Tag: Life

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 13: Revealing my Hand

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In which Our Hero finally plays the writing game, not merely performs the genre.

Yesterday’s post set a record in responses. So I found myself asking:

Why did people like it?

If we assume it wasn’t merely well-written form, it likely was one of these three traits:

  1. I wrote about two games I know extremely well. (I played poker as a method of money-making previously, in the pre-solver Jurassic period.)
  2. I compared two activities everyone recognizes, even if only through cultural osmosis. (Everyone knows what a clown is. Everyone knows what poker looks like.)
  3. I accidentally wandered into a space my sister claims is my superpower: the philosophy of games.

Two months ago she called to tell me I had a gift.

She’d asked for help diagnosing an unspoken social game at her workplace, and when I broke it down for her, she said:

  • “You could be the expert at this. Not ‘an’ expert — the expert.”

For clarity: philosophy of games ≠ game theory.

I’m not a game theorist and have no ambition to become one. (Though one of my closest friends is probably top hundred in the world at the practical application of game theory.)

Instead, I love:

  1. games
  2. what games do to people
  3. how humans use games
  4. the mechanics and sub-mechanics inside games
  5. the social physics that games create
  6. the playing of games
  7. fun

This has always been true. As a kid, I invented strategies in schoolyard games so effective that fellow students rewrote the rules the next day. As an adult, I earned second place in the Hoboken Open pickleball tournament, which is exactly as prestigious as it sounds. In college I studied philosophy to understand the rules of our life’s game (hint: start with Aristotle).

But here’s the truth:

Yesterday’s writing, to me, felt bland.
I haven’t been having many fresh clowning insights.
I’m on break from clown school because of a broken foot.
I haven’t been around many clowns — except myself.

So instead of writing about clowning, I jotted down what I thought were painfully obvious observations.

And two people found them profound.
Compelling.
Insightful.

Why?

Clowning offers two simple rules:

  • give the audience what they want, and
  • follow the fun.

One mistake people make is assuming “what they want” means “repeat the product.”
But that’s not it — at least not entirely.
If I reposted yesterday’s essay verbatim, nobody would care.
This exaggerated example makes the point:

The audience doesn’t want the same product.
They want the same emotional experience.
The same arc.
The same sense of discovery.
The same journey.

Maybe one reader liked my emotional growth.
Maybe another liked the simple clarity around two games they’d only ever observed from the outside.
Maybe someone else just enjoyed seeing me think.

Writers know this:
readers fall in love not with the thing but with the transformation.

Van Gogh didn’t sell paintings until his letters were published.
Until people could see his suffering.
Until his bed wasn’t just a bed but the first possession of a poor, unraveling man.
Stories create meaning.
Meaning creates attachment.

And that’s why
Starting today, I’m going to include writing about hormones.

Yesterday I talked for an hour with my parents about my four-year experience taking œstrogen.
It was medical, emotional, biological, and sociopolitical.
It reshaped my values, which reshaped the games I chose to play.
It rewired my physical and emotional landscape.
It altered my comfort with strangers, my sense of risk, and my appetite for play.

I was on œstrogen when I decided to go to clown school.
I was back on my natural testosterone when I actually started the school year.

That contrast was… intense.

My desire to play poker changed with my hormonal profile.
My social ease changed too.

On œstrogen, my fluency with strangers soared: top decile of my life.
Now that the ease has dropped, I’m having to relearn it.
And with that comes fear.
Not melodramatic fear. More like the fear of an aging driver noticing their reaction time isn’t what it used to be:

  • “I used to be good at this. What if I’m not anymore?”

But here’s the secret about fear:
It’s freezing.
But it’s also your friend.
If you don’t embrace it and step through it,
You’ll always be under its power.

This was as true yesterday — staring down an A6s decision on a 4-6-7-A-K board facing a river jam — as it is about my long hesitation to share my hormonal story.

In that hand, I should have called.
In this life, I should speak.
Not because you’re entitled to know. You’re not.
None of this is “your business.”
But I chose to be a writer.
Which makes it my business.

