Tag: Fiction

Clown School Day 32: A Virtuous Pleasure Cycle

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In which our hero celebrates yet more acclaim (with utmost humility)

Hearing of my post yesterday, the reader who recommended the game emailed to share their joy: “It gave me pleasure to recommend the game. It gave you guys pleasure to play. It gave me pleasure you liked it … a circle of joy. So happy!”

As I read this message, I smiled. For it felt like the most virtuous cycle of pleasure since the invention of what the French call “le soixante-neuf”.

Perhaps what’s most interesting: I now understand why people engage with fans.

Plus: Not only do I have dozens of daily readers (and some more non-subscribed daily readers); I’m also an accessible human person.

You – yes, you – can communicate with me, and I will respond + engage. An act of engagement mirroring that of the audience x clown. 

Humanizing. Connective. Satisfying. 

“Okay,” I then thought, “What would it be like to explore and isolate this wheel of success? Is it the same in all media  (including clown; public intellectual; and writer)?” 

Looking at it, I saw the following wheel: 1) Make a thing; 2) make it public; 3) engage with those who like it. 

I then began thinking: “Wouldn’t it be cool if I brought even more people joy?” and then, a bit of fear: “What if I got big enough to have people who dislike my work?” 

Doubtless, in any city of sufficient size you will have bad actors. Similarly, in any media reach of sufficient size, there are bound to be haters and/or trolls.

As such, the question is not if, but when. And being a sometimes-catastrophizing sort (even when I’m imagining a future world where people enjoy my artistic work enough to be popular), what would they say? Here’s what I imagine, and my thoughts on them:
1. “I hate you” / “you suck”. (People like to say things like this; they’re non-substantive; next.)
2. “You dive into particular and uninteresting rabbitholes” (I follow what interests me. It’s not going to interest everyone. I hope to be accessible to those who will find me valuable.)
3. “You have X blindspot” / “How can you not know Y” / “What the fuck is wrong with you for Z”. (This is my favorite – unnecessarily aggressive, but at least there’s substance. I’ve spent my life separating the person from the idea, parsing for the gold nugget of truth while ignoring the surrounding turd, so these are responses that I genuinely look forward to).

Yet, upon reflection, many of these notes I’ve already heard at clown school. From our Head Teacher in response to one of my performances, I once heard – direct quote – “We don’t like you”, alongside feedback that I failed at showing my personhood/humanity. Last I checked, I have always been a person (and I suspect the Head Teacher knew this). Perhaps this intensity of aggressive attacking is part of the inoculation of clown school. Or perhaps, as a family member put it when I described the social structure of the first two weeks, “that sounds like brainwashing.”

So if clowning (art?) is about creating games and playing them with others, what games do I want to create for my writing audience? 1) in this post, look at the first letters of each paragraph to find a cute little easter egg, and 2) over the next few days, let’s both be on the lookout for where interaction goes. Perhaps it will go nowhere. Or perhaps I’ll find some fun to share. Since clowning is about so much present-ness, there’s really no way to tell. Guess you’ll have to keep reading 

!🤡

Clown School Break Day 26: Clowning as Emotional Oddity

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In which Our Hero ends on an unusual question. 

Clowning is an odd emotional experience.
Clown school is an odd emotional context.

Where else is one assigned the task: be emotionally open, vulnerable, generous, light, and kind?
Where else is one given an explicit assignment to manipulate their own emotional state in service of others?

One place that comes to mind is politics.

I recently happened upon a (¿state?) senator. I was coming from a friend’s birthday, and the senator commented on the hat I’d given my friend. The senator exhibited genuine-seeming curiosity about what it meant, then delight in the silly inside joke it represented.

And,
like,
he wasn’t being inauthentic.

But,
like,
that is his job.

I don’t believe he was deeply interested in the game itself. I doubt he’d want to watch it or play it unless it came packaged with votes or fundraising. And yet: the delight was real.

I suppose clowns are the same way.

It isn’t inauthentic to change your emotional state and then share that state with others.
But it is contrived.

It’s not inauthentic to manipulate someone at a poker table either.
But it is manipulative.

So what’s the point?

Is this the core function of most people-leadership roles? From CEO to politician to parent to clown: are they all versions of the same act?

