Jason Roeder

Anything bloggish can now be found here:

http://twitter.com/jasonsroeder

I saw a beautiful iguana in my parents’ backyard this morning. My first thought was that it could find a job if it really wanted to.

Seriously, it was pretty impressive. It must have been eight feet long from the spine on its nose to the tip of its tail. It was yellow-green with pure yellow claws and had a track of stripes on its back. I took a picture of it with my awful cell phone.

Anyway, I called the mayor of Coral Springs, Florida, and they’re sending someone out to build a Papa John’s on top of it right away.

I’m in Florida for a week. I have nothing to report from my flight except for the fact that the previous passenger in my seat had given up on the sudoku in the back of Sky Magazine after just one 7. Also, the woman behind me might have smothered her baby.

Anyway, on the ride home from the airport, I saw a Yield sign suction-cupped to the window of an SUV (yep, still). The sign read “Jesus on Board.” I saw those everywhere as a kid, but having spent the past 18 years up north among secular humanists who sodomize lattes all day, it was a little startling. But I was reminded of this inspirational story. Do you know it? It’s about the motorist who always felt comforted by having Jesus driving in the lane next to him. But strangely, when times got tough, there was just one set of tire tracks. Where was Jesus when he was needed most? Jesus explains:

“I would never leave you during your times of trial and suffering. When you see only one set of tire tracks, it was then that you were carpooling with me.” 

Last night was my cousin’s Chrismakkuh party. (I think I have that spelling right, but I’m too lazy to consult a Bible.) Fun, fun. I’m better at parties than I used to be. I can chat with strangers about their jobs without simultaneously feeling above it and not equal to it. It was not always thus. In another decade, I’d approach parties with exotically ineffective plans like this:

If there was an unpopulated room—a study, a less obvious hallway, any nook, really—I would seek it out. And I would wait. My hope was that someone—well, some woman—would notice that the guy who hadn’t budged from the gap between the snack table and the wall, the man who by all appearances was the guacamole’s Secret Service agent, was suddenly missing. She would have to consider this meaningful for some reason and seek me out, in vain as far as she’d be concerned. Surely I was standing to the right of something at another party by now.

But then she’d find me in that quiet space. I might be paging through a book—who wouldn’t want to know someone who left the fun to study an atlas? Or maybe I’d just be standing there thinking, my own cogitations too sophisticated and too persistent for the noisy common room. They imposed themselves on me, these ideas, and I had to give them their say, even if they drove me from people. She would recognize a man apart, someone whose complexity needed to be slept with that very night.

This tactic worked exactly never. The overall effect, I think, was of a person who tried to attend a party but missed.

I was self-pityingly in need of a cheeseburger, and there, only a block from where I just had an interview, was Johnny Rockets, which, if you don’t know, is a chain of restaurants with a half-chewed ‘50s theme—jukeboxes, milkshakes, and so forth. The restaurant at midday was empty, so I had to guess where the Whites Only section was. The waiter, whose soda-jerkish uniform included a paper hat that I think will drive him to hurt innocents someday, asked me straightaway what kind of milkshake I wanted. Not drink, milkshake.

“Water,” I said. I wanted a milkshake, actually, but I can be like that if I’m gloomy. Maybe someone who looked like he was there only because he couldn’t find the “Nighthawks” diner shouldn’t have sat down in a place like Johnny R’s to begin with. I also ordered a bacon cheeseburger. The waiter didn’t ask me how I wanted it cooked, and I didn’t volunteer the information. That would have deprived me of resenting him for getting it wrong.

Here’s something they do at Johnny Rockets: At certain diabolical intervals, normal manufactured fun gives way to supercharged manufactured fun. The lights blink and the ‘50s music (“In the Still of the Night,” in my case) gets guillotined for…disco? Suddenly, it was like a Bee Gees air raid. The waitstaff, a member of which was supposed to be getting me a glass of water, began a loosely synchronized line dance to “Stayin’ Alive.” It was like the electric slide, but infinitely less rococo. Half-turns, claps for no reason, roof raising—truly, any three delegates plucked at random from the Republican National Convention could’ve improvised something better. I myself could’ve, and I dance as if in my own personal earthquake. And I was the only person there. This was for me. Throughout the whole song, I just sat there pretending to read the only material I had with me: my resume. I so do not know Photoshop.

Anyway, there’s no real story or epiphany here, so don’t bother workshopping it, okay? My understanding is that I would have had a far worse afternoon in Zimbabwe than the one I had at Johnny Rockets. I’m just trying to blog at bit more, that’s all. So, Johnny Rockets sucks.

I’ve been reading atrocious celebrity profiles at work. They provoked the following: 

Interview with an Actress

I’m sitting in Bistro Max eyeing the basketed focaccia covetously. It’s official: Chloe Pomeroy is late for our lunch date. I’m wondering how much time we’ll have to chat because she’s got a plane to catch. I’m wondering if, in the presence of such beauty, I’ll reach my first question mark before melting into a puddle of adoration. I’m wo—two of the most luminous green eyes I have ever seen are fixed upon me from across the table. Who needs daydreaming when there’s an actual dream suddenly right in front of you?

