We had an awesome fucking time last week in Minneapolis.
The show at the Fine Line Music Cafe was a hell of a lot of fun, especially for my first time performing in Minneapolis. The people were cool as fuck, and luckily since we were there in the summer, the weather was great too.
Talking to people that live there and asking them how cold it gets in the winter can really scare the fuck out of someone that’s been living in California for the past 14 years getting soft.
It gets 30 below zero, every year.
Maybe that’s why the people are so nice there. They’re probably just happy it’s not winter.
They even have these enclosed walkways downtown that connect all the buildings together so that you don’t have to go outside to walk across the street.
Sometimes when I see how fucked up the traffic is in California I just think that maybe it’s worth it to live in a place where it sucks for 3 or 4 months out of the year to keep the weak willed from clogging up the highways.
Then again, I like wearing shorts in December…

Brian Redban made a cool little video about the weekend, and we’re gonna try to put one of these out after every one of these crazy UFC weekends.
Check it out:

This weekend I’m at the infamous Fillmore Auditorium in San Francisco on Friday night, and the Moore Theater in Seattle on Saturday night, and I’m extremely fucking pumped for the shows. I’ve always wanted to perform at the Fillmore, as it’s one of the most historic venues in the country. I’ve got a framed poster on the wall of my house from back when Lenny Bruce was there in the 60’s, and many a time I’ve used it for inspiration, or to just ponder what it must have been like back then when Lenny was literally taking the first steps of the modern stand up comedy movement.

Without his contribution stand up comedy would likely be far different today. Pryor, Kinison, Hicks, Carlin – they all passed through the doors that Lenny opened up.
Sometimes when you watch stuff from that long ago it’s hard to put yourself in the mindset of that generation, and realize that his approach was completely revolutionary for the time.

It’s going to be a tremendous honor for me to perform in the same building where Lenny did, and the fact that it’s in San Francisco – one of my favorite cities ever, just makes it ever the more sweet.
On Saturday night were taking the freak show up north to the Moore Theater in Seattle, and that should be awesome too.
Seattle is always fun, and I don’t get to perform up there very much.
Hopefully Joey Diaz’ warrants won’t come back to haunt him up there.
See you motherfuckers this weekend!!

SFist.com is a great website of local news and events for San Francisco.
The interview was to promote my stand up gig there August 22nd at the Fillmore theater.

How long have you spent in the Bay Area? Any favorite memories?

I actually lived in San Francisco from the time I was 7 until I was 11.
I used to perform a magic act on fisherman’s wharf for tips when I was 8.
My magic sucked, but I was cute, so I usually made a couple bucks and
I would spend it on comic books.
I guess that was the start of my performance career.

What’s your take on the local comedy scene here?

It’s a healthy scene. San Francisco is a very smart city, probably
the smartest per capita in the nation in my opinion. All those smart
people living together are bound to point out some funny shit. Very
few hacks seem to come out of San Fran too, which is pretty
impressive.

Favorite Bay Area commedians?

Patton Oswalt spent a lot of time here, and I think he’s hilarious.
Al Madrigal is another really funny guy that I met working at Cobb’s
years ago.

What is funny?

Everything. It’s all in how you look at it. Everything can be a
subject for comedy, but the most important criteria is that it
actually has to be funny for the person telling it.
There’s the old adage – tragedy + time = funny. It’s not necessarily
that tragic events are funny, it’s just that everything can be funny
if it’s looked at properly. Tragic events usually have a little more
pop to them because of the taboo factor. There seems to be some sort
of a release we enjoy from talking about forbidden things.
Fortunately for me, almost everything I find interesting is taboo to
some people in one way or another. I didn’t really plan my act out
that way, it’s just that’s how my mind has developed.
Of course everything isn’t going to be funny for everyone, but that’s
part of the fun in it. If you think something is funny, and someone
gets upset that you think it’s funny, it usually makes it even
funnier.
The real key is that it actually has to be funny to the person
describing it. Real comedy comes from a real and honest perspective.
It’s basically “here’s the world through my eyes.”
The real key to it is finding the point of view that has the most
funny in it, and then delivering it in a way that introduces it into
people’s minds in the smoothest and most efficient way possible.
That’s the real craft in the art form.
It takes a lot of experimenting to find the correct mixture of words
and ideas to express a point, and it’s incredibly satisfying when you
nail it.
Stand up comedy is this weird, intangible art form where you’re using
ideas to cause a real physical reaction in people.
You take them on a ride of thoughts, and one of the craziest aspects
of this experience is that when I’m really locked into the zone on
stage I’m just as much of a passenger in the ride as the people in the
audience.
I’m guiding it all based on my writing, my research, my practicing and
honing bits time after time, show after show, but when it all comes
together I’m just riding the wave along with everyone else. That’s
the most beautiful moment – when it all comes together and we’re all
locked into one gigantic thought.

