UN votes to admit Palestine as non-member state

The UN overwhelmingly voted to admit Palestine as a non-member state today.  The 9 no’s were predictable, including the US, Australia, Canada, and Israel.  Israel was especially unhappy, and immediately asked to vote on a proposition to build a giant fence around the Palestinian delegate.  Germany also voted no and then winked at Israel letting them know this made them even.

The 173 yeses unsurprisingly included all of the Muslim nations.   There were 21 nations, including Niue, Eritrea, and Central African Republic that were unable to vote as they couldn’t afford the membership dues of $8 and a pack of Bubble Yum.  That $8 would have been half of Comoros’s Gross Domestic Product.  Switzerland uncharacteristically stayed neutral and abstained from voting altogether.

When an advocate for Palestinian statehood was asked about the effect on relations with the state of Israel, he answered with “the what of Israel?” and  stressed that this vote is a powerful international statement of support of the Palestinian state and a repudiation of Israel’s claim on the land and their existence in general.

When Israel was asked if the UN vote would prompt them to offer an olive branch to the Palestinians,  they said this would be impossible as they had removed all of the olive trees earlier this week.

An open letter to President Obama Re: Gay Marriage

Dear President Obama,

From what I hear, you now support and endorse the right for gays to marry.  Now, while I understand that  the first amendment precludes the allowance of religious arguments influencing law by stating that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion,” you must know that those aren’t the only arguments worthy of consideration.

The argument that makes sense to me is about children.  How are children raised by gay parents expected to cope with the inevitable insults, ridicule and even bullying that will occur at the hands of people who think it’s unnatural, wrong, or strange to have two mommies or two daddies?  It’s not their fault.  They have no control or say in the situation.  And yet they will be the ones who suffer bullying by those that don’t care.

While I realize that this is the same argument that may have been used 50 years ago regarding interracial couples and marriage, that fact doesn’t negate it.  It even gives us the hindsight to look at what happened then, how children coped or didn’t, how cultural acceptance evolved or didn’t, and how children may or may not have risen above that ridicule.  So I say we look at the kids of those early American interracial marriages as a testcase for how it might be to grow up with two moms or two dads.

So I ask you, can you name even one woman or man who dealt with the stigma of being a child of an interracial couple before it was widely accepted, and rose above it to do something great, President Obama?
Sincerely,

Matt Heikkila

To Be Caught by a Predator

It’s late in the summer of 2008 and the first time I’ve done “behaviors” with the dependably feisty Reina.  By doing behaviors, I mean  doing the training, with my boss backing me up.  My first move is to call her stage left, up on a pedestal.  I bridge her for correctly performing the behavior I’ve asked.  The bridge, in this case is a simple clicker bought in any pet store, which lets her know that she has food coming to her.  Using a flat hand, to avoid accidentally getting punctured by her 2 inch canines, I hand feed her a chunk of meat.

From there, I have her jump down and follow me around to the other side of stage to the triple jump.  As I run a few feet ahead, she looks up at me with an unsettling focus – more unsettling because I know what she’s capable of.  I motion her up on the first pedestal and ask her to hop to the next stone pedestal and to the next in one fluid motion.  So far so good.  Next stop: tree hop.  The stage is made out of a rubber track type material, that has a good amount of give, and it makes it easier on our bodies and the cats.

As I jog back across the stage again  I drop a couple of 1 inch cubes of USDA choice raw beef.  As she finishes eating the meat I dropped to stall her, I weave a half lb thin cut, slice of steak onto a modified blind walking stick.  Then I hold the meat up to the tree hop, and Reina leaps up after it.  She uses her large claws to lunge up the tree hop, and she’s nearly 10 feet up the simulated tree when she uses her incisors to snatch the meat off.  Reina drops to the ground more clumsily than her arch nemesis, Chandaka, an unrelated white tiger who single handedly puts the myth that cats can’t climb to bed.

Reina, a 3 year old golden tabby Bengal tiger, follows me to the center of the stage, where I ask her to do what we call a shoulder rise, which consists of her leaning on me with her front legs, and her hind legs firmly planted on the ground.  Her paws grasp my right shoulder, and her head rises a couple feet above mine and she latches onto the bottle in my hand, which contains a milk/blood solution.  My boss checks to make sure her claws aren’t out and digging into my arm.  Although she, and all of the cats have their teeth and claws, they have been trained not to use them on us since they were cubs.  Even then, food, blood, or even milk can cause excitement and that excitement can cause the claws to come out of their sheaths.  While the behaviors she has done so far display her physical prowess, this behavior shows two other things; her size in relation to a man – at 300 lbs and standing over 8 feet from the tip of her nose to the end of her tail, the contrast is substantial; and our powerful shared relationship based on love and mutual respect. The most important factor is trust.  She trusts us to an amazing extent, and we never trust her fully.  A wild animal can be trained, but never fully tamed.  I shed her off of my shoulder, and after she drops to the ground I hand-feed her with another piece of restaurant quality top sirloin.

