All posts by Richard

A Tribute to Mr Hendrick: Comedian, Nice Guy, Hero.

William Hendrick – “NY Johnny”s father – passed away unexpectedly last month and his loss is more than just the passing of someone I know’s dad. Mr Hendrick was a really great man and while lots of people already knew this and I’m sure have been saying so since hearing the sad news – there was another side to him that I feel personally compelled to make sure is recorded for history now that he sadly is no longer among us.

Mr Hendrick was a local politician in the town of Lynbrook Long Island for years before being appointed and then elected mayor and that was always cool to me but I never knew him as or saw him as a politician. My interactions with him were of course always as “Johnny’s dad” but I never thought of him as just a friends dad either. The most defining trait of Mr Hendrick, to me, was that he was one of the most on-point comedians I have ever known…

I was annoyed when I saw this photo – a dour gloomy expression – as the choice by Newsday to illustrate the announcement of his passing, as my memories of how opposite-from-that-depiction he was flooded my mind. Even the local Fios News report of his passing picked gloomy looking photos, which is a real shame because it doesn’t memorialize who or how he was as a person at all.

Mr Hendrick was uniquely humorous…. And he was the best kind of humorous. My preferred kind of comedic delivery. The kind that doesn’t try too hard because it actually doesn’t try at all and just exists because it has no choice. The kind of hilarious that can’t be stopped because it’s not the result of an effort to be jovial or jokey, but rather is just the natural combined result of a high octane mind in the face of the chaos and tragedy of existence that chooses to laugh instead of cry about it. It’s the sort of comical view about things that can only come from a good natured intelligence – a kind hearted nihilism that recognizes that everything either is, or is an opportunity to become, a joke. Not a joke in the traditional sense of a set-up with a punchline, but rather the much harder to do style of improvisational social commentary.

Mr Hendrick’s humor was biting, dry, sarcastic, and most of all: omnipresent. Every situation was an opportunity for comedic addition and there was no “off” button, no matter the context. The news reporter on TV, his sons attempting in earnest to deliver information to him (amidst him messing with them during their attempted delivery), the amount of clutter on the coffee table – all were taken as set-ups to a style of Directors DVD Commentary that was always funny. And that’s the thing – somehow, his gags always landed, and on the rare occasion of a bomb or zinger that didn’t quite make sense because it was ushered out of his mouth before having been fully fine-tuned – he would adeptly flip even that into a solidly constructed laugh line. That is the true trademark of not only a good comedian, but a sharp mind – and the best kind of one requires the other, in my opinion.

It’s times like these when I wish I could share clips of my memories to showcase these moments as examples so that they could be fully enjoyed to the extent that I enjoyed living through them. Like the time when Johnny and I returned home late and started moving our stuff from the living room, awaking Mr H who had fallen asleep on the couch in which within 1.2 seconds of him opening his eyes, asked me – in reference to my gigantic 17-inch Macbook Pro laptop (that they don’t even make anymore) – why I had “a fkking cafeteria tray for a computer”. That’s the kind of thing that makes me laugh even right now as I typed it because it’s just so quick. What dad isn’t angry at being woken up, let alone has a humorists state of mind at that time, let alone is able to conjure it in application to his surroundings within a moment of booting up his brain and pull a reference like that? Mr Hendricks, alone.

