Tag: Life

Road Trip Prelude

~ lawrencegriffin5 ~ Leave a comment

I’ve been back in Asheville for a month now and it’s just gone by like wildfire. I’m gonna leave again pretty soon. This time for longer.

My trip back from Houston was a bedraggled mess in which I got COVID and had to work as well as drive 900 miles northeast. I didn’t get hit by the COVID too hard, but it was a pretty ghastly few days. The sun beat down like an unforgiving cruelty, the snacks and water from the gas stations all sucked. I did like the music. And I stayed in a Quality Inn in north Alabama that was surprisingly nice and got to watch a bunch of stuff and finally fucking relax. I almost didn’t care that the country’s rampant inflation and economic insanity made me pay $159 for that. That much money for a hotel right off the highway. What a time to be alive.

The following week and a half of COVID isolation was a blur. I barely remember the separation between the days. It was as though I stepped through a time warp and came out the other side.

Had a brief online dating fling. Didn’t take. I feel like all of my relationships are either toxic as fuck or some kind of penpal-esque thing where it’s awesome conversation but no romantic attraction or even mild flirting. It’s tough out there.

Comedy is good. Had a great set the other week as the first show of my run for the beginning of summer. You chase the high of the laughs, and there’s an inner satisfaction in pulling off an execution of a set really well. I did a podcast the other night with some guys here in town. Fun time. I really feel like I am getting into the vibe of Asheville. It’s a good thing for me; I am drinking less, comparatively anyway, and I feel more at peace with things. Florida always had too much chaos for it and I fed off that, and it led to a lot of negative interactions with people, and I was not very happy a lot of the time. I hope I can move on and keep doing well here. There’s just places you fit into better, and maybe this is one of them for me.

But I am about to leave again for Florida for a few weeks, for comedy, seeing old friends, a bachelor party and Key West. More soon. I’d be happy just hanging around here longer. I feel I am cultivating something and there’s something to be said for a humble life. But I also do want the adventure stories. It’s just a shame I have to drive all this way on fucking Memorial Day weekend, a day I swore I’d never drive on again after the horrific traffic jam in Florida exactly a year ago. Memorial Day weekend and all these holidays are pure bloat and nonsense. It’s better to stay inside if you can. Or at least off the fucking highway.

Then of course there have been the myriad political situations. This atrocious shooting. Like, we’re all just powerless, so you get the same things every time, a lot of people who are grieving with nothing to do but post on social media about it. It becomes numbing and it’s good to take a break. The whole situation is so pitch-black awful. It’s nihilistic in the ceaseless violence. The country is mired in a toxic mix of gun worship, a kind of religious thing, along with a lot of paranoia. Then add in the fact that there’s no safety net and the government, both parties of it, have primarily served to enrich the rich and protect property and capital, with the cops their arm of that. And so you get this stew of white supremacy, hate, rampant violent paranoia.

I don’t know what the solution is. I don’t think anyone really does. Banning guns would maybe be nice, but I don’t really know how you’d enforce that, especially not when the police seem to be either on the side of the shooter or completely ineffectual.

So instead we get this thing where the country wants you to have the baby no matter what, but wait, there’s no guarantee he won’t get shot in a school shooting.

You can find all manner of similar points everywhere. I’m aware I’m saying nothing new. But writing’s the universal constant. We can be united in our ideas here.

The Rest Of Our Lives

~ lawrencegriffin5 ~ Leave a comment

The pandemic’s not over – there seems to be the undercurrent of this virus that will continue indefinitely or for some time longer, anyway. I think about it often, how there wasn’t much for us to do about this after a while. Wear the masks, get your shots. That’s all we could do. I think movies gave us all a main-character syndrome where it’s like we began to think going back to regular life during this was some sort of betrayal, like we didn’t care about the virus or something, like there was something more important we should’ve done. But much of all of this was completely out of our hands. There was nothing for the common people in previous pandemics to do either – there was no time where people weren’t just going about their lives. It just keeps going. This isn’t to defend any bad behavior or downplaying of the pandemic. But I just don’t know what else to do about it at this point.

It really feels like this year is kind of a waking-up after a two-year-long haze of sorts. Like there was a lot of stuff I just wasn’t dealing with at all for most of the past two years – like the pandemic just gave me this excuse not to focus on the long-term goals in life. I don’t know how much longer I can use the bizarre allergy-drug addiction period of 2020 as an excuse anymore, though. I think it’s already just about spent.

I think that’s been the biggest thing fucking with my head lately. That and the impending months of activities hanging over my head – big anticipation.

Ultimately I feel like I have to start thinking about the future more. Building a good life and whatnot. I don’t know what that means. I just know I spent a shitload of time alone writing and reading. And that’s fine by me. But it’s good to have a real community and a richness to life in whatever capacity. I wasn’t finding it for a long time. My friends are scattered everywhere. A lot of the communication is through text now. That might sound like I’m complaining. I think it’s an alright life. I think I’ve chosen solid people to surround myself with overall.

***

I’ve been on the road for days. Going to Houston to do some comedy and see the Hell’s Heroes festival, full of all these bands I’ve liked since high school for fuck’s sake. It was a long dreary haze of the driving. A mass stretch of churches and Dollar Generals, long empty plains, gas stations, cars driving erratic, one incident of a Fed Ex truck that looked to have had a bomb go off inside it off on the shoulder of the road – a burnt out wreck that delayed traffic for a bit. This is such a big country. It’s unfathomable how huge it really is. The great vastness of it.

