#51. You and The Boss

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It’s been an extremely surreal week in New York, where the streets and subway stations have by turns been full of protest marches and costumed Halloween celebrants. This year, my neighborhood has really done it up with spooky decorations. A neighbor pointed out that this corner of Brooklyn probably goes bigger for Halloween than it does for Christmas. I can’t explain why that is, but it does seem accurate. Specifically this year I’ve noticed an enormous breadth of skeletons. We all know about Home Depot’s 12-Foot-Tall guy (aka Victor Web-bone-yama), but I have witnessed a staggering diversity of skeleton height, posture, and attire this year. I’ve included a few of my favorites below. (One requires a click-through.)

Some skeletons of Brooklyn.

The other thing that I’ve got going on, personally, is that Maris fixed our freezer’s built in ice maker (I know, ooo la la) by removing the giant chunk of ice that was sitting at the bottom of the tray, leading the cube dispenser to think: “No need for more cubes here, I see! This sucker is choc full of ice already! Might as well take this time to work on my novel or fold laundry!”

Previously, we rationed our cubes carefully for iced coffee and seltzer and cocktails. Now, I can get my drinks as cold as I want. I love the little rumble in the ice tray when I open the freezer. I wish I could dive into the cubes like Scrooge McDuck. It is borderline humiliating to admit that this give me a rush of endorphins every time I enjoy a cool beverage. (Also, this fixation reminds me of

Jo Firestone

’s perfect newsletter about small passions to which everyone should subscribe.)

Oh one more small thing: Last week I saw Dicks: The Musical (formerly known as Fucking Identical Twins) and they got a SAG-AFTRA promotional waiver as an independent film so also feel free to promote it. It’s so funny and gross and weird!!! I laughed REALLY loud in the theater. It’s dumb as hell (extreme compliment) and has such a wonderful specific comedic voice. I recommend it with four thumbs up (for how many thumbs most sets of twins have).

ANYWAY!!!

NEW YORK: I’ve got a few fun shows coming up including hosting Jesse David Fox’s book release show at the Bell House on 11/7. Jesse is really a really smart thinker and writer about comedy, and his book (about comedy) is full of his smart ideas, written down!!!

PITTSBURGH: I’m going to be at Bottle Rocket in just a couple of weeks (11/18) and would love if you were there! Grab those tickets now!

PEP TALKS FOR READERS

This is a long-ish newsletter as you’ll see in a moment, so I’ve got a few quick pep talk requests that I’m going to answer with quick pep talks. I’ve done a little editing/condensing for the sake of smoothness, but it’s all staying true to the intent of the writers, I swear!

It’s a week until US daylight savings. I need a mantra to get me through week, until I get an extra hour of sleep and another hour without seeing or hearing this horrible news cycle.
- Miles To Go

Easy! Sing yourself the chorus of “This Year” by the Mountain Goats but replace the word “year” with “week.” NEXT PEP TALK!!!

Hey Josh! I’m in a do or die semester of grad school (PhD program) and I spent the majority of October sick with flus and colds. That’s means I’m entering a two-week sprint that will determine whether I can keep moving forward. Thanks!!!!
- Grad to the Bone aka Tick Tock, Doc (a quote from the Al Pacino film 88 Minutes)

Okay what you’ve got to do is listen to “This Year” by the Mountain Goats and replace the word “year” with “two-week sprint.” (I mean, it couldn’t hurt to start there, but I do have more to say!)

Okay for real though this isn’t really a do-or-die stretch; it’s a do-or-not stretch. I specify for two reasons:

1. Even if you can’t complete your assignments in these two weeks, you will not die (from this…on a long enough timeline you will probably die, but that’s not my business nor is it the matter at hand).

2. The next two weeks are basically guaranteed to suck ass, but once they’re over, they’re over. And you can put up with so much for two weeks. You were just sick for a month, and you got through that! “Flus” plural sounds miserable. Flu me once, shame on you, etc. etc. But given your recent triumph over your own body’s betrayals, you can definitely muddle through two weeks of heavy work knowing the reward for doing a good job!