Next we head to the catwalk, which is just past the triple jump.  The stage is large, with a number of features places efficiently and economically.  There’s a lot of “stuff”, but every piece is used, and there is still a lot of room to run, which will come in handy later.  I haven’t even mentioned the pool with a viewing glass at the front of the stage, the back wall, or the massive Jurassic Park looking fence that goes in a half moon around the front of the theater.  I also haven’t mentioned the audience, which I have paid less attention to than usual.  I jog with Reina toward the catwalk where I need to navigate up two steps.  So I look away from Raina at the steps for a fraction of a second, and back at her.  She has kept the six foot or so cushion of distance behind me, her ears are pointing up and her tail relaxed, (The 18 muscles in her ear not only give her the ability to precisely locate prey, but they give away her intentions, and if they aren’t back, they probably aren’t aggressive).  I momentarily glance forward at steps as I approach the first one, and as I look back at her she’s on top of me, literally.  I’m off balance, and I stumble.  At 300 lbs, she’s nearly twice my weight, and in the wild tigers can take down prey more than twice their size.  I try my best to keep my footing as I’m ascending the last step but the odds aren’t in my favor.  I drop to the ground like…like, well, like a tiger is tackling me.  My first reflex is to keep her at arms length, literally – which is the correct reaction.  I put my arms out and extend them fully, so her massive head can’t get any closer to my face or neck, as she has me pinned.  I start to attempt to push her off me, but by this time, maybe 3 seconds after I go down (though it felt like 30), my boss is there and tells me to relax.  He pulls her off of me, and I bounce to my feet.  No harm no foul.

What I registered immediately, is that her goal was to take me down: the end.  When she was on me she looked around like, “what now?”  A lot of people think that large carnivores are natural killers.  That if one, even a trained one takes you down: you’re dead.  As David Mech wrote of wolves, and it holds true for all carnivores: they aren’t natural killers.  They have the physiology that makes them capable, and instincts which if strung together make them efficient killers. If an animal runs, a wolf has the instinct to chase it.  When the wolf gets near it, he has the instinct to trip it.  The rest is trained. The same thing is true with tigers.  I’m not saying they aren’t still capable of killing, but with training, it can be negated in most instances.  And in the case of Reina, she had been trained to jump on trainers since she was a cub; and most importantly to keep her teeth and claws out of it.  To get anthropomorphic, in her mind it wasn’t an aggressive act, it was just a fun one.

As I get on my feet whether I vocalize it or not, I make it clear I’m ready to continue, and so is Reina.  I ask her to jump up on the catwalk.  She walks along it to the end, her tail swaying back and forth helping her to keep balance and I hand-feed her and give her some bottle.  I have her hop down and we go back to the center of the stage.  I ask her to sit, then to lay down, and finally to lay on her side.  Many of these behaviors, the hosts explain to the audience, aid us in our husbandry behaviors with the cats.  Instead of needing to anesthetize the cats when minor medical issues, or sometimes major ones arise, we can, with the aid and instruction of the veterinarian, assess and treat them without knocking them down.

I ask her to sit again, and then we leave the stage  together and she goes into her kennel.  Soon after she comes back on stage for the finale of the show which is a play session.  It’s the most dangerous and exciting part.  Any time you ask the biggest of cats to initiate their prey drive, and simulate a hunt, it has potential dangers involved.  In this case, the prey drive is directed at toys: large pool inflatables, stuffed animals with the stuffing replaced by large balloons, plastic trash bags with balloons, cones, even shoes and clothes with balloons.  During this play session Reina often turned her attention towards me, and I placed the toys and the 6 foot poles they were hanging on in between us.  There’s nothing more exciting than playing with a tiger.  Nothing. I won’t say I don’t miss it.  My biggest worry is that I won’t get to do behaviors with her for a while; my worry is quickly put to rest when my boss has me work her the next day.

Get Up Stand Up

On beginning stand up in San Francisco.
I’ve been doing stand up for less than three months, so these are some of my musings on that process, and what I’ve learned.

