John Bizarre

I'm sure I've written about it before, but this morning I'll dedicate the next sip of coffee and scratch of the bum to John Bizarre.

John Bizarre, in his current form, is a Las Vegas-based comedian and filmmaker. He also maintains a blog/website at http://www.bizarre.com/blog.html. His writings there slip and slide from the profound to the profane, and rarely miss a chance to be deliberately, almost obsessively silly. While his (two) books are also written without much reverence, these daily writings are what I'd expect in a way: the little building blocks of thought, speculation and everyday happenstance that decay and ferment and give eventual life to the more refined end results that entertain.

My wife and I saw John Bizarre for the first time in Fairfield, California, at a club called Pepperbellys. It was my first real live comedy show after watching stand-up for decades only on television, and John Bizarre was the right comic to jump start the experience.

Anyway, this isn't meant to come off as a creepy memorial, just a nod of gratitude to the universe for bringing back a ray of twice-weekly light for a deskbound office monkey. Bizarre had taken a few years off from social media, and only recently returned from self-imposed exile. Not only has the website been resurrected, but he's got a facebook page, too. It's a real pleasure to see him back online, and on social media again. I dig it.

Keep it moving

Yesterday was a good day. Let's discuss why.

I had the day off, thanks to the ongoing "furlough days" my company has adopted to help address cash flow problems (theirs, not mine). I started the day the same way I start a lot of work-free days: with a feeling of lightness and energy and all the things I want to accomplish buzzing around the inside of my head like houseflies. Often, the first challenge is to corral and list all these ideas before this fleeting clarity of purpose dissipates like (the opposite of) a morning fog.

I compiled an ambitious list of chores, and got started. Early on, it occurred to me that this was a component of my daily head space that I'd forgotten: just "keep it moving." I have lapsed over the past year or two into a very sedentary lifestyle. While adopting a couch potato-like recreational life sounds very relaxing, it's not a satisfying default. From the couch, I can see and imagine all the productive things that need doing. However, my brain has developed some very effective techniques for thwarting such noble impulses.

One such techniques is drinking the beer. Oh, how I enjoy most every sip of beer. But not all of them. If you pay attention to your body chemistry, you can discern a lot about how your body reacts to booze. You get the rush, the gentle euphoria, the energy boost... and then what the good Lord giveth, He also taketh away. What goes up must come down, and as the tide comes in, so it must go out, etcetera. The high is equal to the crash, and there's only so much you can do to ameliorate that equation. If you avoid it altogether, I find that even this fat, oldish body can maintain natural energy for over a surprisingly longer time period. I'd forgotten that.

And so it came to be that after working through the morning, when I prepared myself a cheap but pleasant lamb lunch, I forwent skipped the accompanying wine. Dodged that metabolic bullet!

At the end of the day, I got just over half my list done. Not as much as I hoped, but the results of a genuine effort are hard to feel bad about.

And throughout the day, it dawned upon me increasingly, that just "keeping it moving" is a pretty good ethos to weave into the quilt of my daily operating procedures. It's especially helpful because I can be quick to despair at too many choices, especially when planning my day. For some reason, this mindset helps me keep it positive and light, and not get stuck.

At the end of the day, I wasted spent a considerable period of time playing video games, without a pang of guilt or regret, and I got some good stuff done. A good day.

I still have this thing?

I have the urge to write in this blog, for a few reasons:

• It's a fun way to chronicle my life. There are times when I look back at photos, facebook posts and other digital debris, and it's nice to have these "artifacts," as Joe Crawford calls them. Most of blog-thoughts have evolved into facebook-thoughts, and it's not altogether the best thing. Plus, looking back to see only 3 entries for 2015? That makes me sad, bubba!
• I need conversations to work things out in my head. This blog is nothing so much as a conversation with myself, and helps my "flow."
• I'm finding that free-writing can be good for creativity, and I need help getting some jokes written. There are few things more satisfying to me than putting together a promising new joke.
• And finally, sometimes I really like writing and the things I write. I feel surprisingly unashamed at the sound of my typewritten voice.

On the other hand, I really don't like writing about how I should be writing; it quickly becomes annoyingly self-referential. But, I do like that I've come back here and scratched something on the ol' cave wall. Little steps, little steps...