What is not funny?

Again, everything. If you don’t think it’s funny, than it’s not.
It’s a purely subjective art form.

What makes a good audience and venue for a comic?

My personal favorite type of venue is a place with low ceilings and
tight seating for about 200 people. I love intimate shows. I think
those kind of environments are the most suited for a real connection
with the audience. You can pull off that group connection in a larger
place, but it takes a slightly different approach. You have to turn
it into a big party.
As for the audience, in the beginning of a comic’s career you don’t
have people that are coming out specifically to see you, so if your
material is controversial like mine, it can be hit or miss. The real
key is being able to stick with your guns long enough that the
audience comes to you because they like what you do, and they’re
coming out to see it.
I feel very fortunate that I’m in that place now. I appreciate it
very, very much, and I’m having the time of my life.

What are Bay Area audiences like?

The best in the country. The smartest audiences, with the least
amount of douche bags.
I love it here, that’s why I recorded my last CD in San Francisco.

First News Radio, then Fear Factor, now UFC.. how did you move between
all these?

The perfect combination of luck, whore-like opportunism, a rabid
hunger for pursuing my personal interests regardless how the
conventional wisdom would say they could negatively affect my career.
I just do what I like to do, except in the case of fear factor, where
I did that because I like money.

The Fillmore—pretty historic venue to perform at—any past shows you
would have liked to have caught there?

Lenny Bruce. I’ve got an old poster framed in my house from one of
his old Fillmore shows. He’s the godfather of my kind of stand up.
He opened up doors that all of the greats came through, and several
times he got arrested doing it. Without him and his efforts none of
this would be possible. It’s an incredible honor to be performing at
the same venue that he once did.

People should come see your shows because…

I’m bringing a big, fat, fucked up party to San Francisco. We’re
going to drink, we’re going to think, and we’re going to laugh. We
are all experiencing this ridiculous virtual reality of society
together, and we all have jobs to do, and shit that needs to get done,
so we’ve all collectively agreed to keep up business as usual.
Sometimes it’s important to be reminded how insane this whole thing
really is. Sometimes you need someone to point out that as much as
you think your life is important, we’re all just temporary talking
monkeys crawling around on a rock that’s flying through the universe.
Life is a massive fucking mystery, but with the right point of view,
it can be a really fun one. I’m here to point all that out. It’s
what I was put on this planet to do, and all of the events of my life
are just preparation for the next group experience at the next show.
I’m gearing up for it right now, and I can’t wait to see you
motherfuckers August 22 at the Fillmore.
Leave all the bullshit behind, we’re gonna have some fun.

Have you ever had a thought that was so powerful that it completely changed the way you view the world? I do a lot of thinking about all kinds of shit, and sometimes it can feel like I’m just spinning my wheels, going over the same thoughts and problems over and over again looking for solutions. Then one day, out of nowhere the universe will send me the gift of a thought that changes the entire landscape forever. A clue that takes all of the perplexing pieces juggling around in my consciousness and guides them into a form that makes the great picture come into focus in a way I’ve never seen it before.
I’ve had precious few of these gifts in my life, but recently I had the strangest, and most powerful one yet.
I’ve been trying to figure out how to put it to words in a way that would make sense, and although I think I can get the general idea across, I’m not really sure if it’s there’s a way to completely describe the way it hit me.

It happened to me when I was in Hawaii riding in the back of a boat staring down at the beautiful clear blue water when a pod of dolphins started swimming beside us. Now, Hawaii always puts me in a special frame of mind because it’s such an unusual place, with it’s own very unique energy. We think of it as a beautiful chain of islands, which it is of course, but what it really is, is the peak of the world’s largest active volcano popping right out of the middle of the fucking Pacific Ocean. The volcano constantly pumps out lava into the surrounding waters, occasionally violently erupting, dissolving streets and houses under it’s wake, and reminding everyone living there that this state of existence, like everything else is very temporary.
They sleep on the side of this beautiful, benevolent god Pele, surrounded by incredibly deep water, never knowing when it’s all going to explode into an end and a new beginning.
To me it always feels both humbling, and incredibly inspirational.

