Hey ladies, I’m sure you won’t mind if I tell you I’ve been eavesdropping on your little investment club, and I have to tell you it’s really inspiring that you gals are trying to learn the stock market. You know, it can be very tricky –

Hey, I didn’t interrupt you so please don’t talk over me, that’s pretty rude. Anyway, I couldn’t help seeing on your sign that you call yourselves “The Women in Professional Stockbroking Meetup”. That’s cute, but how about something a little more fun, like “Invest-WO-ments” or “The Devil Shares Prada” or something like that.

I’m sure you don’t mind I’m joining you, because if you did I would have heard you say something. Exactly, like “Please leave”. Right, “Get away from us you creep,” is another great example of what I didn’t hear you say. Anyway, I don’t know how much experience your little sewing circle has with Wall Street. Oh, all of you? Like penny stocks, or…?

Oh, you all work on the Street. I guess these firms need secretaries and what not. That’s something fun to do until you snag a rich husband from among your coworkers on the trading floor. See? I bet she married her boss. Oh, you’re the boss? I bet you are. You mean he’s a literal subordinate? I bet he is!

Anyway, if you just want to invest for fun, I recommend starting with a newer tech company. Sure, you might be tempted to invest in a “brand name” you’ve seen around the house like Procter & Gamble, or Johnson & Johnson. But let’s be honest, those industries, soap, band-aids, medicine, they’re all very volatile. All it takes is a competitor coming up with a robot maid – I bet you’d love that! - or a cure for split ends or whatever you ladies need, and those companies are out of business.

Yes, I suppose you can record me with your phone if you want. You’re right, it is easier than taking notes. Anyway, what you want to do is invest in an industry with long-term potential. For instance, I just got off a chat with my AI investment counselor at the Breaking Wall Street app and the word he’s hearing is that there’s a hot new company out of Georgia that manufactures AI-powered kitchen appliances.

Of course you can ask a question! No, he isn’t on Wall Street, he’s on r/WallStreet, the subreddit full of highly successful amateur investors.

No, not Georgia the state, Georgia the country, where a lot of the best computer programmers out of the eastern former Soviet bloc live. They helped develop the Khlam 100, a competitor to the MacBook before all those fires that killed their customers.

Why is she giggling?

Right, I’m not like those other guys who explains things to women in their field of expertise. I’m really glad you recognized that. I’m kind of like a feminist, not like a radical “Let’s burn everything down and fire men for making jokes” feminist. I like to think of most women as something like my equals.

Anyway, as I was explaining, this company’s hot. Like, “their warehouse caught fire” hot. Don’t worry, the Georgia politsiya did a full investigation and it turned out not to be insurance fraud, but the guy who runs it now has additional capital to invest in stage 3 of appliance development. These are going to connect to the Internet with the help of superfast wires that plug directly in. It’s a feature unavailable to our modern laptops running on American wifi.

And get this, his company Khlam Shell Corporation, is on the market for only fifty cents a share. It’s going to be the new AMC! Where did my AI counselor get his info? No, not the Wall Street Journal. Not the Motley Fool, either. I’ll give you a hint of two words and two words only: Joe Rogan.

“Do I help other women in professional fields?” It’s not a woman thing, I help everyone. I had a doctor’s appointment yesterday, and the nurse thanked me for all the help I was giving her operating the blood pressure cuff and digital thermometer and so on.

I’m sorry you’re leaving so soon, and yeah, I’d be happy to let you “tag” me in a video on Instagram or whatever. I’m NiceGuyDontKnowWhy02. And slide into my DMs, I’d be happy to give you more money tips.

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In addition to being America’s most successful writer of the modern era, Stephen King is its most prolific. The master of suspense and horror for the past half of a century, King has written, or been responsible for, a hundred stone cold classics in novels, film, and television, many of them stories of common, blue-collar hard-working bestselling authors who just happen to be thrown into extraordinary situations.

However, he has also been responsible for some stinkers. Here then is a celebration of King’s five worst works:

5. “Jury Duty” (short story) (1992)

Barry Garibaldi is your average working class New Englander who just published his seventh novel in a series about a lawyer-turned-detective who wins cases by solving them. When Garibaldi ends up sequestered in a case where a sports hero is accused of murdering his wife, the evidence against the athlete seems pretty straightforward.

However, he overhears the athlete in the elevator tell his attorney that if he’s found guilty, everyone on the jury dies. Now in his spare time, Garibaldi has to fabricate and plant evidence to prove the athlete innocent.

4. Professor Know-It-All (novel) (2007)

The protagonist of this 1400-page novel is John; no last name ever given, also the other two main characters are named Joan (his twin sister), and Father John (no relation). John works at the Castle Rock Community College as an adjunct professor, teaching a course called “The Mechanics of Writing Novels.”

John’s least-favorite student writes a well-received horror novel that accidentally contains real instructions on awakening an ancient God living underneath the town’s sewage treatment plant. Now John has to deal with this disrespectful young author who ignores all his sage advice while battling a menace that literally spews shit wherever it goes.

3. Late With My Coffee (episode of Tales from the Darkside) (1985)

In this 22-minute episode, Frank McHankprank is an insurance salesman who is celebrating the publication of his bestselling instructional book, Sell Like Your Life Depends on It. Unfortunately, most of the book was stolen from a never-finished manuscript by his mentor Stan O’Flanderhan, who gained his incredible sales abilities by making a deal with the Devil.

The entire episode takes place in real time at a diner booth as O’Flanderhan tricks McHankprank into signing a contract giving over his soul in exchange for Stan’s. The entire episode was also written in a diner booth in twenty-two minutes while King waited for his waitress to come with a refill of coffee.

2. The Basement is Flooded (miniseries) (1997)

A bestselling author of horror comics named Mike Prince wakes up one morning to find an evil eldritch witch has cursed him, breaking all the pipes in his basement. The Plumber, a shapeshifting demon, is the only being that can repair these pipes, but it’s going to cost him dearly.

The only way Prince can break the spell these evil creatures have on his basement is to spend the weekend delivering a four-episode miniseries to ABC in the hopes that they hand him enough sacks of cash that he can then burn them in a ceremony that will ward off all aquatic evil.

1. Maximum Overdrive (movie written and directed by King) (1986)

When a bestselling novelist accidentally becomes a Hollywood player by allowing his books to be turned into some of the greatest films of their era, he accidentally snorts an evil demon up his nose that convinces him that he should write and direct his own work into movie form himself.

It’s terrible, and also for what it is, it’s actually a lot of fun.

When I first launched this Substack, I called it “Sorry I Haven’t Posted
In A While.” It was a joke about early 2000s blogs, and how that was the most common way that posts started as people’s lives got busy and the deadline grindstone of their blog wore away at their joy of writing.

I changed it to, “Write, Liam!”, because I decided to use it as a tool to hold myself accountable for sticking to a deadline and producing pretty much anything. Good, bad, serious, funny, it hasn’t mattered as long as it’s finished.

When art becomes a job, the relationship to it changes. And when there’s little or no pay, there tends to be a degree of resentment or cynicism around it. There’s a tendency among comedians who achieve a degree of success to deprecate the work. I’ve certainly been guilty of falling into that trap. I don’t want to make that mistake with this blog.

All of this is a way of prefacing this statement: Sorry I missed my Monday post. Although my Substack has a smaller readership than most, I take my relationship with those of you who subscribe just as seriously.