What helped me the first time I stood in front of a crowd to tell jokes is that the jokes were at least somewhat tested (Thank you Facebook), and on mic so was I (Thank you animal training career).  It’s still a scary thing (Like spiders) – standing in front of a couple dozen people in a cafe/laundromat/part-time comedy venue and trying to make them laugh (Even scarier if they don’t know it’s a show).  Brainwash is an interesting place in the heart of SOMA (That’s south of market neighborhood in San Francisco, for you uncultured red state people).  I don’t even know what “in the heart of”, means in this context, but I’m going to use it anyway because it adds an extra layer of completely unnecessary specificity to the description.

Brainwash is a cafe with quality food, and a laundromat I can’t rate (Because I don’t wash my clothes?). While it’s an odd set up to step up on a short platform, and tell jokes to an attentive audience up front, people to the left ordering food and beverages, and a somewhat less attentive  and more talkative audience in the back, it’s also a welcoming and warm crowd that wants to laugh.  It’s very different from many of the open mics that are often about 100% or 99% comics waiting for their stage-time.  While those rooms are usually willing to laugh, they’re tougher, and I feel like it means a little more when they do.  One thing I’ve seen increasingly recently is a comic basically bombing in a comedian filled dour open mic devoid of all laughter and then seeing them do really well at the Punchline with essentially the same material.

I try to hit open mics as possible.  One that has a decent set up but usually seems pretty dead is Deco, a gay club in the cold black dead heart of the Tenderloin district in San Francisco.  Oh, to give you an idea about how depraved and insane PETA is: they’re quite offended that the Tenderloin is named after a delicious cut of meat, and not about all of the abject crime, poverty, and harrowing drug use in that neighborhood.  “Oh, is that a homeless crack addicted teenager dying in the streets?”  “Yeah, but what about the name of the neighborhood! So wrong!”  There’s another at EJ Phair in Pittsburg that is a great room but it’s so off the beaten path that it’s been more or less dead when I’ve gone.

Another club a few blocks away in an even worse part of the Tenderloin is called the Comedy Cellar, located at what operates as a cool little club most nights at 222 Hyde.  Right outside the door is a lively and vibrant yet horrifically depressing carnival of despair – like most carnivals I suppose.  “Cirque du sol oh my god what’s wrong with these poor wretched drug addled degenerates?!”.  Only slightly less sad is what happens inside…easy: I’m kidding.  The Cellar has a little stage, and a couple dozen seats filled with mostly comics, but it has such a set up that even if people aren’t laughing, it’s not difficult to be comfortable.  I feel more comfortable trying jokes that feel too dark to do other places – I’ll do them elsewhere, I just gotta break that fucked up ice.

Amnesia, in the Mission is a bar that has an open mic I tried early on, and while I did better the first time than any time since, I still enjoy the set up and the crowd can be very responsive in a good way.  The thing about most of the open mic that can be a bitch to learn is they all have different ways to sign up; whether that is emailing the host, putting your name in a hat and hoping to be picked early, waiting in line early to get at the beginning(ish) of a list, or just trying to jockey for position to sign up relatively early.  Amnesia goes the straight up lottery route, which I often prefer.

One of the times I was at Amnesia another comic told me about an open mic in Berkeley called the Starry Plough, which is an Irish bar.  It’s a mainly music open mic, the ceilings are high, the crowd at the bar is loud, but the audience in front of the stage can be quite large and attentive.  I was told that it was the “hardest place to do comedy.”  Being a masochist, this sounded like fun.  I first went to do recon, and when I went back and signed up the next week, I waited for several hours before going up.  I was exhausted, and it took some getting used to, the bar was loud and the sound carried oddly, but I enjoyed it.  It felt like the audience had seen dozens of musicians and bands and a few rappers (Many: really fucking good), and it was nice to have a breather and hear some jokes.  The bar even quieted down about halfway through my set.  The oddest part was that I would tell a joke, hear no feedback (at all), assume they didn’t like it, and as I started the next one BIG LAUGH!  It’s why comedy clubs typically have low ceilings: the joke to crowd – laugh to comic sound effect is more immediate (That makes sense, right?).  I had an audience member tell me they “really liked the iPhone joke”, and the host was really supportive and even zinged me, “I really liked the joke about abusing Girl Scouts” (Never change, Berkeley). “It’s really difficult to do stand up here…I think you’re onto something.”  I’ll be back.

Cafe Yesterday in Berkeley is another open mic I’ve been going to recently that is really a cool and comfortable spot (See video at bottom of page).

