I had a stinky hole in my head, San Jose improv this weekend

I had been feeling a little “off” the last few weeks, and I couldn’t really put my finger on it. I started having a toothache, and a dull pain in my jaw, and considering that I hadn’t been to a dentist in almost 10 years it’s not that much of a surprise.
Well, I got checked out, and apparently that “off” feeling was a fucking rotten hole in my head where my tooth had decayed to the point where it had caused a hole in my jawbone that had bacteria growing in it.

It turned out that I had to get a root canal, and the next day I was getting a hole drilled into the problem in my head. The dentist drilled away until he broke through to the pocket, and the most putrid fucking smell came out of it. Like rotten eggs and sulfur. Then it really sunk in – that shit was in my fucking head! A rotten hole in the bone in my fucking head.
Yikes.
Now I’m on antibiotics, and I’ve got a new found respect for how important dental hygiene is. My whole system was thrown off by this, and didn’t realize how much so until I got it cleared up. I feel like a new man now.

It really made me stop and think how fucking lucky we are to have modern medicine. If it wasn’t for doctors my physical life would be total shit. I’ve had 3 knee surgeries, including 2 ACL reconstructions. Amazingly enough, they don’t bother me at all now. The left one had some meniscus taken out, and sometimes it gets a little sore, but nothing worth complaining about, but my right one feels fantastic. Just a hundred years ago these injuries would have left me a hobbled mess.

A hundred years ago the hole in my head would have probably never been diagnosed since x-rays weren’t around, so I probably would have continued to suffer until the tooth just rotted out of my head and left me all fucked up and infected. It might have even caused a heart attack and killed me.
Pretty fucking nuts when you think of how recently a hundred years ago is in the greater spectrum of the earth’s time line.

I’ve decided to take care of another problem that’s been bothering me forever, so next month I’m going to get my nose fixed.
Not the way it looks, but the way it works. My nose has been almost useless to breathe out of most of my life. I fell down a flight of stairs and crushed it when I was 5, and after that years of kickboxing and jiu jitsu have left the inside of it filled with broken cartilage and scar tissue that almost completely blocks air from coming in that way.
Whenever I take a yoga class they’re always getting on me to breathe in through my nose and out through the mouth, but my shit just doesn’t work correctly.

I’m a mouth breather.
Literally.

I’ve been wanting to get it fixed forever, but I’ve never been able to set aside the time for recovery. When you get something like this done, you can’t work out at all for 2 weeks, and then after that there’s absolutely no contact for 4 weeks, so in my mind that means that I’m going to get horribly out of shape and get my ass kicked in jiu jitsu when I get back, and that never seemed that appealing. It’s really one of those things where I have to just bite the bullet and take the 6 weeks off and just get the damn thing fixed already.

Getting things taken care of feels great.
Just getting the tooth taken care of not only makes me feel better physically, but it’s also one more thing I don’t have to think about. The less bullshit I’ve got rolling around in my head the better, and over the last couple years I’ve gotten really good at clearing things up and getting rid of problems in my life. Peace of mind is really a fucking incredibly underrated commodity, and as I’ve gotten older and wiser that’s one of the more important lessons that I’ve learned.

Physical health is another thing that simply can’t be emphasized enough. Usually it takes me getting sick until I’ve really got that fact drilled in my head to the point where I can truly appreciate it, but over the last couple years I’ve been really diligent about reminding myself of how important it is while I’m still healthy.
I realize at the end of this blog entry that it’s not even remotely entertaining, but I still think it’s worth posting.
Take care of your body, party people.
That’s my message of the day.

I promise the next blog entry won’t be so serious and dry. Other than my stinky hole in my head and impending nasal surgery, everything else is damn groovy.
I had a fantastic time at the House of Blues in Vegas Friday night, and the UFC fights Saturday were off the charts.

One thing I did differently for the House of Blues show was that I made it a sitting only show. In the past there would be a lot of people seated, but then there would be a few hundred more standing over by the bars.
That always led to people talking and generally made the mood of the show more like a rowdy bar gig and less like an entertaining comedy show. I never even thought about doing anything about it until I went to see my buddy Doug Stanhope perform a couple weeks ago in LA. He did a gig at a bar here, and it was standing room only.
I’ve done plenty of standing room only shows, but that was the first one that I’ve ever seen as an audience member, and it was pretty uncomfortable.
Standing up and performing for an hour and a half is one thing, but watching a show while standing up kinda sucks. After a while my back was bothering me, and I wanted to stretch out. Doug was hilarious, but I was actually relieved that it was over. I learned a lot from that, and from now on whenever possible I’m going to have sitting only shows.

I know they turned a lot of people away Friday night at the House of Blues because of this decision since it meant they couldn’t sell as many tickets, but I guarantee it was a much better show for the folks that went. It was better for us too. I had a great fucking time, and there wasn’t nearly as much drunken heckling. I’m sorry for the folks that didn’t get tickets in time, but that just means you gotta be on the ball and hop on that shit early!
Join my mailing list to stay up on all my future gigs.

This weekend I’ll be in San Jose at the Improv with Ari Shaffir and Tom Segura. It should be a fucking bang up weekend, so hop on the tickets early so you don’t get left out of the party.
See you bitches then…