See the letter explaining this after the jump.)

Here’s a transcript for Google/readability purposes. I’ve take the liberty of making minor spelling and punctuation edits:

Jeff,

I scored some color pencils about 2 weeks ago and have been drawing quite a bit. It’s been a while since I actually used pens and pencils for anything past a rough sketch. Usually PhotoShop or Illustrator takes it over from there.

It’s been nice to physically create again. I’ve had an issue with subject matter in here, though. I mostly draw self-portraits of sorts: Me in orange, counting the days with looks of desperation or depression.

One or two people saw my drawings an now everyone wants me to draw shit for them or their lady back home. I have to say, it’s opened up my mind and my sketch pad greatly.

It kind of reminds me when I first started doing “nose drawings,” where I’d hammer a pen up my nose and draw. At first I got stuck in the studio with “what the fuck do I draw?” I took a desk out to public places and asked people what they wanted me to draw, then rendered that.

It was great practice, then eventually the performance evolved to just that – Drawing what the people wanted.

I get commissions for chips, candy bars, stamped envelopes, basic commissary goodies. Mostly I get people wanting tattoo designs. I did a nice version of “The Weighing of the Souls” the other day. A black Muslim man asked me to draw a unicorn for his wife. I tried to make a black unicorn, but it just wouldn’t come out right. Eventually the guy got a white unicorn with blond hair & blue eyes. He liked it, though.

It’s funny, ’cause when I was in jail in Virginia back in 2002, I drew a unicorn next to a waterfall, all set under a rainbow for some guy’s wife.

Anyway, all this inspired me to draw you a unicorn scene. White folks are rare in here, kinda like unicorns. At the moment in my pod of 48 guys there is only one other honky. He is constantly trying to be my pal, but he is really really fucking annoying.

He has a “Jesus” neck tattoo, which is really odd because the last white guy in here had a Satanic neck tattoo! In reality both of those guys’ God was obviously crystal meth. Enjoy the drawing, it makes me laugh – which is very necessary in this place.

Love,

Tim