Who is Remi Account?

I don’t know how to answer this so I’m taking a personality quiz online. I’ll let you know how it went in a future answer.

Okay I started the quiz but it is way too long but I’ll tell you how it went so far.

It seems as if I am creative, unorganized, depressive, anxious, kind, critical, open – I got bored writing this list so I went back to the quiz and discovered I’m a “Stargazer” which means I lie back, look up at the skies and dream.

What inspires you?

My psychosis and the psychosis of others. Insanity has great curative potential but often leads to destruction because its power is boundless and mostly untamable.

I enjoy when people take bits of chaos and shape them into something structural while still preserving the massive power of delusion, hallucination, and other such mental oddities.

What is important to you about comedy?

It is silly and fun. Nothing is better than that. Nothing.

What's your perspective on today's communication?

I only communicate through a seemingly random series of clicks and whistles so I’m sort of out of touch. What I’m doing here is implying I’m a creature.

how would you describe your sensibilities?

I’m working on this new thing called cottagecore that I think describes me prettttty well. My sensibility forces me to lie like this, to make jokes about cottagecore. Do you understand now?

What work are you most proud of?

I don’t really look at my work in those terms. I am pleased/displeased with something and then it fades into my mind and I don’t think about it again. I am easily discouraged and hardly proud.

What are the plans for Remi Account?

Nothing. If you think it should be something please reach out to me and tell me I’m doing a good job and should do more, or give me any sort of feedback. I might do something then because of my shallow egoistic nature.

The story, all names, characters, and thoughts portrayed in this production are fictitious. No identification with actual persons, places, concepts, feelings, and products is intended or should be inferred.

“Coming to the stage, Pauly Shore, on deck we have Wesley Silverman.”

Wesley stands up against the back wall of The Comedy Store. The wall begins to rumble. He turns and sees that it’s Pauly strutting to the stage. Embarrassed, Wesley texts his mom. “I accidentally leaned on Pauly Shore at the comedy club for like 10 minutes. Fuck my life.” His mom responds in seconds with “what?” Wesley is happy to receive her text, as it proves she is still alive.

Pauly is on a lot of drugs. Nobody in the audience is concerned or saddened by this; they are just happy he is having fun. He dances sadly on stage, making his hat fall off. He decided to be a “hat guy” a few days ago after seeing two bald men sitting next to each other on the curb outside a Chipotle. One of them was hatless and depressed while the other, a happy bald man, wore a novelty baseball cap that read either, “IF IT HAS TITS OR TIRES YOU’RE GONNA HAVE PROBLEMS” or “IF IT HAS TITS OR TIRES I CAN MAKE IT SQUEAL.” Pauly, who struggles with depression, memory loss, insomnia, and male-pattern baldness, took this as a sign. He spends the rest of the three minutes on stage trying to make people laugh with jokes about his life: Pauly is lonely because his girlfriend left him, lonely because his girlfriend took the dog, and lonely because the maid that cleans his mansion only cleans the rooms he is too scared to enter so they can’t “hang.” Everyone laughs heartily at his misfortune. He does not pick up his hat as he exits the stage. It is the only one he owns.

“Coming to the stage, Wesley Silverman, on deck we have… no one! Make sure to tip your wonderful waitstaff!” The wonderful waitstaff blushes.

Wesley panics. He did not sign up for open mic, and he did not hear them call his name before; he was distracted by thoughts of his mom being a corpse. He cannot do this. He is not funny.

“Excuse me, I can’t do this. I’m not funny.”

The emcee informs him that if he does not go up, he’ll face a week-long ban from performing. Wesley sees hatred in the emcee’s eyes. If he doesn’t perform, he might be banned for life; he will probably be dragged into some alley and beaten until he’s dead. It will definitely be painful and slow and miserable. The news won’t even cover his death because it will be too sad and confusing. His feet start to sweat and swell. His vision fades and blurs at the thought of dying before his mom. She’s in a hospital, she should die first, this is not fair. He goes on stage. In the front row, he sees most of his coworkers and his sister. Is this a prank? Did they sign him up? Is that a crime? It doesn’t matter.

