I flew into Chicago this morning, leaving at 6am LA time with a solid 40 minutes of sleep under my belt. I did press all morning for the Improv in Shaumburg, Illinois this weekend,, and then my friends Brian, Joey, Ari and I sat and had some dinner in the hotel bar and listened to some people complain about their jobs. At least that’s what I thought they were doing.
The truth is, I was actually just assuming that they were complaining about their jobs, because that’s what I naturally do when I see guys wearing ties sitting down drinking and talking after work.
What an unfortunate little world we humans have created, where most people have to spend most of their time doing shit that they hate so that they can afford to do the shit that they love with what little time is left over. It’s a real sucky cycle, my friends.

I feel so fucking blessed to be able to actually make a living doing only shit that I love.
I can vividly remember the “job” days – spent doing construction, driving limos, delivering newspapers, etc – basically anything I could do for money while I figured out how to make a living doing comedy. There was always a part of me that felt like a loser because I hated working regular jobs.
I would just think, “What the fuck is wrong with me? Other people can pull it off, why am I such a fuck head?” I just despised the idea of spending my days doing shit I hated, and no matter how hard I tried, I just couldn’t “grow up” and put in my daily hours like everyone else.
Looking back now though, those years were incredibly important to me.
They gave me a deep appreciation of my freedom, and inspired me to push even harder when I’m feeling lazy. You gotta feel the sucky to appreciate the good stuff.
Sort of like how nothing makes you appreciate a good woman more than being in a relationship with a fucking nightmare, and nothing makes you appreciate the smell of roses more than walking into one of Joey Diaz’s farts. At least the farts are funny. That’s just one of the universal rules in life that we all know; when dudes are hanging out together, farts are always funny. I guess the nightmare relationships are funny eventually too if you can get out alive. But I digress…

It appears that the “method” we were using on my myspace page for event invites is no longer effective, so to advertise club dates in the future I’m going to be reduced to posting up frequent bulletins when the dates arise, and sending out email list blasts from joerogan.net. That, and of course my calendar will always be up to date if you wanna check there.
To keep informed of new club dates near you, please sign up for my list here.

What I’ve been doing lately is trying to return to a city just about every 6 to 8 months or so. The way I see it that seems like just enough time to give people a break, and to write a reasonable amount of new material.
That, and I’m really committed to being more active with this website. I love writing, and I really appreciate all the kind words and responses to the blog, it’s just a matter of forcing myself to spend a certain amount of time posting on it each week.
I’ve got a whole experiment that I’m going to do with managing my time when I get back to LA, and I’ll post about it here.

I’m also going to try to post much more frequent clips of my stand up here too. Preferably right after the week is over.
Here’s a clip from last week in San Francisco. It’s my brokeback mountain bit.
It was on my CD, and I love the bit, but realistically it’s shelf life is fairly limited because of the fact that it’s a movie that’s already at least a year old, and after a while a topic like that just kinda gets stale. Nothing is sadder that seeing a comic doing a bit about a movie from 10 years ago that no one remembers. My bits evolve and change as I continue to do them until they’re pretty much “done.” This one seems to be done, so I figured I’ll just throw it out there on the net.

Enjoy!
If you’re not one of my myspace friends, add me, motherfucker! My page address is here: http://myspace.com/talkingmonkey
Most importantly though, sign up for the mailing list at joerogan.net. That’s where I’m going to try and put the majority of my energy in the future.
I’ll try to get another one of these blog entries up before the weekend is over.
In the meantime, Chicago people, strap the fuck in! We’re here all weekend at the Improv in Shaumburg, Illinois, and we’re in high gear.
Joey Diaz, Ari Shaffir and I have been traveling around steady for months now, and the shows have been fucking insane. The best shows I’ve been a part of in my entire life by far.
If you’ve never seen Joey and Ari perform with me, they’re both fucking hilarious, and both of them could easily headline clubs on their own. They’re also two of my best friends on the planet, and it’s been an honor doing all these shows with them.
It’s more than just comedy, it’s a fucking movement, and everyone can be a part of it. Come on down and catch us, we’ll make you laugh, and we’ll change the way you look at life.

Onward!!

One of my favorite songs - especially when I’m on the road, is the great Johnny Cash song “I’ve been everywhere.”
I’ve got a little routine I do when I land in a city; as soon as the plane lands I load that fucker up on the ipod, say thank you and good-bye to the flight attendants, then I press play and let Johnny roll. It’s the perfect mood setter and it never fails to get me excited about the weekend ahead.
I’ve been doing a ton of road work lately, traveling all over this great land of ours doing stand up, and having a fantastic time doing it.
Nashville, Vancouver, Sacramento, Atlanta, Dallas – (all rattling off in my head in Johnny’s voice, “I’ve been everywhere, man, I’ve been everywhere…”)
The list goes on and on, with great memories of great shows and great crowds at every stop.