If behavior flows from emotion, is a leader’s primary job internal emotional manipulation, followed by broadcasting the result?

I’m reminded of LBJ amping himself up – working himself into a righteous frenzy – before speeches and political events, especially if it felt like he was behaving in ways antithetical to his values. He told himself he was doing it for people he cared about. That the moral sacrifices were worth it.

And then he sent those people to die in Vietnam.

I’ve known a CEO who practiced a similar kind of self-amping. His former employees now, at a remarkable rate, despise him.

So what’s my point? The connection to clowning?

Is it bad to manipulate your own emotional state? Obviously not. But when does it become bad? Under what conditions? In service of what ends?

What’s my point?

I don’t know. I’m musing.

That’s what this blog is. Thinking out loud. Marking where my thinking currently sits and letting it evolve. I don’t endorse everything I’ve ever written. That’s part of being a writer.

But today I’m reminded of how strange an emotional experience clowning is.
And how much people hate politicians.
And I find myself wondering whether – or more precisely, to what degree and in what ways – they should also hate clowns.

🤡

Clown School Break Day 24: Clowning is for Babies

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In which Our Hero shares a lack of pain.

My sister’s sixteen-month-old child has not yet learned that life is more pleasant when one defecates intentionally in prescribed locations. Instead, he saves time and effort (and I admire his efficiency) by pooping wherever and whenever inspiration strikes.

After completing this task, he begins to smell.
It is not a pleasant smell.
It gives one the impression that all disgust responses originate here.

To rectify (pun!) the situation, one generally places him on his back and swaps out his undergarments for fresh ones, with some cleansing wiping in the middle (pun!).

He does not enjoy being on his back.

Would you enjoy being held on your back by beings eight-plus times your size?

In response to this dissatisfaction, I’ve learned to change his undergarments while he’s standing. This satisfies the basic needs. But sometimes the environment is not conducive.

Such was the case this afternoon at the park.

We – my father and I – flopped the nugget onto his back.

His face screwed itself into a pre-wail.

I noticed something in myself: calm. Comfortable ease. I found it, then sent it his way. His pre-wail ceased. He looked at my face.

I knelt above the boy-child’s head, my face upside-down over his. He gazed at my scruffy visage; I gazed down at his soft, pudgy one. It didn’t take effort. Just a gentle internal returning-to-the-calm.

He did not find this enchanting. (For roughly four seconds during the change, he looked away.) But it was sufficient.

I am not, perhaps, more entertaining than a stubbed toe is painful.
But I can be more engaging than a sudden flop onto one’s back.

—

At clown school, the second-years play a warm-up game with a baby.

They appear on stage one by one. They make a face or a sound or some small action. The teacher plays either a baby crying or a baby laughing. They continue. The question is simple:

How long can you keep the baby laughing?

I’ve wondered for a while whether that’s the goal of clowning: reach some pre-culture, fundamental-to-all-humans level where your pleasure arrives into any audience, underneath their higher-level reasoning. 

I do not yet have the skills to make this baby laugh on command. (Except via the super-secret hack of foot tickles.)

But I do have the ability to Turn On The Calm.

And that

can be

enough.

Clown School Break Day 21: The Egg Game

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In which Our Hero encounters an eggregious machine.

Walking through the casino today, I saw a brilliant game.
A perfectly engineered one.
A real bad egg.

It’s a slot machine called something like The Egg.

You put in your money. You slap the button.
Standard procedure.
Nothing shell-shocking.

But instead of reels to spin, there’s just an egg on the screen.

Every time you slap, the egg cracks a little more.

And when the egg is fully broken –
crack –
you win a jackpot.

The jackpots (at the $1 play level) range from about $3 to just over $10,000.
All of them are progressive.
They grow the longer you play. 

The egg takes a variable number of slaps to break.

It’s a well-made game.
Eggsactly balanced.

Here’s why.

1. It redefines winning.
You will win.
The only question is when.
Just keep putting money in until the egg hatches.

Winning doesn’t feel like if.
Winning feels like eventually.

2. You feel progress.
Every slap cracks the egg a little more.
You’re getting closer.
A chip here, a fracture there.

Are you actually closer?
Who knows.
But it looks like you are, and that’s all your nervous system needs.

