#188. My Ceiling and You
Hi everyone,
As you have assuredly heard by now, the New York Knicks won the NBA Finals, clinching the series with a(nother) comeback victory over the Spurs in San Antonio. The individual games in the championship series were basically all thrilling even though the 4-1 result says more about the way the Knicks were able to slam the door on the Spurs in the fourth quarter than it does about the overall tension from game to game.
That tension, however, does not approach the stress I would have felt going into work at Desus & Mero to have my bosses make fun of me on television in the wake of a historic Knicks victory. Literally the only time I am grateful that the show was cancelled (R.I.P.) is when the Knicks thrive or the Celtics fail.
As I wrote for Lyz Lenz's excellent newsletter (while Lyz was running a relay across the state Iowa for charity), the effervescent energy across New York City was briefly interrupted when Knicks owner James Dolan invited Donald Trump to the team's first home game of the Finals, resulting (directly, I'd say) in their only loss in a month and a half.
But the positive feelings returned quickly. Last Wednesday, the Knicks came back from a 29-point deficit, the largest such comeback in NBA Finals history. Law and Order's Mariska Hargitay was sitting courtside and gave Taylor Swift a big hug when the game ended. Hargitay, it was pointed out, rushed over to Madison Square Garden after TWO performances of the one-person play Every Brilliant Thing. My footnote to that footnote is that my sister had come into town earlier that day and taken me and Maris to see that show. That doesn't mean anything, really, but it feels like slightly more than nothing. An interesting tangent point to a tangent point to history. It's my newsletter, so I get to make things about me if I want.
When the decisive Game 5 ended, Maris wanted to keep watching until all the players had finished hugging each other, and then we went to bed. You have probably seen the streets teeming with celebration in pictures and videos, but it wasn't my team and wasn't my joy, so I didn't really know what I'd do if I went out. Just kind of...watch, anthropologically? I certainly wasn't going to chant. I am happy for my friends and neighbors, but not that happy for them!
I felt a little left out by all the excitement around me, but I realized that I also have never gone out in the street to celebrate when a team I do root for has won a championship. I skipped the Red Sox championship parade in 2004 (too many people) and stayed put in my apartment in Allston when the Sox won again in 2007 and the Celtics won in 2008. Ultimately, I love sports, but I do not love crowds or being inconvenienced, so I do a lot of quiet fist-pumping on my couch in victory, and staying up late stewing listening to podcasts in defeat.
I will say that the rapturous championship vibes did not touch everyone in the city. On Saturday, I was walking through my neighborhood, enjoying the sunshine and general pleasant ambiance, when I found myself crossing the street towards an older woman walking with two small dogs. I am used to talking to people on the street when they have dogs, often because I have to warn them that my dog might unexpectedly try to fight theirs. In this case, I felt like I could say hello even though I was walking alone and that maybe some intrinsic small-dog-owner energy would radiate from me.
"Hello!" I said to this older neighbor (and her dogs).
"Who the FUCK are you?" she replied. I had headphones in at the time, and I wasn't positive I'd heard her right. I turned back to look at her as I passed. She turned back to face me as well. "Who the fuck ARE you?" The shift in emphasis suggested a deeper existential query that was more than I could bear to engage with on a Saturday afternoon, so I kept walking, leaving her question unanswered.
So, in case you were wondering, there were people less enthusiastic about the Knicks championship than I was. Or maybe she could see in my eyes that I'm a Celtics fan.
The weekend got worse from there, but more on that later.
If you like your topical jokes a few days late, I'm on this week's Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me! panel with Shane Torres and Shantira Jackson. We did a lot of silly riffing together and a LOT of making fun of Shane for his toothbrushing technique (listen and find out why). It's extra great to get to be on a panel with real life friends! In keeping with that energy: Enormous congratulations to Alzo Slade, who has taken over for the recently-retired Bill Kurtis as the permanent scorekeeper and announcer! Alzo is great, and several years ago we had a little chat on the phone when he started on the show as a panelist, and it rules that he is a fixture of the program now! Robert Smigel, a comedy legend, was the "Not My Job" celebrity guest, and he was super funny and super nice too.