Said differently:
I chose this writing game.
Time to stop playing it like a wimp.

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 9: The Missing Signposts

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In which Our Hero chuckles that no one is coming to explain anything.

Clown school gives no guideposts.
No emotional map.
No “You’ll feel terrible during Neutral Mask, but it gets better during Melodrama.”
Not even a simple “We beat you down because it makes you better.”

Instead, they teach.
And we endure.

I’m not the first person to go through this course. This version of the school has existed for 25 years; Gaulier has been teaching for 50+. There must be a method behind the madness. So here are my hunches:

1. Presence as pedagogy

Clowning is about now, not before or after.
Emotional signposts would implicitly validate the idea that your current feeling matters, or that suffering is part of some arc.
But in clowning, only the present matters.
You aren’t promised redemption later; you just have to deal with what is.
“I don’t care what else is going on. Find pleasure and share it.”

2. Stress inoculation

Clowning demands emotional manipulation—of yourself and the audience—under pressure.
If you can’t do that while confused, scared, or humiliated, how will you manage when there are thousands (or millions) watching?
Not knowing why you’re doing something is part of the training:
you have to stay open and playful even when you’re lost.
“You’re lost and confused? Time to clown!”

3. A filter, not a cushion

It’s a weeder course.
If you’re not meant for this world, or if the suffering feels unjustifiable, you’ll remove yourself.
Not with an official expulsion—but with exhaustion, frustration, or indifference.
The lack of emotional guidance is part of the sieve.
“I don’t like how intense school is.” “And you think professional theater is for the faint of heart?”

4. An accidental design flaw (or feature)

The teachers are clowns, not pedagogy nerds.
They’re masters at teaching clowning, but not necessarily at building meta-frameworks or emotional scaffolding.
Signposting requires stepping outside the art to label its structure—
which is the opposite of presence.
So maybe the absence of guideposts is deliberate.
Or maybe it’s just what happens when clowns teach.
“🤡”

5. A disrespect for logic

One of the teachers has told me to stop analyzing.
They said it’s not doing me any favors.
That analysis will not lead me to better clowning.
If that’s true… whoops.
<Cue the banana peel>

For what it’s worth, the course is structured brilliantly: Le Jeu → Neutral Mask; Simon Says for weeks; harsh critique without directions.
Are the missing signposts a bug or a feature?
I suspect it doesn’t matter.
Not-knowing is part of the training.

But it’s also part of the suffering.

And maybe that’s the whole point.

Or maybe it’s not.

We’ll probably never know.

Clown School Break Day 5: On Play and Depression

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In which Our Hero muses on the interaction of these forces.

The question came up at dinner:
What’s the relationship between play and depression?
Is play the antidote? Is the lack of play the cause? Or are they simply two dancers who keep stepping on each other’s toes?

My take:

  • I love Play. Play is enlivening and delightful and deeply satisfying.
  • Play is a sign of a healthy environment: one that nurtures the growth and expression of its members.
  • Some environments don’t require play or can’t support it, especially high-stress or high-stakes ones in intense moments.
  • If you lack play long enough, you will feel like crap.
  • If you can’t play with people, you won’t feel good around those people.

Blockers to play:

  • Lack of safety. If you can’t experiment or express, you shrink. The body contracts. The options narrow. The world gets small.

I often think of depression as a kind of flatness. A greying-out of inner movement. And a lot of what prevents play, at least in my own experience, is fear/anxiety. So the loop becomes:
fear/anxiety → no play → depression.
It’s not the only description of the loop, but it’s a fair one.

Another view:

  • Maybe depression is fundamentally the lack of experienced pleasure.
  • If that’s true, then you can find pleasure through play. But also through other avenues, including observation and appreciation.
  • In that framing, play is one antidote, but not the only one. (And it may not be the proper antidote for a specific situation, nor a permanent fix.)