I’m turning 50 next week, and I’ve been undergoing the big assessment men my age go through. What did I do right? What mistakes do I regret? What happened to the big dreams and goals of my youth? What are these smaller pleasures that have gradually replaced them?

This year I got my bachelor’s degree – meaning that I now have a piece of paper that says that I am officially a bachelor of the arts, which I believe is how newspaper columnists of the 1950s referred to Liberace.

The irony is, I actually worked my way through school as a freelance comedy writer, and now that I’ve graduated and am ready for a full-time gig – there are none. So I’m producing spec work a handful of people will read — working twice as hard as I would at any actual job — to prove that I can do the work that no one’s currently offering.

This year also marked my 30^th anniversary of doing standup comedy, and my 29^th doing it professionally. The story of being 20 years old and bombing all over the East Coast and Midwest as part of the You Laugh You Lose Comedy Game Show Tour is one for a different post, but needless to say that my life has consistently been an adventure and I’m grateful for every day.

So, what is the point? I am exhausted dear reader, and I am introspective, and I am frankly overwhelmed at the amount of work ahead of me. I am at an age where my peers are winding down their careers, and I am just ramping up.

There’s a famous F. Scott Fitzgerald saying about there being no second acts in American lives. I have found that not only is this not true, but like Shakespeare’s Hamlet, I am now entering my fifth act. And like the melancholy Dane, I’ve had a long and bloody journey to this, the point where the action really starts. Hopefully it ends with fewer bodies on the floor.

So I must ask you to forgive me if this summer there are weeks when this Substack feels a little more low-effort than usual. I promise to be back to my usual no-effort writing schedule soon.

So it was in New York City back in the olden hairy husky days of the early Millennium, oh my Best Beloved, these of course being the dark days before Social Media. The Man Child - being a primitive, backwards sort - used his Cell Phone for making calls, and the Phone Company charged him by the Minute.

On occasion the primitive Man Child left his musty moss-covered cave and found himself caught away from his computer. And then, my Best Beloved, he and his friends had to check their email at gathering spots called Internet Cafes. And in these old cold shivery days before the world was lit by the fiery glow of the ever-present Screens there was a method of sharing very important information called the Newspaper. It gathered very important News stories in one collection of printed pages much like the News Feed of today, only these very important News stories were not allowed to be posted unless they had been verified as true.

And in this Newspaper there was a section called “The Classifieds.” And in The Classifieds you could find tiny little bug-size advertisements for everything, from Jobs to Housing to a Willing Sexual Partner. And even though these ads were tiny, my Best Beloved, they were powerful, for it was the money that people paid to place these ads that paid the salaries of many of the Journalists who wrote the very important News Articles that filled the rest of the paper. And so, it is in The Classified Section of a once-mighty Newspaper called The Village Voice that our story truly begins…

Back in the 2000s, I found myself between jobs. I had done two seasons on a Vh1 pop culture show, and I was three months away from landing a full-time writing job.

And so I did what we used to do in the olden days before LinkedIn and its AInspirational Stories®, when the world was green and your humble narrator had two good knees. I consulted the HELP WANTED section of the Voice.

In my personal opinion, the “Help” that was wanted by many of the people who placed the ads were either psychiatric (seeing as many of the people who placed “Rock Star Wanted” ads were pure d nuts) or legal (judging by the many interviews for scam jobs/pyramid schemes I ended up on).

I found an ad though, whose headline read, “Reference Verifiers Wanted.” Now, if you ever looked for work in New York City at that time, you know exactly the ad I’m talking about. It was in the Voice longer than those “escort” ads in the back. I’d always been curious, but I’d never applied because it didn’t even give you a phone number, just an address to apply in person five days a week.

But basic cable pop culture commentary didn’t make enough money to build a solid nest egg with, and I had my rent coming up, so I figured, “Can I afford to be so snobbish? Goldman Sachs ain’t exactly knocking down my door with executive positions. What could I lose?” So I packed my resume and a sack lunch and made my way to 8th Ave. in the thirties.

I was a young comedian in New York at the tail end of an era when a young broke creative could still afford to live, if not terribly well. I had started at Queens College at the same time I had started at open mics, and had dropped out after a semester and a half to go on a tour. Since then, I had taken a mix of good jobs that I found personally and creatively satisfying, interspersed with crappy disposable jobs I could drop any time I got something better.

If I had to describe my resume in terms of the sort of book review you’d find in, say, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, it would be: “A fantastic work of ‘historic fantasy,’ that blends true events with fantastic flights of fancy.” Yes, there were a couple of small lies in there, like “Hey, I graduated college.” Again, this was before the Age of the Internet, when you could still lie about your past. Now you have to spend a full decade artfully constructing that lie over multiple platforms.

I want you to picture me walking up a flight of stairs, grasping a handrail that had chipped over decades of use but had been recently varnished to what seemed an approximation of the wood’s original dark chocolate brown. Now imagine, oh my Best Beloved, that it is illuminated by bare bulbs in red metal cages, each step a metal plate colored with the same white paint as the walls. And these steps creaked like the Bamboo of the Senegal woodlands under my feet. And as you picture this, I want you to remember: I was clutching this document to an alternate history of work and education as I prepared to apply for a job with a company whose entire function was to verify if job applicants’ resumes contained the truth.

As I entered, to my left was an office with a receptionist’s desk between the main entrance and the door.

To my right, a large waiting area filled with those desk/chair combos you got to sit in in high school. Over on a far wall, a bored woman behind a counter wearing a lab coat. Behind her are six numbered doors. A couple of them were open; inside were toilets.

I was the only person applying for a job that morning, and I was taken into the interviewing office by a really nice older gentleman with a thick Israeli accent – or so I guessed, I’m not good at guessing this sort of thing - and a huge white walrus moustache. As he explained the job to me, I kept realizing I had no idea what he was saying because I was spending that time staring at the moustache.

The first question this guy asked me was if I have ever done any drugs. He told me to come clean with him, because I will be tested later. Then he told me that one of the things this company does is drug testing for large companies that were - I got the impression - hiring poor people off the street to do dirty work. He described a scene to me of burly surly men lined down the stairs and around the corner, waiting to pee into a cup. In that moment, I pictured the woman sitting in his waiting area, behind a desk, wearing a lab coat and surrounded by empty piss cups. I could see a window into my immediate future. Then he told me about the job.

The company’s main focus was to go over people’s resumes who are applying for jobs at Fortune 500 companies, and check to make sure that everything written there is the 100% truth. This is what they do all day. Then he asked me about my college experience.

It wasn’t until many years later, when I was sitting at home alone watching The Sopranos and eating a grilled cheese sandwich, that I sat bolt upright as I was struck by a sudden realization: This was the point in the interview when I should have come clean, explained my entire situation, apologized for wasting his time, and gone home.

Instead, we had a fantastic conversation. He told me in the interview that he was going on vacation the next day, but he was so into the idea of hiring me that he was going to expedite the paperwork so that I can get working there as soon as my background check came back.

And then he placed me in a small room where I took a basic skills aptitude test; half-high school English and half-high school-level Math. I pondered, as I worked, on the fact that back in high school I had decided to not pay attention to Math on the grounds that never, ever, in the real world ,will I need to know how to compute fractions for any kind of job I would ever hold. And here I was, taking a test that asked me to compute fractions as a prerequisite for getting a job

It did not occur to me until I was writing this story right now this very minute that a reference verification business probably didn’t need to know how I would have done on the SATs, and that this was strictly to keep me occupied while they ran a background check on me. God damn it.