Fear Factor was a terrific job, and I certainly feel very fortunate for having had that gig, but man, I can’t even describe how much happier I am traveling and doing stand up.
I’ve been doing comedy for almost 19 years now, and the more I do it, the more I love it.

There’s some very strange thing that happens when I’m performing, and I’m not exactly sure if I understand it. I can recognize patterns and waves in it, but I’m often just as much of a passenger on the ride as anyone watching it in the audience.
It’s like “my act” is this living, vibrant thing that I activate when I perform, and the more I perform, the stronger and the healthier and the more powerful it gets.
One of the least expected and least understood aspects of performing stand up, at least for me, is that the better I get at it the less I feel of it as “mine” or “me,” and the more I feel like I’m just some sort of an antennae tuning it in and performing the show.
It’s a very weird feeling, and it’s very hard to describe - like a strange balancing act of consciousness in my mind; be present in the moment, but don’t think about how crazy it all is. Enjoy it, but don’t dwell on how great it is or you’ll lose the feeling – ride the wave.

After the show is over, I go over the recordings and sit down and try to write out my new ideas and expand and enhance them. Until my next show, my act stays alive in my head and in my laptop.

With all this traveling that I do I feel like I’m getting a very, very unusual view of the world we live in. I spent a lot of time living in LA staying here while I was filming Fear Factor, and only going on the road once a month or so during the off season, but lately it seems like almost every week I’m in a different place, with a completely different vibe, and I’m really starting to feel the effects of it.
It’s like the more I travel, and the more I see, the more I feel like a different view of the world, and humans in general is coming into focus for me. It’s sort of like having just a couple pieces of a giant jigsaw puzzle solved, so you decide to only look at the small area that you have put together, and proclaim that as the image. Then slowly you start to put together new areas far away from the other area, and the more often this happens the more the idea of what the puzzle really is changes.

One of the things that’s really odd about seeing people in so many different places is how many people in each area follow whatever the local pattern of behavior is, especially the accents.
Going from Belfast, Northern Ireland to Atlanta was a trip. It’s hard to believe that they’re both speaking the same language.
And it’s not just how they talk that’s similar in each area, but what they like and what’s important in their life.
For instance, I don’t think I’ve ever seen as many churches or bible billboards in one location as I did in Georgia. They just LOVE the baby Jesus down there in Hotlanta.
And I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many cokeheads in one place as I did hanging out at night in Phoenix. Now, coke is one of the drugs I’ve never actually done, so it took me a while to figure out what the fuck was going on there. I probably wouldn’t have noticed how prevalent it is at all if my friend Brian hadn’t clued me in to what was happening.
I just thought everyone was really talkative and excited.
Now don’t get me wrong, I’m certainly not saying that everyone in Phoenix does coke, or that it’s a bad town, because it’s actually one of my favorite cities to perform in. I’m just being honest about what I saw going to clubs out there. Apparently (according to a buddy of mine that’s a cop) Phoenix is in the middle of some sort of pipeline that brings coke up from Mexico, and a ton of it goes through the city. Literally.
I can vividly remember one night where it felt like I was trapped in a cocaine version the movie “blade.”
Def Leopard’s “pour some sugar on me” was playing in this club, and the unnaturally enthusiastic locals threw their hands up in the air and cheered out the words like they were waiting for a combination of blood and coke to come spraying down from the fire extinguishers.

Now, if I had to choose between hanging out with someone who is fucked up on coke, or someone who is fucked up on the baby Jesus… well, that’s a tough call.
The one thing you DEFINITELY want to avoid though, is a cokehead that’s also a Jesus freak. That, my friends, is a one two combo that can very easily lead to an opening segment on the evening news.
The problem I’ve always had with people that are doing coke is that their ego gets out of control, and they can tend to get violent.
And if you know someone that’s a coke head, and then all of a sudden they start text messaging you bible quotes – I’d say that’s a pretty good time to get the fuck outta town.

Now, I can understand how a lot of people that live in a certain area can act and think in a similar manner. It’s totally natural. We’re sort of designed to play follow the leader.
What I don’t understand is when they try to turn their particular way of thinking and acting into LAW, and they try to enforce these rules of behavior inside invisible lines in the dirt.
The whole concept of borders is really fucking bizarre when you think about it. Country to country laws is a little more understandable, but the variations from state to state just always seem completely ridiculous to me.
One of the things I like to do as a goof whenever I go to a new place, is go on the internet and find out what kind of weird, fucked up laws that state has. A couple weeks ago I was headed to Georgia, and I just fucking KNEW they must have some doozies. I mean, it is the Bible belt after all.
Well, I wasn’t disappointed.
Turns out that Georgia has some of those really cool, old school “sodomy” laws!
Now, if you’re only casually familiar with sodomy laws, you might get all confused and think that those are just laws passed to keep gay guys from banging each other in the ass.

