I might be heading to the land of the bean and the cod to go to a news media and the Internet conference at some one of the many schools people think of when they think of my former fair city. It’s in mid-May and on a Friday/Saturday, so might get to go with the male companion. Ask the kids say–kewl.

All expenses paid visit to the ‘hood, thanks to the new day gig. Better yet, on account of the internets. Fucking full circle, that’s what that is.

Sunny days in California, man. OK, record rainfall making me wonder about the end times, but it ain’t no snow.

At the one year mark or so, a couple of things have come up to give me some of the old reflective pause. You know? East v. West and all that kind of bullshit. Cali is not the Northeast, and New England ain’t Cali. Profound? Fuck, nah. But, still and all, true, true, true.

You all start thinking about the red state/blue state thang, but it’s failure is East and West each being in the blue camp come off the same, they aren’t. And, apart from missing family and the familiar sense of place, I swing more west.

Here’s the evidence, the portent, the signs. They’re looking at work and flows and work flows and who the fuck does what at work. To that end, I had to sit down with the HR chick. A woman seemingly cool enough to get totally why I live in mortal fear of those wearing the HR badge. She gets the reason petit bureaucrats get a rep for the petty.

Apart from talking about tasks, we swapped stories on living here, living there and working and all. There is an undeniably narrow world where NYC and Boston and DC assert their superiority for money, books and politics, but often lack the openness to see value outside of the prescribed paths. The right school, the right level of ed, the right experiences, the accepted norms. I always suspected a great deal of bullshit (some of the best and brightest I’ve met didn’t go Ivy League), and I know I was a peg unfit with sharp corners in that round hole.

Seriously, though, the last time I clocked outside of a quick in/out of an HR office, let alone watched the minute hand do a 360, let’s just say it didn’t go well. Today, I feel like someone listened to me. Fucking weird that.

Simultaneously, I’ve been watching the saddest of spectacles on the world wide web. I’d link, but I suspect I’d be hunted by grown up babies waa waa-ing that I’d spoiled the game. Comedians have no sense of humor, especially about themselves. (If you know me and are curious, email me, and I may or may not point you to the right space.)

A few weeks back I got an email that crystallized, encapsulated, codified and fucking highlighted in big, wide stripes of fluorescent yellow marker my experience in Boston comedy. Fucking douchebaggy, crybaby, competitive, holier, funnier and sweeter smelling than thou, the funtime, playroom of laugh makers out there from whence I came.

Here’s an excerpt:

But I see this site at a higher level – both of humor, maturity and intelligence. And rookies and others not initially a part of it could only benefit from reading a discussion of what it’s like to play Vegas between 3 headliners. I would happily sit there and post nothing – just read and absorb. Until I got bored and feel the need to jump in and call someone a fat faggot just to start shit. ;>)

Would you be interested in helping build it – if time allowed – and if you were not one of the original gang? I hope so. You’re very talented and could really make this a great site I’m sure. And we’d plug the shit out of you (not sexually, you dirty dirty girl) on the board all the time…until you were admitted to the site. Then we would shit all over you just like old times. But we’d shit because we love, you know that.

Here was the sweet, cherry offer — I design and set up a new website for a group of Boston comics. In return, I would get exactly nothing. But, I was assured that (a) I would enjoy what I read and presumably be better off for having seen the prose of others and (b) over time, as the idea took hold with folks ostensibly more talented, brighter, funnier than I writing, maybe they’d all let me write a little too. Maybe.

Guess whether I said “No, thank you, really,” politely or not. Who the fuck would go along with that?

Thing is the the group is kind of sad. They’re looking to recreate some web fun circa the turn of the century (the most recent one). I was there, back in the day, when on-line bulletin boards and fora were new, weblogs hadn’t been invented yet, and the comics currently gathering were in fact largely new and as fresh as Web 1.0, while witty banter drove hit rates up.

(I wasn’t in on it day one, but a short distance down the road, I started stretching my curious little computer geek fingers toward the Boston/Cambridge stand up comedy world. I got reamed six, seven, eight ways to Sunday with my unsophisticated questions and first impressions of timid outings on stage. I endured, I lived, I learned.)

I could go on about the weirdly high school in-crowd/out-crowd aspect, but seriously, at 42 fucking years old, I would just pity myself the wasted energy. Sure, I’m old fashioned and think if you try to enlist folks to help build country club exclusivity, um, you might want to toss a bone to the ‘help’ and let’em join, but I’m not really dying for membership.

Instead, I’ll mock the vision. Recreating an interactive environment from the early days of the web, which succeeded in its day precisely because of a few little webby things like that interactivity thang along with open access and experimentation and anonymity? OK that might work. But, yeah, the part where you have a bulletin board by invitation only governed by a guy prone to pages of what people should write and how it should work (the excerpt above was a brief take from several much longer emails. Rumor has it on good authority, I wasn’t the only recipient of control-freak meanderings)? Um, good luck.

The Northeast angle on all of the above for me — I haven’t met as many people here who define themselves by self-appointed inclusion. I haven’t met as many people hell bent on explaining to me that time and experience of a certain kind is a unassailable pedigree granting an anointed status to veterans that newcomers will never have or know.

