Day Dream Job

I always have loved stand-up comedy. Some of my earliest memories are seeing Steve Martin, arrow through his head, goofin' it up on stage and watching a room full of adults cracking up about it. The people on TV were loving him. He looked like he was loving it right back. That looked like a lot of fun. It wired me, perhaps, to "get" comedy. It tuned my Sense of Humor. Like how blindness accentuates the other senses, or a how dullness of taste excites one's love of Daughtry's music or buffet dining when not in Vegas, my Sense of Humor has always been prominent.

What the hell does it matter? Why pursue COMEDY as a hobby, career, second job, or passion? To make people laugh? I don't like people all that much, in a general sense. As dumb as I project most of them to be, almost every audience I've performed in front of has been nearly 100% people. And I'm supposed to make THEM laugh? They expect me to give them some sort of levity from an existence that is routine, by rote, a rut from their mid-twenties until they go cold and limp in a chair 4 years and one Easter dinner after retiring from Accounts Receivable. And honestly, who deserves it more than them?

I pursue comedy for the same reason some people pursue celebrity cupcake-making, or giving it their all as a Real Housewife on TV.... they have bills to pay and demand attention.

I kid.

I can't NOT be funny. At work, in line for coffee, on the phone with a customer service rep (even if English is one of their top two languages), with doctors... Funny happens with me. And I feel blessed to be able to do what I do, get paid for it, enjoy it, and have strangers enjoy it, also. It's not always great.
Sometimes it sucks. Sometimes I hit a stage without any energy at all and have to be professionally pushing myself to be a bit louder and more animated until I finally HIT with the audience. Non-comedians know it as "every single day." But it is my passion and I can't NOT do it. I no longer question "why" our society - American, that is - has shows that embrace what seem to be waste-of-time pursuits, either. I get it.

Honestly, do we need a SINGLE show on TV, paid-for by advertising and cable bills, that solves the ages-old dilemma of whose group is the most dynamic at dancing? DANCING. If it keeps the kids off the streets and out of malls, great. And they love it. Perhaps they'll learn to appreciate other people's creative passions and shut the fuck up at a comedy club and not send useless text messages while the comedian is talking about how dumb young people are.

But the other part is that until it all clicks, The Passion pays dick. Especially if you're married and have a kid and a mortgage and other things you wanna do. While those inspire comedy, and work, and love, and provision, and Life, they also require a finely-tuned management of schedule that usually escapes most comedians. I've been a lazy joke-sack for a couple of months. And that's not something I love about comedy. It doesn't need me as much as I need it. Until I go to an open mic and hope the audience doesn't think comedy doesn't need me. Because, wow, some people are better off just judging comedy instead of doing it.

Take Me Home
My Blog About My Dad


MC, HOST, CORPORATE, COMEDY, SEATTLE, GEOFF, LOTT

Workin' Out

It's been well over a year since I last swung a picture badge past a security box to enter a building. During an interview last year in California, a young recruiter was confounded that I had not been employed for over 5 months. Her exact question was...

"I notice, like... quite a gap in your employment here. What happened with that?"

I won't read into what EXACTLY she was getting at, because I'm likely too smart to be able to. Her tone wasn't one of earnest discovery as much as accusatory anticipation. BUT, I think what she meant was "Why aren't you working when it appears that you (me) had a great job with AT&T?"

There are a few ways to answer this, but only 2 true ones. If you want to know them, you have to either be interviewing me or a dear friend. The casual conversation may only be bogged down while you wait on that $1 worth of a $5 sandwich comin' through the broiler. So, the WHY and WHAT of my employment gap is for me to know and for you to offer me the chance to show you why I'm a great hire to find out. For the record, I was not fired from my position with AT&T. I haven't been fired from a job since college, and it was completely the right thing to do, because nobody's going to believe you when the other guy in the clown suit has a bloody nose and won't stop crying.

Let's not forget that a LOT of very smart, capable, and considerably less-handsome people have been out of work for quite some time due to A MASSIVE ECONOMIC DUMP taken under the guise of "bad lending practices." Lest we forget, there are plug-ins and WiFi capabilities in any number of COFFEE SHOPS within a few miles of your home, 12-step meeting, dog's groomer, and office. How did we ever lose productivity? That's a question to post on your FaceBook profile, I s'pose.

And what transpired between the day I left until now, where the "gap" could have been filled in with money and $ecurity and routine the ribaldry of "Employee Recognition Day: You Work Here, Right? Have A Muffin!" , well... like, I wouldn't trade it for the world.

But seriously, somebody's about to hire a freakishly capable Business Analyst. Like... yeah.

2010 - The Year I Told You So

Why are we making resolutions?
A recent study by the American Institute of Studies & Results resulted in a study that showed Resolutions aren't as valuable as PRINCIPLES. My principles can't be broken. I have exhibited a certain "Principle Flexibility" from time to time, but NEVER have I gone so far as to call the police when it was something I could handle myself. Which is why I invested time and money into learning non-lethal trapping techniques.