“My cab driver was a little slow,” Chloe tells me, with smooth blonde hair that could have been poured from a bottle of chardonnay, “and by slow I mean retarded.” She pokes her tongue through her lips and crosses her eyes. “Of course, it’s hard to tell with foreigners,” she concedes.

You know Chloe best as—well, maybe she’s not someone you can know, a sensual shape-shifter. After all, the 23-year-old bombshell has taken on roles as diverse as an agoraphobic lifeguard, a lovelorn dog walker (in the Luke Perry vehicle Heart on a Leash), and a spitfire saloon dancer who battles the walking dead in How the West Ate Brains. Action suits her, it seems: When our bill is settled this afternoon, Chloe is off to Canada, where she’ll be co-starring with Dolph Lundgren in the environmental shoot-em-up Leave No Trace.

“I always need a challenge,” she says to me, with perhaps a mote of flirtation in the upturned corner of her mouth. “If I’m not pushing myself, I’m bored, and if I’m bored—well, that’s when the really deep hate comes out.”

Chloe admonishes our waiter to avoid eye contact with her at all costs and orders the arugula salad with orange-rosemary vinaigrette. She vouchsafes me a few words concerning the tabloids (”the next hack who trashes me gets his pets stomped”), her recent charity efforts (”none”), and her week in New York (”just read over my lines, wrote the word Satan over every appearance of God in the Bible”), but I sense that she’s heard these questions before—yet another script to contend with. Something tells me that this stunner wants to go off the page.

“Who are you?” I ask her. “Or, if you’d rather: What does Chloe Pomeroy want—and you can’t say ‘to direct,’ dear.”

“Well, if that’s off the table, then I guess I’d go with oblivion,” she informs me. “Like, to be quadriplegic, but from the neck up, if that makes any sense. I suppose actual connection with life would be nice, too. But odds are, I won’t be leaving a pretty corpse, and you’d better believe I won’t be leaving just one.”

A sphinx without a riddle? Hardly. Miss Pomeroy is an enigma wrapped in sphinx’s clothing. I wait for her to vacuum up some cocaine residue she discovers on the side of her thumb, and I try a different tack.

“Soon you’ll be on a plane headed north of the border,” I say, “but if you could take the controls and go wherever you liked…”

“Go? Who wants to go anywhere?” she says to me. “But I do have kind of a silly recurring dream about flying. I’m circling the whole world in a crop duster, except it’s not insects I’m poisoning, it’s people. The insects are spared. For everything else, it’s death from above.”

The clock strikes one-thirty, and this Cinderella has a 767 to catch. She walks—no, she positively flows-through the dining room, pausing just long enough to demand that the manager fire our waiter for no particular reason. Then she is gone, and it occurs to me, anguishingly, that when I next see her, she will be caged in a DVD case.

Death from above? Perhaps. Oh, but truly an angel of death.

“This is a tough crowd, man. All comics.” Mike was cluing me in. We were sitting so close in the unheated basement of the bar that it almost seemed illogical not to talk to each other. Mike’s choice of words puzzled me a little. If I’m a “comic,” then the cardio-kickboxers in the 6:30-7:30 class at UltraFitness are gladiators. After all, I had just paid $5 for a five-minute open-mic set, the exact placement of which would be determined by the order in which my name was drawn from a fishbowl by the host. And with all that in mind, why should this be a tough crowd? Are we really competing? If that’s the case, I should’ve just dropped in a $20 and been the headliner. I mean, I’m not going to manufacture a laugh for shamefully hack material, but you’d think beginners would want to, like, support each other.

Anyway, the audience consisted entirely of the 30—yessir, that many—open-mikers, plus a random couple that a barker had pulled in off the street. I don’t even want to think about how badly the actual show failed the pretense that was used to sell it. It was that uncomfortable. Imagine a football game in which a player was wheeled off in a cervical collar every down, except not nearly as sidesplitting.

As luck would have it, I went up 26th out of 30. This meant that by the time I took the stage, everyone had already sat through a two-hour show (on a Wednesday night), and not just a show but an awful one that couldn’t have been as bad without their stammering, half-remembered contribution. 

“How’s everyone doing tonight?”

My own five minutes went just like I practiced in my apartment that very day, meaning I got every word right and the room was silent throughout. That’s not entirely true. Certain bits worked but most were just sort of stillborn. Or maybe I just fell asleep at some point. I noticed that the comics who got more laughs all had one thing in common: humping the air motions. Big laughs for tired basement dudes.*

*(and one girl)

So, it seems I haven’t been the only one sleeping in my apartment, and I’m not referring to the Australian college girls I pick up at the Times Square Ruby Tuesday. I’m talking about roaches, always dead and on their backs, because when you’re a roach, once you’ve reached a floor tile, what’s left to live for? My landlord Muji brought over what he called “the roach medicine for all the roaches.” I had my doubts because I wasn’t sure roaches deserved VapoRub, but Muji was actually referring to this toxic paste that the bugs find so yummy, they can’t wait to bring some home and kill their families with it. In any case, it’s not going to matter six weeks from now.

