This Week's HoaxUh, it's a blog, but when I started writing these things in 1996, I called them "hoaxes."

Me at the Riv.

I  ran out of underpants on Friday. I called the front desk.

“Do you guys have a laundromat here?”

“No, just drycleaning.”

“Oh. Is there a laundromat nearby?”

“Nope.”

“No?”

“No ma’am.”

“Well, how do people clean their clothes here?”

“I don’t know.”

Thanks, helpful! And people do wash their panties in Las Vegas, but not on the Strip. I found a laundromat near UNLV and on hot, blue Saturday afternoon, I put my dirty clothes in a suitcase and stepped on the bus known to Vegans as the Deuce. Air-conditioned, with comfortable cloth seats, the Deuce is a double-decker bus that travels up and down Las Vegas Blvd, dropping tourists off at various casinos. Three dollars one-way, or seven dollars for 24 hour access. The night before, I bought an unlimited pass to the Deuce, and sat in the front row on the upper deck, videotaping my ride to a midnight movie playing near the MGM Grand. A drunk blonde boarded the Deuce at the Wynn and announced that the Party was <i>here</i>. Right where she was standing. The party followed her as she wobbled down the aisle, until she collapsed into a comfy seat. Then the party fell asleep.

The Saturday afternoon Deuce was party-free, packed with sober, sticky, sunburned tourists. Standing skin to peeling skin. At each stop, twenty-five people got off, and twenty-five more got on. The Deuce covered 2 miles in an hour. At Flamingo, I transferred to a regular, east/west bus. The clientele changed dramatically. The fat, chatty tourists were replaced by the working poor, the DUIs and a few wheelchairs. The bus stops in Vegas are made of a metal scrim, which allow sun or shade to peek through holes. People avoided the sun by standing, ghostlike, behind the scrim, like black paper dolls. A bunch of Boo Radleys waiting for the #202.

Two transfers and an hour and forty five minutes later,  I was pouring detergent in a wash machine.

On Friday, Babble.com published a piece I wrote about being a comic and raising a kid. I spent most of the day in the my hotel room, refreshing my browser to read comments. (That’s not my torso, by the way.) It’s stupidly exciting when someone leaves a comment, good or bad. While googling, I found this site of user reviews of my shows at the Punchline a few weeks ago. I got three 4 (out of 4) star reviews, and one 2 star review. That user, called “DeeDee,” cruelly brought my average down to 3.7 stars. She thought my pacing was “strange” and postulated that I was “bored and didn’t want to be there.” In summation, DeeDee felt my show was, “entertaining, but I wouldn’t see her again.” Aw yeah, I think I’ve found a new pullquote for my promotional materials.

Delayed at the Denver airport. I was in Aspen this weekend, performing at the Rooftop Comedy Festival. In one short walk, I saw mountains, some snow-capped, some not, a stream, a black and white butterfly and a crow.  It’s amazing how the trickle of a creek can pry open the pages of a joke book. Tomorrow I’m flying to Las Vegas, but I’m stopping in NYC to see my son for about three hours, if he stays up late. Or less, if this flight gets  delayed again.

I stayed up late last night, hanging out with comics. Getting drunk, talking loud in a bar about GETTING REAL onstage and DROPPING THE FACADE and FUCKING FUCKHEADS, etc. Good times. Then our table shrunk to just female comics and we tore THE PATRIARCHY a new one.

In San Francisco a few weeks ago, I stopped by an open mic, next door to a bar which once was the Holy City Zoo. Much of the neighborhood has changed, but the Toy Boat ice cream store was there, and so was Green Apple Books. I bought some books for KilBaby (”Plankton,” the story of a plankton, if that creature exists in the singular, and “Slug,” the story of a slug. Both books are from the same publisher, and are very compelling to a two-year old.) I also bought a moleskin blank book for jokes. I have been a Meade Composition Book aficionado for many years, I have dozens of them, filled with political and/or anus jokes. My moleskin was preferred by F. Scott Fitzgerald, according to the insert. Also Hemingway. So there.

Two weeks ago, the baby, his father and I were headed for brunch in Harlem. I unscrewed one of the caps on my contact lens case, poured what I thought was saline solution in the lens, and then the course of my day changed.

“This happened 12 hours ago?” scolded the emergency room nurse. “Why didn’t you come in immediately? This is serious.” She pried my weeping eye open and poured saline solution in it, for about ten minutes straight. It was uncomfortable yet soothing.

