The Shape I’m In

There was a chunk of years – 1999 through 2006, roughly – when I was given to daily, public introspection. Everything I did, thought, said, or experienced was fascinating to me. I kept a daily journal and I treated it like storytelling. I wove tales about me and my friends, sometimes gave over to hyperbole and embellishment, and made sure my life was given a structure. That’s what nonfiction is, especially when it’s memoir: a way to give the messiness of life a through-line. I put my life online, first under an alias and then out loud and public. And then I stopped.

It wasn’t a conscious decision to stop. I just got too busy with my actual life to document it. One of the things people used to say to me is that my life was “so fascinating; I don’t have that interesting a life, so I don’t journal.” My response was always, “Well, no. I don’t have that interesting a life either. I just make it look like I do.” Neat nouns and vivid verbs, that’s what I was taught in high school, and always make sure your conversations read well.

But as I’ve indicated, my life didn’t stop when I stopped writing about it. What kind of sucks is that the last two years were among the best of my life. 2012 and 2013 were an explosion of fecundity for me. My writing, my comedy, my Disney life, my friends, my obsessions, even my boring day job – everything got better. And it just kept getting better. Never once did I feel like it could get worse, because I kind of don’t believe in that. I believe we have peaks and we have valleys, but it’s all a part of some grand tapestry that makes up who we are. Besides, my dreams came bundled with an abundance of drive and ambition: I wasn’t just whiling my day away, wanting things to get awesome and not doing a thing about it. I was out there every day, busting my ass making sure I made manifest the things I wanted in life. I wrote novels and nonfiction books. I took my sketch comedy team to New York City. I became a stand-up performer. I became a host and producer of a comedy night in a bar. Everything was great and everything was perfect until it wasn’t.

You don’t see harbingers until later, I think. The bar I hosted a show in had a fire, then water damage, and then the owner had a stroke. That night was put on hiatus; only later, online, did I find out the bar would be closing permanently. Then …

Okay, making this a list sucks. It’s not a list. It’s my life. My sketch team imploded. Duct Tape Revolution ended. Not organically. Not well. And I did it. I stopped it. I broke up the band, for reasons I don’t want to dive into, but they seemed like good reasons at the time. Most days, they still seem like good reasons. Do I regret it? Every day. Would I change what I did? I don’t think so. Am I sad? Yes. I’m sad.

Breaking up the group happened as a major confluence of negative events tornadoed into my life. Philip Seymour Hoffman died. He died. He overdosed on heroin and he died. He won’t make any more movies. I had to give up my hope of someday meeting him in person and shaking his hand. For so long, he was my favorite actor, and always remained in the top 2. I had a crush on him and he died. Looking in from the outside, it’s almost ridiculous of being this thrown and tormented by the death of an actor I never met, but it fucked me up.

Then I got sick. It wasn’t the worst sickness, just a bad cold, but it drained me and I had to give up my routine. No gym. No Rocky Horror. No karaoke. No work one day. Around this time, I found out that one of my jobs would be dropping me in a couple of months – a thing I’d known logically for awhile, but hadn’t yet accepted emotionally – and that I was going to have to get one of my teeth yanked, probably. Am I having the worst tragedies in the history of the world? No. I’m still writing, I have a new comedy night at a new bar, and me and my sweetie, Shawn, just passed our fifteenth anniversary. I have my Disney friends and I travel the country seeing Drive-By Truckers and I’m on a new diet and exercise routine that seems to be working. I’m fine. I’m fine.

Except: goddammit, I’m used to better than fine. I’m used to awesome. I love awesome. My three-week deep depression seems to have lifted, but I’m still not over stuff. And I know that it’s going to take awhile to get over stuff. To live through the bullshit of a normal life. I can do it. I’ve done it all my life. My life has been a series of getting through a lot of bullshit so I can do great things that matter. Eventually, the residual sadness will also depart, and I’ll be great again. That will happen. It’s just not happening yet, and that makes me sad, too. Knowing that you’re ready to be back on top and you can’t quite get there yet is its own special version of hell.

So yeah. That’s the shape I’m in. Better days ahead, right?