3. Everything is a jackpot.
I watched a man spend $70 chasing one $10 jackpot and two $3 jackpots.

He won three times.
He lost $54.

But emotionally, during the process?
Sunny side up.

After he left?
Fried. 

4. It’s intelligible.
Most modern slot machines are incomprehensible.
You don’t even know what the rules for winning are until you’ve played for a while.

That confusion creates a false sense of mastery:
“I’m learning the game.”

You are—but learning doesn’t help.

The Egg is different.
Egg → crack → jackpot.
No shell game.
No mystery meat.

Immediate understanding.
Immediate hook.
Egg-ceptionally approachable.

A game egg-zactly positioned to attract newbies. 

5. It creates tension – and guarantees release.
The egg will break.
That’s the promise.

When that suspense releases, however,
the yolk (“joke”) will already have been on you. 

6. Your action feels causal.
Slap the button.
The egg jiggles.
A crack instantly appears.

Your body doesn’t care about RNGs or payout tables.
Your body says: I did that.

7. You can mash.
On a normal slot machine there’s a pause between spins.
The Egg?
You can mash the button 30 times in 30 seconds.
(I saw a guy mash 70 times in under 3 minutes.) 

So if you spend $40 and win $20, you feel frustrated.
And to relieve that frustration:
Have you considered mashing the button?

The feedback loop is tight.
The illusion of control is strong.
The design is…
let’s be honest…
eggstraordinary.

That’s it.

I’ve cracked it.

And now I’m walking away, before I get completely scrambled. 🥚

(Author’s note: I did not actually play the game. I am not a fan of slot machines. I did, however, admire it from afar. Here’s a video of someone playing it.) 

Clown School Break Day 20: The Dealer Doesn’t Care

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In which Our Hero recalls, yet again, that feelings are weather, not climate.

Poker.

I don’t like poker.
It fucking sucks.

The intensity, the swings, the way it presses you between two stones: your own decisions and the randomness of the universe. As one poker TV show once put it, “It’s a hard way to make an easy living.”

There was a time I stopped playing altogether because I believed poker was net-negative for the world. You take money from people who can’t afford it. Addicts. The lonely. The poor.

And what do you give in return?

Entertainment?
A distraction?
A slow-motion morality play about risk and consequence?

These were my thoughts after losing two big pots tonight.
One I played fine. Just ran into the top of someone’s range.
The other I played poorly preflop in a $50 splash pot and donated my stack like a confused philanthropist. (“Splash pot” = the casino added $50 to it for free.)

Woof.

So I asked myself, as one does after being spiritually hit by a train:

Why do I do this?
Why are we attracted to what we’re attracted to?
Is it genetics? Happenstance? Praise when we were eight and wanted to feel special?

Clown school has taught me one brutal, luminous thing:
You will be pummeled on your chosen path.
Mocked, rejected, flattened, ignored.
And that’s just by the teachers! 

Your path should therefore be the thing you continue doing despite the punishment.
What’s the thing you’ll walk through hell for?

I’m deeply dissatisfied with poker tonight. But here’s the truth:
Poker is a game of millions of hands.
Variance is a dragon that only bows after thousands upon thousands of repetitions.
This hand doesn’t matter.
This session doesn’t matter.

Clowning, on the other hand, is both slower and faster.
Yes, the craft takes years, maybe a lifetime – but the feedback is instantaneous.
You step out, you try something, and either the audience lights up now, or it doesn’t.

Steve Martin once asked himself:
“What happens if I never release the tension?”
Instead of setup → punchline → laugh from tension relief, he just stacked more and more absurdity.
If someone left the show emotionless and burst out laughing in the car ride home, he considered that a victory.
(His memoir is worth a read.) 

Here’s the thing about Cards.
And the thing about Clowning.

The C’s don’t care about your feelings.
The dealer doesn’t pause because you’re tilted.
The audience doesn’t laugh because you’re sad.

The next hand came.
My body was buzzing with frustration.
But I played fine.
And that was what mattered.

Ugh.

—

It’s now an hour later.
The frustration is gone.

How astonishing, how liberating, how funny it is to remember how fleeting feelings are.

And how little they matter to the game.
Any game.
When the next hand is already being dealt.

Unless you let them play instead of you.
And they are both bad cardplayers and bad clowns. 

