I haven’t figured out what I’m going to talk about yet, but tonight I’m doing what is most likely my last ever nude comedy performance.

The first time, it was transcendental. I felt like I was conquering some of my stage fright and just naturally speaking and getting my words out there and it worked. It was an unbelievable, ultimately indescribable experience.

The second time didn’t have the magic of the first. It was fun, but akin to any other good comedy set. It worked, you’re pleased, but the earth spins on its access unaltered. You and the audience go home feeling that it was a pleasant evening, but no one is going to bed still talking about the night.

Now, the third time, I fear will have all of the shine and newness of a truly mundane chore. It might be folding my underwear (as if I would do that) at the laundromat before going home to eat a can of soup.

Likely, it will go fine, but the story from the night will not demand retelling. I will go home content or comfortable but unchanged. (Except, of course, when I realize that by doing it three times I will have wandered into creepy territory, where the novel has become fetish. I should wear a trench coat and a black box over my eyes to disguise my shame. Someone reading this ‘blog, when I hit rock bottom and start doing stand-up at strip bars for $1 in my g-string, just go ahead and punch me in the face.)

The first time I loofahed and depilated for days, tweezing, trimming, shaving, shaping. I bought variously shaded foundation to smooth and contour and hide blemishes on any conceivable surface. I paid attention to my skin, my hair, my nails, and wound up wearing eye, lip and cheek makeup to call attention to my usually prominent visage.

The second time, it was not a multi-process and there were no dry runs to see what looked best and most natural. My skin was clean and I believe I had my hair highlighted and cut beforehand (as they said in junior high, the hair on my head), but I didn’t fuss that much.

Now, the last, perhaps waltzing into seedy land, I am going plastic. I got even lighter highlights the other day and a full set of bitch red acrylic nails. I’m also since yesterday sporting my first ever fake tooth, having a temporary crown resting over a broken and molded nub from the set with which nature started me.

It’s probably an over-compensatory reaction to the hippie earnestness of the group I will be entertaining. I am not a hippie, I am a fallen woman, dyed and painted and put here for your amusement.

My one nod to the hippie naturalness with which I usually am at ease: I’m wearing baggy underpants and a loose-fitting bra for now, so that by show time I won’t have deep red lines from elastic tension encircling my bod.

I am Shiva, the Destroyer. I am the decider of destiny. I am death.

A wee, tiny mousie breathes no more, and I am the mistress of it’s fate. The one, old-fashioned trap, the one that was not bloodless and fake clean, displayed it’s victim, which I double-bagged within the trash, an inelegant and undignified ending, perhaps.

The other traps will remain, because a mouse is not a lone wolf. Perhaps the traps will become beacons of danger, signposts to the mouse masses. In my house, in this castle, yours is not a welcome visit. Move on, or taste the wrath of my steel (or plastic), as it were.

Today’s mood may be encapsulated by an interchange with the boyo (aka the man with whom I am theoretically involved in a relationship), as he navigated his morning commute on the other side of the country. As I bitched about my now FIVE different types of mouse traps and inability to catch it or them, quote he:

Wow, even the mice are rejecting you.

Followed by giggles and chuckles on his end of the phone.

Some gals get romance, but not I.

I ended up fitfully sleeping last night, curled in a fetal ball, grabbing the covers like a shield barring certain doom. Pathetic, really.

The reason? The goddamned Algernon-smart mouse that cannot be killed, which has taken up residence here for what is now months. I literally have set three different kinds of traps and threw in some poison to boot. Yet, it lives.

NOTHING seems so loud and frightening when you are alone and half asleep then the stomping feet and chewing clickety teeth of a rodent. And, I had thought my room an oasis it had not reached, since there’s no food and the door is usually shut.

Normally, when I’m neurotically sleepless, I’m afraid of a home invasion by heavily armed young men looking for some of my more portable and sellable possessions, who are more than willing to smack me around and act out in all sorts of unsavory manners. One of the things that I do miss by living alone is the comfort of thinking someone might hear my screams.

Last night though, it was giant sounding footsteps and the irrational fear of something that small possibly touching me.

So I remain caught up in my head and foolishly worrying and feeling bad for myself, but I am beginning to realize my retardation. Maybe it’s the Somerville News reference to my pessimism.

Anyway, to really sink into a useless feeling of failure and bleakness, you probably shouldn’t have any friends. But, alas, it appears that I do. I had a couple of convo’s with comics that reminded me of the 900 ways you can have bad feelings while putting yourself out there in a risky (or at least quite uncomfortable) venture. And, yeah, quite a few fucking people you are going to meet in a day are going to be selfish. No surprise there.

Maybe comics are more selfish, or maybe the fact that you are competing for attention with other people who believe they have something as important or more important to say just makes it seem that way. For me, if you up that dynamic by throwing me, a middle-aged chick, into a realm dominated by young men and essentially boys of 20, it would be far more unusual if I didn’t feel alienated.

Of course, the difficulty of boy comics is that they think they have insight. There is nothing more boring or annoying (in a gnat swarm on a summer’s day way) then some boy equating his experiences with yours.

