Time and time again people say timing is everything. No shit. Especially if you’re a comedian thinking about doing a show for the Edinburgh Festival in August. The time of day a comic puts on their show can be just as important if not more so as the timing of whatever punchlines they may or may not have come up with. An act needs to first look at what kind of show they think they have. Should it go on earlier in the day and compete with drama students from schools that can be so exclusive they couldn’t even afford to ask directions to the exit? Will it pull audiences’ from kiddy shows where adults dress up as famous murderers from history and do their best to make light of their bloody contributions by re-enacting bad decisions? Go on later in the day leaning towards the evening and into the night and you could find yourself competing with comedians the general public sees everyday on television whether they want to or not. Comedians talking about things they have no knowledge of but will skillfully gloss over the facts to get to the safe punchline written for them by someone being paid to stay off the stage because they have a wonky eye or they’re considered too old or under educated. There is an hour to put on a show, a sort of golden time to get in on just after this deluge of pre-programmed guffaws but before the shit storm of multi-act laden shows. These are the showcase events where the acts who are represented by the power broker agents toss their wares in just because they can and as a result push out the lesser competent acts who could really use the £50. This golden time begins roughly half way through 9 pm but needs to wrap up at or before 11 pm. This is the time where comedians are tossed in a little later than the guaranteed sell-out acts so as to not upset the delicate balance that is the art of selling out both literally or otherwise but can still get away in time to sling jokes to drunks who paid just the right amount to see many comedians as opposed to just one. So, where did I end up in all these choices? Right where an act like mine belongs and much later than all of the envied time choices a comic thinks they want. I bring it to a small crowd in a small room above a high heeled slut factory filled with potential walking blow jobs being plied with booze by skinny jean wearing closet gays hoping one more slap from a chunky council waif will give them the excuse to jump the fence. A venue that for some reason is strategically next to a gay bar filled with youngsters who are convinced they have made the right choice all the while ignoring the brave homeless man and his dog outside who hope their outfits are too tight to hold spare change. Spare change they won’t rid themselves of as they feel the need to pool their financial resources together in order to purchase chips and deep fried processed meat from the corner chip shop so they can fuel up for later when they fight and fuck and vomit and see my show based on all that’s real.

Growing up in North Idaho one of the best ways to get a girls attention was by having a really big four wheel drive truck. Big trucks with tall tires, loud pipes and a stereo blaring anything from Hank Williams Junior to Van Halen all the while getting two or three miles to the gallon. A lot of really good looking, shallow, slutting girls fell for those trucks god bless ‘em. I couldn’t afford a big truck or even a small truck. I had a Chevy Nova and tended to play things on my car stereo like The Surf Punks, Led Zeppelin and an unknown band for Idaho called The Specials. My friends and I never really got along very well with the people in the big trucks and always felt as if they drove such things to make up for other short comings in their lives personal or otherwise. This kind of rational has stuck with me through the years so when I arrived in Edinburgh for this year’s Festival I was amazed at the size of the posters being put up. Massive things that homeless people could use as shelter if they folded them in half and publicity driven art work that would make Don Draper from Mad Men green with envy. Posters that obviously could never be put up by one student but rather a team of laborers guided by a poster engineer making sure that the maximum amount of space is used and no other lesser posters would have room to gain purchase and encroach upon their territory. I saw one poster that was at least four paces long and well above head high with art work so detailed and elaborate and beautiful that I wasn’t really sure what the show it was advertising was about. Maybe if I went across the street in order to see it better? The smaller posters near it must have felt pushed out of the field of vision like long established residents of Palestine.  Smaller posters advertising shows about monkeys or dating or something I unfortunately can’t remember as the information RAM in my head was temporarily full with what the largest poster was trying to tell me. I can’t even imagine what these tarps cost and the ego is must prop up as a result. Hopefully when this festival is all over and the clean up begins some guy living rough on the streets can save one of these things from the bin and use to it to protect himself from this year’s winter. I’m sure it’ll come as great comfort to be sheltered from the elements all the while knowing the show he’s under got 5 stars in last year’s Guardian.

