poison in the garden

One time I was getting a drink in Big John’s Tavern downtown. I ordered, gave the female bartender my card, she looked at my last name on the card, and her face soured like I had stiffed her on the bill. “Coker?” she asked like it was the worst thing to be called, “yes, thats me” I said.

“Are you related to judge… Coker?”.

“yes I am” I replied.

This has actually happened to me a lot. My uncle was a magistrate for North Charleston up until his death. I’ve met a lot of people who saw my name, put the two and two together, and then told me cool stories about how my uncle helped them or showed them leniency or, in one situation, made overzealous cops back down when they were harassing them.

Not this lady.

Once she heard that I was related to judge Coker, she told me about how he had screwed her over and presented it like she hadn’t done anything wrong. I don’t believe anyone is perfect, especially family, so I kept asking questions. Turns out , she was before him because she had a DUI.

Literally everyone I know has driven when they shouldn’t, so I’m not here to judge her. But damn, if you get a DUI and the judge isn’t nice, maybe the judge isn’t the problem.

The less we are responsible, the more we feel harrassed. The less we are responsible, the more scared we are. The less we are responsible, the more we must devote large amounts of mental energy to picturing worst case scenarios and assigning the most one sided motives to people who we are at loggerheads with.

Being responsible is not the same thing as being at fault. I, like you, have had things happen to me that are unfair. I got accepted to my dream school when I was 27, but couldn’t get a loan to go to school to save my life. That wasn’t my fault per se, but if I don’t take responsibility for that then I will moulder and seethe and poison myself.

When you allow your disappointments to lay on other people’s desks, they will never be processed.

Every man and woman has a few drops of pure poison in them. Its easy to recognize when it comes from someone else, its much more uncomfortable to see the poison that you have generated on your own in reaction to life.

I don’t think all the poison can be removed, but I do think it can be used to help pursue a good goal.

I saw a video about a garden in a British research facility that is filled from corner to corner with poisonous plants. Every thing that grows inside the high walls of that garden could kill you, your dog, your family.

The scientists don’t hang out there, but they do study it. They learn from it, but they make sure that they keep it locked up, and they wear protective gear when they go in.

We all have our poison garden. We all have our injuries. The evils we have done or had done to us.

But we all have a choice how we manage the landscape. Being responsible for your own shit is the only way to keep the poison from showing up where it shouldn’t be.

Happiness is guesswork

I did an aerial silks class one time. My thinking was that all the gripping work would be a great way to cross train for Jiu Jitsu. I liked the teacher and the people in the class, but I wasn’t great at it and the whole course moved unbearably slow for a stimulation seeking brain like mine. I bet if I was more advanced it would have been different but what can you do. I did the course for six weeks though, and I’m glad I did because I now have a slightly more informed opinion where I used to just have a theory. I thought it would help my Jiu Jitsu, it didn’t really, and thats ok.

I was having drinks last night with a friend and the conversation turned to exes and ones that got away. I feel like I’ve written adnauseum about both on this blog so if you’re not caught up, go read my book for the back story. Suffice it to say, I have loved people that loved me too and have had varying levels of fulfillment with it, much like I am sure you have as well.

But last night I was thinking, what if I actually got one of those relationships back? Or what if, they never ended? Where would I be?

I ended it with my Norwegian ex because I knew in my heart I was supposed to move back to America and build a life from scratch. She wanted me to come back to Denmark and start over again there, this time with her. It was very appealing. The right person, the wrong time.

I have spent all the years between then and now mooning over it. I used the memory of what we were and maybe what I was in that relationship and how she treated me as a type of nuclear fuel. Her belief in me was everything, and I’d do anything to prove her right about what I was capable of.

But in my heart, I know this is just a game I play with myself. I know, if I would have moved back, there is no guarantee of joy. I think that knowing is what made it easy to not move back. I feared most of all repeating a the past. Feeling I was stuck in a relationship with someone who’s respect I was slowing losing no matter how hard I paddled against the tide.

Faced with that, it was better to end it and have that memory die a saint instead of risk becoming a sinner.

As an older man, I know that joy is probability. There is no such thing as a certain pleasure. And if there is, there is no certain pleasure that does not have a great cost. Happiness to me is like ironing a shirt. I can get most of it flat, but there will always be a fold that will not obey me.

Being happy is two things: your long term strategy, and your day to day, moment to moment reactions to what is happening. Most are good at one or the other. Party people make shitty investment bankers, investment bankers make shitty mardi gras companions. I think having both skills is the goal.

I have no idea what will make me happy. I have guessed in the past and been right, I have guessed in the past and been wrong, and I have been completely caught off guard by things that appeared in my life like a breeze in a hot car.

I think all you can do is chase down your guesses, think long term, and treat people on the path with the knowledge that they too are looking for the same treasure.

interpretation

One time in Danish class, I told a guy that the word for gums in your mouth (tandekød) was the word for taint (mellumkød). His danish wife saw me trying to fuck with him and stopped him before he got carried away, but for one second, he was telling a story about how he had a tooth extraction from his taint and it was gold.

Interpretation is everything.

I wish Danish was a language that needed interpreters but it doesn’t. I just always thought it would be cool to be the person in the middle of an exchange, where your ability to translate the concerns of one party to another matter. I still have this fantasy where an old danish couple get lost in Charleston and I get to help them and use this dead part of my brain. But even older Danes are good enough in English to get around.

Interpreting events in life is just as important and just as confusing at times. Things happen, and we are all guessing at what they mean. Many times our guesses are based on how we feel. When I am having a productive day, I interpret minor inconveniences as inconsequential. When I am having an emotional day, I interpret the same event as a cosmic sign that life is against me and I, try as I might, will never get ahead.

How stupid is that.

So stupid.

And yet I do it all the time.

Its not one bad day we fear, its a bad day that is connected to an endless root of bad days, spreading out into your life like a climbing vine, poisoning everything.

The good news that is all horse shit. How many days have you had that were utter failures, but in hindsight were the start of greatness? And how many days have you had where you thought you were on to something only to learn you were wrong?

Whatever your interpretation of events are, they are probably going to be totally wrong to kinda wrong, depending on circumstance. This is a common trap empathetic and intuitive people fall into.