No, no, no! Sodomy laws are actually laws, real fucking laws that get argued in court that are based on some crazy, biblical, fire and brimstone shit!
The definition of sodomy, as it appears on the books is this:

(a) A person commits the offense of sodomy when he or she performs or submits to any sexual act involving the sex organs of one person and the mouth or anus of another. A person commits the offense of aggravated sodomy when he or she commits sodomy with force and against the will of the other person. The fact that the person allegedly sodomized is the spouse of a defendant shall not be a defense to a charge of aggravated sodomy.

How fucking great is that?
The definition of “Sodomy” actually includes blowjobs and eating pussy!! And it’s illegal, even if you’re doing it to your lawfully wedded wife!!
See, it’s actually from the Bible™! It’s a real law that exists in 2007 based on a story written way back when they thought that the world was flat and the sun was 17 miles away about Sodom and Gomorrah where God decided to fuck everyone up with fire raining from the sky, because apparently too many people were getting head, and it was really pissing him off.

The actual punishment is listed here:

(b) A person convicted of the offense of sodomy shall be punished by imprisonment for not less than one nor more than 20 years. A person convicted of the offense of aggravated sodomy shall be punished by imprisonment for life or by imprisonment for not less than ten nor more than 20 years. Any person convicted under this Code section of the offense of aggravated sodomy shall, in addition, be subject to the sentencing and punishment provisions of Code Sections 17-10-6.1 and 17-10-7.

Lick your wife’s pussy, do ten years in a cage.
That seems fair enough.
Well, at least Georgia’s got great weather, nice people, and awesome Barbecue!

What I really want to know is who the hell was trying to make laws to stop blowjobs?
How did that even come up?
I mean was there actually a bunch of dudes sitting around talking about what they should put people in jail for?

“We’ve got to do something about this KKK problem we have!”

“That can wait!! First we need to put a stop to all this dick sucking!!”

Whenever I see someone all confused like that - like some young conservative guy on TV arguing against gay marriage while he’s wearing a bow tie - I always think that the poor dude probably just had no one cool to hang out with. Either that or he’s gay.
Or both.
That’s really the problem- not the gays, but that people growing up heading into politics and passing those goofy laws just had no one cool to hang out with. At least that’s my theory.
I think that’s why there are less of those goofy laws here in California.

And for those people out there hating on California - please put it to rest.
Forget all the bullshit you hear about people being dumb or fake, (all true) all you need to know is that it’s 80 degrees and sunny year round, the women are ridiculously hot, you can get state legal medical marijuana in over 500 different locations, and the Terminator is the fucking governor.
This state fucking RULES.
Sure there are some idiots here, but there’s idiots everywhere. No getting away from them.
What California does have going for it though, is that most of the people that live here moved here because wherever they used to live sucked.

I’m pretty sure they’re not regularly enforcing these crazy laws that some of these states have, but it’s not like they’re in a rush to wipe them off the books, either.
There’s sooo many weird state laws out there, especially when it comes to sex.
For instance:
You can’t have sex with a 16 year old girl in Boston, but you can always take her on a trip to New Hampshire where it’s totally legal.

“I heard about a place that has the BEST ice cream, and it’s only an hour drive away!”

The age of consent in New Hampshire is 16, but if you want to try any of that homo stuff, you have to be at least 18 or they’ll lock you up.
I’m pretty sure I was a lot smarter if I was a sober 13 than a drunk 21. Maybe they should take that into account up there too since they have a liquor store just about every 20 yards.
When I was a kid, Boston had those retarded colonial age “blue laws,” where liquor stores were not allowed to sell you booze on Sunday, so people often drove up to New Hampshire to buy booze. It was a regular event. We actually had people that made laws forcing you to observe religious days, and to not allow folks to earn money selling perfectly legal booze on “the Lord’s day.”
Sort of like our own little Taliban.

What if say, you’re of a universal, rationally acceptable age to be having sex with a 16 year old girl (so it doesn’t make this idea too gross); like say 17 or 18 - and what if you’re RIGHT on the legal side of the border in New Hampshire, and while you’re in the throws of passion your feet and ankles manage to slip over the border into Massachusetts?
Just how thick is that border anyway?
Is there a neutral gray area in between states? Maybe we should try that out.

How about a one-mile strip in between states where you could do whatever the fuck you want.
Carry a handgun, get a hooker, eat magic mushrooms, run around naked and piss in the street screaming into a megaphone that you’re going to kill the president and fuck his lifeless face - anything you want to do, as long as it doesn’t actually hurt anyone.
We can just have a few common sense and decency laws.

There would be a big sign when you enter:

“You are now entering a “gray area” of limited laws. You must be 18 or over to enter this area.
The rules are:

No murder.

No rape.

No thievery.

No drunk driving, and you can’t fuck kids.

Good luck, be careful, and have fun.”

How fucking cool would that be?

