Dear Journal,

I just returned from Los Angeles where I shot a TV pilot for CBS.

What’s a TV pilot?

Well, no one’s really sure, but my best explanation is that it’s a sample episode of what a TV series would be. It’s like the first batch of pancakes where you decide, “These are going to be some good pancakes,” or, “Let’s not make pancakes.”

I brought my brother Joe, of course, because he loves pancakes and tends to come along for almost anything. I also brought my girlfriend and another friend who’s also a personal trainer and nutritionist to help me cut down on how “pudgy and awkward” I am. It turns out eating spinach salads for every meal helps cure pudginess—but not awkwardness. As Popeye once said, “I yam what I yam!”

I rented a house so that everyone had their own room and you know, Journal, having roommates was harder than I thought. Like for example, sometimes they wouldn’t do their dishes. And that felt really bad. It probably felt like they felt when I didn’t do my dishes. Bad.

The toughest thing about LA is that there are just too many cars—and it’s not like one of those places where everyone is good at driving, like…heaven. I think the reason people in LA are so bad at driving is that showbiz people are so used to lying that they tell people who are bad at driving that they’re good at driving.

They’re like, “You’re the best driver. You’re like the Johnny Depp of driving.”

And they’re like, “Really? Well I’m going to email all my friends and tell them you said that…right now…while I’m driving.”

Going on the freeway in LA is like going on an amusement park ride with consequences. You come off it and you’re like, “Whoa! That was CRAZY…I think I killed those people.”

Well, I made it out alive and my final task was to catch a flight at 6 in the morning- which meant that I had to stay at the airport hotel and wake up at 4. That is early. That is like earlier than the earth exists. I walked out the door of the hotel and they hadn’t set up the ground—like they hadn’t programmed that part of the Matrix yet. All these computer programmers were freaking out, like, “We need a ground stat and a postman walking by and…a rental car shuttle.” It was like Trinity and Tank in their Long-Johns going, “No one’s ever woken up this early!”

Well, luckily they programmed an airplane so I made it back to my apartment in New York after a month and a half and I woke up this morning and made pancakes. And I haven’t tried them yet, but I feel like they’re going to be some good pancakes.

And that concludes this week’s entry in my secret public journal.

Dear Journal,

This month I’m living in Los Angeles, preparing for my CBS pilot, and celebrating the release of my first DVD, “What I Should Have Said Was Nothing.” I’ve rented a house, and my girlfriend and my brother Joe have moved in as well. It’s a lot bigger than my apartment in New York, which only slightly bigger than my body. My place in L.A. is slightly bigger than Joe’s body, so it’s big.

This month I’m trying to lose weight because television makes normal people look fat, and makes fat people look like airplanes. I’ve actually given up pizza which is my favorite food. Giving up pizza has made me realize how much I crave pizza. I’ve realized that the time I crave pizza the most is the moment before I fall asleep. I think that should be a menu item: “pizza until you fall asleep” and you call and order it and then leave your door unlocked. And then you time it just right so the delivery man walks in the moment before you fall asleep with a pizza shaped like a travel pillow - This kind of calzone-y pizza that wraps around your neck and you just gobble it while doing neck rolls until you fall asleep.

So my life in Los Angeles is pretty similar to my life in New York. I work and sleep, and spend hours and hours wandering the Internet - which is sad, because it’s occurred to me that the Internet is an infinite well of nothing. When you’re there, you think it’s something. It’s like getting drunk. You’re like “I’m going to go here, and then over there- and then here!” and then after four hours you’re like, “I have no idea what just happened. I better clear my history.”

I always have these grand ambitions about when I’ll be online. I think- “I’m going to look up healthy recipes and gyms in my neighborhood.” And then I go on line and I’m like, “WHY DON’T I GOOGLE MYSELF AGAIN.” I don’t even Google myself anymore; I get “Google alerts.” Which means the Google Robot emails you when you’ve been mentioned on a blog or a website.