Their feeling of something is god. And like Fox news, they don’t fact check their feelings. This rational poverty can feel great on other days, but in a bad week, when your heart is telling you lies, it feels like death and its completely unnecessary.

Your interpretation of events is your gift to yourself. Be as accurate, logical, and empathetic as you can. You will probably be wrong regardless, so air on the side of positivity and kindness.

You know the old expression “whats the biggest room in the world? Your mother’s bath tub”. jk, room for improvement. You get me.

everyone is moving away from you (and its ok)

Something I learned a long time ago teaching kids martial arts was that the best students move away. As a teacher, it sucks. We invest so much into our pupils, seeing them off is always an exercise in letting go. But good kids are usually the product of good parents who are good employees and thus getting better offers in other parts of the world. Its logical, and its ok.

Everyone you know is moving away from you. At different speeds, at different rhythms, for different reasons, with different memories of you, and its all ok.

Its arrogant to think in terms of eternity when we know so little about it. The members of the scientology priesthood called the Sea Org are famously said to sign billion year contracts. Which is probably what I signed with Verizon and how long it will take to pay off my iPhone 8. I digress.

We can’t know, its not our job to know.

But every person we have in our life is a short term experience. Maybe that term will be 30 years, maybe it will be 3 days. The beautiful thing about time and people is sometimes a person can swell in importance in your life even if you didn’t get that much time with them.

I didn’t want to write this blog because I thought the headline sounded like a bummer, but its not nearly as dark as it sounds.

When I teach kids, I never just make them stop playing before class. I give them a time frame. “guys, you have 2 minutes left to play before we start practice”. Knowing that what they are doing will end actually makes them enjoy it more. No pleasure springs eternal. No relationship goes on unbroken. The only relationship that never ends is the one we have with ourselves.

In the face of imminent death, fear of what other people think becomes a non issue. If you lived forever, the opinions of those around you would be your constant companion. But no opinion about you lasts forever, because no person lasts forever.

This should be all the impetus you need to be as much of yourself as you can be al the time, in all directions. To be as brave and as kind as you know how to be, to enjoy and savor your good and bad days because they both are what makes a complex and joyful life.

I heard one time that the best way to hold a golf club is like a bird. Firm enough to keep it safe and loose enough not to hurt it. Maybe thats how we should hold on to each other.

running from the dream self

I used to have a podcast. Which, besides being a true statement, is also the best way to stop any woman’s sexual interest in you in its tracts.

The podcast taught me a lot, but it never became what I wanted it to be and I got tired of it. But I am glad I did it because it was an idea that came to me from my dream self for a lack of a better word.

We all have two layers to everything we do. We have our functional self, and then we have the world of dreams. They intersect in very clear ways, but not at all points.

Most people I meet are led by their functional self. They work, they share things on Facebook, they go to the movies, they have completely acceptable friendships and adventures, they are moving, but they are generally moving in a circle. I am not arrogant or naive enough to think I am better than them. I’m sure in some ways I am not them. But functional people are sometimes cut off people. They forgot about the second part of their nature and its hard to be around someone who doesn’t know themselves well.

People who are led by their dreams are crazy. Not unstable or immature, but crazy. Their high’s are higher, their low’s are lower. Because dreams are crazy. Dreams are where we go to see the impossible. Dreams are where we go to reach beyond.

I know I have said it before but I just love this quote. I saw a documentary about voodoo recently. They had a quote from a historical voodoo figure who was comparing Christianity to voodoo. They said “you Christians go into church and worship god, we go into our ceremony and become god”.

I think that is also the world of the dream self. In our dream self, we are limitless.

Every time I am unhappy with myself, its because I am being untrue to my dream self. I was given an instruction that I ignored or delayed, or pretended like it mattered less.

Every artist I meet who is restless or depressed or hard to be around is usually that way because they are running from something their dream self gave them to do.

In the story of Jonah, God tells him to go preach to the people of Nineveh so they wouldn’t be destroyed. Jonah, being a wack bitch does the opposite and books passage on a boat in the opposite direction. Storms come, the sailors believe someone who is cursed must be on the ship, and Jonah knows he’s at fault and volunteers to be thrown overboard.

As the story goes, he is swallowed by a whale where he lives for three days and nights. Then he is spit back out on dry land.

I think we all journey far far out of our way sometimes to avoid the voice in ourselves. The reasons we do it for are as various as our faces.

We are scared, we view ourselves as incapable. The only good idea we have has been done before. It would take too much money. We are busy, other people would think us arrogant, we don’t want to look ridiculous.

These thoughts are all functional thoughts. They are probably true. And they are also not your problem.

To be an artist means to live in two worlds at the same time. To hear two sets of voices at the same time. To weigh the advice and choose well.

As a comic, being next on a lineup in a tough room, I know functionally this could not go well, and people could think less of me if I bomb. I also know my bliss is on the other side of that negativity.

I hope you find yours, wherever it goes and wherever it tells you to go.

zero with a thousand faces

“Then Jesus asked him, ‘What is your name?’ ‘My name is Legion, for we are many’.

- book of Mark, Jesus speaking to a demon

One thing that happens to you when you become nonreligious, is you go back and examine the classic villains in bible stories. The quote above is one of the few times where a devil or demon speaks in the bible. And as weird as it sounds, i relate to that.

Everything I am now is a reverse Russian stacking doll of things I once was. I used to be a baseball player. When i was kid, that was all that mattered besides my family and karate. Later in life, guitar. Later still, Karate and Jesus, later again my marriage, then sleight of hand and balloon animals, then Danish, then harmonica, the songwriting, then Jiu Jitsu, then entrepreneurship, then podcasting, then comedy.

I don’t list these to impress anyone. Most of these pursuits are things I didn’t get what I wanted from. I have at all times been looking for one continuous face to wear in the world. One thing to be at all times. One logo, one business card, one last name.

A couple years ago, I did acid for the first time. I took it very serious. My friend and I woke up early, got coffee and had breakfast, then relaxed in my living room as we started to slowly trip balls.

I was expecting to stand on a pyramid and see shapes, instead we talked non stop, alternating laughing and crying as our brains flooded with serotonin causing us to see connections between things.