One mile of casinos, 24 hour liquor stores, whore houses and night clubs that only close for a couple hours to clean up.
And when we catch people in that area that are just useless douchebags, we can all pass a vote on it and kill them.
To the person that lacks the proper vision that can seem barbaric, but really that’s just the right and civilized way to deal with some people that are beyond hope. It’s not like there’s some shortage of people, and leaving them locked up in a cage until their heart stops beating isn’t really doing them any favors. I’m not talking about doing this for normal illegal shit - just for stuff like murderers, rapists and kid fuckers.

I believe that there are certain people that deserve a second chance.
I believe that many people evolve over time. I personally have certainly evolved in my own life, and I certainly do think that some people can change, and learn, and grow, but I think it really all depends in where they’re starting from, and how much time they’ve been alive. There are some people that are just completely beyond hope, and we really just need to kill them off, the same way we kill off bad dogs.
When someone’s pitbull eats the mailman’s dick, no one thinks “Well, I guess we need to train that little fella and teach him to stop doing that.” No, you’re like, “Shit, I need to kill that fucking crazy dog.”
That’s the way it should be for people, too. You catch a grown man fucking a 10 year old boy, you’re not supposed to lock him up and give him therapy… you’re supposed to gun him down in a crowded arena and stream the whole event live on the internet.
Maybe he’ll come back as a beautiful sparrow and start all over again, but in this life… you fucked the catcher of the little league team, and you gotta go.
It’s not like if we didn’t kill the creep he’s going to live forever and cure cancer.
He’s gonna die anyway, just like you and me. We’re just pushing him to the front of the line to make this dimension a little more habitable for nice folks.
I mean, realistically thinking, what are the odds that guy is ever going to get his shit together?
What are they, a billion to one? Is it a lot more than a billion?
If you could bet on that shit in Vegas, the odds would be ASTRONOMICAL.

The bet is this: there’s a guy that’s 36 years old, he lives with his mom, and he just got arrested and convicted of fucking a 10 year old trick-or-treater who was dressed up like a pumpkin in exchange for 10 boxes of chocolates. Will he ever get his shit together and become a productive member society before he dies?
Yes or No?
No bookie in the world would take that bet. You would have to bet like a hundred billion dollars to win a penny.

And really the guy would probably be happy if you killed him. He’s probably miserable every second that he’s alive.
Look at it like this; it’s sort of like when you’re playing someone in a video game and the score is like 200 to -1, and there’s only 2 minutes left in the game. There’s not much motivation to play when there’s no way you’re gonna catch up and end that game a winner.
It’s the same thing for the game of life, my friends. Some people just need a do over.

Anyway… more travel this weekend with the fabulous city of San Francisco and Cobbs comedy club on the menu! I’ll be there this Thursday night through Sunday night.
I know I’ve been slacking on the blog updates, but it’s really not because I haven’t been writing, it’s because it takes forever to chop one of these fucking meandering things that springs forth from my keyboard and translate it into something cohesive.
I think in the future I’m going to try for much smaller but much more frequent updates.
Please feel free to give me shit if I don’t fulfill that statement.
I usually appreciate the encouragement, and certainly all the emails I get from people that enjoy the blogs and wish they were more frequent.
I’ve got some big plans for the internet in the next few weeks, so please check back often.
If you would, please sign up for my mailing list too. I’m trying to get that shit organized this week.

I’ve only been upset at Paris Hilton once in my life, and it was pretty brief.
I was watching her little home porno video, and right in the middle of giving this young man a blowjob she actually stopped to answer her cell phone.
How RUDE!
I got over it though, and I’ve never had a problem with her since. Hey, it wasn’t me she was being rude to, so what the fuck do I care? To a large percentage of the population though, it seems that hating Paris Hilton is a guilty pleasure bordering on a national obsession.

What’s the deal?
I understand that seeing her everywhere can be annoying, and that she’s got no discernable talent, and all that good shit… but I really don’t understand all the hate.
The day she got out of jail a friend of mine who is normally very rational and intelligent was actually angry. Really fucking pissed.
“Why the fuck should she get out of jail early? She gets home confinement in her fucking mansion? I’m sorry, but that’s bullshit!”

Meanwhile, across the world horrific drama goes on every minute of the day and gets relatively little attention. Bombs drop, and IED’s explode, people die…
Cool, fun loving people that will be sorely missed by their loved ones vanish from the earth every day, but on the news it’s marginalized to a number.
“13 US soldiers lost their lives in battle this weekend, making this one of the deadliest months on record.” Reduced to a number. A 1 in 13. A part of Monday’s update on the weekend’s action for those that went fishing and want to keep up on the count.
But Paris Hilton is BREAKING fucking news.