This crunch to get through a too much work in too little time will be a good test for whether, in the future, you’d enjoy working in a field where (I imagine) similar circumstances might arise again. It seems unlikely that this is the only time your job will be a little overwhelming for a fortnight. So, finishing up this sprint with good results is a great sign for your future in this field. And grinding miserably to a stalemate for the next half a month says: “Yikes, maybe this isn’t the life I want to sign up for forever!”

But, you’ve gotten this far, and you want to go further, so…you’re probably going to do. There’s a slim chance you won’t, but at least you’re not going to die from this. I (basically) promise.

I feel like you wrote about a similar topic last week, but I’m an American Jew from the northeast my parents and a lot of my friends are very shitty about the Middle East right now (read: aggressively pro-Israel and genocide). It is hanging over every conversation and interaction I have. If you can’t do this, I get it! Using this as also a vent.
- The Struggle IsReal

Given the relentless violence and heartbreak that has permeated the news this month, I don’t really have anything too funny to say here (cue a chorus shouting: “Do you ever?”). It’s been hard to navigate feelings of grief and fear and anger all while having disagreements with people you didn’t expect to ever disagree with so heatedly with about anything.

As I’ve said in previous newsletters, I think that Palestinian people should be able to live freely and safely, and I don’t think that is mutually exclusive with freedom and safety for Jewish people (also a priority for me, obviously). I haven’t specifically said that I am hoping for a safe return home for the hostages, because taking the other side of that issue felt like more of an opt-in position. I basically believe that everyone is against hostages dying unless they say so (or are the ones personally taking hostages). Maybe I’m in the minority on that? I don’t think so though.

Regardless, I don’t know all the steps to bringing about mutually assured peace, prosperity, and security, but I do know that what’s happening now isn’t going to do it. A (U.S. sponsored!!!) campaign of militarized state violence against the desperate and vulnerable population in Gaza can’t and won’t solve the problems at hand (including a safe return of hostages, it seems like).

That’s most of what I know: This isn’t the answer! In the same way that sometimes I’m not sure what I want for lunch, but I’m clearly not going to choose a bowl of thumbtacks floating in gasoline. Even if you don’t have everything figured out, it’s okay to look at something horrible and say no thanks!

Fortunately, I’m not a diplomat or a world leader! I’m just some guy who hates it when basically anyone is killed by bombs! I’m inclined to align myself with the people taking to the streets for peace and the ones urging our government to stop participating in war. I don’t know what the next step is, but I know it can’t be this. And it doesn’t have to be!

There have been some recent high-profile examples of antisemitism and Islamophobia across the globe recently, and guess what: My (controversial?) position is they all fucking stink! That doesn’t feel contradictory to me! But most of my public freaking out energy has gone towards asking that brutal violence not be carried out in my name, funded by my tax money (or at all, really, but you really only get a say in certain things).

I guess this isn’t a pep talk so much as it is an acknowledgement of ongoing horror amidst what’s otherwise a pretty frivolous bit of writing and a reminder that you can still call your representatives and urge them to support a ceasefire.

Okay back to the usual goofy bullshit!

A LITTLE PIECE OF FICTION I WROTE

I don’t really write fiction, but I was asked to read something seasonal/spooky at a live event last weekend, and I didn’t really have anything appropriate, so I wrote this little short story based on the stupidest idea I could think of that still fulfilled the assignment. I had fun with it and thought that maybe some people who weren’t in the room on Saturday night would also enjoy it, and maybe That’s Marvelous subscribers would be those people. So…here goes!

Greetings from a Delaware Strip Mall

“Pull the bus over,” rasped Bruce Springsteen, who in addition to being generally The Boss was also specifically the boss of this thirty-two city headlining tour. He collected himself and started again. He’d been working in couples therapy on modulating his tone. “I’m sorry, Johnny. Please pull the bus over. I feel a song coming on.” 

It had been months since inspiration had struck like this, and he wanted to make the most of it. Lately his thoughts all felt like movies he hadn’t seen before, but weren’t novel enough to watch to the end. At a recent gig in Atlantic City, he’d tried out a few bars of his new tune “You Can Bet On Football From Your Phone These Days,” but the audience could tell right away he just was going through the motions.