One thing I kept saying was that I am a master at things that never add up.

I am an earnest person. My whole life I have been trying to be something. Much of that is a reaction to feeling overlooked as a kid. The classic “I am not special so I will become uber special” dynamic.

But there is more to it. I am, as much as I hate saying it out loud, an artist. It is why normal is hard, and crazy is soothing. My desire for variety is wired into me in a way I can’t understand.

My friend I did acid with is a very successful comic, and I have always in my bones been happy for his success. One thing I have been open with him about though is that I don’t envy his success, but I do envy his epiphany. I am jealous of anyone who has found something they love, feel good doing, and the world conspires to get more of that from them.

I used to think that was music for me. I tried so hard to write the best songs I could, but it never seemed to get off the ground, like two sexy people with no chemistry.

But even inside my music, there was some type of beauty. I was always better with words than I was with music. And music is the wrong business to be in if you want to be a wordsmith. Thats what lead me to comedy and writing. In comedy, all you have is your words. That is simply it.

So in a way, as much as it was a death to move away from music, moving towards comedy felt like I was getting closer to what I truly have, to my own epiphany.

But I also accept the possibility that some people don’t get one. They get several different masks to wear. I don’t mean mask in a trite way. Masks are beautiful, and they are symbolic, and they carry meaning.

I don’t know. We are all creatures that desperately above all things want certainty. But only the wise know that certainty will drive you mad. Prisoners have certainty. Toll booth employees have certainty. The need for novelty is the counter point.

I still don’t know what my thing is, maybe I will never know. But i do know the search for it is part of what drives all my restless up and down progress.

the unconscious cloud

The heart is a storage building of emotions. Each little unit marked and walled off from the other one. And thank god. I do not want how I feel about my teaching job colliding with how I feel about my eventual mortality. Knowing it is there is a good first step, even if you never deal with or look at it.

But some people are trailed by a ghost. They walk a few steps ahead of a floating mass of nerve endings that connect to them in ways even they don’t understand. There is an unconscious cloud over them, on good and bad days.

As a feeling person, I can sometimes sense that. Its like rain trying to fall but the weather isn’t right. Sometimes the cloud is full of love. Usually its filled with undressed experiences. A bible proverb I’ve never forgotten says “hope deferred makes the heart sick”.

In 2019, there is a lot of talk about trauma and therapy and I believe in and support that. I think the examined life is generally the good life. I think we all have a responsibility to move our experiences from the cloud to the storage building. I know that the ease of that depends on the severity, and its easier said than done. I’m not exempt. Two of my siblings have passed away. I know what its like to hear my mom scream in the house because she just discovered my sister’s not breathing. I know what thats like. And whoever you are reading this, I am certain you have carried in some way your own doom. Something that you have lived through.

I also know that that is part of my story, and in some way I don’t or maybe never will be able to grasp, it is at the core of some of my best attributes. Suffering either turns your empathy way up or way down. We get to choose.

Maybe we all have a cloud behind us, but its the job of a good person to not let the cloud overshadow the people we love or that love us. I work on this and I hope you do to.

the art of cobbling

I am eternally an all or nothing person. Its my best and worst trait. I see the all the possibilities until I decide, and then I forgot that there were ever choices. This is good in high stress situations, and maybe thats how it formed. In tragedy, I often am my best self in the sense that I am of help to other people. I don’t get freaked out or overwhelmed easily, probably because I don’t see the choice to pull away. Maybe its the Christianity, maybe it was the karate background, who knows.

All or nothing thinking is a type of perfectionism, and on the dark side probably a form of egotism and self sabotage. I’ll never forget when my ex wife and I were young, like 22, she wanted us to run together because she was trying to get in shape. I was already in good shape from my ill fated competitive karate career, but I was game to help and do something with her. We had just moved to Park Circle and we went jogging around the main roundabout. After about 10 minutes, she just stopped jogging. I pushed her to keep going but she didn’t want to budge. Not because she was done or feeling sick, but just because she wanted to take some breaks in her run. This blew my mind. This isn’t how you get in shape. You keep going and don’t stop then you go further and further each time.

I was right, I was also very narrow minded. The problem with this type of attitude is that it doesn’t consider the living conditions of your pursuit.

Before you reach your goal, you will have to live in your process. We spend most of our time in our process and only brief glimpses of sunlight in our goals or our failures.

I am the kind of person who is willing to live in shit in order to get what I want. As I write this, I am living in a 4 bedroom house that is almost completely empty. I have a couch, tv, table, coffee table, desk, and 1 bed. The AC in the upstairs doesn’t work well. One wall is ripped out in my stairwell.

But the rental unit on the back of my property however is perfect, well appointed, and cute as fuck.

This is how it has to be in the beginning. Either your dreams or you are going to go hungry, there often isn’t enough food to go around.

With all that as a preset, recently I’ve started to learn the value of single event progress. Your whole life can change in one moment. One conversation, one seminar, one album. John Danaher, the famous jiu jitsu coach talks about this a lot.

As a all or nothing legalist type, i resist single event progress because it doesn’t fit my preset of huge commitments and thats a mistake.

I’m working on this, but its hard because I’m very very hard to influence (stubborn).

But often times the times I open myself up to single events, I am delighted with what happens. I let my buddy Michael Clayton bully me into going to New Orleans with Hagan last year and the first night there was probably the most magical day of my whole year.

I’ve been training with a very talented brown belt friend named Rehan lately. We just get in rounds where we can, and my mind resists it. Because its not long term, because its not on some orderly schedule. And yet, every time I train with him I get better because 1. he’s way better than me 2. single event progress is a thing.

The opposite spirit of unhelpful perfectionism is the art of cobbling. The definition of cobbling is

“to roughly assemble or put together from available parts, to improvise”.

For someone who likes to bullshit and go with the flow as much as I do, I have a lot to learn about cobbling.

Sometimes we don’t have all the elements we think we need to go where we want to go. But that can very very easily become the excuse you use to not build. At the end of the day, you do not have control of the elements, you have control over your work.

Build that road, build that dream, build that business, build that album, build that love, build that joke and don’t sweat it if things don’t match at first or ever. Just build.

