If you’ve ever wondered what one of my stories would look like if it were written down on a printed page and accompanied with cool illustrations on Post-It notes, you’re in luck. I’m pretty honored to have a story included in the Post-It Note Diaries, to be released on October 5th by Plume books. The book is a collection of short stories illustrated on Post-It notes by Arthur Jones, featuring notable luminaries like:

Andrew Bird
Arthur Bradford
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Daniel Engber
Jonathan Goldstein
John Hodgman
Starlee Kine
Chuck Klosterman
Laura Krafft
Beth Lisick
Marie Lorenz
David Rakoff
David Rees
Mary Roach
Kristen Schaal
Jeff Simmermon
Andrew Solomon
Hannah Tinti
David Wilcox

The only person on this list that I haven’t heard of is me. It’s a pretty big honor to be included, to be honest.

You can learn more about the book here: The Post-It Note Diaries.
And pre-purchase a copy here: Post-it Note Diaries: 20 Stories of Youthful Abandon, Embarrassing Mishaps, and Everyday Adventure on Amazon.com

This link will show you a sample chapter by John Hodgman.

There’s going to be a release party and show next Tuesday, September 27th at Littlefield in Brooklyn, NYC. Me, Starlee Kine, Andrew Solomon, David Rees, Hannah Tinti, Daniel Engber, David Wilcox, and Arthur Jones will be reading/performing. For tickets and info, check this out: Post-it Note Diaries: Book Release & Reading.

I hope you guys can make it, or at least read a copy of the book. Buy a couple if you want — use ‘em to hold up the short leg on your couch.

(I took this picture of gummi fangs. But otherwise, it doesn’t have anything to do with anything in this post.)

At the risk of appearing in Cory Arcangel’s project, I’m kind of sorry that I haven’t posted in a while on here. I’ve been busy, sure, there’s that. So have Brad, Cyndi, and David.

As you may have seen, Brad’s launched The Standard Issues podcast. This is a project that, like anything else in life, sounds easy when you’re necking on about it over a few beers, then gets really, really hard. That’s how the whole life thing works, I think: everything that’s hard now gets easier, and you can relax for a minute. Then you get some new problems. I’m really stoked for Brad, though – this is a great idea, and once he gets the formula down it’s really going to take off.

Cyndi’s just wrapped the first run of her one-woman show Wonder Woman – A How-To Guide For LIttle Jewish Girls and is gearing it up and refining it to hopefully take out into theaters again. I saw it during its first week and loved it my damn self.

David’s been working on a longer form video piece with our friend and fellow artist Nathan Manuel.

And me, I’ve been doing all kinds of stuff. For one, I’ve been doing my actual job a lot. And when I’m not doing that, I’ve been trying to write a book. Ssshh. I don’t want to curse it. But it’s time. I kinda got myself to this Jonah and the Whale moment in the last few months where I’m either going to have to write a book or turn into whatever the creative equivalent of Frustrated Sports Dad is and yell at a future child from the sidelines at spelling bees or something. I don’t have a deal yet or a contract or anything like that. I’ve got a friend at a publishing house here who’s helping me out, though.

For all I know, all these words will eventually go into a greasy paper sack somewhere and then move with me from apartment to apartment along with a few coats I can’t get rid of for the rest of my life. But it’s still important. It’s got to happen. And it feels right.

So this blog, this project I’ve had for coming up on six years now, it’s changed a bit. I’m not doing this because I feel this *urge* anymore. When this started, I had all this *stuff* inside me that just came flying out. Now I’ve learned how to shape that stuff a little, and I’m not trying to blog my way to a book deal anymore.

Nor do I really want to be a professional stay-home blogger that depends on ad revenue for income. It would be nice to build this thing into a powerhouse with a huge following, sure. My ego would like that. But on the other hand, I really don’t like what I turn into when start living and dying by my blog stats. I spent a few months checking and rechecking my stats about 80-100 times a day, my heart soaring when traffic was up and grumbling and frustrated when it kind of flatlined.

That’s not a good way to be on the earth.

