Community Confession: I’m in love with Britta.

Elliot Smith’s No Name #1 on a loop.  Walled up in my office.  Let’s try to keep things light today.  Let’s just talk about work.  How’s your job going?  What do you do again?  You’re a nurse or something, right?  Okay, your time is up.  Talk about me again.

Should be a good season.  I think?  We did a table read of the Halloween episode yesterday.  I dudditz [STEPHEN KING’S DREAMCATCHER, 2003].  We all “dudd” all of the scripts together, but my name’s on the cover sheet of this one.  I think it’s a good script.  There’s one thing about it I don’t like but I’ll fix it today.  I think.  I can’t really figure it out.  I need inspiration.  I think if I just listen to this guy that stabbed himself in the chest singing “leave alone, you don’t belong here” a couple more times, I’ll come up with a pie fight.

We’re shooting the fourth episode of the third season right now.  You’re about a month away from seeing the first.  I haven’t seen a cut of it, yet.  So, all I’ve got are vague anxieties, and the comforting thought that I probably had the same vague anxieties last year, and everything turned out swell.  One of Erin’s most important functions was Dan Harmon Mood Archivist.  I could tell her I felt like a mediocre turd and she’d say “that’s how you felt last August,” and I’d take her word for it and it would make the mood feel less powerful.  She demystified me.  I could use a little demystification these days, but it’s got to come at my own hands or I’ll never get better.  I’ve got to be my own yardstick.

This is really not a good guy to be listening to on a loop.  The guy literally died from feeling what he’s singing right now.  This is the equivalent of rubbing bees on a bee sting.  Well, my hands are tied.  It’s just not a Who Let the Dogs Out morning.  And I can’t make it one by playing Who Let the Dogs Out.  

I could maybe make it one by actually letting some dogs out.  The answer to “Who Let the Dogs Out” would have to be “Dan” in order for that song to work on me, and I do not currently feel like a person that is capable of letting dogs out.  I could maybe leave a cage door open for a ferret, that’s it.  Who Let One Ferret Out?  Dan.  Dan Dan Dan.

I got nothing to say.  I thought if I started typing, something would happen.  This must be how you feel every day, huh, mister Nurse.  This is your whole life, walking around, made of solid gingerbread, nothing coming through.

What’s that?  You think I should take a 20 minute nap?  Okay.  You’re the nurse.  Sorry I implied you were made of solid gingerbread.  I’m sure you’re very special to someone.

Here is an image of what transpired for those that missed it.  Harmontown tickets may still be available at http://bit.ly/q5rtzm  Special thanks to @Mr_Hambone for putting this visual transcript together!

This is a very good question.  There are several important things you need to do.

First, you need a round hole in your chest that goes all the way through you.  I can never stress enough to the kids, it has to be a perfect circle, about the diameter of a drinking glass rim, it has to be in the absolute center of your chest - like where a heart would go on a plumber or a woman - and it has to go clean through you.  If you’re standing in front of me and I can’t see the wall behind you, you’re never really going to write much more than a dream journal, recipe book, or maybe one of those manuals that tells people what writing is.

A lot of people say “what about my heart, what’s going to pump my blood around,” which brings us to step two: you have to be made of something other than flesh and blood.  I prefer to be made of mud, because it keeps women and children away from me.  Other writers are made of dirt, or excrement, the choice is yours, it just can’t be anything that anyone would want in their bed and it has to be a substance that adheres to itself but nothing around it, so that you can keep a generally human shape for as long as possible.  Appearing human-like is important to the next step.

Sit or stand in front of paper or a computing device and turn your back to everything, which will incite it to attack you.  Everything preys on humanity and goes for the heart, so hold still, arch your back and it should shoot through your hole and onto your keyboard.  As it passes, it will be tainted and scattered by the inside rim of whatever you’re made of, which some would call your “voice” but which I call “filth.”  The more there is, the more people notice you’re “a writer” and the more you’re doing it wrong.  Your job is to be a heartless piece of dirt, a puppet, a necessary but largely unremarkable conduit of something better than you, something lovable, something with purpose, and your one redeeming act before it finishes with you is to find the angle at which you barely affect its path.

If none of this is possible, you could always become an assistant of some kind on Glee and I’m sure eventually you’d just get to write one.  Good luck!