Shane had wrangled tickets for the two of us to see Jimmy Eat World after the taping, but it was an outdoor show, and it was cancelled on account of a tornado warning. Prudent choice, if you ask me, if disappointing! Still, a great trip to Chicago!
In other Josh Gondelman news: I am on the most recent episode of the Soccer Moms podcast (an improvised comedy show with the premise that it's being recorded from the parking lot of a youth soccer game every week). I play Stu, a local cable guy who invented DraftKids, an app for betting on youth sports. Hosts Katie Rich and Holly Laurent have such preposterous chemistry together and are such brilliant improvisors, and I had a ball trying to keep up.
I also popped onto What's All This Then? with the delightful Libby Watson and Charlotte McDonnell to talk about the Spice Girls! Libby and Charlotte made me laugh a ton as well!
This week I'm co-hosting Frankenstein's Baby with Tyrone (BOYS NIGHT!), doing a spot on Padma Lakshmi's (already sold out) charity show at the Bell House, and then zipping up to Boston to visit my folks and tell some jokes on a show at the Harpoon Brewery on Father's Day.
PEP TALK FOR MY CEILING
Yesterday afternoon, I woke Maris up from a nap by screaming "FUCK!" after I'd gotten up to investigate a dripping sound and found water absolutely gushing out of our ceiling and somehow up from the floorboards as well. The futon in our office pretty quickly became saturated with filthy wallwater. We used all our towels in an attempt to barricade our other stuff from getting ruined, to mixed results. Our heroic neighbors lent us some extra towels and buckets and a wetvac. The fire department eventually turned off the sprinklers, which was fine because there wasn't a fire in the first place. Water continued to drip into bowls and buckets for what I'll conservatively call all goddamn day.
It seemed like we were out of the woods with the worst of it until a ceiling zit full of gross slosh kept growing over our living room, looming like an enemy spaceship in a Star Trek movie. I say zit, but when I showed a picture of it to my friend Jordan she replied: "That's a full ceiling titty." We tried to move the couch out of the path of its potential blast radius, and we positioned one of our several borrowed buckets underneath its blossoming curves (so beautiful when a ceiling becomes a woman), but before we could batten down our metaphorical hatches, it exploded all over our living room, ruining our couch and further ruining our day. Ultimately, to put it crudely, it was more like zit behavior than tit behavior after all.
Maris furiously mopped the floors. I furiously (in a different way) carried sixty pounds of wet towels and machine washable rugs to the laundromat. There's some more cleaning to do, and we'll have to replace our furniture, but we've got the funds on hand to make it as painless a process as possible. I am going to buy our neighbors a fancy-ish bottle of wine to hand over when we return their towels and vacuum later today.
Overall, this experience has sucked a goat's hairy ass. However, on the spectrum of asses that things can suck, we got off ass-easy. Our renter's insurance policy should cover the couch and the futon. We didn't lose any cherished heirlooms. We barely had to say goodbye to any books or sneakers, which if you've ever seen our apartment, you'd know is a borderline miracle. Our bedroom was mercifully spared from the path of destruction, meaning we haven't had to relocate for an extended period of time, which would have sucked a rhinoceros's scaly ass. Our landlords appear to be on our side (which is reasonable because none of this was our fault). There are so many worse things that could have happened and so many worse ways this particular bad thing could have gone.
"It could have been worse," isn't always helpful perspective. ("Oh, thanks, I hadn't considered that BOTH sets of my grandparents could have fallen into that volcano.") But here it is. It could have been worse. But I am still going to complain about it a lot. Once again: My newsletter, my prerogative.
PEP TALK FOR A READER
There were some hiccups in this initial request that I assumed were typos, so I changed them and added a nickname.
I got kicked out of the house with the kids so mom can cram for the patent bar exam! Ended up in a McDonald’s PlayPlace.
- Not Loving It
Buddy, this is the good stuff!!! Yeah, an afternoon of monoparenting is frazzling, and exponentially so with every additional kid. Well, not "additional", but every number of children more than zero. None of them are the additional one. Okay, sometimes one of them is "additional" but you can't tell them that. It's your fault more than theirs!
