Life, the Longest Con

When this is all over there will be a rush to the bottom — of a glass, of an ass, of a bowl. It won’t really be over, but we’ll want it to be, we’ll tell ourselves we deserve it to be, and so for all intents and purposes it will. There will be binges, there will be orgies, there will be decadence. 

I will, as always, remain on the periphery. 

If there is one thing I know about Americans it is that they hate to wait. If there are two things I know about Americans it is that they hate to wait and they love to reward themselves for doing the bare minimum.  

Side Note: Lest you accuse me of not being American, I just used some of my stimulus check to buy a used Leica off eBay. The excuse I gave myself for making such a seemingly frivolous purchase was, naturally, the “difficulty” of plodding through this past year and my desire to return to the comfort of one of my dearest hobbies, that being taking unflattering pictures of people without their knowledge or consent. As America will soon become Caligula, my work will be cut out for me. 

It’s not as though I don’t understand restlessness. It’s not as though I don’t understand wanting. Everyone I know is still so frustrated by time, but for the past year it is all we’ve had, an endless void of interchangeable hours. I have become used to every day being essentially the same. It suits me, actually. The longer things are the same, the more patient I become. I don’t want to return to wanting. 

Because the less you care about something, the less power it has over you. Allowing want to overtake your mind and hijack your ability to appreciate what exists in the now renders you powerless, betrothed to the whims of something beyond your control. Being stuck in your apartment doesn’t make you powerless. Caring about being stuck in your apartment, however, does. 

For one calendar year there has been little else to do in my “leisure” hours than sit and think. I suppose I could have ignored the tedium of certain death-imposed isolation — I suppose I could have toured tertiary markets, maskessly performing in comedy clubs in flyover states — but I don’t harbor the delusion that the world needs my unique and irreverent take on this crazy thing called life so bad I’m willing to put the lives of others in jeopardy in order to pursue talking for a living.

Side Note: Most of the comics who engaged in this behavior were already gainfully employed in the growth industry that is talking for a living, playing “devil's advocate” on their interchangeably inane, lib-baiting podcasts, but I digress.

Side Note to the Side Note: Just kidding, I never would have been able to tour tertiary markets. I’m a woman.

All this sitting and thinking has generated a list of things I no longer care about. Said list includes:

Money

Success 

Resenting my parents

Appearing smart

Being alone 

It may still not be safe to leave my apartment but I nevertheless feel freer than I did last March 14th. Time has made all this possible. 

And besides, “it” never happens when you want it to. It happens when you need it to. I realized that, too, as soon as I stopped caring. 

Yesterday afternoon I walked, as I am wont to do, in the hills of a neighborhood I could never afford to occupy. In my left hand was a cigarette; in my right, a plastic cup filled with purloined flowers pruned from the landscaping of homeowners. “Y’know that cat you scared off when you drove up?” I asked my friend. “The one who almost let me touch it?” She nodded. “I think it’s trying to communicate with me,” I said. She took this absurd statement on its face, presumably because I had also just told her to “open [herself] up to the universe” in regards to finding a new apartment. 

The cat, a stringy, mangy stray, has been leaving gifts directly below the chair where I write, the chair in which I sit writing this right now. The first was a mouse, palm-sized and the color of brown sugar. The second was a bird, perfectly preserved with the exception of a bite in the torso. I didn’t mind scooping them up and placing them in the garbage, though I do hope the elderly woman who digs through it looking for cans doesn’t stumble upon their eviscerated corpses. 

The cat knows I’m lonely. The cat’s lonely, too. Hence the gifts. 

One thing about starting comedy late, having squandered the majority of my 20s on drinking 24-racks of Rolling Rock and watching “Blind Date” at 3AM, is that many of my contemporaries are younger than I; even though they’ve spent less time on this Earth, time by and large remains the bane of their existences. They are frustrated by this impotent year and its inability to get them closer to what they want.

One friend is ceaselessly frustrated by her inability to find an appropriate partner on a litany of fuck apps. “I was being beaten when I was your age,” I tell her. This never makes her feel better, though it should. 

The first time I met the man I thought I would marry at the Silverlake Lounge I was in a bad way — in the throws of being beaten by the beatener. I walked offstage and out the door and this man followed, running down the sidewalk to tell me how much he liked my set. I needed an out and I got it and he got one too, moving into my studio apartment in lieu of returning to his charmless home state after he lost his job. We dated and were happy until one of us (I can never remember which) asked the other “This is over, right?” and the other agreed and that was that. We still talk every day. I call him King. He calls me Queen. It’s not weird. 

The second time I met the man I thought I would marry at the Silverlake Lounge I was in a less bad way, the sort of bad in which you have become complacent with the encroaching darkness, rendering you too oblivious to know how bad you, in fact, have it. He had come to see me perform because another comedian I respected had vouched for me in some obscure publication. I’d never met him even though we had numerous mutual friends; I’d never met him even though my car was once used in a music video for his band. In the video itself, I am laying in the back seat of the car as it travels down the highway, instructing the driver in which direction he should steer. You cannot see me but I am there, in much the same way I, for years, never met the man who, independent of all this, chose to be one of ten attendees of a show in which my friend and I literally just talked for an hour. If I close my eyes I can still remember the specific wattage of the bulb illuminating him when I told him this, how his eyes got wide but the whites of them looked yellow. The relationship that ensued eventually soaked the bed in piss but it helped at the time — helped me realize how miserable I actually was, helped me learn and grow and all that garbage — and I remain grateful for the cosmic coincidence that instigated it. I am alone now, but I am not hopeless. 

Because that’s the thing about the universe: You have no idea when it will decide to throw you a fucking bone, be it figurative or literal. Trying to force it to bend to your will is only an exercise in frustration. 

So stop wanting and start accepting. It gives until you don’t need it anymore. A primary part of getting on the ride is waiting in line.