He walks on stage, anxiety devastating his mind. “What is this place, some sort of play?” gesturing backwards at what he thought was a red curtain but is actually a brick wall. It definitely was before. Maybe Pauly had them remove it?

“This mic stand looks like a black stick.” He’s floundering, no laughs, but the audience is intrigued. This is the sort of alt-anti-comedy that certain audience members wake up for. Some of them have even been caught saying on public access that they might have ended their lives if not for strange comedy. The host, usually a comic, nods, hugs them solemnly, and tells the audience that the goal of their humor is to preserve life.

With the worst possible comic timing, Wesley continues. “What’s up with this floor? Is it wood?” It is not. He thinks of his not dead mom and how he could have put her in a better hospital.

He’s afraid. He pivots to crowd work.

“The guy in front looks kind of weird, like a centipede or something. How many legs do you have, sir?” Pauly laughs uncontrollably. “The guy in the back knows what I’m talking about!”

I don’t know where that came from.

The targeted man responds, “Two.” Wesley, in a state of comedic terror, does not hear him. He only hears the sound of laughs, his nervous internal ramblings, and the echoes of his shrieking anxiety.

“Y’all ever notice how bright these lights are? What are they trying to do, blind me?” The lights get brighter, or at least seem to. Pauly laughs harder and nods as if to say “true that.”

I’m on a roll.

“How come women are so scared of centipedes? I mean, men are too, I don't mean to generalize, but generally, women act more scared, sometimes at least. Come on, it's only a centipede, ladies.” This light sexism will not resonate with the Los Angeles crowd, and Wesley knows it. His audience is not the audience, however: it is Pauly Shore. Wesley looks to the back and sees Pauly asleep on a freshly made bed. Fuck.

Wesley’s sister and coworkers have left at this point. Not because of anything that was said. They just had better things to do. Wesley understands completely.

“Oh, one more thing about the light joke: centipedes are blind. Are you trying to make me into a centipede? With all those legs, there is no room for eyes, I guess.” Everyone laughs. Wow. His sister returns when she hears the uproar. She has to pay another five dollars to get in again. His coworkers want to come back too, but they are too broke and spend the rest of their lives on the streets.

“So, work sucks…” the audience members are leaning forward in their seats. “...because of all the centipedes.” The crowd turns to one-another and decide, in unison, that what he said was funny. Laughter fills Wesley’s ears like an infection. He feels good. His sister, seeing her brother comfortable for the first time since their father’s death, frowns.

The spotlight is getting brighter. Why? Wesley can’t see anything but the mic and half of its stand. His ears start to bleed as the laughter makes its way into his brain.

I place my hands to my ears and don’t feel any blood.

Wesley’s vision turns white. It hurts. There is only laughter.

I see the pure light transform into something familiar, a kitchen? I hear nothing.

It is 6:01 PM. My dad is late, today of all days, and I’m getting hungry. He usually brings home some sort of meat. I am excited to eat it. I am six years old and nothing makes me happier than meat. When I stop eating meat at age ten, I will miss it, but it wasn’t worth the anxiety; at age eight I started reflecting on what the animals thought before they were slaughtered as I ate them. Only some of the thoughts were happy.

My dad comes through the doggy door. I don’t find that joke of his funny, but maybe that stems from my chronic lack of humor. He is carrying a cat crate. Oh god, I don’t want to eat a cat.

“Sorry I’m so late, bud. Check out what I got.” A centipede crawls out of a hole in the crate. It could have crawled out at any time, but it decided now was best, which seems quite polite. It is a foot long and so black I can’t make out any detail.

“A millipede?” I don’t want to eat this.

“No, it’s a centipede!” He lets out a genuine laugh at my lack of skill in identifying bugs. “Millipedes went extinct, remember? Remember?”

“I don’t want to eat it.”

He laughs again, “No, no, no, I got this little guy for you as a pet! I thought I would get you an early Christmas present.” It is December 24th. “Her name is Charlie.”

I eye Charlie, trying to make out anything other than darkness. Charlie crawls into my dad’s mouth. Is she trained for that, or is my dad just being a freak? I dare not ask when he has his mouth full.

