Welcome 2009

Sometimes we lose sight of our goals. Sometimes they happen while were busy still complaining about where we want to be in life. They aren’t the most profound realizations a person could have but they work. New Years Eve has always been a mind fuck to me. Januarys resolutions become Februarys regrets. Drunks wander around slapping each other on the back congratulating each other for another year. It’s a milestone. A shared moment of contemplation and expectation we all share. This year I was sliding into it like I do with most of these holidays. I was vibrating contempt for my fellow man worrying about what I had not yet achieved in my life. I was walking to my gig for that night thinking of other years at other venues in other times. Some were better but far more were unquestionably worse. Then it struck me, I am headlining a New Years Eve show in San Francisco. I have worked a lot of new years eves in this town. That makes me relatively lucky as a comic. I’ve been a host at all the major venues, Punch Line, Cobb’s and even the Palace of Fine Arts. Last year I headlined a small venue in Davis, CA. It was a great gig. But the prize has always been to not just be on a show in the city, but to be its headliner. It had come true almost without me realizing it. It was a last minuet gig but everything about it was right. The money was good the people I would be working with even better and the venue a place I know well. I said it out loud in my head a few more times. I am the headliner for a New Years Eve show in San Francisco. That is cool. Anyway you want to look at it I accomplished something I had wanted for so long that when it happened it not only happened by sheer luck, but the thrill almost passed me by. It was only when I was about ten minuets away from the gig did I find myself smiling for the first time that day. It wasn’t a cocky feeling or a conceded feeling of thinking I was so great, it was just an acknowledgment that I need to get my head out of my ass and appreciate something I have said I have wanted for a very long time.

So it goes. I spent New Years Eve of 2008 at the San Francisco Comedy College on the fifth floor of their Clubhouse. We had two shows in front of good crowds. I was paid right afterwards, congratulated by happy audience members and made to feel important by all the people at the Comedy College. Not bad. Not bad at all. I didn’t have any resolutions when I went into the night but I left feeling like 2009 was set up great. It taught me that people care about me even when I think they don’t. It showed me how much I can get in the way of myself being happy. So my resolution is pretty simple. I am going to work harder at including the people who care about me in my life. I am going to find a way to remember that things inside my head are not generally the way things are.

My New Years Eve turned out pretty good.