I have a strong affinity for stand-up comedy. It takes particular skill to be able to make a group of strangers laugh on command—no music, no special effects, no backup dancers, just a single person and a monologue of well-crafted words. They have their work cut out for them. Writing is hard. Writing something funny is harder.
There’s a great episode of Seinfeld touching on this. Jerry wakes up in the middle of the night with a brilliant idea for a joke. He scribbles it down, between laughs, before going back to sleep. Come morning, he finds that the note is illegible. No one he comes across can read it either. His great bit is gone. Fortunately, by the end of the show, he recalls what he wrote.
“Flaming globes of Sigmond!”
It was a line from a bad TV movie—a line Jerry had subconsciously recalled in his sleep. As he is quick to point out, “...That’s not funny…there’s nothing funny about that.”
I suspect many creatives are the same. They have an epiphany for a book or a song or script and write the idea down on the closest napkin they can find. In 2014, I developed a similar penchant. It started off reasonably. I had an olive-green notebook where I jotted down music ideas: lyrics, guitar tabs, artwork, mixing and mastering techniques. The content was, for the most part, inspired by other musicians. However, the act of gathering that content together and distilling it all into something well-crafted, that was something I took directly from the comedian’s handbook.
There was one unfortunate problem.
During that time, I was severely dependent on heroin and methamphetamine.
Now, contrary to popular belief, heroin addiction can be quite a slow process. Pride is a bad word, but I will say this: after many months into my addiction, not only had I written dozens of songs, I had booked and played several live shows as well. This is not to brag (if you’ve ever heard me sing you would absolutely know that). It’s to show that not all drug addicts start out as Night of the Living Dead extras. In fact, I would go so far as to claim that none of us do.
Whether it’s true or not, I was still on my way there. After finding some relative success composing music, things began to unravel. Yes, there were all the usual things you’d expect: the dropping out of college, the opting out of hygiene, the shocking loss of weight, and so on. But there was also another curious thing that happened.
I could not stop writing.
I’m not talking about music, or books. I’m talking about every single inane thought I was having. The neutralizing combination of both uppers and downers had put me into a constant hypnagogic state. Like Jerry, every idea I had while barely conscious, no matter how bizarre or commonplace, was brilliant. My olive-green notebook was quickly filled, front to back. It got to the point where I would carry around a notepad small enough to fit in my pocket. I collected several. I was always at the ready.
Fortunately, or unfortunately, I still have most of them. Even better, they’re all legible. Here’s a small sampling:
Remember: 3rd Order Guardian Angels!
I think we’re moving backwards and forwards through time while entropy increases.
How fast does a thought travel?
What direction have beings generally faced the most throughout life?
2011 - Shia LaBeouf - Jack in the Box
And even a picture:
The “2011 - Shia LaBeouf - Jack in the Box” incident is actually a pretty funny story, but I’ll save that for another time.
If, while reading these notes, you’re saying to yourself, “...That’s not brilliant…there’s nothing brilliant about that.” I would find it hard to disagree with you. Nothing I came up with during this time was particularly insightful, no matter how much it felt like it. I thought I was way more enlightened than I actually was, and that’s the dirty trick. I was not destined to be “more popular than Jesus.”
Perhaps there’s something to a couple of these thoughts, or maybe there’s not. Regardless, at the end of the day, it’s not the thought alone that counts. A thought needs to be flushed out, played with, and combined with other thoughts. Together, they should hang as a cohesive whole—a sum bigger than its parts. They should then be gift-wrapped and prepared for an audience. In short, they all need that comedic touch.
The frequent and frantic consistency with how I take notes has not really changed much. To be fair, I’m no longer asking questions like, “how fast does a thought travel?” But I still try to be curious and jot down strange ideas as they come. What has really changed is that I no longer stop there. Many of those notes have ended up, or will end up, being used in some way or another. Ultimately, at least according to the dozens of stand-up specials I’ve watched, it doesn’t necessarily matter what you say, but how you say it.