I present it here because, well, I think it's important to be open about the process of writing as well as the finished product. I know it helps me to see 'behind the scenes' of my favorite writers and comics. That everything they do isn't gold. So maybe this will help some of you.]

The only thing that’s worse than getting fired from a job is not getting fired.

That isn’t to say that getting fired doesn’t suck. It does. And unless you go out with middle fingers raised to the sky, giving that final speech where you tell everyone exactly what you think of them – the speech we all rehearse every morning on the drive in. The one where you finally get to tell Betty down in HR just what you think of her cubical full of cat pictures and her fucking email memos about copier etiquette – getting fired is the ultimate walk of shame.

But getting fired isn’t the worst thing that can happen. Say you get caught masturbating. I’d happily clear out my desk if it meant that I’d never have to look those people in the eye again. And we’ve all done it. You can’t stick the average twenty-something anywhere for eight to ten hours without them sneaking off to rub one out. I know a girl who came during a funeral. It’s not something she’s proud of. It’s not a war story she passes around but to hear her tell it, surrounded with that much grief and sadness the only thing she could do to stay sane was force herself to feel something else. And pleasuring one’s self in the bathroom is less intrusive than say, sparking a joint or diving head first into a flask of whiskey.

And if she’s running off during the funeral service, what hope do the rest of us have, stuck at a desk?

But it’s one of those things that you absolutely can’t get caught doing. Once you’ve been caught, the whole house of cards comes down. This fiction that we’re at work for anything other than a paycheck – that we’re not just killing time until we can go home and get loaded – is over.

And that fiction is important because it allows us to dress like assholes and spend all day surrounded by people we actively dislike. It lets us pretend that we find the work stimulating, engaging, fulfilling. Because we don’t want to be in it just for the money, whoring ourselves out to the highest bidder. We want to believe in what we’re doing, that at the end of the day we didn’t just make a living but maybe made the world a little better.

But sadly that isn’t the case.

I knew a guy who got caught. But Jim didn’t get caught just rubbing one out. He wasn’t sprawled out on the toilet with his pants around his ankles thinking about the cute temp in reception. He was standing. One hand wrapped around himself and with the other, he’d stuffed his thumb in his own asshole. Lost somewhere in his inbox was a memo from Betty that the bathroom door latch was sticking and that maintenance would at one that afternoon to fix it. If he’d waited forty-five minutes I wouldn’t be telling you this story.

Jim didn’t get fired. He got a note in his HR file for ‘Inappropriate Workplace Behavior’. He attended six hour one hour sessions of required counseling and spent two more in a sexual misconduct seminar. Eight hours of trying to explain why he felt the need to touch himself at work.

Those are the types of conversations no one wants to have. You can’t say that you masturbate at work precisely because it is inappropriate. Because while you might be willing to trade away slices of your life for a shitty paycheck, you’re not willing to trade in your very soul.

Alcoholics have it easier. Everybody understands that alcohol deadens the pain enough to make it in by eight every morning. As a culture we’ve created entire systems, entire classifications of disease to explain our need to bury and burn away those parts of ourselves that can’t handle so called modern living.

But no one wants to talk about those acts of rebellion that make us feel alive. That allow us to turn the middle finger outward, back on our employer. Fucking at work is so common that it should be an Olympic sport. It’s an act of rebellion that allows us to connect with another person, to do something life affirming and honest

And masturbation is just the fiction that we’re fucking. Masturbation at work is just a lie buried within a lie.

For poor Jim there are no lies left. He’s a constant reminder that we’re all fucking ourselves behind closed doors. He might as well be invisible at work. No one can stand to look him in the eye. He’s become the white elephant in the room reminding us that even unspoken, we all know that we’re all just faking our way through the day.

All that’s left for Jim is to sit at his desk for eight hours a day not daring to move. Because the moment he stands up the question will hang over the whole office ‘what new perversion is Jim into?’

I got fired last week.

Over the past 14 years or so, I’ve held some cool jobs. I’ve been a network engineer. I was the creative director of a media company. The job I got fired from was barista at a coffee bar. Which hurts, because at 32 I shouldn’t even really be working in a coffee shop. And that’s the job I failed at.

I got fired because a homeless man shit himself while standing in the middle of said coffee shop, which I guess in Pennsylvania is grounds for immediate termination.

This is what happened. We had this policy where if you bring in your own cup and you didn’t have the $1.29 for a small coffee, as long as you threw us something, fifty cents or sixty cents, we weren’t going to fuck with you. You could just have the coffee.

And we had a few homeless guys who would snag cups out of the garbage and we’d rinse the cups out for them and everyone was happy.

But if you try and do something nice for people, someone will fuck it up.

This morning a guy comes in. White, late thirties, twitchy in that crackhead way and he’s just gripping the shit out of a fistful of pennies. Immediately he starts arguing with me over the cost of a small coffee. Since I can see that he’s not holding a hundred and twenty nine pennies in his hand, I tell him that if he just goes and gets a cup, I’ll give him the coffee. I don’t want his disgusting change.