Last year someone came to one of my shows and said they enjoyed it but that I was “pudgy and awkward.” It was like, “Bam, you’re p’awkward.” I was like, “Thanks for the heads up, Google Robot!“ I wasn’t feeling great about myself already and besides, aren’t those adjectives a little redundant? How many people do you know who are pudgy and smooth? “Pudgy and really has it together - I like that Alan!”

You know who else is pudgy and awkward?

Bloggers.

I know because I am one. Which is why I’m sitting in Los Angeles finishing up this p’awkward entry in my secret public journal.

Hey Internet life partners,

I have great news. The secret public journal emails you’ve been reading for the last 20-25 years are being made into a comedy pilot (and ideally a series) for CBS!!!

Maybe it was the 93 comments you wrote after my last entry or Ted Kennedy’s endorsement, but they’ve decided to let me and my friend Andy Secunda make a show about a guy who does comedy, writes a journal, and kills polar bears for sport (not true). CBS has also assured me that if the show is a success, they will also green-light television shows based on all of your blogs and all of your friends’ blogs, even this one.

Now here’s the downside. (And I ask you to bear with me.) I’m going to have to postpone most of the upcoming tour, including Boston, DC, Raleigh, Atlanta, Nashville, Indianapolis, Cleveland, Detroit, Columbus, Minneapolis, Chicago, Kansas City, and Denver. I promise I will come to these cities. But right now we have to shoot this pilot to have a chance to become a series in the fall.

Also, with slight scheduling changes, I will be definitely be appearing this weekend in Cincinnati, New York City, and hopefully Tempe, Los Angeles, and San Francisco at the end of April.

Thank you in advance for your support and if you’re presently sticking a needle into a voodoo doll of my balls, I totally understand and - oh wow, that hurt. That too. Please stop.

Love-
Mike

Dear Journal,

I just got back from performing at Penn State University, home to a made-up holiday called “State Patty’s Day.” Apparently, because St. Patrick’s’s day usually falls on spring break, and the students at Penn State didn’t want to miss out on a holiday dedicated to binge drinking, they invented another one. However, this year St. Patrick’s Day didn’t fall on a their spring break, so they’re celebrating both State Patty’s Day (which does not exist) and St. Patty’s Day (which exists). Penn State students are nothing if not inventive, and great at peeing their names in the snow.

As soon as I arrived on campus I knew this fake holiday was a red flag and so I picked up their newspaper The Daily Collegian and the headline read “Victim Takes Partial Blame.” I thought that was a little vague, so I read on and discovered that there has been a widely discussed event on campus where a drunk driver hit a drunk walker. And I thought, “Maybe these people shouldn’t be making up holidays to drink more.” Maybe if they drank less they might be able to name their newspaper articles more specifically. For example, I would name this last article, “Drunk Driver Hits Drunk Walker Drunkety Drunk I’m So Drunk.”

Drunky McDrunkenstein

Well, I’m heading to my hometown of Boston in a few weeks and I’ve been getting a lot of emails since my special aired from my hometown of Shrewsbury. You see, journal, on the commercial for the special they air a joke where I’m describing how I performed for the U.S. troops and signed autographs for people who had been gone from America so long they didn’t realize I’m not famous. They’d be like, “Where do I know you from? And I’d be like, “Are you from Shrewsbury? Because I played backup right field for Economy Paint Supply, I don’t know if that rings a bell.”Well, it turns out that a guy who works at Economy Paint Supply has a television, and he sent me a MySpace message. And that struck me as odd. I didn’t realize the paint supply culture was so into social networking. So this guy Rich writes to me: “Hey Mike - I had to ask one of the owner’s if we ever had a baseball team and he said they used to sponsor little league. So you must be telling the truth. …It is cool when someone mentions something on national television (my wife says cable’s not national; yeah she sometimes hurts)”First of all, “she sometimes hurts”? Sounds like someone needs some Economy Therapy Supply, Rich.Second of all, the travesty of this situation is that my beloved Economy Paint Supply is no longer even a little league team. How did they back out of that?

