Comedian Ari Shaffir

I just finished taking what could possibly have been the longest running dump I’ve ever conceived possible and it made me consider the interesting things in my life. I think almost everyone takes for granted where they are in relation to where they thought they once might have found themselves. Sometimes it’s interesting to step out of your body for a moment and think about your life from the perspective of your younger self of 10 or 20 years ago. And by the way, when I say “longest running dump” I’m referring to the amount of time that doodie was coming out. It lasted 40 minutes from first kerplunk to final splash. It wasn’t the biggest mass I’ve ever had but it wasn’t too far off.

I took this dump in a hotel room in Philadelphia, where I was in between doing stand up comedy for two sold out shows at Helium Comedy Club with Joe Rogan and watching the UFC live at the Wachovia Center the following evening. I had just smoked some of the Banini joint that I smuggled across the country. I think it’s a cross between Banana Kush and something else that ends in “ini” like Martini OG or some crazy shit like that. I don’t know why they don’t just give each weed a numerical assignation. That would be easier to remember. “I like pot flavors 3, 217, 136, and 44. Actually, that would be significantly more difficult to remember. Let’s stick with the name system we’ve already got.

Anyway, this joint and one just like him were given to me at a marijuana dispensary in Studio City, California. It’s right over the hill on Laurel Canyon just before you get to Moorpark on the right side of the street. I just did some research. It’s called Secret Garden Cannameds. And what they did for me (because it was my first time there) was they offered me for free one free small pipe of my choice (valued (by me guessing) at 10 dollars), 10 screens to fit in that pipe (valued at 1 dollar), a lighter (valued at 50 cents), and 2 joints of a hybrid marijuana that they’ve renamed “Banini” (valued at 15 dollars). That’s a total prize package worth over 26 dollars. And all because I bought a Reefers Peanut Butter Cup, and a Tokreo Cookie for 10 each and two lollipops for 7 each or two for 10. I can’t vouch for the edibles because I gave them all away. The first two to my friend Pete who was having an emotional mushroom induced life crisis and the two lollipops to my friend Steve who has a kid. Pete said they were wonderful, Steve never said anything, and I can vouch for the Banini myself. I think it’s an indica, or a hybrid but that’s just a guess. What’s not a guess is that it’s A to the Wesome.

On Thursday I woke up in Los Angeles, California in an apartment on the Sunset Strip. I live in a nice builiding in an awesome location in a pigsty of an apartment. Since the girl moved out, I’ve cleaned exactly zero times. I’ve been relatively careful not to leave foodstuffs around so as not to attract bugs, rodents, and (later) taloned birds. The mess is just a clutter but its a horrible clutter. I sleep on approximately 1/3 of my bed because the other 2/3 are covered in clean laundry that I haven’t folded in maybe 3 months. If you’re doing the math, that means you think I haven’t washed my sheets and blanket in 3 months. Wrong. It’s probably been closer to a year. My couch is full of clean laundry. There’s a blanket on the floor that is also full of clean laundry. One area not full of clean laundry: My closets. There is an area where the kitchen table would go if I had one that is filled with plastic grocery bags. It looks like that giant garbage barge the size of Texas that’s off the western coast of the United States. Attached to the barge is the yard sale area. That’s where I keep a selection of toolless power cords and out of date connectors, worn out golf bag with no clubs, printers, and books. All of which I would sell at a yard sale for 50 cents each or less. That region borders Box Town, where I keep my cardboard boxes open that I may fill with pieces of balled up paper, empty Jujyfruit containers, self loathing, unemployment check pay stubs, empty ibuprofen containers, and smaller, less adaptable boxes. That area butts right up against the La-Z-Boy recliner that my brother in law gave me if I was willing to pick it up from The Price is Right stuido warehouse. It’s a wonderfully plush maroon recliner from Living In Comfort (pictured here and valued at 549 dollars).

