Open mics are to self-help what Columbine was to school spirit: A step in the wrong direction.

Big laugh. Meta as hell. Enough time has passed to where it works. Crowd loves it. They carry me out of there like Rudy.

The days of facial ignorance are behind me, I’m slowly morphing into a hobgoblin of the highest order in my 23-years and I’m done shaking my gargoyle fist at the stars about it. I am a man surely soon to be damned to a life in the shadows of some long-forgotten David Cronenberg cathedral. With a missing canine tooth, the hair of a disgruntled Locks For Love terrorist, and one functioning pair of ink-stained Levi’s, I look more like the type of guy who writes erotic Neil Young fan fiction than a dude who you’d want to help give directions to the nearest ugly haven.