If you're wondering why those tales of my adventures in no-day-job comedy never showed up, it's because I went to back to work a month and a half later. The new job (at the same place) is more in line with my strengths, so I believe I'll be able to do it as hard as I can while I'm there and forget about it when I leave, meaning it and comedy won't have to duke it out.

I'm still a comic. Well. A comic with health insurance. Does that count?

Furniture Salesman No More!



So, this happened last week.

 

I left a job I'd held for 18 years, a lot of good friends, and a sense of security behind for an uncertain future. It was necessary for me to leave for complicated reasons (not all of which I'll share), but suffice it to say it was my call, on good terms and unavoidable.  

 

And now I'm out on this ledge, ready to pursue a career in comedy. And I keep thinking of Pauley's question when 60-year-old Rocky Balboa told him he'd be boxing again: "what -- you don't think you've peaked?"

 

I'm going to make it work. I'll either make my living making strangers laugh, or I'm going to make just enough money at a day job somewhere to make it work. What I'm not going to do is take a career that demands all my time and attention. If I work outside comedy, I'll be working to shore up the bills and support stand-up, not "doing comedy in my spare time."

 

It's scary. Fun. Uncertain. Fulfilling. And I'll be telling you about it here. Watch this space, and we'll cover the adventures of an ex-furniture salesman.

 

...because I haven't peaked. 

 

God damn it.

Family Research Council and innumerable others warned about this, and it has come to pass. The Supreme Court has failed to defend my "traditional" marriage, and now it is meaningless.

That January day in 1986 when my wife and I stood in front of a Greenville, NC magistrate and said tearful vows in front of two impromptu witnesses (another magistrate and a parking ticket lady) -- disappeared.

The time she called me with the news she'd felt our first baby move for the first time (she was at home watching Overboard, and I took the call at a Kmart service desk, in those days before cell phones) -- nothing.

Celebrating each other's triumphs and bolstering each other during failures, holding hands at tense hospital times, laughing at family in-jokes that no one else will ever get -- gone.

All of it gone.

Swept away by an activist court's evil choice to give same-sex couples a shot at those same experiences and memories.

You bastards. You should have defended my marriage. From the gays. And their gay "marriage wiping out" powers.

Now it's all over.