Jessy Delfino's Blog

WE INTERRUPT YOUR LIFE TO BRING YOU A BIT

By day, I'm a jobless, hopeless, meandering freak. I wander from subway car on the 6 to subway car on the N or R, sometimes W, watching people, listening, waiting for something interesting to happen that can be morphed somehow into a crowd pleasing bit. Sometimes something happens. A fat lady carries a large bundle of inflated balloons? Where? What is she, a big fat clown in the circus? What is her agenda? A drunken bum yells at an invisible person sitting next to me because the train never takes him where he wants to go. He stands up and shows the empty seat his torn pants - sliced clean through, as if cut with a knife. What does this mean? Was he in a bum fight? Is this even funny?

Sometimes jokes are born not in the outside world, but in my head, as if by radio broadcast. I'm sitting, eating a cracker, when, blammo! A joke about getting kissed at a lesbian christmas party under the camel toe crawls out of my ear and punches me in the face. As long as I hear, feel, smell, whatever, that little vibration, that 'joke alert' sensation that I am so familiar with, the joke is alive, and soon to be down on paper. Maybe it will make it to the stage later on when I go back through the day's musings. But most of my jokes have the life span of a fruit fly, and are dead even before they get to reproduce or grow wings.

At night, I am a comedian. I get to let my little ones go out into the world. I pick them up, I throw them off the roof, I try to teach them how to fly. Many of them fall to the ground and break their legs, I can see the future before they even hit the tops of the people's heads. But every once in a while, a strong one comes along, as if given to me as a gift, when I'm not even supposed to be able to have this privilige. A special one. The inspiration for the joke, the father, who I don't even remember sleeping with - a cracker, a banana, a ride on the bus. A piece of gum flattened onto the sidewalk. The cold-ass wind. So many forces of nature, modes of transporation and pieces of food are responsible for impregnating me.

That's where I find the little fat babies, because most of my friends are evening friends. At night, we congregate and talk and mutter and write things down in the dark rooms, and we share insight and we talk shit and we complain and we fear the future, all together at the very same time in the same moment. But during the day, I'm a jobless, hopeless, meandering freak, and like a homeless person looking for leftovers, I wander from subway car, to subway car.....