Wholeness is overrated

I’m re-reading one of my favorite books called Mr. Vertigo. The book is special to me because how I came across it.

Back when I was in Denmark, I was traveling to Spain for a work trip. I had a layover in England and decided to make a 24 hour stay of it and enjoy the city. I was going to be staying with some friends in the evening, but they didn’t get off work til 5 so I arrived in London completely alone.

There is a rare joy of traveling into a huge expanse completely and utterly alone. No one knows who you are, but then again, no one knows who you are. All the ways you sublet your identity to others free up and for once in your life you are truly your own man/woman. Its always refreshing.

I knew I was going to have the day to myself, but one thing I refused to do was plan. Not a god. damn. thing. I arrived at the city center, checked my luggage into an overnight locker, took my return key and set out to find the best coffee shop within walking distance.

I stumbled upon a large square attached to a very official museum with large steps. People were just lounging in the sun, in groups of 2’s and threes. waiting to go in or relaxing after their tour inside. I sat out there for hours, just drinking coffee, journaling and people watching.

At some point, I noticed a little knot of people was assembling, I wasnt sure if it was a school group or a tour. They didn’t appear to know each other. Then one person spoke to them all, apparently giving them instructions. After he stopped, all the people in the group produced a book out of nowhere. My immediate assumption was that this was some kind of cult bullshit and I was about to have to listen to a short elevator pitch about scientology or Hare Krishna.

With that in my head, I was completely caught off guard when a very normal guy approached me and asked if he could give me a book.

In Copenagen, there are weird cults that offer you a book, but then when you reach for it, they don’t let go, and then they say “everyone can donate something”. I was expecting something like that.

Instead, he explained that he was a part of a flash mob that had met, and the point was to show up somewhere and give away one copy of your favorite book. I love sincerity, and I was thankful and I took his book. It was a novel I’d never heard of, but with an introduction like that, its hard not to give it a fair shake.

I read the book, and it moved me. It is the story of a poor ignorant boy that gets adopted by a mysterious foreigner who promises that he will teach him to fly.

In the course of the book, the foreigner Master Yehudi puts the boy Walt through a lengthy and grueling process intended to help the kid learn how to levitate.

The steps make no sense. One day he will spend buried in the ground up to his neck for 24 hours. Other times he will be compelled to take a vow of silence for a month.

One of the worst ordeals is he has to cut off the tip of his own pinky finger. After he heals from the amputation, he notices months later that Master Yehudi is wearing the severed finger tip around his neck in a tiny jar of formaldehyde as a reminder to himself of what he owes his pupil. Later in the book after Walt levitates for the first time, he gives the necklace back to Walt.

As the story develops, so does Walt’s ability to levitate. He learns how to float and move forward, bit by bit. The master and him practice several hours a day on this other worldly ability. Once they feel Walt has maxed out the distance he can move forward, they turn their attention to trying to float upward.

Here Walt fails and nothing they can do gets him more than about 5 inches off the ground.

Then Master Yehudi asks Walt to remove the severed finger necklace, thinking that the weight of it is impeding him.

The next exchange is so good, I’m just quoting it in its entirety.

“I’ve worn that thing since Christmas” I said. “Its my lucky charm, and I can’t do nothing without it”.

“Yes you can Walt. The first time you got yourself off the ground, it was slung around my neck, remember? I’m not saying you don’t have a sentimental attachment to it, but we’re intruding on deep spiritual matters here, and it could be that you can’t be whole to do what you have to do, that you have to leave a part of yourself behind before you can attain the full magnitude of your gift”

Man, that to me is what 2019 feels like.

Everyone that I know and admire is not a whole person. They are often lopsided. They are one hand dominate emotionally. They are incomplete. But they are also brilliant. They are masters, they are levitators in their own pursuits.

As I’m getting older, I’m starting to believe that wholeness as a goal is overrated. In the Christian culture I grew up in, they talked a lot about brokeness. The idea was that you had to allow God to heal you so it would stop impeding your life. New age spirituality/health can be like that to. I’m not living my best because the water isn’t filtered, or my supplements are off, the vibrations etc..

Maybe there are things that help and hurt us that we can’t see. Spiritual or health wise. But the ability to perform despite those things is the only way I have discovered to be a man. Its not what happens to you, its what you do in response to it that is your beauty, your glory, your legacy.

We will always leave pieces behind. We will always have pieces that don’t connect.

I love people that don’t love me back. I speak languages that i never get to hear or use. I have made beautiful things with beautiful people, and felt that it was leading to momentum just to watch it all dissolve. The pain of that is real and maybe eternal.

But those jagged edges can still harmonize in a way that doesn’t yet make sense to us if we open ourselves to it. I don’t believe everything happens to us for a reason. I believe its our job to synthesize. To make a collage of what doesn’t make sense, and live with it and inspire with it and laugh with it as best we know how.

built for tragedy

Some people can never get ahead. Or so it seems. Some people, every time they turn around, a cartoon piano falls on them from a great height. Calamity, of all stripes seems to be attracted to them.

Worse still, the unexpected negative becomes their only conversation starter.

“man, you’ll never guess what happened to me”. etc.. Let me guess, something lame. My worst fear is probably that I am this person myself haha.

I, like you, am lucky and cursed. I have natural advantages. My brain chemistry, the era of the earth I am born into, being white, whatever.

At the same time, I have arrived at 35 full of holes. I’ve lost much, I’ve missed much, and I know about suffering. I feel most comfortable around people who have had at least one major catastrophe. Until you have had at least one major structural failure in your life, its hard to relate to hurting people.

Theres a dark lottery running through life. Everyone gets a ticket, and everyone gets called up.

In Jiu JItsu, every color belt I know has had at least one terrible injury. Maybe its your ACL, maybe its your back, maybe its your rotator cuff. But no one gets through this hard of the sport without a toll.

Life is the same. You will lose something. I hope for you it won’t be what you hold dearest but it damn well could be. Sometimes the worst thing you can imagine comes upon you. Doom.

I say all that to say that there are some losses that are out of your control. They will alight on your roof like a flock of birds and disappear the same way.

Other than that, there’s people who are constantly on the ropes. They are built for tragedy. And I don't mean deep loss, I mean that they choose to self identify as someone falling down the stairs forever.