Did they think that their team’s record reflected badly on their image as a paint supply store? Are people thinking, “There’s no way I’m trusting those guys with my low budget paint supply needs, they lost 42 to nothing to the Lithuanian War Vets!”

So this week I decided to sponsor my own little league team in Shrewsbury. It’ll be called, “Mike Birbiglia’s First Place Little League Team.” That way, no matter what place they’re in, they’ll always be first place.

This morning I got a “Google alert” that I had been mentioned in Penn State’s Daily Collegian. The headline read, “Comedian has crowd in stitches.” Which comedian? It’s not important. Because those readers are so drunk.

Dear Journal,

I just resurfaced after being bedridden with the flu for 2 weeks. The “two-weeks flu” of course, is the much less sexy version of the “24-hour flu.” The two weeks flu forced me and my girlfriend to watch every episode of Bret Michaels’ Rock of Love and Randy Jackson Presents: America’s Best Dance Crew. I am confident that I’m officially dumber than I used to be.

We did watch some good things like the entire box set of Freaks and Geeks and repeat viewings of my favorite Talking Heads concert film Stop Making Sense - which eventually started making sense.

Robots love Vermont

So after two weeks, my first venture back into the world was a trip to Middlebury College in Vermont and I made the mistake of listening to my satellite navigation machine for directions. Now, to give you a little background my brother Joe bought me the navigator with my own money and he keeps it at his house, usually in his car. Every time I want to use it I have to pick it up from his house which is difficult because his house is hard to find, so I could really use that navigator I’m going to
pick up.

This is the interior of my dream car.

And while the navigator is convenient, I find the level to which we trust these machines is a little dangerous. There was a news item a few weeks ago that a satellite navigator had directed a woman to drive into an oncoming train.

She actually made the turn and then jumped out of the car and the car crashed into the train. Which means she trusted the machine more than her eyes. She was like, “You’re right, nav, but I’m outta here!”

Now to get to Vermont the navigator directed me through the mountains in a snowstorm. If I had used my human brain and human eyes to look at a map I might have noticed the little triangles that indicate mountains and said, “Well, this isn’t gonna work.” But I didn’t. I’m too trusting of the navigator. I’m like, “Whatever you say, robot lady!”

So I’m driving in Vermont and the navigator says, “Turn left,” and I turn left and I find myself driving up a mountain. I mean, there were roads of course, but I was driving on snow up a steep incline in a Hyundai Sonata. And I get about 6 miles up and all of a sudden I’m going slower and slower until I’m no longer driving at all. But my foot is still on the gas. And the tires are spinning out. And on the dashboard all of a sudden there’s an orange exclamation point. And I was like, “I know! That’s exactly how I feel.” And I look at the satellite navigation and it’s not offering any help. It’s like, “Continue 4 miles.” And I’m like, “Look navigator, I’m trying to continue 4 miles but I can’t.”

So I turn around and head down the mountain. And the navigator lady starts freaking out. It’s like, “Turn around. Go back…turn around.” And I’m like, “Navigator, are we in the same car?” So I call my brother Joe and he gets out a map and helps me figure out an alternate route and I get to the show just in time.

My jokes reached the hoop

Now Middlebury had me performing in their basketball gym—which is unusual—me getting applause in a basketball gym. Basketball was always my worst sport. I remember in 6th grade actually crying because I played in a competitive game where my shots didn’t even reach the hoop. I had no upper body strength and I didn’t realize that a lot of shooting basketball is in the wrist. And I’d had plenty of practice with my wrist.