I finished the test quickly, and so, bored, began to notice that scattered around the table I’m testing on, was the entire series of Left Behind For Kids books. Left Behind is the fundamentalist Christian literary series about what happens when the Rapture happens and God’s Chosen Few must battle the Anti-Christ, an Israeli fella who takes control of the U.N.

I was called back into The Moustache Man’s office, where he leaned across his desk and confidentially asked if I want to “come clean” about anything on my resume before they conducted a background check. He specifically asked if I wanted to admit that I had lied about my schooling, just as one random example he could think of for instance.

Then I was given a drug test.

As I was leaving the office, walking down the stairs, each one creaking as I took a step, it hit me that my entire resume was a lie, that this company’s entire business plan was to catch lies on a resume, and that no matter how well our conversation went I was never going to get this job. And then a week later, I was invited to submit for a writing gig. And that is another story.

And so it is, Best Beloved, that from that day to this the Liar will always justify putting outrageous untruths on his resume, with the understanding that Corporations see it as a sign that he truly wants the job. But it is also true that from that day to this, the Corporations will always justify not hiring the Liar if he can't be clever enough to hide his tracks.

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Every American is entitled to host at least one podcast which is watched by less people than there are on screen.

The right to pay no more than ten dollars a month to stream every song, movie, or TV show ever recorded, while also complaining that only nepo babies can afford to be artists.

The right to get “creative” on dating apps about unimportant details, like age, height, or marital status.

The right to go first through a four-way intersection based on a complex personal scoring system that weighs arrival time, vehicle size, eye contact made, and whether you're having a bad week.

The right to park their shopping cart in front of the produce section blocking all other shoppers from getting what they need while they compare different red bell peppers.

The right to watch videos at full volume on one’s phone in any kind of theater; movie theater, Broadway theater, operating theater.

The right to use a Starbucks bathroom as a WeWork location, spending hours writing emails, holding Zoom meetings, or composing an opera.

The right to expect everyone to speak English whether in a San Leandro taqueria or rural Japan.

The right to use TikTok to self-diagnose serious disorders like ADHD, OCD, narcisissim, or autism — conditions that, conveniently, explain everything except why you're like this.

The right to ask to escalate to a manager, then corporate, then the Senate, then the U.N., until you find someone with the authority to say “Yes” to your completely insane and unreasonable request.

The right to insist every worker be paid a fair wage except the one delivering your food.

The right to be famous. Just be famous. Exist in a state of fame while doing as little as possible for it.

Every American has the right to receive posts like this for free every Monday and Thursday. Exercise your rights and sign up below:

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It arrived in Tom’s inbox a second before he knew it was there. He was hunched over his cornflakes, pushing a banana slice around the bowl.

He’d been tired of bananas since he was a kid, but as any proud Clevelander was taught in grade school, ever since the Rust Belt Zone went tropical, it was their biggest crop. “Yellow gold”, they called it, and something about the redundancy of this phrase bothered him until he turned seven and the Implant went in.

Now, of course, the mention of “yellow gold” filled him with a regional pride.

He looked across the table at his wife, and he could tell by the way she jumped a bit that she’d gotten the email the same time he did. That’s the way the Implants worked; the part of his frontal lobe that had been sectioned off for communication and entertainment contained all of his emails, bills, spam, as memories of having read them.

Some people, like Tom, had no problems processing incoming communication as it landed. Others, like his wife Theresa, were sensitive to the effect of having a new memory jammed into their brain once every three minutes. He chalked it up to her having tested at 30 IQ points above his – and this was after the Implant. Some men he knew would have been upset at being married to someone that much smarter, but he reasoned he was free to watch his old movies while she did the work of worrying about things. They kept it quiet, and only their closest friends even had a clue.

He was reflecting on his memory of what the email had said while she was already staring him in the eyes, reacting. Her patience with his retention skills got lower the longer they were married, and this was their twenty-third year. After waiting an eternity of thirty seconds, she snapped:

“They’re going to take away Casablanca.”

“But I have it on a 64k stick,” he muttered, waving impotently at his collection which took pride of place in the next room. A wall of bookcases contained a thousand chrome sticks, each placed on a tiny black cardboard pedestal with the name of a movie printed on it in cheap blue ink. He then waved his hand feebly over the array of small, rectangular chrome ports on his forearm, his index finger landing on the slightly dented, slightly rounded rectangular entertainment input.

“All I have to do is watch it again on my physical media.”

She snorted and shook her head. It was at this point that she knew she wanted to grab a pen and a piece of scratch paper to record some important information. But as the impulse arose, it was tamped down by an electrical charge in her brain.

A year earlier, she had begun to want to take notes almost all the time. She’d bought pads of tiny Post-It notes and a few pens. These had been expensive, but she knew at the time it had seemed worth the price. She didn’t think she ever actually took notes, but occasionally she would find little notes around their home with random names and titles.

“It doesn’t matter,” she explained carefully. She loved her husband, but sometimes she suspected he was being deliberately stupid, pretending to be this bad at processing information. She continued explaining, because at the end of the day the important point she really needed him to understand was that she was correct.

And so she pressed on, slowly, as if speaking to a small child:

“Our neural network has lost the license for the movie. It’s not a memory problem, it’s a license problem. No license, no storage. So not only will your memory be completely erased of having seen the film, any time you watch it and attempt to create a new memory of Casablanca it will be - erased - from your brain - as you watch it.”

He frowned, then gave her a half smile. She knew that meant he was trying to cheer her up. Somehow it had the opposite effect, and she resisted the urge to murder him.

“To see Casablanca for the first time all over again, that’ll be an experience.”

She picked up a scrap of paper lying face up on the table. It read: Emily Dickinson. Was this a friend of hers? Maybe from high school. She frowned, then crumbled the paper up and dumped it in her empty cereal bowl.

He poked at his cornflakes, then mumbled, “Great movie.”

“What movie?” She paused. Then, “Did you see we lost the license to Casablanca today?”

“You know, I have it in my physical media collection but I’ve never… I’ve never seen it. Let’s watch it tonight after dinner.”

If you’ve seen my special West Coasting, you’re aware that I spend about five minutes on a bit about haunted houses. What is less apparent is that that was the end result of literally years of writing material about ghosts and haunted houses until I hit on the stuff that both worked onstage and also within the context of my act onstage.

While perusing through a notebook from mid-2016 – early 2017, I found the following material. The carnie bit at the end is something that, ten years later, I’m still toying with.

When I was a kid, the logic of Abbot & Costello movies bothered me. These were two guys who met Frankenstein, the Wolf Man, the Mummy, Dracula. And yet in movie after movie, they’d be exploring a spooky abandoned mansion, and Lou Costello would say, “Hey Abbot! I’ve seen a g-g-g- a g-g-g-g- a GHOST!”

And Abbot would then act like it was the craziest thing he’d ever heard. Sure, in their last movie they spent 90 minutes dealing with a vampire, a walking undead corpse who can’t be seen in mirrors and who spends his nights feasting on the blood of the living. But a floating candle? That was apparently completely out of the question.

Horror movies are the biggest thing right now, and yet. Hollywood doesn’t really make movies about haunted houses anymore. Sure you have your Paranormal Activity type movie where a couple lives in an ordinary house that just happens to have ghosts in it, but that’s not a proper haunted house.

When was the last time a young couple was told they could inherit their forgotten aunt’s entire estate if they stayed twenty-four hours in a haunted house?