—

We’re now an hour after that.
I quit the live game because it wasn’t profitable enough.
I wasn’t having fun.
I asked myself the question “If I lost my stack in the next hand, would I rebuy and keep plying?”
The answer was no. 

So now I’m at the deli, eating dinner with my father…
While we play online poker with a different group. 

🤡

Clown School Break Day 16: Cooperative Games

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In which Our Hero remembers the audience and the performer are on the same team.

Today I didn’t buy a painting.

I could have.
There are worlds in which I walk out of that studio holding a canvas, or at least a print. I like his work. It’s good enough that I’d happily see it on my wall. I also, frankly, think this guy could be very successful. And while I don’t know anything about investing in art, I do know that he does good work. 

Instead of buying, I did something arguably more valuable: I gave him one mental shift that might change the way he sells forever (hard-won after nine years of being a creative freelancer myself). 

The shift was this:

  • You and the buyer are on the same team, trying to get to the sale together.

Most artists don’t think that way. They imagine selling as hoodwinking, convincing, persuading. Commerce as a low-grade con.

But when I exchange $20 for a meal, two true things are happening at once:

  • I am saying, “I’d rather have this meal than this $20.”
  • The seller is saying, “I’d rather have this $20 than this meal.”

We both win. That’s the point.

If someone wanders into your studio already 50% likely to buy your painting, wouldn’t you both be better off if a sale happens?

That’s what my friend was missing. He felt like he was pushing against the customer, trying to “get them” to buy, and he hated it. Instead, he should walk next to them, shoulder to shoulder, helping the buyer cross the line they already half-want to cross.

Sales, at least for an honest artist, is a cooperative game.

Clowning is the same game

This is also the part that many performing artists (including clowns) forget: the audience wants you to succeed.

When we audience members sit down for standup, for a play, for a clown show, we’re not secretly hoping it’s terrible so we can be right about humanity’s decline. We might predict it will be bad, but given the choice between:

  • “I knew it would suck,” and
    “It blew my expectations out of the water,”

almost everyone would rather be wrong and delighted.

Even the pessimists would rather go home saying, “Honestly, it was great.”

So performance is also a cooperative game:

  • As the clown, you are the leader.
  • The audience is your team.
  • The “sale” you’re closing together is shared pleasure.

You’re not dragging them, hostage-style, toward your weird art. You’re inviting them into something – pleasure – they already came to find.

This, unfortunately, is not my default setting.

Competitive games vs cooperative games

I am more experienced with competitive games than cooperative ones. Poker, for instance, is the opposite:

  • There, the goal is to hide.
  • To show nothing.
  • To give away as little information as possible while extracting as much value as possible.

Clowning is about the inverse:

  • Openness instead of secrecy.
  • Generosity instead of extraction.
  • “Let’s enjoy this together” instead of “Let me get the best of you.”

One of the purposes of clown school (for me) is to re-train this reflex. To make cooperation feel as natural as competition.

Right now, the questions I’m wrestling with include:

  1. How do I lead the team gently?
    Guide the audience without shoving, nudge without bullying, care for each teammate without over-focusing on any one.
  2. How do I actually lead, instead of hiding behind stronger personalities?
    Be the tip of the spear, not the person comfortably in the second row.
  3. When I’m with a partner on stage, how do I treat them as a collaborator instead of a combatant?
    Remember that “winning” is making the scene sing, and that often occurs when you’re playing harmoniously. 
  4. How do I remain open when uncomfortable?
    Oftentimes, I’m shutting down. And that… is not… helpful. 😦 

These are not just stage problems. They’re life problems. Which brings us to the cocktail party.

When I forgot we were on the same team

At a cocktail party today, I met a few people I genuinely liked. Smart, funny, curious. The kind of people I’d happily see again.

They asked about my relationship status. I told them a technically-true (and engaging), but far-more-boring version.

Here’s what I told them: 

In college, I was interested in a girl who was dating a woman. A friend told me she only dated women, so I filed that away as “ah well, not for me.”

Ten years later, we reconnected. It turned out my friend had been wrong:

  • She does not, in fact, only date women.

And here’s the part I didn’t share – not because it’s shameful, but because it’s intimate, and intimacy is precisely what I tend to withhold when I get scared: 

  • At the time of meeting her, I was taking exogenous estrogen. I had grown breasts. My emotional life was much closer to that of a woman than a man. 