But there are goals I do have for the year. Broken down to a smaller basis, it's more of a week-to-week thing for me. Listing them here would be silly, narcissistic, and dissipating of their energy. But when you see my new hairstyle, oh... you'll know we're on the Path, friends.

I see a change happening, however. It may be that I'm entrenched in my mid-30s with a warehouse of possibilities in front of me. But I do see more people extending small courtesies to each other. After a year in Los Angeles the opening of a door for a stranger there was met with a moment of pause as if their exit was to be met with a "LOOK AT MY SCRIPT!" Nothing seemed Free. Everybody expected somebody to want something from them. And guess what? KINDNESS IS FREE. Merging without a blinker, however, is for animal abusers.

2010 is going to be whatever you want it to be. Stop listening to reports of Economic Anemia, Stolen Organs, and Terror, Terror!, TERROR! Be the kind of Person you'd want to hang out with. Show Compassion. Let the Poo River flow under your Serenity Bridge. And stop reading "The Secret."



Take Me Home

My Blog About My Dad

Better, Closer, Funnier

Last night I tripped northward with Todd Sawyer to check out a room he's been working with, the Ventura Harbor Comedy Club. I went for a number of reasons, most of them centered around my genuine personal growth that happens every time I'm around Todd. He has been endlessly rooting for me for years now, since I first worked with him at the Underground in Seattle. Todd's a smart, paced, calculatedly hilarious comedian, and on the grander scale, he's under 6-foot and tromps daily on size-13's. The guy's kind of a freak, but he's got basketball skillz, from what I've heard. And he bought me a footlong.

The first time I saw Todd in 2003, long after he'd started throwing show-closing heat on the regular, I re-realized that there is a place for smart comedy. It first hit me when I saw Joe Vespaziani in 2000, that comedy is not ONLY a fake, manufactured energy propping-up a soul-dead thrice-divorced "Veteran," hacking their way through local references and built-in applause breaks ("How many y'all got kids? Applaud if ya got kids, I got kids, who got kids?"). Todd's help in Los Angeles, and even before, when I was drifting my way into the Seattle Comedy Competition Finals in 2007. (p.s. Los Angeles doesn't give a SHAYT 'bout it.) And his advice has only ever helped me correct my direction. Especially when I talk with my wife about "What is next."

So I get up there and got a lucky spot, in that another comic didn't show up to do this taping for a local TV station. Boom, got 10min at the front. I reacquainted with Courtney Cronin, met Marla Schultz, dug the set of Dante, and talked more with Todd over the 6 hours we spent in the car yesterday. Y'ever feel like you grew so much in a short time you just go quiet in contemplation? It hit me last night on the way home...

This is closer to the stuff I moved here to do. Progression, growth, career on FORWARD. The leap was taken, the net may not have appeared yet, but that's because I'm in the freefall. And when you're in FreeFall, the key is to not keep looking for the splashdown.

The key is to turn your fall into a stylish dive. Flips, turns, back-saults, fireworks.

And when you accept your rewards, thank the good people who helped you in public, then party it up with them in private. Watches will be purchazzed.

Take Me Home

My Blog About My Dad

Blog 600! Gotta Do What Ya Gotta Do

There was a time when I thought to myself, "there's no way he's going to make it to the next rooftop." He did, by the way. I still can't believe he did, but squirrels are very athletic, with high degrees of Athleticism, which is a word a sportscaster made up to sound as though he had a high level of intelligism.

Life, as I've learned, is not a lineal path from Point A (your mother's "baby garden") to Point B (3rd Grade) to Point C (Cryogenic Head Reanimation). Oh no, it's not. It's lot of twists and turns. Like a river, filled with some rocks, some rolls, some backfat, some babyPhat, and some bodies. And I'm the water. In MY life, I mean, I'm the water, you are your own water.

Whatever it is you're planning on doing, stop planning and start doing. PLanning is NOT work, mmkay? It's been documented frequently - and perhaps to my detriment - on how many issues I had in corporative Americanus. Meetings, for one, were rarely places that work got done. They usually set up other meetings because some dipshit who called the meeting "Necessary" didn't make it. Likely in another meeting about their love of eating crapwiches and mustard shakes.

I now embrace my personality and creativity. For a looooooooong time - longer for my teachers - I was told to sit on those things, take them outside, or disallow their development. Well, NOW, I get to use them as a way to make money. A lot of money, I hope. Money's just a tool to build other things with, don't frown upon my desire to prosper and develop a robot to crush the dreams of my foes. Both of them.

So whatever it is that feeds your Zen belly, get the heaping handfuls you want and cram them inna yo face. I, at times, have to remind myself that "this is water," for you D.F. Wallace fans, and that I'm where I'm s'posed to be at this point in life. No, the money's not rolling in right now. There aren't agents knocking at my door. I don't have a big deal to sign tomorrow morning. These aren't things to discourage me, however. These are MOTIVATORS. And if I do what I'm supposed to do, which is different for everyone, then it will happen. And if it doesn't, so help me Bob Bledsoe, I will call a meeting.

Take Me Home

My Blog About My Dad