Tag: Writing

Clown School Day 1: The Honking Commences

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Squeak. Squeak. Squeak.

A pair of large red shoes emerges from behind the curtain. Above, a painted face under a red wig.

“Am I in the right place?”

—

I considered entering clown school in full Ronald McDonald regalia. Starting with a joke. Establish a clear reputation from day 1.

But that’s not clowning. At least not here. Here, clowning is an Earnest Art. It’s Authenticity. Connection. Sharing. Giving. Kindness. Lightness. Joy. It’s a Raw and Unadulterated Openness. The successful threading of a needle where one side is the Error of Honesty, the other Pretense. We do neither.

Instead, we Play.

Light,

Open,

Gentle,

Subtle,

Friendly,

Kind,

Grounded.

And the best part:

it’s all a lie.

—

We began the day by walking around the space. “Think of a naughty thought,” our teacher prompted. Immediately, eyes magnetized. Twinkled. Lightened. Brightened. Illuminated.

I know my Naughty Thought. My cadre of considerations. My illustrious internal illustrations.

Heeheehee.

The strangest feeling:

some of the students remained flat. Some stayed boring.

But others.

Oh lawd.

Drawn to them: intellectually, physically, psychically, carnally. With appetite, curiosity, interest, want and need.

Whoa.

How beautiful is it to watch someone play.

How beautiful indeed.

After class, I approached one of the clowns. “I don’t want you to take this the wrong way,” I said. “But I loved watching you with a naughty thought”.

She promised me she’ll tell me her thought

as soon as this course ends.

—

Have you ever felt you’re in precisely the right place?

I have.

Twice.

Once, in a Chicago airport. I had flown in for an interview at an arts program for a master’s degree. My bag became weightless. I was Following My Purpose.

The other, today, upon entering Ecole Philippe Gaulier.

Glee. Humor. Airyness. Mixed with hard work and trials. Difficulties and action. Giving it your All and then some.

Crying. Caring. Trying. Opening.

And then

ideally

success.

—

I am currently a student at Ecole Philippe Gaulier, the world’s premier clown school. I write and publish daily.

Mugged in a Crowd

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On a muggy New York summer afternoon, only One Man is fool enough to wear a sweater. He’s attractive in a grungy, Brooklyn sort of way as He leans against a lamppost, cool and calm despite the summer heat. I’m walking south only a few blocks from Times Square when He locks eyes with me. He springs to attention. His opening line: “Give me money, Gypsy.”

There are twenty people within arm’s reach, yet I’m suddenly alone. I’ve never before been called a gypsy, and while I don’t know its associations I suspect it’s intended aggressively. I mutter something noncommittal. His face looms closer to mine: “Give me money for the holocaust, Gypsy.” His sentence betrays a lack of historical understanding, yet I suspect this fact irrelevant to our circumstance.

When I had first spotted Him leaning against the lamppost, I had clocked the precisely-styled single braid dangling beside His head as attractive. Now, I see it more like a distraction on the end of a spear.

I say something that equates to “leave me alone”. The words I choose are imprecise and confused. I only slept 30 minutes last night. But my words, like His, communicate mainly in tone and posture.

“Give me five dollars,” He elaborates. “Give me five dollars for the holocaust!”

I tell him I don’t carry cash.

He’s angry I wasted His time. His right arm pulls back, then shoots forward: a punch. I instinctively pull back my right side, meeting His force with less resistance.

A few New Yorkers turn and comment. It’s not every day you see violence in vivo. Yet no one does anything. Why? Maybe because there’s nothing to do. We could call the police and wait for them to arrest This Fellow, but what would that accomplish? The best argument I can imagine is akin to “it’s your civic duty to get someone like this off the street”. But if that’s true, then why am I the only person I ever see picking up litter as they pass it in Central Park?

Growing up, angry kids told me on at least three separate occasions that one day someone was gonna punch me in the face. I’m now 30 years old and this prediction has not come true. Somehow I think this altercation doesn’t count.

Five minutes later, I arrive to my afternoon date. I tell her this story. She says I was mugged. I agree: it was at least an attempted mugging.

His punch left a bruise, but I’m more struck by my nonchalance. Still now, a day later, I don’t feel afraid. At no point – not even now – was I concerned for my safety. Maybe I deeply understood This Guy. Maybe I knew I’d be fine. Maybe I knew this to be the cost of engaging. Most New Yorkers avoid eye contact with strangers; I’ll meet the eyes of anyone equally bold.

Honesty in Comedy

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Yesterday I intentionally lied to you. I posted an AI-generated picture of a tattoo, claiming to have received this tattoo while drunk in Bali.

I have never received a tattoo, nor have I been drunk in Bali. I lied because it was April First, the only day out of the whole year when non-malicious lies are more than accepted: they’re celebrated.

