No, I’m Not Dead
I’ve gotten a lot of emails recently wondering if I’d died or was otherwise incapacitated grieviously. I suppose it’s a reasonable enough conclusion, given that I haven’t posted anything new and have barely visited my own forum in weeks and weeks and weeks. Below, then: what I’ve been doing instead of updating the website.
We Bought a Dog
We recently brought home a four-month-old rat terrier named Orwell. We chose him at the pet store because, unlike the other dogs we looked at who ran all over the place in a flurry of barking and sprayed urine, he was ridiculously mellowed out. Surely this dog will be the perfect addition to our alcohol-basted, low-energy lifestyle, we thought.
We were played like chumps, of course—having settled into our home for over a month now, Orwell has abandoned his relaxed facade in a manner similar to a cackling ’30s villain removing his false moustache and hat; and has revealed himself to be a biting, sprinting, barking little poop factory. I’d had no idea, but caring for a puppy is terrifyingly similar to looking after a baby, the only differences being the amount of fur and length of prison time if, after having found a ripped-up pile of your favorite comic books scattered around the bedroom, you logically decide to drown it.
The Jay Pinkerton with time to spare in the mornings and evenings is gone, in other words, at least until the little dude grows up into a dog and learns how to entertain himself for five goddamn minutes without destroying something valuable or getting his head caught in a closet door. My free time can now be broken down into the following categories:
- Taking the puppy for walks;
- Training the puppy not to shit all over the place;
- Cleaning up vast, mountainous piles of shit when he, with willful defiance, shits all over the place anyway;
- Telling the puppy “No bites” when he bites me;
- When this fails, simply ignoring the puppy when he bites again;
- When this also fails, entertaining the idea of simply hiding the puppy in the freezer until Karla gets home;
- Idly wondering how the ungodly hell a small handful of kibble can somehow become eight pounds of wet, creamy fecal waste in less than three hours. (I suspect he must be eating shit when I’m not looking.)
Travelling
We flew up to Kingston, Ontario for Canadian Thanksgiving with my parents, then over to Indianapolis for American Thanksgiving with Karla’s mom. I’m sure there are some webmasters who can fly off for a few days without it interrupting their update schedule. I am not one of those people.
In all honesty, I can barely maintain a regular posting schedule in the absence of any interruptions. Relatively minor lifestyle adjustments like losing the can opener or setting the clocks back an hour can transform my life into a bleak, chaotic wasteland that takes weeks to crawl out of. Given that a trip to Indianapolis has the raw potential to destroy a healthy, organized mind, I didn’t honestly stand a chance.
My Day Job
Back when I wasn’t writing comedy for a living, I’d come home from work bursting with creative energy. There’s nothing quite like spending a day writing business proposals outlining the consumer benefits of value-added technologies to make you want to let your hair down and make fun of the Bible or put raunchy dialogue in Spider-Man’s mouth. Now that I’m at Cracked Magazine, though, I’m pretty much writing, editing, commissioning and designing Photoshop work for humor articles all day. When I get home from work, I don’t even want to think about jokes.
Worse, the sheer number of submissions I read every day tends to sour you a little on comedy writing. Namely, you start to read the same articles over and over and over and over again. If I see one more fucking guide about how hilarious ninjas or pirates are, I’m going to lose it and pull someone’s dick off with my bare hands. As you can probably imagine, it tends to damper one’s incentive to sit down and write something funny about, say, Michael Richards, or the latest James Bond movie, when you’ve spent the day reading 30 articles apiece about them.
JayPinkerton.com is Five Years Old
I can’t believe it either. I know some people who’ve happily crawled into their blogs like a second womb, recording every aspect of their existence for future generations to pore over (they won’t, of course, but isn’t it nice to think they would?). Personally, I’ve just gotten a bit tired of it lately. Have you ever hit that horrible, depressing point where you realize you’ve spent the majority of every day for the better part of a decade staring at a computer screen? I look back on my 20s and realize I spent every weekday in front of a computer at work; every night at the computer writing comedy; and every weekend at the computer, playing video games, surfing the internet and writing more comedy. This isn’t to say I’m becoming a Luddite; simply that I’ve learned the benefit of unplugging the computer for a bit on weekends to enjoy the finer things in life. Watching DVDs, for instance.
Anyway, with 2007 rolling around, I’m at a point where I’d like to try something a little more ambitious. I’d like to produce a comic book, or try writing an actual novel. Of course I’ll continue to update the site, if only to keep enough of you around long enough to try out something a bit longer. Truth be told, I really just need to kick my ass to get back in the writing groove.
So that’s the deal, folks. Sorry I haven’t posted in so long, and thanks for checking in occasionally to see if there’s anything new. Hopefully I’ll be back with regular updates soon enough, and by this time next year, I’ll maybe even have tried out something a bit more ambitious for you to look at. (It’d be nice to turn Back of the Bible into a full-length book, for instance.)
Oh, I’ve been getting a lot of email about posting another one of those “What I Did In the Latest Issue of Cracked,” like I did for Issue #1. So I’ll post that tomorrow.
Jay