BONUS The Dublin Diary
Music Music
so bonus material what is bonus material this is bonus material how are you yeah i just woke up so the idea is that is there a way for me to go more in depth with my experience in places if that is what i choose to do with this with this extra stuff for you for you people who
who've decided to go all in the big spend five bucks a month for stuff that you can only get right here right now and i i don't know what the spectrum of that is i guess it's totally up to us but i can tell you what's happening right now if you listen to the regular show you know that this is uh my last day in ireland
By the time you listen to this, I should be, hopefully, if all works correctly, flying back to Los Angeles, and I need to go back to Los Angeles.
As I talk to you a bit about that strange, untethered feeling, I have felt okay, but I don't think it's unusual to get homesick, but how I rationalize
you know, how do I figure out how to comfort myself around whatever that is, that weird kind of loneliness of being in a beautiful place with lovely people and lovely food and plenty of things to do.
What does one do about the loneliness of being on vacation almost and
ridiculous i guess it's because i'm alone i don't know but the way i kind of rationalize it i'm you know i haven't been deployed you know i'm not on a tour of uh for war you know i'm not stuck somewhere i'm not being bombed there's a million ways to kind of
put things in perspective or at least make your experience or whatever you're feeling seem silly obviously I don't know if that's the best way to comfort yourself but I think I don't think it hurts but it depends how far you take it you know I had this moment I guess basically what I'm doing this is sort of a a
kind of audio diary upon awakening which is I've been up for about an hour and I got a
You know, I wake up and I think like, did I do enough?
I've been away.
Have I done enough?
Am I doing what you're supposed to do when you're away?
And when I really look at it, I have done a lot.
And I had a big plan today to take the train out to Houth, where I've been before.
I've been here many times with different people.
But I don't know if my plans have been dashed because somehow or another, I was at the breakfast.
I can't.
The amount of excitement and shame that I experience around a buffet is a little bit daunting.
I just, I fucking just love to eat.
And they have that nice soda bread here and full English or Irish breakfast.
But I didn't do that.
Somehow or another, I've managed to avoid the blood puddings and the white puddings and the sausage and the bacon.
I've had some heartburn on this trip.
And I saw a play last night that heartburn was part of the play and it led to a heart attack.
So now I've added that to the list.
That where I'm going to sleep here in Ireland, kind of thinking, half thinking,
well, what if I die here?
And then it makes total sense to me.
Why wouldn't you wanna die in Dublin?
I mean, this was part of your dream to be in Ireland.
I mean, wasn't that sort of the end of that dream to die?
Yeah, but I thought maybe the countryside, maybe in a cottage where someone finds me a few weeks later next to a fire with a book in my hand, not just laying in a suite at the Westbury Hotel,
after eating sausages for three days.
But what's my point?
Oh, yeah.
So I get up.
You hear the pain?
Hear the pain?
I wake up this morning, I get up, I stretch a little bit, and then I just haven't been exercising.
I'm not going to beat myself up about it, but I'm so tired of beating the shit out of myself.
I can't begin to tell you.
But look, so I go down, and I'm like, you know what?
Just get some brand cereal.
I haven't eaten any cereal.
I barely eat cereal.
I barely eat carbs, but now I'm sort of inundated with carbs, caffeine, nicotine.
It's just like all in again.
And I'm old.
This is not the time to be doing that.
So what I'm building to really is that I'm just eating some of that all-brand cereal, and it's kind of like, you know, I don't know, you know when it breaks down cereal, you kind of get to the bottom of the box, and there's, well, these are little brand bits.
I'm having coffee, and I eat a spoonful, and it kind of gets stuck in my throat kind of, and I'm coughing.
I cough, I wasn't choking, but I was coughing, and I hurt my back.
I hurt my back coughing.
Like I'm in pain.
And I felt it happen.
And then I coughed again.
I tried to move my position.
It happened.
It exacerbated it.
So I have a back injury right now from coughing.
Had I eaten the sausage?
Had I eaten the black pudding and white pudding?
Had I eaten the bacon?
Which wouldn't have caused that.
You know, I wouldn't be in pain that this, you know, this kind of pain, that weird muscle pulley thing that you do in your back.
It'd go on for weeks, coughing, clearing my throat from brand cereal.
Yeah, that's where I'm at.
So now I don't know if I'm going to go to Houth, which is a harbor town that I've been to, but it's really the closest kind of, I'm looking out of my window here.
Over Dublin, and I got a sweet, I think I'm gonna break even on this fucking trip, to be honest with you, after three shows.
Got a sweet looks over Dublin.
I'm just in this little downtown area, Grafton Street, the stuff here, Trinity College, the tweed store that I go to.
And I know there's got to be an expanse of stuff here.
There's got to be strip malls and circles that people drive around and little things that people do outside of this town.
I imagine the people that live in Dublin don't spend much time where I am.
But I don't know.
What am I going to do?