It’s natural and all, but goddamnit, the eagerness of 20, but when you’ve lived twice as long, your outlook is just different. That realization sounds like fodder for the neighborly crank character, but it’s fucking true. I am sure at 80 I will have a different perspective, weighted by my life of decades, as compared to 40. It is the same with my 40 years over their 20.

My antidote is to seek out conversations with peers, whether chronologic or otherwise. I succeeded in doing that tonight, and the bonus was we may have chased off a 20-something, who suddenly seemed to realize we weren’t all on the same page and left. (Or maybe, and correctly for him, he was bored with our older woman speak; Good riddance.)

Anyway, how can I feel too low, when my mailbox is full of cool, affordable apartment listings from M. that include pools and hot tubs and gardens and the California grooviness you hear tell about.

Day after day I’m doing a lot less than I think I ought to be doing. Of course, I’m probably be a little hard on myself, but I just don’t feel overly motivated.

Comedy is a drag, thinking about my budget and needed home repairs is a drag, writing is less satisfying than I want it to be, and I’m confused and overwhelmed about getting started on my fantasy new life. I do suspect that maybe this week is just one of those weeks and I’ll soon snap out of it. But, for now, I’m WHINING into the Internet.

Rather than whine exclusively, I’ll throw out this link from M. about tourists and Asia. I wonder if he is (a) inviting me to plan a trip to see him and (b) suggesting I pack some candy.

For days I have felt inert. I’m getting some stuff done, including some reading and thinking, and I’ve washed and dressed every day and cleared the dishes. However, I just feel apathetic and sloth-like.

I know part of my problem is the perceived immensity of what I have to do in order to move — Get rid of shit, fix my place to rentable condition, not fuck my budget, get into and through the holidays, pack the junk I want, figure out what the fuck kind of job I want, find such a job 3,000 miles away, remember to focus on making positive, life-affirming steps, try to launch myself into freelancing or otherwise using my apparently not completely sucky communication skills (although the phrase “not completely sucky” does call that assertion into question) and, finally, physically transport my self and some belongings without having my heart explode from free-floating anxiety.

Sometimes it just seems like too much work to do what I think is necessary and beneficial, and it’s hard not to just cave and stay where I am and continue in my secure little rut.

Adding to all of the neurotic juice I can squeeze on my own is the actually funny prank that I’ve been living through with some comedy buds. It was pretty public knowledge when M. left for the left coast, especially since he stopped coming out with me to clubs and what not. Among my friends it’s pretty obvious that he’s a nice, digable guy with whom I would want to stay in touch. So, the discussion of my moving came up pretty quickly about a year ago when M. manifestdestinied.

Since losing my job, the talk of my moving has risen exponentially, and I’ve talked about it since I’m ready to shake the dust off my staid New England existence and do something the fuck else.

Enter this guy. Not one to miss a good opportunity for some comedic hijinks, he announced here, to the Boston comedy community,that I had already moved. A shitload of people took the bait and for awhile wherever I went, there was surprised recognition followed by “I thought you moved…”

I won’t write about how he upped the ante on that prank, since the little kid in me still believes you can jinx things.

Anyway, as I wander through my days wallowing in my own self-created anxiety, worrying that I will fail to sieze a little gusto in this life, and essentially pussy out*, the pressure from outsiders pretty much throws my whole fucked up, neurotic brain into overdrive.

Imagine how shitty I will feel if I do whimper into the next few decades unable to break the status quo and failing to even approach the buffet table let alone suck any marrow from breathing and surviving. (By the way, I don’t actually ever want to literally “suck marrow.” Just ew.) But, to publically be a complete and total pussy? Not sure if my weak little mind could handle telling all the people who have already wished me luck or congratulated me on my move that I suck.

Anyway, I think the reason for writing all of this shit out is the time table. I never expected I could do everything I feel that I have to do quickly and efficiently. I know myself, I know my problems and I know the immensity of ridding my life of detritus. Generously, and ambitiously, I started out thinking I could get things done some time between the start of the holidays in late November and the completion at the end of the year. Considering two different house fixes I need will require contractors and in the first phase the hired contractor is three-weeks’ overdue, “ambitious” is a kind word for delusional.

Now, I think before I am 41 in the first week of March is a good target (although, I’ll have to make decisions about spending from my savings). Adding the extra time gives me (and perhaps more importantly, M.) breathing room, but it also underscores the haunting apparition of my pussy self and the real or perceived failure of me to get started on a new life.

_________

*”pussy out” I love this phrase for it’s quasi-dirty, bad junior high connotations. I love it more, because I am theoretically a radical-leaning feminist, and a chick using junior high misogynistic slang is sadly funny to me. However, I think I love it most, because it the metaphor is weirdly meaningless, ’cause to be a pussy means what exactly, that you don’t do anything. Yeah, that makes sense, the sweet little spot that quite a bit of the population drools over is just weak and uninvolved. Empower the phrase today, call a co-worker a pussy.

And, since so many in the American population are apparently religious, please pray that I, Dee-Rob, am not a pussy and that when it comes to moving I don’t “pussy out.”