So even if she had only dated women, I still might have qualified.

That’s the good bit. The twist ending. The painting on the wall I could have offered.

Instead, I hid it. I offered the flat version. And therefore, the next bit that I added – when I later tried to connect – didn’t land. I’d already collapsed into myself, ending the cooperative game. 

I protected information, staying “safe”.
But they weren’t my opponents. They were potential teammates. We were building something delightful together. And that collapse — the retreat instead of the play — is exactly the reflex I’m trying to rewire.

(To be clear, the issue wasn’t that I “should have” told strangers something deeply personal. It’s that I noticed myself collapsing inward even though both they and I wanted to play, to connect, to stay in the cooperative game.)

The update

So: today I didn’t buy a painting.
I also didn’t honestly sell myself.

In both cases, the correction is the same:

  • Be in situations where we’re on the same side. 
  • Remember we’re on the same side.
  • Act like the game is cooperative.
  • Offer the real story, not the safe one.

When I become excellent at those in daily life, I’ll be a better clown.
And when I become a better clown, maybe I’ll finally remember, in the moment, that we all walked into the room wanting the same thing:To leave having created shared pleasure.
And in that pleasure, created Value.

Clown School Break Day 15: The Lightness Advantage

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In which Our Hero learns that ease is its own form of status.

The skills of upper-class social engagement and the skills of clowning: shockingly similar.

Can you keep it light—even when the topic isn’t?
Can you remember the game? That this is a game. That life is a game. And the more you remember it’s a game, the less you’ll feel poked. The less you feel poked, the less likely you’ll commit a faux pas.

When meeting someone new:
Can you stay present? Open? Emotionally available? Can you find pleasure in what they’re saying, find pleasure in yourself, and entertain yourself while entertaining them?
Do you make eye contact instead of studying the floor or the ceiling?

Can you jump to the new game quickly?
Roll with the punches without letting irritation leak? Or if you do get irritated, can you metabolize it quietly so others don’t feel it?

In short: are you easy?

Even shorter: be social soy sauce: enhancing whatever flavor is already present.
Do not be social tofu (merely a warm body), nor wasabi (adding too much kick), and certainly not ginger (an entirely unrelated taste altogether).

Some people don’t need to be easy. They have structural reasons to be included—money, skills, status, connections. Their mere existence provides value.

If you have those advantages, you can afford a little heaviness.

But if you lack them, ease becomes an important asset.

—

I met someone today who was surprised to learn a fairly large fact about her husband.

I get that.
It’s also foreign to me.

When one (A) has enough happening that there’s no need to narrate every detail, and (B) is so deeply present with others when actually together, the result is fewer facts shared and more connection felt. This is an instance of putting the text on the game.

Perhaps these people live such driven, full lives that they don’t need to lean on each other for conversational ballast. They’re satisfied by the things they’re doing. Their overlaps shrink. Their presence expands.

—

Maybe this is why the skills of social ease and clowning feel so linked for me. I had to learn lightness. I had to learn the game. I had to learn to entertain myself, then others, and to orient toward warmth and pleasantness.

Other people don’t always need those skills. They build companies, hire teams, command rooms, confer opportunities. What do I confer? Stories. Emotional resonance. Connection.

I’ve lived as a writer for the last decade. I’ve flown around the world, lived in a van, written books, attended clown school, played competitive pickleball, lived as an œstrogen-powered life form. These things made me interesting, but they did not give me structural advantages to hand out.

What I offer is not leverage. It’s wisdom. Presence. Delight.

So it sure as hell helps if I’m light.

Airy.
Gentle.
Easy.
Fun.
Funny.
Generous.
Kind.

This makes it possible to add me to your car, to your dinner, to your team. It makes me someone who lightens your load, even when you carry me on your shoulders.

But when I’m heavy?

Well.

🎈

Clown School Break Day 12: Poker vs Clown

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In which Our Hero manages his emotions (and plays poker because, with a broken foot, what else are you going to do?)

If clowning is about managing your emotions in service of giving pleasure, then poker might actually train part of that muscle. The emotional management is enormous.

Earlier today I lost three spots in a row.
One I misplayed slightly.
Two were just unlucky.