(I take and value experience very seriously. Comedy performance especially benefits from repetition and exposure to more shows, more people. But, there are unfunny dicks with years and years and years of experience under their belts (although the greatest also have those years), and there are brash, new kids doing interesting stuff, especially kids weaned on media and computers. The best comedy I’ve seen learns from whatever school features funny. Period. Hearing anyone in any field bitch about the attention younger players are getting invariably degrades into bitterness that rings about as true as “Pianos are destroying music, in my day people respected the harpsichord.”)

So, here I am a year later. And, well, I feel about 900 years further ahead than a lot of what is behind me.

Was it declared international pedophile day, and I missed it? Tonight the MSNBC/CNN/Fox fake news channels are awash with diddling. Homeland security, education, Congressional hearings and some kind of international spy or something who’s into Filipino boys and the Feds knew it.

Me, I’ve historically declared myself as extremely anti-pedophilia. Definitely have come down on a non-waffling stance there.

Still and all, I’m considering digging Brian J. Doyle. Wee tiny eentsy kudos to the deputy press secretary of our fine federal office of Homeland Security. Because really, what’s a “deputy press secretary,” but some flavor of PR flak. And, what is better PR than child pornography and luring minors into a fetid, sordid little bit of darkness.

Kind of a double hit down the middle for our friends on the side of right and red statedness, a dirty old bastard arrested as Tom Delay throws in the towel. Lets review, shall we? Whitewater and a helmut polishing from Monica, during a time of relative peace and prosperity versus what we got now. Right. I’d take the BJ and cigar.

Also, what the fuck is wrong with us, collectively, like as a nation? Seriously. One of the “news” shows, M.’s soulmate and real girlfriend, Nancy Grace, perhaps? I can’t remember. Anyway, one of the shows preoccupied with molesters featured an “expert” who was touting his book. The “EXPERT” was some kind of retired molester himself, who wised up and wrote a book. Fuck, sure, the guy probably knows his shit, but are we that hungry for expertise?

Here’s an idea, let’s boycott molesters all, past and present.

Sure, whatever, fucking sunlight, yay sun. Or, the universe should just give me my fucking hour back.

Sometimes living in California is a lot like living in California. The Whole Food crowd. The earnest. The fit, the organic, the brown rice, the soy latte, the supplements, peace, fucking love and granola.

I’ve had laryngitis all week. Either I have a particular throat-stabby burning rhinovirus, or the lovely, verdant hills are sprouting allergens all over their earthquake built peaks and valleys, or both. Fuck viruses and fuck pollen.

Universally, the folks at work recommended vitamin C. Not just vitamin C but the cultish little packets they buy at Whole Foods Market and pour into bottles of water. s Maybe I’m just too fucking cynical to enjoy a good, old-fashioned placebo effect.

A few people pulled out various viles of magical elixirs. I feel like shit, I will continue to feel like shit throughout the allergy season and/or the virus performs its little parasitic dance of birth, colony, free-for-all and death in about seven days. So it is and so it shall be. And, hippie cures of natural combinations of alleged healthy ingredients won’t change my fate.

I ended up in a joking argument about it all and about healthy food movements and organic this and that. What I want to know, what makes the chemicals you buy at Whole Foods superior to the vitamin-laced chemicals they spray on magically delicious, tasty cereals? I point out my youthful appearance, a product of chemical preservatives. Years and years and years of ingesting preservatives.

Not much to write or say. Prevailing wisdom says don’t write about the workplace, but it’s the workplace that’s responsible for the fatigue.

What’s a girl to write?

I’ll say this thing, though. I may lose the occasional job in a blaze of glory, but I kinda hate that I’m overall a goody-goody, obedient sort. I don’t steal, don’t lie, don’t rape and pillage. I tend to do my tasks well and make nice with the other kids.

I fucking hate that. Conscientiousness, empathy and ethics make you kind of a chump. I try to keep shit covered, so I invariably end up watching folks a little lighter on the neurotic workaholic scale cruise by unencumbered by a job well done.

M. has a friend, or maybe acquaintance, or maybe devotee, who I hate. I used that word advisedly, but in many ways he represents all of the mean-spirited, low, boring, unimaginative shitheads I sought to leave behind in my new life.

Boston is reputed as parochial. It is sometimes well-deserved, full of people with no concept of self-reflection, caught up in believing that they have contributed to the “Hub of the Universe.” Emerson, Thoreau they ain’t. Living near a college doesn’t make you a scholar. Attending classes doesn’t make you critical, thoughtful or intelligient. Proximity means nothing.

Still and all, in a gown town like Cambridge, you run into people who think their own farts are wise utterings.

Then, you get the other side, many of whom lived in the town where I grew up. Proudly, they proclaimed that they have never wasted time going to the city, because everything they needed could be found in their suburb 20 miles south of Boston (presumably at the mall). Not to mention if you drove there, you’d have to go through “wrong” neighborhoods, and if you took the train, you’d likely rub shoulders with black people. Perish the thought.

