Just Be Normal: A Guest Post by Nate Bargatze
With laugh-out-loud life stories, comedian Nate Bargatze shows he’s just as funny on the page as he is on the stage. Read on for an exclusive essay from Nate on writing Big Dumb Eyes.
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Big Dumb Eyes: Stories from a Simpler Mind
Big Dumb Eyes: Stories from a Simpler Mind
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Hardcover
$25.00
$30.00
From one of the hottest stand-up comedians, Nate Bargatze brings his everyman comedy to the page in this hilarious collection of personal stories, opinions, and confessions.
From one of the hottest stand-up comedians, Nate Bargatze brings his everyman comedy to the page in this hilarious collection of personal stories, opinions, and confessions.
Hello, or hey bear. The title of my book is Big Dumb Eyes, and I am happy it is the title of my book. I also still can’t believe I wrote a whole book, with words and commas and all that other book stuff, but I’m getting there. I’m getting there.
My mom, though, had another idea for naming the book. She wanted me to call it Just Be Normal, from a story that took place years ago when she was helping me, my wife, and our baby daughter Harper move to Los Angeles, which we found out is a city that is very much not our kind of normal. Here is that story of a title that is not the title of my book, but my mom probably still wishes it was.
Water Don’t Sparkle in Tennessee
My mom, whose main goal in life has always been for all her children to never set foot out of her actual house, came to LA that first week to help us find an apartment. She had just flown in from our small town of Old Hickory, Tennessee, and to her Los Angeles didn’t just feel like a different place, it felt like a different planet. One day, the two of us went to a little restaurant for lunch, and the way-too-good-looking waiter asked us if we wanted to drink sparkling water with our meal. My mom stared at him as if he was speaking Chinese.
“Sparkling water?” she goes. “What the heck is that? We don’t have anything like that in Tennessee.”
The waiter looks at me like how does your mom exist on this planet called Earth.“Um,” he says, “it means water with fizz. You know, bubbles?”
My mom just shakes her head. “Nope. Never heard of it.”
She turns to me as if maybe I can help translate this crazy foreign word she has never heard before. “Sparkling? Sparkling? Spark-ling. Nathan, do you know what this man is talking about?”
I myself have actually heard of sparkling water, because I have left my home town once or twice, but I learned a while back that it’s better to let stuff like this go when you’re talking to my mom. The waiter has not learned this lesson. By this point, the guy’s actually starting to get flustered.
“Look,” he says, “I’ve been to Nashville before. They definitely had sparkling water there. You know—La Croix? Haven’t you had La Croix?”
I’m like, “Old Hickory is different, dude. It is possible she has not had La Croix.”
Finally my mom goes, “Ohhhhh! You mean soda water! Yeah, we don’t say words like ‘sparkle’ in Tennessee. That’s way too fancy.”
Turn at the Rocky Rock
A couple days later, we were all driving to check out one of the few apartments we could actually afford, which was so far out in the middle of nowhere that whenever an actual person saw us, they would just shake their head and go “Why?” The sprawl was crazy, the traffic was crazier, and we had no idea what we were doing or where we were going.
I was driving, Laura was in the backseat with Harper, who wouldn’t stop screaming, and my mom was sitting next to me upfront, trying to figure out how to work the GPS. My mom needed to figure out the GPS because back home no one ever used a GPS. What was the point? Who needed an electric map to show you how to drive down the three or four roads in town?
Even when the streets got a little complicated it didn’t really matter – you grew up here. You didn’t even need to know road names. You’d just tell someone “turn right at the gas station, then go past that big yellow house, then do a U-turn at the rock. Yeah, you know the rock I’m talking about. The rocky rock. That one. Then you’re there.”
But not in LA. Here it was hundreds of miles of lines and arrows and colors and dots and a robot voice going “Now merge! No, not there! Are you insane? Didn’t you hear me?”
So my mom’s turning the map upside down and right-side up and upside down again, trying to figure out which way the car is going before we end up in the middle of the ocean. And she’s shouting “Go left!” and the baby screams. And she’s shouting “Go right!” and the baby screams. And she’s shouting “Go back left again!” and the baby screams some more.
And finally I lose it, so I go, “Please! Just be normal!”
“Honey, we aren’t normal here,” she says, completely cool. “Because we are way too normal.”
To be fair to my mom, me, Laura, and Harper only ended up lasting in Los Angeles a couple years before we moved back to Nashville for good. So maybe she was right about the whole “too normal” thing. And I do think it would’ve been a pretty good title for my book too.
Thanks, Mom, and thanks for reading, y’all.