Once you start focusing too much on what’s popular, you lose sight of what’s important. First it slips away online, then it slips away in your real life and you’re just this walking collage of other people’s ideas.
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I had the honor of performing in The Moth’s GrandSLAM back in January at the Highline Ballroom here in New York City. The night’s theme was “Into the Wild.” Naturally, I told another story about the brief period of time I spent working as an assistant to a kangaroo shooter in the Australian Outback.

I’ve been to that well before, and I think I’ve about beat that thing to death by now. Still, I’m glad I was able to squeeze another story out of it.

It’s not every day that a giant lizard tries to eat your blood-soaked pants. And the opportunity to talk about having a giant lizard steal my pants on a kangaroo shooting trip doesn’t really come up in conversation at the office all that much either.

So I’m really glad I got to use that little gem for something. I’ve probably forced it a few times too many over the years.

The Moth was awesome enough to include my story in their podcast today, too. I’ve wanted to make their podcast for years, and it’s a pretty huge honor. I feel like running down the hall at work high-fiving people, but I’m pretty sure that opportunity’s not going to present itself either.

Here’s a video of me telling that story from today’s Moth podcast at the January GrandSLAM, in case you’re stumbling in off the Internet and wondering if I am, in fact, a bald-headed white dude with glasses and a suit:

If you want to see more stories, you can do that here, here, and here.
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When I had my testicle removed, the doctors refused to let me keep it in a little jar. Which was probably pretty smart on their part. Because I swear to fucking Christ, the next person who tells me that a diet rich in leafy greens and condescending self-help would have prevented the whole thing would catch that severed testicle right in the face.

It would have been nice to know that I should have been putting “Eat, Pray, Love” into a VitaMix with a bunch of wheatgrass juice and drinking a big glass of it every day for a decade before I got sick. Instead, I ate right, exercised, and got sick anyway. I don’t think all the sunshine and yoga in the world is going to grow that sucker back.

I made this image about it last night. I’m not sure if it sends the message or not, but sharing it makes me feel better. This one’s for all the people who don’t want to turn their illness into a life-defining mission. It’s for everyone that just wants to get back to normal.

I don’t want to fight cancer — I just want cancer to fuck off.

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Is there a worse word in American English than the dreaded “c-word?” I really need to describe pretty much the worst human being I’ve ever heard of, and “cunt” seems downright generous under the circumstances. I like the Jamaican “bumba claat,” but it’s not really my language and I need to see clearly when I swing this hammer.

It’s a shame I can’t ask the author of the little document below. If he doesn’t have any leads now, I bet he will in a couple years. A good friend of mine teaches GED school. He found this on a desk in his classroom last month:

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I have climbed a mountain of my own bullshit and started yodeling. The avalanche is picking up steam and it’s gonna get real on December the 5th.

Some time ago, I whipped up a bunch of big talk about turning this blog into a live show. I got D.Billy and Brad and Cyndi all excited about it, and then we went and made it happen. For real.

And I’m a little antsy about the whole enterprise.

Here’s a flyer for the show:

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My first job after college was as a rude little gingerbread boy in a touring children’s theater company. We did three or four shows a day across Virginia, DC, and Maryland. I wore a costume with adorable fake raisins trailing down the front, a little hood with faux icing on it and burst out of a plywood oven.

It was my job to escape from a large, sweating woman in a fox costume, and usually I did. Sometimes my costume would be damp in the dryer from washing it the night before, and I would dry it in the microwave, 30 seconds at a time. I got sick, ran out of money, and tried to sell my plasma to make up the gap but nothing worked. I was doomed to become some sort of indie-rock influenced Krusty the Clown.

Every time I smell apple juice, vinyl nap mats or canned chicken soup I just want to run right into traffic and let an 18-wheeler carry my tortured soul back home. I like little kids when I can get to know them, but seeing hundreds of them in a day just reduces them into this shrieking, messy mass for and I really don’t like the person I start becoming.

If you’re doing something as a joke you’re still doing it, and you might end up kicking a kid in the face. I wish I could say that I learned that from that experience, but really it took about ten years.

I told this story at The Moth at Housing Works bookstore in SoHo back in early September, 2010. It was possibly the most fun I’ve had all year and definitely made the whole experience worthwhile.

