The Five Year Writer's Block: A True Dark Comedy... by Bryan O'Gorman

In the objectively boring movie 'The Green Mile' starring overrated human Tom Hanks, heaven is described as 'living your favourite day over and over again forever.' Deep. I was raised Catholic, so I understand god is a trap set by swindlers to rob fools. But there is something to be said for manifesting your ideal day and living it as many times as possible. A tangible heaven. Thanks, Hanks! They played that endless pile of shit movie on TV throughout my adolescence so the idea stuck with me. I began to structure a perfect day for myself which was based around stand up comedy. I loved comedy because it fit my life. Spending all night in bars telling filthy jokes is what I do anyways, the fact I started getting paid for it was coincidental at best. A comedian is something I realized I am more than I tried to become.

The Hanksian groundhog day I created for myself looked like this: I'd get up at two or three in the afternoon, masturbate until my penis hurt, memorize the scribbled hyroglyphic jokes I wrote on napkins the night before, smoke twenty cigarettes, watch 3 hours worth of stand up videos, crack a beer, do a shot, maybe shower if they were lucky, then saunter to the comedy club and see my friends where we would create fun out of thin night air to the harmony of laughter until I passed out on my neighbour's roof. It was fucking glorious. For almost fifteen years I sustained that day. I even got to take my day on the road to dozens of countries. Seeing the world on someone else's dime was always something I could see myself enjoying but I wasn't prepared for the mental exhaustion that came with the never ending laugh orgy I'd dreamt into reality. I didn't want to lose my Tommy Hanks day so I neglected everything else in my life.

The way I saw it, time not dedicated to live comedy was time wasted in this short life. People often ask comedians 'what would you do if it weren't for comedy?' I dunno, fuckin hunt people who ask stupid questions. I never entertained the idea because there is nothing else I thought I needed. There's no other environnment where someone as weird as me can thrive. No job on Wall Street for loud, gangly truth tellers with googley eyes and crooked teeth. But that's cool. Even if the economy collapsed, I would tell jokes for chicken bones n' banana peels. Lick em clean and move on to the next town. A humble ending, but one I could handle with grace. Comedy to me was never the idea of being rich and famous, it was more selfish than that. It was living in a rose coloured bubble floating around the world sharing laughs with small rooms of functioning addicts(I don't trust groups over 250, that's how wars start). But then my bubble popped. While I was on tour, my Dad was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer. Extremely selfish of him considering all the fun I was having. He contracted a very trendy tumor called a glioblastoma that took out a few celebrities around that time like Senator John McCain and musician Gord Downie who is only famous in Canada amongst other men named Gord. Shout out to my actual Uncle Gord in Toronto though, Gords are solid dudes. Gords aside, I came off the road for about six months to help my mom take care of my father as he gradually slipped away. During that period I also stopped writing jokes completely. Weird. They just wouldn't come as I watched my father die in agony for some unknown reason. I was also quickly going through the measly savings I'd stashed in my fifteen years of trapesing around the earth as a naive clown whore.

Drinking a big bottle of whisky and a case of beer a day was normal to me by then. It was beginning to shred my insides and my wallet badly. I asked my agent to book me a 10 day tour of Alberta, Canada to make some cash. I was vulnerable as a plucked chicken but the people there had always been kind to me even in my more destructive youth. So I went to perform and my brother came to stay with my parents whilst I was away. I'm a pro so I was intensely drunk and ready to perform within an hour of arriving at the YukYuks in Edmonton. I was pacing around smoking before the show when my brother phoned me. My big bro is a loud, two hundred pound, hockey playing business shark who grew up working on Italian construction crews... but all I could hear on the other end of the phone was crying. So I asked, 'is he dead?' And my brother replied, 'Aaaaaahhhblablwawaaaaaa,' and I had never heard him say that before. Surely the old fucker had croaked. So I calmed my brother down by screaming 'fuck' loudly and hanging up the phone right after. I had two headline sets to do that night, forty five minutes each. No time for death now, there are strangers in a dark room that need to chuckle! Muscle memory took over as I performed without mentioning my reality and the audience was oblivious that the clown wanted to end the show by locking the doors, setting the club on fire and hanging himself with the mic chord. Comedy, heh?! They weren't the best or worst comedy sets I've ever done, but I was relieved to have a stage at that moment. See I'm comfortable on stage, it's the rest of the time I don't know what the fuck to do. When I flew home the next day, I started worrying about leaving my mom alone in an empty house after all this hurt. 

