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colin quinn

I didn’t know what my next blog was going to be about. I had been sitting there thinking about it for the past week. I had just come back from a fucking crazy trip to Iraq and I was so whipped up to write a blog about it. And then my friend Jordy over there at myspace did me a solid and featured my blog on their comedy page. And I just sat back waiting for the blog comments and accolades to come in. I was checking my myspace everyday, like every fucking hour. Who am I kidding? Ok every five minutes. I was checking my myspace waiting for a comment from someone at CNN saying something like, “Hi, my name is Daniel Keller, head editor of CNN online. And I just want to say I have read many blogs on Iraq and you got it. I sent the link to a friend of mine. You may have heard of him, Larry King, and he loved it. He would like to have you on his show, Larry King Live, to talk about your time over there. Would this be something you would be interested in? Let me know.”

It never happened. I don’t think my myspace was working right. I think it was busted. Or maybe no one really liked it. That’s the problem with having a shitty child hood. If my step father Billy Manchington could have told me just a few times, “You’re a really strong, good, smart person and you can do anything you want in life”, and followed up with a huge hug instead of, “Shut the fuck up you dumb shit head cause that’s all you will ever be,” followed by a smack to the head, maybe I would be able to just write something and move on to the next thing and not care what people think about it. I’m not saying that I wrote that last blog so that people would throw me a parade. I’m just saying being on comedy myspace for a week I thought a lot more people would find their way to to my blog and write me and tell me how much they enjoyed it. Or maybe they just didn’t enjoy it. At least that’s what my friend, the legend, Colin Quinn thinks. I think his words were, “ That blog had the humanity of a police blotter”. He said the tone resembled something of a six year olds account of his summer vacation, “And then I went to Vegas. And then I went to Iraq. And then I went in a helicopter. And then I went home. And then I felt good. “ Thats what he said, word for word. I guess I didn’t put enough details in it for him. Like how flying in the black hawk helicopter with the doors open made me feel somewhat invincible. I could remember as a child playing on the swing feeling the same invincibility, as my friend was pushing me harder and harder faster and faster closer to going clean over the swing set. But I didn’t care then. I wasn’t afraid of getting hurt. I new it would be ok because this was what I was supposed to be doing at that very second in my life. It felt right being in that helicopter hanging out the window going 100 miles per hour over the pink dessert sand. Knowing that I would be landing to do what I do best, make America laugh. Maybe I should have explained that a little better. No! You know what? FUUUCCKK HIM!

Now don’t get me wrong; he has a point. And that’s why I love my friends. Because they’re honest with me 100 percent of the time, almost too much. Which leads me to the subject of my next blog: my shitty, although bluntly honest, friends. To be fair, I did start the whole Iraq blog out by saying I’m not a writer. (Which, by the way, was the only part my pal Colin liked) And here I am writing a new blog about the old blog. That says it all right there. I just want to be liked. I want to find some way to reach out to as many people as I can so they can tell me, “Wow, Robert you’re awesome.” I don’t think I’m alone in this desire. I think that’s why everyone creates to begin with. There was some point in my life when everything around me sucked and then I did something creative and I got praise for it. I remember what the exact moment was like for me. I was in second grade. My teacher, Ms. Julian, was kind of a bitch. Hated most things, but she loved art. It was like she turned into a different person when she taught art class. In second grade, you had one teacher for all your classes. There was no switching around classroom to classroom, teacher to teacher. You had that one teacher for the whole year. And if she didn’t like you that whole year was going to suck. And the beginning of second grade was going to suck for me because, you guessed it, Ms Julian did not like me. But one day she gave us this art assignment. We had to draw an animal of our choice. I was excited about this kind of homework. It was so much better than fucking history, which as I would find out later in life, was pretty much all bullshit. Well not all bullshit but they left a few things out. Like maybe the part about black people existing prior to 1970. And Indians getting raped and killed for their land, shit like that. Like instead of a cornucopia we put on the thanksgiving table , why not have an Indians severed head drinking a jug of rice whisky. That would have been a little more historically accurate. Anywho, I digress.

I got home and started on my dog drawing. My mother saw what I was doing and came over to lend a hand. My mother was a very creative person herself. She might have been an artist or something. But she got knocked up at 15 with my sister so that big old bucket of old placenta juice put out that fire. She had to get a job and take care of my sister. Now if I were doing math homework she would have left me alone. There has been no record of any kid showing off a well-done math paper and people crowding around it with amazement. “Wow! Did you do that yourself? I love the plus and minus signs and the way they are perfectly in line with one another!” But you draw or paint something half decent and people love looking at it. How many times have you seen someone painting on the street and you have to walk by and see if they’re any good? Most of the time they suck and they’re just going through a mid- life crisis. But its still cool to see someone being creative. Now me and my mom are both sitting there together. Which to me was amazing. My mom never had time to sit with me. I was always alone. But now, I had found something that got me attention.

(Cut to 37 years later me out side the comedy cellar after a show getting compliments from strangers about how funny I was. )

So me and my mother drew this dog. It was a Great Dane. It came out fucking unbelievable. It looked like a real artist drew it. Definitely not a second grader. I brought it in to class the next day and Ms Julian flipped out. I instantly became her favorite student. She took me class to class to show me off like her little fake prodigy to all the other students and teachers. It was amazing. I went from being the dumb shit to the star pupil in one day because of one stupid dog drawing. I was a superstar. My whole inner feeling about myself changed. I felt proud, confident and most of all happy. Wow, what a thing to learn at such a young age: If you make other people happy you can feel happy. Sound familliar? I would go on for the next 30 years doing the same thing over and over. So let me get this straight. If other people like you, you feel good? You don’t have to learn to like yourself. Just get other people to like you and it feels just as good even if its only temporary? It was still easier than learning to like myself which at that age was a concept I had no idea even existed. That would have been my parents job to teach me. Instead I was taught to draw a fucking dog and hope people liked it.

Years later, on my way to college to pursue a degree in fine arts I found that dog drawing. And I also found out that my mother had done most of the drawing. Sure I had colored inside the lines a little but my mom did 90% of the drawing that I had based my whole artistic career on. Here I was headed to art school based on a drawing I never did!! Based on forgery. I was never that good to begin with. It was me trying to do something that felt good based on what other people thought. I later took an improv class and then did a talent show which eventually led me to explore stand-up comedy. And again, for the first 15 years I did it for the praise. For me, only in the last three years have I started trying to be as honest as I can and not care as much about what other people think. I think it’s only at that point that you are a real good stand up or, for that matter, a good creative anything. The day you just do it and not think about how it’s going to be received or if people will like it. Some people just start off that way doing what they think is good. Some people have to learn that. Now I’m not saying you shouldn’t want people to like what you do. You should. But it shouldn’t be the foundation of your creative process. There are always going to be people who hate what you do for no reason what so ever. (And all those people should die speedily of Brazilian AIDS.) But those peopl shouldn’t stop you from doing what you want. You never know where anything is going to lead you. In some fucked up way, my mom drawing that dog for me led me to doing stand up. And stand up led me to writing this blog so there you go.

It’s 4 AM. I have to film another episode of Law and Order tomorrow (shameless plug) and I’m up trying to explain my old blog. Just one hug and some words of encouragement from my shitty step- father Billy and maybe I would be writing about the political landscape and how it affects our country. Maybe, I wouldn’t be trying to justify what a low self esteemed cunt I am.

Thanks Billy. No, really, thank you for being such an abusive fuckface. I would be were I am today.