shady's back

hmm...  ahem.  check check.  one two.  this thing on?  [loud  microphone feedback]

ahh... hello.   so here i am once again.  I haven't been here for quite a while.  I've been doing things and thinking things elsewhere.  I wrote some things in my real notebook, and had some conversations with real people. 

I've been teaching myself Final Cut Pro, and I grew a beard.

I quit smoking.  Today is day 9.  I have felt, by turns, homicidal, suicidal, broken and strong, but mostly like I did the best and most important thing that I've ever done for myself.  I am very grateful to myself.   I did slip up, though, and had one cigarette on Friday night, but I forgave myself and didn't beat myself up.  I don't think I want to slip again, though.

They say that when you quit smoking, "you get your sense of smell back" and it's really true!  I had been smoking so long (26 years) that I didn't even remember my sense of smell - but all last week, I started noticing a cornucopia of odor I never had before.  Smell is a really handy sense to have when you're hungry and need to find a place to get a slice.  I'm finding that i can sniff out a pizza joint from blocks away.   However, it's not such a picnic when you're stuffed on the subway at the end of the day, or walking behind someone who smells like dog shit.  I always picture the smells like those visible wafts of odor that are always coming off a pie or something in cartoons, and that would turn into a hand and tap you on the shoulder to try and tempt you.  That happened to Fred Flintstone a lot.  Anyway.

For the first few days of not smoking, I went a little crazy on the snacks and totally overdosed on wasabi peas and gummy clown fish at work because I couldn't go out for cigarette breaks.  so then i had an upset stomach for almost a week.  Oh, and I can't sleep for more than 2 or 3 hours at a time.  Fucking annoying.   A friend gave me some Melatonin the other night and that helped a bit, but makes you groggy for the whole day afterwards.  I have a doctor's appt. weds, maybe I can get him to prescribe me sometlhing good.   Thing is, I have like a shopping list of drugs that I want to request, so maybe I should prioritize my drug list.  Or is ok to ask for lots of stuff?  I haven't been to a doctor in almost 5 years.  I don't know the rules.

hurricanes are all the rage this year.

Noel said this will be "the most productive month of my life".  I hope he's right.  Something good better come of not-smoking!

Margaret and I went to see Demetri Martin's one-man-show, These Are Jokes, in the village on Saturday night.  As someone who's name I'd heard off-and-on through the years,  and who seems to be starting to get a little famous now, I really wanted to see this show.  Rev told me that the Trachtenberg's said he'd sold out every night of his shows in Edinburgh - and it looks as though he's continuing that streak stateside.  The 300+ seat Village Theatre was sold to cap (despite a monsoon of biblical proportions) and I heard the show's been extended.  I love it when artstars do well.  And he deserves it - the show was beautfully written and performed.   Martin's a standup - and what he did was almost entirely stand-up material, which he made uniquely theatrical by simply superimposing these ... jokes.... over a guitar and harmonica, over the sound of a glockenspeil, over some silly drawings on a "very large pad".  But at the end of the day.... these are jokes -as he warns us in his title- and they're really fucking funny. 

And I don't know if Martin gets this comparison often, but he reminded me a lot of the late Mitch Hedberg.  Same 'likeable hippy dork' type of persona, and one-liners that would be a good match for Mitch's in a comedy knife-fight.  But Hedberg never would've done a one-man show... he was happy just doing comedy.

As a comedian, they always want to you do other things besides comedy.  "Oh, you're a comedian, can you write?  Write us a script.  Act!  Act in this sitcom."  They want me to do shit that's related to comedy, but it's not comedy, man.  It's not fair.  It's as though I was a cook, and worked my ass off to be a really good cook and they said "Alright, you're a cook.  Can you farm?"  (MH on Strategic Grill Locations)