Climbing Mt. Never-Rest

Friday March 20th, 2009 - Lake Villa, IL

Today I climbed Mt. Never-rest. That’s the huge pile of emails that keeps growing and growing and never seems to stop. I do what I can to get caught up and then other things in life slide in and take me out of the groove and before I know it it’s piled up even higher.

Today’s total was right around 800 and that’s as high as it’s gotten in a while. Many of them were from ex students asking me to critique their acts and as much as I try to offer a helping hand there are not enough hours in a day to keep up with every one of them. I was swamped and some things I had to delete or explain that I just don’t have time to do it.

I’m also up to my hard drive in goofy downloads of farting pigs and love cutesy poems that if I don’t forward to a dozen people in four minutes my wang is going to shrivel and fall off and my breath will smell like a three week old diaper filled with rotten shrimp.

Most of that I delete right away but some of it comes from people I like and I feel guilty if I just delete it without at least reading it first. Usually it’s a waste of time so I just store it and before I know it I’m having nightmarish backup like I am now. I need to stop this.

I spent the entire day today answering the emails I needed to and sorting and deleting all the ones I didn’t and twelve hours later I’m down from 800 to under 100. My head is very confused right now but at least I took the situation by the horns and wrestled it with vigor.

A lot of the emails required some thought or were from people I wanted to actually send a well crafted response and today was the day. I didn’t finish but I put a major dent in it as the day wore on so that made me feel like I accomplished something. I also cleared out all my phone messages and that took a while too. My voice mail was completely packed full.

Much of this was a backlog from last week because it was my birthday and also from all the fuss in L.A. with the TV show. Most people were very nice about it and offered up all their best and that’s always flattering to hear that. I wanted to answer every one of them.

I got some good news too. I’m booked at a club in Appleton, WI coming up in May and I’m glad to get it. I never worked there before and have been trying to get in for a while. It has a great reputation for being a killer room and I look forward to working there. I had to hurry and get some promotional material to them before next week and I mailed it today.

They require a DVD to show clips of upcoming events to their customers and a CD for radio commercials. They want their headliners to have a working website and I called my web person Shelley to help me get that started too. This will all make me a better comic.

Getting the emails out of the way felt good but I really need to find a way to avoid being so lax in the first place to let them pile up this high. I try to keep it under control but there are a lot of other things that just get in the way. Before I know it it’s piled up again and all of this starts over once more. For now, it’s manageable. I would like to keep it that way.