Two bars right next to eachother in Inner Richmond that have open mics on different nights in SF are Dirty Trix and Rockit Room.  Trix is a bar that has an open mic which starts later than most of the ones I go to.  It typically has a ton of people, and signing up on the list goes by jockeying for position.  One of the nights I signed up, then played around on my computer in my car for a couple hours waiting and when I went in learned that Robin Williams had stopped by.   The next week I went to another open mic and missed him doing a set there altogether.  Dammit.  Don’t blink.

There are 4 aspects to starting out in comedy in San Francisco that I’m finding out are integral to progress (And they’re probably fairly similar in other cities).

1. Write a lot (Jokes, funny stories, whatever it is that’s funny to ya).  When a funny idea comes up, write about it, expand on it, tweak it, save it if it isn’t ready, reassess it later.  This is something that I was doing anyway, I love to do it, and I’m confident in my joke writing.
2. Get on stage as much as possible.  There are open mics every night, all over the bay.  I try to go back to places I like, and expand my list of open mics to visit any chance I get. Any night I am free I try to get on a stage.  The only way to know if a joke will work in front of a crowd is to say it in front of a crowd.  The only way to get better is to do it as much as possible.  http://www.sfstandup.com/stagetime/ http://badslava.com/san-francisco-open-mics.php
3. Go to the Punchline.  The Punchline is an influential San Francisco comedy club that holds a showcase every Sunday.  The new (and less new) local comics wait in the back of their room for a shot to get in front of a hip, large, real comedy club audience.  It can take up to or more than a year to first get on that stage.  How long you have to wait after that is based on how well you do.  I’m at the beginning of this process, and it can be enjoyable if I don’t treat it like a weekly grind.  Last night I went to see Mike Birbiglia’s film “Sleepwalk with Me” in Berkeley, then went straight to the Punchline for the showcase, and Birbiglia showed up to do a set at the showcase (He had been doing a Q&A across the street at the other bay area theater showing his movie). http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/sleepwalk_with_me_2012/  It isn’t just about the experience; it’s about the experiences. Here is a good blog that learned me some about the Punchline system before I started going: http://blogs.sfweekly.com/exhibitionist/2012/05/punchlines_local_comedy_showca.php
4. Be social.  I know what those of you who know me are thinking (Uh oh). Make friends.  Talk to other comics.  Many of them host shows, or have advice they’ve picked up that doesn’t need to be learned the hard way, or know open mics I may not.  This is my weak point, with out a doubt.  One of my early evaluations when I worked at Six Flags gave me low marks for not socializing with other employees enough (Sorry, I was trying to do my job which mostly involved being in a place other employees couldn’t step foot without being killed by tigers).  Familiarity breeds comfortability and comfortability breeds socialness, for me.  I’ll get there.

On the Back of a Buffalo

I hate writing about myself.  I’m not saying I’m not an excellent subject; it just makes me worried I’m coming across as self involved and arrogant.  It’s ironic I’m worried about that since I don’t mind being perceived that way, in general.  It doesn’t make sense to feel that self conscious about it.  Most of my favorite writers are autobiographical, and the great majority are autobiographical about their work or interactions with animals.  The other ones are humorists.  Or at the very least humorous.  When you think about it, I’m right in my wheelhouse, whatever the hell a wheelhouse is.  What is a wheelhouse?  Probably a place that houses wheels, I’d reckon.  End digression.

My point is if I weren’t me I’d enjoy what I have to say.  And the way I say it, because I say it good.  Real good.  I generally enjoy what I have to say.  Is this blog getting too self referential?  I think it may not be self referential enough.  Now, if you removed the stigma of being a big fan of oneself, I’d be a fan of myself.   But when I read back my writing that is about me I usually say, “Jesus Christ, what is this, a cover letter? If it was I would hire the shit out of me, but still Jesus Christ.  One more Jesus Christ for any Christians still reading.  Jesus Christ!”  I don’t care what I would be applying for either: Dipping Dots Flavor Strategist, New American Sign Language Sign Designer, Secretary of the Interior, Miniature Golf Caddy, Jesus Christ, whatever.  I’d hire me.  Jesus Christ.