I assumed my strategy wasn’t working.

But it was.

I do this in clowning, too: I try a thing, it doesn’t land, and I immediately abandon it. But that’s rarely the answer. Sometimes you need to push the thing farther. Sometimes you pivot to a different game. But the one thing you don’t need to do is collapse inward and quit. You don’t just give up and take your ball and go home.

Instead, check your fundamentals.

In poker: Is this still a good game? Am I playing well?
In clowning: Have I found the game? Am I playing it?

Yet the two arts couldn’t be more opposite.

Poker is about hiding.
Showing nothing.
No emotion, no tells, no generosity.

Clowning is the opposite: openness, earnestness, authenticity, giving.

Poker is selfishness.
Clowning is generosity.

At one point today I was down $650. I kept playing because I was playing well—and because, in theory, I’d been winning the whole time.

That’s another key difference: poker has theory.
Clowning has only practice.

Poker’s truth reveals itself over hundreds of thousands of hands.
Clowning’s truth reveals itself instantly.

If everyone’s laughing at you at the poker table, you’re the fish.
If everyone’s laughing with you on stage, you’re the clown.

—

I was also especially open with my family today. That was nice 🙂
Time and place, boys. Time and place 😎

Clown School Break Day 11: Poker?

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In which Our Hero hardly knows her. 

I played poker profitably today.

Once my comfort and confidence arrived in, everything clicked. First I made a $10 mistake. Then a $50 mistake. Then I found an edge and optimized the hell out of it. And I ultimately walked away $445 richer.

A poker pro friend, after reviewing one of my hands, put it perfectly:

“This hand is not GTO-approved at all haha, but sounds like you found a spot to hammer.” (“GTO” = game theory optimal)

I like to hammer. It’s fun.

Was this more fun than clowning?

Maybe.

Probably?

When I think back to the times I’ve “succeeded” at clowning — the moments of actually opening myself to the audience — I enjoyed those less than I enjoyed today.

However.

I’m not at clown school for myself. Not really. I’m there to learn (1) to be open, and (2) to play well with others. These are skills I want to develop for other people, not just for me.

And when you zoom out, which is the kinder pursuit: clowning and contributing to others, or playing poker to funnel money into your own pocket?

Clowning, clearly (at least to me). Poker is generally net-negative in pleasure: studies show that in most people the pain of losing outweighs the joy of winning.

But right now? I don’t care.

And that’s… telling.

Maybe it suggests my calling is less likely clowning than a poker-adjacent path. 

—

When I chose clown school, I was emotionally compelled. Drawn. Obsessed.

I’m still very interested — especially in bouffon next term — but I’m also open to this new signal.

Maybe my sister was right when I first told her I was “choosing between a one-month clown course and the full year.”

She said: “When have you ever committed to a year of anything? But if you did, it would be clown school.”

It would be very funny if I only did part of the year.

I’m such.
A.
Clown.

Clown School Break Day 10: The Arbiter of Fun

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In which Our Hero demonstrates he visited a casino today.

“The person on your left determines how much fun you have.”

A friend said this about playing poker at a casino.

In poker, the player on your left acts after you. So in marginal spots—hands that could go either way—they get to decide how much intensity to apply. They can re-raise you (the aggressive choice) or fold (the friendly one). Since the spot is marginal, it doesn’t meaningfully affect their win rate; it just affects your experience.

Improv works the same way. Your job is to give gifts to your partner. “Pimping them out” (putting them in a tough or absurd situation) is the aggressive choice. Establishing clear relationships, objects, or stakes is the friendly one.

Does clowning have a similar dynamic?

Maybe the parallel is playing at versus playing with. Playing at your partner is fun for you, but it’s not oriented toward maximizing their pleasure.

And in clowning, the audience is a partner, too. That’s one of the big surprises of clown school: realizing that you play with the audience just as much as you play with the other performers.

In clown, maybe the major determines how much fun everyone gets to have. Can the major establish a clear, joyful game? That’s their job. The minor can always destroy the game, of course, but it’s hard for a minor to create a bigger game than the major has already laid down, at least not without stepping on the major’s toes.

So in clowning, just like in poker, the person on your left might still determine how much fun you have. The difference is that in clown school, you might actually enjoy being the sucker getting hosed for everyone else’s amusement.