Clear Care is the kind of stuff I never use because I wear disposable lenses. Sitting right next to rows of different brands of saline solution, I assumed Clear Care was too. Same size box, same “no rub,” promises on the cover. And it was on sale. What’s not to love? Contact lenses are shaped like little ice cream bowls. So on that fine Sunday morning, I cracked open the box, filled my left lens with pure hydrogen peroxide and lowered my eye into it.

“Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!” I screamed. I jumped, high. Really high. I remember seeing my knees at eye level.

“What? What?” Chris asked. He rushed into the bathroom. I was screaming, trying to open my blazing eye to pull the lens out. My eyelids fought back and sealed themselves, like a bank vault slammed shut. We were in a stalemate, my eye and me. I couldn’t even explain what happened. I could only gasp.

After about a minute of hopping, I got it.

“I put the wrong stuff in my eye,” I explained, blinking back tears. “I’m ok, let’s go to brunch.”

I figured I’d tear up for a few hours. It would be an inconvenience, I’d have to wear my old, uneven glasses. At the end of brunch, the pain had worsened. My eye was on fire, and on the way home, the sun’s shine felt like gas being thrown on it. I ran up to the apartment and shut the blinds. Chris went to Duane Reade and bought lots of eye products. One thing came with a little shot glass that you fill with saline solution and press against your eye, with your head leaned back. It’s like a bath. I could do that for about twenty seconds at a time.

The first thing the pre-recorded message says on Clear Care’s customer service 800 number is, “Go to the hospital.” I went to the ER at Columbia-Presbyterian, up in the 160s. My eye was bright red and my other eye was turning red in sympathy. The waiting room was full. A nurse approached a coughing Latino, “You need to wear a mask, just in case you have the flu.” This comment was translated into Spanish, and she was fitted with a SARS-y type of face mask. After an hour, I left, unexamined.

At about 3 PM, I began canceling spots. I was so sensitive to light that I couldn’t imagine keeping my eyes open onstage. I explained my situation to Allie at the Comic Strip, she told me about the Ears and Eyes ER downtown. Like the stores that sell “Just Bulbs,” this NYU ER does ears and eyes and that’s it. We kept our comedy sitter for KilBaby and used it to go to the hospital instead.

“They should take you in the order you come in,” said an older woman in the waiting room. “I’ve been here for an hour and people keep rushing by me. It’s not fair.”

I assumed this comment was directed at me. I hadn’t been taken yet, but clearly I was about to bump her. So this is what it’s like to be Dave Chappelle, stopping by the Comic Strip on a Tuesday night. I empathized with the woman, because I had been her many times. But business is business, and in the eye-injury trade, my eye had its own series while hers had some basic cable credits. Go home lady, it’s gonna be a long night.

“Laurie? Come here please.” said the nurse.

“When is anyone going to see me,” the woman asked.

“This lady has a chemical burn, it’s very serious.” said the nurse.

The woman kept complaining, but her words faded to grey and the nurse’s grew bold, black. 24 point. Chemical burn. My eye. “This lady” was me. The nurse sprayed the saline hose directly on my eye, with a firefighter’s grim resolve.

“Oooh, I’ve done this before,” said the opthamologist, who peeked in to check my progress. “Just a few more minutes and we’ll look at the damage.”

Turns out, it wasn’t irreparable. I was given a few prescriptions and sent on my way. On Tuesday, I flew to the Bay Area to work at week at the Punchline. In scratched, uneven glasses. By Saturday, I was back in my lenses. Today, my eye feels ok. Sorry for the mildly happy ending. Something shitty will happen next week, I promise.

Aw, man. I really needed to headline in Seattle. The audiences were smart and fun, the other comics were funny and nice, the club is brick and cool and the management loves comedy. I write this at great risk of sounding like a douchebag, but it was nice to be reminded that, “oh yeah, I’m funny.” I kind of, sort of, do a pretty good job, actually.

So there.

KilBaby and I iChatted over the MacBook a few times. He is a plane/train/automobile fan and kept showing me his toys. He’d leave the screen, the pop up again holding a train. Then he’d leave, and come back with an ambulance. And so on. As he grows, the mysteries of men are slowly being revealed to me. They like to show off their shit. They don’t hide this need and they don’t do it secretly, like women do. It’s not a learned thing, it’s innate. Cause I didn’t teach my son to lift up his shirt, pat his stomach and say “tummy,” like it won a first place ribbon. That is not something I will ever do. The closest I will come to that is pointing to another woman’s stomach and saying, if it is flat, “bitch.”

