013: Sometimes it still works

I have seen the future: it is three 5-hour shifts per week.

It was quite a weekend. A busy one, for sure. It began with my somewhat reluctant (okay, not somewhat) agreement to come in to work on Friday. I treat it like a hassle to get called in to work when I'm not booked, but when I'm there I don't actively give a damn. Yes, the world would be a stupendous place if I had loads of free time but there's not a lot of money in that (not until I make this whole writing thing work for me anyway.)

The weekend proceeded in this way. Saturday was particularly bad as I was scheduled to work 1-5. Andy was also booked until 5, but he was on cash, so when he counted out his till, he was gone and I was still helping cutomers. By the time I got around to telling Karen "Okay, I'm gone for the night," she managed to wrangle me into staying late to help with returns. Sigh. Again I struggled but to no avail, the lure of money is too great for a man who hasn't worked a steady (non-temporary) job since 2005.

So I ended up staying until 9 or so, well after we should already have vacated the mall, which closes at 6. But we did finally get those blasted returns done, which is why they kept calling me, so that's over with and now we can settle into a recurring rhythm. And for my part in it, I'm a hero. as much of a hero as one can be doing mundane tasks for a giant corporation that doesn't care about you.

But then I got home and had wings, so all was right with the world.

Sunday, Andrew didn't show up, so I ended up working until close, rather than the 10-3 shift I was booked for. Because I have a secret personal vendetta against Andy, I couldn't keep from making a little comment about how this proves I'm better than him. It's an extraordinarily petty thing for me to say and I don't think anyone wants to hear that shit, so I oughtta keep my mouth shut.

It's not really his fault, the vendetta. The truth is, we get along well and he's entertaining, because he's so damn weird. He will say anything that comes into his mind. He hits on all the female customers in this guileless baby deer way. He is capable of repeating the same shtick over and over and making it seem like this is the first time it has ever occurred to him to say it. He has no self-consciousness whatsoever. He is my opposite.

He's what you might call a Cloudcuckoolander. We were talking one time on the weekend and I asked him if he'd gone for his break yet. And he says "Oh, I'm only here for 7 hours, I don't think I get a break." Uh, of course you do. "Oh, well okay, I still don't think I'll take one." Really? Do you not need to eat or anything? "Oh yeah, I forgot about food. Yeah, I guess I'll take a break. Hey, I'm gonna take a break if that's okay." Knock yourself out. Literally, if possible.

I kid. I make fun. I have a vendetta, a non-violent one, because there are people I liked working with (durr, Caitlin,) who were easily more qualified, but did not get the job, but he did. I have nobody to bitch about this to at the store. Hence my frustration.

But I don't hate the guy. You can't hate him, he's too good-natured. The act of hating him is futile. I don't think it would accomplish anything but frustration. So I vent by goading him into these bizarre verbal traps, like discussing the finer points of statutory. It serves to amuse, and to keep my own wits sharp.

So there's some value with this guy. I just need to keep my abuse from being overt.

When I got home on Friday, I was feeling bouncy, so I decided to take my new keyboard for a real spin. I took another shot at the first chapter of my constantly-revised book. I really liked the results. I'm maturing as a writer, getting better at curbing some of my less welcome tendencies, (to editorialize, to theorize, to write essays in my prose.) Part of the humour in Melancholy comes from this sort of behaviour, so it's okay if I keep doing it, so long as I never take it too seriously. That's the key. You do a story like this seriously, you're done. It don't work. It's a myth, a fairy tale, and yet it's modern, so it needs to view those types of fantasies with a healthy skepticism. So comedy happens. Can't make it any more clear than that.

Spring of 2005, I'm in Grade 12. I'm doing a stage version of the Breakfast Club with many of my Grade 12 friends. Playing John Bender is a talented kid, a Grade 9 or 10 who can really hold his own. But he seems utterly in awe of the world, uncertain how to approach it. Socially awkward. So he turns to me one day while we're rehearsing (I played the Principal, most of my dialogue was to him) he just flat-out asks me, "What is comedy?" I can't remember his exact phrasing. Maybe he said "What's funny?" or "How do you do comedy?" He was asking for instruction on how to learn comedy, I'm saying. I stammered a bit, theorized on some stuff, but there was nothing I could say. You just are funny, if you're funny. And if you're funny, you have innate knowledge of things that are funny and an intuition for why they might be, but its not something you can put into words, or at least not something I could, either on the spot at the time or now with nearly 5 years to think about the question. You take something that's expected, a human behaviour or a social convention. And then you do the opposite, or you do it properly but in the extreme. How can anyone explain this shit? I'm the guy who still doesn't know how he managed to make a room full of people laugh with Half-Past. I'm sorry kid, but you can't ask how to be funny.

Comedy is taking an impossibly complicated concept and summing it up with a quick, yet accurate phrase. Comedy is splunge.

Shit, man. Watch some Monty Python. If you can't conceive of why Monty Python is funny -- I'm not even saying, if you don't find it funny, I'm just saying if you don't understand where the humour is supposed to be, you're completely hopeless.

I love punchlines. It sounds like a hack comedy-writer thing, but consider, from a formal standpoint, the punchline to a riddle or a knock-knock joke. The nature of a punchline is its inevitability -- a bizarre route taken to an unstoppable conclusion. I watched the Cheese Shop sketch... and I know, Python was really, REALLY not about punchlines, but the lack of a punchline WAS the punchline. So, when Cleese tells Palin, "I'm going to ask you once more whether you have any Cheese in this shop, and if you say no, I'm going to shoot you in the face. Do you have any cheese?" "No." Blam. Where did the gun come from? Who the fuck cares? He said he'd shoot him. Over cheese. Get it?

Comedy is swearing there's now way you can explain a concept simply, and then attempting to do so, and getting caught up in attempting to state and re-state my premise in a complicated way, exactly as I said I would, exactly the reason why I said I couldn't.

Last point about comedy. This poem I write a little while back, entitled "Success":

Success
has ruined me.
I now
no longer know
if I am writing
poetry
or a grocery list.
Bacon.

Cute, funny, at least, it's intended to be funny. It was one of many poems I came home from work to find a commenter had reviews, positively. This girl, Lola, had stumbled upon one of my pieces on Writers Cafe and really seemed to dig it, and I read her stuff out of politeness, and to my surprise, I dug it. It's so rare that I find someone whose work I actually liek on that site, which makes doling out reviews a difficult prospect because you don't wanna be the one who's crapping on everyone else's work. At the same time, it's never been within my capacity to fake it. If it's important enough, I can be kind and reassuring (see my brief rocky stint as a CD reviewer for sceneandheard, where I gave an outright positive review to pretty much nothing.) In most of this girl's writing I could find something that really struck me, a word choice, an image. There was a repetitive nature, she implied mostly the same unstructured free verse strategy, but she was good at it, so I enjoyed. And she's been reading the chapters I've posted.

Except now I've really gotta get back to that play. Oy, ok. It'll be good.

Today was more work. Went right from school, although I had about an hour and a half to just kill, so I caught up on reading. It was chill (not much of a rush on a Monday evening) but we did have to set up new releases, which was quick, so though I was booked til 10 we got out of the door at 9:47. Last time I did New Releases, with Karen, we were there 'til about 11. Today it was with Alan.

Tomorrow, I'm meeting up with a person from drama to read over the next play. This person is a female, and you can draw your own conclusions, and whatever happens will be happening, but we have yet to see if that is anything at all. Got it?

Don't ask how to be funny, ask how to be sexy. I have absolutely no idea.

Keep on rockin'
-Scotto