First Sunday at the flat off Spey Terrace and the world couldn’t feel more distant. Riots being justified in Tottenham and America’s credit rating circling the drain seem a world away from Edinburgh and the students making £6 an hour to push fliers for my show into strange people’s rain soaked hands. The really great thing about doing shows for The Stand is it’s on the other side of town. A side of Edinburgh that feels like those walking past you might still be involved in a life outside of this thing called a festival. None the less I sometimes feel like Bill Murray’s character from Tootsie who drunkenly spouts off to a small group of actors that when the play he’s writing about the nuclear disaster at Three Mile Island opens he hopes it’ll be raining, that way he’ll get people who want to be there as opposed to those who feel they’re following some of artistic trend. What a load of crap but I love it. Last night, Saturday night after my show to a small but attentive crowd I wondered over to do a set for a late night crowd at the Pleasance Dome. At present the real estate there resembles a circus side show where those plying their wares for the Assembly, Gilded Balloon and the Underbelly are all gathered doing their best to out poster, out flier and out shame each other. Possible audience members are fought over like handfuls of flour in Somalia. My first impression on seeing the massive posters and such plastered about are not unlike walking into a porn shop for the first time. It’s a visual information overload where you can’t really focus on anything only this time instead of seeing tits and ass everywhere it’s the faces of comics many of whom have just rounded the corner of puberty or student improv groups falsely thinking that what they’re doing has yet to be done or comic friends of mine who look out at me from their staged photo session with a sly smile doing their level best to impress some stranger they normally wouldn’t help to change a tyre. Looking around and witnessing it all did I envy it? Of course. Did I wish I was a part of it? Not really. I’d rather be one tit on the wall on the far side of town than many tits on this side.

Am I going to jump on the band wagon with an opinion regarding bin Laden’s death? Am I fuck. The real shit starts now after the fact. Think about it from his point of view. He really hated America because even though he never bothered to whip out his own cash to fight the Russians but America did he didn’t like the fact that American troops ended up on the ground in Saudi Arabia forgetting the fact that they were invited there in the first place. Invited in an effort to maintain good customer relations with the Saudi’s number one oil customer all the while troops were doing their best to bring property values back to normal in Kuwait after Saddam was looking to take over all the boat ramps south of Bagdad. So after Osama directed a few warning bombs directed at America and their armed forces he finally gets everyone’s attention by being the so called brains and of course the figure head of 9/11. What I’ll bet he didn’t figure into the equation was how shit house crazy non-passport applying American citizens can get. They’ll re-elect a failed oil drilling major league baseball team owning draft dodging spent less time in the white house guy like George W. Bush and then wave flags and get weepy while he sells the idea of illegally invading a non-involved country like Iraq. A country run by a guy who’s ego had no room for a headline grabbing prick like bin Laden. This is also of course the same president who supposedly never saw the collapse of a western mortgage banking system looming on the horizon that financially did more to bring down the west than crashing a couple planes into two towers. Bin Laden must have been giggling a bit to himself as he read about how America felt it was more important to make sure the wealthy maintained their tax exempt status than for the poor or middle classes to get proper medical care or hope to see any of the money they’ve been putting into the social security system. He might have felt a little twinge or foreboding when Barack Obama was elected but I’m sure was able to sleep a little better once the national news was filled with whether or not their new president really was a citizen or not. Nice to see that the very Americans that elected him felt it was more important to disprove Obama’s birthright than to get those same citizens back to work again to make those mortgage payments on the house they never should have bought in the first place. I digress, I can only imagine bin Laden’s surprise when faced with an elite team of Navy Seals packing big guns and bent on using them on anyone who’s not wearing the right kind of trainers let alone someone who we all now know watches more television than an unemployed union autoworker. Did he resist? Who knows and who cares. Odd that is was not him but one of his wives who kicked up a fuss because she of all people around him knew this was the end of her meal ticket or maybe Seal Team 6 didn’t wipe their feet before storming in. Either way she took one in the leg for the home team. Good luck getting remarried with that limp. So now it’s all over, he’s been slid off into the ocean like garbage from a US Navy ship (it’d been kinda poetic if it was the USS Cole) and Pakistan is pissed we never called ahead to allow them to book the table. Hey boys, America has given you over 15 billion in aid. Guys, let it go. You fucked up so burn yet another American flag if it makes you feel better and start getting ready for the next monsoon that’ll carry more of your relatives downstream if you’re not careful. Besides, Schwarzenegger is in the news these days more than bin Laden getting double tapped and unless Arnold was in Pakistan and fathered more children no one is going to listen to what you missed right under your ass for the last five years.