Features include massage and built in refrigerator. And it’s sitting, unplugged, in the very spot 36 inches inside the door my friend Shawn and I set it down when he helped me move it in. There’s an area outside the clean laundry on the blanket on the floor area path (I have paths set up so I can get around) where I just have empty and half empty suitcases piled up. My kitchen is disgusting. And my bathroom is beginning to smell like a gas station restroom. Plus the fridge is making a strange noise like the motor is about to fail and the shower drain has been stopped up for 5 months so I have to wade in an ankle deep bath 3 minutes into any shower I take. And I can’t call the maintenance guy to come fix those things because I’m too embarrassed for anyone to see how I live including the Mexican fix it guy who sometimes sleeps drunk in the bed of his pickup truck outside our building as he sings himself to sleep.

On Friday I woke up across the country in a hotel room in Manhattan. At 7 am I walked from there to the Sirius XM studios to be a guest on the Opie and Anthony show. It’s my favorite radio to do and it’s my favorite program to listen to. I’ve had some of the best, most memorable times of my life on that show. Do a google search on “The Baby Bird on O&A” and you’ll see my favorite. Hopefully you can find the video. It involves an eggnog drinking contest and a lot of radness. On Friday we all sniffed the dried up and fermented spooge puddle that Jim Norton found in his belly button. It made Jim Jefferies barf. I uploaded a video of it here:

Later on Marion Barry, the former two separate time mayor of Washington D.C. came in to talk. Well, he didn’t actually come in for that reason. He was there to do an interview for the black station, but Norton asked him if he’d like to come in there and the former mayor/crackhead accepted the offer. He did a 2 minute interview about his new HBO documentary and about overcoming adversity and about how he didn’t really smoke crack because the cops were setting him up so it wasn’t crack in that pipe. When asked by Rogan what he thought he was smoking, the man cooly replied, “I never smoked it. I just took a drag.” Then he realized that he was standing next to a trashcan full of vomit and he left the room shortly thereafter.

We drove from there to Philadelphia where we went straight backstage to the weigh-ins for UFC 101. I like being backstage for those things because it’s my only real chance to say hi to all the fighters and trainers that I’ve become friends with. Most of them sit in super VIP areas during the fights and unless I run into them in the morning in the hotel lobby, there’s never any time to catch up. You can’t do it at one of the retarded after parties because I can’t talk over the Pussycat Dolls on full blast. It’s demeaning to me that professional sluts are turned up so we can hear what they’re saying. Plus, my ears mumble as bad as my mouth, so communicating at clubs is an impossibility for me. So at the weigh-ins I got to talk to Greg Jackson for a while and he introduced me to Renzo Gracie. I also got into a nice theoretical discussion about breakups with one of the behind the scenes guys whose name I won’t mention until he’s no longer hurting. Kendall Grove came over and said hi. He and BJ Penn saw me in Columbus and they’ve both been cool ever since. The weigh-ins themselves were uneventful. Ed Sinister was talking about Anderson Silva’s stare down, but I didn’t know there was any real beef between he and Forrest Griffin, so I don’t think I noticed that it was too harsh. Then I said hi to Dana White and we we went back to our hotel to get ready for the Helium shows.

