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.

I’ve met a couple of Gawker writers here and there over the years, and they were just these tragic husks that wrote really poorly when they had to share their own souls. I worry that I’ll get to this point where I can’t write anything except blog copy for the Internet’s relentless grunting eyeball parade. A lot.

In PR and marketing and your other marginally creative douchey fields that have glommed onto the Web, there’s this constant talk of “the conversation.” “Effectively leveraging social media in the digital space is about joining the conversation,” according to any number of perky consultants with their jacket sleeves pushed up to their elbows, “about listening to the conversation and sharing ideas among your networks!”

First of all: fuck those people. Ugh. There’s nothing more boring than the listening to the constant wind tunnel of “social media best practices strategy for brands” or whatever the buzzword combo is.

Secondly: Sharing links is the mortar that holds the Web together, yes. But at some point you’ve got to lay a few bricks of your own. If you’re not generating your own URLs and pushing ‘em out on the regular, you’re probably just “sharing ideas” to distract people from noticing that you’ve got none of your own.

It’s fun to look at stuff all day. In the years that I’ve been working online I’ve mastered the art of surfing the Web for 8 straight hours and fooling myself into thinking I’ve been productive. But I always hate myself a little bit afterwards. Making something new, that never existed before — even if it’s just a sentence — is the noblest and most fulfilling thing a human can do, short of taking a bullet for a loved one. If you spend too much time with your head dunked in the Internet’s popular plastic river, you’ll forget to think for yourself.

So this blog has kind of shifted a little. None of us really wants to be popular bloggers. I haven’t asked Brad, Cyndi, or David about this, but I don’t think we’re looking to repurpose and re-present the stuff on Buzzfeed, The Daily What, Reddit, anything like that. We’re using this as a platform for our own ideas, a place to say “check out this new connection I’ve made myself.” Sure, we find stuff and share it. But the point is to find it under a rock WE flipped ourselves.

All of this sits on a bedrock of solid storytelling. Sometimes we’re promoting stories we’ve made, sometimes we’re telling the story right here, sometimes we’re presenting alien artifacts that imply a whole story in another world. But underneath every single pixel, it’s the story that matters the most.

Ultimately, I don’t care about the conversation and I don’t care about social media any more than Vonnegut cared about typesetting. If the whole Internet burned down tomorrow I’d be bummed for a few weeks and then start scratching stories into wet cement with a stick.

This concludes the whining portion of the post. Now, for the good news part: We’re putting on another live show on April the 17th at the Kraine Theater in the East Village. We’ll have a belly dancer, comedian Matt McCarthy, burlesque by Cyndi Freeman and Apathy Angel, puppetry by Z. Briggs and stories by me, Brad, and Cyndi. We may have a live musician in there somewhere, still working out those details.

But the point is, we’re laying a few of our own bricks and making something real. Hope you can join us.

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.

I have a much more noticeable Southern accent in that story than I normally do. That’s because I had more bourbon in me than I usually do, too. The Virginia accent is milder than an Alabama twang but excitement, fun and booze will bring it right on out.

I have two rules for myself when I’m doing a show:

1) No more than two or three drinks max before telling a story
2) If someone buys me a drink, always say yes. They’re wishing well, and it’s a kind gesture

As you can see, there was a bit of a conflict. One sniff of a bartender’s rag and grits would have started shooting out of my pores.

I struggle a little bit, too, with the way that I’ve personified “Craig,” the ‘roo shooter in these stories. I make him sound like a really gruff, caustic jerk. That is not so much an inaccurate description as it is incomplete. There’s a lot more to him than than a five-minute story can really convey.

While he is perfectly capable of cussing a buzzard off a shit-wagon, he also has a huge, generous heart. The way that he talked about his kids, his excitement about having his first grandchild and his tremendous love of the land didn’t really fit into either story, but those are just as important as his sporadic torrents of emasculating verbal abuse.

He took me into his home before we went on the trip, worked around my general cluelessness, kept me alive in some of the most brutal climate on Earth and tipped me out extra for a job well done at the end of the gig. I learned a lot about how to get tough real, real fast from that guy. Pretty much everything I’ve done since has been easier or at least more manageable.

And he was pretty much fine with me telling stories about it, I think.

If you imagine Jeff Bridges’ character in “True Grit” transplanted into Mad Max, you’d pretty much have him, actually. He’s the toughest guy on earth. And you just don’t expect the world’s toughest guys to hug it out with you when you disagree.

I wrote down his address in a notebook after we parted company and promised to mail him any writing I generated from the experience. And then, somewhere in my move back to America I completely lost the notebook. Then the internet caught on, and nobody on earth ever put pen to paper again.

I doubt he’s an avid blog reader, but I’d love him to know these stories are out there. If any of you recognize him in this, please do get in touch and let’s verify it privately.

“Craig,” if you’re out there, I hope you’re happy and healthy and loving being a grandpa. I hope you’ve got your feet up and a cold one in your hand and a whole marathon of “Law and Order” reruns to watch on the telly.

And thank you for everything, so, so much.

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.

I would like to clarify my position here a little bit, though. It’s not the actual acts of following a self-directed diet, exercise, meditation, whatever else program that bothers me at all. Pursuing a healthy lifestyle in the face of a life-threatening illness (either pre-emptively or after the fact) is probably a good idea.