Goddamn am I looking forward to this year being over! I managed to get a few climbs in but never enough. Had a great time hitting the slopes on the board but on January 15 the slopes hit back and I smashed my head against a tree (while wearing a helmet luckily) giving myself a concussion. My wife shook her head at what might have been the outcome and informed me that if I really stack it up she would not be there to wipe my ass till I die. None the less, I still seem to have holes in my memory. For example, I for the life of me can’t understand why 10,000 people would want to file into a stadium to watch one comic. Even if by some miracle Richard Pryor would suddenly rise from the grave and do one of these I’m sure he’d just make fun of them all for showing up. I understand that playing to 10k is probably a skill that must be learned but where do you go from there? Only Hitler could play a bigger room than that and even he had to compromise by killing Jews and invading Poland. Sorry, I’m off topic again. Must be that knock on the head. So, as the year tightens up like a rectum finally tired of losing everything eaten since grade school I am for the most part satisfied with what I’m doing on stage unfortunately I’m the only one. Those with checkbooks, production titles and a better education than I was ever aware was available do not agree and quite honestly I’m pretty okay with that. Recently someone who is doing extremely well (no names mentioned) once commented to me that I was old skool when it came to doing stand-up. I guess that means my goals when I first started only went as far as getting as much club work as I could and to some extent that’s true to this day. There’s something perversely cool about getting in front of a room full of strangers and entertaining them enough to keep them from chucking food and empty bottles at you which by the way if that does happen I drop the mic and walk with my middle finger extended. Exposure is king these days. When I first started gigging in the UK I was lucky enough to get on a few television shows that featured comics sitting at long desks talking shit about something they really had no business talking about i.e. politics, sports and general news items they knew they could get a quick laugh at by simply heckling headlines. This technique, heckling headlines, is really simple by the way and anyone can do it. Just pick up any newspaper that’s free or cost less than 30p, read the headline out loud, pull a face then tie it into something sexually juvenile and bam, you’re now topical! Do I do this? Hell no, I can’t even get past the pictures on the front page let alone the headlines. Maybe that’s why I’m not one of the 60 plus comedians in the UK who has a DVD for sale this holiday season. 60 plus! Wild eh? About a year and a half ago a production outfit I respect came to me and told me they thought I was funny and that they wanted to shoot one of these DVD things. I of course said sure because it really felt like someone was giving my little ego a nice little hand job. However, no DVD shoot has taken place as no one knows who the fuck I am so as a result I can’t fill a theater let alone a medium/large sized club. All that’s fine by me as I’d rather shoot it some small venue where if I have to I can afford to buy everyone in the place a drink if they become too restless to pay attention. Why shoot the messenger if he’s willing to pony up a few shots of Jager, right? Besides, one of the best, early comedy shoots I can remember was Dennis Millers’ Black and White. It looks like it was shot in a small club and has an intimate look that makes you feel like you and a select few are in on the joke. Forget the fact Dennis is one smart prick the show just looks cool. Will I still try and shoot a DVD? Hell yes, why not? However the so called extras will probably not include me doing color commentary over my misplaced idea of a show but it will include guns, riding my motorcycle through traffic like an asshole and if I’m lucky being slapped really hard by someone who has gone to the best school their parents money can buy.

