I've Found a New Friend

Hello there from Poland.

I have a lot of memories from my time living in South Tampa. One of them was the time my Philadelphia pals came to visit in 2002. This was when airline travel stopped being fun and everyone was taking airport security really seriously.

One of my friends had a flight out of Tampa International (you might remember me talking about playing Hide and Seek there). I took him on my motorcycle as he only had a backpack. I dropped him off and got a text about an hour later: I hate you so much.

Back then, especially in that first post-9/11 year, TSA was deadly serious. My friend’s backpack was flagged at security. They took him to the side and started unpacking his bag — which was stuffed with an unhealthy amount of porn magazines that I had graciously packed for him without his knowledge.

My friend was shocked. So much so, that the TSA agent asked, “This is your bag, right?”

“Y-yes.” He sighed. “It is.”

“Did you pack this bag yourself?”

Defeated, he had to say, “Yes, I did.”

I hope you love your friends as much as I do.

Notes on Notes

Some of you wrote about how you liked my comedy notes (cheat sheets) from last week’s newsletter, so I figured I’d focus on that this week.

One of the things I miss about doing stand-up comedy regularly is all the notes I’d make in preparation. I’m a visual learner and a compulsive doodler, and the prep notes give me the space to really bring both of those areas together.

(I have a joke book, too — something I’ll write about in more detail another day. But to set this up, the book is an organized list of my jokes (many Drunk Hulk jokes that have been de-Hulked). I say organized only in the sense that I understand how it’s laid out. I also have about a dozen different Google Docs full of jokes, half-jokes, and notes for works in progress.)

The purpose of the written notes is to map out the shape of the performance. The process also helps me develop the proper segues from one joke to the next. One of the things that makes it hard for me to remember sets (outside of not doing every night or week) is that I’m constantly moving jokes around.

There are three phases for my notes. I scribble the material on paper by hand (the second page from the left in the picture below). Sometimes I’ll retype the material as a doc. Then I re-write the material by hand in a neater style as more of an outline (fourth page from the left below). Once I’ve settled on the order, I create the stage notes (cheat sheets) using keywords with colored markers (first page on the left).

Colors can indicate a few different things. It can simply be a matter of helping me see the order more clearly, and in some cases, the color can indicate where there’s a callback. Colors can also indicate a group of jokes within a joke, like the ladder story I talked about last week.

Road to the Dark Tower II

And now here we are with the second Dark Tower book — The Drawing of the Three — where the story kicks into high gear.

It’s pure distilled 80s King at — arguably — the height of his powers. It’s also another example of a book full of Amblin energy. It might be one of King’s most fun books, with interdimensional travel (and/or time travel depending on your POV), body swapping, shootouts galore, and monster lobsters (lobstrosities!).

This is the book that really gets people to fall in love with the series. If you read the first book and didn’t see the appeal, the second entry is most likely going to take you by surprise. Like I said last week, the book subverts your expectations with a “‘Holy shit!’ moment within the first 10 pages.” And this is saying a lot because the whole series is one subversion after another — once you think you have a handle on the story and where it’s going, another bit of insanity ensues.

I noticed a trend in the more recent books by King where he’s not afraid to reference his own books in his stories. I believe that at least two King titles have been mentioned in the Holly books alone, establishing that she exists in our world

The Dark Tower books do two things simultaneously with this idea: 1) establishing a world where Stephen King exists as a writer, and 2) establishing a reality where all of King’s stories are connected. Through cultural osmosis, you might know that King does something pretty big with the first idea later in the DT series, and The Drawing of the Three is the first time that there’s a mention of that possibility (much earlier than I remembered).

The DT books are fundamentally about storytelling and the magic that it creates in small and universe-altering ways. But that idea isn’t crystallized in the first two books (despite the story within a story within a story in the first book — again, see last week’s newsletter). At the moment, the book is really about addiction. Eddie Dean’s heroin addiction. Roland’s obsession with reaching the Dark Tower. All of this is made more interesting by the fact that King is writing The Drawing of the Three at the tail end of his own addiction to drugs and alcohol.

I know a lot of King fans who won’t touch the DT books, which is a real shame because The Drawing of the Three might be one of his strongest and most exciting books. I mean, speaking in movie terms, if The Gunslinger is like The Road (2009), then The Drawing of the Three is closer to Fury Road (2015).

Fight for What You’re Worth

Larry Hama is a comic book writer and artist. Despite being an industry legend for over 50 years, he would charge $20 for pencil sketches at conventions. At one con, after a quiet morning with no one interested in buying his art, Hama went to lunch.

While he was away, another legendary comic book artist – Neal Adams – saw how much Hama was charging and was furious. Adams left the convention and went to a printing shop to make Hama a new sign – this one charging $100 for his art.

When Hama returned from lunch, he saw a line of people waiting at his table.

Hama eventually asked Adams why he did that. Adams said, "If you don't charge enough, people think it's valueless."

How much are you worth? Are you getting it?

My Nemesis

There was a bar in South Tampa back in the day that used to be a gas station. The bathroom was located in the back of the building — meaning you had to step outside the bar into the night, walk a few meters to the left, and find the door.

In this particular bathroom was a mirror where someone had written a cartoon bubble (that appeared to leave your mouth when you stood just right) that said, “One day, I’m going to kill you.”

I remember washing my hands and looking up to discover that cartoon bubble. My nemesis was finally revealed.

In some ways, I’ve been looking over my shoulder ever since.

Have a great week!