Eddie Van Halen Solo Antics 1982

Originally uploaded by Taylor Player

A few weeks ago, I got myself into a little pissing contest in the comments section of this here blog.

Here’s most of what I said:

I’d encourage you to take a long look at your own life. Whatever chain of decisions you’ve made in your life has led you to this very moment, a moment of your making.

So at some point along the way you decided something, perhaps subconsciously, that resulted in you sitting in a room in front of a computer, leaving a nasty little hateful notes on other people’s expressions of joy and passion.

That’s the kind of person that you have become.

It’s totally normal to have lonely moments where you feel unloved — it’s part of the human experience. The next time you feel lonely and unloved, just try to remember that you deserve it. The person you’ve decided to be when nobody else is looking is a total cunt.

There’s an inherent irony in using the Internet to write a nasty note in public to chastise someone for writing nasty notes in public. I’m aware of that now. But in the moment, I just couldn’t help myself. It’s something about the human condition that just disgusts me, casually revealing such hateful awful stuff when we don’t think anyone else is looking. You’d think that children would grow out of pointing the finger and howling at somebody that’s different than themselves, but they don’t. They just hide it better.

During the great coffee debacle of 2008, a man emailed me directly — at my personal e-mail address — to inform me that if there were any justice in the world, I would be raped to death in prison. Or by a goat, if they were maybe allowed into the prison yard.
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This week’s Moth podcast is really exciting for me. It features two people that are not only great storytellers but great friends of mine: Brad Lawrence and ******.

Brad’s way too modest to say so, but he is tearing UP the NYC storytelling scene right now. He won two Moth GrandSlams back to back, which is not unlike Ian MacKaye starting both Minor Threat and Fugazi — except tinier and more fleeting. He and Cyndi Freeman have a new storytelling show out in Brooklyn called The Standard Issues, and he’s blogging here AND his personal blog, too – you’ve heard me mention that ad infinitum.

****** has been a great friend to me since the night we met. She’s a hilarious storyteller and a caring soul who once painted me a picture of a pink cockroach with one testicle while I was recovering from surgery. She lives in Philadelphia and occasionally creeps up here on a Chinese bus, lays waste to a roomful of people and then goes back home and hides in her attic until next time.

Here’s their shared podcast: < href="http://themoth.prx.org/?p=928&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+themothpodcast+%28The+Moth%29" target="blank">****** & Brad Lawrence: GrandSLAM Stories

Brad posted a video of himself performing at Story Collider yesterday on this here blog — I’d encourage you to check that out.

And this is a video of ****** doing what she does best. She actually performed this story the night that we met for the first time. It was my first Moth event, and it felt like pulling a sword from a stone. I’d been looking for something to do and some cool weird art form to dive right into, and that lightbulb went on during ******’s story. I ran up to her after, trying really hard not to be a creepy fan guy. Turns out she was just as stunned as I was. She’s helped me shape a lot of my stuff and is always there to freak out with over the telephone.

Being friends with ****** reminds me of being in high school, where we talk on the phone late at night and say outrageous stuff to each other and are both way too sensitive and passionate. We got in a fight once like a couple of teenagers and it felt like one of my legs got cut off until we made up.

But anyway: here goes ******:

Enjoy, people.

So this is a video of me doing a show that I am in love with. It is called Story Collider, the producers are Ben Lillie and Brian Wecht, and it is a science themed storytelling show. I don’t know why I am so in love with that concept, but for some reason it has a lot of romance for me.

The show features storytellers with no science background, as well as scientists with no performance background. The theme for the one I did was Friction and, as you will see, mine is very science light because I am somewhat science dim. Or to be generous, I took the metaphorical route. Cyndi will be appearing in their next one, which is Epidemics, on August 12th at Pacific Standard.

As you will see in the video, a show about science; educational perhaps, but not for kids.

After you enjoy this, go check out my GrandSLAM winning story on The Moth Podcast. It won a GrandSLAM.

And then there is this story.

Trust-fund Soviet – Brad Lawrence from The Story Collider on Vimeo.