Building callouses

It gets to be a grind going to all these mics and churning away on new material. Was talking with Mark last night about it. He mentioned some other folks who do similar shows but never go to mics. They only do booked shows. While we come up with a new five minutes almost every week (admittedly, lots of it is trash), they do normal sets and slip in one new joke here or there. And prob maintain a lot of sanity in the process. Nothing saps your will to live more than a shitty mic.

But of the people he named, they had mostly been doing it twice as long as us. I can see how your approach might change then. But for us, for now, we kinda agreed the grind is still the way to go. Can't say for sure until yer on the other side but it feels like there's a period where you're still building a foundation. Where constantly writing new stuff and getting up all the time, even at mics, is teaching you the process of being funny. Writing all those new bits is building up inventory. Even if ya wind up not using something, it's there to revisit later if ya can thread it in with something else.

And those stage reps are how you build callouses. Each joke that does or doesn't work is teaching you something. And each shitty room is preparing you to handle anything.

At least that's what I keep telling myself.