I’m talking about an old Victorian house perched on a hill like a vulture overlooking a small peaceful town, draped in cobwebs, broken windows, its own personal lightning storm behind it. And in that house is an attic and in that attic is a ghost. And the ghost is supposed to be terrifying because in the middle of the night it rattles chains and makes crazy moaning noises.

I had a worse roommate than that when I was 22.

In the 1980s the horror movies like Amityville or House or Poltergeist were about an innocent family who were tricked into buying a haunted house. If you made those movies in this real estate market, the first act would be about some real estate agent being very upfront about it.

“So yes, this house is haunted by a ghost – a lady ghost which is what makes it a haunted home. The walls bleed once in a while, but with the cost of getting an interior decorator to come and paint, the fact that she’s willing to do it for free is an added benefit. Plus you won’t get burglars, trick or treaters, political solicitors, or really any visitors so that’s an extra cost. Yes, every once in a while you get dragged out of bed and into a hell dimension, which is why I’m willing to sell this to you for only $1.7 million.”

I don’t think it would even turn off a potential date:
“You own a home?”
“Yeah, but it’s a portal to a hell dimension.”
“Understood. But you don’t rent, you own.”
“Well yeah, but once a month the walls bleed.”
“Well so do mine but you don’t hear me bragging about it.”

Ironically, the least scary rides at any carnival are the haunted house rides. Just a cart on a track through a trailer outfitted with red lights and carnies dressed as monsters jumping out at you. “Ahh! It’s a wolf man. Part man, part dog. Hope I got my rabies shots! “ “Oh no! A Frankenstein! Dr. Frankenstein isn’t covered under my insurance!”

The scariest ride at any carnival is of course, literally any other ride because they’re all manned by carnies. Six teeth, eight fingers, he’s in charge of running and maintaining a ride going a hundred miles an hour in loopty-loops half a mile up and half a mile down. You want to talk “haunted”, take a look at any face in the good eye at any carnie. That’s a man who’s not allowed back in seven states or Mexico. That’s a man who married the prettiest girl in his high school when he was 25.

You want a haunted house ride to scare me, halfway through have a carnie jump out, grab me, and say “The curse of a thousand years is broken! We’re trading lives now! You’re the carnie and I’m the normal!”

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INT. COUNCIL CHAMBER – DAY

A CROWD OF TOWNSPEOPLE throng in the large room. QUINT, a rough old fisherman, stands in the back, watching. Next to him is a large blackboard with a drawing of a shark on it. POLICE CHIEF BRODY is leading the meeting with COUNCILMAN DENHERDER.

BRODY
Yesterday, our beach was hit by a shark attack. Councilman Denherder and I called this emergency meeting with the Mayor.

DONALD TRUMP enters, walking briskly to the center council table.

DONALD TRUMP
You can all relax, Mayor Trump is here. Chief Brody, Councilman, nameless townspeople. First, I want to assure you all that there are no sharks in the water. That’s total Fake News.

TOWNSPERSON #1
It ate the Kintner boy yesterday!

DONALD TRUMP
There’s no proof that the Kintner boy was eaten by a shark.

TOWNSPERSON #2
We all stood on the beach and watched him get eaten.

BRODY
That’s why I’ve decided to close the beaches for a short time.

TOWNSPERSON #3
But my business depends on the beach being open! All of ours’ do.

DONALD TRUMP
And we’re also shutting down the police department.

BRODY
I didn’t agree to that!

DONALD TRUMP
Don’t worry. We’re going to move that funding to immigration enforcement. No Mexicans will be allowed in through the Atlantic Ocean!

DENHERDER
Sir, that doesn’t make any sense.

DONALD TRUMP
What doesn’t make sense is paying police to work on land when the alleged shark, which doesn’t exist, is committing its crimes in the water, which isn’t happening. Meanwhile, left-wing terrorists attacked my swimming pool. The town paid thousands of dollars to have sand put in at the bottom so I can feel like I’m at the beach.

BRODY
Sir, we investigated -

DONALD TRUMP
Antifa put seaweed in my pool and the Sheriff’s department did nothing!

BRODY
We’re talking about the shark! We agreed to put on extra summer deputies. I called in an expert from the Marine Science Institute on the mainland.

DONALD TRUMP
And I canceled him. I already have the best science expert right here.

Trump takes a remote control off the table and turns on a TV on the wall. It’s set to the Weather Channel, where a WEATHERMAN is giving a report.

WEATHERMAN
As you can see, there’s a storm coming in off the northeast.

DONALD TRUMP
Oh, Magic Science Wizard who lives in the wall, tell the losers and haters that sharks are Fake News.

Denherder takes the remote, turns the TV off.

TOWNSPERSON #1
Mr. Mayor, one boy died already. All of our children are at risk.

DONALD TRUMP
So you want to feed more kids to the shark, and then save money when we shut down the schools. You heard her, people, round up your kids.

DENHERDER
No. That’s the exact opposite of what she’s saying.

QUINT runs his fingernails - SCREEEEECH! - over the blackboard. All turn to look at him:

QUINT
Name’s Quint. You all know me.

DONALD TRUMP
You all know me, too. My name’s written in big gold letters on my house so I don’t forget.

QUINT
You know how I earn a living. I’ll catch this shark for ya, but it ain’t gonna be cheap.

BRODY
Mr. Quint, thank you, but the town council isn’t the place for the rantings of an angry old drunk.

DONALD TRUMP
He’s right. We’ll have to put you on the Supreme Court.

QUINT
Angry old drunk or no, hunting a Great White ain’t like going down to the local pond and catching bluegills and tommycots. Shark like that will swallow you whole. Bad fish. I’ll catch him, and kill him, for ten thousand.

TOWNSPERSON #2
Mr. Mayor, either this old drunk kills the shark or we kill you.

Townspeople shout agreement.

DONALD TRUMP
Great news. I have negotiated the best deal with Mr. Quint to catch and kill the so-called fake news shark for ten thousand dollars. And then I can throw myself a big state fair!

DENHERDER
We don’t have that much money.

DONALD TRUMP
And we’ll have big strong men wrestling and a big arch and Kid Rock! A hundred thousand people are already there!

BRODY
Come on, people. We’ll hunt this shark ourselves.

All exit, leaving Trump alone. A SHARK pokes its head in.

DONALD TRUMP
There you are! I’ve just appointed you Secretary of People Not Getting Eaten.

BLACKOUT

Hit the like button so the algo knows you were here.

ALL THAT JAWS

I should be working on my screenplay ha ha.

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A house is on fire, and the owner is screaming that her child is in there, but the fire department is still ten minutes away. A real American will

A) Run in to save that child, knowing their friends will set up a GoFundMe to cover the hospital bill for their third-degree burns.

B) Stream it on Instagram Live so everyone can enjoy.

C) Pay someone from Central America five dollars an hour to take care of it.

D) Vote for any candidate who promises to cut fire department funding.

Which of the following is not a protection enshrined in the U.S. Constitution?

A) The right to stockpile military-grade assault weapons to defend yourself when the government comes to take your military-grade assault weapons.

B) The right to peacefully assemble and protest in areas where the police plan to shoot rubber bullets and tear gas.

C) The right to ask for a cup for free water and then fill it with soda because soda practically don’t cost nothing anyway.

D) The right to both speak freely and also remain silent, the second often happening not long after the first.

