He leaned back, took a long drag on his cigarette, then snuffed it under his heel on the stage. “If they only knew,” he thought. “If they only knew.” You see, what they didn’t know — couldn’t know — is that his once promising career as lounge singer was cut short. Tragically short. He sighed… best not to think about that right now. “So there’s this guy I know, a cabbie,” he continued.<\/p>\n
The audience responded with a blank stare. In fact, it seemed as if the funnier his material was, the less they got it. It was funny material. It was good<\/em> material. He’d saved it for just this kind of night. <\/p>\n When he finally stumbled off stage he knew he’d done this for the last time. “Scotch, neat. Better make it a double,” he told the bartender. The bartender mumbled something unintelligible. It might have been a question. “Yeah, whatever,” he responded. It was time for some serious thought.<\/p>\n What did he want to do when he was a grown up, he wondered? Who did he want to be? One would think that a 42 year old man would know this by now. And yet, he didn’t. Besides, if forty is the new thirty, then surely forty-two is the new thirty-three and one half. There was still time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" When he finally stumbled off stage he knew he’d done this for the last time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-232","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p706FA-3K","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clank.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/232","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clank.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clank.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clank.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clank.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=232"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.clank.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/232\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clank.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=232"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clank.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=232"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clank.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=232"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}