Come To Me, Jungle Friends

It probably says something profound about my relationships with humans that the two most spiritual experiences I can remember having principally involve animals.

Well, that's not exactly true. Humans are involved, but only peripherally.

Here they are; the saddest thing and the happiest thing that I have seen, ever:


First, the saddest thing. My street, in Little Armenia, maybe four years ago. A dead cat, hit by a car, in the middle of the street. Between the cat's front paws: a flower. A pretty flower that someone obviously plucked and deliberately placed there.

When I saw this, my first thought was "who does that? what a tool" but my very next thought was "wait a minute, why not? why SHOULDN'T a kitty be commemorated? kitties are people too!" and as I thought about it more and more I got sadder and sadder, because isn't that where we're all headed? And as we lay in our final sprawl, squashed on the pavement of life, wouldn't we all like someone, even a total stranger, to lay a flower between our paws?


Now, the happiest thing:

Tyson the skateboarding bulldog

No religion, no self-help book, no sexual act, and no mind-expanding drug has ever given me such a feeling of connectedness to the universe and all its creatures as this video of a dog playing in a parking lot. And it's NOT because it's cute, and it's NOT because it's such a weird thing for a dog to do. It's because the dog is FUCKING ENJOYING HIMSELF. Look at that face! He loves this. He is not doing it because he was trained to do it for snacks. He's not doing it to please his owner. Sure, maybe that was how he was persuaded to hop on a skateboard in the first place, but now he is doing it because it is fun. He is having fun in his own little doggy world and could give a shit about anything else. That's freedom. That's consciousness. That's LIFE.

That dog...is me.

If I were a resolution-makin' man, I would resolve to do everything in my life with the same reckless enthusiasm that Tyson brings up onto his board. I don't know if I have it in me, but I'm goddamn glad that there's at least one bulldog out there who does.

Last Comic Sleeping

I just went to the Improv to check out the "Last Comic Standing" line and it was already 1.5 blocks long when I got there. NOOO thank you. Plus side, I met a couple comics I knew there, who were also not getting in line, and we stood and chatted with some of the people in line for a while.

I wanted to at least take a look at the line because standup comics are largely solitary, territorial creatures, and it was a rare opportunity to see a whole gargantuan shitload of them in one place. There were people in sleeping bags, on their headphones, eyes closed, not talking to anyone. There were people looking subtly around for people to hit on. And there were people jumping around, sipping coffee, trading insults with late-night weirdos in passing cars. A typical exchange:

PERSIAN GUY IN GIGANTIC S.U.V.: "What is this line for?"
COMIC: "Last Comic Standing!"
PERSIAN GUY [utterly confounded]: "What is THAT?"

[and scene]

There was also a guy from some sort of Eastern European type area. He was wearing a black tracksuit and stood about 6'4". He was thickset with a military haircut that highlighted the conical shape of his enormous head. He was like Sloth from The Goonies without the restraint or the people skills.

At one point he advised my friend Richie to avoid talking to passing cars because they could be full of gang members. When Richie made a joke about it, the guy said, "Don't be sarcastic. I'm trying to help you."

I like the balls on a guy who says "don't be sarcastic" while standing in line for "Last Comic Standing."

But mock as we might, we still tried not to be sarcastic so loud, because the guy had 50 pounds on us and was scary and Belorussian and stuff. And he kept throwing back smart remarks at the cars that pulled up to look at us, and he was so into on-the-spot humor, and so not good at it, that I realized what a torture it would be if someone was trying to get you to play short-form improv games, and they sucked at it, and you were too terrified for your life to tell them no. We were very glad Vladimir didn't ask us to give him an occupation and the name of a city, is all I'm saying.

All in all, an hour and a half well spent. It was nice to see the wackos, but it was nicer to see my comedy friends. I'll be back next year, early in the day, probably for only like 15 minutes. Look for me. I'll be standing with my car keys, looking at my watch, but I will damn well be there.