He is coating Charlie in saliva. “Mmph mmph mph mmm?”

“I do not want to hold her right now. I’m scared.”

He spits out Charlie, sopping wet, onto his arm. “C’mon bud, what are you scared of?”

He never calls me bud twice in one day.

“Centipedes.”

My dad fakes a frown. “You create your own reality, I suppose. You are your own thoughts! I guess I’ll have to kill her then. Where is my tiny hammer?” He always does this. It will lead to his demise.

My dad lets off a life-ruining scream as Charlie crawls off of his arm and under a newspaper on the table. Front page. “Millions Dead”

My dad continues to scream, but words are coming out now. “That cunt bit me! I’m going to die. I’m going to die. I know it is a natural part of life, but I’m so scared. Bud, I’m not ready.” Cunt is a bit harsh, I think – and sexist.

I need to call for help. I run to the upstairs bathroom, the only place we keep a phone in the house, and open the bathroom door. However, the door opens up to the kitchen, where my dad lies motionless. I go outside to look for neighbors, specifically a doctor-neighbor, but all the houses are abandoned.

“Son, stay with me as I die, nobody will come in time to save me.” His veins are turning black.

I sprint up to the bathroom once more, this time met by a locked door. So I go back down the stairs, which has since been transformed into a slide. I hate this place.

I check under the newspaper for Charlie. She’s gone. I sit by my dying father while surveying the room for centipedes.

“Son – I mean bud – there’s a pistol upstairs your grandfather stole off an enemy soldier. Go grab it and shoot me through the head. I’m too weak to pull the trigger myself. Please, kill me”

For personal reasons, I do not want to kill my dad. I know he won’t accept such a selfish response, so I try to lie. “I can’t go upstairs because the stairs turned into a slide.”

“Bud, I know you think that’s a lie, but the stairs really did turn into a slide, so you’re right, you can’t.” He talks clearly through the bile pouring out of his mouth. “Just stay by my side and don’t leave no matter what, even if you have to go to the restroom, you promise? I love you.”

“I promise.”

He dies at 12:01 AM. He suffered greatly and didn’t experience a moment of happiness in his final hours alive. All of his veins are black, including the ones in his eyes and dick. My mother comes home with my sister the next morning after their girls-only camping trip. The girls cry for ten minutes before burying him in the backyard. I am not allowed to watch, so I go to the bathroom instead.

Charlie was seen once more years later in our living room. She was as long as the couch and recliner combined. Only I saw her. Nobody believed me.

Applause.

As I start to walk off, I trip on a loose sparking wire, which charges me in such a way that I stick to the brick wall on the stage. A spotlight illuminates me. No one tries to pry me down because nobody there loves me. My phone rings, but I am too stuck to answer it. Luckily, my ringtone is a soothing instrumental track titled “Very Quiet Sleepy Time Melody” I stole from a Thai Buddhist website, so it doesn’t bother me much.

A romantic straight couple or some siblings walk on stage and tell me how amazing my act was. It was their favorite of the night. They really enjoyed the bit where I talked about having sex with my wife and getting worried centipedes would come out of her vagina but then realizing that no self-respecting centipede would leave such a warm, cozy home. They laugh recounting it. I tell them I don’t remember saying that They tell me more things they liked about my set, all centipede stuff. I tell them I don’t remember any of it, but they keep talking. Can they hear me? The couple, or siblings, maybe even friends wish me luck getting off the wall and exit stage right. They walk past Pauly Shore’s bed and remove their earplugs, throwing them, from a few feet away, into a cup of water with a toothbrush in it by his bedside. If I made that throw I would have celebrated. They’re so fucking cool.