I’m currently writing a personal-history one-man show that aims to be honest, to entertain, and to have impact. Honesty is tough when speaking to a diverse audience. New Yorkers will take your words at face value unless you indicate exaggeration via a clear tonal inflection. (Does this make New Yorker a tonal language? I say yes.) Brits and southerners prefer a deadpan that allows them to employ their own bullshit detector. One cannot satisfy everybody’s requirements for honesty while preserving the level of humor I desire. In my upcoming show, I will need to choose between being a comedian (entertainment) and being a journalist (honesty). I will need to have a defined stance, if only to maintain my ability to sleep well in the face of twitter criticism. John Oliver threads this needle by claiming comedy, which allows him to have the impact of a journalist without the industry’s behavioral constraints. Is this cheating? Absolutely. But it’s also an elegant way to win. So here’s how I define my stance:

These distinctions are absolute tosh. They’re like saying “a comedy ends with a marriage; a tragedy with death.” When was the last time a romcom ended with the marriage of all significant characters? Or a modern tragedy ended with a Hamlet-like bloodbath? We’ve been mixing genres over the last few years because they’ve always mixed. And April Fools is a holiday to remind us the ability to impact truth through lies. Is Amazon’s 2013 Cyber Monday claim that they’d have drone delivery in two years any more of an April Fools hoax than the 2019 April Fools joke of an Amazon delivery blimp? Many people even treated the April Fools one more seriously while ridiculing the the Cyber Monday one as a joke! Impact-wise, isn’t the main difference publication date, enabling Amazon to be the most-discussed retailer on one of the most profitable retail shopping days of 2013?

Approximately 50% of the people who received my tattoo message recognized it as an April Fools joke. The other 50% were hoodwinked. I debated over telling these hoodwinked people “April Fools!”. I’ve concluded I’m not going to. Because at some point most of them will realize that it was an April Fools joke. And doesn’t the fact that the joke lasted months or years make it even funnier?

And for those who never realize it, I’ll take solace in the fact that I’m not a journalist, nor a comedian: I’m an axolotl that regenerates its skin every few months, which is why the tattoo has already vanished. But I’m sure you already knew that.

Care / Try / Worry / Do: A Psychological Framework

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  • Care = believing something to be important.
  • Try = psychological effort, eg imaginative rehearsal or planning.
  • Worry = physiological/emotional arousal.
  • Do = action on the world.

These four functions are separable: each can be on or off individually. There are 22 different combinations. Some of them have names. E.g. Try + Worry + Do (without Caring) is called ‘Being triggered’”, Care + Do (without Worry or Try) is called “Being in Flow”, and “Maturity” or “Expertise” is Care + Try (with decreased Worry and Do).

I have a hunch that we exist in many or all of the 22 mental states at different times, and that one could use these mappings to intentionally move between states. (E.g. When “Practicing”, aim to be in Worry, Care, Try, and Do, but when “Playing”, exclusively Care and Do.)

I’m considering making a flowchart of the 22 different possible states, with arrows + tactical blurbs indicating when one should be in them and how to move between them. Thanks for reading this blurb – I have three quick questions for you:

  1. Is this framework interesting?
  2. Would you find such a flowchart interesting?
  3. Do any of the terms (Worry/Try/Care/Do) seem misfitting? If so, what terms would be more appropriate? (Eg I’ve considered “Act” instead of “Do”.)

17 syllables on my most exhausting week in memory

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New job + old job = tough week. I couldn’t do it, but I care.

(I started a new job this week. It’s co-founder at a startup. I’m still ghostwriting for some people & editing for others. The co-founder role is a full time gig. My former job is still a full time gig. Dear Lord [that’s you, Smidgen], How are we gonna get through this?)

(The ending “I couldn’t do it but I care” is intended as an allusion to the impossibility of stretching oneself until necessity and desire intersect. I’ve done things this week that I couldn’t have done. But must + want => can. So I do.)

A Cool Piece of Interactive Art

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I saw this piece of interactive art on the streets of SF (you can visit it yourself: it’s on the even side of the 800 block of Duncan – between 814 and 892 Duncan St, San Francisco, CA 94131) & left a note asking the creator if they had thought about vandalism before creating the art. They hollered back with some pics and their musings – you can find those both below!

Two Delightful Ditties

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I started a writing group. It was awesome. In our first meeting, we completed three 10 minute writing sprints, each followed by responses from peers. Here, my delightful darlings, you may find two of those creations:

Prompt 1: Picture an object from your childhood. Write something involving or inspired by it. 

I’m two years old and in a swing. A duck swing. A goofy, yellow duck swing. My sister stands behind me, pushing. I don’t have a fond memory of this first memory of my life but hey, isn’t that fitting for a constructed memory? See: 

I don’t actually remember being in that swing. I don’t feel my sister standing over me. I don’t feel what it’s like to be bald and big-eyed and have my lips puff out like Alec Baldwin doing a Trump impression. I can’t. It’s not a real memory. It’s a memory of a picture my mother (father?) took. A picture I’ve seen countless times and incorporated so much into my being it’s become what feels like my earliest memory. 