Is just take a train out a few stops and wander around a neighborhood?
But health is accessible.
I might go out there for lunch.
But I saw this play that I mentioned in the intro and I could go on a little more about.
I've seen two plays since I've been here.
That's the thing.
I have done a lot of stuff.
A lot of stuff that I wouldn't do.
I've talked to a lot of people.
I talked to Tommy Tiernan the other day.
charming fella.
It was very funny though.
At the end of his conversation with me, he said, I'm going to feel bad about this.
I got too vulnerable.
And it's like, no, no, no.
Charming fella, half vulnerable.
I had a good talk with him.
It was like kindred spirits.
There's been different kindred spiriting going on.
Me and Jeremy Strong, me and Tiernan, which you'll hear at some point.
But the play I saw, Solar Bones, which was a book that I don't know about, and it was an adaptation here at the Abbey Theater, and it was kind of tremendous.
in the sense that I don't go to much theater and it just seems someone, a guy who's a fan of the show who I ran into coming out of the theater said, he told me something someone said to me that baguettes are to Paris what theater is to Ireland.
But this is like, it's quite an amazing piece of theater.
It's based on a book by a guy named Mike McCormack.
I guess it won some awards.
The guy named Michael West adapted it, but it's an hour and a half of a guy in what looks like a construction site of a kitchen in a house.
There's framing, there's a counter, there's some appliances that seem to be wrapped in plastic, either coming or going.
There's some rubble, a table.
There's some stuff, a teapot, but there's nothing being poured, but he's miming it.
But it's this middle-aged man talking about his life, his work, his past, his father, his wife, his children, his transgressions, his small battles as a civil engineer.
And there's no real time to the play.
And he looks at the clock.
He mentions a time.
The lighting changes as if days are passing subtly.
And so I guess I could say spoilers.
There are spoilers for the...
The Solar Bones play, which may or may not come to America, or you may or may not be seeing it in the next two days.
But I'm going to assume that most people are not saying like, fuck, I was just going to go to Dublin to see that.
It's running till the 29th.
So you've got two days to get to Dublin to see the Solar Bones at the Abbey Theater.
And this is like a great old theater, great old town.
But this actor...
Stanley Townsend did a spectacular job.
Hour and a half monologue.
And what unfolds and what you assume fairly early on is that this is a ghost of a person.
This is this is happening.
This is happening in a world that's not quite correct.
That's not together.
And I just talking about it, the idea of the deconstructed set or the set in the house in transition or, you know, being built or not being built or being tearing down or not being torn down is that.
This is the purgatory.
This is the limbo.
This is his first stop after what you find out at the end that he's dead.
He's had a heart attack in his car.
And it really...
was an examination of not a mundane life, but a life of a guy who did his job and did the best he could.
And towards the end, most of the talk towards the end of the monologue is about his wife getting ill from a waterborne virus that infected hundreds of people in County Mayo.
I don't know if it's based on a real story or not, but him taking care of his wife.
And her starting to come back, you know, come out of it.
And him going to the store to, you know, pick up her prescription, going to the pharmacy and not making it home, having heartburn, heartburn, heartburn, pull over, you know, and eventually that was it.
He experiences that as the apparition or as the body or soul or energy in transit, which is what we're witnessing.
This wave of memories leading up to this and to his experience of transitioning from life to death.
And it's very poetic.
And it ends with a fuck, which you gotta love.
Again, I may be spoiling this for two or three people, but it'll be okay.
It's not like the big reveal necessarily.
It's sort of scripted that way.
But if that's why you're going to the play or why you think the play is important is how it ends in the sense of that with this type of play, then I don't know what to tell you.
But there's something provocative that I guess I'm trying to get at here in terms of me seeing theater when I'm away or me assuming that theater is better in either London or Dublin and me really, to be honest, not being a theater person.
somebody who goes to that much theater.
But seeing that Helen Hunt play, the play in London, the Eureka Day, the sort of, not lighthearted, but a light sort of borderline comedic approach to the issues of today with some very strong comedy in it.
And this play, which is just this kind of...
a recollection of a life in the frenzy of the first stop, whatever that may be, of life leaving one's body.
Very different, obviously, but impactful.
Here I am, a week out from the Helen Hunt play, but this is the morning after I saw this
this play based on the book by McCormack, and I'm still thinking about them.
And that's not something that happens with TV content or Instagram reels or movies, occasionally movies, sometimes TV.
But what is it about the delivery system?
Because there is something fragile and vulnerable and human engaged.
And I've talked about this before and everyone talks about the sort of essential nature of theater, but no one goes to the theater.
But what is it exactly?
What is the experience?
There is sort of the weight of the risk of the actor fucking up.
of the actor not showing up for his job in a way and feeling that.
But when everything is humming at the right frequency, it connects on a very visceral human level.
If you're capable of listening on that level.
This is the other thing, too, about watching Tommy Tiernan stuff before I talk to him and sort of a tradition of storytelling, of real storytelling.
