Live from Not For You Studios, The Happy Comic Comedy Act with Mr. Jack Happy: "No Means Whatever"

[Act One: Scene Three]

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June 18th, 2008:

Jack knew he would never know who he was. Identity was clay—an unfired lump of mud on his work-table. It was a grade school ashtray, a middle school miniature penis, a high school Futurist knock-off, a college equestrian figurine waving a saber… A young adult’s hobby locked in the closet, shoved behind the shoes, taped in a box, mislabeled, forgotten.

There’s productivity to be had! Work to be done! Money to be made! What need is there of an identity in our capitalist society driven by consumerism, in our popular culture driven by fads? Hark, you can be What You Do! It’s simple, it’s easy, it’s profitable…

…It’s predictably boring. So Jack cleaned out the skeletons from his closet and found his old identity. It was markedly different than what he remembered, though: he remembered noble delusions of intellectual pursuit and Renaissance knowledgeability. He remembered words like “knowledgeability.”

What was Jack to do? His identity was dusty and unrecognizable, some maligned form of a lost truth in darkened memories. Jack was once an Artist, but now what did he have—nothing more than a lot of words he learned in school for describing what he didn’t have. He wold be a Writer.

But, ‘tis the Modern Age, young pioneer! So, being a Writer quickly becomes being a Blogger, and Jack did have himself a Blog for awhile. Until it, too, bored him, and lost its purpose, and gave him no sense of identity; so, instead, he fell in love with a beautiful maiden.

Jack did not live Happily Ever After. Quite the opposite, in fact, for awhile… It was lucky for Jack that he had good friends.

And it was there that Jack knew he had found his purpose. He saw Art in friendship, and he saw an entire generation with that empty reflection in their eyes, that lost identity. Who are any of us, anyway?

Therefore, Jack knew he would never know who he truly was, but he knew he could draw, and write, and talk, and laugh, and cry, and live, and die.

But never love again.