UPCOMING EVENTS

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The Failure Pile In The Sadness Bowl

One of my Xmas presents from The Wife was "222," a 2-disc set of an uncut live set by Patton Oswalt that was edited down for his album "Feelin' Kinda Patton". Oswalt is my latest Comedic Man Crush. I get one every 18 months or so. And like real-world crushes, it doesn't come out of nowhere. It's more like, there's that one chick you see in the hallway at school a lot, one that you figure "Yeah, she seems pretty cool," but you don't spare too much thought for. Then one day you have to work on a biology class project and the floodgates erupt. OH MY GOD WHERE DOES SHE LIVE DOES SHE HAVE A BOYFRIEND WE ARE GOING TO GO TO THE PROM AND ONE DAY HAVE BABIES TOGETHER IN A LOG CABIN ON THE MOON.

I'd seen Patton Oswalt on TV for years, doing this and that, and I always thought he was funny. I knew he was kinda tight with David Cross and Jon Benjamin, two of my previous Comedic Man Crushes, or at least from the same School Of Funny. I didn't seek him out, but if I saw him on TV while flipping through the channels, I'd tune him in. What really pushed me over the edge, however, was when I was working a magazine publishing job I didn't particularly like. I didn't particularly like this job because said job required ungodly hours. Like, 10 in the morning until 3 in the morning the next day.

I'm sorry to be so vague. I'd rather not name the players and risk getting sued. Suffice to say, the magazines in question focused on celebrity hijinks. So whenever Britney squeezed out another bratling or Lindsey Lohan showed up somewhere with a sweaty snortful, a new EXCLUSIVE with pixelated cell phone pics would have to be shoved into the layout. Editors were constantly rewriting stories and hunting down grainy paparazzi photos. It cost the company tens of thousands of dollars for every half hour the magazine was late getting to the printer, but The Alimighty Scoop trumped The Almighty Dollar. I could do my job completely the way it was supposed to be done, but if Jessica Simpson looked at someone funny, I was gonna work into the wee hours regardless.

Why would I take such a job? Glad you asked. The reasons are (A) It paid well, though that turned out to be little compensation for my loss of a life outside of work, and (B) They straight-up lied about the hours. I don't mean they hemmed and hawed or were purposefully non-specific. I mean, they did not tell the truth. I was told the typical work day was 10 to 7, and I almost balked at that. I worked those hours once, on my first day. When a potential employer asks you in an interview if you can do overtime, you say yes, of course. You figure "overtime" means "occasionally work past normal business hours when called upon to do so," not "spend every waking moment of your existence chained to a light table helping retouch badly taken photos of Angelina Jolie ".

At the time I was working this job, my father was dying. And he was dying halfway around the world. In a typical Dad move, though he had been given a short while to live, he decided to take a contract to work in Nepal. Just let that sink in for a while. Got it? Okay, so he fell terminally ill in Nepal. Since my mother and him had divorced, I became de facto next of kin. In other words, it was my job to get him back home. So I was constantly calling the American Embassy in Nepal and the company he was working for to help get him back to the States. Let's just say that air travel and customs become much more complicated when a person changes over from passenger to cargo.

In America, even if you don't have insurance, a hospital will treat you first and bill you later. In Asia, they do things differently. I started receiving really nasty calls from the hospital where my father was staying, demanding payment, basically threatening to pull the plug on him. And they didn't like hearing that I didn't have two cents to rub together. Even if I had sent them every dime I had, it wouldn't have paid for half of his hospital stay. Thanks to his company and the embassy, I managed to set up a medical evacuation, but the hospital refused to release him until they got a little down payment.

My troubles with the hospital were compounded by the language barrier and thick accents that prevented me from truly understanding the doctors I spoke to. Also, said doctors' assessments of my father's condition seemed to change by the minute. One second he was walking towards the light, the next he was ready to run a marathon, depending on who I talked to, and when. Imagine getting in a cab and trying to decipher the questions the driver asks you. Now imagine that if you answer wrong, instead of arriving late to wherever you're going, someone will die.

So all these things are going on while I'm trapped at a job I shouldn't have taken in the first place. I feel utterly trapped and helpless in every aspect of my life, in and out of work. I don't sleep when I get off of work because, thanks to the time difference, 1-9 in the morning EST was when things were happening in Nepal. And if I nodded off for 3 seconds, my phone would start vibrating, and I'd find myself talking to yet another heartless asshole halfway around the world asking for money I didn't have.

My only escapes were the TVs in the office. Televisions were stationed all over the floor; during the day, they were tuned to CNN or E! in order to get the latest celeb news. At night, the helpless proles left in the office would turn to the Mets or Yankees game. During these idle hours, waiting on an editor, anticipating bad news from 6000 miles away, I focused on baseball. It was cathartic--baseball was the one thing I could yell and get pissed off about, and devote far too much mental energy to, that at the end of the day wouldn't actually impact me in a negative way.

The problem was, there was only 3 hours or so of Mets a night. So once their game was over, I'd switch over to one of the West Coast games on ESPN. "Wow, Padres vs. Diamondbacks!" But most nights, I'd be in the office well past the end of these games, too. So it was a mad scramble to find something to occupy my brain that didn't have anything to do with money or death or Nicole Richie.

While trapped there late one night, post-Mets, post-West Coast, waiting to be given the signal to go home, I came upon Patton Oswalt's half-hour comedy special (not "No Reason to Complain," which hadn't been made yet). Seeing something so god damn funny, at a moment when I felt so miserable, was truly uplifting. For whatever reason, I remember losing my mind over his bit about Piss Drinkers ("My grandfather had a dream..."). I mean, like breathless laughter that I had to explain to my sleep-deprived co-workers. How do you tell your co-workers you're losing your shit over an imagined chewing-out delivered by the editor of a fetish magazine?

Patton caught me right when I was at my most vulnerable, so I've got kind of a Stockholm Syndrome thing going on with him right now. Which is fine, since that's how most of my relationships have started anyway.

Post-holidays, I put "222" on my iPod so I could listen to it on my way to work. I've been listening to it constantly, to the exclusion of everything else, because I need a few laughs during the morning commute. It's even supplanted my constant listening to old Jean Shepherd shows and archived Mets playoff games from 1999/2000. For whatever bizarro reason, I don't want to listen to music on my iPod anymore. Only words. I don't know what this means.

Inevitably, I'll hear something on "222" that cracks me up, even though I've listened to the whole thing 1800 times already. My first impulse is to stifle myself, because I think that someone laughing to himself, even while wearing the quite visible white iPod headphones, looks insane. But then I think, keeping yourself from laughing looks as weird as keeping yourself from sneezing. Maybe it's best just to let go. Usually, I don't commit to one or the other. I just let go with a half-laugh/half-suppressed laugh, which probably looks craziest of all.

I swear I'm getting weird looks from my fellow commuters every day. Then again, maybe that's because they can hear lines like "And you ASSHOLES are RAPING HIS CORPSE! " trailing from my headphones.

Posted 01.11.07 10:09pm * Permalink

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