I’m moving to Brooklyn April 1, this time with roommates. I haven’t actually found these people yet, but I’ve been prowling Craigslist every day. In the past, Craigslist has helped me unload a bookcase and connect with just the right sexual monstrosity, so I’m confident that something will work out. It has been about 10 years since I was last in the position of auditioning for a room (yes, “auditioning” is the word), but I do all right in these situations. I’m a mild sort with good credit and nothing in my background that the statute of limitations hasn’t rendered moot.

Astoria is fine, of course, and I think if I were a few years older and bit more settled personally and professionally, it’d be a worthwhile option. But right now, I need a place that’s a bit more—okay, I’ll use the word—happening. It’s a strange word for me, considering I’m the sort of curmudgeon who could walk into bingo night at a Knights of Columbus hall and within 30 seconds be muttering about fucking hipsters. But I’m convinced this is the right decision.

I have left my job. I know that in the days and weeks to come, I will ask myself how a position I took because I desperately needed a paycheck and any means of staving off the wriggling insanity of unemployment could go so wrong, so quickly. So, as of next Wednesday, I’m freelancing again, whatever that means.

I just now noticed that, when typing, I sit with my knees out to the side and my upper torso swiveled toward the laptop. This might explain why my back’s been hurting a little lately. Who can I sue? Can I sue you?

Last Monday’s reading at McNally Robinson went well by any measurement (four stars, two thumbs up, Big Gulp). I’m pretty sure it wasn’t recorded, though, so you’ll just have to imagine the three of us—Sarah Walker, Wendy Molyneux, and myself—making our friends and family laugh. If you don’t know what we look like, you can find pictures of us on the web or trust my descriptions: Sarah’s kind of a tall mediabistro job ad, Wendy’s a really funny gym membership I have to transfer before I move to Brooklyn, and I’m some large cardboard boxes the supermarket gave me.

It is possible I am preoccupied.

I recently had a conversation with my agent about What’s Next. Obviously, the publication of Oh, the Humanity! would pave the way for a very similar follow-up, but I think I’m kinda done with long-form parody. The shorter humor stuff will probably go on forever, but the next project is probably going to be a comic novel or a screenplay or a very different kind of humor book. I hope to zero in on an idea in the next month or so and have a draft of the whatever-it-is done by the end of the year. Be sure to throw this paragraph in my face come December.

Another semi-ambition: a humor reading series. I participated in one a few weeks ago called the Ritalin Reading Series, which was great. But there aren’t very many like it, if you exclude actual stand-up open-mics. If you live in NYC and think this might be something you’d be interested in exploring and doing most of the legwork for while dividing the credit down the middle, definitely get in touch.

I haven’t written in this blog for almost a month, and I’m not really going to boo hoo about it. Think of my occasional blog entries as you would other unexpected gifts like a snow day or a blog entry you find on the sidewalk.

Here’s a pic from my reading in Brooklyn:

If you’re wearing your fashion glasses, you’ve noticed that I’m in the same sweater in both this picture and the one from my last entry. And if you’re really paying attention, you’ll recall it’s the same one I was wearing at the Lorem Ipsum reading a couple of months ago. It’s my one “classy” sweater, and I’ve just discovered that moths have been munching on it. This always happens, and I’m tired of it. At my reading in February, expect me to show up with a space heater strapped to my bare chest.  

Sorry to make you see that.   

Oh yes, there’s an event in February. It’ll be at the McNally Robinson bookstore in SoHo on the 11th. Not one, not two, not four, but three TOW writers will be reading that night. There might be a party of some sort afterwards as well as another reading at some point that week. 

Just when it seemed like I was going to have to sell my body to the rich and menopausal, I got a job. I’ll be a marketing writer/editor for LaGuardia Community College. It’s like what I did at Berklee, but with fewer vibraphone solos. Whew.

Here’s a picture of me trying to take in the moment. (Click to enlarge my exultation.)

What moment? I knew you’d ask, possibly. My Thanksgiving decoration won the art contest that was held at the conclusion of the Utter Wonder Reading last night. Sure, I read from my book, host Chris Monks and special guest G. Xavier Robillard made guffawing drunks knock over their beers and lick the spillage off the legs of their barstools because they have a sickness, but let’s get back to what’s important: I am a winner. I have a trophy with a sticker that says “Winner!” on it. That’s how I know. I realize it’s the kind of trophy that campers get for winning water-balloon tosses, but don’t tear me down. Yesterday’s trophy was my first ever. After all, they don’t pass out awards for failing to register for the spelling bee or leaving your lunchbox on the bus or shoplifting post cards with ladies in bikinis on them, do they?

Thanks, Chris, for having me. It was great . . . except for the folk singers who took forever to stand down and let us take the stage on time. Apparently, shoving your mandolin in a case takes the same labor and coordination as dismantling an Olympic Village.

The Utter Wonder reading was actually my second that day. In the morning, I held another reading at my aunt and uncle’s house for their friends. What was great is that people were buying copies above and beyond the courtesy purchases I expected. I figured one per household to stave off awkwardness, but people were taking home multiple copies. I brought 20 books to Boston with me, and I leave with none.