This is something that...
gets bandied about a lot, the word storytelling and whatever the fuck that means.
You know, it's been hijacked and appropriated by content providers and branding junkies.
So, you know, authenticity, storytelling, those two words are buzzwords.
And the content garbage, you know, brand peddling world, the frequency of...
Kind of like malignant entertainment, but to be present for an unfolding that has a beginning, middle and end in it of its own time, not limited to something an algorithm decides is the time somebody decides.
can watch these things is a fundamental human experience.
That the idea of theater, and this is something that happens as somebody who watches, I realized after watching this play last night that
That what I do is theater and that me spending half of, what do you mean, like 90% of my life over the past 30 years in comedy clubs, either watching or doing comedy, that is a type of theater.
That is a type of visceral human engagement.
I live theater.
in a world of theater in a way.
And I think some of the things that has inspired me over this trip is that why not do some real theater?
And I guess I do.
I mean, I had an experience that I talked about in the intro at the Bloomsbury the other night where I was very conscious of the transition.
I had to deal with somebody who was being disrespectful in my space as a performer.
Look, I'm a guy who can do crowd work.
I can handle headquarters.
I know how to function and I can usually move through it diplomatically if it's not hostile.
But I was trying to transition into something vulnerable that I wanted to do on stage that was going to be funny but required something else of me other than the guarded nature of standing behind jokes.
And I didn't feel like I could pull it off with somebody being a fucking dick.
But the power of theater is that, is that you walk away, you know, with a reaction to a prolonged and extensive human engagement.
which we rarely have.
I mean, sometimes you remember arguments, you remember near accidents, you remember weirdos yelling, you remember something that hurts your feelings.
But to have it contextualized and drawn through a performance and to be able to react to that with your own heart and mind is a beautiful thing.
And leaving solar bones,
you know, at the age I'm at and being what I went through him, you know, dealing with his sick wife and me thinking about Lynn, um, him dying and Lynn passing.
And the last time I was in this town was with Lynn, um,
And it's weird going over the memories of being here in Ireland, you know, at the beginning of our relationship that was only to last, you know, less than a year after that really.
You know, is that you go over things and just like that character was going over things, going over his life in this purgatory that he was in that was the deconstructed kitchen of his house.
You know, going over your life.
I'm doing that is, you know, I'm awake.
I'm not dead.
I don't think.
He had heartburn.
I've been having heartburn.
You know, I don't know.
I had dinner with a friend of mine who's a promoter here, Bren.
Brent Berry, who went to me and Lynn as guitarists, we could sing songs out there in County Donegal at the house we had rented.
And he had met her and seen us together and he was asking about her and he had just gotten stents put into his heart.
And this heartburn and this play and stents and now I'm going to bed.
Usually I'm worrying about other things.
I'll find something to beat the shit out of myself.
thing I realized is I don't really do it with comedy anymore I don't have the dread about getting on stage which is a relief I think it's just by virtue of the fact that this I'm very confident in this material but I do find other things to beat the shit out of myself for unnecessarily it's just my spiritual nature I guess but coming back around to it the
The difference between being nostalgic and being haunted is very fine, very delicate.
It's a fine line.
Fine line.
This guy, McCormack, the writer, was asked in an interview if there was such a thing as Irish writing.
Some guy tweeted this at me.
He said, McCormack suggested that indeed there is and that it consists of a three-part harmony of experiment, comedy, and metaphysics.
Hmm.
I've got to read the book now.
But anyways, being haunted and being nostalgic, that wavering between the two, thinking about the time I spent here with Lynn, thinking about the time that I was trying to take care of her when she was sick, thinking about the time I spent in both of those situations, being a bit selfish, being a bit whiny, like, oh, this house is okay.
I mean, is there a heat?
And like, oh, you're going to, yeah, I'll make you some food.
you know, all of our, our memories, if you dig a little deeper, all of the good memories are, you know, sort of can be undermined a bit by our actions or selfishness or, you know, mistakes.
And, you know, that was sort of what the play was about in a sense.
You know, what is a, an assessment of a life?
What is memory?
You know, what, what,
What makes it, I don't know if it's good or bad, but how do you justify it?
It's just like every day.
But I mean, most of the memories I have here are nostalgic and sad.
I was here with Sarah as well.
And so that's got its own baggage of, you know, I hurt that woman.
I'm sure, you know, she doesn't talk to me anymore.
I'm sure she feels betrayed and angry for life.
But we had a nice time here and we had a nice time together at times.
But I was also, you know, a selfish shit a lot of times.
It's just very hard for me to let love in.
I'm gonna listen to that Nick Cave song.
And most of the time, people I'm with for a period of time, Lynn, are just trying to get me to do that.
Because that's how I'm hobbled.
But it is heavy, man, to be here and to think about her and to think how long ago that was now and to try to balance that slight difference between being haunted and being nostalgic.
That is your bonus content for today.