Even when they’re talking about other shit they’ve got a Paris Hilton update scrolling across the bottom of the screen. “Paris Hilton hasn’t eaten or slept in days!”
Larry King actually devoted at least two entire shows to Paris, and had people that were friends of Paris on.
He asked CRAZY questions, like “Is Paris down to earth?”
“Really?”
I was watching it and that was all I could think. Just “really?”
This whole scenario just seemed like a funny scene in a Judd Apatow movie or something. Just wow… how fucking weird are we?
This is what we care about most while we’re in the middle of this crazy modern day holy war?

I’ve actually heard a conservative talk show host say that if the media concentrated on each and every death and went into detail about it people would lose their taste for the war. He went on to say that the American people, especially the young just don’t understand the sacrifice it takes to keep this great land free.

Speaking of freedom… justice has been served, and it’s back to the slammer for Paris Hilton!

What… the… fuck.

They make fun of this young girl that they don’t even know with glee in their voice.
It’s the ultimate opportunity for people to be a hater. Everyone’s hating, come on in and join the fun!
Paris was at the MTV Movie Awards where Sarah Silverman was hosting, and the crowd’s response to her was nothing short of bizarre. Sarah had some fucking hilarious jokes that she wrote for it that I had seen her working out at the Improv earlier that week. Really funny shit.
But what was weird was that when she mentioned that Paris was going to jail, a huge part of the crowd started cheering. And kept cheering while they saw her on the big screen cringing in the audience.
It was a mass, group hating. It was a free shot, and a lot of people took it. Even people sitting close to her.
They clapped, and cheered, and looked right at her while they did it.

They showed a close up of her face, and you could see the pain and frustration in it. And for what? I really don’t fucking get it.
“She makes me sick because she’s a fucking attention whore, and she’s talentless.” Isn’t being that itself punishment alone? Why do you think that you keep hearing about these nutty Hollywood kids having breakdowns, and going to rehab?
It’s certainly not because they’re super duper happy. That existence itself is probably punishment alone.
The emptiness of it all, the hole that can never be filled… just living life day after day struggling to stay on the top of a big fucked up, fake mountain.
It probably does suck, but most importantly, why does it bother YOU?
I just really don’t understand it.

She’s committed no atrocities, hurt no one, ripped no one off, hasn’t profited off other people’s suffering… she’s just rich. Rich and young and she likes to party and she’s spoiled and she’s never had to work a day in her life.
Oh yeah, and she drove drunk too. Lord knows none of the people hating her have ever done that before and gotten away with it.

“She shouldn’t have been let out early!”
Maybe not, and I absolutely agree that drunk driving is some serious shit and it should be vigorously discouraged, and that jail is a viable punishment for people that can’t get their act together, but the ugly truth, is that the prison system is incredibly over crowded. People are getting out early for all kinds of things.
A buddy of mine just got locked up recently for growing weed. His sentence was somewhere around 90 days, and he did a total of 2. He’s at home now chilling with the same house arrest ankle bracelet deal that they gave to Paris.

I have friends that are cops, and the stories that they tell me about prison are fucking hair raising.
These guys are faced with an incredible amount of prisoners. I suspect that if they feel that you’re not a real danger to society, they would rather let you out and leave the scarier fucks inside. It makes sense to me. The whole prison system is incredibly insane, and I couldn’t imagine the stress that the people running it have to go through.
I personally have a tremendous respect for law enforcement.
I think they are greatly underappreciated. We hear stories about bad cops, but the truth is I’ve met way more cool cops in my life than I’ve met cool actors. A certain percentage of the people in ANY line of work are going to be douche bags, and cops are no exception, but I’ve personally never had a single problem with a cop ever, and it’s because I respect what they do, and I always convey that respect when I talk to them. It may sound like some suck up shit that I’m writing to get me out of my next speeding ticket, but that’s the truth, so help the sweet baby jeebus. There are some really fucked up people out there, and we need cops to keep these motherfuckers away from the rest of us. There’s always going to be a lot of people that should be either be locked away or killed, but in light of how fucked up and crowded the jails are, should there really be a priority in keeping Paris Hilton locked in a cage?

Is it just that some people need to get angry at something, and that she’s just an easy mark? That sort of makes sense.
Maybe instead of encouraging people to be less angry, which certainly has never worked before, maybe we should just help focus all their anger and help them to choose some more worthy targets?

You have a need to be pissed off? You wanna really get outraged? How about this crazy bitch that shot her fucking preacher husband in the back in his sleep with a shotgun, and only got sentenced to 210 days in the pokey.

http://www.cnn.com/2007/LAW/06/08/winkler.sentence.ap/index.html

She’s already been locked up for 5 months, so they’re saying that she may only get 60 more days in a mental hospital because of time served.
Well, that should be just about enough to cure her, right? I mean, she only shot her fucking husband in the back with a shotgun while he was sleeping. No biggie.
60 days should be plenty to cure her of that.
She said in her defense that her husband was abusive, and that he pressured her to wear a wig and large platform shoes during sex.