Still, I think social play is necessary for social satisfaction.
It’s a treadmill you have to keep running on—just enough—for the system to stay stable.
Stop for too long, and you get flung off the end, cascading into a wall of lonesomeness. Start running again, and the world comes back into color.

However, you can’t force play. You can only create the context for it to naturally emerge.
Even if you’re a player?
Even if you’re the game.

Clown School Day 35: Time for Me to Fly

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When Our Hero closes a door, He opens a window.

All three teachers agree: I should not attend the second half of this course.

That’s nice.

I wasn’t enjoying Neutral Mask. I wasn’t looking forward to Greek Tragedy. Friends have commented worries about my emotional health and about whether the school’s pedagogy implements brainwashing tactics. Perhaps it will be nice to have time off.

One of the main teachers says I analyze too much. Instead of analyzing, they say, I should “sit in the feedback.”

I’m not so sure.

When I sit in feedback, I misread it. When they told me my costume looked like “vomited broccoli,” I thought they were literally insulting the outfit. A friend later suggested it was meant to get under my skin — a non-literal pedagogical tactic.

But how am I supposed to incorporate something non-literal without analyzing it?

If literal doesn’t mean literal, then…?

And anyway, who wants to sit in vomit?

—

The head teacher asked me a question today. I wasn’t performing on account of my fractured foot, so another student took my slot. She looked at me and asked:

“Was your replacement excellent, or could you have done better?”

I said, “I don’t want to answer.”

The class booed.

I felt confused.

I asked her to repeat the question. She did. I said, “I don’t think it was excellent, but I don’t think I could have done better.” Then I named two specific weak points in the scene.

She said, “It’s good to know your level.”

And I agree. I wasn’t being self-pitying or self-judging — just honest about where I’m currently at.

I’ve had trouble with complexity here. A few days ago, we had three mistakes to resolve, and when I chose one hug, one kiss, and one Swedish handshake, I sensed tension as though people thought I was trying to be unnecessarily cute. And that’s literally 1+1+1=3. Complexity seems to be frowned upon. So what do I do when I’m tasked with following the fun, and sometimes find complexity fun?

At coffee today, a classmate realized Los Angeles is on the west coast rather than the east, and mentioned she formerly thought Africa was the world’s biggest country. She’s also had much more success than I have in recent class sessions.

Maybe I’m expecting something different from these clowns than they have to give. I’ve watched people forget a promise five minutes after making it. I’ve watched them make complete 180s in real time. Perhaps an excellent clown is so right-brained they exist only in the present moment.

Regardless, they’re great clowns.

I’m gonna miss them. 🤡

—

I’m excited to have some time away.

In January, a friend arrives to the school. That’ll be nice. We’ll take a course together. Probably live together. It’s good to bring a friend. 😀

I asked the assistant about switching classes; she said it’d be good for them administratively. So I might as well try it for one course: Melodrama. After that comes Bouffon, then Vaudeville. A change of pace. And if it’s still rough, I’ll know it’s not the section.

As for the newsletter: I was supposed to be on winter break from clown school for six weeks (Dec 13–Jan 25). Now it’s nine weeks. I’ll continue writing daily for two reasons:

  1. It keeps me fresh.
  2. It’s the sort of person I like being.

Clown School Day 34: Frustration Sans Fun

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In which Our Hero wonders what specific problem is afoot.

My roommate asked if I’m on the spectrum.

He teaches improv to autistic kids professionally, so the question wasn’t random. He even offered some lightly camouflaged feedback he gives his students:

  • They find the game and play it very hard, but ignore the pleasure of the people around them.
  • They approach situations with a kind of childlike openness, but the moment someone comments on them, they build a thick, impenetrable shield.

I asked him if he is on the spectrum.
He said no.

I’m grateful for his attempt to help. I’m also aware his description fits me in class. What I’m still missing are the “what” and “how” of changing it.

–

I’ve only worked in one real office. I was 19, a sophomore in college, with a summer job at a NYC marketing agency. They paid me $16/hr to make the same repeated mouse clicks, transferring digital assets from one system to another. I downloaded a mouse-recording tool and automated my job. Then automated the interns’ jobs. Then automated my direct superior’s job.