But one night she assured me, she said, 'seriously get the fuck out, I'm fine, you're starting to annoy me now, go back on the road, like furreal yo get out, I need the space, I'm turning the guest room into a yoga studio piss off!'  I figured she'd probably survive at least a while without me.

 So after six months of mind bending tragedy, I went back on the road like nothing happened. Why wouldn't PTSD and substance abuse help my career? It worked for all those dead millionaires I idolized. And so I drank and travelled and performed for a few more years pretending I was ok. I don't remember a lot from that period. I drank and wandered so much that eventually I wound up sitting in the backyard of my kind and hairy friend Gavin of Sydney, Australia. I was preparing to headline the Comedy Store there, so naturally I drank three 40oz bottles of beer in an hour. Then I noticed something...I felt ...nothing. Not drunk, not sober, no fun, nothing. Da fuck? What was the point of drinking again? I had forgotten. I hadn't written much in years now and still wasn't dealing with my mental wounds. I hated Tom Hanks during that period as well as myself. 

 Luckily at some point I met the beautifully weird American dancer, Chelsea Mulholland. We had both recently lost our fathers and were at different stages of healing in that she had quit drinking and I was actively trying to kill myself with drinking. But the girl had passion for dance the way I had passion for fart jokes and soon we fell in love. I decided to leave the booze alone for a while because she straight up wouldn't fuck me when I was hammered and smelled like cigarettes (a woman's scorn). Things were so good between us that we moved to the San Francisco Bay together just a few months before the COVID-19 pandemic hit. When it did we were devastated and like many, we lost our careers completely. But the way I figure it, a quarantine is a little like doing prison time. It's not good to stare at the wall and jerk off all day, you'll go nuts. You want to do lots of pushups and read Malcolm X so you come out better than you went in! Champ shit. My American visa expired that summer so we moved to Victoria, BC to wait out the virus and work on our own heads. Chelsea pushed me to do therapy at first, then I began doing yoga every day, I skateboarded every day, joined a fight club, quit tobacco, mended relationships, began talking directly to dogs instead of their owners, stayed away from drinking, learned to use my recording equipment, volunteered some of my time, talked with my family and then...after months of that crap...I fuckin wrote! I wrote and wrote and wrote like L. Ron Hubbard with an eight ball of top shelf Siñaloa crank! Yo, I'm even writing this! I've been writing an hour or more every day for over a year now. There's over five hundred pages of hand written smut I can't wait to try out on stage or put to film! It's not all great material and I'm not saying I'm enlightened or any of those comedic death rattles. What I do feel is a renewed gratitude and passion for my gross art because I took the time to deal with my problems outside of it. If your career is great but everything else is falling apart, the world becomes bleak and stinky like old spinach. Without some poise in this life, quite simply, we die. That's not hyperbole. Love, touch, community, health, talking directly to dogs intsead of their owners, certain things humans just need or we go mad and begin a downward spiral toward the grave. It's biological as are we, no amount of escapism can change that. I know this to be true because the more I acheive balance in my life, the more I feel creativity firing through my veins again like sweet strawberry lightning. The muse comes daily now and so do I. It proves that whatever you do in life, no matter how immearsed, be sure to take care of life itself or...well...you'll straight up fuckin die. Like, for real. Toast. Fin.

Morals are nice, aren't they? Kinda wraps all this shit up.

I'll be doing my first show back in one week as of this writing and I'm so happy to get back on stage that I might just put the microphone all the way in my butt and never take it out, get your tickets now!!! Also, If you see me perform any old material, you have my permission to throw a broken bottle directly at my crotch because THAT is how committed I am to never living in an unmanageable Tom Hanks fantasy ever again.

Bryan O'Gorman is a professional stand up comedian currently in dramatic self imposed isolation on Vancouver Island in British Columbia, Canada. He will spend the summer there polishing his new comedy act, swimming naked and training to compete in an amateur martial arts tournament with MMA pioneer, Gary Barker. In the fall he plans to go back on tour and eventually return to the fallen empire of California with his hot and flexible life partner, Chelsea. Bryan is the host of the webseries Glorious and Free and the podcast Good Dirty Fun on the Comedy Here Often network. He has two audio albums available at ComedyRecords.com.

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