Stop Me If You've Heard This One

by Kristen Arnett

When I clown, I become something bigger than myself. And hey, I know what it’s like to have to work harder for what I want than anyone else. I’m a queer person living in Florida, aren’t I?

Clowning requires a kind of steeliness that I associate with my coming-out process: the knowledge that there will always be people in life who will hate you for who and what you love.

What Do You Want to Be Remembered For? I want to be remembered for making someone laugh. For them to really fucking feel it, right in their guts. Even if they don’t want to.

She unironically likes Precious Moments figurines and has never ingested a drop of alcohol in her life, and one time she beat up a guy in a parking lot because he told her that her hair sucked. She’s unapologetically interested in the things that she loves; something I can’t often say for myself, a person who loves clowning but hides it from her family because she can’t stand the idea that her own mother might look at her with disgust. A phrase I often hear from Darcy: Who says punk can’t be pink?

How can I turn this into a bit, I wonder. That’s how my brain always chooses to process trauma or grief or anxiety. How can I turn this into something easier to digest?

The clown is my id, greedy and impatient and uncaring of the mess it might make in its quest to get off a good joke.

Shouldn’t all things funny start out with a joke that’s just for me?

Mentorship issues aside, the library sex was incredible.

Time is quickly slipping through my gloved fingers. Right now, I am twenty-eight, but soon I’ll be thirty-one, and then I’ll be forty-eight, and after that fifty-six, and on and on, and maybe things will always be this way, until finally, I’ll be seventy-nine and die alone in bed and never have made it onto a comedy tour or even a carnival circuit.

Orlando is like any other place that’s being slowly but steadily gentrified; we’re swallowed by the sinkhole before we’re even awake enough to know that the house is halfway underground.

Sometimes there’s just nothing a person can say to make a situation better. It’s just going to suck, and that’s it.

It’s like whiplash. That’s the only way to describe it. Over and over again, violence, and then we’re expected to immediately return to normalcy. But I’m not sure we know what “normalcy” is anymore. Is it normal to be a queer person living in a place with a government that actively tries to harm you? Is it normal to know that you might attend a gay club and be gunned down in the middle of the night? But if you don’t return to “normal,” what kind of life are you living? If there’s no joy, then what’s the point?

I wonder if it’s possible to get an ulcer from capitulating to patriarchal bullshit.

Some days I feel loaded up with other people’s loathing. I wonder if there’s a single thing about me that people could just plain love.

I miss him like I’d miss myself. I’ll always wonder what kind of clown I’d be now if he were around to see it.

“You’re a clown?” “Yes, I clown. I clown, therefore I am. I’m down to clown.”

And now we must bid you adieu, our rapt and soulless audience, and entreat you, without question, without qualm, and with great pleasure on behalf of the clown, to please, Go fuck yourselves.

Family are the people we choose to keep. And I’m choosing to let this one go, with love.