Writing a Script, and Awesome People

I just spent the past two weeks in Austin, Texas, where I once called home.  It was honestly two of the better and more forward-moving weeks of my life, and I'm excited to write about the experience.

Stand-up is going wonderfully, as I continue to get better and better at exactly what I want to be doing onstage, instead of feeling like I have to handcuff myself to anything that's been done before.

I continue to find amazing, exciting, passionate people as I wind my way through life.  As far as trying to stay passionate and trying to live the best life I can, these encounters are like having someone hand you a cup of water while you're in the middle of a marathon.  A lot of times, you don't spend a lot of time with them.  But man, does that cup of water help.

And some of those people, it's a different analogy.  I can't think of it right now.  It's like another runner, I guess.  And you just happen to be running, and you both notice each other.  And you just kind of nod.  And then you start running together.  And you challenge each other, and you both start running faster.  And it's just awesome.

I've met some really fast runners.  And they make me want to run as fast as I can.  And it makes life a fucking blast.  It really does.

If you have awesome people around you, odds are good that you're life is going to be awesome. It's going to be fun, and exciting, and you won't get bored with it.  It's almost impossible.  There are just so many awesome things happening all around you.  Whether you want them to or not.

That's the key to my life, right now.  Is just having awesome people all around me.  It's making my life incredible.

One of them is my (basically) sister, Lydia.  I'll write more about her sometime.  But she's great.  She's a scriptwriter. And she came to me about two months ago, and asked if I wanted to co-write a script with her.

I said yes.  And we have been.  Which is part of the reason I haven't been blogging.  Though another part - as it always is - is just that I haven't been blogging.  If that makes sense.

I can't stay long.  I wrote this in 10 minutes.  Which is probably the best thing I could do.  Is write something so quickly that I don't have time to care about it.  Here it is.  It's done.  An update.

I'm writing a script.  And it feels fucking awesome.  Sorry for the cursing.  But you get the point.

Life is good.  My trip to Austin was inspiring, and my trip home - a 60-hour odyssey on an Amtrak train - was the best decision I've made in a while.

Now I'm back in New York City.  My home.  And today is the last day of August.  8 months down in 2012.  4 months to go.  I don't think I've ever been more excited for a 4-month stretch.  I've packed a ton of life into 8 months.  And there's little reason to think the next 4 won't be pretty awesome, too.

It's all about the people around me.  That's the whole game.  Which is why New York is such an amazing place.  You slowly find people, that inspire you, and you get over your fear that you're not worthy, and you just try to put yourself around amazing people as much as you can.

This place makes you super humble.  But I can think my life is awesome, and still be humble.

When everyone else in my life is awesome, my life is going to be awesome, even if I totally suck!

Maybe I do, maybe I don't.  But it's starting to matter to me less and less, whether I suck or not.  My life is awesome.  I feel very lucky.  But a lot of life is a coin with no heads or tails on it.  We just kind of flip it, and then decide what we see.

Life is a coin with no heads or tails.  Yes? Do you get it?

At least that's what my brain tells me.  And that's all I have to go off of.  If your brain disagrees, then more power to you.  But that's what it looks like from here.  Just so you know.

Love,
Bryson

Even when unnecessary, captions are fun

How Comics Affect Comics

It’s Friday, December 9, 2011. I haven’t had a productive day, by almost any definition. But I’m fighting.

As I’ve been wasting time, I’ve spent part of the day on youtube. And I started watching a clip or two of Louis C.K.

And I came across this clip, from a tribute to George Carlin from last year. Louis talks about what George meant to him, why he meant what he did, and how George’s passion for stand-up inspired Louis to become the comic that he is.

It reminded of the impact that Patrice O’Neal has had on what I try to do with stand-up, and why I approach it in the way that I do. And it made me think about all the interesting ways that we can impact the world, beyond how we ourselves impact the world. Ways that literally can’t occur to us.

George was doing his stand-up to do his stand-up. But him doing that - being the best comic he could be, and living the most honest life he could - affected things, and affects things, that he never directly came into contact with.

Louis never got to know Carlin, and yet still, Carlin changed his life forever. And Louis knows it.

“...anything that ever happens to me that’s good, is due to this guy."

In that way, whatever Louis C.K. does - and whoever’s thoughts or behaviors or lives are changed because of his choices in life - would never have happened without George Carlin’s stand-up. Louis had a huge head start on figuring out how to do what he does, and it’s thanks to Carlin.

“He was always the beacon for me.”

Here’s hoping Louis continues pushing forward, eventually past Carlin’s beacon and into the unknown. If he does, it won’t mean Carlin’s life and career mean less - it will validate them even more.

And hopefully we, as the next generation, use the beacons that Louis - and Patrice, and Burr, and Patton, and the rest - are hanging up for us. Because we should want to be better than them. Not just for our own sake, but so that the next generation can be even better than us.

That’s why I love comedy. That’s why I love great comics. That’s why I love passionate people. Because we look for beacons, and because we look for beacons, it occurs to us to try to hang some up, too.

Anyway...it was just a cool clip, of a speech - from the heart - from Comedy Central’s 98th-best stand-up of all-time, about their 2nd-best stand-up of all-time.

But what the fuck do they know?

Patrice O’Neal Live

These are my thoughts on Patrice O’Neal as a performer. Patrice suffered a stroke last week, and it’s unclear whether or not he will recover. To combat my feeling of helplessness, I wrote this.