1. I didn’t mean that Erin didn’t love me, or that I didn’t love her, or that we didn’t have love together.

2. I didn’t mean she was ever dishonest.

3. I didn’t mean she was anything less than a perfect girlfriend.

I have emails from Erin that she wrote to me when I was feeling like a depressed, hacky pretentious baby, that should be framed in the Smithsonian as examples of unconditional love and support.  She kept me getting out of bed every day, she kept me out of a bottle, she kept me connected to people, she kept my cartoonish and unjustified outrage grounded, often by asking simple questions like, “I don’t know, are you sure that parking meter is stealing your humanity?  Are you sure it doesn’t just want a quarter?”  She made me a human being.  She made me accessible, she made me the person that you don’t hate and she made me the person that kind of didn’t hate himself.  If I could have a girl like Erin, after, all, how bad could I possibly be.

Okay, so, here’s the problem with being that fair in my journalism.  It makes the obvious question “why did you break up with her” and I don’t want that question being asked of me 6,000 times a day.  It prolongs all the pain and torture.  We’re not getting back together, so where is the therapy and the where is the comfort in talking about how good it was to be with her.

I also don’t want to talk about our relationship in general.  It invades something we owned together, it’s half owned by her, I’m not allowed to just say “this is how it was.”  What I really need to do is express my hatred of myself and my solitude.  I need to atone with my loneliness and make it my best friend because I am not going to be with anybody in any foreseeable future, and if I ever am, it’s because I was weak and I made a big, dangerous mistake out of weakness.  I am a fucked up guy that just needs to be fucked up and learn to live with being fucked up.

Erin “responded” to my blog entry, in which I said love doesn’t exist and that I hated being in a relationship.  She responded understandably.  Justifiably.  I didn’t want her to read it.  It wasn’t for her.  It was for me.  I’m salting the wound, I’m lying, I’m twisting to make myself feel better, all correct.  Her appraisal of my blog entry is all correct, although I didn’t read every word because I don’t want this to become discourse.  It’s not a divorce.  It’s a breakup.  I want to be alone and I also want to be incapable of being alone and write wounded bird blogs in which I pat myself on the back for being all Neil Diamond about shattering someone’s entire life down the middle.

It’s my right to lie to myself, but not about her.  I crossed a line, I guess.  I never meant to imply she was a bad girlfriend.  They don’t come any better, they never will.  That’s a lot less satisfying to blog.  For me.  I’d rather be punk rock about it.  For me.  Erin, I’m sorry, world, I’m sorry.  I’m a bad person, I’m a bad person, I’m a bad person, I’m a bad person, I’m a bad person, I’m a bad person.  If we can all just agree on that, there won’t be any more need for clarification or retractions.  I’m a bad person.  I’m bad for saying I’m a bad person.  I’m bad bad bad bad bad bad bad bad bad.  I don’t secretly think I’m good.  I don’t want to be told I’m good.  I’m a bad person.  And now I’m honest.  And boring.  And sad.  And going back to work.

1.  Everyone is basically a liar, because you can’t possibly tell everyone the truth about everything - we’d never get anything done.  That being said:

2.  There are the people that, by default, prefer you to know what they’re thinking, and there are the people who, by default, prefer you not to know.  Nobody’s good and nobody’s bad but it’s safer to keep to your half of the world.

3.  To complicate things, there are people that think “Good Will Hunting” is a good movie, and there are people that cringe while watching it.  There are honest people and dishonest people on both sides.  And if you are an honest person that hated Good Will Hunting, you need to minimize your contact with dishonest people that loved it, and I don’t even want to get into why this gets nearly impossible to accomplish.  Let’s just say that there has never been an easier lie to tell than “I hated Good Will Hunting,” and there has never been a lie more incentivized than “I thought it was fine.”

4.  There’s no such thing as love.  There’s infatuation, there’s obsession, there’s addiction, there’s ritualistic, compulsive repetition, there’s horniness, but there is no such thing as love.

5.  I hate being alone.  I hate waking up alone.  I hate waking up with strangers.  I hate my empty rented house on my dangerous winding street full of rednecks that can’t wait for an earthquake to kill me because I had a party once.  I hate not having feelings.  I hate having too many.  I hate not being able to express them, I hate the way I express them, I hate people’s reactions to my expression of them.  I hate people trying to cheer me up, I hate people casting me adrift, I hate being alone.

6.  I hated being in a relationship.  Every day in a relationship is a lie.

7.  I hate Good Will Hunting.  It’s a terrible film.  It’s a crime.  If you like it, I think you’re stupid.  Remember the “apples” scene?  Do you remember it?  Really think about that scene.  Are you smiling?  Then I hate you.  But thank you for being honest.  I would hate you more for lying.  Thank you for letting me hate you.