Anyway, now I’m going to write about the plight of child textile workers in Honduras.  No, I’m not.  Because no one cares about that.  I’m going to ignore that particular plight and keep purchasing cheap, comfortable clothing.  And I’m going to write about myself – specifically my animal experience.  My work with animals began when I started attending the Exotic Animal Training and Management program at Moorpark College (EATM) in 2005.  I had first heard of the program when I was in high school.  Someone at school was talking about this crazy Australian dude who wrestles alligators on this channel called Animal Planet.  (Crocodile Dundy?)  And like Coldplay, they had me at Yellow (Hello pronounced with a ‘y’, anyway…it’s a pun, deal with it.).  After checking this arcane little booklet called a “TV Guide” (You’re too young to know what that is hypothetical teenager reading this), I turned the channel to Animal Planet early that evening.  There was a show about a vet school, followed by this program called Moorpark 24/7, about an animal training school.  I enjoyed that vet school show as I had toyed with the idea of becoming a vet when I was younger, but put it out of my mind when I was dissuaded by the idea of putting animals down and dealing with sick and dying animals all the time.  There’s an Anthony Jeselnik joke that comes to mind, “I wanted to become a vet when I was a kid, until I realized it wasn’t just putting down cats all day.”

The animal training school sounded amazing, and not only had I never thought of training animals as a career path, I never knew there was a real avenue to pursue something like that.  Cut to 4 years later, after high school, after pre-requisites, after not getting in the first year I applied (It’s a lottery system), and I was there.  Not to sound over-dramatic, and to blatantly rip off a Colin Hay song, but until then I was just waiting for my real life to begin.  (Oh wait, Colin Hay wrote Land Down Under by Men at Work and with the Australia connection it all comes full circle – that’s a callback, friends).

Just that first week, just through meeting all of the animals (and by meeting I mean we weren’t aloud to talk to or interact with any of them for the first year), I immediately realized this is what I was waiting for since I was a young’n visiting the zoo, or taking a field trip to what was then Marine World Africa/USA, and would later change it’s name and even later than that sorta almost hire me then not because I’m a good person and other people aren’t.  Before my classmates and I even got our uniforms, we had an alumni stop by with a tiger cub that one of my classmates got to bottlefeed right in front of the school.  Who gets to do that, for free?  That’s right: a mother tiger, smart ass (Are we gonna have a problem with you?), but also animal training school students.

This program had wall to wall classes I was interested in (Technically wall to wall to wall to wall to ceiling, because that’s how classrooms are built).  Before that if it weren’t for a charismatic instructor, school was like hell, in that I didn’t believe in it.  In that way it was also like Heaven, and God, and funny Jeff Dunham jokes, and the female orgasm (Am I right fellas?  That’s a joke, easy).   Yeah, some of EATM was tedious, difficult, boring, tedious, redundant, but the scientific name for humuhumunukunukua’pua’a is Rhinecanthus rectangulus and I’d rather know that weird little tidbit than the square-root of a sailboat or whatever shit people learn in normal school.

One thing that had changed long before I got there was a sort of wild west mentality that tends to exist with most new things.  When I was there all we heard were the tales.  There were now many rules and precedents set based on past mistakes.  But still, we got quite a bit more leeway with wild animals than most college students do.  It always bothered me when people didn’t spend every waking moment at school – in that I couldn’t fathom it more than anything.  Long before I attended the program, it really was 24/7 (As such the Animal Planet show was called Moorpark 24/7).  There was a nightwatch, when students kept an eye over the zoo while staff was home sleeping.  And, there were requirements to spend ungodly amounts of time there.  In latter years, after the founder of the program retired, and the college took more control, those sorts of unrealistic, and probably illegal requirements were dropped.  Now it’s just a suggestion to spend all of your free time there.  It never had to be suggested to me, and I gravitated towards people who spent similar amounts of time there as well.  I picked animals that took up lots of time, and I wanted to work with as many animals I was interested in as possible, and I wanted to be as creative as possible with the training.  Train the baboon a multi-step comedy bit?  Sure.  Fly the hawk onto the back of a moving truck?  Of course not…that sounds unsafe…or whatever.   Ride a water buffalo that’s never been ridden?  Hell yes.