Of course this pisses him off and he starts yelling at me “Fuck you. This is bullshit. Fuck this place.” As he’s shouting in my face, my coworker Shannon is standing next to me muttering under her breath. She’s like 5’3” and 100 pounds soaking wet. And all I catch as she’s muttering is “motherfucker” which, of course, she says loud enough for it to cut through the shop like a gunshot. There were like seven or eight customers sitting around the tables and all of their heads pop up to see what’s happening, like a field of prairie dogs.

Shannon loses it. She storms around the counter, throws open the front door and grabs an empty cup off of a trashcan. And she gets right in this guy’s face saying, “take the cup. Just take the fucking cup.” When he finally recovers from his surprise he takes the cup and drops the fistful of sweaty pennies into her hand.

The look of disgust on her face was almost indescribable. She looked like he had just spit AIDS into her hand. She runs to the front door and whips the change into the street.

When she does this the guy just freezes and I can see the panic in his eyes. This has got to be like the Sophie’s choice of homelessness. He doesn’t know whether to go after the free money outside or to try and get his cup of coffee and hope that he’ll be able to find all his pennies.

Watching this it was clear to me that this gentleman was homeless for his inability to make high-pressure decisions in a timed environment. He just stood there frozen. His eyes darting between the front door and the coffee machines.

And as he stood there, I could see him start to crack. Sweat started to bead on his forehead. His hand was shaking and after about fifteen seconds it was too much. He lost it and his bowels let go.

As soon as it happened everyone knew what exactly what happened but none of us knew what to do about it. The three of us are standing there in this Mexican standoff when I hear the back door open and a moment later my boss walked up behind me.

There must be situations in life where you don’t care if there’s an explanation or not, you just want the situation to end. Like you come home early from work and find your eighteen-year-old daughter with a ball gag in her mouth getting nailed from behind from her boyfriend. You don’t really care if they’re in love, you just want them to stop so you never have to see that again.

Watching watery shit run down a homeless man’s leg must have been like that for my boss. He started to ask “what the hell is …” but stopped himself and just told the three of us to get the hell out of the store.

Another year gone by and what a blessed year it has been. At first it was a challenge to have Matt [her husband] out of work but we always look for the silver lining in any cloud. This year it was our wonderful road trip that allowed to us to see so many of you.

In addition, we’ve been able to continue our process [couple’s therapy] and I’ve kept Matt busy with all the projects that he’s put off for so many years. That awful yard has been cleared and cleaned and the garage has finally been painted. Now I truly feel like we deserve to live on the same block as Susie Miller and her wonderful husband Edward.

[Susan Miller is a woman in her late fifties who did some modeling like thirty years ago. My aunt is obsessed with her and has been trying to be her BFF for years. The really creepy part is that my aunt has every magazine and photo shoot Susan ever did and she’s more than happy to show them to guests when they come over, sort of like how you’d brag about pictures of your children. What’s worse, the Millers moved to Florida last year.]

I’m happy to report that Snowball [the dog] is recovering speedily. For those of you who don’t know, poor Snowball ate a roll of quarters that someone had left on the living room floor. At first I insisted on surgery as I don’t know what I would do without my best friend but Snowball’s doctor advised me let nature run its course. He was right. And in the interest of being green, I’ve recovered almost nine dollars from the back yard. This year we’re doing our part for the planet.

But the highlight of the year was spending Thanksgiving in Philadelphia with Marilyn [my mom] and her family. I was surprised and tickled to death to see Ben [me]. We used to be so close and he always had time to help with the groceries or with the chores, but in recent years we haven’t seen him once.

[Let me explain. When I was in high school my uncle worked nights. So during the summer a few friends and I would ride over to my aunt’s house to drink beer and smoke pot in the back yard while she watched TV inside. One of our favorite things to do was get loaded and race the riding mower down this huge hill they have. Whenever she would ask us what we were doing out there, we'd tell her we were helping with the chores. What's really terrible is that she believed that we wanted to spend out summer nights mowing her yard and would pay us like ten bucks a week to come by.

We eventually had to stop going by her house because one night while we were racing the mower we hit this huge rock that was hidden in the grass. We were going fast enough that we ripped out the whole bottom of the mower which sent us flying and caused the the mower to roll down the rest of the hill. It was loud enough that the neighbors called the cops and the cops said that they knew what we were doing and if they caught us in the back yard again, they’d bust us for Minor in Possession, Possession of a Controlled Substance and we’d all lose our licenses until the day we turned 21.]

Privately I feared the worst. Ever since the Klein boy’s struggle with heroin took him from us a few years ago, I’ve often wondered if the same fate was in store for my dear nephew. But seeing Ben I’m happy to say that my fears were unfounded. He’s much too fat to be messed up with those drugs. I think we’re all relieved, even if he doesn’t have time for his old aunt.

