April had turned out not so bad, so I’m rewarding myself with a good meal and some singing at East End Grill’s karaoke night. Little do I know that the night won’t be around long. The glory days of the Asgard are getting harder and harder to recapture, and the gang – without a guaranteed hang at least once a week – is sort of splintering. This is the maybe the harshest of my growing-up truths. Just as I start realizing my friend really isn’t going to come out to Rocky Horror with me any longer, I discover a new ongoing social thing … then that goes away. I used to think when I was small that when I became a grownup, I would settle into a series of patterns and those patterns would never change. But they change constantly, to the degree that my childhood now seems like the bastion of stability. Which it absolutely wasn’t, but distance and time makes you nostalgic for the darndest things.
Speaking of Rocky Horror, I was back in full swing. There’s a documentary being built called Rocky Horror Saved My Life, and one late night in May, I was interviewed, sticking to my theory that Eddie is the most important character in the film. Eddie was the most important character in my life, of course; finding out at 15 that chubby guys could be gay, or at the very least bisexual? Changed the course of who I was. I was wearing my horns and my 30 Odd Foot of Grunts mechanic shirt, because that’s what I used to wear in my 20s when Tracey and I used to go to Rocky weekly and it was the most important part of my week. I own every 30 Odd Foot of Grunts album. These are things you need to know about me.
While we’re on the subject of transgender-based musicals, I hopped a bus to New York City midway through the month and spent a night with my awesome buddy Jeff taking in Hedwig and the Angry Inch on Broadway. I immediately pre-ordered the soundtrack and listened to it throughout the year, alternating between that, every Blitzen Trapper album, English Oceans by Drive-By Truckers, High Hopes, by Springsteen, and the new Gaslight Anthem album that comes out near the end of the month. It’s called Get Hurt, and … look, I’m never going to stop identifying with music as a simple means to get to the heart of how I’m feeling. It’s called Get Hurt and I fall in love with a lot of it, especially “Selected Poems,” which goes “All I seem to find is that everything has chains / and all my life just feels like a series of dreams.” That’s how most of 2014 has felt to me: a series of dreams. Some good. Some bad. A lot that’s felt out of my control.
Look, maybe a lot of this is irrational. More I know a lot of this is irrational. My comedy night I built from the ground up at Johnny D’s has been going gangbusters. My May 5th standup show (which I titled Cinco de Microphone, because I enjoy punning on cultural traditions) brought in a standup that had been on television, which meant that we got a pretty hefty audience. I got offered to run someone else’s show. I appeared onstage in a format called The Shatner (half monologue, half karaoke). I kept doing naked comedy. My newly reformed sketch group, World of Hurt, had their first shows at Sketchhaus near the end of the month, and the reception was pretty damn good. My book, Panic Town, was going very well. And yet … and yet, my depression was back, and I didn’t know why.
I know depression doesn’t have to have a reason. Sometimes it just is. One thing came from what should be a good place. The new Stephen King book came out and it was great. I raced through it and wrote my review … and didn’t send it anywhere. Didn’t get paid for my insight or my thoughts. Another reminder that a giant conglomeration bought my company out and crushed the freelancers. That’s never the happiest memory.
Some of it might have come internally. I was spending a lot of time on Disney internet, reading lies and complaints and eyerolls and all this stuff that happens on the internet when pundits think things should be the way they want them to be without doing a thing to make their own art or effect positive change. I tended to get mired in these discussions, often because I felt like someone should be the voice of positivity. But the anger I carry with me, like my time-bomb gluten allergy and the sciatic pain in my leg, had begun to win, and the sadness that came with my anger began to win. I discovered a song by Slobberbone called “That Is All,” which goes:
And every version of me I tried so hard to retain Gets swallowed and sweat out and pissed on down the drain There's just no easy way to say That everything you thought was right was wrong today Move along, 'cause you can't stay. No way.
It was the perfect soundtrack to my rebounding weirdness. April had been cautiously optimistic and now … now, everything I thought was right was wrong today. I shut off Facebook for a week. I got internal. And I didn’t hide my sadness. I didn’t tell everyone that everything would be all right. I just hoped it would be and waited. Eventually, the fog lifted. The bike had something to do with it.
I’d been using the bike share called Hubway ever since summer of the year before. It’s great. I still use it. But the closest station to my house is about a half-mile away, which makes it somewhat inconvenient for riding home at 2:00 AM after Rocky Horror, especially when the station near my house is full and I have to park a mile away and then do the extra long walk, because my happiness makes life complicated.
Then my friend Marty wrote to me. “Hey, my Dad had this bike he bought and rode twice and never rode again. Do you want it?”
I blinked at the email. Blinked again. What. What?! Did I want it? I’d give my eyeteeth for it, especially because eyeteeth sound like a creepy thing from The Dark Half. Marty and his roommate Brian packed up the bike and drove it down all the way from New Jersey in a single afternoon. We went to some bike shops and picked up accessories and then went to Friendly’s and had some ice cream, and then, ceremoniously, I lifted the bike off the rack and took a spin around the parking lot. I wanted to close my eyes and feel what it was like to move so fast under my own power. Being a pedestrian isn’t the worst, and having a subscription to a bike share, especially in cities like Boston and Cambridge, makes life amazing. But to have your own bike, to be able to go everywhere, just when you want to? That opens everything up. Nothing is the same.
My depression and I had reached something of a détente with one another. For now. It was a draw. I could live with a draw.
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