There’s a song that came out years ago in 2004 as part of the I Heart Huckabees soundtrack. It’s by Jon Brion, and it’s called “Knock Yourself Out.” When I was going through my hard year of 2005, I listened to it a lot, constantly. The whole song is great, but one line – “And you’ve gotta find a way to be okay” – kept rising above the rabble of my brain. I discovered it again in August, and I put it into a lot of my new playlists – ones featuring new music by Drive-By Truckers and Blitzen Trapper and Springsteen, and one-off songs by Taylor Swift and Katy Perry. Buried in the middle of everything is something telling me – commanding me – that it’s not a choice. That I have to find a way to be okay. It’s not a choice. It’s not an option. Maybe you can’t always hit terrific. Maybe you can’t always be your best self. But you have to be okay. You have to be okay. But sometimes it’s so damn hard.
Shawn injured himself, that was the start of things…
Well, no. The start of things was that I was having a really bad day August 1st and I don’t remember why. It’s all over Facebook. I was having a terrible day and even though I was working out and writing and putting on shows – doing my routine – and none of it was helping. It was just my brain being my brain. Part of it was because someone had read my article about putting on a woman’s comedy show on the sly and being told it didn’t mean shit because I was a man. I’ve had a little more time dealing with this, and talking with women, and getting some input, and I’ve come to some conclusions. I did the women’s comedy month and didn’t tell anyone it was a women’s comedy month and then wrote an essay about why it’s important to feature women in comedy, and how I went about doing it, and why the status quo should be all different comedic voices at all times. Most of my response, from men and women, had been very positive, but all it takes is one negative. Someone telling me that I should feel bad because I have a dick.
Now, look. I get it. The world would be awesome if either I was a woman, or a woman had made manifest this comedy experience. And maybe the thing I was doing by writing an essay about it – one that might have come across as “see what happens when a man lets the women talk?” – was gloating or reveling. But … okay, goddammit, I did a good thing, and it was something other people weren’t doing, and I wanted to be an example. Selfishly, too? Yeah, I wanted credit. Sure I did. Not as a man, but as a booker. As a producer. As someone who came up through the ranks in comedy and finally had the power and the means and the will to enact good, positive change. I felt – and I guess I feel – like I deserve some credit. Maybe that makes me a bad feminist. Maybe this is the definition of “mansplaining.” But my essay tried to underline my flaws, my questions, my nervousness at dipping my fingers into potentially volatile waters. But what I come away with after all this is that I, as a human, did something I thought was necessary, and it benefitted a lot of other people who felt the same way. I’m never going to apologize for doing it, and while I probably shouldn’t be all, “look at me, world, aren’t I awesome for doing it,” I’m not going to feel sorry for feeling good about doing it, or for talking about it. I’m not a damn saint. When I help an old person across the street, I tell people I did it. I also tell people that I threw a brick through a synagogue window when I was eight. I live a live wide open, and if I’m going to own up to all my shit, I’m going to take credit for the good stuff I do, too.
So, the good stuff I do: a friend of mine got a rare virus (not AIDS) in August, the day before a big work trip to Denver. The emergency room called me at 10:00 at night because he’d been found on his floor, unable to get up or call the ambulance. I got on my bike and drove the five miles out to the hospital, where I stayed with him until he was conscious, and answered all the doctor’s questions. After I got back from Denver, I went to the recovery center every other day to check up on him, and bring him stuff, and try to make his life better.
Of course this was when Shawn hurt his finger. For most of the summer, he couldn’t use his hand. It fell on me to do all the cooking, all the cleaning, all the chores. The cooking was a big deal for me. I decided I didn’t want Shawn to get bored with the same old food I’d been making lately, because at home, the kitchen is usually his, despite the fact that I’d shown something of a flair for French cooking a few years hence. Now, though, I could jump back into things. The kitchen became my domain, and I didn’t stay French. I decided to go worldwide, finding interesting recipes from countries all over the world and serving them up, trying to keep Shawn engaged and happy and not bored with things.
In the midst of all this, I went to Denver, for my big work trip. There, I skipped out on the baseball game everyone else went to, and I finally – finally – met up with my friend Beemer, who’d been my buddy since the heyday of LiveJournal, but who I had met only fleetingly, at a Panda Express near my office like 7 years prior. A little tentatively before my trip, I’d asked him if he’d be into driving up to Estes Park, about two hours out from Denver, so I could fulfill a lifelong dream of seeing The Stanley, the hotel that inspired Stephen King’s The Shining. Literally a lifelong dream. I’d wanted to visit The Stanley since I was fourteen and read the novel for the first time, then read all the backstory on it. I could picture Stephen King and his family in the lobby in 1973, being the last guests of that hotel, and King looking out at the Rockies as the winter came on and getting the idea for the novel all at once. The story and the story behind the story have been inside my DNA since I was a teenager, and with Beemer’s help, I was going to see it.
Of course, I was nervous that he and I wouldn’t get along, or that the conversation would dry up, or that I’d annoy him with my fanboy lunacy. But the best thing about knowing people through LiveJournal first is that they’re already used to your weirdnesses, and are prepared for an onslaught of you. I met Beemer like an old friend, and that feeling never went away. We climbed up and up into the Rockies, talking and growing closer and better, and slowly the hotel of my dreams and nightmares made itself visible on the horizon.
We did the ghost tour, of course, and it was fine, but mostly it was cool because it got me going through the hotel more. I’d been on Stephen King tours in Maine before, and they were all fine, but for the first time ever, it really felt as if I was wandering the hallways of my writing hero’s imagination.
Home awaited me, of course, and all my old and new responsibilities. And it was hard. I don’t mind saying it was hard. And I don’t mind taking credit for doing all of it, either, because maybe I am a good person, okay? That’s a thing I’m learning to be okay with this year. Maybe I am a good person, but maybe I’m not a selfless person, because good people can have bad stuff in them, and questionable morals. I’m not the best person, and I think I’ve come to the conclusion that I don’t have to be. Sometimes in the past, I didn’t live my best life because I didn’t want to be all prideful about doing the best I could. That’s … maybe that’s fucked up.
I want the credit. I want to be recognized for a job well done. I want people to like me for being good at who I am, what I do, how I help. Does that suck? Maybe it does. But this is me, being me. I’m tired of pretending I don’t care if people know I’ve done something good. I’d be a terrible superhero. Daredevil and Buffy never wanted a standing ovation for saving the world, and here I am wanting people to say how awesome I am for making chicken cordon bleu because my husband broke his hand. I don’t know what kind of person that makes me.
One final thing: I finished Panic Town. Midway through the month, I finished the first Wayne Corbin book in over five years. It was my nineteenth novel, and I wrote it in three months flat. I got some of it right, some of it wrong, some of it bloated and some of it too compressed … but it was finished. I’d given myself until October to finish it and managed to get it written in five months flat. It was the fastest I’d written a novel since the mid-2000s, when I wrote an 80,000-word book in under a month. And I was proud of that too. It needs editing and it needs more editing, but that first draft is always the most important. Being able to stand with your art and say, “this is something I did, this is a thing I made that didn’t exist before,” that’s something.
Writing is something, and helping is something, and being a good person is something. And it’s taken me such a long time to get to the point of this, because I have so much doubt in my own abilities, and so much anxiety about being good, and so many problems with the man I am and the man I was and the man I will be. But I think, after all this time, I’m learning how to be okay with it all.
You gotta find a way to be okay. You gotta.
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