Circle all wars that America won

A) The War on Drugs

B) World War II

C) The Iraq War

D) The War on Terror

E) The Other Iraq War

F) The War on Obesity

G) Vietnam

H) The Cola Wars of the 1980s

I) The Other Other Iraq War

J) The War on Algae

K) The 2026 War in Iran (just do us a favor and circle this so we continue to receive funding)

When is an inappropriate time to start the “U-S-A!” chant?

A) When the money starts rolling in on the GoFundMe you set up to pay your medical bills.

B) When applying for a disability check because you lost the War on Obesity so hard you can no longer work a regular job.

C) When a masked immigration officer without a warrant takes away your neighbor of 27 years.

D) There is no inappropriate time to chant ‘U-S-A’. If you were ready to circle one of these, you aren’t ready to be a citizen.

In the space provided next to each name, indicate whether they are a Civil War hero or a character from the Police Academy film franchise.

Brigadier General Thomas Francis Meagher ________________

Sergeant Carey Mahoney ________________

Lieutenant Moses Hightower ________________

Second Lieutenant Alexander Hays ________________

Captain Eugene Tackleberry ________________

Captain Philip Kearny ________________

The Sound Effects Guy ________________

How would an American answer the following? PLEASE NOTE: We are not looking for the correct answer. We are looking for the most American answer:

Where do Hondurans come from?

A) Isn’t Hondura the capital of Mexico?

B) Mexistan

C) A housecleaning agency

D) I DON’T KNOW BUT I KNOW WE’RE SENDING THEM BACK! U-S-A! U-S-A!

If “Lift Every Voice and Sing” is the ‘Black National Anthem’, then what would be considered the ‘White National Anthem’?

A) “America! Fuck Yeah!” from Team America: World Police

B) “We already have a white national anthem, ‘The Star Spangled Ban-’ oh right, I’m not supposed to say that out loud.”

C) Whatever Taylor Swift decides it should be

D) A gentrified cover of “Lift Every Voice and Sing” by boygenius

Pick the answer below that comes closest to your definition of “The American Dream”. Keep in mind that there are no wrong answers, just answers that block your path to citizenship:

A) Sitting on the New York City subway, on your way to an Andy Borowitz book signing, and reading this week’s copy of The New Yorker.

B) Sitting by your pool in Los Angeles, listening to the news on NPR, and sipping on a mojito with your wife and her girlfriend.

C) Volunteering at a free legal clinic in Hamtramck, Michigan, explaining to illegal immigrants from Islamabad or wherever the best way to vote without an ID.

D) Working 12 hour days, seven days a week, cleaning houses, even when you’re sick, saving up so that one day you can buy a house and afford to hire a housecleaner.

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I watched Slacker tonight – tonight being when I wrote this, not when you’re reading this – a movie I haven’t watched in thirty-five years. I was in high school in 1991, and flipping through the channels late at night while my parents slept, and I stopped on PBS, channel 13. On was something the likes of which I’d never seen before – a movie with no narrative structure, where none of the characters or scenes came back, filled with non-professional actors monologuing at each other about life, about philosophy, about conspiracy theories, and sometimes about nothing at all.

I was living in Central Queens, and by that point I’d been reading Spy magazine and, through following writers I liked like Joe Queenan, Movieline and other more pedestrian showbiz rags. But there was no Internet and no social media, and so while I vaguely knew about the Sundance film festival (thanks to it being founded by Robert Redford), my only periscope into the world of indie filmmaking at that point was through the few movie pages of The Village Voice. And their mandate seemed to be to mostly focus on New York-based and especially queer1 independent cinema.

I know, I had access to the Quad cinemas and the Anthology Film Archives and the Angelika and the Film Forum and so on, but keep in mind I was young, and going into The City at night to the East Village, still a truly dodgy place in the early 1990s, was not something I was going to do alone. And the friends I had back then weren’t going to ride downtown with me on a Wednesday night to hang out at some indie theater for the new Jarmusch movie.

So Slacker was my first exposure to something completely different and daring in cinema, and part of that was that – unlike other movies we would see coming out of Hollywood, even other movies of the indie revolution that followed – this seemed like something that anyone could have made.

In fact, at that point, as I’ve written in this space before, I had started at the age of 12 just jumping on the subway in the morning instead of going to school and just taking it to different parts of the city or even once into Newark, in the hopes of finding – something. I didn’t know what, but I knew it was going to be more interesting than I could find in central Queens where I lived.

Slacker was filled with the kind of young people I’d only met at that point as camp counselors – collegiate, or post-collegiate – educated, interested in ideas, open, friendly. This was a community I wanted to belong to.

And the thing I found really attractive about this movie was, you could tell everyone had fun making it. At that point, I’d been mostly inspired to want to be a more elegantly funny Woody Allen type comedian/writer/filmmaker, but Slacker showed me that there was more to aspire to out there.

And so, I began writing my adventures out in a primitive type play form, writing out the funny scenes and people I would see in my daily adventures. There are some things I still only remember to this day because I still have some of these scenes in a notebook that is currently in my possession. I had a vague idea that I could somehow direct and star in this movie, an idea that I gave up on when, at the age of 19, I dove headfirst into being a standup comedian.

By the mid-90s I’d begun to find my tribe of creative, talkative, slacker weirdos in the open mics and black box theaters of Manhattan’s gritty and historic Lower East Side. Where, at the age of 15, I would peruse the events listings, club nights, and performance opportunities in the back pages of the Voice, now I was, at 19, meeting people, attending performances, and living the kind of bohemian intellectually-seeking slacker life I’d seen in this movie which, at this point I should say, I had only seen once late at night on PBS channel 13.

Watching this movie reminded me, too, that life had once been radically different for young people. And I can say I know this not as an old fuddy-duddy shaking his cane at passing traffic. I say this as an adult who just got his bachelor degree surrounded by young people. It’s a different world. In some ways a worse world; paranoid after 9/11, yes, but also filled with a social media that drives the populace to think in extremes.

Believe it or not, there was a time when the announcement that the NYPD planned on installing cameras in Washington Square Park was met with a genuine public outrage and a debate over how far we would allow a surveillance state to go in the name of public safety and eliminating the sale of dirt weed and fake shrooms in New York. Now we are a happily self-surveilling society, with Ring cameras on every other door invading a privacy we gladly sacrifice in the name of the phone cameras in our pocket that can video ourselves or strangers and upload instantly for the entertainment of ourselves and other strangers.

I happen to like a lot of the Internet and social media. I like keeping up with the lives of friends I’ve known over the decades. I quite enjoy the livestream revolution that YouTube has brought about, and find that amateur-hosted podcasts are some of my favorite listening.

The fact that I can write this essay and send it directly into a hundred inboxes delights me. The fact that I can work on a book and publish it easily and cheaply is freeing, genuinely freeing.

But what Slacker reminded me was that we’ve lost a world of casual thought and action. Of sitting around being weird with televisions or reading a book, or meeting up with a group of friends and going to a rock show in an empty club or not going to a rock show. Of wandering from one party to the next and randomly running into friends you hadn’t seen in years.

There was no staring at phones or doomscrolling. And as much as I like to give myself a hard time over the mistakes I made as a young man, I had the freedom to make those mistakes and become a better person without an ever-present network of cameras and instantly-published gossip and slanderous distortions of the truth. There has been a tightening of the social noose that is now beginning to emotionally choke young people.

The Austin of Slacker is gone, of course. If the movie were made today, it would follow an endless parade of the bad comedians who have colonized the city, all complaining about how they no longer have the freedom to use slurs the way they used to.