I’ll keep this as brief as possible. Recently I was talking with a friend of mine about the differences between President Barack Obama and former Alaskan governor Sarah Palin. His argument was that as far as he was concerned, politically, they were both the same; idiots. First off I was proud to hear someone criticize Obama and not pull the race card. Being from Idaho and now living in London I’ve had all kinds of people including my father go on and on about issues that wouldn’t possibly exist if Obama was white or even such premises that if Palin wasn’t a woman she’d have more credibility. Fair enough. Eventually I’ve formed a bit of thick skin to subjects like this as well as all the conspiracy theories regarding whether or not Obama is actually a Muslim or even a US citizen and on a lesser note, if Palin’s new born is actually hers and not her daughters. I’ve said it before and I believe it now, conspiracy theories will always find fertile ground with the weak minded. Looking for truth on the internet? Go to WikiLeaks or snopes or pay to get a better security clearance with janes.com. Where was I? Oh yeah, Obama vs. Palin. Both of them were born in out of the way places that some people don’t associate with producing leadership quality citizens. Obama in Hawaii and Palin in Sandpoint Idaho. I think both places have their redeeming qualities for producing “out of the box” thinking. King Kemehameha of Hawaii did a pretty good job uniting the natives of the Hawaiian Islands and then defending them from the outsiders. Also Hawaii was brought into the US fold by negotiation and not by force. Nice, to see what was possible before cluster bombs and drones. On the other hand Idaho has a very large Mormon community and in the beginning they didn’t take shit from no one. They had such a history of being persecuted that they even went so far as dressing up as natives and murdering anyone who came near them. As far as leaders from the region in north Idaho where Sarah was born history has shown that people in north Idaho get shit done no matter what. A railroad needed to be built to transport ore out of collection of valleys near the Montana border so the local mines hired a crowd of Chinese labor fresh from the east west rail project and got it done. Sure it’s regrettable that they hung them all after they were finished but…well there is no but, that just sucks. Maybe it was some sort of karma payback for the Hawaiians killing Captain Cook. Moving on, Obama in his youth left the US to visit foreign countries like Indonesia to expand his horizons. Palin did the same though that foreign location was Alaska (don’t get me wrong, Alaska is amazing and if more people would visit it they might appreciate being warm more often) and later she and her family would visit Canada and the reason her family did visit Canada, by her own admission, was to take advantage of Canada’s free health care. Later on both would expand their horizons by attending university. Obama went to Harvard which say what you want about Ivy League schools it does give one a leg up even if the world thinks you’re an idiot (GW Bush? I’m looking a bit towards your way). Oddly enough Palin did a bit of school in Hawaii and it’s too bad she and Obama couldn’t find common ground there with such things like eating warm Malasadas at Leonard’s in Honolulu (don’t ever pass this up, ever). Palin came back to North Idaho and first went to North Idaho Junior College aka N.I.C. in Coeur d’Alene Idaho and then on to the University of Idaho in Moscow Idaho. Now don’t get me wrong, N.I.C. ain’t a bad place. I know as I myself took classes there and found them interesting. Granted I was still in high school at the time but that’s not the point. I too attended and graduated from the University of Idaho. The U of I is a really good school if you’re planning on getting a degree in forestry or mining or engineering. Maybe that’s why my degree was in music composition. I’m an idiot but damn it was fun. Sarah thought this out a little more than me and got her degree in communications. A degree that allowed her to sit in front of a camera and read sport scores off of a teleprompter in Alaska. You can’t blame her for using a teleprompter as sport scores are important to get right the first time almost like a state of the union address. After graduation Obama went on to wear bad hats, be called Barry and eventually run for public office. Obama went on to win a seat in the US senate but Palin was not far behind and did get elected to run a town in Alaska called Wasilla, a town of almost 9,000. I’ve been to Wasilla Alaska and done shows there with the late Mitch Hedberg. They hissed at my jokes and just starred at Mitch (crap I really miss that guy sometimes). Sarah went on to be elected governor of Alaska but would resign as Fox news pays better and Alaska is just too far away for people like Glen Beck to take seriously. I could on and on as some people feel the need to do to prove one is above the other but for me personally, the biggest difference between Obama and Palin is I’m pretty sure Obama never went skiing at a ski hill in Kellogg Idaho formally called Silverhorn in the eighties, get drunk and have sex with me in the back of a 1979 Cadillac Fleetwood. Sorry Sarah, if that was really you I should’ve called after. My bad.

