Imagine Nation.

Fuck everything I wrote yesterday. It was all a lie. Why didn't anyone like my new queef joke? Apparently NY isn't ready for the joke where I compare a windy vagina to the sounds a frustrated horse makes when it's trying to huff glue. Whatever, I'll burn a few bridges and then make my way back home where people get me.

But seriously. -- ANON

02.08.2011

Lucas Molandes

I had a thought that keeps going through my head: why be anywhere if you're not following your heart? I've been guilty of such things. I've left a lot on the table, and I've put more out there than I actually had to give. When the goal is to be great at one thing, it's easy to loose sight of how important it is to have balance ...  Having one food supply cannot sustain healthy growth when the dry season hits. This is especially true of the comedy scene in Austin where there's very little industry. If you look at the people who were in the finals of the Funniest Person In Austin last year, how many of them do you see out more than once a week? If you look at young comics who haven't been in the contest yet, or have not made the finals, how many times do you see them out each week? Having something to prove is great for motivation, but once you've proven yourself to others, will you still have anything to prove to yourself? And once you think you have a reputation, how hard will it be to live up to what you think people see you as?

It's so hard to live up to and confront yourself. Most people spend their lives piling up the distractions until life becomes a depressive Groundhog Day scenario.

Zzz

Sorry, I sometimes get caught up in the blanks spaces in my head. I've had plateaus in my creative journey, but I've come to realize the necessity of their existence. The down time is when stimuli and ideas settle in the subconscious, like drying paint. But...is it unrealistic to expect my brain to operate at a furious level of creativity? I am in NY, which is a town that I assume is smarter than the average city. There are probably pockets of self-taught academia that could intimidate  most college graduates. How do I compare in a city where homeless guys are reading Mamet on the subway at 3 AM? How can I stay relevant in a town where there are people who spend their free-time searching for Nth digit prime numbers and developing Mandelbrot sets that show a correlation between imaginary numbers and the growth of animal populations in Alaska. I spent an hour this week amazed that Kirsten Dunst had been in the Horse Whisperer. FUCK.

And then I'll go back to Austin and people will say, "oh you couldn't hack it in the big time? You're afraid of success?"

And I'll say, "why does it matter where I live if the goal is to follow my heart and find peace? You don't get it!"

And my friends will drop it because they don't want to hurt the Jenga-like castle of denial I'm living in.

There's a point when people are just people and helping them doesn't help them. And we owe it to them to leave them the fuck alone. There's a point where you can't tell your brother that he's never going to graduate from college and he'll never be better than a manager at Payless shoes. Hope may be all he has to keep himself afloat in this world, so why take that away from him?  

That's what scares me most, having my reality broken to me. We all have an unspoken social contract in that -- unless we are provoked -- we tip-toe around that which allows our fellow man to wear his self-denial as securely as possible.

We all have that thing we hold onto to keep ourselves from giving up. What's scary is that I'm in NY, pushing my chips forward because I believe that comedy is what I was meant to do. But what If I'm just as delusional as those first episode of Last Comic Standing tryouts who legitimately think they have a shot? What if I'm not even as crazy as those people? What if I'm one of the ones you never see because they're just too sad a creature to show on television? What if there's not even a novelty aspect to my desperation? How will I ever get a second date? That’s my move!

What if I can't see that level of delusion in myself because questioning myself and evaluating myself and having existential crisis are what my delusion does to help hide itself from me even better. "Clearly you're thinking about things and second guessing yourself, so you must not be as deluded as you fear you are," I tell myself.  But what if delusion is using my self-awareness against me to camouflage itself!? What if the more self-aware I am is actually a reflection of how unaware I actually am? I am become deluded, the denier of worlds.

The lord works in mysterious ways ... or maybe I'm a fuck up. Maybe it's a symbiosis. The neuroses gives me writing supplies, and I give myself neuroses. 

Zzz

You just gotta make sure that you and your heart are on good speaking terms. Knowing who you are will help you in any situation, especially in NY where so many people play it safe and cling onto advancement as if it's the last morsel of food found. If you play the same game, you’ll exist against a cliched backdrop, struggling for relevance as defined by that cliche. Confronting yourself is empowering and it can make other people uneasy. We still live in a society where you can be judged for having a face tattoo on your own body. What am I getting at? There are punk-rockers who rebel against society by going against its norms. If you really hate something, would you want to live as a reaction to it, or would you want to find yourself independently of it. Which one is better? Which one is punk as fuck? Which one lives in NY and which one lives independently of it?