The lights start to fade so that Pauly Shore, star of Bio Dome and Encino-Man, can get some rest. Maybe I’ll be able to sleep too without the mouth-based snoring (due to enlarged tonsils) of my life partner and wife, who are the same person. As my vision reduces to a horizontal slit, I focus in on Pauly’s cup of water. The earplugs didn’t actually go in! They are teetering on the edge of the glass, rocking back and forth as if they are sentient and scared of heights. I can’t sleep with this sort of tension. I fill up my lungs and blow, not as hard as I can, but close, at the earplugs forty feet away, which works way better than seems possible. The earplugs fall into the water and cause a cannonball-sized splash, coating Pauly in an inch and a half of water. He wakes up slowly, rubbing his soaked eyes and brushing his wet teeth with his now-dry toothbrush. He brushes for the exact length of his open mic set. For the last minute, he unblinkingly stares at me. I am enamored. I like a hygienic man who pays attention to me.

“What time is it?” Pauly asks in his famously annoying voice. I love him.

I look at my wrist as if I am wearing a watch, but I can’t lift my arm up, so I abandon the gag. One time doing an open mic and I think I can do gags. I must be insufferable now. When I go home to my wife, I bet she’ll take one look at me and hand me divorce papers. I’ll ask her how she got divorce papers so quickly and how she knew I was insufferable only at a glance, but she won’t respond because she’ll be too disgusted. She might spit in my face, though, which would be a shame considering I’ve been asking her to do that to me in the bedroom since we got married. She said she didn’t want to degrade me, but now that we’re getting divorced, she doesn’t care? I would have rather been beaten to death by the emcee (or my wife!) instead of going up and suffering such heartbreak. I cry.

Pauly ignores my tears. “What time is it, man?”

“I don’t fucking know!” I scream. I can’t see much through the tears coating my eyes, but I can tell Pauly is moving towards me, probably by walking.

Pauly, hatless and vulnerable, starts humming along to my phone ringtone, which I just noticed has been playing non-stop since I got stuck to the wall. He’s trying to calm me down with his serenading. So he is sanitary and empathetic? Swoon. The humming shifts into words.

“It’s alright, I love you, it’s not that scary, I will not harm you. I am the knife you hold to protect you. You only have one thing, one thing to lose; when your head makes your eyes move in reverse, and they detach from your brain, simply unsay these words: there is a place that you’ll never visit, you are not real, they are not real, nothing happens that doesn’t happen forever, I am Pauly Shore and this is my song.”

It’s an impressive song despite it not rhyming a lot, and when it does it’s mostly repetitions of the same word. He is standing right in front of me. We are the same height. “Did you write that?”

“No.”

“You have a beautiful singing voice.” I lie, I think.

He stares off into a nearby wall and twirls his hair around with his finger, saying nothing. I jiggle around a little bit to demonstrate I am stuck and am not just being weird.

Pauly speaks after a minute or two of silence. His hair is aggressively twirled-up. “First time doing open mic? A lot of first-timers get stuck up there. Some never come down.” Now I know why there are skeletons on the wall next to me. My jiggling turns into a ferocious struggle.

Pauly laughs. “Don’t worry, I can get you down. Give me a minute or two, muchacho.” He goes back to twirling his hair, but in the opposite direction as to straighten it. He ties it up with a hair tie he finds in my pocket. I want to tell him it is my wife’s, but I don’t want to knock him out of the zone. I also want to tell him I’m 45 years old and am no longer considered a young man or “muchacho” as he puts it. He is 73, so perhaps I am one to him. I blush.

“The Weasel will come to your aid in uno momento.” He opens his coat, pulls out a leather satchel with a lock on it, tries the lock for a while before giving up, takes off his shoe, grabs a knife hidden under the sole, slashes the satchel open, and drinks the reddish-pinkish slush that comes out. “The hardest part about summoning the weasel is keeping the juice cold.” He is visibly pushing back a brain freeze. His muscles bulge. He grabs onto both my arms – oh my – and pulls me off the wall, ripping most of my clothes off in the process. He pulls out thirteen ice packs from his coat and hands it to me. I put it on to protect his eyes from my semi-nakedness. Pauly does not offer me jeans, even though he is wearing two pairs: khaki and blue. I am still grateful. I thank him for a pathetic amount of time until he goes back to sleep in his soaked bed. I ask the waitstaff to tuck him in, but they are not there, so I tuck him in myself and leave the waitstaff a $3.25 tip.