Johnny, who was itching for a cigarette and hadn’t clocked his-slash-The boss’s initial sharpness anyway, guided the tour bus off the regional highway and into the parking lot of a strip mall. Many of the usual offerings were present. A CVS, a Game Stop, an independent Chinese restaurant and a franchised hamburger spot. One furniture store that felt way too upscale for the town stood out like a guy wearing a tuxedo at his wife’s nephew’s bar mitzvah. A reptile and reptile supply store glowed fluorescent. Must be a lotta freaks in this town, Johnny thought to himself.

“There,” Bruce whispered, clasping Johnny’s shoulder and pointing across the parking lot to a vacant storefront. “…I mean…if it isn’t too much trouble.” Springsteen rushed to the common area and snatched up his guitar. Then he scrambled back to the front door to make sure he was the first one off the bus, not that anyone would have cut him in line. The rest of the band and the crew members who’d been woken up by the break in the gentle rumble of pavement beneath the vehicle’s wheels followed their bandleader off. They were grateful for the chance to stretch their legs. Plus they knew it might be a while before they got moving again. 

Bruce was always stopping the bus to gaze at some kind of downtrodden Americana bullshit. They had to build it into their travel days or else they’d wind up missing soundcheck. One time after a gig, Springsteen spent three hours pacing in front of an abandoned rollercoaster that it turned out was just actually closed for the night. And don’t even get the tour manager started on the time Bruce spotted a bald eagle’s nest on top of a telephone pole. He had to be physically restrained from climbing up to check if there were any eggs inside. His guitar tech literally sat on him like a weighted blanket until he fell asleep muttering something about the wandering soul of a nation left behind by history. That’s the problem with being a titan of the American songbook. Nothing’s just a thing to you; it’s all a goddamn metaphor.

Bruce peered into the eyes of his own pale reflection in the storefront’s darkened windows. A brisk November breeze raised goosebumps on his arms, which were bare below the shoulders of his leather travel vest. The sign had already been taken down from over the door, but he could make out the faint outline of the lettering: Spirit Halloween. There it was. His next big hit.

Bruce wondered how many lives were ruined when this place shut down, how many families torn apart as jobless men (or women and nonbinary people, he reminded himself) set off in search of seasonal employment wherever the hell people worked in the winter months. Snowball factory? Reindeer slaughterhouse? Bruce felt a great affinity for the working people of these United States. And yet, as the economy shifted away from manufacturing, he felt less and less in touch with the pulse of American labor. He was trying to maintain that connection, dammit, but it was hard. Self-professed “huge Springsteen fan” Jeff Bezos had sent Bruce a handwritten letter slash cease-and-desist halting the release of his single “Bottles of Piss” an ode to Amazon warehouse workers that his wife and bandmate Patti insisted should have been called “Shipping It All Away” in the first place.

Springsteen squinted through the window, trying to catch a glimpse of the store’s derelict interior. In a far corner he saw a skeleton slumped against the wall. That’s a good start, he thought. But what the fuck rhymes with “skeleton?” 

He pictured a young woman, a single mother maybe, working the cash register. Hawking afro wigs and tubes of thick green makeup and off-brand Barbie costumes labeled things like “Doll Person With Rockin’ Bod.” This young woman, a girl really, forced to grow up too fast, spent her days selling other people their dreams while keeping hers hidden away from the world. She made their fantasies come true and saved up what little cash she made until she could bring her own ambition to fruition. Yes, there it is, Bruce thought. It’s happening. He knew a real corker of a tune was brewing when his thoughts started to rhyme by accident.

“Aww shit,” muttered Little Steven Van Zandt. “He’s got that look in his eyes. We better order some Chinese food.”