But I’m in the basketball gym and 5 minutes into my performance an industrial heater goes on, which was very smart for those basketball games that can get very cold. But for the comedy show it created quite a quandary because comedy is very dependent on hearing the comedy. My physical comedy clowning skills only go so far. Once I had exhausted “the wall,” “the robot,” and “blowing up a fake balloon,” I had no other tricks in my bag. So I felt very fortunate when they were able to find the heater switch and I finished my show, with 15 points, 55 punchlines and 12 rebounds. Just another triple double.

“What seems to be the trouble, occifer?”

The next morning, I drove back to New York. It was a sunny day; the roads were clear and I mapped out a route to the highway that didn’t include snowy mountains. When I got the NY State Thruway I was home free. Just cruisin’ at 85 miles an hour, which just so happens, is 20 miles above the speed limit. As the cop explained this to me, I nodded and braced myself for the ticket. It cost me 4 points on my license, which is more points than I scored in a full season of 6th grade basketball. And when I called my brother Joe and told him what happened, he said, “You shouldn’t be driving that fast.” And I said, “You know, the cop told me that. I was kind of hoping for a second opinion.”

But I continued on. At this point, I had typed in “home” on the navigator and after 6 hours, eventually it said, “30 miles” then 20 then 10. Then 2. And I’m realizing that I’m actually nowhere near my apartment. And then finally the navigator says, “You have arrived.” And I look up and realize I’m at my brother’s Joe’s house in Westchester, NY and that Joe had set his home as the home in the satellite navigator.

And I thought, “This is not my beautiful house. This is not my beautiful wife.”

And then I left the navigator there, I took out a map, and I drove home.

Hey friends,

Great news. I’m about to list several exciting Birbig-news nuggets in bullet point form. Just like school!

- My Secret Public Journal Live was named “comedy album of the year” by Time Out NYC and Time out Chicago. (along with Patton Oswalt’s Werewolves and Lollipops) Can you still get buy a copy? Of course you can, consumers!

- What I Should Have Said Was Nothing was a huge success and is re-airing this Friday night on Comedy Central @ 11 pm EST. Did you miss it the first time? I NEVER SHOULD HAVE TRUSTED YOU.

- I’m touring 24 cities in March and April with my new DVD and I worked really hard on visiting cities where people have been emailing me from. So get your tickets now, because I’m playing some cool, small venues but tickets will go faster than you can type or even think.

“Bonus features” of the tour:
-Most shows are 18+ (and New York City and Detroit are all ages!)
- I’ll be signing copies of the What I Should Have Said Was Nothing DVD at every show!
- I’ll be performing all new material from my forthcoming CD “Sleepwalk With Me” (plus I’ll take requests from TWO DRINK MIKE and JOURNAL LIVE!)
-We’re kicking off the tour in NYC at Caroline’s with 4 nights of 4 different shows:

THURSDAY: TWO DRINK MIKE
FRIDAY: MY SECRET PUBLIC JOURNAL LIVE
SATURDAY: SLEEPWALK WITH ME
SUNDAY: BEST OF, REQUESTS, and B SIDES

If you come to all 4 NYC shows, you’re going to get something big. Not sure yet. So far all I’ve thought of is a sexy hug and a hearty handshake. But Joe Bags is working on it!

But for now, the first 30 people to buy tickets to one of the Caroline’s shows can get a free ticket to a private showing of “Sleepwalk With Me” in NYC February 26th with an intimate Q & A afterwards by emailing your receipt to Joe Bags at: joe@birbigs.com

Ok, now that that’s out of the way.

Ready, America?

Here are the cities!

February

• 22 | Middlebury College STUDENTS ONLY

March

• 1 | Penn State University OPEN TO PUBLIC!
• 8 | Atlantic City, NJ GET TIX NOW!
• 10 | Austin, TX (with Eugene Mirman & Michael Showalter) GET TIX NOW!
• 18 | Missouri State University STUDENTS ONLY
• 20-23 | Cincinnat, OH GET TIX NOW!
• 27-30 | NYC GET TIX NOW!

