REID #95

Reid Pope

Jul 26, 2022

i’m so obsessed with this photo of straight finance ppl trying to understand Janeane Garofalo’s stand-up

SHORT:

as a kid, i went to jewish day school to experience community

and non-jewish summer camp to experience people who were tall

MEDIUM:

my non-jewish summer camp was in santa cruz and there was a steep hiking trail that we sometimes visited

at the bottom of the trail, there was a freaky hollowed-out abandoned Volkswagen Beetle

i think about it a lot

because supposedly the ghost of a young girl lives in it

and sometimes, when i think about my “girlhood”

i think of it living in that beetle too

preserved between the redwood trees and the car’s metal skeleton

but then I think

nah

probably not because

even though I spent most of my “girlhood” dissociating

i still remember my mom yellin’ about how we shouldn’t drive/ go in german cars

and even my ghostly girlhood

would try to honor that

LONG:

it’s been another breathtaking 48 hours in the life of me

i spent the first 14 freaking out that nobody is going to attend the show I directed that will be going up in Edinburgh next month

(but then what if also people do come and don’t like it? what if we don’t get “five stars”? who even invented the “star” ranking…? stars are for the sky and for when you’re bored in class and drawing on ur hand )

luckily, my UK freak-out was curtailed by the news of a big comedy showcase that I didn’t apply for but decided to obsess over for another 6-9 hours

i would kill for things to motivate me instead of them making me want to jump in2 the sea, never 2 return.

the line is so thin.

and I’m always on the “sea” side of it.

btw mom (and others), when I say freak out, I don’t really mean “freak out”.

i mean i sort of just sat quietly and stared at the wall

and then watched an old tape of myself doing standup and thought, “… nope”

nope

— shoutout Jordan Peele!

… My TikTok keeps giving me ads for that movie… should I go see it?

as I’ve previously mentioned, I don’t really care about cinema (or anything) that relates to the extraterrestrial or “other realms” — also wtf is a “realm” ? If anyone can actually explain to me what a “realm” is, I will pay u 3 million dollars — and don’t just go looking it up in Merriam Webster, I mean really explain it to me (u won’t b able to because, like most things, it’s a singular word for an abstract-amorphous-nebulous-and-hence-basically-pretend thing).

i know this is all sounding hypocritical coming from the person who started off the newsletter with a story about a girl-ghost in a punch-buggy, but I just said I REMEMBERED that story not that I LIKED it.

i don’t want anything (in film or real life) to be “eerie”

i just want it to be normal.

is that so much 2 ask?

…

as I sit here and write this (while taking breaks and scrolling through pull quotes from nonfiction books about self-compassion that have been screenshotted and posted on the-guy-who-played-the-hot-prison-guard-on-orange-is-the-new-black’s instagram),

i can’t help but think about

how i would pay 1 million dollars

to not know what any of the words i just typed in that parenthetical

mean.

maybe then i would have “self-compassion”

and/or peace

and/or calm

or whatever i would call those feelings

if i didn’t have a body

or brain

or instagram

or the internet

but i do

i’m on tiktok too

which is, for those who don’t know, an app where they’ve successfully managed to bottled hell and set it to music about loving yourself.

I’m hoping to get more followers on the app (because I want to get bullied more consistently)

…

well… this was uplifting!

…

I just did a late-night comedy writing class on zoom where they gave us prompts and we had to fill in the punchline.

One of my jokes was:

Florida was the only state in the U.S. to *skip* pre-ordering doses of COVID vaccine for young children… they can’t say gay if they’re dead.

and everyone laughed but then ppl were like “that’s probably too dark for t.v.”

Then I shared:

U.S. Customs agents seized over 23 pounds of cocaine hidden inside the seat cushions of a passenger’s wheelchair… it was the most butt-crack the airport had seen since the annual plumbers convention came thru

[insert picture of plumbers bending over to open their suitcases, butt-cracks out]

I’m an artist.

And I only keep getting better at my craft.

…

we live in hell i hope any/all of this made u laugh

c u next tuesday