This girl…Wendy? No he’d used that before. Mary? Shoot. Same. Sloppy Sue? Goddammit. What are girls even named these days? Ravyn with a Y? Bruce shook his head. Too specific. Tundra? Too gender-neutral to play in the heartland. Willow? Yeah. Willow. His acquaintances Will and Jada whose marriage made total sense to him as another preposterously famous person had a kid named Willow around the age of the girl in his mind’s eye. “Willow worked at the Halloween store/There were the masks that she sold, and the mask that she wore.” Fuck yes. He was cooking with gas now. He peeled a bar napkin from the stack in his back pocket and produced a Bic pen with which to scribble down the lyric before it evaporated the way inspiration often does when disrespected.

By this point, an hour and a half had passed. The band picked at the last of their lo mein as they watched their-slash-The Boss stare off into the distance, making occasional notes. 

“We’re still four hours out from Richmond,” said Tammy “The Tambourine” Valentino, the band’s newest member. “Should somebody say something to him?” 

“Better not,” Patti replied. “He’ll be ready when he’s ready.”

Time, in its way, continued to pass. The last fingers of sunset lost their grip on the horizon and slipped away. Bruce thought about his own past, the desperation to leave his hometown, the warmth he felt when he returned. Willow couldn’t know this when she got laid off, but maybe from the narrator’s perspective Bruce could hint that as she drove off in her Tesla…no, too expensive…her used Nissan Leaf…maybe someday she and her kid would come back under better circumstances. He envisioned a triumphant saxophone solo playing her out of town, but it still felt too soon to hire a new saxophone player after the passing of the Big Man, Clarence Clemons.

The autumn breeze became cruel and biting, Lawrence, the tour’s denim jacketdasher brought Bruce a coat and draped it over his shoulders. He shrugged it off. Oneness with his environment was part of the process. The wind wasn’t a nuisance, it was a necessity. The car horns in the distance didn’t distract him as he wrote; they added texture, context to the experience of writing. Stars gleamed in vast expanses of sky between the streetlights along the highway. Bruce knew the names of several constellations but not how to identify them, so he allowed the words “Orion’s belt” to pass in and out of his consciousness without any specific image attached.

Gelatin? Sprinsteen thought. Melanin? Sometimes he felt like writing a song was like being trapped under ice, and only when he figured out a crucial element could he break through the surface and breathe again. He was exhausted, almost dizzy, but he knew that as soon as he struck upon a rhyme for “skeleton,” the cold November air would fill his lungs again.

On the bus, the band and crew members dozed in their bunks. Patti, sensing her husband might be getting hungry, heated up an egg roll in the microwave. The appliance’s orange light brightened the kitchenette in a way that to Bruce seemed almost demonic. Wait, he thought. That’s it.

“Without a Spirit, this town’s just a skeleton/She’d been through it all before, wouldn’t get dragged down to hell again.”

“Yes!” he shouted, as he pumped his fist once in celebration. The twerps at Rolling Stone are gonna crum in their skinny jeans when they hear this. (That’s Bruce’s word for when you crap and cum at the came time.)

He got back on the bus, winked at Patti, and took her in his arms.

“Let’s go!!!” he hollered to Johnny, the driver, through a mouth full of leftover egg roll. “That is…as long as you’re ready.”

PICK-ME-UP THING OF THE WEEK:
NATE BARGATZE’S SNL MONOLOGUE

Nate Bargatze is very funny. There’s maybe no one in comedy who can make a joke hit harder while also sounding less artificial and more conversational. He is playing, like…hockey arenas on his new tour, so I imagine you’ve heard of him, but if you haven’t, I really recommend his specials specifically Full Time Magic on Comedy Central (wherever you find their stuff now), his half hour episode of The Standups on Netflix, and The Tennessee Kid on Netflix also. Not that this is the whole draw, but he works very clean and his comedy is nice to watch with your parents if you’re looking for a thing to watch with your parents.

ALSO, this year, Nate produced specials for Greg Warren and Joe Zimmerman, and both of them were terrific (and also very clean)!

UPCOMING SHOWS

I’m mostly doing shows around New York City for the next month! More on my website!

11/5: Afternoon Show: Abby Govindan and Enemies at Chelsea Music Hall (NYC)

11/7: Jesse David Fox Book Launch Show at Bell House (Brooklyn)

11/8: Cracked Live at KGB Bar (NYC)

11/18: Bottle Rocket (Pittsburgh)