But the New York City of bohemian slackers has shrunk now, too, replaced by hustlers grinding away at a million side gigs to stay afloat financially. Or the children of the well-to-do producing a conveyor belt of mediocre “content”. Everything now escalates too quickly, too angrily.

And I know, I sound like exactly the ranting old crank my friends and I made fun of when we were young. In my defense, I do say these things mostly with an understanding that the world changes constantly, that to complain that everything was better when you were younger is futile if your goal is to engage with the world around you today, and to work into the future.

I watched Slacker tonight for the second time of my life. I was reminded of who I was when I was younger, and who I had always wanted to be going forward.

Shout! Studios currently has Criterion’s transfer of the film up on their YouTube channel:

This past week I’ve been doing some research1 on 1970s television, made in that glorious decade when TV networks learned that the less their writers tried, the more money they could make.

In the late 1970s, superstar television producer Jeff Johnson ruled the airwaves, being responsible for half the hit shows on the networks. There was Manaconda: LAPD, about one Detective Mark Prick who was hit by a bolt of lightning just as he chased a criminal into a snake exhibit at the L.A. Zoo. and subsequently could transform into a large snake at will.

Then there was the hit sitcom Strange Bedfellows!, about a man who rented a room in the only place he could afford: The girls dorm at a Catholic high school.

And of course Johnson created the beloved nine-season dramedy hit Hailes to the Chief! about a man named Ron Hailes who accidentally gets elected president when a Senator with the same name dies in the middle of the campaign, sweeping Ron into office alongside Vice President Bubbles the Orangutan.

ABC aired these and other equally successful shows with their award-winning advertising campaign: “Eh, it’s Wednesday night, what the hell else are you gonna watch?”

Johnson’s only misfire as a producer was his 1977 foray into the supernatural anthology series, Jeff Johnson’s Tales of the Surprising.

Perhaps it was the fact that his Rod Serling-style narrator/host was O.J. Simpson. His host segments were filmed in one take, with Simpson stumbling over larger words and then saying “To hell with it” and pushing on. One episode, they filmed Simpson at Pebble Beach while he was in the middle of a golf game.

Or perhaps it was because the “Twilight Zone-style twists” that ads for the series promised were always that the entire story had been a dream.

In any case, only five episodes were ever produced, and only three made it to air. What follows is a recap of the three episodes that aired, and keep in mind these were one-hour episodes.

Title: The Monsters are Commuting to Work on the 8:03am IRT

The Story: Five passengers who represent a cross-section of New York City stereotypes are waiting at the 16^th Street subway station. A transit cop informs them that it will be delayed a few minutes because a UFO crashed into the 23^rd Street station. The passengers suspect each other of being an alien off the ship, but then just when the cop removes his head to reveal he’s a lizard person one of the passengers wakes up in bed, revealing the previous events had all just been a dream.

The Cast: Martin Balsam, Royal Dano, R.G. Armstrong, Kathleen Freeman, and Jo Van Fleet as the passengers, with Jester Hairston as the transit cop

Title: Ma Bell is Watching

The Story: Henry Jones, a typical suburban husband and television producer, lives with a horrible nag of a wife. He has a saintly patient girlfriend who is going to star in his next show, and when his wife disappears he worries his girlfriend might have had something to do with it. But now every time he’s going to relax in his own home he paid for, the phone rings and it’s his wife on the other end nagging at him from beyond the grave. The episode ends with our hero waking up from a dream because the phone ringing: It’s his wife on the other end, demanding a divorce. Then he wakes up again; the whole thing had been a nightmare and he had never gotten married in the first place.

The cast: Darren McGavin as Henry Jones; Anne Ramsey as the wife; Sandy Dennis as the girlfriend

Title: A Town Named Scary

The Story: This is basically an unofficial remake/ripoff of Cape Fear, but with some half-ass supernatural elements added. Hank Crank works in a coffin factory, and is arrested for sexual assault and murder. He’s convicted thanks to the testimony of a veterinarian who witnessed the entire thing. Seven years later Crank’s released, and seeks revenge against the vet and his family. In the third act we find out the hospital Crank was born in was built on an Indian burial ground and he’s possessed by an evil unkillable spirit, or maybe he’s not. In the end, the whole movie has been the revenge fantasy of Crank who is sitting on Death Row.

The cast: Elisha Cook, Jr., as Dr. Wright; William Sanderson as Hank Crank; Louise Latham as Mrs. Millicent Wright; Melissa Sue Anderson as their daughter Penny; Mills Watson as Deputy Sheriff Anderson

This coupon good for twenty minutes of sitting alone in the car before I tell Mom you’re home.

Valid for one (1) cross-country trip in a Subaru station wagon during which bearer will not hear it suggested that waking up at 3 a.m. and driving across five states in nine hours constitutes less “a vacation” than “even more work than you do at the office.”

Redeemable for one free hug. (Valid for use by my third-grade teacher Ms. Goodson.)

One full winter day of having the thermostat as low as you can possibly stand it, regardless of whether I am “freezing to death” and also putting on a sweater will make me “too hot.”

This coupon entitles bearer to one (1) instance in which, upon opening a Christmas present from Santa and muttering “Santa spent half his paycheck on that,” I, being 7 years old, agree to ask zero follow-up questions resulting in an emotional meltdown roughly comparable to Chernobyl.

Good for one (1) instance of having the presence of mind to answer “What beer?” when Mom quietly asks how many you’ve had to drink.

This coupon entitles bearer to one (1) occasion in which, when I change the channel and bearer says “Turn it back, I was watching that,” I will not point out that bearer was asleep and snoring loudly enough to wake the neighbor’s dog.

Valid for one full calendar year of not having a medical emergency when the goddamn Mets are finally in the playoffs already.

Redeemable for sixteen gallons of premium unleaded so bearer does not have to take out a second mortgage after I borrow the car.

This coupon good for one (1) instance in which, upon bearer saying “Do you think I’m made of money?” and my responding “If you did you’d have married a hotter wife,” I , being 17 years old, will possess the common sense not to interrupt the fifteen-minute introspective silence that follows as bearer stares into the middle distance.

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Back in 2003, I’d been looking for steady day work for several months. As a comedian, I needed a job that had enough hours that I could pay my bills, yet flexible enough that I could leave for a few days if something better came up. This meant spending a lot of time on the Craig’s List “part time/etcetera section”, competing with thousands of other people for the three jobs that sounded like they weren’t a complete scam.

If you weren’t old enough in the early millennium to have been broke and conducting business on the Internet, Craig’s List had replaced newspaper classified ads with a single website where you could arrange a date, a job interview, or to pick up a free sofa, all with the same probability that the ad was placed by someone who was going to murder you.

Out of frustration, I placed my own fake Craig’s List ad, claiming that I ran a company providing the service of sifting through organic waste for contraband that people had swallowed, or valuables that pets had eaten, thinking I had invented the one completely demeaning job that no self-respecting person would want. Forgetting who was looking for work on Craig’s List.

Within the first two hours, I received three hundred responses. Over the next month, I got hundreds upon hundreds more, over a thousand, all with resumes, many misspelled, many who ended up following-up because they hadn’t heard from me and they were very interested in getting started in the exciting field of sifting through shit for hours in search of something of value. Little realizing that, by searching Craig’s List for a worthwhile job, they already had.

This Substack is entirely community-supported, and all subscribers get access to the Substack’s entire (almost) archives as well as free posts every Monday and Thursday. Paid subscribers also get my serialized instruction book on doing standup comedy.

