I’m going to try to be quick and glib and probably not the least bit funny. I’m tired and have a headache and think crawling between the covers with my video iPod, Jon Stewart and The Daily Show would be mighty fine.

Tuesday night, to now be referred to as fucking awful Tuesday, I did an open mike at a suburbanized shithole British Pub. The host is a nice enough guy with whom to have a convo, but the fucking douche introduced me and the other chick doing the show that night as “vaginas.” What the fuck? Oh, right, that’s why I get to call you a cock, peckerhead, dink, dickwad fuckface.

Anyway, the show was excrutiatingly painful in all the ways open mikes can be. It started out with people whose thoughts are amusing only if you make fun of them, segue-ing into a dude who I wished I knew the other comics better, so I’d be comfortable saying, “That’s just fucking racist, right?” Ultimately, several people who I’ve seen before and are genuinely funny comics just went down in flames.

Honestly, what’s the point in struggling against a lousy sound system and disinterested drunks just watching you die and enjoying the schadenfreude. I drove home thinking this is just the fucking stupidest thing I could do with a night. Comedy is ludicrous, why bother, really?

Today I had another show, and I could only feel dread. Fucking dread at walking through another fucking lame as lame can be painful night, standing with microphone in hand wondering “Why? Why the fuck am I here? Why the fuck am I doing this?”

But, then I got to the place and there was audience. Real people knowing perfectly well what was going to happen in the little back room into which they had crammed themselves. Better yet, everyone who performed had something to say. Not every joke knocked my knickers off, but a hefty percentage had me laughing. Out loud.

I walked in with less than zero expectations and left pleased. Better yet, I asked the host to mention my vagina in my introduction. So, I joked about the dick the night before introducing me that way. It felt all shivery-like empowering, you know, a black guy reclaiming the N, yankee doodle dandy, sticks and stones can break my bones, blah, fucking, blah, I owned the words.

Afterwards, a chick about my own age paid me a compliment and said something about my shit being smart. The coup de grace, I got in my car with $20 extra in my pocket from tips.

I wants to quit the bitch, but the bitch makes it hard.

To celebrate driving the snakes out of Ireland, here’s a reprieve of M. and me at the Penang Snake Temple:

Other than that, never having been here in Cali on St. Patty’s Day, I’m veritably shivering with anticipation. The woman in the next cube and I both have on green shirts. I saw “Patrick” in the lunch rooom; he was wearing green too.

I wish I could be around Boston for some friends planning a pub crawl — They are likely crawling already, since it was starting during the day. Ah well, you move 3,000 miles and you are sure to miss a few parties.

If I know you, you’ve ever thought about a pancake breakfast in Southie, you have a name like Dot or Pat or Mike or Peggy or Gerry or Sully or Fitz or anyone’s ever called you Mc, Mick, Mac, Paddy, Patty, Greenhorn, Herring choker, drunk, Mackerel snapper, Harp, Bog-Trotter, Papist, Cat-lick, Leprechaun, Narrowback, Pogue, Shanty, Spudfucker, Spudnigger, Potato Head, Bog Wog, Donkey, FBI, Left footer, Mickey Finn, Plastic Paddy, Potato eater or Spud lover, Happy Saint Patrick’s to you!

Everyone else, pog mi hone.

Well you could knocked me over with a feather or kicked me in the ass and called me Germaine Greer.

I did a show, a brunch show. It was at a nice, rustic-y looking restaurant out in the woods. Way the fuck out in the woods. Woods that to get to I drove loopy, redwood-lined roads through mountains. I even saw patches of snow in shadows littered with rotting leaves. Fucking country with a capital ‘K.’ So far out in the sticks that my GPS device and satellite radio faded in and out. My cell phone was dead. (How the fuck deep are you into nature when satellite technology can’t find you?)

The stage was awkwardly set. Very awkwardly set. A microphone across from the front door with people sitting in two rooms stretching out left and right from where the mike was. Bad fucking comedy mojo that. (Note to self, never, ever, ever agree to attempt to talk to two separate rooms. Bad fucking idea.)