Self aware, and ever-conscious of his surroundings, Mr Hendrick unwittingly taught me more about comedy through example than any acting school could have. With most parents-of-friends, there are inevitable awkward moments or lulls in conversation during the filler time you spend with them before, after, or during the hang-out time with that friend – but not with Mr Hendrick. Not ever. Mr Hendrick preemptively sandblasted those moments with his trademark brand of engagement that was like a Standup doing crowd work to the point where I would not dread, not merely tolerate, but actually look forward to getting to talk with him. Whether we were talking about politics, movies, comic book character back-stories, or whether I was talking or arguing about those things with Johnny and Mr Hendrick was moderating the debate – he always had unique and clever additions to the topic. And it wasn’t because he was trying – it was just the natural way he flowed into conversation – A unique quality I’ll miss most. That engagement.
In my experience – Mr Hendrick would razz you, himself, his surroundings and his two sons about absolutely everything. Whether it was a direct shot fired or a mutter to himself, Bill Hendrick had a dry observation that owned the moment. It was awesome. But while no haircut or goofy outfit or misstatement or shared atmosphere was safe from his roasting, you absolutely never felt bad about it because it was never mean spirited. It was never cruel. Even when you were the target of the tease, Mr Hendrick never made you feel picked on and that wasn’t his intention. I admired this in particular about Mr Hendrick because he effortlessly achieved what I couldn’t at the time, and to many extents still haven’t mastered, in that effect. Where as I, even in my light hearted razzing of a person would often be taken as an attack – Mr Hendrick could straight up demolish you and you would actually feel good about it. More typical however was just the type of comedy he would interject into every situation. Whether it was something universally regarded as ridiculous, something none of us thought as ridiculous until his commentary, or something as mundane as the deli (or one of his sons) bagging the wrong type of bagels he wanted – Mr Hendrick had a way of adding a dry barb to the situation with just the right tone, comment, or sometimes just a Ralph Cramden/Honeymooners-esque reaction that got a point across, humanized the context, and challenged you while keeping things pleasant all at once.

And that was the kind of brain he had. The kind that cut through the superficialities of this existence and asked the real life questions on all true deep-thinkers minds – like – “Which cartoon sidekick could carry his own show as a spin-off?”. His choice was Patrick Star from Spongebob Squarepants – and he was totally wrong about that choice of course – but the fact that he even deliberated over the question is what matters. I argued with him (somewhat to poor Johnnys dismay as I think he tired of those kinds of mock-debates after the first 2 rounds, where as my tone deaf self would extend them to infinity) for at least an hour over why there was no way in hell Patrick Star could carry his own show and vigorously defended my own pick (from his list of choices) of Woodstock from Snoopy/Peanuts, stating that while Woodstock speaks in animated form only through squeaking, he could usher in a new era of non-dialog driven animation that had huge potential – far more than the lovable dope schtick that Patrick offers.

But Mr Hendrick, like a good attorney defending his client, delivered a thoughtful defense of Patrick Star because, as he said, he was the working class little guy who always tried in earnest, arguing that he wasn’t so much “dumb” as depicted but just operated on a different wavelength and was mostly misunderstood. I could assume that that’s a similar feeling he took to his politics, now that I think of it – not that his constituents were dopes like Patrick of course, but that even those who appear to be dopes have stories to tell and aren’t just the supporting characters on the sidelines of life but often are deeply misrepresented and unfairly ridiculed by the mainstream. Perhaps that is a stretch on my part, but I still think that those who knew him solely as a politician might find it of comforting interest that in a private moment, with no outsiders listening in, vigorously cross examining his sons friend over cartoon series feasibility – Mr Hendrick believed in the working class little guy and defended him – even in animated sea creature form – from the elites.

My specific dot-connection there, aside – In the respect of defending the little guy at large, the dude really was a hero. I was always observing clearer, less murky examples of this and always appreciated his diligence as it always seemed to be extra from what someone in his position might be expected to do or say or try. NY Johnny, whom many of you know is, and always has been a gifted artist, drew a portrait a decade ago representing his dad titled “unsung hero” and I remember thinking at the time that it was spot-on. *UPDATE: In the process of posting this piece, I saw that Johnny mentioned this in a most excellent eulogy to his father, recanting that title after seeing the hundreds of people who appreciated and loved his father turn out and say kind things about him, adding that he would addendum that title from “unsung hero” to simply “hero”, and I love that sentiment. But to continue with my previously written comments on that subject:

Mr Hendrick was an under-appreciated gem, not only from being a font of comedy but being a tirelessly good guy. Admiration of his high octane brain made me realize he went above and beyond in other areas of his life as well. and he didn’t need to. Middle aged, divorced, with two grown up kids starting their own lives, and a government job – no one would have blamed him for doing or being less. He could have easily relaxed or worse – given up and become an Al Bundy type character, cynically moping through life. But he didn’t. For whatever demons he no doubtably internally suffered – He kept hustling. He continued serving the town of Lynbrook as an active and involved Mayor. He kept his nihilistic humorist view of life always on an upbeat tone that satirized the cynical instead of embracing its darkest parts. The man had bittersweetness to his outlook but didn’t let it metastasize into selfishness or self destruction and as a person with a similar outlook on the theater of Life, it’s a lesson I’ll always carry with me.

