“I’m tall and generally easy-going but not mild-mannered. I like to think I’m a rock but I have my weak moments like everybody else. I think I have too many interests. I love to read thrillers and obscure histories. I write and perform, see movies, walk the city, play basketball and golf, watch the Yankees, learn languages, and frighteningly I think I now have every Law & Order episode memorized. Not SVU yet, but I’m working on it. My nephew is a magic elixir and I spend as much time with him and my family and friends as I can. I’m the son of a man who can fix anything and even though I’m not nearly that good, I’m ok with a toolbox. I’m really fortunate to have a lot of great friends and a wonderfully close relationship with my family. I work out all the time but it doesn’t stop me from enjoying dessert with my steak dinner. I think I’d work out even if there were no women in the world. I just wouldn’t do as much cardio.”
Wait a minute. That’s the start of my JDate essay. This is my new Comic Gold Blog. I’m sorry. I haven’t written much else lately and I got confused. I have to switch goals. Instead of going for thoughtful but rugged, I have to go for clever and provocative. Still with the ultimate aim of getting women though.
Years ago I wrote an on-line column, entitled A Dog’s Lunch essays. A dog’s lunch is an old English term for odds & ends, but in America it seemed to mean, “what the hell does A Dog’s Lunch mean.” My dad used to call them my Dog Day Afternoon essays, which looking back, would probably have been a better title. Two of my essays were published by another website which was pretty cool. Once I was on that website’s home page along with a column by Thomas Friedman. The Pulitzer Prize winning Thomas Friedman. I was pretty excited by that. Much more excited than Friedman would have been had he noticed he was sharing a page with Drew Carey audience warm up comic Dave Goldstein.
I should have gotten the Pulitzer Prize for that work. Trust me. 12 hours of game show warm up is a hell of a lot harder than coming up with another column on the Middle East.
Fortunately some people actually missed the old essays’and mentioned that to me, which I have to admit felt pretty good, so I figured it was time that I join the Blog revolution. I’m only about a decade late, which is about how I do things. The great thing about blogging is that it’s immediate and really visceral, which means to me primarily that I really don’t need to spell check. That’s the visceral part. This stuff is too hot to waste time with bourgeois spell checking.
I’m planning on writing a longer piece at least once a month, on the 1st, and then some other pieces periodically when I find I have something really important to say. Like when I have a great dinner at Dinosaur Barbecue in Syracuse or when the Palestinians violate another ceasefire.
At least that’s my writing plan. Of course, life doesn’t always follow the plan. As my friends know, I’m sort of a self-declared military expert and there’s an old military adage that, “a battle plan never survives first contact with the enemy.” I’m sure that’s true in war and that’s got to be true in the on-line world too, because it’s definitely true in my real life.
I still work the road a lot for comedy so I keep my trunk prepared for any contingency. I tend to go a little overboard. This is where having OCD actually pays off. Planning + neurosis = success. It’s February, so right now, I’ve got long underwear, protein bars, Carhartt overalls, and a couple of little bottles of bourbon in case I break down in the cold of upstate New York, or suburban Cleveland. I’ve got a deer rifle in the there too in case things really hit the fan and it looks like I may end up missing a meal.
For years I’ve kept a roll of toilet paper in my car. Just in case I have an emergency some day driving to a gig. Good plan, right. But in December, I actually had to use that toilet paper’in my own apartment.
Thanks.