Two of the animals I worked with were a water buffalo and a highland cow – two massive animals who lived together; one of which was learning how powerful he really was, and the other had lice (We all have our cross to bear).  My co-trainers, co-walkers, and I with the help of staff did our best to learn how to control them to the point where they could be relatively safe to walk.  Most times that involved avoiding attractive targets to a growing water buffalo, like bushes, and then when that didn’t work steering and redirecting Walter away, when he was exhibiting his strength.  After we learned how to work with them in the safest manner possible and redirect his power, my friend suggested we try riding Walter.  Now, people ride water buffalo in other parts of the world, and even though we had learned to walk Walter pretty safely, his reputation was that of a temperamental teenager.  So when we asked if we could walk the two big bulls, as was required at EATM before taking any animal out of its enclosure, we posed the second question in the most delicate possible way to get the answer we desired.  Casually may be the best way to put it, and a little sarcastically.  First we asked the staff member on duty “Can we walk Walter and Dunny?”, as we asked every day.  “Sure,” she answered.  “Cool if we ride Walter?” “Yeah, good luck,” she replied.  “Thanks.”  Now, being  a sarcasm aficionado, I’m pretty good at sniffing out that particular affectation.  But on that day I guess my sarcasmonitor was in the off position.  Since it was my friend’s idea in the first place to ride Walter, he got the first chance.  And you ever watch someone ride a bull in the rodeo?  Because that’s not how it went down.  Not really, it went pretty smoothly, and painlessly.  First, we used a chair so he could get up there.  Remember, this is a very wide, relatively tall animal.  I believe he was about 1200 or 1300 lbs at this point.  With a person on his back, Walter seemed confused, and ultimately calmer than normal.  We walked around the zoo, and as we were heading back towards the hoofstock area we realized there was another staff member in there working with other students.  Even though we had technically asked, technically been given the go-ahead, and technically not broken any rules, my friend already had a couple strikes against him at this point (what they used to call “unsafe credits), so we thought it better that he not ride Walter into that area.  So I did.  I take pride in knowing that I was able to hop up there without any assistance, like cowboys always do in movies.  And so we walked Walter in through the gate, me atop his back, and as we walked past Gary I asked “Hey Gary, is it ok if we ride Walter?”  And he answered, “sure, just wear a helmet next time.”  A helmet.  We didn’t think of that.

Riding Walter

Why So Serious?

After I dropped my first blog I was trying to figure out what to write about next.  I didn’t have a conundrum of too few options, but too many.  Then the Dark Knight Rises shooting in Aurora shooting happened and that shot to the top.  I already have strong opinions about guns, lack of gun policy, and this political third rail status oddly surrounding the subject.  Then I thought, you know what – the way the nation looks at and treats deadly weapons won’t change – and I’ll just write about that subject the next time one of these horrific shootings “inexplicably” happens.  I’ll write about myself this time around.

Me at the SF Comedy Cellar

I started doing stand up comedy a little over a month ago.  It was inevitable that I would procrastinate for years before getting on a stage to tell my own twisted jokes.  I’ve been up on stage about a dozen times at different open mics around San Francisco.  I really can’t think of another skill, profession or hobby that has a learning curve like stand up comedy.  If you’re swimming, you dip your toes in, get into the shallow end of the pool step by step, then  you usually have someone to teach you how to swim.  In stand up you throw yourself into the deep end.  And there are waves. And it’s rainy, and cold, and you’re not sure if your arms or legs will keep you afloat.  And, you’re in the ocean.  Without a life-preserver.  At night.  And there be sharks afoot.  And bed bugs.  Giant aquatic bed bugs.  And the sting ray that maliciously murdered Steve Irwin is lurking sinisterly out of view, ready to strike at any moment.  If this all sounds like a hyperbolic over-exaggeration that’s because it is, and because I’m utilizing a comedic principle called “heightening”.  And I’m doing so poorly.  Now I’m using a disarming universal principle called “self-deprecation”.  But, it is tough when you start.  No matter what.  Even if you’re not one of the majority of people who say they’re more scared of public speaking than death, you’re still going to get on stage and tell jokes and try to make strangers laugh.  It’s scary, because you don’t know if those jokes will work until they do.  And there’s never a guarantee that people will laugh, because they come in there with their own slate of preconceptions, mindsets, senses of humor, and biases.

I’ve hosted  hundreds, if not thousands of animal shows over the last 7 years.  I’ve done everything from completely scripted to completely improvised; in front of a few people and in front of a thousand.  And even at my extreme level of excellence at the craft that is public yapping (I’m alright on a good day), I was nervous doing stand up the first time in front of just a couple dozen people who were willing and primed to laugh.  It’s different when you’re telling your own jokes; you choose how to deliver them, when in the set, and what to emphasize.  It’s all on you.

I’ve been a smart ass since as long as I could remember.  But being a smart ass is a reactive state of being; little more than instinct.  That’s still multiple steps from writing a good joke.  A good burn or a clever quip is tee ball.  Luckily I’ve had Facebook to post whatever the hell I want.  Even with a combination of stage experience and an ability to write out a dark joke that gets some ‘lol’s on the internets, you still don’t know what’s going to work on a live audience, how well, or how best to execute the jokes.  That takes practice.

