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.