I have to admit, the new millenium has not been kind to me. At least, it didn't look that way for the first six and a half years. But I've learned a great deal in those ghastly years, not the least of which is how lucky an unlucky man can be.
Follow along if you will while I sit on the titty-pot and whine...
I was unhappy when Al Gore was anointed the Democratic candidate for President in 2000. I didn't like him very much, and wasn't looking forward to holding my nose and voting for him. But vote for him I did, because the other guy was George W. Bush, and I was damned sure that there was a difference between the two. One was a statesman who's dispositions and attitudes I disliked. The other was a made man in the abominable cabal of superwealthy oligarchs who gave us Ronald Reagan (and all the wonderful things his administration did). I knew beyond all doubt that if this scion of the soulless ascended to the Oval Office, we were going back into the Middle East with a vengeance (Almost literally). When the 2000 elections were hijacked, I ranted vehemently, and when the SCOTUS handed Bush the White House, I broke my television with a large, hardcover book (Harlan Ellison's Dreams With Sharp Teeth, if memory serves).
My then-girlfriend woke me on the morning of September 11, 2001, and I watched in horror as the towers fell. My fears were twofold: what had just happened, along with it's implications, and what the Bush Administration would do with it. Both were realized.
At the time, I was a successful stand-up comedian, having worked for and/or been on Comedy Central, HBO, and NBC. I toured nationally and in Canada. And using what little exposure I had, I dug in and began to fight. I had already incorporated vocal and scathing criticism of Bush (not in the late-night talk show, golly-he's-not-smart way. I never thought the man was stupid. Just overprivileged and mean. The smarmy, aw-shucks buffoonery was just a Rovian tactic.), and post-September 11, I cranked the volume and vitriol up to deafening levels. But of course, we're talking about the post-9/11 world now, and every chuckle from the audience was matched by a gasp and/or a sneer. You could almost hear them thinking: How dare he attack the President now? We need unity, not divisiveness. Why does he hate freedom? Club owners, bookers, and managers suggested that I cool it on Bush (of course, every "impressionist" who lampooned Bush's mannerisms and mangled English was given a pass; only people like me, who attacked his so-called "substance", were pulled aside). Bookings began to dwindle; rooms began to evaporate in the economic downturn. My savings took hit after hit.
Now, anyone who has teetered on the precipice of financial ruin knows what happened next. Murphy shoved his foot up my ass, and while I scrabbled for a purchase on the slippery economic slope, Murphy's Law tossed me an anvil. After my best friend took his own life, I was forced to play the role of the "strong one": holding everyone (myself included) together while planning the ensuing events, canceling gigs in order to plan, host, and attend both wake and funeral, even going in solo to clean out his apartment (and scene of his last breath). The booking agents, displaying the compassion for which show business is legendary, retaliated against my having to cancel gigs by stonewalling (and nearly blackballing) me. Any remaining agencies were reluctant to book a comic who didn't blow sunshine and daisies up the asses of their audiences when it came to the Bush Administration.
In the meantime, my brother had been deployed, redeployed, and re-redeployed to Iraq. Each time he came home, I soaked up every last bit of his time I could. Each time they sent him back, the knot in my gut tightened into an ulcerous fist of despair and helplessness. "There's nothing you can do about it," people would tell me. "I could go punch an Republican," I'd reply.
But life was apparently not content to see me squirm, gasping for financial (and, at this point, emotional) relief. I received a message informing me that my brother's convoy was struck by an RPG while I was away on a gig. Acid boiling in my stomach, I called my parents to find out that luckily, he was uninjured. I remember worrying about how much longer that luck would hold, right up until later that night, when I was robbed of a badly needed $700 - my pay for the gig. On the way home, I blew a tire, damaging the rim and sucking the last of my money from my bank account.
By 2005, my resources were stretched to the breaking point, which of course meant that I must therefore develop an illness. Shingles to be precise. The conversation with the doctor went as follows:
"Mr. (lotusmaglite), you have herpes zoster."
"What?"
"Herpes zoster."
"What?!?"
"Shingles."
"Well, then you fucking say shingles. Don't come at me with this herpes crap."
"Mr. (lotusmaglite), herpes zoster is shingles."
"Oh."
Shingles is basically Chicken Pox II: This Time It's Personal. If you've had chicken pox, you carry the shingles virus with you. Right now. All it takes is enough immunosuppression due to age, illness, or (in my case) stress, and it activates. And by activates, I mean it hurts like a motherfucker. Of course, it's exceedingly rare for someone my age (34 at the time) to develop shingles. Even rarer for those that do is to develop the complication of postherpetic neuralgia. Rarer still is for PHN to last more than a few weeks/months. And even rarer than that if for PHN to last for years. Guess which one happened to me?
Less than six months later, I was deep in debt, anxiety-ridden (why wouldn't I start having panic attacks?), in paralyzing agony, and unceremoniously homeless. Yes, homeless.
To recount, the Bush Administration had been (at least partly responsible) for my declining finances, the lack of my brother's presence, my lack of health insurance (and subsequent debt, eviction and pain), and panic attacks. I do understand that bad luck was also to blame, but hey, this is a rant. No rationality needed.
But in 2007, a funny thing began to happen. My one man biography of Job closed it's curtains. Without changing a word - or even inflection - my anti-Bush jokes seemed to "get funnier". A part-time, Andy-Kaufman-esque job yielded the minimal health insurance I needed to begin addressing my PHN pain with something slightly more healthy than bucketfuls of alcohol and illegally scored narcotic painkillers. Bookings picked back up. A friend offered me a spot on her couch while the aforementioned job began to pay off bills and pad my account. And a random email on a social web site (which, while I won't mention it's name, provided me with myspace to network) introduced me to the woman I married this past June, and the children I've come to think of as my own.
How many lessons can one man learn in so short a time? As I watched in horror while the Bush Administration lied their way into an illegal and unjust war - with the ensuing occupation and civil war, passed a slew of bills stripping Americans of their civil rights (including the so-called Patriot Act), ignored the catastrophic fallout of Hurricane Katrina, established the worthless and bogus Department of Homeland Security, illegally spied on U.S. citizens, set up concentration and torture camps, grabbed power with both greedy fists, and shifted enormous wealth away from those that needed it toward those that already had it, my life was falling apart at the seams. And yet, I fought on. I refused to water down the attacks on Bush and Company; I stepped out of the limelight I'd lived in for 7 years and got a "real" job; I grit my teeth and bore the PHN pain while I did the one thing I hate more than any other: accept charity from others. (Pride. It's a bitch - thus, the title of this little whinefest of a diary.) But I found a home. I found a family. I found a way out of the darkness.
And at last I saw a man who might be able to do the same for our United States. A "skinny kid with a funny name."
How many lessons? I couldn't count them, but I can concentrate on the important ones. Never give up. Fight. Fight until you don't think you have anything left to give, and then fight some more. Don't let the seemingly endless barrage of injustice and outrage slow you or weaken your resolve. So many people did exactly that in order to put Barack Obama in the White House, and I am proud to have been one of them. And as I have learned, I must continue to fight on - unto the very last. Until this country has been pulled from the darkness, as I was.
Others have suffered worse for less in countries that don't have the freedoms we (still) have. Fight on.
If I can do it, anyone can.