Today is Thursday and every Thursday at Epic Cafe here on 4th Ave in Tucson they have an open mic night. Musicans, poets, my actor friend Dave, all show up to try to connect a little with the world.

I come here because they have wireless access and they have coffee and I stay for the open mic because it is fun to watch people work through that need to show their stuff. To throw it out there and to get no response at all is a brave fucking thing to do.

Sometimes people are good and that’s good because it’s so rare. The guy who runs the open mic is amazing and everytime I head him I can’t believe he’s here in Tucson running an open mic instead of headlining in some club in LA/NYC/Chicago/Seattle/Austin fucking Tokyo anywhere really instead of the shithole that is Tucson. But it’s good to hear him play so I guess it works out for me at the very least.

Anyway, I find getting up on stage to be the scariest thing in the universe so when these people get up at the open mic and they suck I have enormous respect for them while simultaneously judging them insignificant and worthless. Such is the dichotomy of the enlightened audience.

For the past few weeks Dave has been doing a weird performance art piece where he started telling a story that we’ve been tossing about for a year called Hunting the Homeless. If done the way we’d like it would be a kind of social commentary hidden deep in the folds of a pitch black comedy. It would be a video short parody of a hunting show.

The next week he did a meta commentary on that piece and the week after that a prayer after commenting on the previous commentary. Last week he did another prayer, kind of creating a whole new religion revolving around the Total Nuclear Annihilation of Thine Enemies and then morphed that into a piece about trying to pick up some chick. I played the Shakespearean chick in this peculiar play of sexual deviation and an conscious attempt to make the audience of coffeehouse patrons deeply uncomfortable. It was fun even if no one got the joke. That’s just an aside for the hell of it ecause I like Dave and respect his desire to make the world uncomfortable.

The crazy thing about the open mic are the people I cannot understand in any way…the crappy talentless motherfuckers with no self-consciousness at all. Every week for as long as I can remember there is The Poet.

The Poet reads the same poems over and over and they don’t get any better. They’re a parody of bad poetry. They are the stuff that 14 year old girls write in their journals when they think they’re being “deep”.

He writes stuff like

My love is a flower dancing in the breeze
My love for you strengthens me
My love is a hope that you’ll be on your knees…

Okay I can’t remember anything he said but trust me it was way worse than that because that at least has a bad sex joke in it. Nope. The Poet is earnest. The Poet feels and believes his poetry book is filled with wisdom and profound thoughts.

What baffles me, amazes me, confounds me, is that ability to not see yourself at all. To have no idea that what you’re doing is total crap. Right now, I’m revising and rethinking this post and wondering if it’s worth it at all. Should I delete it? Should I post it? Would anyone at all care? When I put Push the Tempo into the film contest I was sure it would get gonged out of the running. That the blood red spotlight, The Crispin Glover Memorial Spotlight (why? I have no idea), would come on, people would scream that I was crap and the gong would be hit. That didn’t happen but I’m so damn self-conscious, can see every mistake, bad edit, bad choice, missed shot, missed notion, that I was sure it would.

The Poet though, the gets up every week, drives the entire audience outside, once out into the rain, to escape the trauma of hearing that shit, and then the next week he gets up and does it again. Tonight he’ll get up, cause people real physical pain, then leave a happy camper.

I guess. I can’t imagine what’s going through that head and I suppose that’s what fascinates me so much about that cartoonish character who will be on in minutes. Time to pack up and get ready to leave before the pain starts.

[update: Dave, the actor mentioned above, showed up at the Epic open mic and did great piece parodying the bad poet. If you click on the picture below it will take you to a page with the video I took of him in the that glorious moment.