And nobody liked me.

I was there to work. To do the task. To be effective. Clock in, clock out, $16/hr. Promotion was not on the menu. Mostly, they just wanted me swept quietly under the rug.

The connection between that summer and here isn’t skill: I’m far worse at clowning than I was at automating workflows. The connection is the feeling in the room. The details are different, but the emotional texture is uncannily similar. There, as here, I tried to make friends. There, as here, people were cordial but uninterested.

To me, clown school feels like a coworking space. Others have formed friendships; I’m batting maybe 2-for-10 on hangout invitations, with no successful follow-ups/second hangs from the two. Eventually you give up, videochat friends from home, and read a book.

It makes it harder that I’m not enjoying the classes.
Nor am I learning well.
It’s just terrifically challenging.

Maybe that’s intentional: the hardest class comes after the fundamentals.
Or maybe I’m unraveling.
I keep wondering whether the problems I had back in April/May were different ones. I was in a completely different psycho-emotional state then.

–

After class today, a teacher asked what I planned to do with my broken foot.

I told them I’m of two minds:

  1. Take it as a sign from the gods and get the fuck out of here, returning in January.
  2. Stay and see whether this new, legless constraint allows for new growth.

–

Last night a friend told me I only ever talk about myself.
Sure.
My pleasure is in the game. And it is vast. But it doesn’t seem to be in the sharing. More autistic people become computer programmers than clowns. Perhaps I’m less naturally equipped. Maybe my version of sharing the game is the multiple clowns who I helped with visa applications. Maybe it’s in the creation of a clown house so people aren’t stuck with individual roomshares. Maybe it’s cleverness or intellect. Those play poorly on this stage.

High achievers share one trait: grit.
Do I want to grit through this?
Do I even want to be a clown?

At the beginning, my clown school goals were 80% spiritual and 20% tangible. The tangible ones were:

  • Learn the practice.
  • Learn the theory.
  • Make friends.

Right now:

  • I’m injured.
  • People keep telling me they don’t connect with me (and act like it).
  • Peers are also sharing their suffering.

–

One performer friend says the physical restriction might actually help my clowning. Another says being forced to “not try so hard” might help me be better at clowning and enjoy myself more.

Personally, I’m unconvinced the foot bone is connected to the trying bone. Or that either one attaches to the funny bone.

Meanwhile I spent six hours crying on Tuesday.
Cried three more times today.
And feel like I’m banging my head against a wall.
(This feels like a particularly intense few weeks, not my new permanent state.)

With my foot injury, I even lost morning movement class, which I liked more than afternoon improv.

Ugh.

Today in class I performed one of the “substances”: Chloric Acid. I struggled because I didn’t know what specific acid she meant. She said it was something used to unclog drains, so I did drano. She said my rhythm was too slow. My later googling suggests chloric acid can have a fast, popping rhythm—but it is definitely not a drain cleaner. Maybe she meant hydrochloric acid? If this is my problem at clown school, maybe I’m better suited to be a chemist. (Tomorrow, I hope they ask me to play Barium Disodium.)

When it came time for “cream,” I sat out.
Then I lied down on the floor so I could elevate my fractured foot above my heart. Which my roommate later said indicated to him I was autistic.

What’s next?

Ugh.
Time for more searching.
The searching is the practice, I guess.

😮‍💨

​​Clown School Day 33: Milk, Movement, and Metatarsals

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In which Our Hero boils over, breaks down, and opens up.

I was milk.

Not your boring half-full breakfast glass:

I was milk on the stove that someone had forgotten about.

Warming gently, then rapidly, then dramatically.

I boiled, I foamed, I rose.

A glorious dairy geyser.

I was beautiful, exciting, energetic, light.

They loved me.

I was milking it for all it was worth.

And then I landed. Hard.

On the outside of my right foot.

The outermost digit rolled under the meat of the foot.

My milk, so recently ascendant, suddenly boiled over and ran down the sides of the pot.