It was a perfect day.
I was in a very unusual state of mind because this vacation had a very special significance for me; it was the last one I would go on before my girlfriend gave birth to our daughter. Just the reality of becoming a father alone has been an incredible catalyst for thought. My mind is always wondering and racing around as it is, but with this new chapter in my life approaching my consciousness and awareness have been at an all time high.

The magical influence of the sacred plant enhanced and illuminated everything around me, accentuating the colors and intensifying the feeling of the warm sun and gentle breeze to the point where it was like the whole fucking world was giving me a giant, loving hug. I couldn’t have felt any better.
I was taking it all in, trying to appreciate it as much as I could when the dolphins started swimming along side the boat.

Dolphins are really playful and they love putting on a show for people.
As we were moving they were swimming along side of us, and they would gather up speed and jump out of the water. They were reaching out and contacting us, and the more excited we screamed when they jumped out of the water, the more they did it. It was really fucking cool.
I just felt like we were sharing this really special moment of communication, and I was so blown away by these intelligent, playful creatures that wanted to contact us.

When you come into this kind of contact with dolphins it really hits you how smart they are, especially when you’re high as FUCK. They’re way smarter than anything on this planet other than us, and possibly smarter than us, they just can’t alter their environment the way we can. They’ve been here a lot longer than us, too. They don’t know exactly how long, but it’s thought that it’s millions of years. I’ve watched a bunch of documentaries on them, and I have a deep appreciation for them, so this encounter was extra exciting for me.
I started thinking while I was being treated to this amazing moment how incredible it was, and this led me to start thinking what it could possibly be like to be a dolphin, and what dolphin consciousness was like. I started thinking whether or not it’s different than ours, and whether they were more or less aware, and then I started thinking about the possibility that our consciousness was the same, but that just our biology and environments were different.

Then it hit me – what if that’s the case with people?
What if “me” is the same for everyone, just the physical circumstances differ.
The thought that hit me was that we are all the exact same thing, we’re just experiencing this existence through an infinite number of different biological filters that we call human bodies.
What if “me” at it’s core is always the same, it’s just the physical body and all the aspects of each particular life that are different?

Of course we all have different personalities, but how much of that is biological?
Human beings vary so much biologically- how much do these factors contribute to what you think of as “you?”
How much of your “personality” is a combination of your own personal, unique biochemistry? How much of who “you” are and the way “you” react to things is based on the levels of hormones your body produces, and the quality of your synaptic responses? How much of “you” is the genetic code that you function under?
How much is your accumulated reactions to life experiences?
How much is based on the alignment of the stars at the exact moment you were born?
Is that shit real? And if it is, why do so many people that are into astrology come off like such fucking loons?
What if the variations in humans can all be attributed to a combination of all of these variables, but what if the “me” at the very center of all of it is exactly the same for all of us?

If I lived your life, in your body, every second of every day of your life until the point where you’re at now, would I be you? What if we are all the exact same thing, but we’re just living out different lives? That’s the thought that hit me.

Right as I watched these dolphins leap out of the water to play with us, this epiphany burned itself into my consciousness and I haven’t thought about a single thing the same way since. One moment that changed my mind forever.

I thought of the struggle for peace and happiness that most of us are constantly engaged in. There’s an incredibly large amount of people in this country that are on antidepressants.
Do you know the numbers? Neither did I, so I just google searched it on my iphone in the middle of the fucking ocean. Bang! Just like that. Ain’t technology a motherfucker?
Strap yourself in for the answer, because it’s fucking insane…

In 2005 118,000,000 prescriptions were written for antidepressants.
One hundred and eighteen FUCKING MILLION.
That’s a staggering number. Are there really that many depressed people out there? I mean, I’m sure that some people really do have a biological imbalance that can be corrected chemically, and that antidepressants help those people, but 118,000,000?
Holy fuck.
How many people are happy?
I mean, if that many were so depressed that they went to the doctor for happy pills, how many people just dealt with it and don’t take the pills?
How many just drink instead? I mean, fuck… there’s only 300,000,000 people in this whole country, and doctors wrote 118,000,000 prescriptions? How many actual people is that taking all those pills?