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This is a famous quote often used in the context of learning the importance of meditation, of the benefits of remaining calm, and of maintaining an emotional balance. But it is also important to keep in mind in the context of learning to maintain focus on your job as a comedian, which is to make the audience laugh.

Here’s the setup:

You are performing in a club for two hundred people. Perhaps you are headlining. Perhaps you are the feature, or even the host. You hit a punchline that has always worked in front of every crowd you have ever performed in front of. The crowd is with you, and there is a large eruption of laughter and applause from every person in that audience, except for one woman sitting second row, on the right side, with her boyfriend who is laughing but also shooting her a look you find hard to interpret.

In that moment, you stop hearing the laughter and focus in on the one person who seems to think your joke is terrible. You wonder what her problem is. Then you wonder what your problem is. Perhaps you let this get into your head to the extent that you stumble on the next joke. Perhaps you decide to call her out.

This is when one must remember the importance of “stillness”.

What is stillness in the context of performing standup comedy?

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Dear Incredibly Cute Animals on Social Media

Let me start by saying I’m a huge fan. There is no way I’m staying up from 3–5 a.m. every night watching your videos for my health. In fact, my doctor has been pretty adamant that I need to stop. But it’s 2026, and it is no longer enough to simply be an animal on social media.

If I am to continue sacrificing the sleepiest hours of the best years of my life, I’m going to need you all to put in some real effort. Staring at your “spare hooman” and then swatting at him is no longer sufficient. There are cats out there dressed as baby chicks riding on their owner’s shoulders in Paris. The bar has been set. All I ask is that you put as much effort into your job as I would put into mine were I not showing up too exhausted to be productive.

Dear The “Watch Credits” Option on Disney Plus

Imagine this: I am sitting on my couch basking in the afterglow of a cinematic treasure like The Jungle Book, or Avengers: Age of Ultron, or The Apple Dumpling Gang Rides Again. The film’s score swells triumphantly as I reminisce on the romance, adventure, and laughs we had along the way.

Suddenly, a small box with the phrase “Watch Credits” pops up and I now have ten seconds to find my remote control before 102 Dalmatians begins playing at a louder volume than any other offering on your service. And if I do want to navigate back to the movie I had been watching before, say, to see if there’s a post-credits scene where Samuel L. Jackson recruits The Apple Dumpling Gang into the Avengers, I have to scroll from all the way from the beginning of the movie.

Then, when I do reach the end, the “Watch Credits” option derails everything all over again.

Dear Jared Leto

Please forgive the informal salutation, which I know should read “Dear Mr. Jared Leto.” But I feel, having enjoyed your work for multiple decades, as if I have gotten to know you personally. My favorite role of yours was your Academy Award-winning turn as Rayon in The Dallas Buyers Club.

And my least favorite by far was your recent appearance in this panic dream I just woke up from. You were dressed as The Joker, and for some reason you filled in as my company’s Human Resources director, telling me that 38 years is far too old to leave my current job and search for a new one. When you began laughing maniacally, it made the act of chaining me to my desk feel personal. In future I ask that you stay in your own head and out of mine.

Dear Brain

We both know how grateful I am for the work you do. You know it because you had the thought, and I know it because you put the thought into my head. That being said, I’ve identified a few areas for improvement.

Specifically, please cease replaying the “spilled apple juice” incident from my senior year of high school. I understand that the combination of khaki pants, adolescent awkwardness, and the presence of my crush made it memorable, but I would very much prefer that it not be revisited during inopportune times: when I’m in the shower, or when I’m trying to sleep, or when I’m leaving my therapist’s office and finally feeling free of free-floating shame and anxiety.

Speaking of memory, I find it confusing that you’re able to bring up that moment without being asked, and yet you require thirty minutes to recall the name of the street I grew up on so I can recover the password to my bank account. I would appreciate it if you could prioritize accordingly.

Hit the “like” (heart) button. It lets the algorithm know people are reading and enjoying this.

“I’m not borrowing money from my parents, I’m borrowing money from my inheritance.”

Take the collection of 9,000 Beanie Babies I bought when there was a bear market, dump them in the city landfill, and move into the storage unit I’ve been keeping them in.

Finally launch that crime scene-to-blood bank sales operation I talked about when I was 17 and getting drunk with my friends every weekend.

Aggressively trading in secondary-market pharmaceutical options. Or as the cops call it, “selling meth behind the 7-11.”

Gain 1000 pounds, make it physically impossible for my landlord to evict me.

Buying one of those Nirvana tees from Target, washing it fifty times, and selling it as “concert-worn vintage” to my kid’s dumbest, richest friend.

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Discover that my real father was a billionaire who left me in the care of the parents who raised me, in the hopes I would turn out “normal.”

Ride cross-country in a boxcar, living on delicious pies left on windowsills by kindhearted farmers’ wives.

Get rich… playing Minecraft on Twitch? That can’t be right, can it? That can’t be what the kids are really doing.

Sell one of every organ that comes in pairs on the black market, invest in medical companies that are working to grow new kidneys, lungs, and eyes in a lab.

Hang out in the dumpsters behind a nuclear waste storage facility. If I get bitten by enough radioactive spiders I should probably turn into a spiderman.

The Mona Lisa’s pretty valuable, so paint a bunch of those and sell them.

Start a Substack. Get a million people to subscribe for $1 each. Retire a millionaire.

I don’t really want your dollar; subscribing for free supports this Substack (although I won’t say no to a paid membership).

Every Monday and Thursday you get lists, articles, stories, and pop culture takes.

Every Saturday, paid members get my serialized book on The Philosophy of Modern Standup.

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Hit the like (heart) button below and let the algorithm know you were here.

Most comedians enter the stage beset by three devils:

The devil of pressure to succeed: You are paid to get the audience to laugh.

The devil of control: To give over the show to the audience is to allow chaos is to give a platform to failure.

The devil of ego: To succeed onstage is to prove oneself.

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Once upon a time in the long-ago year 2006, when the world was green - or at least, a less disturbing shade of crazy – I lived in a city on the sea called New York. Nowadays, every square inch of New York is priced too high for people to live in, but back in those days people willing to pay $2500 for a 248-square foot studio apartment hadn’t colonized every inch of the city yet.

And so, I lived in a magical neighborhood in the middle of the borough of Queens, which these people pretended not to know even existed unless they were in a neighborhood a short subway ride from Manhattan.

It was in this magical land we call Queens that I lived in an enormous two-bedroom apartment that was rent-stabilized. I had grown up in that apartment. When I turned 21, I informed my parents that it was time for them to spread their wings and leave the nest. They bought a house out by the Long Island border, and I held on to what remains the greatest deal in the history of New York City rent.

The neighborhood was named Venice Gardens after the Very Nice Real Estate Corporation which developed the area in the early 1920s, transforming vast tracts of unattractive farmland and foul-smelling forest into city block after city block of beautiful squat brick buildings.

The buildings that lined the streets, while old and maintained to the varied degrees that their owners felt it necessary to invest money, were all built in a time when architects took a degree of pride in making even the humblest structure attractive.

Saturn’s Court, the courtyard building across the street, built in the 1920s, featured ornate window frontage and turrets perched on the corner rooftops, as if to say, “Yes, this building has no elevators, and yes the steam radiators will make your apartment in the winter time (a period defined as October through May) as hot and steamy and impossible to live in as the Darien Gap. But it is still your castle.”

