Ordinary Person

I’m sorry, Joink, but I can’t give you this job. You’re too happy to be a clown. Being one isn’t about going to clown school, cheering up a bunch of sick kids in the hospital, blowing balloons or doing cartwheels. It’s so much more than that. There’s a certain depth to this life that only the most miserable, sorrowed slobs know. This isn’t about jumping around, falling off the trapeze, letting the elephant push you around and playing the trumpet badly. A deep, harrowing melancholy saturates this life — one that makes you see the Flame of the Forest in monochrome after a while, that makes you want to peel off your skin and then set yourself on fire. I speak figuratively, of course, but being a merry andrew requires grit. A hardened heart that’s seen so much that it doesn’t care anymore.

Do you really believe that the clowns that work here like farting into a microphone? Do you think they like being chased by monkeys and falling off donkeys? They despise it. They do it because they love to hate their lives. These are fellows who spend all their time snorting cocaine and letting the strongmen sodomise them. They wallow in misery, get drunk, puke their guts out, and then paint their faces white, wear their red noses and embarrass themselves because they don’t see any other way to move forward (if you can call it that).

These are the chaps who don’t wipe their arses after using the shitter, burp before, in between, and after meals, smell like dead rats and long to bone the trapeze artist only to find themselves in a Turkish bath with burly old men sharing them like they were pizza slices. This life isn’t easy, Joink, and it’s the drug-addicted college dropouts, the masochistic cuckolds who’ve lost their wives to big black men and their money to a poker addiction, the creeps and the freaks willing to prostrate themselves before dominatrixes and have their buttocks whipped like nobody’s business who take it up.

You look like the average bozo who’s gone to clown college, learnt a few tricks there, entertained an audience at a talent show, wrestled a few professional wrestlers, and starred in a TV commercial promoting some useless product. You’re not the guy who begs to be buggered harder by dejection after seeing dry land rid of vegetation for most of his life, and you definitely don’t look like someone who can’t separate the art from the artist.

A clown is an artist, and his art is him. It should reach a stage where he’s willing to let his missus squeeze his balls while he’s wearing a chastity belt after a terrible day of falling off ladders and getting trampled by pigs. He should wear his mascara even when he’s sleeping. This isn’t a job, Joink. It’s a life. It’s unmitigated passion emerging from reckless hedonism engendered by unadulterated rejection. Pure, sickening pain leading to chaos and cacophony. The clown is the tortured artist who can’t come to terms with his depression, rejects happiness and roars — his animalistic shriek coming from a place within that he’s afraid to confront. And hence the shit stained clothes, the man thongs, the cocaine, the downers, the sodomy, the torture, the I’ll-do-anything-for-the-audience-as-long-as-you-don’t-ask-me-to-fight-my-demons zeal that makes him stick a baseball bat up his arse if he needs to.

So go back to clown school, teach, get a diploma, make your students blow perfect balloons, but don’t enter the circus. It’s not for you, Joink. Trust me. It’s for men who’re willing to give bespectacled, pornstached men with pictures of Ted Bundy in their pockets, reeking of alcohol and mutton the time of their lives, even if they’re paid lesser than a convenience store clerk. It’s not the job that matters. It’s the art and the artist that does.

P.S. I have nothing against clowns. So if you’re working in a circus, know that I have nothing but respect for you. Clown lives matter too. This post is fiction like many other posts of mine. I write to entertain myself and my readers. I have to add this note because I’ve gotten some weird comments lately by strangers who seem to think I’m writing about them. So yeah, I’ll reiterate that I make stuff up, and that I’m a liar with a bawdy, idiosyncratic sense of humour. Some people like it; others don’t, and it’s their prerogative. So, don’t be a hater, and as for the rest of you, if you want some midweek entertainment, scroll down to my previous posts and you’ll find the bizarre comments.I’m also taking a break from writing, and I will respond to your comments and catch up on my WP reading when I return.