I have said it before as a joke, but my city is filled with PBR sad boys. Dudes who are 30+ for whom life has happened to. They are victims of circumstance, they are passengers on a bus. I used to live a life where I felt I had no agency, so I know what its like to be a man like that, but I also can’t stand men like that. Mostly because I’m afraid their influence will overpower my own.

The only way to break the identity that you are built for tragedy is through excruciating painful effort. Its easier to do literally anything else than it is to be who you are. Shadow identities and fake you’s are everywhere, but there is only one path for you, and chances are its through mountains.

Don’t be a tragedy when you could live an odyssey.

Or as Lauren Hill said, “don’t be a hard rock when you really are a gem”

emptiness as a virtue

Been feeling off lately. Part of it is the constant need to outdo myself v.s. my laziness. I dream like a pyscho CEO but work like a slightly above average homebody. There will always be tension.

Part of it is the kick back from big things. Tournaments, gigs, people, etc.. theres a lot of unexamined room in my life after goals or deadlines.

There are two experiences of goals, one is going up the mountain, and the other is coming down. Most people live better on either or. The ascent and the descent require different emotional skills. I’m better on the ascent I think. I like to challenge myself. I like to believe I can do anything, I like to punch above my weight. Part of the ascent mindset is un-reality. You are dreaming beyond yourself. Its pain in the service of a purpose and that is beautiful.

The descent is tricky. When we descend, we are leaving with new found knowledge. Moses for example. He saw god on Mt. Sinai and his appearance was changed.

When we try for big things, we learn about ourselves, and that knowledge is like oil and water to the imaginary part of our mind that motivated the climb.

Taking the reality, attaching meaning, separating your experience from the objective facts, taking whats useful, that is all part of the descent and its very difficult. Its the forensic quality of life.

Theres a type of lethargy that settles on me inbetween big events. I think of Sherlock Holmes. Inbetween cases, Sherlock is impossible to be around. He stays up late, he lounges, he smokes too much, may have been doing heroin, he lingers in a manic depressive state that can only be shook by work. His brain needs a problem in order to make him feel ok. I’m not that brilliant or that crazy, but I relate.

I was texting with my mom and I think I made her feel concerned for me because I said I feel like an empty hat. Thats kinda funny but also accurate.

Like many things, it made me think of magic. In magic, emptiness is the start of everything. The hand is empty before the coin appears, the hat is empty before the rabbit is pulled out.

I feel this way in comedy. I always and I mean always feel like I have little or no jokes. Yet, most nights, I am able to do my job as an entertainer which is to make others laugh.

Even writing today. I woke up not feeling myself at all, and assuming that sitting down was a waste of everyone’s time. An empty hat. But here we are. Maybe the emptiness is the best beginning.

People talk about feeling empty after achieving goals. You should, its over, time for a new thing. Its ok to never be full. There is no magic in full. There is endless magic in empty.

three card monte

Like most men who lost their virginity later in life, I went through a magic phase when I was young. By young I mean early twenties. Now you might say, “hey, weren’t you already married then?”. I would say you are right, and I would say shut up. The point of this isn’t magic, its metaphor.

One of the few tricks I remember is the three card monte, a.k.a. find the queen, three card game etc.

The point of the game is three cards are presented, two of the same, lets say two 7’s, and then a queen. The operator mixes the cards, invites you to bet on the location of the queen, then takes your money when you are inevitably wrong.

The trick of course is the operator knows something you don’t. They have a way of handling the cards in which they act like they are throwing a 7, when in fact, they are throwing the queen which is under their hand. When someone is good at this maneuver, its nearly undetectable.

Similarly, I think its very easy to lose the thread of joy in your own life.

Its very easy to get hypnotized in the shuffle, and just guess. Then double down, trying to get back what you lost.

I read an amazing line in Neil Gaiman’s American Gods, shared here in its entirety:

“The secret is this: people gamble to lose money. They come to the casinos for the moment in which they feel alive, to ride the spinning wheel and turn with the cards and lose themselves, with the coins, in the slots,. They want to know they matter. They may brag about the nights they won, the money they took from the casino, but they treasure, secretly treasure, the times they lost. Its a sacrifice, of sorts.”

The opposite of the three card monte in the magic world would be a famous trick called the Miser’s Dream. The Miser’s Dream is at least 100 hundred years old as a routine, and the techniques it uses are older still. In the effect, the magician with sleeves rolled up, produces a never ending supply of coins that he then drops into a tin can or a top hat. He pulls them out of the air, he coughs them up, he finds them behind your ear, handfuls of coins.

Both the three card monte and the Miser’s Dream aren’t real. They are both illusions that appeal to our need for things to happen quickly.

Sometimes I feel like the sucker in the three card monte. Like I was born to choose wrong, always one card to the left or one card to the right. Other times I feel like the man who can produce something from nothing, and out of nowhere.

I imagine, in some way, both have been historically true. I’ve failed at things I wanted to be a success in, and I’ve succeeded in things I had no right to succeed in.

I think I’m just taking the time today to think that we all play different roles. Every life, every year, sometimes every day. And if you don’t like the character you are playing, you can always choose differently.

We get to choose the trick, and we get to choose which side of the table we stand on.

blowing the lead

One of the things I think about a lot is what would have happened to current me if old me had different information. For example, if old me started investing $50 bucks a month in an IRA rain or shine from 20-35 then just forgot about it til 55. That small habit would give 55 year old me $266,000 dollars in retirement.

Crazy.

I think when we feel we aren’t doing well, or our plan is bad, or we get bored, we start looking everywhere but to the task at hand.

We look for windfalls, wild imaginative ways in which the burden of our goals could be lessened. We look in the past and wish we had known better or different. We assume that if we had gotten ahead back then, or received a windfall now, we would be better off.

In my own heart i play this game, but I know this is a lie I tell myself.

You have to have character to manage success. We blame our problem on the resource and not on the container. You don’t necessarily need more water, you need a better cup.

Sometimes I think about unhappy people I know. I think about what they say they want. What they say will be the end of their problems. Money, the attention of someone, some reaction from the world, some debt they feel owed, some level of success or acclaim.