Books didn’t litter their homes, the regional paper was news enough, live theater was captured by television, music played from top 40, middle-of-the-road stations and critical thought was the sports guys on AM radio. They were the prime motivators for me to move from my suburban town and to head to the bright, city lights.

This guy, this moron, combines the worst of both worlds. Through luck and family push and some native math skills, he went to a good college. This circumstance makes him unbearably condescending when he talks about people who didn’t get the breaks he did or otherwise didn’t attend a major university. He believes that through the magical process of receiving a degree people become smarter and those without degrees are destined to uninspired failure. (The irony of this belief system is the very famous, iconic computer company for which he works, headed by a very famous, iconic college dropout from quite humble beginnings.)

He brags that he has never read a book for pleasure. He brags about his stock options. He claims that as a kid he never had interests or passions, he just planned on getting a good job to make money. He brags about his life devoid of pleasure, where he runs a mile at the gym, drinks only juice, eats mostly fruit and salads. He holds others in disdain for their their pleasure-seeking, once telling me that he thought wine was stupid and should just be banned. (Of course, he might have been saying that in jest, it’s tough to tell with the priggish.)

He is incredibly dull in conversation. I can’t add much to a guy who once started a conversation with “A guy at work told me that he saw a show on television…” It proceeded into something so uninteresting I couldn’t hope to pull the content from the recesses of my faded memory. Few good stories begin with anyone talking TV viewing, let alone if you are even yourself removed a step from that inherently passive activity.

He is incapable of discerning truth from fiction on television, completely oblivious to the lack of news content versus editorial on FOX or that Jay Leno’s monologue is based on the actual news. He has voted once. He bemoans taxes and the welfare state. In short, he is the perfect middle-class tool of the Bush state, unable to think critically and more than willing to accept the most transparent of rhetoric. (Except, thankfully, he does get political advice from his dyed-in-the-wool Democrat landlady. Never mind that she is insane and less than articulate on the issues, he listens to her.)

All of the above makes me incredibly uninterested in talking with him. What sends me over the edge, is his sheer bone ignorance, racism and homophobia. I have wasted hours of my life trying to explain that his experience of individual black people is meaningless and ungenerizable, gays aren’t sick (and don’t want him) and welfare recipients, homeless and downtrodden are not all lazy and/or stupid and sometimes addictions happen to good people. It hurts my brain, my soul and my heart to have these conversations, especially repeatedly.

The other night he called me out on his contempt of him. He was right, and it took him a long time to recognize it. In fact, I’ve spent many early evenings bitching to M. that I wasn’t going to go out if it meant seeing this assclown. But, for some sick reason, I think he likes me, has affection for me, respects me. None of those feelings are reciprocal.

After the evening’s fiasco, M. promises it will never happen again. It’s safe to say, I won’t be shedding any tears.

Do you think the parole board for Sirhan Sirhan were basically just whining in their heads the same as kids dragged out of bed on Sunday morning for church?

Whyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy did we have to come herrrreeeeee????????????????????????? Come on, I have things to do. COME ON. I want to GO.

He hates Americans and has no remorse. Seriously, can we go now?

It’s a weird week for me, at least inside my skull plates. I’ve gotten more than the usual in-box of emails from an easterly direction, I’m smack dab in the middle of the anniversary of my personal manifest destiny (I got in my car March 8 and got here about March 19, 2005) and among the comedy folks I miss the most two are in Aspen, CO, I hope becoming legends.

So, to feed my nostalgia, that bittersweet ache of what was but ain’t no more, that quaint and vaseline-lensed swirly dream state of what wasn’t a better time, per se, but with the right lighting could feel that way. I’m bathing my brain in all of the fondness I have ever felt for Boston comedy.

(A community which was in truth something of a mental beat down that made me treat myself better in this comedy world. Kind of a scared straight situation where instead of witnessing a prison rape and deciding I didn’t want to end up there, it was drowning in night after night of beer-soaked bitterness, where a world of failures and up-and-comers tried to make me feel that I could never climb to even the height of their shoes. If enough assholes work on your ego for too long there are two possible outcomes — (1) You start to believe it, or (2) your vision clears, you see their crater-sized flaws, and you pull your own shoes out of that gutter of pathetic, shit-stained dreams. I ended up in the sun, figuratively and literally, like approximately 9,000 other walking cliches who moved West.)

Read this excerpt from last year’s ramblings to feel the transition to an almost year-long adventure.

Anyhow, I kind of digressed there from the warm fuzziness of my love for many in Boston and in that rat race of comedy. Here’s what I have to offer as my Valentine, two videos one that’s been here before and a new one (at least to this page), both of which were shot in the same month, maybe the same week, maybe even the same night, how the fuck should I know, they’re a year old.

In “Bumping” I’m driving the car, while the Walshes and a random fan don’t thankfully die in traffic.

In the second one, the Walshes are talking about my favorite subject, me, at my last Boston show. This videotape will be used as evidence when they come back from Aspen with a TV deal, become famous, and I sue them for some kind of grievous wrong or more likely, patrimony (both of them at once, creating a mutant zombie baby with their combined sperm).