I stayed at my sister’s house for a night, way up in the Portland hills. Her cul-de-sac has a little cottage that the residents’ houseguests can use. It was open, I slept in it and I haven’t been that terrified in years. “Oh come on, it’s so safe here,” my sister said. Yeah. Doesn’t Bill Kurtis say that every time he narrates a rape/murder? I missed the honks and sirens of Harlem. I think I’m a decent judge of who’s a potential problem when I walk from the subway to my apartment. But in Oregon’s woods, everyone looks like a predator to me. I can’t tell the good guys from the pig-fuckers. Even worse, there was a spider on the wall. And when I woke up a few hours later, it was gone. I think it’s still on me, hiding in one of my belly folds, waiting to strike.

I’m on the road this week! In one of my favorite cities, Seattle. Oh God, it’ll be like the good old days. I have been cramped over this laptop for two years straight. Longer actually, if you count my days at Tough Crowd and the Late Late Show. After 2004, I took very little road work, and just did sets in the city (because I was writing on Tough Crowd). Fifteen minute sets for New York audiences, over and over and over again. And then there was that year in LA. Seven minutes sets at coffeehouses and bowling alleys. I couldn’t figure out why performing felt like a task, not a privilege, until I did a weekend in Providence last month. It felt so good to stretch out, to meander, to go off on a tangent because I had the time. To follow a feature who wants to be headlining, so every show he throws down the hammer. Aw, it was fun!

I should have submitted a tape to Comedy Central (for a half hour special) years ago, but I just felt off. I didn’t want my half hour to be something I wasn’t excited about. A friend of mine told me recently, “you’re more of a long-set comic.” And I think that’s true. Years of short sets have have left me feeling crunched and depressed, like I’ve been trying to stand in a coffin. All I know for sure is that I’m excited to leave New York and Kilbaby and just be free for a few days. Free onstage, free offstage. I haven’t been this jazzed to get on a plane in years.

I can crap with abandon once more. For about six weeks, my toilet has been unable to gulp down anything I tried to shove down its throat, no matter how petit and dainty. I had to plunge after every encounter, for up to 10 minutes. Each flush was accompanied by dish washing liquid. We snaked, we changed out some hardware. Finally, the super took out the toilet and found the culprit: KilBaby’s toothbrush. Either he threw it down the toilet, or it dropped unnoticed in the shuffle of three people’s stuff crowded on one bathroom sink. I paid a couple hundred dollars to fix it, and damn, it’s a relief to not have to plan visits to Starbucks around my outgoing meals.

The movie “Observe and Report” isn’t out yet, but I have seen the trailer, with the controversial is-it-date-rape-or-not scene. This is Seth Rogen’s explanation of that scene:

When we’re having sex and she’s unconscious like you can literally feel the audience thinking, like, how the fuck are they going to make this okay? Like, what can possibly be said or done that I’m not going to walk out of the movie theater in the next thirty seconds? . . . And then she says, like, the one thing that makes it all okay: “Why are you stopping, motherfucker?”

I disagree that “Why are you stopping, motherfucker?” makes it ok. Rogen’s character had no idea that Anna Faris’s character was conscious until she said it. He went into that vag thinking she had passed out. In fact, Faris waking up actually ruins Rogen’s date rape. For him to say that line makes it “all okay,” is  a lazy justification. This is my impression based on the trailer. Maybe seeing the rest of the movie will put the scene into context, but right now, it looks like a 1960’s Vegas lounge joke, writ large.

UPDATE: Ok, I overreacted. It’s not as bad as I thought. Yet. Could be, might be, but not yet. I am a worst case scenario gal, so that explains my wasted rage. On the bright side, I am prepared to get fucked. It’s better than a surprise attack.

PREVIOUSLY: I hate everybody. Even you. The past two months have sucked. And I can’t even write about why because it would hurt me professionally. I just have to sit here and get punched in the fucking stomach.

The fact that someone can take a metaphorical dump on one’s head and get away with it never stops sucking. It happens to all of us, so I’m not alone. That’s my only consolation today. And it’s not like I’m an African-American pilot who came home from World War II only to be asked to sit on the back of a bus. That would make me lose my mind. The dumps on my head are not so soggy. So let me re-trench. And I don’t hate you, just everyone but you. They suck.

You and me, we’re cool.

At least my kid is cute:

(Those are his Curious Georges, who must be diapered.)

I was worried. I hadn’t done longer than 20 minutes in… months? I had to listen to old sets to remember road material. And then when I got to the room, it was a dynamic I hadn’t seen in a long time. Mostly white, everyone in the same income class.

That was the thing that threw me about New York City when I moved here ten years ago. The audience members had almost nothing in common with each other. At one table, millionaires. At another, kids from the General Grant houses. I got used to performing in a less personal style, ready to shrug off anything. So, to perform for this working class New England town, where the audiences had many shared experiences was a throwback to the old days. And I had to let my guard down a bit, in a way that is not recommended in New York City. I only had three shows, it took me two to find my sea legs.