8.  I love you.

9.  I love my show.

Before I knew how to talk to people in real life (coworkers will tell you I never actually learned) I learned to talk to people on the internet. I was 14, I had an old TRS-80 from my Dad’s office, and, at night, I would use it with a direct connect 300 baud modem to call a “citizen’s band emulator” and chat with college students.  The system would only let you log in until a certain hour, so the trick was to get in there early and the reward was that you got to stay all night, quoting Python, flirting, arguing about God, asserting your blossoming manhood, such as it was, all through the beautifully face-blind, tone-deaf medium of pure green text on a black screen.

In the 24 years since, I have learned - kind of - to talk to people in real life, mostly through performance techniques made habit; projection, forced eye contact, using my hands and my face to say “I’m here, I get it, I’m with you, I’m alive,” because that’s how people are in real life and if you stick out too much, you’re alone, and alone is really bad.  Alone is no words, no words is no time, no feeling, no life, the blackness between the green.  

We all had to learn to do it and we all learned to do it differently and we’re all pretty much equally weird at the end of the day, but what I’m expressing to you, right now, with these words, is that I am much, much more comfortable expressing myself this way than that other way. I have a better chance at connecting with you through text than through winking and smiling. I am a hovering cloud of letters twisting and shuffling itself in any way it can to feel alive, and I am at my emotionally healthiest, or so I would have myself believe, when I have 100 percent transparency of intent and result with as large a sampling of humanity as possible.  Blogging was always my most effective form of therapy.

I’ve been cut off from that blogging therapy for years, now, because there’s a heightened political aspect to network TV.  There’s big bucks on the line for the companies that pay me and there’s tuition and medicine and food on the line for over two hundred talented craftsmen that work to make our show.  I have to try my best to seem as sane and stable as possible, which rules out constant journaling of every embarrassing ping and ricochet inside my rusting hull.  In lieu of a blog, I had my girlfriend.  She was a verbal thinker, like me, as close to pure green text as you can get while still having a heart, and she gave that heart to me, trusted me with it, so I could come home and tell her everything, and she would tell me everything was okay.  We broke up.  I fucked her over.  I didn’t want to get married.  I did a bad thing to a good person, that’s all you have to know about that.

Moths circle porch lights because they think it’s the moon.  They fly in a straight line by keeping the moon in a fixed position to one side of their vision, so, if they get close enough to a light bulb, their desire to fly straight results in a spiral that eventually fries them to death.  I know, from a lifetime of observation, that I am capable of spirals and frying, unless I keep something big and glowing to the side of my vision.  So just stay where you are and let me talk to you once in a while, and everything will turn out for the best.  The good news for me being, it’s not like you have a choice, because you don’t really exist.  I have chosen my moon wisely.  Shut up and glow.  Have some craters or something, I don’t care.  

My girlfriend hugged me goodbye at the Channel 101 screening on Saturday night, and when she hugged me, her body trembled, and filled me with shame.  Or stirred my sedentary shame into an honest suspension.  

I don’t like myself very much.  I need to say that on some kind of record and then I’m fine for hours or days.  You can’t say it to a real person, they’ll just say, “that’s okay,” or “you should” or “you shouldn’t,” they’ll react, they’ll move, they’ll strategize, they’ll try to adjust me or they’ll run away.  I don’t want it refuted or debated or therapeutically massaged.  It’s not a projection or a misdirection or a distortion.  It’s just a statement about how I feel.  Just shut up and listen to me, you big dumb moon.  I don’t like myself.  And I don’t want to for a long, long time.  

And I never want to feel that kind of tremble again.  And I put that on a separate line so that it feels profound.  And now I’m undercutting that so I feel clever.   And now I’m saying that so I feel normal.  I don’t want to get away with anything ever again.  I don’t want to trick anyone into thinking I’m a hero ever again.

Thanks for your time.  I’ll talk to you soon.  The season’s going to be really good, I think.  We just finished rewriting an episode that I think might be the best ever.  We’re table reading it at lunch, I’ll be able to tell better then.  But there was a joy at the keyboard, in the wee hours, that felt very “D&D episode.”  Then again, I never know what I’m doing.  I hope you don’t either.