April

• 2 | Boston The Comedy Connection
• 3-6 | Washington DC The DC Improv GET TIX NOW!
• 8 | What I Should Have Said Was Nothing DVD in stores EVERYWHERE!!
• 8-9 | Raleigh Charlie Goodnights GET TIX NOW!
• 11-12 | Atlanta The Punchline
• 13 | Nashville Zanies Comedy Club
• 15 | Indianapolis The Music Mill
• 16 | Cleveland Hilarities 4th Street Theatre GET TIX NOW!
• 17 | Detroit, MI ALL AGES SHOW!
• 18-19 | Columbus The Funny Bone GET TIX NOW!
• 21 | Minneapolis Acme Comedy Co.
• 22 | Chicago Zanies
• 23 | Kansas City Majestic Theatre GET TIX NOW!
• 25-26 | Denver Comedy Works
• 29 | Tempe AZ GET TIX NOW!

May

• 1 | Los Angeles The Melrose Improv GET TIX NOW!
• 2-3 | San Francisco Cobb’s Comedy Club

Dear Journal,

I’m in the Bahamas again this year with my friends from The Bob & Tom show. I’m not sure why I got invited again, I think maybe it’s because the moment my brother Joe stepped on the plane back to NYC last year he invited himself on next year’s trip. He said, “Do you think they’ll invite us back next year?” and I said, “Well, if you shout it that loud, I’m gonna guess they will.” It’s like leaving someone’s house at Thanksgiving and loudly exclaiming, “I wonder what they’ll do with all that extra pie?” You see, Journal, Joe is what I call “America’s Guest.” He always tags along to whatever vacation or perk my job as a comedian affords. But he’s not a good entourage member. He’s never like, “You da man, Mike! Or this guy’s a genius!” He’s always like, “I don’t know what dad would think about this or “Do you think they have any more shrimp?” Over the years, I’ve often gotten the question, “Is Joe really that much of a mooch?” And I say, yes. But I sympathize with Joe because it’s got to be hard being an entourage member for a person who is not famous. It’s not like Joe won the lottery, more like he won a scratch ticket.

Gambling is actually a big part of the Birbiglia tradition. We’re really good at getting into the stock market right when it’s hit its peak…we’re like, “You guys are partying? We like to party. Yea - we brought our money!” And by the time we walk in the door, the party is over. A few years ago Joe got me an E-Trade account. Turns out Joe can turn 1000 dollars into 420 dollars in less than a week.

But gambling is a bit of an issue for us, which is why the Bahamas is a dangerous place to vacation. I think one of the ways they hook you in is that they don’t even call it gambling. They call it “gaming.” They’re like “C’mon down and play some games, buddy! And don’t you forget your twenties and fifties!” And now they have spas in the building, because after you’ve blown your daughter’s college savings on an Austin Powers slot machine, you might be a little tense.

Joe loves gambling so much that in addition to losing money on the game, he also lost money on the coin toss. He lost money on the way money fell onto the ground. Joe loves gambling so much that he enjoys standing behind me while I gamble. It’s hard to keep up a mystique when your brother’s behind you yelling, “That’s six HUNDRED dollars! You don’t HAVE six hundred dollars!” And I’m like “Croupier, may I have that man escorted out of the building.” And Joe’s like, “Walk away, Mike. You will LOSE! You have never won anything!”

It’s that kind of support that a guy needs in life. Another guy standing behind him shouting, “You will lose.” This is nothing new. Joe’s been standing behind telling me I’m going to lose for almost 30 years. This year I shot a one-hour special for Comedy Central and I have a photo of me in the makeup room. While the makeup lady is attempting to make look like less of an albino, Joe is in the background with his arms on his sides as if to say, “This is never going to work! You will LOSE!” And then while I’m on stage, he’s backstage pacing and short of breath saying, “They’re never gonna laugh at this. Why are they laughing at this?

