Dustin Meadows

If you guys haven’t noticed by now, I tend to use comedy as a means of working out and venting a lot of personal frustrations and issues I deal with, which is why you’re more likely to hear me crack jokes about having depression or being rejected by women than doing “Y’all ever notice how white people and black people are different…” or any other inane suggestion that non-comedians try to tell me to incorporate into my act. As a result of me not getting on stage as much as I should lately (which is no one’s fault but my own) and not wanting to have a bunch of heavy and depressing blog posts where I muse and ponder on where my life is and how it’s not where I wanted to be at this point, I’ve started using other mediums to express and work through some personal issues, whether it’s the songs my band plays or most recently the hastily thrown together drawings I’ve been posting all week (which have been heavily inspired by this great comic).

There’s a Harlan Ellison short story (which may or may not be in a book I once owned that was lent to a girl I had a brief thing with and then I never got it back afterwards), and that short story may or may not be called “Asleep: With Still Hands.” The basic premise of the story that I’m struggling to recall is that there is a force (The Sleeper, I think), that was solely responsible for all human conflict and once it was discovered by man the Sleeper was…well, put to sleep. As a result, there was no more war but as a further result there was no artwork created in response to the flawed nature of humanity in protest of the inevitable animosity that always arises. A handful of humans realize how boring this utopic new world is and decide to wake the Sleeper and give rise once more to human conflict and bring a new Renaissance forth in what humans can achieve through their art. Is a world free of conflict worth the boredom of a world without inspired creativity?

It’s obviously a much grander parallel I’m drawing here, and one Patton Oswalt sort of touches on in his “My Weakness Is Strong” special when he laments that it’d be worth it to not have ten minutes of killer George W. Bush material as long as it meant having never had to suffer under the rule of that president in the first place. But it makes me wonder if the songs or jokes or stories I get out of every failed relationship is worthwhile knowing that it means I had to endure (and in some instances, am still enduring) some really rough times as a result of the source material. If Johnny Cash or Ian Curtis could have been happier and not suffered the heartache and pain they did, would it have been worth it even if it meant the world would never get to hear that heart-wrenching cover of “Hurt” or the brutal, pained honesty and sadness of “Love Will Tear Us Apart?”

The short answer is “I don’t know.” Nobody wants to be depressed and miserable all the time, not even me. But goddamn if I don’t enjoy the darkly comedic stylings of Louis C.K. or the haunting and tragic songs of The Smiths.

So in the final summation, if I ever get famous then maybe, just maybe, it will have been worth it. If not, well, I at least got to drink a lot of whiskey and hopefully make some people laugh about all of it.

Last night at a comedy fundraiser, my buddy Mark Hale told me we should jerk off into someone’s backpack. I leaned over and whispered to him.

“Do you think I would explain my master stroke to you if there were the slightest possibility you could affect the outcome? I did it 35 minutes ago.”

The high school quarterback was the most popular kid in school. He had sex with the entire varsity cheer squad and shoved many nerds into many lockers. What he came to realize only too late and at the cost of his own life, however, is that werewolves straight up don’t give a fuck if you’ve got a letterman’s jacket.

Chicks, man.

I’ve done some pretty impetuous and irresponsible things over the course of my life, most of them in the hopes of impressing a lady. Other times I’ve done what I believed to be downright goddamn chivalrous and noble things for the same reason. Regardless, the fact remains that over the course of my life I’ve put myself through a lot, all in the name of love or what I may have perceived to be love or even just the hopes of a girl noticing me.

I’ve endured nights in bars (which I loathe), driven across the state on a whim at the empty promise of a kiss that may or may not ever come. Spent evenings talking with girls and been convinced I was making progress only for them to leave with someone else at the end of the night. I’ve missed classes, I’ve missed work. Called in sick because “I had to see about a girl” is apparently not a valid excuse to not show up at your job. I’ve opened doors, I’ve bought flowers, I’ve called on the phone and told countless women how pretty they looked no matter what and meant it every single time. I’ve felt my stomach tighten and died a little more inside any time a girl on the other end of the phone didn’t answer. I’ve believed in something so pure and true and beautiful in spite of everything I’ve ever known in my life, only to have it ripped away and shattered, like all the good in the world had suddenly been snatched away from me and would never return. I’ve spent sleepless nights tossing and turning over failed relationships, woken up in a cold sweat over the ghost of every ex that haunts me even in my sleep and gone through the days drinking whiskey because it makes me feel like a lone gunslinger, riding forever and onwards across the horizon to a sun that never quite sets.

All these things that I’ve done I will continue to do, not out of some romantic ideal, but because sometimes (most times), I am a fucking idiot.