Those things generally speaking would never make them feel complete. Because even if they got it, they don’t have the cup to keep it safe in.

It takes longevity to be happy. It takes real character to get lucky and make it work for you. I think about the cliche but very true experience of lotto winners who are broke within a number of years. They were given more than they could manage and it broke them.

My hope for myself and for you is that you have the good fortune to get lucky, but the stabilizing muscles to not let it become a curse.

Also, I have two shows next weekend, Friday in Park Circle, and Saturday downtown, get them tix and show ya boi some love

Catch & Release: the only way to be artistically happy

One of my earliest memories was being a small child and staring at the blue fabric of our couch. I have no idea how old I was. But inside that pattern of blue with white and red flowers, I could see the galaxy. I could see deep into the blue and imagine worlds, i could move around the flowers on the pattern. Kids have that natural second sight. I remember looking at puzzles as a kid, and getting taken up into the visual story of the pictures.

When we get older, the world pulls this out of us like sap from a tree. It doesn’t help to try and live in that state all the time. That vision mentality won’t help you pay your power bill or deal with an awkward text or confront someone who is being aggressive on the subway. But we all long to return to that sense of connection.

That is why making art matters. Its one of the few ways we get to return to the empathetic flow that used to be our natural habitat.

When we go about to create things, we encounter one immediate but enduring problem. We are never as good as we hoped we would be. The vocal was pitchy, the joke felt deflated in that set, the picture looked better the first time, whatever.

This desire to improve is where the dream world meets the craft. To be great you need both. But some dreamers run into the world of craft and they never come out. They toil and toil, making better and better work, but hide it away like an out of wedlock child.

Or worse, they see the world of people improving their art, and they go backwards. Not even to the dream, they go back to the unconscious. They act like they don’t know what they want to do.

These people are the hardest to help and the hardest to be around. They ate their own treasure map but ask your help looking for it.

There is one way, and I mean only one way to be happy as an artist. Thankfully, its easy to remember.

make shit

release shit

Super easy, and yet the world is full of would be artists who can’t or won’t do this.

We catch a vision, then the scale of the vision scares us. Or we better yet, we start on the vision, we get close, but then we decide that what we have made isn’t good enough (for who specifically?). This is all the giant pit of leaves that artists fall into.

Catch the vision from your muses, whatever the are. The TV or your ex or whatever. Create your world, then expose your world to the air of other people.

I have known so many talented people sitting on their art and it breaks my heart. I have been that person. Its fear, pride, laziness, whatever. The only cure is to let your art go. I don’t mean quit, I mean publish.

Catch and release. The only thing that is real is the things you share. Everything else is still in the dream and as beautiful as it may be there, it is no help to anyone.

Don’t die with all your good ideas trapped in your heart. Don’t do it.

the posture of waiting

I heard a minister tell a story one time about a conversation he had. He was upset about some dynamic in his life, I don’t remember exactly. The punchline of the story was the important part. A fellow minister looked at him and said, “you just have to accept that you’re never going to be anybody’s little boy”. It broke him, and he realized that somehwere in his head maybe that was precisely what he was looking for.

I used to believe in the type of Christianity that promised or at least believed in miracle healings. It was all about laying on of hands, speaking scripture, letting God work through you. I’ve been on both ends of this process. I’ve had people pray for me, and I’ve prayed for people in the street, in churches, in 100 scenarios.

Prayer as an exercise in empathy is fine. In my own way, I pray sometimes now. Usually as some type of metaphysical Marie Kondo. I pray to whatever is above me to let go of the things I can’t carry. But I don’t expect any help or intervention. I think thats best.

The brand of Christianity I grew up in made prayer sound like a super power. A way of moving heaven to change earth.

The worst part of this as a life style though is you are in a powerless position. And you are appealing to someone who has infinite power, but a very strange tax code of when they intervene, when they don’t, and how to get the result you seek.

Christians celebrate the concept of power not coming from the individual. And I understand that in pieces. AA talks about people powerless against something. Artists at their best moments feel as if someone is working through them.

But as a life skill, as a way of being, as a preset, I now reject this wholeheartedly.

We are all captives of this posture of waiting. It moves in everywhere like a draft in an old house. Off the top of my head I could probably name three situations in my life in which I am wanting someone to do the work that I am either unwilling or afraid to do. To that degree, I have given my power over and I am setting myself up for the most bitter and long term failure.

You have to do something. You have to be in charge. Doesn't matter your age, what was promised to you, the ways you have failed. We are our own calvary.

I beg you to examine your life and realize that you could have anything you want if you would stop looking at other people and start looking at your choices.

Every area in your life in which you stop looking to yourself for answers is a dead end. We need outside information, its a must have. But our actions are god. Our attitude is god. Our habits can save or damn us.

the history of perfume

I just finished rereading Neil Gaiman’s book American Gods. If you’re not familiar, the book is a story about America but one in which the gods of past and present still exist. Down on their luck leprechauns, jin that drive taxi’s, gods of the egyptian afterlife that run mortuaries, etc.. there is a constant pairing of former power planted in a mundane position in the middle of a world that is forgetting about them. In this universe, the gods die when they have no one left to worship them, a crazy thought.

Do you like what I write and want more of it? Check out my book here!

One component of the book is the idea of the gods being the cultivated essence of something. The full culmination of a feeling. Pantheism was interesting in that you sacrificed to different gods for different pursuits. Each god had his own likes and peculiarities. I like that. Glad its not the way the world really is, but maybe it is a little when it comes to being a creative person.

One of the dynamics of all diety/human relationships is sacrifice. There is no god that doesn’t require them. Somehow, deep in the core of our brain, we understand that to move heaven, we must move earth. Something has to go into the magic bag for something else to come out.

I think a lot about what it means to be an artist, partially because I have always wondered if I indeed was one. I have always felt less like an artist, and more like someone just smart enough to figure something out, and just restless enough to need to try. Maybe thats what all art is. A neon sign pointed simultaneously at an ideal and at ourselves.

Last night, I was putting the finishing touches on Marie Kondo-ing my house. Sorting through old blank CD’s and uploading stuff on my laptop. I found a little sound card that I thought was blank. Turns out it contained several song demo’s I recorded when i first moved back to Charleston.

