Dan Bialek Loves Kittens

Last night after my commercial audition and before coming home to save my relationship with a 45-minute heart-to-heart talk with my girlfriend I stopped by the Improv on Melrose to watch a friend of mine at the 6:30 New Faces showcase.

New Faces is a free early show in which comics who want to get into the club (i.e. earn permission to call in for spots on the weekly lineups) perform for 3 minutes in front of the club’s talent coordinator and all the other comics in the room waiting to go up and showcase.

This picture pretty well sums up how less-than-nuturing an environment for comedy it is.

Notice the bright lights, the empty chairs, the stone faces in the crowd and the comic on stage gesticulating wildly with his right arm in an attempt to keep the audience’s attention and extrude laughter from them.

Showcases are the worst.

It seems like they were designed just so the people watching you can see you bomb and if you don’t pee yourself and sprint out of the building crying then they assume that you might not suck.

They’re like telling an NFL draftee that you’ll give him 50 million dollars if he can finish 40-yard dash in under 4.40 and then hitting him in both shins, knees and the groin with a crowbar 2 seconds before the starting gun goes off.

Good luck, everybody. Run fast.

After leaving work on the verge of tears and/or arson I went to a commercial audition.

It was for a water conservation PSA. In the audition I was supposed to get kicked in the balls by an old woman in one take and then fall onto the floor while pretending a stuffed dog was attacking my neck in the next.

For once I got to the audition 15 minutes early which worked out great because they were running about 45 minutes behind. So for an hour I got to sit in the lobby and listen to commercial actors roll around on the floor screaming and crying in the next room.

When I went in I figured that whoever ended up watching the casting tape would probably be sick of seeing 30 or 40 guys in a row roll around on the floor yelling and overacting while holding a stuffed animal to their throats. So I decided that instead of having the dog attack me the whole time that I’d turn the tables and start bashing the dog’s head into the carpet and telling it all the awful things that I was going to do with its corpse and how attacking me was no way to promote water conservation.

At one point I scream-whispered into its ear, “I’m going to take a bite out of you and mate with the hole.”

I think the casting people enjoyed it but I doubt I’ll book the commercial.

It’s not a huge deal that I probably didn’t get it because I was in a super crap mood when I went in and I came out of it in a much better mood. The best part is that, now, out there somewhere a group of advertising agency people are going to have to watch (or at least fast-forward through) me pinning a stuffed German Shepherd to the ground and dry humping it.

After re-reading my last 2 posts I realize that they make me sound like some kind of manic-depressive Anti-Christ.

I’m not. It’s just been a crappy day.

Moments before writing my last post I called down to my boss’ office to let him know that he had a phone call. I used the nicest phone voice I could conjure and gave him the entire name of the person calling, the company they worked for and asked him if he wanted me to put the call through or take a message.

He shouted back into the speakerphone, “Yeah, just put them through and stop talking in that stupid fake fucking voice!”

So, I put them through.

I didn’t know what to do about the fake voice because any voice and dialogue coming out of my mouth directed at him where I’m not screaming in his face and telling him what a stupid, cowardly, bald, useless, douchebag cocksucker I find him to be was going to be disingenuous.

I kept the fake voice on for the rest of my shift.

I predict that I won’t make it being an employee at the Comedy Store past the end of December.

I’ve worked there for just over a year and I think I’ve absorbed all I’m going to learn from the place as far as the capacity of wage slave goes.

Hopefully I’ll get passed as a paid regular before I get fired or quit.

When I came into work this morning I grabbed the phone message book and wrote this note to myself.

Then I taped it to the phone next to the receiver so that I would see it every time I answered the phone.

I have been overly nice and outright obsequious to all of the dozen or so people who have called in the last 3 and 1/2 hours. Even the really stupid lady from Canada who has been calling for 3 weeks trying to get a photograph of Jim Carey doing standup (why?) and the three people who called about the Latino Show in the Main Room tonight who asked the same questions about show times, the cover charge, drink minimums and lineups over and over and over.

The trick to it is convincing myself that I’m retarded and then talking in my creepy whisper phone voice and adding “I’d love to answer that” as a prefix to my response to any question they ask me. At the end of the conversation I thank them profusely for calling and tell them to have a “blessed day” and then thank them again as they’re hanging up.

I feel like Winston Smith at the end of Orwell’s 1984 when he sees his girlfriend after she’s betrayed him and her eyes are dead to him and he realizes that he truly does love Big Brother.

I wish someone would shoot me in the back of the head under a cherry tree.

One sidenote, my complete psychological castration and ballless-ness has bled over into my personal life as well. My girlfriend called me 10 minutes ago to ask if we were still going on a cruise of Marina Del Rey harbor this Saturday afternoon for one of her co-worker’s birthday. She was using her PR work voice and was pretending to not remember that we talked about this event over a week ago and decided that I wasn’t going because I couldn’t afford the $80 ticket and I had a show later that evening an hour south in Orange County.

She used the trick of asking me questions and then after my short answers not saying anything so the conversation would hang there in awkward silence that made it appear that I was being difficult. I wasn’t trying to be.

I’m tired.

I’m depressed.

I feel shit.

I’m stuck in a dead-end job and a dead-end career that is going nowhere.

I’m a grown man who has to write Post-It notes to remind himself not to be a cocksucker at work so he won’t get fired from his minimum wage day job.

Does it sound like a fucking booze cruise is what I need to cheer me up?

I took Jimi’s last name out of the last post that I wrote earlier this afternoon. This wasn’t out of fear of Jimi getting mad at me and punching me in the face so much as it was out of not wanting to get myself into anymore trouble than I’ve already gotten myself into today at the Comedy Store.

I figured if some ex-girlfriend Googled Jimi (one of his ex’s is known for doing this) and then called him to complain about some asshole making fun of him in his blog that Jimi would get mad at me and cause a big scene next time I saw him at work and then our boss would find out and I’d get fired or put on double secret probation or something.

This paranoia is justified because earlier this evening I almost lost my job answering phones at the Comedy Store for being rude to several people who called earlier this morning. My boss called me multiple times this afternoon after I came home from my shift while I was taking a nap.

This evening I called him back while driving to a standup show out in Colton, which is much farther away than it sounds when you find yourself actually driving to it.

My boss, who it should be stated is a total and complete handjob, was stammering and yelling into the phone about how I couldn’t answer the phones that way and how I didn’t seem like I wanted to work there anymore.

Really? A $7-an-hour job that involves taking orders from a guy with the IQ of a car bra? You think I might be a little unhappy. Wow, you’re good. You should get a job as a carnival weight guesser or at least one of those guys who hangs out in front of the Benito’s Tacos on Santa Monica Boulevard in a tube-top and sucks strangers’ dicks for crusty wads of small denomination bills. I have a feeling you’d be great at both.

I was so pissed but I didn’t want to lose my job so I promised that I would do a complete 180-degree about-face and be 100% polite and professional when I came in to work tomorrow morning. I added that if I wasn’t he was free to fire me right there on the spot.

The whole time on the phone he kept asking me why I was rude to the people who called and I kept telling him that it was personal and that I wasn’t going to tell him. It was fucking annoying. Mainly because if I told him the real reason — that most of the people who call the Comedy Store are fucking morons so they remind me of him and I therefore immediately hate them — I would have been instantaneously fired.

Sometimes it’s just better to suck it up and choke down a few fistfuls of your own shit so you can live to fight another day.

If I ever make a significant amount of money, like enough where I have 20 or 30 grand to blow on anything that I want, I’m going to shoot his car up with a 9mm in the Comedy Store parking lot and then light in on fire in front of everybody present.