Call it a turning point.

Or a turning-sour point.

Someone asked if I was hurt. I said no.

Classic milquetoast behavior.

They told me they loved my milk.

I felt genuinely glad: I’d worked hard yesterday—six hours improving myself, skimming off the emotional scum, clarifying my internal butter.

And today, between movement and improv, I stayed in the classroom to feel my feelings.

To laugh, to cry, to laugh-cry.

Just to be with myself.

A short personal pilgrimage to the Land of Milk and Honey.

No wonder my performance rose, like cream to the top.

Now I’m at the hospital.

I don’t think it’s broken.

I assume they’ll give me an X-ray, recommend some painkillers, and send me home.

A quick skim.

The triage nurse, Leo, asks if I’m a clown student.

The international ones usually are, he says.

Last year he had:

– a ruptured Australian Achilles (hi, A!)

– an American with a back problem, delivered via ambulance (hi, M!).

This year, he gets me: whole milk, 2% structurally compromised.

Leo asks where I’m from.

“California.”

He says “Alcatraz.”

I say I’ve never been.

He says it’s scary.

(It curdles his insides.)

Now I sit in the waiting room, surprisingly not souring.

Throughout this whole experience, I’ve actually felt my feelings pretty well—

and feeling them has made them less bad.

So much has to work in concert to enable walking, let alone clowning.

Bones, muscles, tendons:

a whole orchestra playing in tune.

Until suddenly the music sours
And my fifth metatarsal decides it has a bone to pick with me. (Alternate joke: “has beef with me”.)

The teacher who drove me here says I’m the first of the year.

The first!

The early bird. The early calf.

The first one to fall before the cows come home.

—

Diagnosis:

A fracture non-déplacée—a nondisplaced fracture of the 5th metatarsal.

Pain meds.

No weight on it.

Three weeks to heal.

A season put out to pasture.

Oddly, I’m calm.

It’s almost a relief to have a socially acceptable excuse for being bad at clowning.

(“Sorry, I should have been cream of the crop, but I was overwhipped/overbeaten and now I’ve split. Maybe I need to find butter things to do.”)

And despite the pain, I stayed with it—

full-fat presence.

—

I bought crutches, pain meds, and a boot from the pharmacy.

The pharmacist noted the challenge of carrying crutches while also needing crutches.

She asked where I live.

“Just across the street.”

She walked with me.

A small, wholesome kindness:

like a neighbor bringing over cookies and saying,

“Here, I brought you some warm milk for your soul.”

She knows my upstairs neighbor.

They have coffee together every day.

We bonded over our love for her cat, chausettes (“socks’ in french).

—

A surprising emotion: relief.

I told a friend about the injury and she asked how much of it might be emotional—

how sometimes a bone breaks when something else is begging to break.

She said when she broke a bone, it partly came from a life she didn’t love.

I get that.

My milk was already foaming over.

I wasn’t enjoying clown school.

I wasn’t doing it right.

I wasn’t satisfied personally either.

Then—splat.

Here comes God to shake it up.

And by God, I mean my own discoordination.

(Or the universe saying, “Time to churn.”)
As a friend sometimes describes about me: “Julian plans, and Julian laughs”.

So now I have a fracture.

And honestly… I don’t mind.

Sometimes the carton needs a dent.

—

My teacher offered to let me watch the rest of the course now and then take the actual course next year.

I’ll take them up on it.

The cows will come home eventually.

Perhaps it’s better that I watch this course.

I might have been trying too hard, mooving with too much vigor.

And at least—

miraculously—

I didn’t cry over spilled milk.

​​Clown School Day 32: Fear & Loathing

JulianLeave a comment

In which Our Hero gently invites his classmates to find pleasure in their fear.

[I wrote this earlier today, before a long and insightful conversation with my roommate. By the vacillations of clown school, I’m not sure how much I still endorse or will endorse tomorrow. How’s that for a cop-out? 🤡]

Another shit day at clown school. I should frighten other students more.