When I hear stuff like that, I go deep inside my own head sometimes. I reject parts, laud others, wonder why certain things turned out the way they did. But in the midst of all my sorting, I found a song with lyrics I forgot I wrote. I remembered one line, but hearing it again, was like hearing it from a stranger.

“every man that ever lived and ever loved a woman

can feel the traces of her father with her

gave you his creative mind, then parked his car on the fault line

then left you in the desert in the winter

and then no one came

so you made up a name

now its the only one you answer to

and I may have given up on us

I may have given up on us

I may have given up on us

But I never gave up on you

Do you remember when the room was filled?

Do you remember when the room was filled with you?”

Could I write it better now? yeah. Did the rest of the song ever come together? No. But man, I made something beautiful. And that is somehow the hardest and the most important thing in the world.

As I went to bed I started thinking about how perfume is made. Perfume is a distillation of something. The essence of something contained in one drop. The word perfume comes from the latin word “per fumus “ which means “through smoke”. I can’t get that out of my head.

Fast forward to now, I am still engaged in trying to make beautiful things, albeit in a different way. Sometimes i make something and people give me love for it. Examining the thing in the abstract, I am grateful but sometimes baffled by their reaction. But today I wonder if the beauty we had to make before in order to create the beauty at present is only perceptible to the other person. In other words, we can’t always see our own layers.

Jesus took break and fish. The most humble of meals. And multiplied it for a large group of people the story says. We all have our bread and fish. And somehow, contained in the humble is the infinite. The beauty of everything you’ve ever done like a long succession of notes.

The only real response to this for me is to make more things. Make beauty, as best you can, as often as you can, share it whenever you can. And cheer on the beauty in others. Pull on it. Don’t let them settle.

In A Christmas carol, Marley’s ghost appears in chains, and the chains had tied to them cash boxes, ledgers, deeds etc... in the after life, he was connected forever to the thing he created and valued most like a necklace.

I hope for myself and for you that we never stop creating things that our significant, and that we get to enjoy them long past the day they had their debut. Maybe Marley in heaven would be connected to a string of good deeds and art and generosity.

Note from Joseph:

Hey friends, I write these blogs because its in me and its got to get out. I hope it helps you do the same, thats the whole point of art to me. If you like what I am doing and want it to grow, please feel free to share my blogs, buy my new book pillar of salt for yourself or a friend, shout me out in an instagram story, whatever. I am not doing this strictly for attention, but attention is always nice and helps me grow whatever the hell I am growing here. thank you so much for the people who constantly show love, you guys are too much sometimes.

your level, your stage

I started this blog early Sunday morning sitting in a downtown coffee shop in the rich part of town. I was picking up my car after a night of celebrating the great show we had Saturday as a part of the Charleston Comedy Festival. The night was a smash hit. Sold out, crowd was hot, and everyone, and I mean everyone did well. I really needed that. Here is my reflections from that night that i had to finish later because I got hungover and sleepy and couldn’t stay there long haha.

Every pursuit has stages and levels.

Your level is your ascent in skill, notoriety, and/or your place in the power dynamic. The levels are endless.

Your stage is what phase of life your heart is in. And just like levels, the stages are endless. Some look similar but they have endless variations.

Lately, I feel like my personal stage of comedy has been one of depressive challenge. I feel like I’ve eaten from the tree of good and evil. My awareness has grown seemingly all of a sudden. I know this joke worked because I used a buzzword, I know this riff fell flat, I know this bit needs to be retired, I know that idea has potential, I know this person in the front row doesn’t like me and are tuning me out, I know this person thinks I can do no wrong, I feel it all.

For all this data, I’m not any more skilled. My writing output or quality hasn’t magically changed. My awareness walks several steps ahead of my skill.

All these impressions tend to depress me. I do a lot of shit, and in every category, I expect of myself miracles. Anything less than that feels like a failure.

When you have high standards, most things you do will cruise under the bar you’ve set like an air ball of ambition.

The answer isn’t to lower your standards. The answer I’ve found lately is to find a way to give yourself micro credit and to examine and edit the things under your control.

I think most people conflate their level for their stage. I feel good tonight, so I did good tonight. I feel awkward tonight, so I did awkward. I fall into this trap all the time. Comedy for me is both a craft and a state of mind. If I feel stressed and unfunny, I take very specific actions to hype myself into the right headspace. I am a method actor after a fashion. i have to carry the flame with me on stage, or I’ll never find it in the moment.

Because of this huge reliance on how I feel, sometimes how I feel gets too much say on how things are going.

This is a giant bear trap for artists. How you feel is not a complete picture of how you are doing. Once again, your stage and your level are different.

In Jiu Jitsu, you may have lost a tough fought match in the tournament. But paradoxically, while you are busy hating your silver medal, your skill bank account just silently compounded its interest.

To get a full representation of who you are, you have to examine both your stage and your level.

How you are feeling is not god. How you are doing on paper is not god. When you examine yourself and your efforts in something you care about, you have to widen your scope and take into account a lot of things.

And in the end, thats why I can’t be sad that my awareness is growing. To whatever degree I am aware, to that degree I am in control.

everyone in this coffee shop besides me were rich people who jogged there. totally awesome

The Black Seeds

I don’t think of myself as gifted in almost any sense. A gift is unearned ability. I wish I was. I have wished my whole life that I was so good at one thing that the world would allow me to be single minded. But for whatever reason, that has never been true. From 17 to 30, all I wanted was to be was a songwriter. I tried really hard. I did well, I had whispers of success or big things, but nothing substantial enough upon which to hang an identity or ego or a mortgage.

I do however have talents. Talents are things you build. They may involve gifts, but a talent to me is the thing you have constructed.

If I could recognize one gift I do have though, I would say I have the gift of reaction. Its my one trick pony in comedy. Its my relationships, its my answer to the tragedies I have experienced. I’m proud of how I handle bad news. Somehow, the worse the news, the better my reaction. Strangely, day to day annoyances hit me harder than life events of seismic consequence. I think its a manifestation of the ADD brain. Under the most pressure, I am the most calm.