Life is huge, weird and complex, too. We all have our own ways of coping. Feeling good is good for you, and most people would benefit from sleeping eight hours and eating less meat, more leafy greens. I’ve certainly cooled it with the booze, started eating better and cut out a lot of other unhealthy habits.

It’s really the presentation and attitudes that get me — the presumptuous belief that one size fits all and that if you get sick, it’s probably because you did something wrong. Everyone’s life and approach to their health is their own, and intensely personal. Blaming the victim is just appalling here, is all I’m trying to say.

That, and I hate inspirational cancer books.

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:

It appears to be the ABCs of profanity in six letters or more. As an artifact, it’s kind of impressive in the same family as the epic Type of Bitches. But the kid seems to have failed his own assignment. A lot of these are phrases containing profanity instead of words. And in the case of Q for quagmire — that’s just a noun.

I’d love to hear your proposals for improvements here, though. There’s something about the etymology of profanity that just gets me all excited. It’s what I like to call the subtle romance of the cuss-word.

I’ve typed this out below for the benefit of Google and the visually impaired:

More Than 6 Letters

A – Asshole
B – Bitchass
C – Crapton
D – Dickfacec
E – Ejaculation
F – Fucker
G – German Nazi Assfucker
H – Hellhole
I – Idiot
J – Jackass
K – King King’s dingdong
L – Lick it you hoe
M – Motherfucker
N – I can’t do this one ’cause I’m white
O – Oddballz
P – Pussy
Q – Quagmire
R – Retard
S – Shitload
T – Tranny
U – Underwear
V – Vagina
W – What the fuck
X – XXX porn
Y – You’re a whore
Z – Zat’s what I’m talkin’ ’bout!

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:

Here’s the text, just to game Google a bit:

And I Am Not Lying – Live

Sunday, December 5th, 2010, 7PM

At Under Saint Marks’ Theater
94 Saint Marks Place (btwn Ave A and 1st Ave)
NY, NY, 10009

Featuring burlesque by Magdalena Fox and Cyndi Freeman, stories by me (Jeff Simmermon), Brad Lawrence and Cyndi Freeman, magic by Nelson Lugo and short films curated by D.Billy.

It’s $8 at the door – cheaper than a movie, better than TV.

The theater can be a little tricky to find, as it is literally Under Saint Marks’ Place. Here’s a map on Google, and a photo of the entrance. It’s right next to a tattoo shop and espresso parlor:

I don’t know why I’m stressing about this. You can think of me what you will, but everyone else involved is a top-notch performer. I’d pay five bucks to see any one of ‘em all tell a story all by themselves, and you get two dancing naked ladies on top of that. If that’s not true entertainment value, I don’t know what is.

I think I suffer from the same delusion that a lot of high-strung artsy types suffer from: that if you don’t worry enough about something, you’re not taking it seriously. The unspoken code here is that you have to sacrifice your emotional stability on a fire stoked with nervous energy for at least a week before any big deal, or else it’s going to totally suck.

Or worse: it’ll just be average. Nothing special.

That’s my real fear, actually — the one that keeps me up at night — the fear that anything I do might just be okay. So I’ve packed this lineup with some really spectacular folks, creative, innovative and consistently awesome people that are totally going to make this thing worth your while. I hope we see you there on Sunday.

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.

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.

All that over a cup of coffee and a couple of jerks whanging on their keyboards.

I work in online PR for a large but not necessarily beloved cable company and ISP. A little while ago, my company was involved in a few scuffles that inspired a lot of people to fire up their computers and write a lot of nasty notes, many of them naming me personally. For three months or so, when you went to Google my name, Google would auto-complete the request and ask “did you mean to type ‘Jeff Simmermon douchebag?’”

When you’re on the receiving end of a huge influx of Internet attention, it really messes with your head. Watching your traffic soar is one of the most addictive feelings in the world, and some little part of you always thinks “YES. Finally, people recognize how brilliant I am.” The positive comments and e-mails can bolster that feeling.

But the haters – the passive-aggressive goatfuckers that sit there and send you nasty notes — those guys can ruin your whole day. One really nasty one just gets in your head and twists like a botfly burrowing in your skull.

That’s not to say that all Internet communication is bad, either. I mean, there’s something in me that keeps me doing this anyway. When I had emergency surgery for cancer last year, I was able to find a supportive community online that I really couldn’t find in real life. It was so nice to read comforting, inspiring messages from complete strangers — just little “attaboys” from out there in the universe somewhere.

We spend our lives moving from one glowing rectangle to another — from waking up and checking our phones to sitting in front of a laptop all day and watching television at night. We think of them as entertainment machines, little boxes that make our brains squirt endorphins when we see something we like.

We’re wrong about that. These rectangles aren’t entertainment machines. These rectangles are powerful amplifiers for the human condition. Greed, rage, love, insecurity and hope all shoot through these things and out of the screen at the speed of light and the feelings usually hit WAY harder than we mean them to. A casual comment can cripple someone or fill them with a false hope or a wonderful, warming sense of peace.

Internet communication has turned us into toddlers with real, functioning lightsabers waving them around the playground. We can save each other from bullies and cut each other’s arms off just to watch the pretty sparks — all in the same stroke.

Like Vonnegut said: “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be.”

Next time you fire up your rectangular emotional amplifier, make sure you fuel it with the right stuff. Try and pour as much humor, empathy and understanding into that thing and blast it at someone that needs it. You’ll make the world a better place without leaving your chair.

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.

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.