But this is it! This is why we do the other stuff! So you can support your partner by giving your kids french fries and hoping that they don't get sick on the twisty slide or put a ball pit ball slathered in e. coli in their mouths. You are racking up victories here, pulling off Tekken-style combos. I feel like that PETA guide to animal-friendly idioms, because this doesn't even seem like killing two birds with one stone. You're thrilling two birds with one scone!
This is too simplistic a way to really see the world, but let's plot out the things we have to do in life on two axes: One goes easy to difficult. The other goes bullshit to worthwhile. Obviously the worst things we have to deal with are difficult bullshit. Navigating and affording the American healthcare system (or dealing with a flooded apartment; I told you I wasn't done complaining about it)...that's some difficult bullshit. Figuring out what to watch on Netflix when you're too tired to really engage with something compelling, that's easy bullshit. You get it.
Every so often, we hit the easy and worthwhile quadrant, but it's definitely the least populous sector of the chart. Sometimes a friend gives you great tickets to a concert because they can't use them. Every so often you get to have a long meaningful catchup with someone you love. That's great! But usually the best we can hope for is difficult and worthwhile. And it's not always because of the unjust ways in which the world can be hard. Lots of good stuff just takes a little extra effort to achieve.
And here you are! Doing the things that make life worth living! Not all hard things are good. Numerous tax forms and boners disprove that assertion. But not all stresses are bad. Some things just take effort to enjoy, and here you are. You're caring for your family. You're in immediate proximity to hamburgers. Your kids haven't thrown up yet. Life is good. Grit your teeth and enjoy it.
PICK-ME-UP SONG OF THE WEEK:
Sonny Rollins - "I'm An Old Cowhand"
After Sonny Rollins died a few weeks ago, I spent a fair bit amount of time with his virtuoso saxophone playing soundtracking my days. I started here, thanks to Natalie Weiner's beautiful remembrance in her (and Marissa R. Moss's) excellent country music newsletter Don't Rock The Inbox. I'd never heard Rollins's cover of "I'm An Old Cowhand" before, and I don't think I could have named the original artist at six-shooter point, but I loved hearing the way Rollins played the melody and then tore it down to the studs and reconfigured it into something totally new.
I don't know a ton about jazz, but I think that's my favorite part of it, the way a song can be fully busted open an mined for notes and phrases and chord progressions and key signatures before being put back together again. Or maybe it's like a musical c-section, with the guts of a tune being unspooled and revealed and then sewn back up.
When I was a kid, I learned "St. Thomas" on the trombone, badly. It wasn't even the same genre of music. There was a level of artistic fluency I didn't possess and never developed. Like, you know how when you see a bunch of kids in a dirt field or a World Cup match, it is all clearly soccer? This was the opposite of that. This cover is so clearly what the song was and it's also something new, and I bet people who know more than me can say why, and people who know less than me can enjoy the breezy ambling tones anyway, and that's really nice.
Also, Natalie's husband Jonny recently put me on to a great hip hop album by DeeboDaGenius, and that's great too!!!
UPCOMING SHOWS
I'm mostly off the road until the end of summer, but I'm ramping up my travel schedule for the fall! Where should I go?
6/15: Frankenstein's Baby at Union Hall (Brooklyn)
6/16: Paulie Gee's Slice Shop (Brooklyn)
6/21: Father's Day Daytime Show at Harpoon Brewery (Boston)
6/22: PowerPoint Comedy Show at Caveat (Manhattan)
6/26: Greenpoint Comedy Club (Brooklyn)
7/7: Alison Leiby's Book Launch at the Bell House (Brooklyn)
7/16: Programme 4 at LPR (Manhattan)
7/23: Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me! Live Recording (Chicago)
8/15: Arguments and Grievances at Caveat (Manhattan)
9/19: The Comedy Studio (Cambridge, MA)
10/21: Dallas, TX (DETAILS COMING SOON)
10/22: Houston, TX (DETAILS COMING SOON)