Part of the way this has manifested in my life for good is in rejection. Rejection is the biggest fear and the biggest teacher. Its in everything. Death is the ultimate rejection. And every smaller rejection carries in it a black seed of the big one. Thats why things hurt. Thats why failure, or losing love, or embarrassment stay with us. They haunt us not for what they are, but for what they signify. The ultimate blackness of death.

We fear rejection and its right to do so. The fear of it motivates our best effort sometimes. But even you on your best day can be rejected. You can be let down, you can fail.

The black seeds go into everyone.

You can try to hide them, but they are there.

The only thing I can say I am naturally gifted at is receiving these seeds. The other day I was talking with friends at our local dive bar The Mill, and we were talking about this. Everything I love about myself is one large constructed reaction to a time when someone I love hurt me. Underneath all my virtue is one tiny vice. Underneath the house is one tiny black seed.

When my brother’s widow (who I recognize now as a flawed and unstable person) tried to hurt me by saying that “nothing that you have is your own”. It stung, because in some ways, she was right. She was not trying to help me. She was trying to shame me. I grew up working in my family’s business in my teen years. My brother Bradley and her were my buffers. They helped shield me from the chaos and made my world simple. They also profited off of me. I worked for them and made them a lot of money, and we were at that time more father son than brother brother. This started to chafe at some point, and thus my odyssey into Denmark was a necessity. But part of why it hurt was because maybe she was right in some small way.

Thats why now, everything is mine. I don’t split things. I own 100% of my company, and property, etc.. I need to know that no one can ever say something to me like that again without getting laughed out of the room.

When I was married, we were both so young. I hold no unforgivenes from that era. I want nothing but absolution from that time in my life. But one of the scars I carried for a while was the feeling that I was inadequate sexually. Not attractive, or manly enough. I may have felt this way with anybody. I was a young man finding my self and my way in one of the most attractive and intelligent cities in the world. But the poignant rejection rung a deep bell inside of me that can never be unrung.

Thats why it mattered to find my own primal power later in life. Around that black seed a new version of myself appeared.

Every black seed thrown into the soil of who you are is a chance to build an opposite altar.

Your reaction is everything. Your counter punch. Your ability to win the room back. Whoever you are reading this, I hope you find your own way to honor the black seeds in your life by building the real you around them.

Maybe they will one day be your most prized possession.

Memories in the trash

Like the rest of the world, I’m taken with the writing and methods of Japanese cleaning and organizational expert Marie Kondo. If you are reading this from prison or a nuclear bunker and haven’t heard of her, start with her book The Joy of Tidying Up. Its profound in its simplicity. What has made her ideas spread is that her method helping people remove clutter is very simple: take each object in your house in your hands, and ask yourself “does this spark joy in me?”. If the answer is yes, you keep it. if the answer is no, you throw it out or give it away with no hesitation.

Cleaning is a lot like dieting, most people that talk about it are selling something. They are more brand personality than good ideas. I hate shit like that. I don’t want to learn tricks. Tricks fall apart like diets. Concepts can last forever.

All week I’ve been going through my house in the presribed order, purging all the joyless things from my house. First my clothes then my books, then papers/records, then what she calls “kimono” which means miscellaneous stuff, and finally saved for last by design, sentimental items.

I stayed up til 5 in the morning last night sitting in the floor of my office. I piled everything that I would consider sentimental in the floor, to be sifted through like a miner.

One of the things that struck me is how much dumb unhelpful shit I hold on to. The metaphor there is obvious, but I mean it more practically. I love throwing stuff out, so why do I have Lowes receipts from 6 years ago?

As I moved deeper through the stack, my mind felt like it expanded like a tent. I have a bad memory, it scares me sometimes. I’m not worried yet though. I have had a very intense life the last eight years. Lived through most of what psychologists list as the most uprooting experiences: death, divorce, moving, bankruptcy (nearly), etc..

I also talk a lot. I think people remember things I said and because I don’t remember saying it, I get spooked. But honestly, I’m swinging for the fences all the time verbally. Trying to be funny, trying to be accurate, trying to be kind.

All that said, I’ve never understood what I should hold on to. Not just receipts for lumber and power strips, but which of these moments are the ones that will matter ten years from now. I guess no one can ever know.

I sat sorting through cards and letters written to me, old pictures, offiical documents from the Danish government, little scraps of paper with goals I had written for myself, etc..

I started to slowly through things out. Old folders, christmas cards from people I don’t know that well any more. As I got closer to things that mattered, I found myself doing something peculiar.

There were certain things I know I needed to throw out, but I needed to honor. I felt myself kiss certain papers before throwing them into the big contractor bag in the floor. I know this sounds so dramatic. But it felt right.

Some things need to go. But we can honor them as they go. We can be gratful for the role they had in delivering us to where we are now. Mostly, doing this has made me realize how much I have been carried by the love and faith of other people. Thank god for them. Hope to be that for others as well.

Little Dick Energy

Before anyone private messages me about this, just know that if you can read this, then this is not about and/or targeted about you. So relax.

2018 gave us the phrase big dick energy. The urban dictionary defines it as “confidence without cockiness”. Of course its based on the concept of someone who is well endowed but doesn’t need to bring it up. Someone who is ok with one of the most intimate parts of themselves and thus can not let their own life be dominated by insecurity.

To me, the opposite of this is little dick energy. This is of course not an attack on anybody’s actual body. We are made how we are made and who cares.

But damn theres a lot of little dick energy going around.

I would define little dick energy as someone who see’s their failings as their destiny. Someone who’s problems are not the only thing under their control, but are like the waves of an ocean that they are navigating on a tiny dick raft.

I have had hard years, and I have had catastrophic years, and its ok to fuck up. But what I’m talking about is the tendency to subjugate yourself to your own trouble. To assume that your abilities, whatever they are, are a fixed point and can not be improved, grown or edited.

The early days of the internet brought us never ending ads for boner pills that promised to grow your piece by inches and quickly. What a world that would be if it was true. Lower back pain in men would go through the roof. I digress.

Every time you agree with the voice that tries to make you shrink, you are repping that little dick energy.

Every time you think the petty grievances you’ve endured are the reason you can’t win, little dick energy.

Every time you don’t show up for what and who really matters in your life, you guessed it.

We all got to push this out of our life and build some momentum while the new year is still new.