• Thirty seconds after it gets easy, you will forget how hard it was.
• Time does not advance 1 second per second.  It advances 1 important moment at a time.  You have less and less of these as you get used to them, therefore, the older you get, the faster time goes.
• [I assume] you can jump out of as many airplanes as you want, and the above fact will never change.  The reason for this is: every time you jump out of an airplane, it becomes JUST a little more forgettable that you’ve done so.
• You can make fun of it all you want but you will always be generally relaxed by New Age music.  They’re not trying to blow your mind.  They’re trying to make you go to sleep.  If you fall asleep listening to New Age music, they nailed it.
• The person you are actually capable of loving will always be out of your league, and everybody in your league will either stop loving you or stop being loved by you.  In other words:
• Love is not a real thing.  It’s an itch you can’t scratch.  It’s greener grass.  It’s a mirage.  In reality, we huddle together, or we stand alone, and in either case, we will always have to wonder: 
• “What if I wasn’t doing this?”

ME I would be a superhero if I could just not think about women.

DINO Every superhero has a kryptonite…

ME Yeah but you’re a not a very good one if your kryptonite is “people that want to beat you up.”

Dear Neighbor:

I’m not new to SoCal - and thank you for abbreviating Southern California to keep your letter quick and painless - but I am new to living near you, and I just want to say…FUCK YOU.  I’m sorry for typing my actual feelings instead of typing one thing and feeling another, but I guess if everyone had your grace and politeness, you wouldn’t have been forced to write your fucking letter.

I wish I could address my response to every member of your confederacy of “natives,” which I assume consists largely of stray cats and/or whoever delivers your groceries.  Unfortunately, you forgot to include your names.  I guess you didn’t want anyone to mistake your motivations.  You’re not in this for the admiration of your peers, you just want the neighborhood to be perfect, like it was before everyone that now lives here lived here.

You say you’ve noticed some disturbing new trends.  Faster cars, sloppier parking, hotter fireworks…I suppose this could be due to all the horrible new yuppies moving into these fixer uppers on this shitty one lane street for which they don’t have enough appreciation.  OR, here’s an alternate theory:  over the last thirty years, although staying in the same geographic location (congratulations!!!!!!) you’ve changed.  You’ve become gradually less focused on the world beyond your street.  Perhaps a lifetime of battles out there in SoCal has given you perspective regarding the breadth of your domain.  Perhaps you’ve come to find, much as a young rich girl finds an eating disorder, that your only genuine path to a feeling of control is to “act locally,” sneering at careless drivers and picking up cigarette butts while you “patrol” this precious, shitty, hazardous one-lane street for human error.  If that’s the case, more power to you.  Spend the twilight of your life empowering yourself, not enough people do that.

But understand that nobody else is required to feel the way you feel.  You’re entitled to nothing beyond the end of your driveway.  Of course, you know that, which is why you’re trying to add legitimacy to your Scrooge-esque demands of the strangers around you by invoking local legislation and public safety.  The “scary reality,” however, is that the government doesn’t give a fuck about our lives, they give a fuck about our money, and the reason we live on a shitty, dangerous, winding, clogged, broken down death trap of a street is because this neighborhood doesn’t generate enough tax revenue to merit improvement to its infrastructure.  If you want “more sidewalks,” write a letter to someone that can provide them.  If you want safer streets, ask your beloved masters, the creators of the faded, life-saving no parking signs, to add new signs or speed bumps or to widen the streets or remove some of the visual obstructions that make every turn a head-on-collision-in-the-making.

If, by some crazy chance, your letters to your Best Friend the Government don’t create results, try writing a letter to your therapist, or to yourself.  I think the advice you’ll inevitably get is to focus your need for control on the things you can control - things that YOU do.  

I was distressed to hear that in the event of a natural disaster, you might let me suffocate slowly under the rubble of my own home, as the ultimate “toldyaso.”  Then I was told that our house is probably the most earthquake-proof on the entire block, because it’s obnoxiously modern and expensive, and that if anyone would be strolling up and down the street whistling with a shovel after the big one, it would probably me.  Ol’ Parties Too Much.  The good news being, I don’t regard natural disasters as an opportunity to settle personal scores, because it’s not 1989 and this is not a direct-to-video kickboxing movie, this is a real life we all share together.  The bad news being, I don’t own a shovel.  I’m also very busy, and will probably be sleeping on my sofa at work when you die.  God knows I’ll be sleeping there when I die, too.  Still.  Have you seen Community on Thursdays at 8/7c?  It rules.