I won’t go into the whole history now, but a few years ago, I decided to create an alternate Twitter account specifically for my Disney thoughts. At some point, that concept turned sour. For hours a day, I’d find myself trolling Disney websites and Disney Twitter and Disney everything and finding angry, terrible people spouting their angry, terrible bullshit about this company I love, and I would make fun of them for it. Rampantly. Joyously. I sunk myself in the muck of their toxic lives and tried to make something positive/snarky out of it. For awhile it was really fun, because calling out idiocy and hypocrisy and false rumors is always really fun. For awhile. After awhile, though, it started to just get difficult. It made me difficult. Personal attacks on me mounted, because duh. You don’t ever want to think of yourself as the troll, especially when you are convinced you’re doing the wrong thing for the right reason.
The second of the trips I’d paid for with my rich-person job was the one where I took my friend Joe to Disneyland. He’d been a Disney World park goer since, and I’m quoting myself here, “he was a zygote,” but had never made the jump to the park that started everything. I thought he deserved a just me and him trip, so when I had all that money, I made it happen. Because when I have ludicrous money, I like to spread it around. Is it because I want people to like me more? Is it because I spent a lot of my life without friends and I want to guarantee them in the only currency everyone understands? Is it because I’m actually a nice guy but I feel like I have to justify that? Maybe let’s not get too deep. Joe and I stayed in the Disneyland Hotel – a first for me – and we had a very, very nice time.
But during that trip, my friend Dave got us all drunk and I brought up some silly controversy that had Disney Twitter up in arms. And Dave, who works for theme parks, explained about long-term thinking and big-picture ideas and the reason why all this stuff is happening, beyond the solipsistic viewpoints of echo-chamber armchair imagineers who know nothing about how theme parks work. Another bit inside me unraveled. A tension that had been building for so long – one that wasn’t allowing me to enjoy the parks the way I wanted to, needed to, because I was letting the snark and the rage and the anger get in the way. It never occurred to me that I could just, yes, let it go. When I got home from the trip, I embarked on a new journey of positivity on the Twitter account … and then I deleted it, permanently. Because giving into my own worst nature is so easy, and far too frequent.
Have I backslid? Sure I have. Someone on the Internet is always wrong. But the point is that I’m trying. Is that the point?
I also spent some time at the base of the Hollywood Hills with my wonderful friend Josh, who lives out in West Hollywood. We hung out, and one morning I went wandering around WeHo alone, listening to “Santa Monica” by Everclear because I’m sometimes obvious, and wishing as I do when I’m out here that I lived here, that I was a person who lived in Los Angeles. Boston’s my home and I really don’t want to be anywhere else for the rest of my life, but there’s a part of my soul that Los Angeles owns, and I’ve never been particularly good at figuring out why. It has something to do with those palm trees, and those hills, and the fact that it’s so far away from where I am and who I am. I’ve built up a mysticism and a romanticism of the city that the actual city should disprove when I’m there, but it never does. I don’t have that kind of brain. If I’m chasing the dragon, I will always be chasing the dragon. And that’s how I want it.
My show opened. The one Allen – who I now thought of as my Comedy Partner, which kind of was a big deal for me – and I had worked on for months had a big splashy opening with press and a full house. I was stuck backstage most of the time, but the laughs were there and the cheers were real. This was something I helped make, and in more ways than one: in the middle of every show, there was a Disney sketch that I wrote, that people performed in and took seriously and laughed at. Allen told me it was not only one of the strongest sketches of the show, but one of the strongest I’d ever written. That’s a high you don’t get every day.
With the help of Dave, I discovered the novelist Rainbow Rowell, who helped me understand that I often wrote young adult books, even though I had never thought of them that way. And Patterson Hood, a personal hero and one of the lead singers of Drive-By Truckers, added me to his Facebook. Around the same time, I took my friend Marty to his first DBT show, in Asbury Park, NJ. We rocked out and Marty seemed to why I was breaking down to “Women Without Whiskey” and “Natural Light,” and he broke down to “This Highway’s Mean” and they played “Adam Raised A Cain,” because this was Springsteen’s house. Then we beat the street back to New York to see Rocky Horror with Duncan, because my New York trips aren’t for rest.
I kept proofreading. I kept producing Johnny D’s Comedy Presents. Things were good. Okay? They were good. And one of the things I’m remembering more and more about this year is that it started off just terrible and there were terrible moments inside it … but it wasn’t all bad. There were whole good months. So that’s interesting. That’s pretty interesting indeed.
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