The crowds in Philadelphia have always been great. They’re a bunch of rowdy filthpigs who like their beer. You definitely get a higher percentage of add douchetards who enjoy yelling out tag lines to every single one of your jokes and set ups. Every time I’ve been to Helium it’s always been just one or two people, which you can deal with. When 5 different people or more across different parts of the room start yelling shit out, that gets a little crazy and it’s hard to deal with. But these shows had nobody bad in the first show and just one idiot in the second, and he wasn’t even that bad. Plus there were two fun black people sitting next to him, so I could play around with them and not worry about seeming too racist. It’s amazing to me that sometimes I’ll make a racist joke and if the 3 black people in the room get upset, the whole room gets weirded out. But if the same 3 black people laugh at the same racist joke (because it’s just a fucking joke and that’s what non-retarded humans are supposed to do), the whole room relaxes and gets into it. It’s almost like everybody looks at those 3 as representatives of the black race and they let them decide what is or is not the racial line in the sand. These black guys were cool, so that transferred to everyone else. Joe Lauzon and Chris Palmquist came to the first show. Our friend/gorilla, Mr. John Rallo, came out to the 2nd show. Rallo is a white, so please don’t think that was a racist joke. Matt Serra, Opie, Cole Miller and his father were also at the 2nd show. It’s strange that there could be a room of 260 people who have never heard any of my bits before, but I can’t stop thinking about the 6 people who might’ve already heard what I’ve said. I was talking to Greg Jackson and Joe Lauzon about it. Joe is a comedy fan, so he understands and appreciates the different subtleties in seeing a joke done two separate times. Greg agreed with me. That still bothers the shit out of me for some reason. So I end up having to try to think when the last time these people saw me was, and then try to figure out all the new material that I started doing after that show. Matt Serra hadn’t seen me for 8 months, so that wasn’t a problem, but Lauzon saw me 4 months ago in Montreal, so I had to scramble a little. I ran out of new material at 22 minutes and had to repeat a jiu-jitsu joke to close it out.

On Saturday I woke up in a hotel room in Philadelphia. I slept nearly a full 8 hours and I probably would have slept longer if not for nearly pissing the bed at noon. I was having one of those dreams about wading through a river and I was too tired to realize the difference between peeing in my dream and peeing in my underwear. I think I probably let 20 or 30 drops worth out before I woke up and pinched it. By then I was up, so I got high and started writing this blog until Eddie Bravo called me to go with him to Modell’s to get a knee sleeve for his student, George Sotiropoulos. We took a cab out to the boonies. I couldn’t tell the difference between the regular people and the hookers. Actually, I think they were all regular people, but I’m still shell shocked from that back alley to Club Soda in Montreal and these people were pretty worn down. The best part of this little adventure is that we told the Muslim cab driver to wait for us for 5 minutes and we’d be right back out. He said he’d wait. Then Eddie gave him a 20 dollar deposit to make sure he’d stay. Of course he wasn’t there when we came back out 2 and a half minutes later. I was just about the forgive Muslims for 9/11 because of how cool this guy was being. Now I have to hate them more than ever. Way to ruin it for everyone, dickwad.

The fights were kind of shitty. There was a lot of hugging and holding and not too much action. At one point during the Aaron Riley/Shane Nelson fight there was a fight in the stands and everybody in attendance was more interested in that than what was going on inside the octagon. I was, too. This dude in the stands connected on a straight right that came from one row up and just leveled this other dude. He had gravity on his side and the shot was brutal. That or the Anderson Silva knockout was probably punch of the night.

On Sunday I went back to the chaos of my apartment. The plan is for me to move my bed into the living room and turn my bedroom into a studio for writing and editing. It will require A LOT of cleaning up and rearranging that I’ll probably never get to but that’s the plan anyway.

So in three days, I got to do a bunch of stuff that I normally would take for granted. I got to wake up on the Sunset Strip in Hollywood, California. I got to be a guest on my favorite radio show ever in New York City. I got to hang out backstage at the UFC weigh-ins. I got to perform for two awesome sold out crowds in Philadelphia. I got to watch perhaps the greatest MMA fighter of all time defend his reputation against a marquee name in a higher weight class. And I got to go back to LA to perform at a club that was once home to almost every legendary standup comedian in history, the Comedy Store. That’s kind of a cool three days. I think it’s not a bad idea to take stock every once in a while to get yourself feeling happy about yourself. 10 years ago, I wouldn’t have thought any of those things were possible for me. Now, it’s almost a typical weekend. Even if I fail as a standup, I’ve still gotten to live a pretty fun life for a decent percentage of my life. When I’m putting the gun in my mouth because I can’t take one more day as a mattress salesman in Maryland, I’ll hopefully look back on a weekend like this and smile a little before I blow my brains out.