Well, good thing she shot him in his sleep! That motherfucker was getting out of hand!
A wig AND platform heels? Who the fuck does he think he is, David Lee Roth?

Haliburton was in the news for overcharging taxpayers something like 90 billion dollars and no one bats an eye. My same friend that freaked out about Paris Hilton heard about it on the news and didn’t even react.
The whistle blower in the Enron scam shot himself in the head, TWICE in what was ruled a “suicide,” and no one flinches.
No two Larry King shows. No Nothing.
And it goes on, and on, and on…

“That little rich cunt!”

Every day sons, brothers, and friends come home dead in boxes from a fucked up war in a foreign land, and the only people that freak out are the ones that know them.
It’s gotten so bad that the media are actually forbidden from taking pictures of the flag draped coffins as they’re being shipped stateside, but the cameras never stop taking pictures of the crying little rich girl in the back of the police car.

And please, don’t get me wrong… I’m not immune to the fascination. I watch it like all the other little monkeys.
I tell my self that I’m just a fascinated observer of the culture, and that as a comic paying attention to this shit is part of my job, but there’s no denying that I’m curious. While I was working on my computer I refreshed TMZ.com every 20 minutes with genuine curiosity.
It wasn’t really just because I’m a comedian, I would have done the same thing if I was a plumber. I’m enjoying the drama for some weird reason. I just don’t get the hate.

There’s plenty of really fucked up shit to hate.
War isn’t your thing? Well, how about this? This is probably one of the craziest jail stories ever - There’s a kid from Georgia that was doing 10 fucking years in a cage, because when he was 17 a girl who was 15 at the time gave him a blowjob on video.
Because he’s technically an adult, it was child molestation, and it carries a mandatory sentence. Now in my opinion, ANYONE that thinks that’s fair is a fucking inhuman monster. That’s a KID –a child with a boner. Bill fucking Clinton, an oxford scholar in his 50’s and the former president of the United Fucking States of America couldn’t turn down the forbidden blowjob, and people think this 17-year-old pro wrestling fan from Georgia should posses the wisdom to avoid it? That’s fucking INSANE.
No one thinks that’s fair, but they have to do it that way, because that’s the rule as it’s written down on paper somewhere. THAT is fucking crazy.
Where’s the outrage? Where’s the “Breaking News?”

I think in our heart of hearts we all know that by age 15 most kids are already fucking the shit out of each other.
I know people with their cute, young daughters don’t really want to think about it that way, but the truth is that humans are just little animals, and we start humping as soon as the word gets out about it.
And in this culture, that’s pretty gosh darned quick.
That might actually be the only way we can stop the cattle industry from putting hormones in the beef. If we could prove in a study that the hormones in the beef are making their young daughters suck cock at a younger and younger age every year.
I wonder if Larry King would have a show about that?
Would he have two?
There’s plenty of shit to be pissed about, People. Paris Hilton ain’t one of them.

Ever seen a fire out of control?
This is the brush fire season in California, and true to form, a big chunk of LA is on fire right now as I write this. Fire has always fascinated and scared the shit out of me.
The first time I was aware of how incredibly powerful it is was when I accidentally started a brushfire when I was 13.
Some friends and I were lighting fire crackers off in a field when some dry grass caught fire and started to spread. We stomped on the flames, but there was a lot of grass and a lot of wind, and within moments we realized we had fucked up big time and the fire had gotten out of control.
I ran to a nearby street, and as luck would have it, some cops were driving by. I flagged them down and told them what was happening, they got pissed and called the fire department, and that was the end of it. We got off very lucky. No one got hurt, the fire was put out quickly and there was no property damage. But it was just luck that it turned out that way, and I knew it very well.
I can still remember that sick, panicky feeling when the fire was spreading, and I knew we couldn’t put it out. That feeling of “oh fuck!” It was something I never thought was going to happen.
There was this realization that this thing that I had taken for granted, this common element called “fire” was so much more amazing than I had ever thought before. I never really gave it much thought at all until it got away from me that day. It was just this thing, “fire,” that’s always been around.

After it happened though, I thought about fire a lot. I thought about how amazing it was that anyone could just walk into a store and buy a lighter and go start a fire.
Then I thought about how fucking stupid most people were, and how incredible it was that this shit isn’t happening everywhere, all day long.

The California wildfires of 2 years ago went on for over a week, and for the first few days it was something I sort of casually paid attention to on the news.

“Top stories at five, there’s a wild fire burning out of control, and people are being forced to evacuate their homes…”

Nothing new here. Another fire, another accident on the highway, another celebrity got busted for driving drunk, blah blah blah…
You get numb to it. That shit happens in California every year.

The weather here is great.
It’s always warm and hardly ever rains, but the downside is that the hills are covered with dry brush, and all it takes is one douche bag tossing a cigarette out the window to fuck things up for everyone. You get used to it. You expect it.
But unless you physically experience it first hand you have no idea what it’s really like, and the one I saw first hand was one of the biggest ones ever.