Well yesterday I won 300 dollars at the casino and my TV special “What I Should Have Said Was Nothing” is premiering this Saturday. Maybe it’s good to have someone over your shoulder insisting “YOU WILL LOSE.” And that concludes this week’s entry in My Secret Public Journal.

Dear Journal,

This week Joe and I are thrilled to be guests of The Bob & Tom Superbowl party in Freeport, Bahamas! I’ll be posting photos and sending you fun updates

Go Pats!

Dear Journal,Every year Comedy Central does this contest for the most popular comedian on the network—it’s called the Standup Showdown. Now, comedians aren’t supposed to care about popularity, after all, if we were popular in high school, we never would have become comedians, we would have become a bartender at a strip club.

This is me in the Stand-Up Showdown

This is me in a REAL showdown

It’s an absurd title to begin with: the showdown — like comedians ought to be dueling. If you placed Demetri Martin and Jim Gaffigan in a steel cage, they might start slap-fighting and hitting each other with their blackberries but inevitably they’d call a draw when someone’s watch broke or contact lens fell out.

I’m no exception. In high school, I made the mistake of joining the wrestling team. I had joined the team because my brother Joe had been on the wrestling team and he had joined the wrestling team because at the time he was…kind of fat. I don’t mean that in a disparaging way, he was a slightly big guy for his age and the team didn’t have a heavyweight wrestler, so they decided to fatten him up like Hansel and Gretel so he could be the sacrificial lamb. But by the time he graduated he had become a pretty good wrestler — like a rabid, aggressive, semi-fat sacrificial lamb who occasionally ate the wolf. So I joined the wrestling team, but what I didn’t realize was that wrestling practice isn’t like soccer practice where you can kind of blend in. you have to wrestle and in my case, be wrestled upon by strong, agile guys whose crotch inevitably would be in my face at some point during the match. And as though it wasn’t degrading enough that I was wearing a woman’s bathing suit, I was so bad that even though I was in the 152 pound weight class, for practice they would place me with a 103 pound wrestler from our team… And it wasn’t as though they had to send 2 or 3 of these tiny men after me—just the one—and he was Asian, which made the spectacle even more like a scene from the show Carnivale. On my college application I wrote “wrestling team,” but in retrospect I might have written “Asian dwarf strangling” with a minor in crotch sniffing.

I rarely competed. I would travel with the team, but I would only compete if there were a few extra minutes at the end of the meet when they would send out the B-teamers. And every time I competed I would jump to the floor and hope to get pinned as quickly as possible and this plan was working quite well until one day I met someone who wanted to lose as badly as I did. I went out onto the mat, took the starting position and for reasons I did not understand, was pinning my opponent. I didn’t know any moves, I had no upper body strength, but I was winning so my teammates who weren’t paying attention rallied around and starting cheering for me. They were shouting, “Squeeze!!!” which means, “squeeze.” And for that one moment I thought, “Maybe I do know how to wrestle.” As I looked down at the mat a single drop of blood fell from my nose and in slow motion hit the mat and the whistle blew and the ref shouted, “Blood on the mat!” and they wiped up the blood. And they restarted the match and I was pinned in 4 seconds.

Well this week I find myself in the top 10 of the standup showdown on Comedy Central— and I’m much better at comedy than Asian dwarf strangling, so I’m going try my best to win. And if anyone’s listening, it might help if you shouted “Squeeze.”

Hey best friends in 2008!

I’m asking you for my first favor:

Go to the comedy central website and vote for me in the Standup Showdown. I know it’s superficial but since I haven’t won anything since author of the month in 3rd grade, my self-esteem hinges directly on the results and right now I’m almost off the list! You can put it in bookmarks and vote once a day, or hire someone who knows how to outsmart computers to vote THOUSANDS AND THOUSANDS OF TIMES PER DAY.

Know that I love you and would vote for you in a silly internet contest as well.

Such an exciting year awaits. More on that later.

Mike