Anyway, in each room were tables of women, come to see women perform comedy to celebrate International Women’s Day. I’m fine I figure, even though the gender rainbow at the titles was decidely ladies loving ladies. But, I’m hip to the L word. Sisters of Sappho are cool by me. I don’t want eat pussy, but I have no quarrel with anyone who does.

But, man oh fucking man, those chicks were not digging my own brand of female. Basically, I wasn’t feminist enough for the militant brunch-dining crowd. As each comic went up, the owner of the restaurant, middle-aged and wearing army surplus, at least I think it was the owner, fussed about and asked the other comedians whether she had or any of us had any “feminist jokes.”

Silly little bubble-headed me, I thought being able to express my ideas and point of view was part of my being a woman. I thought my life lived on my own terms, and fucking talking about it in a humorous manner, was the point. Choice and all that.

Fuck you, honey, but didn’t that brand of militantism go out of fashion in, I dunno, 1972 or so. When common sense prevailed and women stopped gathering in living rooms with hand mirrors to stare at their vaginas in sisterhood and curiousity.

Maybe not exactly that, and I ain’t saying we have won the war. But, fucking A, I hate any kind of eat your own politics where someone tries to decree what is acceptable doctrine. Sorry, lady, I met a dude, and I don’t rug munch, so yeah, clearly, I’m a traitor to the movement.

Blow me.

Although, to be fair, it was the older women who were bumming on whether we all were feminists. Women somewhere between my sister’s and my youngest aunt’s ages. Women who probably lived through shit I could easily take for granted. (I generally don’t thanks to the ghost of Pat haunting my thoughts.)

The younger lesbians, the ones who looked in their 20s and 30s, including one who said she was from South Boston and had an accent to back it up, they were cool. A couple made a point of letting us know their table was laughing hard. I said something to the Southie chick about “No wonder people say feminists have no sense of humor.” She laughed.

Since running away from home a year ago, I made the choice to not subject myself unduly to the special pain that is an open mike. Going to a while lot of open mikes has for me the same kind of pleasure as chewing my cuticles and biting my nails down to bloody goodness. Seriously, when you really get going on nailbiting there is pleasure in the pain, the rip of flesh, the taste of blood.

A cringing, horrible, when will it ever stop open mike feels a lot like ripping your skin through to blood and savoring the moment.

Last night I went to the first shitty dive bar hell hole with a microphone show that I’ve been to in a long time. It was kind of fun and kind of not fun. I took the bullet, after the host did some scrambling, dying time at the top. He baubled my name, forgetting the order he had himself worked out and told us not 15 minutes before, and, in fact, not remembering my gender. (Reason number 512 why it’s a bad idea to make a point of announcing a woman’s gender in her introduction.)

While the host struggled, I leaned over and told M. something like, “Shit, maybe I shouldn’t go up.” The bar was wide and long and loud, the room split with a divider separating an onstensible dining area from the true bar. Classically shitty room for an open mike. (Doesn’t matter where you go in this world, comics will find a shitty hole with willing management and figure the laws of physics and acoustics and shit will bend for them. Comics are kind of delusional, you know.)

So, I’m leaning over and contemplating a bailout. A young dude next to me (I say dude, ‘cuz this is fucking Cal-I-Forn-I-A.), anyway this kid with one eye on the dying host says something like, “You gotta.” I guess he was calculating any change was a change for the better.

I requitted myself better than adequately. I saw laughter and some folks leaning in and listening over a fairly loud din. (I fucking love the word din.) Better yet, a boy (I say boy, but he had to be over 21 to be entertained in this perverse manner), some boy said, “Hey, you rocked.” That’s right boys and girls. I fucking rock.

I spent the rest of the night leaning against the back wall and shitting on the night as a whole. It has been for-fucking-ever since I leaned against a back wall at a show chockful of mockery. It’s kind of fun. (Although, part of the game would be shitting on the performers. I didn’t listen closely enough to do that.)

Fun to be an asshole again. That’s comedy.

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