There would have never really been any way I could have ever communicated this to Mr Hendrick while he was alive I guess, but I’m still sad I’ll never be able to in the future. It’s been awhile since I saw him in person last as Johnnys wedding was a family and local-friends only affair but the blessing of my detailed memory allows me to revisit with specificity and clarity a lot of the moments I had experienced with him.

It’s a loss that I won’t get to riff with him anymore or bounce goofy thoughts off of him or even just hear him say “HI RICHID” in a theatrically gravely voice ever again. I am crestfallen that his grandkids won’t have his razor wit keeping them on their toes and so sad for my friends Johnny and Billy whom he left behind.

God Bless William Hendrick. A man I’m glad I knew.

 

 


This Article posted on the Richardland Life Journal, not to be confused with the satirical/humor blog located @ richardland.com proper.

Getting to Texas for my stupid Birthday

Planes oversold like a motherfkker so i’m still home in North Hollywood tonight, March 17th 2017. I’ll be trying to leave for Dallas again at 6AM. it’s the end of spring break and I’m flying on a standby ticket so I can only snatch a seat if there are un-solds and no-shows. today was competing with 50 other standby waiters. barf. Finally gave up and came back. Will spend birthday at the airport all day. woot [but worth it].

I don’t celebrate your accomplishments long enough

I often don’t dwell long enough on the accomplishments of my business partners before moving on to the next problem they/we need to fix and thats kindov shitty. My nature as a problem solver has its benefits in business, and especially the kind of business that requires lots of those balls in the air being juggled – but a major downside is in the glossing over on the completions in the meantime.

When we fix a flat tire, my instinct is to say “great&goodjob and now what about the transmission and oil and steering fluid and double-axel-piston-valve-port” (idk cars). But that’s kindov obnoxious. Especially if the person changing the tire isn’t a mechanic and even more so if they didn’t know how to change a tire before they learned just to change that one. That deserves some dwelling over before just racing ahead to the next problem to solve or otherwise it can be discouraging as a person is faced with a seemingly endless list of problems.

That’s how I see life, of course (an endless sea of problems that we have to be diligent not to drown in) and while that mentality might be a good way for me to charter my ship, I am recently seeing that it has a drown-y effect on others. It’s a bummer to do something good and then have the immediate next-thing be a new thing that is wrong and needs work and attention, time and energy to solve and otherwise deal with.

I should be better about this and will try to be, but the first step is knowing it about myself and warning others that it is a problem within my nature to skip over the good and scurry right to the next thing that is not-so-good. I excuse this about myself because 1) I don’t deny people recognition for their accomplishments and 2) I celebrate people as a whole after they’ve collected a series of impressive points that make me swell with pride or admiration over them but the problem with both those points is that 1) Sometimes a quick thumbs up isn’t enough or appropriate for the effort put into the accomplishment and 2) if you don’t enjoy the small accomplishments enough, it is less motivating to make the big ones – especially when the small ones lead to the big ones. If you’re building a pyramid, each milestone and perhaps each day of brick laying should be celebrated, not just the grand opening of the finished product. ps: is it telling that the first construction example I thought of was one traditionally built by slave labor? oops.

I don’t mean to be a slave driver. I mean to do excellent things.  I’m hard on those in the trenches because that excellence can only be earned with diligence from tough soldiers. Further, an obsession with success is what allows me to lead those troops to those excellent things in the first place, so I don’t want to lose that – but along the road I do recognize the need for motivation acknowledgement more than what I currently do.

I’ll do better. You’ll all do the same. But I’ll make you feel better about it.