This fire was fucking insane. Within 2 days it had gone from some thing that’s happening out in the middle of nowhere to something I could see from the highway when I was driving home. It was nighttime, and as I was headed down the 101 freeway you could see the raging flames in the distance, burning everything in front of them, completely unchecked.
There wasn’t much the firemen could do at night besides watch and evacuate people if it got too close. They couldn’t send up their planes and helicopters to drop water on it, because it was hard enough to see during the day with all the smoke, but at night it was almost impossible, and far too dangerous to risk. All they could do is wait until the morning light to begin their work again.
That was freaky.

The next day I woke up and the sky was dense with smoke. You could smell it everywhere.
I drove to the set of Fear Factor up north on the 5 freeway, and for at least the first 20 minutes you could see smoke and flames all over the west side of the highway in the distance. You could just tell it was way too fucking big for the firefighters to be in control of it.
It was starting to scare the shit out of me, but I still wasn’t convinced it was going to fuck my life up.
About 3 hours later I got a call from one of my buddies who lives down the street from me telling me they were evacuating my neighborhood. Him being the macho dumb ass he is informed me that he wasn’t leaving, and that he was going to fight the fire.
I told him that sounded like a REAL good idea.

“I mean, why not fight it on your own? There’s only 40 foot high walls of flames, hundreds of miles wide eating through everything in front of them, dotted with fucking tornadoes of fire that were well over 100 feet tall. And you’ve got… a hose? That should do the trick.
You should be fine. But hey, if you die, can I have all your money?”

He informed me that he wasn’t going to fight it alone. “I have my green beret friends coming down here to help me.”

“Oh, well that clears it up. Everyone knows that green berets are way better at fighting fire than those faggy professional firemen with their fancy water dumping planes and high pressure hoses.
Maybe you could have them parachute down into the fire and stab it with a knife.“

“Seriously, I’m not losing my house. Fuck that. I’ll have them save your house too, don’t worry about it.”

“Ohhhhh Kaaaay. But really… if you die, can I have all your money?”

I got off the phone with him and called my best friend Eddie. I asked him to go down to my house and pick up some “important shit,” and get my dogs to the kennel. He called me about an hour later to tell me everything was cool and the dogs were taken care of. Everything else, I just figured fuck it. I was just gonna let it go.

I could always buy new clothes, and if my house burned to the ground it was insured, and I could always move to somewhere else.
I have lived a charmed life, and I’m not about to complain now. This was going to be an interesting life experience, and that was the way I had decided to look at it. It was going to be an opportunity to gain a fresh perspective on things. I decided if the house did burn down, I was going to have a “Fire Gods” party the next week and hire a band to play on the burned out patch of dirt that used to be my home.

I actually was embracing the idea of letting go of my possessions and starting fresh. Once I accepted that, I could look at the whole situation from a different place.
I wasn’t a helpless victim. I had my health, and none of my friends were in danger.
This was a unique opportunity to see unchecked energy running amok. The very energy that powers the fucking stars running out of control right before my eyes.
It was an unusual day, and the lessons that I could learn from seeing this would dwarf the hassle I would have to go through replacing shit. The way I looked at it I had no right to feel sorry or depressed. If I was dying in the middle of the inferno, and I was given the option to live, but I would have to live broke and homeless, starting over from scratch, I would jump at it in a fucking heartbeat. No complaining here.

Let’s enjoy this crazy shit.

We finished the day on the set, and as we were wrapping up you could see the smoke making it’s way over the hills near us. In the 5 or 6 hours that I was there the fire had traveled at least another 30 or 40 miles.

It was that fucking crazy.

I got on the highway and as soon as I made it over the first hill you could see the flames on the side of the road. I drove for over an hour and a half home, and the entire time, for over 70 miles you could see fire to the right of me. Not some fire, some places… but massive amounts of fire everywhere, constantly blazing to the west of the highway.
Every now and then you would see a helicopter or a plane dropping water on it, but fuck if it didn’t look like an a small band of ants trying to take down an elephant.
The sky was thick and grey with smoke, and ashes were falling like it was snowing.
It really looked like a scene from Lord Of the Rings or something. I was half expecting to see a hoard of Demons riding black stallions with glowing eyes come charging over the hills towards the highway.

I was looking over at the expressions of the drivers in the other cars, and fear was everywhere. You could see people looking to the fire and then back to the road, slack jawed and panicked. Everyone looked nervous.
There was traffic, but there was no road rage. Everyone stayed in their lane, and blinker use was at an all time high.
Everyone on the highway that day was humbled by the temper tantrum Mother Nature was throwing. It really felt like that. Like she was on the rag and she was sick of all our bullshit.