I feel like for the most part my personality is more like my dad’s, and I’m generally a shy person.  I’ve always been that way, but luckily I’ve learned to enjoy public speaking.  I definitely take my dark sense of humor from my mom.  She battled alcoholism since I could remember, although in the latter years it usually won.  One of the times she was hospitalized after a seizure (Her shot liver care of hepatitis from sharing needles back in the day combined with drinking vodka like it’s water wasn’t the healthiest idea), the doctor asked her what year it was to get an idea if her brain still worked.  “2001,” she said.  Then he asked who the president was, and she replied, “It’s not still that asshole George W Bush, is it?”  And she did so with tubes in her veins, and tubes in her nostrils, and whatnot.  That’s funny, people.   Oh, and it was still that asshole George W Bush, just to let you non-political history buffs know.

I don’t know if anyone ever suggested doing stand up comedy to me, but I did have a coworker my senior year in high school who said that I should have my own talk show.  Which is sort of funny, because I hate talking to most people.  His suggestion probably had something to do with me coming every day and telling some jokes Conan or Letterman said the night before.  By that time, I had already decided to work with animals.  When attending the Exotic Animal Training and Management program at Moorpark College it gave me a good platform to try to be funny in a clean and specific way to an audience, and to just get comfortable in front of a group of people.  Obviously the focus was on animals, but if I could get some laughs, even better.  After I graduated from Moorpark I worked at Six Flags, where I got to ad lib and bounce my humor off of  hosts who were probably too talented to be working at an amusement park.

After my Six Flags came to a close, I drove back to California from New Jersey and wrote a lot of the jokes I stay on stage now.  A little over a year ago I thought, “hey, maybe I should do stand up”, and I’ve been writing jokes and trying to get them to a point where I would feel comfortable saying them to strangers.

That I decided to actually try stand up rather than procrastinate until the end of time has at least something to do with discovering comedy podcasts (WTF, Doug Loves Movies, and a number of others), that made comedians and comedy more accessible.   I also started going and seeing live stand up (Beginning with Anthony Jeselnik, but since then Greg Proops, Doug Benson, TJ Miller, Amy Schumer).  Ultimately the biggest boost was from my girlfriend saying, “you’ve been talking about doing this for a year, when are you going to actually do it?”

I’ve always thought that most comedians were terrible.  I guess they are.  Most people are probably pretty bad at what they do, so why should comedians be any different.  I thought, they all sound the same.  They joke about the same subjects, and they do so similarly.  Not all of them, though.  I’ve always loved George Carlin, and I watched all of his comedy specials, and a couple years ago I looked up all of the classics I could (Pryor, Eddie Murphy, Lenny Bruce, Steve Martin and so on).  I never looked at the great comedians and thought “I can do that”, just as I never looked at the hack comedians and though “I want to do that.”  I was caught in between a disbelief that I could do stand up as well as I’d want to, and disinterest in doing it as poorly as the majority.  But then there was Sarah Silverman, and later Anthony Jeselnik – neither of which do I think I can be as funny as, but I realized that I already write jokes similar to their style.

After reading too much online advice, and looking up local open mic spots, I started checking them out.  I first got on stage where most people who start in San Francisco do: Brainwash Cafe and Laundromat.  And it was a great place for that; the crowd was encouraging and not patronizing.  Since then I’ve been trying to go to every open mic I  can find to figure out what jokes work where, and what places I most enjoy doing it.  I’m telling my jokes, trying them differently, doing them elsewhere, learning the crowds, and moving jokes around in my sets.  I’ve at least taped the audio of all of my sets, and video of a few.  I watch them back like game film, and grade the reactions. I’m just trying to get better and more comfortable.  I even created/modified an excel sheet to average out the letter grades I give the reactions of my jokes.  And I’m tough on myself.

I don’t have plans.  I’m not setting any big goals.  I never did it with animal training, and I refuse to do it with comedy. I’m going to try to be funny to the people I’m in front of.  When I was at animal training school I never thought “I’m gonna get a job training tigers in a year”; my mindset was always, “They let me work with these amazing animals; I’m going to make the best of this experience.” And I’m going to do the same with comedy.

