Dan Bialek Loves Kittens

Monday was pretty much the pain in the ass day to end all pain in the ass days.

Yesterday morning I got yelled at, cussed out and fired by my boss at my day job answering phones at the World Famous Comedy Store for a mistake that I got blamed for that I didn’t do.

It had been a long time coming and really wasn’t unexpected at all. I have hated my boss’s guts and he’s hated mine for at least the last six months. Now that I don’t work there anymore we can best friends and go surfing and snorkeling together and give each other pedicures and handjobs and whatnot. So, it worked out perfect.

Plus, I still get to perform at the club so I really can’t complain about losing a $7 an hour job.

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Here’s something I saw yesterday afternoon on the wall of a sushi bar in Burbank that my friend Marcia took me to cheer me up and to bribe me to help her shop at IKEA for a duvet cover and picture frames for the guy she is currently boning because she sprained her ankle last night wrestling with some other dude at a comedy show.

The sushi restaurant allowed and/or encouraged their patrons to sign and drawn on dollar bills and then glued them to the walls for good luck. The person who signed this one wrote:

Sushi = Pussy =
Money = Weed =
Alcohol = Me

From the looks of it Marcia and I were eating at Fred Durst’s (or, more likely one of his several-to-many fan’s) favorite sushi bar circa 1997.

We live in a stupid world.

This past Saturday night my current roommate, my girlfriend, my former roommate, his wife and I threw a costume Halloween party at our house. My co-workers from the Comedy Store Jeff Danis and Ryan O’Neill came as my mother and father.

Here are Ryan and Jeff reveling in the fact that their presence made me want to kill them and myself all night long.

I’m dressed as fat Batman and the look of defeat and utter humiliation on my face is genuine.

Here are David Taylor and Steve Rannazzisi sharing a moment in the backyard.

Steve is probably coaching David on how not to get slapped by women.

Here are Matt Champagne and Ruby Wendell in a sea of people who I didn’t know but who drank up every last drop of the booze I spent two hours in line at Cost Co in Culver City purchasing.

In the background of the previous picture, here’s the guy who dressed as one of the Twin Towers, complete with exploding jet liner sticking out of the side and stock brokers jumping out of the windows.

Steve Rannazzisi was in one of the Twin Towers on 9/11 and narrowly escaped that morning without dying. He thought the costume was hilarious. Some random girl at the party came up to me later in the night and yelled at me for letting someone into my house wearing such a tasteless costume. She screamed in my face for four or five minutes and then stormed off on the verge of tears.

But that was the only rough patch of the evening’s fesitivities. Well, that and at the end of the night when I tried to murder a stranger and almost spent the night in jail.

From what I’ve been told and been able to piece together sometime around 3 am a couple of random English guys who had been at the party and weren’t in costume tried to pick a fight with one of my friends from the Comedy Store when he pulled up in his car and tried to park in our driveway. From what I remember I went out front to calm things down and one of the English guys was what I perceived as rude and confrontational. I excused myself, went inside the house and then came outside with a baseball bat and chased the English dude up and down my street with the bat threatening to knock out his “crooked, yellow, cum-drenched, limey faggot teeth.”

The most embarrassing part of this was that I had and still today have no idea why I went so apeshit on the guy. Sometimes when I’m drunk I get this really weird sense of justice and I feel that I have to right what I perceive to be a wrong at any cost. In this case I was under the impression that the English guy had threatened a friend of my mine and then told me to go f myself at my party on my driveway. I have no idea if any or all of this went down. All I know that I found myself in the middle of the street at 3am screaming at the top of my lungs holding a piece of wooden sporting equipment.

Eventually the English people left and I went back inside and put my bat away. About fifteen minutes later two police helicopters were circling the house and shining their lights into my and my neighbors’ backyards. I told everyone they had to go home and that someone should probably wake up my girlfriend and tell her that I was going to be spending the night in jail.

Fortunately, when I went outside and explained the situation to the police officers on my driveway they were very understanding. They said that they weren’t going to arrest me or give me a ticket. They also told me that next time I pulled a baseball bat or other deadly weapon on a stranger that I should at least make sure that they have hit me first or else I could face felony assault charges.

By all accounts everyone (except the English guy that I tried to murder) had a good time at the party. Here’s Ari Shaffir congratulating us the following afternoon on a successful event and on the fact that I did not go to jail.

stuffed with a rusty, broken glass center.

I won’t lie to you, I don’t enjoy my job answering phones at the Comedy Store all that much. I’m supposed to be there every Monday through Friday at 10 am. Most mornings I roll in at least 10 or 15 minutes late. And even if I leave my house late I still stop at the Starbucks down the street for coffee and a fruit cup if they have it. Punctuality and a good performance review are not among my top priorities at my workplace.

Last week I wrote a blog and made a short movie of Ding Dong Show cast member Barton Nemer standing in front of my desk in my office and screaming into the telephone at an imaginary ex-wife. When I came in to work this morning at 10:20, Juan Carlos, the Comedy Store’s building manager, warned me that there was a homeless guy waiting for me upstairs. And sure enough when I came up the stairs there was Barton wearing a dirty and tattered black sport coat, a neon t-shirt and filthy, urine-stained white painter pants. He was screaming into the telephone, as is his way. And when I asked him to please leave he told me to go fuck myself.

So, I sat down at my desk, fired up my iBook and recorded the last couple of minutes of his belligerent tirade. Halfway through my boss called on the other extension and I explained the situation to him. Here’s a movie clip of what I got to listen to less than 2 minutes after coming into the door at my job.

I wonder if Barton ever made it to Norms for breakfast.

I hope so.

Here’s a short clip of me last night at the La Jolla Comedy Store proving that I have way too many bits about cars and traffic.

Next week I’ll tackle the differences between men and women. God, I’m terrible.

Earlier today someone posted a comment about my previous entry asking if I’d seen the trailer for the Ding Dong Show documentary on YouTube. I hadn’t so I clicked on the link.

Don Barris has spent years and years putting on this show every week at the Comedy Store and filming every performance and the lives of the people involved in the show. When I first started going to the Store and saw the show I thought it was sad how these confused and deluded comics were being led around and filmed in a show that seemed to be exploiting them. Then I got to know Don and I saw how much time and effort he put into the show and making sure that all the Ding Dongers weren’t picked on or made fun of by the other comics at the Store and how he took care of each of them and probably knew as much about them as people than some of their family members and doctors.

Here is the trailer for the movie.

I can honestly say that with the hundreds of hours of footage that Don has compiled over the last decade this movie stands a very good and likely chance of becoming one of the greatest cult documentaries of all time. I really believe it could even surpass the accomplishments and popularity of films such as American Movie, Grizzly Man, My Best Fiend: Klaus Kinski and even mainstream documentaries like Hoop Dreams and Spellbound.

It’s funny to think that less than a year from now college kids and hipsters will be quoting lines from Big Mama, Blue Iris and Big Dogg.