Patrice live is different than any other comedian I’ve ever seen or known of. I don’t know how to explain it, except to say that calling what he does “stand-up comedy” is doing it a disservice. It’s not stand-up comedy. Not in the way that every other comedian performs. It’s closer to a conversation than it is to the “stand-up” that most people imagine.

Read: Onstage, he is not a stand-up comedian. He is Patrice O’Neal. If you haven’t seen him live, then you have never seen what he does. No one else, by definition, can do what he does. Because onstage, he is not a comic. He is Patrice O’Neal. It is its own thing.

I’m not sure I can put into words the impact it had on me to see Patrice O’Neal live. It broke barriers in my mind. Before I saw him, comedy was something in my mind, and it had a ceiling to what it could be. After seeing Patrice do 7 shows in 4 nights (while waiting tables at the DC Improv), I woke up that next Monday with a new definition of stand-up comedy. It had a new ceiling, and new walls. As in, no ceiling. And no walls.

Stand-up comedy was, for me, a different thing after I saw Patrice O’Neal that week in DC. Forever. Literally, he changed my definition of what is possible, when it comes to a live performance.

Maybe if I hadn’t seen him, I would have had the same revelation a year later, or five years later, when I saw another comic, or when I saw a play that broke the fourth wall in some crazy way. I don’t know what would have happened to me if Patrice didn’t exist - all I know is what did happen. And when I saw Patrice O’Neal perform for the first time live, it was like the scene in Pleasantville when things started having color again. He was revelatory - in the most powerful sense of the word.

Revelation (noun): the act or process of disclosing something previously secret or obscure, especially something true

Given the place that stand-up has in my life and my own personal growth, I’d say seeing him perform that weekend was one of the 30 most transformative events in my life. And that’s not hyperbole, or I would have said top 10. I’ve had a lot of things happen in my life. One of my best friends dying, a permanent injury in a car crash, my first hard break-up. Lots of things define our existence - a comedy show shouldn’t be anywhere near the top of that list. Not the list. Not the list of everything.

But - for me - simply seeing Patrice O’Neal perform is up there. Think about that. A silly little comedy show. Dick jokes. Just a dude talking. A human being connecting. Trying - passionately, unapologetically - to make others understand his reality. To make sense of the world around him. To bring everyone with him.

One of the 30 most impactful things of my existence. I’m telling you, he was doing something different than everyone else. It was a different thing. The man was on a search, and his shows were a check-in, to let everyone know what he’d found so far.

He has made missteps along the way, both on the stage and in his life. But that’s what you have to do when you’re making your own path. That’s what you do when you’re searching for something nobody else has found yet.

Man, I hope he makes it. Not for his lady. Not for his daughter. Not for his friends. I feel for them, but I don’t know them. I know me. And I want him to still be in my world. I want to hear more check-ins. I want to compare more notes.

Selfishly and helplessly,

Bryson Turner

Paying It Forward

I think this will be a fairly short blog. I just want to document my feelings right now, as I am very inspired by Lucas' productivity. Lucas has been writing at a frenzied pace these past few days, and it's something that really impresses me. I have ideas for blogs to write pretty much every day, but I end up not writing them, because I'm afraid of what they'll end up being. I have such high hopes for an idea in my head, and if I actually write it out and it becomes something that exists, instead of something that I'm imagining, then all of a sudden it's not nearly as great as I told myself it would be.

I just read something Lucas wrote that he posted on Facebook. I thought it was amazingly perceptive and completely ballsy for him to open himself up as much as he did. It deserved to be in a book, not on my shitty Facebook newsfeed. I commented on it.

What else can a reader do? Did he expect me to be so inspired by what he wrote that I dropped everything in my life and flew to Egypt to protest? What do I really expect of someone who reads something that I write? I don't know. But the longer I don't write something, the more that reaction would have to be in order to justify how long I've put off writing it in the first place. It's a vicious cycle, and it's almost as if I don't write something immediately, without thinking about it all, then it will never get written at all.

I'm trying to not be stubborn in my ways - I'm trying to be willing to have art affect me. Lucas' art is affecting me, and I consider how he lives his life to be a form of art, if a bit more well-disguised.

Maybe in a way all of our lives are also a work of art, that we are working on constantly. The problem is that if I think of my life as a piece of art, I tend to do the same thing with it that I do with most blogs I don't write. I think in my head about all the awesome things I could do, and how awesome my life could be, and then I get bummed that I haven't started doing it already, and then I don't want to face the reality of the minimal impact that even a great life would result in.

Who are the most influential human beings ever? Maybe religious people? Jesus? Muhammad? Surely they would be satisfied with the impact they had. Right?

Well, both preached non-violence. Is there still violence in the world? In fact, are there certain believers of both who are violent in their names? How about Gandhi? Would he be happy with his impact? Martin Luther King, Jr.? Malcolm X? Does racism still exist? Are inner-city public schools still shit? Would they be happy with their impact?

And this is when I realize the flaw in the thinking. No one person can ever really be satisfied with the "impact" they have, because you can't control the "impact" you have on people - on individuals or on the world as a whole.

You can't choose how people interpret what you do - all you can control is your own existence, your own decisions, and how you life your life. How people interpret this blog is out of my hands. But I've written it, and I wrote it in part because Lucas chose to write his. So I'm glad he did, because it helped me live my life better. I love the idea of being able to pay that forward. But I don't need it. This blog is what it is. It stands alone.