“You wanna litter? You wanna pollute my water and my air? Well I’m gonna show you goofy apes who’s running shit around here!!”

I talked to one firefighter that I know, and he said that the big worry was that the wind would shift and the fire would head towards LA and burn all the way through to the ocean.

“Is that really possible?”

“Fuck yeah. It’s really just a matter of time before something like that happens. When a fire gets this far out of control we do our best to contain it, but the bottom line is that one streak of bad luck, one mean shift of the wind that lasts a few days, and everything burns.”

I think most of the time we live our lives in this weird state of delusion, where we view everything we see around us as solid or permanent. It’s always been there, and it always will.
Change is slow; a new building gets put up where there used to be nothing, urban sprawl expands, but whatever it is, it usually happens slowly enough for us to process the change.
But really, we’re like the oblivious ants in an anthill. That’s how I always look at it.
If you see an anthill sitting in a field, to the ants living and working there, that’s always existed. For the few weeks or months that an ant has been alive, that hill has always been there and I’m sure they assume it’s always going to be there. Then, one day a little boy is walking through that field, and for a goof he decides to stomp on it. Then to those ants, nothing is ever the same again.

We’re all aware somehow that catastrophic change is possible, and that it’s happened to past civilizations like the Volcano that killed everyone in Pompeii, or the Tsunami that killed hundreds of thousands a couple years ago, or even the meteor that killed all the dinosaurs, but until you’ve caught a glimpse of something like that it sort of just bounces around your brain like an abstract concept.

Live it up, bitches. This shit ain’t gonna last.

I’ve been wanting to get over to the UK for a long, long time, and I finally made it a few weeks ago for the Ultimate Fighting Championship, and a comedy gig at a cool little place in Manchester, England called “Charlie’s.”

First off, English people are so fucking polite and friendly it’s insane.
It really makes you realize how douchey people from America can be sometimes.
There were several times when I was over there where I was trying to figure out why there’s such a drastic difference in the way people over here behave.
Is it the hunger for success and the drive for the “American Dream” that makes so many of us a bunch of rude cunts? It can’t just be that, because the contrast was also apparent in the comparison in the attitudes of the American airline security peeps, people not exactly known for their relentless ambition.
In England, they couldn’t have been nicer. Everyone that passed through the x-ray machine got a “Thank you, have a safe flight.” As soon as we landed in Chicago we were welcomed back by a rude 300 pounder who was upset that the people streaming through that goofy fucking security maze weren’t aware that she had opened up a new path. “Damn, people so stupid.” She mumbled under her breath to one of her equally plump, and equally dull-eyed co-workers, who nodded in slack-jawed agreement.
The land of the free and home of the brave, indeed.

Whatever it is, I think it would do a lot of people over here in the US some good to take a trip across the pond and hang out with the English for a little while.
Everywhere we went people were friendly and polite, from the salespeople in the stores to the drunks at the comedy show.

I was over there for the UFC, but most of the time when I travel for the fights I try to schedule a gig somewhere nearby for the night before. Dave Bishop is an English comic and an E-friend of mine that I met online a few years back on my messageboard. He hooked up a show for us at a Manchester comedy club called “Charlie’s.”

It was a cool little place that was probably only supposed to comfortably hold about 100 people, but it was stuffed with more than double that with a bunch of drunk and enthusiastic English folks that would occasionally break out into song when the moment moved them. It was a wild, fun fucking show, and apart from the shitty mic that kept cutting out every 20 seconds, and the few drunks that couldn’t shut the fuck up, I don’t think I could have ever had a better time for an hour and a half.
Now I understand why Bill Hicks loved England so much.
I can’t wait to get over there again.

I think we’re going over to London sometime around September for another UFC, so I’m going to try to get there a few days early and schedule some more shows.

My new comedy CD, “Shiny Happy Jihad” is finally out, and the sales and reviews have been fantastic. I really couldn’t be happier. I think it’s the best thing by far that I’ve ever put out, and one of the few pieces of my own work that I can sit through without wanting to shut it off and run out of the building. It’s also really the only thing I’ve ever put out where I was really only concentrating only on stand up when I recorded it. I’ve made the mistake many times in my “career” of spreading myself way too thin by doing a million different things at the same time, and I think my stand up - the thing that’s the most important to me - is what has suffered the most. Well, I’ve learned my lesson, and from now on I’m altering my focus drastically.
A HUGE thank you to all the people that loved the new CD and sent me all the cool emails, and thank you to all the people that wrote all the great reviews. I really, really appreciate it.

My much delayed new website is almost complete now. There’s still a few things we have to add, one of them will be the ability to add comments to blog posts, and some other nifty shit.
The main frame of the site is done now, so my blog postings will be a lot more frequent, and I’m going to put together some sort of a regular pod cast too.
The one hour I did with Joey Diaz on Sirius satellite radio last week was really fucking fun so I’m gonna try to do some more of that too.