Some people say these numbers are so high because doctors over prescribe the drugs.
Although I’m sure that’s true, there’s still got to be someone saying that they’re not happy for them to be treated for being depressed. It’s not like they’re handing that shit out at the laundry mat. Those people all sought out a doctor’s help for depression.
No matter how you look at it, that’s an incredible amount of unhappy people.

So really, what am I trying to say? I mean, so far, this sounds like some typical stoned, hippy bullshit about universal consciousness, right?
I’m well aware that to discuss anything as sensitive as happiness or consciousness you immediately run the risk of sounding ridiculous, but I really think I might be on to something with this line of thinking.
Something is very wrong, and very unnatural about the way most people live and think about this life, and I think it’s a major factor in why so many people are unhappy.

The way the majority of people in this country are living their lives is a sign of a sickness. We’re a group of people playing follow the leader, but there’s no fucking leader. Most of us will live our lives connected to a system that makes you labor all day for very little joy, pretending that somehow there’s a better life waiting when you’ve done your work.
This life flies by at a blinding pace, and often despite your best intentions it can take a turn for the miserable and just stay there until you drop.
You can read all the right books, take all the right yoga classes, but you never get happy.
Why is that? Why do so many of us fall into this trap?

My thought, while I was out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, high as giraffe pussy and trying to talk to dolphins – was that the way to really be happy is to view everyone you meet as you. Be as happy to meet them as you would be meeting another version of yourself living a completely different life.

Could this really work?
It’s certainly working for me, but is this an idea that a large number of people would accept? I honestly don’t know, but when I look at it objectively it doesn’t seem very likely to catch on in a grand scale anytime real soon, and that kinda sucks.
It just seems like there’s way too many broken people in this world. There are just so many people that have lived their entire life in a shitty direction, and have neither the will nor the inclination to change it now. There’s just so much momentum propelling so many people into a shitty direction that it would take an incredible amount of energy to turn it all around. A mass psychedelic movement where thinking was readdressed and the consciousness of the entire population were reprogrammed.
Realistically, even if we started teaching thinking like that in our schools tomorrow, it would probably take a long fucking time for it to be sorted out, if ever. I mean, in 1859 Darwin published “origin of the species,” and in 2008 a recent Gallop poll found that over 50% of Americans said they thought that evolution was fake, and that the earth is less than 10,000 years old.

There’s going to be a lot of people that aren’t going to come along on our little hippy love fest. There are also a lot of people that would probably try to take advantage of this new way of thinking. Crazy homeless people would especially become a real problem, “I’m you! Give me my money, bitch!”
Either way, I had this thought a few months ago, and I’ve been subscribing to that notion ever since. It gets a little slippery sometimes, but for the most part the idea has stuck, and in fact it seems to be strengthening and growing.
Sometimes I need to remind myself how beautiful that idea seemed on that boat in the middle of the water, and that’s one of the reasons why I wanted to write this blog.
That, and if it’s possible to do the thought justice, I wanted to put it in a way that could spread this idea.

We as a race are clearly in some sort of an adolescent stage of evolution, and it certainly doesn’t help that we’re only alive in this life for a shockingly brief amount of time during which long before we ever get our own shit together, and develop a healthy perception of reality, we’re already trapped in the capitalist work grind and raising an entirely new batch of kids on the same dopey bullshit of the past.
I’ve been crazy, and I’ve been sane. I’ve been angry, and I’ve been happy, and a lot of what seems to make the difference for me is how much effort I put into positive patterns of thought and the proper biological maintenance. Positive thoughts attract more positive thoughts, and the more I focus on it the deeper and smoother the groove becomes.
Wring the stress out of your body in the gym so your mind can be free of the leftover chimpanzee rage.
Clean your mind of the foolish thoughts of the misguided souls that have lived before you and followed a blind path into the impossible jungle of consciousness.
Just because a bunch of other people are moving in the same direction, it doesn’t mean that any of them have any idea where they’re going, and just because they’re following one person, it doesn’t make him or her the leader.
A lot of people are just plain fucking scared of the dark, and they’ll follow anyone that’s holding a flashlight.

Where am I going with all this? I’m not exactly sure, but I really think I’m on to something. I know it sounds crazy, but try it, even if you keep what you’re doing to yourself. Try thinking of and treating everyone you meet as if they’re you.
You might be surprised at the results.

Mad love to you all.