I spent some time in New Orleans and Baton Rouge. I must’ve been tired in New Orleans, because the whole place gave me a slightly off-kilter energy, and the disparity between the massive shimmering lights of the theater and the grungy abandoned buildings and various homeless destitute folks I saw on the streets, in the exact same area of town, both of these things. But this kind of thing happens everywhere. We have to do what we can to help and alleviate it all. The government won’t help very much. You have to do solidarity, mutual aid, etc. That’s power.

I want to go back to New Orleans soon and give it another go. See what there is to learn. Baton Rouge was peaceful. I couldn’t figure out the energy of Louisiana yet. That interested me. The food was good.

Texas seems like its own whole universe. You could just drive and drive here and there’s still more of it. I did comedy at The Secret Group last night, a big warehouse-like building with a rooftop patio, flashing red club lights, a bunch of various rooms all for comedy. They directed me back to a black wall along a desolate street with red flashing letters advertising THE BOX above a black door blended into the wall. Lynchian – a strange passage for sure. I’ve been doing comedy with only the one hearing aid for a while. That, plus the bright stagelights, made it like doing comedy in a vacuum. You soldier through these things. You just do it with confidence and hope you’re getting the message across. Any hesitation and they will sense it. You have to be impeccable and above the crowd onstage – something beyond human. Then you go in the green room and get a complimentary 4/20 joint as payment.

Trying to get beer after and I learn they stop selling alcohol at midnight in Houston. I got to a gas station at 11:55. The guy working wouldn’t let me in the building at all. He tapped his hand on his own phone which, somehow, said it was 11:59 when mine said it was four minutes earlier. Baffling. Don’t be such a stickler for the rules. Fortunately I nabbed a six-pack at one closer to my hotel, thankfully run by a guy who wasn’t such a rule-minded individual. You find ways.

Time Allotment

~ lawrencegriffin5 ~ Leave a comment

I’m very bad at keeping up this thing, which was supposed to be a way to keep some interest in my site. But I haven’t had anything published in a while. And when I tried to upload a comedy video it was annoying and I ended up forgetting to follow through. So this all just seems like a pointless internet vanity project right now.

I can’t help it – I just have more fun actually tinkering with creative shit than doing stuff to build up marketing or whatever. I don’t think I’m alone in that.

It’s been a decent life as of late though. I did a few comedy shows – I drove two hours each way for shows two nights in a row, in different cities. It was like it used to be. There’s something fun for me in the long drives, the playing music, the stopping at random gas stations or hotels. It’s an adventure. I would probably get tired of it if I did it for a living month after month.

The world seems to be a bigger place out here (North Carolina, where I live now). In Florida it was literally narrow – you could drive up and down that state, but it was time consuming to go further. I used to work a desk job as a reporter, and I didn’t have time for it then. I could drive up and down Florida, that thin tube of a state, but the rest of the country seemed a big mystery a lot of the time. It’d been a while since I left.

Now I have the range to drive in different directions and potentially enter two or three other states. I visited Colorado last year and am going to Texas this year. It all seems broader now and I think you need that.

I have been reading a bunch of shit all at the same time – Marx’s Capital and a Keith Richards biography are two of them. It’s not so bad. The Marx is really something – he sure has a lot of ideas. I feel like I’m giving myself the forbidden education that was never in the curriculum when I was in school. I got the old fashioned American dogma so I’m going in another direction now. Here’s hoping a bunch of Republican senators don’t find out. The Keith Richards is good too. He’s a strong writer; funny and to the point. Rock stars can occasionally really pull this shit off.

Politics is the same as ever – endless culture wars dominate while the rich get richer. Seems like the status quo. They are talking about a war with Russia now. I’m sure that’s going to be an entirely noble thing, born solely of good will for the underserved people of the Earth. I’m also very glad our military budget is in the hundreds of billions while nobody can afford rent or health care. Great system.

I’ve been thinking more about anger lately. We all have to live in the world, and the last two years if nothing else have spotlighted just how bad a lot of service workers have it. The animosity directed at them. They get the brunt of the anger from short-fused, small-minded idiots and it sucks, because they are just trying to survive. Now, I would occasionally get drunk and send off some kind of angry email to a politician chastising them for being full of shit. But they aren’t reading those emails. The ones who got the brunt of my own wrath were hapless interns or something, also just trying to make a buck. So the anger becomes impotent. If you’re really deserving of that rage, you’re insulated from it. Money can be a buffer in that way and you can go on and do the same horrible shit you were before.

I think there might be a joke in that. This is how I write jokes. I just sort of type out a bunch of stuff and hope a punchline can be gleaned from it like a nugget of gold. It’s a work in progress.

Anyway, this has all been a hodge podge of random thoughts. Here’s some stuff I’ve been enjoying lately:

MOVIES: TITANE was good. Interesting and artsy and vague in the best ways. Art’s supposed to make you feel things and challenge you. This did that.

MUSIC: Right now I am playing the first Jimi Hendrix Experience album. There’s something to the brevity of it all. The simple, direct musicality. He had something to say and he said it. Also been playing some Voivod. Their Post-Society EP is so good. A true free-thinking band.