My building, having been built in the 1930s right before World War II, had a far less ornate massing, but nevertheless it did have elevators. And like every apartment in Venice Gardens, it had giant twelve-foot ceilings, a sunken living room, and large windows that captured the afternoon sunlight. The Long Island Railroad was three blocks away, and on a quiet night you could hear the train in the distance speeding down the track, blowing its lonesome horn.

Even in the year 2006 most nights were quiet, this being the year before the opening of the tropical-themed nightclub on Queens Boulevard and the weekend drunken domestic disputes that subsequently played out up and down the street every weekend.

I was the building’s eccentric. In the 1980s, when I was a child, the neighborhood teemed with eccentrics. There was the insane old woman whom we’ll call “Harris” at one end of the hall, who kept watch on the floor’s comings and goings through her peephole. One February when I was young, my sister and I were tasked with throwing away the last Christmas tree our parents ever bought.

It had transformed from a festive decoration to a dead brown firetrap that the family had agreed, without speaking a word to each other, to never look at or acknowledge. If anyone had wanted to know who the last family in the building to toss our tree was, it would have been easy to do the detective work. We left a trail of dead pine needles from our door, to the elevator, out the back door, to the trash area.

The next day, I came home from pretending to go to school to find a crazy letter, in a shaky hand, threatening to murder our entire family for the crime of leaving a trail of pine needles down the hall. It was signed “The Management”, an attempt to pin a murder threat on our building’s landlord.

Harris was our number one suspect partly because everyone else on our floor worked for a living, and mostly because she had been put into an institution for a year for attempting to throw her mother out of her apartment window.

But that was the old version of the United States, when an eccentric could work even part-time and make the rent and live a comfortable life in a major city. In New York, in Los Angeles, in Austin, we’re living on the cultural and financial inheritance of a previous generation.

By 2006, I was the “character” of the building, which by this point had become the global center of Bukharian Jewish life. The Bukharians are a sect of Judaism that fled Uzbekistan, a former Soviet republic where, judging by my neighbors, the cultural heritage involved staring into the middle distance and also not talking to strangers.

My neighborhood, Venice Gardens, was home to every wave of immigrants that hit America’s rocky shores, and by the early 2000s had become the refuge for a generation of Bukharian Jews escaping oppression. By 2006 it had the highest concentration in the world, and every apartment in my building that wasn’t occupied by fellow rent control survivors was taken by an Uzbeki family.

They were fantastic neighbors. Nothing but quiet neighbors who followed the rules in a way that only people who do not want to be forcibly emigrated to the land of their birth will be. I would mostly see them in the halls bringing covered dishes to each other, and small talk was limited to the occasional elevator conversation about the weather.

One day, an old man was complaining about how cold new York gets in February, and I said, “Doesn’t it get colder than this where you’re from?”

And he replied, “Why do you think I moved here?”

They also carried just enough organized crime in their numbers that the streets, sleepy and suburban anyway, somehow even safer from petty crime. Although not from a Chinese burglary ring, which is another only-in-Queens story.

As I said, I had become the eccentric character in the building. Due to my lifestyle as a comedian, my neighbors would see me coming and going at all hours, falling down drunk sometimes day or night. I’d be coming in with different women, different friends, different roommates moving in and out at irregular intervals. Doing my grocery shopping at 2pm. Calling the locksmith in the middle of the night.

From their point of view, I was the guy you meet, or even avoid, in the halls, and ask your friends, your neighbors, and your group chat, “Who is that guy and how does he support himself?”

Then one day, one of my neighbors, a middle-aged Uzbeki lady, casually mentioned during elevator chit-chat that she had seen me on television. After that, the building’s attitude towards me became relaxed. Neighbors whose faces had been as cold and stoic as the edifice of Lenin’s tomb became marginally warmer, even hinting at notes of friendliness. Conversation became less forced. And I realized that I’d provided them with the one thing human beings desire about each other and rarely get: An explanation for the way they behave.

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Dream 1
I have the ability to fly just by spreading my arms and jumping. I get into the upper atmosphere, and am immediately approached by a Delta flight attendant who reminds me that I paid for a coach seat. She then straps a standard airplane seat to my back, the weight of which causes me to plummet screaming to the ground. I land at LaGuardia airport and am forced to spend all eternity at Baggage Claim watching an endless parade of identical black suitcases, none of which are mine.

Dream 2
I am nine years old and am sitting in a Broadway theater for the musical Cats. Only the Playbill says “Cows”. The actors are in the aisles squirting milk from their udders on an ecstatic audience. I run into the theater next door, where Cats is playing. The Cats are in the aisles, terrifying an unsuspecting audience. They smell the milk on me and begin licking me to death with their giant sandpaper tongues. The last thing I see before I wake is Magical Mr. Mistoffelees’ cold dead eyes staring through me.

Dream 3
The year is 0000 AD, in Bethlehem. I have snagged the last room available at the only inn in town, much to the consternation of a pregnant lady and her husband in line behind me. I pay with my last check, which bounces when I absent-mindedly date it 0001 BC. I find myself lying in a bed of straw in the barn out back with three disappointed men looking down at me.

Dream 4
It’s my first day working for a New York City public high school. I’ve been hired to teach the Gifted and Talented Driver’s Ed class. I’m behind the wheel of a car, with my principal in the passenger seat explaining what the course entails. We get to the intersection of 48^th Street and 7^th Ave., and I try to stop the car but the brakes don’t work. The principal tells me, “We don’t believe in forcing students to stop.” I scream that we’re about to run through a red light. He smiles condescendingly and says, “We don’t see any difference between the lights.”

Dream 5
I’m reading a book when I suddenly remember that I have a pet cat, a British Shorthair, that I haven’t fed for months. I search frantically all over my apartment in terrible, guilt-inducing fear that it’s dead. I finally search the bedroom, where I find a set of papers suing me for divorce on grounds of neglect. When I get to court, I see the judge is also a British Shorthair. The jury is composed entirely of British Shorthairs. My lawyer tells me not to worry. The trial ends when someone hears a bag of treats being opened three rooms down and the courtroom empties.

Dream 6
I watch the news on TV. Devils and madmen make laws, thugs enforce them. Everyone is confused and angry. I wake up in relief—but when I turn on the TV, I see the same news. A pelican with a man’s face appears at my window. I realize I’m still dreaming. I try to wake up again, but I can’t tell if I have.

Dream 7
The year is 1935 and I’m an editor for Simon & Schuster. I’m at the White House for a dinner with Eleanor Roosevelt and Gertrude Stein as part of a media tour promoting Stein’s next book, 30 Days to Catch a Man. Things go well until Stein turns to me and asks my thoughts on the use of semicolons. “Well, Gertie,” I reply, “I don’t know how you do it in Paris, but here in the U.S. we get our best writing from a full colon. Mine certainly works overtime.” Stein says, “Your output does have an excrementary quality.” I thank her for what sounds like a compliment. Mrs. Roosevelt coughs in embarrassment.

Dream 8
I am working at a call center job where I hold a phone to my ear and listen to an eternal monster from a dark dimension growl wordless noises. When it stops, I then ask, “And on a scale from 1 to 10, where 1 is amazing and 10 is the best, how would you rate your wireless carrier service?” I ask my supervisor, a faceless demon named Redd, if I can use the bathroom. He fires me – through a window into a featureless void where I am condemned to spend the next 20,000 years navigating New York State’s unemployment system.

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