 

 

Charmander’s High School Photo (meme)

“When yuh girl shows you a pic ‘from high school’ and you realize it was taken in June of this year”.

6 months ago, this chick was in high school. That’s amusing because it doesn’t seem like it, and that’s the only reason it’s a joke. If she was an immature dumbass then it would be embarrassing that I’m stooping so low but instead it’s a hilarious coincidence. That’s a good thing to notice and log for posterity.

Sunrise Wig hike (without the sunrise or wigs)

Continuing my lack of going to sleep before 7am all this month, Russian-Anna suggested a sunrise hike at 5AM and Anastasia suggested we do it in stupid wigs.

I was down for both but figured neither would happen. To my surprise, I got a confirmation text at 4-somethingAM from Anna and within the hour she was there to pick us up, wigs and all.

We arrived at the Malibu mountains on time but at no point for a sunrise to be visible and while the girls thought the wigs were still going to happen, I knew a shorter more local hike was the time to do something like that and let that just die.

The hike was good though. More images forthcoming.


Breakfast for Lunch, Kills…

Think twice before you go against Nature and God and decide that you can just have your bacon&eggs and eat it too.

24 hours after going out to an afternoon breakfast with Tisch – she’s posting to social media laid up in the Emergency Room from some kind of virus that I googled and then got immediately bored with because it wasn’t about me or whatever.

 

breakfast for lunch

Also don’t forget that “that which doesn’t kill us, only makes us hurt in the meantime, adding more gratuitous setback to an already ultimately meaningless existence in a cruel and disorderly world of relentless suffering that weakens our body and spirit on this conveyor belt to nothingness where we’ll all be forgotten anyway”. Amen.

“Work with you to make money and build things? Nah. I’d rather do it for free”

Why do people hate making money and building things that benefit them? It makes no sense to me yet ever since the advent of social media, my biggest struggle has been in convincing people to de-value social currency in favor of actual currency.

It started with Myspace picture comments and now it’s Facebook likes and Twitter stats. Those things are only useful if you make them useful towards something, and they are fine as a metric towards that end but if you subjugate that end and make the digital approval of strangers the only currency you traffic in, then you are wasting your life.

That’s just a truism on its own but in regards to people within my sphere, it becomes unconscionable because I’m actually trying to leverage those platforms for things that matter. Thus when people insist on using those things exclusively for things that *don’t* matter – they are not only wasting their own time but they’re undermining what i’m trying to do and trying to make them a part of. It is short-sightedness that I have little tolerance for, especially after the 99th time explaining it.

Not to pick on individuals more than others but to do exactly that for just a moment: I have been unsuccessfully trying to get Anna to leverage Facebook for years but the Likes are more valuable than the dollars the same uploads and efforts she does in Facebook would yield. Same with Anastasia who doesn’t do anything on any social media except Instagram and I can’t get her to do the same things she’s doing there – even if it is literally just embedding the same IG uploads to a brand to build – because again, the immediate social currency isn’t there. The worst (unsurprisingly) though is Wyatt, who is completely obsessed with Twitter and has the nerve to excitedly brag to me how many interactions his tweets yield. It’s infuriating that he insists on getting thousands of twitter views, mentions, replies, and retweets and its all for absolute nothing. His Twitter name is some less character version of “BulletProofDiction” (bltprfdction? idfk) yet he has no blog he either maintains or links to (even to an ancient version) – YET – his display name is his full name… If that sentence wasn’t immediately obvious to you on why and all the reasons it is stupid beyond belief: Brand building means actually building a brand… If he wants it to be his name then it should be a him-centric account promoting his website. It isn’t. If he wants it to be the Twitter for a website he runs, it should be an account for that website that links to it in the bio and in frequent tweets. It doesn’t. It’s the worst of both worlds and is a total waste. and he’s happy to be wasting it all on activity that doesn’t matter.

I don’t know why I can’t drive this simple concept home… It’s not that Twitter doesn’t matter. It’s that he refuses to make Twitter matter. You have it explained to you what to do and what not to do – you claim to agree – you get specific instructions and claim to accept them – and then ignore it all to go right back to whatever you are used to.