It was fun.

Americans spend 8 hours a day in front of screens.  (TV, computer). I am one of those people, that’s disturbing. It all feels so important, I need to read all eight of the stories I have tabbed in my browser. But at the end of the day, what did I do? Sit in my corner of the couch and read stories that I have already forgotten. A link to Natasha Richardson’s 911 calls is given the same weight as a story about how the world is reacting to America’s stimulus package. You can hardly tell what’s really a news story anymore.

I had a paper route when I was 12. Cherry Lane, Alderwood Road, Del Hombre Lane, Roble Road and Honeytrail, the group of then-hip condo townhouses built near the Pleasant Hill Bart Station. Rolled papers in the morning, carried them in this awkward cloth sack apron, rode my bike over from Juana Court, threw the papers in their respective driveways and collected money every month. I was never bitten by a dog or molested by a customer. Not even in Honeytrail, which now seems like the kind of place where Chris Hansen could host Predator permanently.  Once, an old lady invited me into her house on Del Hombre and showed me memorabilia from her life. She had been an actress. Almost famous. She had small parts in movies, from the 40s, if I remember correctly. I thought it was neat and then vowed to be famous enough so that if a papergirl met me, she would recognize me immediately and scream.

I wish I could remember her name. I could probably look it up in county records the next time I go home. I know the house. It’s the least I could do.

I wrote that previous hoax about 8 months ago. Not on purpose, but my personal life was crap and my professional life was busy. I had few experiences I felt I could divulge, and no time to do it. Well, that’s all been reversed. Personal life is coming around and professional life is about to fall apart.

So, howdy!

At 23/6, I was promoted to deputy editor the week before Joe Biden was selected as Barack’s VP. That weekend was a little busy (if you recall, the text announcement was sent at 3 AM on Saturday). The next week was the Democratic Convention, with its Clinton drama and Obama speech before Greek columns. That wrapped up on Thursday night, and ten hours later… Sarah Palin. After that, I never had a full day off until after the election. We got the bad news, that Barry Diller’s IAC would no longer fund the site after January, a few weeks ago. Our site could not get advertising, and IAC is a public company, and I guess you have to justify everything to shareholders these days.

All of our stuff will be archived at Huffington Post.

Sometime in September, I was contacted by a book agent to write a celebrity memoir. The photographer Dan Dion gave my name to my now-agent. I submitted a few hoaxes as samples. The celebrity and I, both over-40 moms of young boys, hit it off. The book was a go. The previous author had flaked out, wasting months of writing time, so the celeb and I got to work, pounding it out on my nights and weekends in order to finish by the December deadline.  Palin jokes by day, comedic memoir by night. I thought my trackpad-hand would fall off. My boyfriend took Kilbaby to Texas for a month so I could immerse myself. 13 weeks later, we turned in an 80,000 word book. It will be published in the fall. I had considered that money to be extra money, for a savings account, but I think that soon we will be living on it.

Scary times to be a middle class American, but you are probably aware of that.

I mostly write about Kilbaby in a private blog, but I can tell you he’s huge and he talks. His height and weight are off the charts for his age, while his head circumference is slightly smaller (Oh well, athletes make good money too). He’s two years and three months old. When Kilbaby doesn’t get his way, he lies face down and cries. No matter where he is. In the drugstore,  a Starbucks or the crosswalk on 145th and Edgecomb.

And as I refuse to drop my latte to pick him up, I have to lift this crying, dead weight with one hand. Like any good mom, I will remind him what my options were I found out I was pregnant, “Planned Parenthood was 3 train stops away.” But he doesn’t care. That ingrate.

Kilbaby also lies to me. He doesn’t have the language skills to pull off a technical lie, but he can pretend that he doesn’t understand me when I ask for an apology for biting me, and that is a form of lying. And insulting, because all day long, this child is a mockingbird.

“Can you say, ‘plane.’”

“PLANE.”

“Can you say ‘tree.’”

“TWEE.”

“Can you say, “sorry?’”

“PLANE.”

Kilbaby lies and stalls with the cockiness of a baby conceived from $25,000 worth of fertility treatments. He looks up to the ceiling, over to the walls, and around my body, like he is waiting for a bus that is late. His acting is comically bad. His eyes get wider and he rolls his tongue around his cheeks like a sixty-year old accountant who took an acting class because it was on his bucket list. Then I start laughing. Then he starts laughing, because he has won. Kilbaby already knows how to play me. Bastard.

Thanks God!