So it’s coming up on two years since Obama was elected and apparently everything that happened to the country before and after him being elected is entirely his fault. At least according to all those forwarded emails my Dad keeps sending me. Apparently the current Democratic congress is the worst one ever. Quite a claim considering the past competition. I’m no history major and considering the claims made by elected officials neither are most of them but maybe they should start at the beginning. My memory may be a bit fuzzy but worst? Shouldn’t you include the congress that first met up and drafted the constitution and forgot to make slavery illegal? Must have been a cultural thing and as a result excusable I guess or maybe they were so busy feeling oppressed by the British they forgot they were doing the same thing to the good people helping them be prosperous. Then Lincoln brought about the 14^th amendment and granted freedom for the slaves and citizenship for anyone born in the US of A. Seemed like a good idea but I have yet to read about one freed slave getting their promised 40 acres and that mule. Gawd bless Spike Lee for keeping that dream alive by naming his production company after that promise. Any chance you might back off a bit with the white guilt Spike? No? Alright, my bad…still. And as far as the 14^th amendment goes there are now folks walking around today that think that it’s time has come and gone at least as far as the born in the US thanks you’re welcome part. Unless you’re white I’m assuming, have a good job and don’t have part of your name that can be found in the Koran. Then there was the congress that allowed the first and most historically written about to date stock market crash of 1929 slip by. Apparently one reason being for them not to get involved before it all went to shit was big banking felt it was none of their business to poke their noses in the system that allowed huge speculation and no credit to anyone feeling the need to get rich as quickly as possible and without doing any work. Oh well, good thing the government eventually stepped up and put new laws into effect to see that wouldn’t happen again. Then they put people to work improving and building public works and generally getting them out and being productive. It may not have been sexy but at least it held them until the Nazis filled up the newspapers. Then when that kicked off too bad all those black soldiers that fought and died wouldn’t be able to vote for a few more years yet. By then congress thought taking over from the French a little fight in a lesser known country called Vietnam was a pretty good idea. Many years and lives later who would’ve thought it’d become the hip new place to go on holiday where you can enjoy noodles and shrimp at a café right across the street from the old US Embassy where those great shots of us leaving from the roof where took. Also the tours in the tunnels that caused our guys so many problems is a real must see I guess. So now supposedly communism is not the great threat it used to be, aside from North Korea of course where some old guy has decided recently to pass on the torch of starving the locals to his fat fuck son. Now the new evil is religion. Not all religion, just the one that wants us dead and the really cool thing is they don’t need or probably even want a country they just want us dead. So, what’s the best way to fight terrorism? Well apparently up until about 2008 it was to buy real estate with no credit checks. I guess the feeling was if you can buy with no money down but decide instead to rent the terrorist win. Reagan, Bush, Clinton and Bush again all let it slide and even encouraged it as nothing takes your mind of an illegal invasion in a foreign like home ownership. Then suddenly people were fucked and banks were fucked and people were unemployed so people who never thought about voting decided to vote and who did they vote for? Barack Obama of course. Why? Because of a bunch of reasons not the least of which being that old guy John McCain who probably should've won in 2000 decided to try and trump the idea of a black man being president and got a woman as his running mate and not just any woman, one that looked pretty decent in a dress. Who cares that Sarah Palin knew very little about American foreign policy since 1901 or had never really done anything significant but let special interest groups with oil on the agenda court her while she was in Alaska, she was kinda hot in an odd Alaska governor who shoots animals kinda way. Oh yeah, because of the ratio of men to women in Alaska is so off they have a saying up there; you don’t lose your girlfriend you just lose your turn. Honestly, if it I did live there and my turn on her came up I’d have to take a pass or do her from behind, again but more on that for later. None the less, we all loved the story about her selling the state private jet on EBay and yes it’s too bad she sold it for a loss but now she knows the importance of putting a reserve on these kinds of things. So now the mid-term elections are coming up and just short of burning a cross on the white house lawn everyone with a whacky no he ain’t one of us agenda is gunning for Obama. I say good luck to them. If they win they’ll discover it ain’t as easy as it looks and that includes not being able to masturbate, I’m looking at you Christine O’Donnell. If the republicans do get it and screw it up again Obama could be a shoe in for re-election. What’s the punch line to all this? I’m not a liberal. I believe in accountability. If I fuck up and boy have I ever, I’m willing to admit to it. It stings but hopefully I won’t do it again. Then again, I’m an American and proud of it so more than likely I won’t be able to keep my opinions to myself and screw up the next opportunity presented to me. Worst case scenario I’ll just do what everyone else does back home and blame the government.