Listen:

Earlier today we were playing dodgeball. Someone on the opposing team had the ball and motioned toward me. I ran away, bumped into a teammate, and she let out a startled little yelp, plus an admonishment along the lines of “come on guys, it’s a game.”

Later in that same match, I leapt to grab a ball, robbing the opposing team of a catch, like stealing a home run but dodgeball-style. A player said, “Chill out.” The first person would probably call themselves unathletic. The second, not very competitive.

Okay.

Sure.

What of it?

Sidebar: clown school is populated far more by theatre nerds than athletes. I’m probably the best all-around athlete in my class—not the strongest or tallest, just the one with the most hunger to win and the actual ability to put that into reality. So why is it not showing up?

After her yelp, I shrank back. I became smaller, gentler, duller. I had less fun.

But realistically? A little bump between teammates in dodgeball is not a big deal. No one fell. No one got hurt. It was a collision between two moving bodies in a game whose entire premise is hurling projectiles at each other. 

The recent American neurosis of “don’t cause anyone fear ever” does not help me here. Hurting people would be bad. Frightening them? Not inherently. If two people bump into each other while playing dodgeball, the appropriate move is some sort of affectionate “eh, no worries love”. 

But I’ve been avoiding frightening people. And it’s getting in the way of my clowning.

The first time I truly succeeded on stage was when I FINALLY LET LOOSE. A demon burst out of my sternum and shat poop-colored rainbows across the stage.

The teacher told me to tone it down, apologize, and bring the same energy with more sensitivity.

The second time I started from a light, airy emotional place: gentle by nature, and the power followed.

Today the feedback is that I lack impulse. And the truth is: I felt it. In the afternoon class, I wasn’t powering with impulse at all. I was stuck in my head, nitpicking the pedagogy (correctly, but uselessly). I couldn’t find pleasure in anything.

I hate being in this oscillation space.

My roommate disagrees with my whole “frighten them more” instinct.
He thinks I’m conflating playing intensely with playing to win (and that playing to win will necessarily not maximize group pleasure).
He says I lack a lightness—a tiny joke kept in the back of my mind.

And maybe he’s right. On stage today, I lost the game. I forgot the game.
I played it well for a few minutes. Then I forgot it.

Never forget the game.

Look.

When I do have impulse, people get scared. That’s the truth. I’m intense. When I try to win at dodgeball, people get quiet and the light, floaty vibe evaporates. Today I had the ball, and an opponent squared up. I pump-faked twice. Then I whammed him.

During that exchange, the room went silent. The airy part of the game vanished.

Did it become another kind of fun?

Is it not fun to watch two gladiators square off? To see combatants toy with another in a spirit of agreed-upon play? Isn’t that a form of respect—acknowledging we both have power and we’re choosing to use it?

Maybe the audience wasn’t laughing. Maybe they were leaning in. I don’t know. Maybe I’m justifying. 

Maybe I should scale it: go hard against the skilled players, soften against the less-skilled. A consent-based approach to dodgeball. (Unless I’m the last one alive. Then it’s win, win, win.)

I don’t know whether it was pleasant to watch me whang that guy. I imagine it was.

I’m six feet tall, bearded, and frequently voracious. Of course people are scared of me. Underneath any coverings I add (silliness, friendliness, gentleness), they may always feel some amount of fear. 

But maybe their fear isn’t a reason for me to shrink.

Maybe their fear is something they get to deal with.

Because otherwise, I become small and boring. I lose my impulse. And that is absolutely not fun for me.

Fear without safety is fear. Fear with safety is exhilaration.

I guess I need to give people that safety.

To clearly show this is a joke.
This whole thing is silly.
Show them in a way that’s obvious to them: I’m not taking myself too seriously: the thing I’m doing is a joke.
And that way, when you fear me, you also feel safe around me.
And that way, even though you fear me; even though you respect me and my intensity, you love me.

Would you rather I be too much or too little?

Right now, at school, too much. They can work with too much. Too little just gets kicked off. 

In general: Dumb question. 

Nurture the fun.