I feel sad when I think about it. 

It feels like the outside looking in, interposing on me in a nonconsentual way. Like we’re born and we die and in the middle we waffle around, buffetted and muffeted and ruffeted and scuffed by those bigger or stronger or wiser or older or first. Just first. Because first isn’t even a legitimate benefit. First is just first. It’s born at the right time or the right place or to the right sister or parents. And that reminds me of the melencholy in the world and that makes me sad.

I look back to that picture—that swing where I’m dangling form the ceiling, suspended in some ridiculous duck swing and I’m reminded no person is alone. No one is an individual. No being lives in true isolation. 

Still, at least I was supported. 

Prompt 2: Remember a time something made you angry. Like a 6 out of ten. Dial it up to an 8. Now a 9. Now a 4. What would it be like to live life feeling that level of angry in that situation instead?

“What is sanity?” The blue shrimp told me. 

It was tuesday, and tuesday is when the existentialists meet. 

“I don’t know, but he does,” he replied. 

“You can’t reply to yourself,” I told him, “It’s against the rules” and that’s when it 

broke. 

It shattered to tatters as my grey matter splattered. 

What’s it like to be an honest orange? 

How do orangutans pick a hand? 

What’s a perspective and how does it–? 

Can I please have another? or another? Or a hug. 

I don’t find myself flying most of the time. 

I don’t find myself crying most of the time. 

The words come in and I grasp what I can. 

Most tunas escape their captors. All salmon some day die. 

“This got weird”, I want to say, but then you’ll know that I could’ve stopped it, 

and we forgive those that can’t help it while

lighting aflame those that can. 

What is responsibility? 

What is it to be mean? 

Two Terrific Ten-minute Jottings

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Dr. Seuss on Breakups

One sheet, two sheet, three sheet, four.

Slam that paper to the floor.

Rip it, tear it, burn it good.

Light it up as though it’s wood.


As you hear the crackling flames,

As you feel the warm remains,

Eyes reflect the flickering embers,

Spleen and liver scarce remember…


What he did to break your heart,

How you swooned back at the start,

How you cried o’er these letters,

Before he ripped your heart to fetters.


Now kiss all the gifts he gave.

Rub your cheek and feel his shave.

Toss this bear into the fire.

Hear it roar like your desire.


You may feel crick in your neck,

Weighty eyes as though you’ve wept

Tickling soft palate above your tongue,

Ringing ears as you’ve been wrung.


All these wants, stuffed in your mind,

Salty-sweet of love unkind,

Prickling poke of lover’s yoke,

Brilliant blaze, gone up in smoke. 

A Humorous Happening

“I did not knot the naughty Norwegian nurse, nay!” I say to the barrister as she lifts her haughty head higher, sliding her specs down her protruberant and bulbous nose. I wish to honk that nose and I know that she knows that I know she knows it!

“But sir,” the barrister bellows in a reedy, sinewy snarl, “You were locked in her chambers, the only one!”

I snort and hock a particularly phlegm-filled hunk of malevolent mucus into the bin.

“And I’ll have some decorum in my courtroom!”

“Awright,” I relent, congealing into the visage of an upstanding citizen. “I’ll take you there: see, the shipmate and I had spied a trifle of glinting gold in that there stowhole not two days prior to her nursehood’s ‘napping. An’ we, ‘aving ‘eard of ‘er reluctance to part with treasures, either internal or ex-, went a-sniffing our way ‘round the floorboards above, where the bilge’d been spilt and reeking and rotting salty sea water only a few days prior. So the mate, ‘e says to me, ‘why don’t ye stick yer wooden leg under that there board and heave to with yer hips and cascade it over, lettin’ us shimmy downward into Her Highness’s quarters and ransacking her all good ’n’ proper?’ Only that cankered, leprosy-ridden, flea-infested mate sneaks down ‘imself and grabs the gold and hoists ‘imself back up, only to push me down into the hole myeself, to be caught by yer most High and Honorable lawmen!” 

Today in Music.

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In which I attempt to play the intro to Thunder Road on Harmonica (I do not yet play the harmonica), do a poor, shrill, and off-key impression of Bruce Springsteen, and snuggle quietly with the dog.
(Also, at the end, the song ends rather abrup

Notes to readers:

  • If you have a harmonica in the key of F, play along.

Notes to self:

  • Yes, I always knew I was going to be famous.
  • Yes, I posted these in part to inoculate myself against public mockery and to get comfortable with being emotionally authentic in public.

I’ve always wanted to be Ellen. (A Crowdsourced Poem.)

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Poems should have hyperlinks. This poem does.

Poems should give their readers commenting access.

This poem does.

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