How is this not unclear at how insulting and annoying this is?… I didn’t get insulted and annoyed and say I don’t want to work with people like this because they use a micro-blogging communication service. What I hate are instances where their approval-based dog mentality (that I think is gross and that they are gross for embracing instead of fighting) manifest themselves in ways that show a clear ignorance and apathy for the goals and work I am focusing on in addition to the detriment and dead weight in exactly that sector.

It’s like you love raking leaves for the fun of it and because people give you positive attention for it and I say “hey, I actually have a leaf-raking business. Why don’t you keep doing what you’re doing using a LeafMeAlone Inc rake and hat I’ll give you and then when people come to the company because of it, you’ll be a part of that action and increase the attention, love-of-doing, and significance of what you like doing anyway – and you claim to be enthused only for months to go by not doing it and you come up to me expecting me to share your excitement that your non-branded raking got thumbs ups from a tour bus passing by, showing me the pictures of the people in the bus raising their thumbs while I continue putting in the long hours in my leaves removal business I feel strongly about.

STILL they choose familiar-waste-that-feels-fun over new-growth-and-evolution.

Why do people hate progress, productivity and making money so damn much?

I live to to work… (not work to live)

Realized something big about myself that I guess I always knew but didn’t… realize. Geez. You’d think I would have crafted that sentence better or at least avoided using “realize” twice. “I came to the realization of something that I suppose I always knew but never truly… — crap. No. There isn’t a better word for it.

 

Okay – Start over:

 

I only exist to work and it’s something you should know about me.

 

While talking about my endless grind and trying to evangelize it to Dwayne across a Steak n Shake table in my trip to Missouri this month he brought up the question of “do you live to work? or work to live?”. The reason for anyone saying that phrase is to highlight the fact that work shouldn’t control you or be your life and that you should remember that you only work so you can live the way you want and not the reverse. But for me, it really is the reverse. I suspect it is for many entrepreneurs but who gives a fkk about them – the point here is that I LIVE TO WORK. It’s what I’m all about. It’s all I care about. It’s the only reason I get out of bed every day.

 

Not just the act of working – I’m not an oxen for frick sakes – but MY work. My work is my life. It’s more important to me than traveling or building life experiences or comfort or pleasure or ice cream or any other perk of being alive one can think of.

 

I live to do my work. I’m not on this planet for my tombstone to read “He watched a lot of tv” or “He visited a lot of cool places” or even “He shagged a lot of pretty blonde girls and ate a lot of pizza”. Those things are meaningless in comparison to my actual life’s work. It’s my motivating factor, my life blood, my Force, my existence expressed in action. If I die before it is significantly off the ground then whoah be unto you, mankind, for you missed out on a wild ride. And double whoah unto me personally, for I will have truly wasted my adult life. But oh well. That is the gamble I’m making. This is where all my chips are bet (betted? bought? bit? buttered?). I’m in it to win it and it’s all-in or nothing.

 

If you know or understand nothing about me – know this: My work is my life and the thing that consumes my entire existence.

 

Now lets just hope I get to see it to its proper heights and live long enough to enjoy some of its spoils.

 

Cheers, bitches.

My first rejection

I was 4 years old and one of the kids I would play with in the neighborhood was riding her bike down my street. She was a few years older than me so to 4 year old me she might as well been 21 in the way I viewed her so in that sense I looked to her as an authority and someone who knew their shiz.

 

As she approached my house I exclaimed “wanna play!?” and she replied “yea, but not with you” – and she continued riding her bike down the street.

 

I was stunned. Yes, she DID want to play… but… no… not with…me?

 

It made perfect sense what she said but that reaction was one I had never even considered before. Up until that moment in my life I had only thought about either wanting to play or not wanting to play. Not being in the mood for play was understandable but I thought that if someone did want to play, then that’s the end of the analysis. The concept of wanting to play with some over others changed my whole perspective about the world. Merely existing was not enough. I had to achieve. I had to win people over. I had to be someone people would want to play with.

 

And thus the journey started…