Walking outside, I see my cobalt vintage car is gone. I deduce it is a theft from a note on the parking meter. “I had to take your fucking car. Sorry! -S.'' I also deduce my phone has stopped ringing as I can clearly make out the whispers, or tinnitus, as my doctor says. I check all my pockets to no avail, as I have no pockets ever since my jeans got ripped off by Pauly Shore. I try the door to The Comedy Store, and it opens up into a kitchen. Nope. Not doing that shit again. I close the door and try opening it again. This time it’s locked. I try the door for a few more minutes at about .5 tries per second until it is unlocked and opens to the right place. The lights in the club are completely off, but it still seems darker than it should be. A spotlight flickers on, illuminating my shredded pants, which are now sitting on a wooden stool. As I walk closer, I am unable to see any part of my body until I step into the spotlight. I search through my pockets and pull out my phone, which no longer has a case, and turn it on. A message pops on the screen. “You’re Cell-Phone is out of battery. Please see/read user manuel and to learn how to fix it. Thank.. You!.” The message is accompanied by a smiling emoticon. The smile takes up most of the screen and is incredibly bright. I’ve never seen it before on my iPhone, and I have scrolled through all my emojis really carefully as of the latest update. Then again, I’ve never let it die before and will never let it again. I stow it away in one of the impossible-to-locate coat pockets.

I go outside and start walking to my house. There are no cars on the road. What time is it? It doesn’t matter regardless because nobody is going to pick up a man with no pants on, at least I wouldn’t. My journey is a horrible affair as I'm thirsty, my feet hurt, and I’m 45 years old. On the bright side, quite literally, the large smiling emoticon produces enough light for me to see where I’m going. Every so often I turn my phone around to see if the emoticon changed its expression to more fittingly match my situation, but it never does. The sun rises and still nothing populates the roads, so I pretend to be a car for a bit until I get hit by a semi-truck carrying a silo full of live turkeys. We are going about the same velocity, so little damage is done to any of our bodies. Besides the turkeys, they all died.

The sun is five hours from directly overhead when I reach my house. My wife is going to be so upset. She’ll never love me again. I brush myself off before entering, but I am covered in so much mud and blood and feathers that it doesn't really work. I don’t know when I got covered in the stuff, but I’m semi-glad I did because it looks like I’m wearing some sort of jeans, even if they are too punk for my tastes. Also, my shoes are missing?

“Honey, I’m home!”

Actually, I don’t say that. It’s not only cliché, but inappropriate given the circumstance of me being covered in blood and such. I do think it would be a funny gag, though. I’m insufferable.

Wesley walks into his home and greets his wife with silence. She sits in the living room watching CNN. They are reporting on a recently discovered mass grave of soldiers and civilians. He walks up behind her like a creep and clears his throat. She turns and meets his bloody, dirty, feathery underwear and then, after a while of upward searching, his eyes.

“How did open mic go? Did you kill?”

Wesley looks at her, stupefied. “I didn’t go up.”

“The whole point was for you to go up! Did you chicken out? The feathers make you look like you did! Ha ha ha ha.”

“Well, I did. But I was only there to watch. I think my sister or coworkers pranked me and put me on the open mic list. It was humiliating. But I met this nice guy, Pauly Shore. He helped get me unstuck from a wall. There were skeletons up there. I could’ve died. I’m so happy to see you.”

“So, you lied to me, you did do the open mic.”

“I’m sorry. It’s been a really hard day. I don’t mean to lie. Please don’t divorce me.”

“I’m just fucking with you, Wes! I see one open mic didn’t make you take anything less seriously. We’ve got to get you back up there! I’m glad your sister showed up, it’s been years, yeah?”

Wesley cries semi-inconsolably.

Why won’t she acknowledge what happened to me? Why is she acting like it was my idea to go up? Why can I only think about centipedes? Nobody loves me is why. Nobody loves me.

“I love you, Wes.”

Wesley doesn’t believe her.

“I love you too, Zee.”

Wesley goes upstairs, alienated and alone, while his wife continues to watch the news. More mass graves are being discovered every minute. It’s a fascinating watch. Wesley is depressed and anxious and therefore wants to jack off.

I think I’m covered in feces as well, I shouldn’t masturbate.