That’s been our year. I hope this year finds you in good spirits and health.

Emma.

When I was 18, I moved to Arizona for college … and within one semester had completely failed out of school. The only things I had going for me at the time was that I was working the register at a Jack in the Box and dating a girl who was a senior in high school and living at home with her parents. So to say that it wasn’t a real positive time in my life is sort of an understatement.

Since Arizona wasn’t working for me, I decided to move back to Philadelphia. I had barely enough money to cover the gas for the drive so my brilliant plan was to sleep in my car in rest areas so I wouldn’t have to pay for motels.

Now if you’ve ever done any long distance driving, you’ll know that this was just a disaster. I couldn’t sleep for more than an hour before I’d wake up sweaty and disoriented. And I should have know just how bad I was doing because every time I’d walk into a truck stop, and you have to remember that it’s all long distance truckers and Midwestern families out there on the interstates, I’d get these looks of horror. I’d come staggering in, surrounded by my own personal cloud of failure, and the poor clerks would have to say something like “sir, if you’re going to shop here … you’re going to need to put on some shoes.”

The other thing about long distance driving is that it’s fucking boring. So, and this is really embarrassing, but I had started masturbating while driving to pass the time.

At first the novelty of it was really exciting but soon it became just as mechanical as everything else I was doing. I’d wake up, get on the road, eat half a bag of chips, rub one out, drive for another two hours then fall back asleep.

So I was just outside of Chicago and I was going through the motions of trying to pleasure myself and the car was shaking so bad that the napkins I was using to clean myself up had slid off my leg and onto the floor. And I sort of finish and realize that the cd player, which was on the seat next to me, isn’t just skipping but it’s actually bouncing up and down and the steering in the car has gone to shit.

I pull over and go to get out of the car and I have to sort of tuck myself back into my pants but when I get out of the car, there’s a six inch bulge in my tire. And I’m standing there trying to work myself through the steps of changing my tire when this guy pulls up behind me. He takes one look at me and gently moves me out of the way before getting down and changing my tire for me.

And then he did something that I’ll never forget. He put his hand on my shoulder in this very fatherly way and said, “You’re going to be ok. Just get to wherever you’re going safely, ok?” In that moment I realized how fucked up my life had become. I was clearly just running from my problems. I didn’t have enough money to get back to Arizona if I had wanted to and there wasn’t even anyone I could call for advice. I hadn’t told my parents that I was moving, and I hadn’t really told my girl friend, although I’d sort of hinted at me leaving. But I didn’t know what to say to this guy, so I just nodded and he looked at me one final time and got back in his car and drove off.

As I’m standing there seeing myself through his eyes for the first time, I realize what I must look like. I’m so dirty that my hair looks wet from the grease. My fingernails have gone completely black and I’ve got these black smudges on my face from where I’ve been wiping away sweat. And of course I’m barefoot on the shoulder of this four lane highway and as I look down I realize that I have cum all over my shorts and there’s no way he could have missed it. Thankfully he didn’t say anything.

Now I know that 90% of you don’t care about me doing an open mic night, or about this set. But I’m posting this because I want to show that the work isn’t in the first draft. It’s in the iterations and the revisions. It’s in the doing.

I hold no illusions that I’m going to become a great comic or that I’m going to have a career in comedy. It’s not about that. It’s about getting up in front of people and learning how they interact with the material. It’s about finding out what people find compelling, what they want to sit and listen to and what bores the fuck out of them. It’s about pushing myself to become better.

Because most of this can’t be intellectualized. You can read as many books about writing as you want but until you sit down and actually write the story it’s all worthless. And just slapping some words on the page and calling it a day isn’t doing yourself any favors either. You need to go back to that material. You need to figure out what you’re trying to say and then really see if what you’ve written on the page is saying that.

Otherwise you’re not really putting in the work. It’s only in the revisions where you can push yourself to get better. Where you can start to see what you’re doing right and what you’re doing wrong. And if you decide that you don’t want to put in the work, that you’re perfectly happy with where you’re at skill wise then that’s fine. You have a hobby. But stop pretending that the reason you don’t get any traffic is that your blog isn’t SEO optimized.

I know I’m talking to a small subset of people here. Because most people only want the finished product. They don’t care about blog entries like this. They want the stories about my life. They want the short stories, the novellas. And there’s nothing wrong with that. That’s what I want to be known for. But the problem is that a project of that size takes time to produce. So to those who want to make something great, something that will touch other people, listen up. Most of your audience doesn’t give a shit about your process. They don’t care about the hours of revision. They don’t care about the hours you spent pacing your kitchen practicing. They don’t care about how nervous you are or how much of yourself you gave.

But you still have to do it, you still have to put in those hours, day after day because that’s the only way to get good at it.