thoughts

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When I was age seven or eight I wanted to be a comedian. I never told anyone.

My mother really liked to watch comedians on television. I guess my parents had that in common, because I could always seem to unearth yet another comedy routine of Robin Williams or George Carlin from our pile of dubbed Beta tapes. My mother would always say they were not appropriate for me, but she never stopped me from watching them.

At the time I didn’t especially enjoy being in front of people.  I had to be dragged into performing a simple narration in a school Christmas pageant at age 10, which I have absolutely no recollection of due to what I have to assume was my blacking out from fear.

I did not want to be in front of an audience, but I wanted to be clever. I liked the idea of making people laugh for a living.

Even eight-year-old me understood the precarious economics of the Comedy profession. You would have to be super, ultra funny to get as many people to sit in front of you as Williams or Carlin, let alone Gallagher with his watermelons. I loved Gallagher. Jay Leno. Tim Allen, too. They were zany, and they were clearly very talented. I was sure they wrote their own jokes, which was an awful lot of jokes.

(I cannot speculate on whether that lead me to focus on writing. I didn’t write things that were especially funny at that age. I preferred the macabre. Too much Stephen King, I guess, another one my mother was never sure about but kept letting me read.)

Eventually I gave up my secret comedian wish in favor of one more typical for a bright kid – doctor, I figured. Yet, that early urge to be funny probably informed my profession more than most of my math and science scholastic endeavors aimed at a future in medical school.

Now I don’t like most funny things. Jokes, pranks, comedians, sitcoms – they mostly elicit a groan from me. I still laugh, mind you, but I like my humor sarcastic, or ironic, or soaked in pop culture. Nothing overt. No cartoonish hammers wielded against watermelons. Joss Whedon and Tina Fey are my comedy gold.

Sometimes I catch myself thinking, “comedy is for kids.” When you are a child, every joke is a new one. Every episode of I Love Lucy or Looney Tunes has a gag so funny you think you will stop breathing. Sitcoms play out tropes you’ve never seen before. Talk show hosts tell groaners, but you don’t understand that you should groan.

I do not want to be a comedian anymore. I don’t think I ever did, to begin with. I wanted to be what comedy represented. An innovator. A trailblazer. Something novel, every time.

Little did I know how in demand that would be when I grew up.

Last night while sitting in my studio I found myself thinking about how my adult life is a lot like kindergarten.

I have only a few specific memories of my Montessori kindergarten, which coincidentally is more or less down the block from our present-day house.

(One is of my refusing to partake in nap time, instead preferring to gossip with the teachers about their social lives. Oh, five-year-old me, always the middle-aged adult.)

The only classroom memory that really sticks out has a lot to do with the Montessori method of pedagogy, which is basically to let kids loose in an environment with a number of potential learning activities to discover things for themselves. Our room had a number of low shelves on the wall with different sorts of things – blocks or puzzles or dioramas, and we could pick up whatever suited us.

In my memory, I picked up a small model of a mountain and an accompanying lake. I’m not sure what I was supposed to do with it or learn from it … maybe something about evaporation or the source of rivers or glaciers? Clearly it didn’t make a huge impact.

What did make an impact is essentially, “WTF, what a weird thing to play with as a kindergartner.”

(We also learned about fractions by slicing apples at lunch, which I then declined to eat because they had already begun to oxidize. Oh, five-year-old me, always the fussy one.)

Fast forward to modern me sitting in my recording studio. It’s not just a studio, really, but our converted attic which serves as studio, gear depot, and hang-out lounge. There’s a lot to do there. I could mix our newly-recorded vocals on the Arcati Crisis EP. I could rearrange my pedals to work on a new signal chain. I could make more lead sheets for Smash Fantastic. Or, I could just play music on an number of guitars, basses, or keyboards.

I decided to rehearse to my vocal warmups and then make some new playlists for my commute. Afterwards, I moved onto other open activity rooms like my office and the kitchen.

That’s my whole life right now. Once I get home from work and fulfill a few basic needs like laundry or grocery shopping I’m free to play. I’m still roaming from room to room, picking up new things and learning about them, then working with them for a certain amount of time.

That’s just my nature. Or, is it my “nuture”? It looks a lot like the model of my two years of Montessori schooling. Now my interests are a little more specialized – I still don’t know too much about mountains or rivers, but I know a lot more about words and music.

I’ve been learning and schooling and rehearsing all this time just to get back to what my days were like at age five, when all I wanted to do at age five was grow up.