There’s a poetry festival in New Jersey I’ve never even heard of. But now I want to go to it. This big deal poetry festival. Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival. Carlos said he went once in the 90’s. I have FOMO. For something he did in the 90’s. I met a poet tonight who used to help run it. Looks like there’s a lot more to it these days: https://www.njpac.org/series/dodgepoetry/ Maybe there’s not even a festival like there used to be. But it does remind to me to see what the Nuyorican Poets Cafe is up to.

I’ve been having more thoughts like that recently. Things I want to do. Idle fantasies.

Like, I want to go bowling. It happened suddenly, like the way I hated salt and vinegar chips until one day, I just wanted them. Like, my mouth watered for them. Bowling. I mean, I’ve never actively desired to go bowling before. I’ve been a few times over my four decades, and I generally had fun, but I never actively sought it out. And now I want to.

But I don’t want to go Manhattan bowling. I want to go New Jersey bowling. Or Westerly bowling. (The last time I did that, we all got dressed up in costumes and face paint for my friend’s birthday, and bowled like that. Just a bunch of grown-up goofballs partying in bowling shoes.) I just want to go somewhere where they’ve had a bowling alley for, I don’t know, 50 years at least. And you take your kid there for a birthday party. And there are bowling leagues. And a cup of coffee doesn’t cost NINETEEN DOLLARS. Or whatever the going rate is. Not that I drink coffee. But you see what I mean?

A friend of mine’s husband was a part of a stand-up comedy night in Manhattan, and we went to see it while a friend was visiting a couple weeks ago. All three of us had had varying degrees of experiences with stand-up comics, very few of them good. But, you know. THIS time might be different. And we’d all been watching Dropout TV, which really gives you high hopes and expectations for improv and comedy and gaming and just joy in general.

And the stand-up night was… fine. Just fine.

My friend’s husband was the best part, we thought. Didn’t punch down. Wasn’t just flat-out depressing. Or mean. Or meh. He just talked about fun, queer, sexy stuff–the comedy of self, of family, of identity–and it was nicer than being made fun of.

That’s the thing about stand-up comedy: half of it is belittling the audience for not being a better audience, or for being weird-looking. More than half maybe. (Even Dropout’s new stand-up show “Crowd Control” is not innocent of this.) (Not that it needs to be; comedy is many things, many flavors.) (It’s just, I don’t like most of the stand-up that I’ve seen for the aforementioned reasons.)

But I don’t regret going. It broke the pattern of NOT going out. It was something new. Something at night. I like that.

I’m off to a friend’s wedding in New Orleans this weekend on a whirlwind visit, then taking an early, early flight back, and–if all goes well!–hopefully be in time to see the Shakespeare SlayFest that my play is in. Mine is the last show in the line-up, so I may even have some wiggle room to be late. But I hope I’m not.

I was telling Carlos that there are times I feel like I’m having a very “New York Moment.” And I can never tell when I’m going to have one, usually. It often has to do with seeing a show. Or, in this case, being in one. I say this as I’m having a Queens moment: writing in my blog at night, looking out the window, thinking of the city that never sleeps, about 7.1 miles to the west.