THIS is a CLOSE-UP?

Aside from a brief snapshot of throwing a small can of tomato paste at my mother's head for no obvious reason, most of my earliest memories consist of trying to make people laugh in any way possible. I used the tools that were available to me: my body for standard physical humor -- passing gas through any bodily orifice and variations of "baby fall down" were hoary chestnuts of mirth and merriment -- and my voice for imitations of things I saw and heard. This means that the standard vocal go-to's were pretty typical for a socially awkward skinny white male of a certain age and time -- lines from movies ( Caddyshack , Blazing Saddles , the Monty Python catalog), quotes from television (especially Looney Tunes / Merrie Melodies ,  SNL and The Simpsons ), and so forth -- and while I'd like to say things have changed from then to now, they really haven't. They really haven't. As the spark of singular creation is largely absent in me, I've always been ...

Around the age of 16, I discovered I could dunk a basketball, and the game of basketball suddenly became a bit more fun. When it comes to dunking, most people jump off both feet, leaping towards the hoop via an elegant synchronicity of upper and lower musculature. Sadly, I never had that strong a frame -- my standard joke has always been that I have the body of a 13-year-old African girl, and in my teen years, that wasn't far off -- so I dunked off one foot, pushing off with my left leg. At my jumping peak, I had around a 34" vertical leap, and dunking was relatively easy for a while. Just under twenty years, to be exact. But when you dunk off one leg, that leg will twist in the socket like a mortar and pestle, with each twist grinding a bit of cartilage into nothing. And when you combine thousands of those twists over years of basketball with the odd now-and-again acute trauma -- such as the occasional undercut causing me to crash to the ground -- you end up with bone-on-bo...

After wavering for a couple of years, my friend Brian Siers and I decided to finally make the trip out west in 2004 to a festival called Coachella, about a half-hour east of Palm Springs in a sleepy dessicated burg called Indio. At the time, it was a two-day weekend festival -- the first night featured Radiohead and The Pixies, while The Cure headlined the second night. (I remember lots of things from that weekend, but I still chuckle when I think about Dick Valentine from the band Electric Six thanking Radiohead for being their opening act.) On that first adventure, we didn’t really know what we were doing -- we drove from San Diego instead of Los Angeles, we had no OTC painkillers, we stayed far away from the festival, we were stuck in traffic for hours, and so on -- but we still had a great time. As we came back year after year, our Coachella game got better and better, as we fine-tuned each and every aspect of our adventures. And while the music remained compelling, the trip b...