on exhaustion

In my head there are filters. I think about what I say before I say it, and only a fortunate confluence of predisposition and schooling have engendered enough quickness to make myself appear spontaneous.

I think too much about facebook comments, blog posts, greeting cards, phone conversations. I start every sentence several times before it gets enough momentum to reach a predicate. It lends itself well to the crafting, re-crafting, and over-analysis of jokes.

But it doesn't lend itself to telling them. It was beyond me, for a long time, to understand (even as I was compelled myself) how comedians can reconcile the agony of finding the right words with the inexplicable impulse to expose them to many people at once.

And the effort of trying to pit those instincts against one another, the need for expression versus the capacity to filter yourself into silence, ended up making me uneasy and terrified of what I was doing and relieved when it was over.

But then I got tired.

Tired of long days. Tired of worrying, tired of dodging the future. Tired of having potential, tired of marveling at the time going by. Somewhere I decided to talk as much as I can and filter it when it seems like it's becoming unwieldy, to sleep when my eyelids force me to and wake up as soon as I get another idea.

Comedy is about being fed up with absurdity in the world, on the face of it, but it's really about being fed up with a past version of ourselves. And the more exhausted I get it, the more nights I week I shake myself awake and find a stage somewhere, the less I pick and choose words out of fear- now I find new ones out of excitement and variety.

It took a year and a half of third shift to wear me down this much- if I ever spend any time on the road, I might even say things the very instant that I think of them. But as long as I'm weary and well-spoken, as long as I force sleep to catch me after a long footrace, I'll hit the pillow closer to myself than I've ever been.