Below is me doing stand up at an open mic in San Francisco.  It’s a small audience of mostly or all comics, but it’s a fun room.  And some of you asked for video…so this is for those of you friends and family who can’t be here to not see me in person:

Here We Go

Hello.  It’s been like 8 years since I last had a blog.  A long time, I know.  It was so long ago Michael J Fox was probably less shaky, and Michael Jackson wasn’t molesting kids in Hell yet.   My blog died along with the website it lived on (http://gnn.tv/).  Well they say nothing is ever truly dead and gone on the internet, but as close to.  Why am I starting a blog, do I think it’s 1998?  No, of course not.  That’s silly; if it were 1998 I’d be gearing up for a large party of some sort next year, and then an unavoidable worldwide technological disaster where the internets will fail and the world’s economies with it two years after that.  I start this blog for a number of reasons.  It’s for my jokes that are too long for Facebook and way too long for twitter.  It’s for my incredibly intelligent, aggressively correct, well-researched, and supremely modest polemical rants .  Mostly, I blog because I like writing and I want to do it more.  Also, I plan to write a book eventually (If that dickhead Charles Dickens can do it I can to).  I don’t really have an issue with Dickens, it’s just that from what I understand, sex tapes and feuds are the best way to get your name out there, so I’m gonna take this route.

To give you an idea of when I last wrote, here are a couple articles of mine that floated around the internets for a while and are surprisingly still out there-which is nice because I don’t even have the original word files…

http://forums.yellowworld.org/showthread.php?t=23200

http://www.wolfsongnews.org/news/Alaska_current_events_1319.htm

The first one is hilarious because it actually incited 10o comments in a debate on an Asian website called “yellowworld” (the most offensively named website I’ve ever heard).  Probably as contentious because of the headline “Japan: Save the Whales, So We Can Kill them,” as for the content.  Although the second one has some grammatical mistakes (it was pre-final draft…how the fuck did they get it?), it’s better writing.

Where am I now VH1 will probably never ask ?  I tweet here http://twitter.com/MattHikes.  I put my best photos here http://fennecx.deviantart.com/ and sometimes upload videos here http://www.youtube.com/user/mattheikkila/videos.  And I’m gonna get a website going to put all these things together.  I already have the domain name-bookmark it so you’re ready when I launch it: http://mrbojangleshasadrinkingproblemandwhywouldnthe.uk

Actually it will be mattheikkila.com  I’m creative in that way.

Since this is Blog 1, I will explain how I got here, wherever the hell I am.  I had a childhood of sorts (To give you an idea what it was like I don’t know if I remember a drug raid on our house or if I just heard the story so many times it feels like I remember it…), then I graduated from high school with honors (Not honors: honor), and the next thing I did that was worth a goddamn was attend America’s Teaching Zoo in southern California.

While at EATM (The Exotic Animal Training and Management program is the other name for it) I flew hawks onto a moving truck, trained a baboon to let me poke her with a needle (Tried to but she screamed at me…it was for a voluntary TB test behavior: I’m not a monster), road a water buffalo, walked cougars, and learned lots (I did, but telling you that I learned how red and white tops contrast from purple tops when drawing blood is less interesting than that other stuff).

Straight outta there I got a job at a Six Flags park on the east coast, where I worked with 6 trainers to provide all aspects of care for 7 tigers and put on award winning tiger shows.  Up until this day the best review and most shining endorsement for anything I’ve ever done was from a 20-something fella who saw us tiger crew in uniforms and asked “Tiger show?”  To which I replied, “Yep!” And he responded with an enthusiastic “Fuck yeah dude!”  Fuck yeah, indeed, dude.  Fuck yeah, indeed.   It was central New Jersey so the tigers had higher IQ’s than the visitors to the park (Boom, New Jersey, eat that).  I was there for 4 years before the program was discontinued.  I drove back to California with my dog and taking several poorly planned out, ill-conceived shortcuts to visit friends and family, it took us two months and 8000 miles to make the weeklong, 3000 mile drive from coast to coast (Holy shit, it was fun).  I then got a job doing what I was already doing for free (Walking my dog around the bay area on different trails), and I started walking other dogs as well for some scratch, shekels, money (US currency to be exact, ya heard?)  It’s funny my first instinct is to defend that choice of employment and say I’ve had other job offers (Dippin’ Dots flavor strategist, Labor Secretary, etc), but it’s a good job; pays decent, with shorter workdays than the 9-5 grind, and I get to be outside all day working with a type of animal I didn’t have any professional experience with before this job: dogs.

Here is me working with exotics, it’s essentially a video resume I put together when applying for a job last year: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1NDCAaCX6mQ

I’ve recently combined my sick sense of humor (which has up until this point only been used to get me kicked out of class throughout k-12 and offend and/or delight friends and family) with my adequate ability to get in front of a crowd on mic, which I’ve fostered over the last several years working with animals – and I’ve started doing stand up comedy.  I don’t know where it’s going to take me (Um, the top probably), but I never know where anything is.

Pees.

Matt