I’ve been into climbing for over thirty years and there’s a really great moment that rarely happens when you are shit scared. Contrary to popular belief most climbers don’t go looking for these instances and if they do they don’t label it as that butt clinching moment when you’d trade family members to be anywhere else but where you are which is probably about to give a $100 lap dance to Mr. Death. Most climbers, me included, are looking for that point in time where control is down to them and them alone. I was lucky recently to have one of these moments while doing a new rock climb in North Idaho. I found myself a good 40 feet out from a bolt I clipped my rope into and doing the math in my head I realized that if I did come loose from the rock I was going to fall 80 plus feet and crash into the ledge 30 feet below me then road rash my way down the rest of the rock but hopefully come just short of the ground thanks to an attentive belay. The option of retracing my moves and thus decreasing my chances of severe injury was not an option. I’d made some moves up that I had no doubt in my mind were going to be harder to undo than they were to do in the first place. I now had two choices: continue up another 20 feet to where I thought I could see positive holds or freak out and hope gravity would treat me kindly which of course it never does. Gravity doesn’t give a shit about anything. It’s selfish like that. Believe it or not this was exactly why I got into the sport. It was also at this point I was hearing some murmurs from Steve and Joe my two climber friends below me. They later told me they were working out the logistics of the worse case scenario where I fall, get all busted up and one of them does their best to treat my injuries while the other one retraces the two hour bushwhack back to the truck and drives another 45 minutes for help and a possible airlift out. It’s a little game climbers play regarding worse case scenarios and what they’d do if confronted by them. It’s not morose, it’s smart. Best case scenario for them if I do come off is I die. Meanwhile, I wasn’t thinking about any of this. As a matter of fact I wasn’t thinking about anything. I was clearly beyond the point of no return and all the things that were on my mind earlier like career, or lack there in, my family, my debts, health, age, short comings and all the other bullshit that seems really really important all that was nowhere to be found in my immediate conscience and it was fucking fantastic. I didn’t go looking for this moment but here it was. My only concern was to make as many smart moves upward as I needed to to get past where I was at that moment. I knew it was possible I just needed to focus on the moment. Six or eight moves later I was able to calmly reach up and grab a substantial in-cut hold in the rock and pull myself up into a section that offered for more safe choices. I was now more than 50 feet up from the bolt I clipped and I should’ve stopped right then and there and chosen one of the many pieces of rock gear I’d brought with me and placed it into a crack. Clipping the rope into this would’ve made things safer for everyone and I’m sure allowed my climbing partners to breathe a bit easier but above me about 8 feet was a crack I was sure I could get one particular favorite piece of gear in so I decided to go for that. It was easy climbing compared to what I’d just done and once I got that piece in and safely clipped the rope my partners on the ground yelled up some atta boys and promised me the one Blue Moon beer back in the truck.

That was a few weeks ago and lately I’ve been able to draw some parallels between that moment on the rock and where I’m at now. I’m grateful for all the work I have doing shows in the clubs all over the UK and even in places beyond but not including America. However there appears no chance of ever seeing what I do come to light on television. I had a brief moment and now that’s past. I used to think what I needed was to get more of that but I’m beginning to see it not as a step up but like that moment on the rock a few weeks earlier as a step in possibly the wrong direction. I can see what the good folks in programing may or may not be trying to accomplish but I don’t have anything in common with those they’re doing it with. Another thing that seems to be growing in Britain at least is the desire to blow your act out to an hour and tour the living shit out of it. It’s a chance to reach what some might call their fans but in reality it’s a way to make more money than one would in the clubs. I have no problem with this and wouldn’t mind getting some of that road cash as well but the people I pay commission to on occasion don’t feel this would work out in my favor because even though I have enough material if written out would paper a large toilet in a five star hotel no one knows who I am and without that you’re left with empty rooms in such places like Coventry and Preston let alone London. So here I am. I can’t go down where I was but I don’t seem to be able to follow where everyone else seems to be going. Also to let go at this moment and give myself over to gravity would leave just short of homeless. Remember, gravity is more apathetic than the Inland Revenue and the IRS combined. How does that make me feel at this moment? Oddly enough, quite liberated. Lately I’m enjoying for the most part what’s happening on stage and really couldn’t give a rats ring hole who’s watching that might help me later as long as I get to talk about what’s on my mind and portions of the audience are with me. However, if those that watch can help I welcome them. Now, what’s that career hold above me that I’m reaching for? To get one of my feature length screenplays produced. This can’t be safe. How the hell did I get to this point?