I told this story at my friends Brad and Cyndi’s “Stories at the Creek” a couple weeks ago. It’s a work in progress for me. I’m trying to turn this year’s cancer battles (well documented on this blog) into a story I tell on stage, and this is the first crack.
Like I say in the video, I’m not sure if I’m ready to talk about this or not, but I’m ready to be ready to talk about this, and that’s as good a start as any. I think that telling stories based on our memories helps us get control of them and bend them to our purposes — something I’m really eager to do with this particular experience.
I wouldn’t have told this or posted it if I weren’t ready to see this as material, something to be honed and edited with the help of sharp-eyed, caring friends.
This thing’s a whammy, too — two ten-minute videos about cancer and depression. Not exactly the light and fluffy feel-good romantic comedies I’m known for performing, so brace yourselves. Maybe this is like watching “Requiem for a Dream” (not to flatter myself): good once, but a total fricking BUMMER.
Long story short, I’m used to telling funnier stories with big laugh payoffs, and this sure isn’t one of those.
During the time that I was in Royal Quiet Deluxe (chicken band), I was invited to a large dinner with the Reverend Al Sharpton. Everyone had to go around the table and describe who they were and what they did. I was neither an accomplished member of the community in Norfolk, nor was I African-American. Everyone else at the table was both. I just kinda ran with a description of the band.
It did not go well. At all. In fact, the evening rippled throughout my life for about ten years, causing tremendous embarassment in a comic book store this summer.
Here’s a video of me telling the story on stage at The Moth:
I think I’ve just about milked this chicken band thing for all it’s worth now …
It’s been a couple days now, and it keeps happening — and at the oddest times, too. Sometimes I can control it and sometimes I just let it happen, let the people on the subway stare. My breath hitches kinda funny, hiccups, and my throat and voicebox shake like a bus on a bumpy road. My eyes tear up every time and I’ve just sort of stopped wiping it away.
I can’t tell if I’m happy or sad when it happens, mostly I’m just swallowed up by the enormity of the feeling. It’s like being a particle of plankton and getting swallowed up by a gigantic, benevolent whale.
America elected Barack Obama to be the President of the United States on Tuesday night, and the emotional aftershocks just keep coming.
So along with the spontaneous, random sobs of joy and relief, I’m having this recurring hallucination. Or maybe it’s a daydream. But whatever.
Every time I see, hear, or imagine somebody doing something incredibly well, that person has Barack Obama’s head.
Sometimes a piece of poetry, prose, visual art or music manages to transcend the perceived boundaries that separate us. On those rare occasions, disparities of race, class, gender, sexual orientation, religion, and political affiliation are stripped away, and we stand bare-assed and grinning, basking in the blinding light of our common ridiculousness. Click away, and soak it in:
I came across a pretty interesting passage in “Host,” an essay by David Foster Wallace that perfectly sums up why negative news travels so fast on the Internet. The essay happens to be about AM talk radio, but the words still apply:
It is, of course, much less difficult to arouse genuine anger, indignation, and outrage in people than it is real joy, satisfaction, fellow feeling, etc. The latter are fragile and complex, and what excites them varies a great deal from person to person, whereas anger et al. are more primal, universal, and easy to stimulate (as implied by phrases like ‘He really pushes my buttons’).
In other words, the principal exports of the blogosphere are bullshit and outrage. Why? Because as a species, we are flawed creatures that gobble it up.
