This Is Not Fame: A "From What I Re-Memoir" (Doug Stanhope)

People are easily swept into this brand of hysteria in almost equal line with their own boredom and how much their own lives suck. They need an enemy when the real enemy is their own poor choices. You didn’t even want to have that baby in the first place and now that child has got you anchored in this idyllic little hamlet, glued into a Groundhog Day existence. The only escape from your per diem reality of production and predictability is the newspaper, shot under your door daily like a prison kite.

My regular flight anxiety as involved with traveling is mostly the fear of not being able to smoke or having some dullard next to me try to strike up a conversation.

Some comedians focused solely on their craft and their career and I tended to avoid those types. Which wasn’t difficult as they tended to leave right after the show to go back to their hotel and work on a screenplay or a television project or yell at their agent for allowing some vulgar miscreant like myself to be their opening act. By then I’d be wildly drunk with the fuckups and the staff, trying to talk a waitress into letting me beat off on her tits in a bar toilet. Or in her car in the parking garage. Wherever.

They started to take comedy seriously, which seemed such a deformed way of doing comedy.

I’ve gone on Netflix binges so epic that Netflix couldn’t keep up with enough content to support them. I put as much effort into sloth as others do into achievement. But I never felt relaxed, even if there was nothing specific that I should be doing otherwise.

Every time I catch myself in that mental rat trap of “I could have done more with my life,” I realize I have done more with my life. I just don’t remember a lot of it. You’d blame the years of alcohol but the years alone will do it. I know plenty a peer my age who hasn’t soaked their head in booze for decades and they can’t remember shit either. People who tell you that you could have done more with your life typically mean that you could have done more with your career. They equate work with living.