Hey what’s up? Welcome back or thanks for reading my newsletter for the first time. If you do any artistic endeavor for long enough, you are no longer “repeating yourself” and are now “digging further into a subject”. There’s a lot of the greatest hits in here. Food, body image, sex, uncertainty, bragging masked as humility. Some of the Tenets Of Please Enjoy. I had a good time writing it so I hope you have a good time reading it. Either way, it’s free so it doesn’t really matter.
-Mike
Every once in awhile I will be sitting in the park, trying unbelievably hard to seem both intelligent and sexually desirable. After I unfold the blanket that I shoved into an undersized tote bag for the job, I will see an attractive woman having fun with a child in the middle of an open field and the thought “I would like to have a child with her” will shoot through my brain like an asteroid. I understand, on a biological level, the desire to procreate. We’re wired to keep our species alive, unlike the suicidal nature of the panda. I do not actually desire to be a father but you can only do so much to fight nature.
I’ll probably get a vasectomy before the year is over so the conversation is becoming increasingly moot. Either a vasectomy or a silver tooth to fill the gap where my missing tooth is. Or maybe I’ll buy a few more rugs and pairs of jeans. Or I can get my neck tattooed. Either way, I will yet again not be opening a savings account.
There’s got to be some secret to happiness that I don’t know yet. I know people with and without children who are satisfied with their lives. I also know people with or without children that are unsatisfied and angry. The answer can’t be that satisfaction only comes from within and outside forces don’t really help that. It has to be something else. I’m begging you.
If we dare listen to Freud, we all know that a parent's actions are responsible for their children's personalities and neuroses and I am not one to answer for my own mistakes or shortcomings. I don’t want to pin the blame on my parents as the sole reason I’m both twitchy and mean with no ability to control the tone of their voice so I always sound condescending. But I need to blame someone who isn’t me.
I can only imagine the psychic damage I would unknowingly instill upon my child. My problem with children is the same one that I have with most animals. They’re unable to vocalize what their needs are and it drives me insane. I’m too much of a prick to communicate with them in a way that suits us both because I feel personally attacked when I have to do anything other than exactly the way I want to do it.
Sure, I want the couple thousand Instagram likes you get from having a baby but I could also become successful or adopt a dog or get hit by a city bus and I can get them that way.I do not look down on people who have children. It just seems like a foreign lifestyle to me. The same way I look at dog food and go “ok that’s food for someone. Not me, but someone.”
I used to look down on anyone who didn’t live exactly like I do but then one day I realized I was deeply unhappy with my life, so why would I force that on someone else? I have worked hard to rid myself of envy and pity. Now, if someone I don’t like becomes successful or if someone I love does something I would never dream of with their life, I clear my mind and think “I hope they are happy.” because anything beyond that is poison for your brain.
The last year or so of my life has been dedicated to changing it almost completely. I’ve lost jobs and women and weight and money and old hangups and sanity. I’ve gained freedom and friends and strength (both physical and emotional) and responsibility and perspective.
I am, for all intents and purposes, a professional comedian. I pay my rent with money from talking. I’ve traveled more in the last year and a half than I have all of the years of my life before that combined. Seeing the green rooms of Improvs and Funny Bones again and again and they never change. The soda is kind of flat and the fries are kind of soggy and the staff looks at you sideways if you don’t want wings or a beer.
At the beginning of 2021, I didn’t even know if I would do comedy again and now I’m here. I was on a date at Doris last March and it was going well. While I was walking her home, we passed by an apartment and she pointed at it and said “My friend used to live there and host a comedy show in the basement.” I said “Oh yeah, that’s (name redacted)’s old apartment. I’ve been there before.” I had not mentioned comedy once up until this point because just breaching the subject would have caused me to spiral in a very unattractive manner. I had to finally admit that I was (at least at one point) a comedian and had performed in that basement. She said it was “sociopath behavior” to not mention that over the previous 2 or 3 hours we spent together. The jury’s still out on if she was right or not.
In February I had just quit my job so I could tour full-time and I celebrated with a run, a thing I never really did before then and have barely done since. On that run, I passed right by Doris and paused. I gave myself a few seconds while I caught my breath to acknowledge the massive shift I had made since the last time I was there and then kept moving forward. That’s all there ever is to do. Put your head down and trudge towards change until you get there and then keep trudging.
Fitness has, unfortunately, become a big part of my life lately. I never envisioned myself as someone who stretched every day or worried if they were doing too much cardio for their weightlifting results to really manifest or ate oatmeal with goji berries and flax seeds for breakfast every morning. Considering caloric intake, protein levels and portion control instead of eating an entire family bag of Lay’s chips for dinner. I must maintain control because if I am mentally strong then I can become physically strong.
It takes a lot of work to have a body that is this unremarkable. I’m eating rice cakes and not drinking calories. I’m utilizing the gym in every hotel I stay in. I’m feeling so energized after lifting weights that I’ll try to drag Diego out of his bed in our hotel room and wrestle him. I’m seeing real results from the work I’m putting in. I am actually fitting into the bag of shirts that never fit me labeled “ONE DAY CLOTHING”. My arms and shoulders and traps are bigger than they’ve ever been. My stomach is flattening. My jawline is coming back. My eyes look tired and my hair is greying. My body is sore in places I didn’t know had muscles every single day. I think I need to buy all new pants. I accidentally dug a knife into my palm while putting a new hole in my belt. You can’t win them all, I guess.
People keep congratulating me like I completed a marathon. There’s still a part of my brain that won’t let me accept compliments or anything nice anyone says in general. When anyone says anything nice about my weight loss, I take it as them patronizing me. I assume everyone has some kind of ulterior motive and the goal is to make me feel bad. Instead of knowing that everyone isn’t out to get me and could even possibly be happy for me, it registers as some worldwide conspiracy.
I owe the bulk of my physical transformation to biking. I picked up a side gig doing bike deliveries while not on the road to supplement my Nighttime eBay habit. Nighttime eBay is when you don’t know what to do with yourself after the sun goes down and you’re alone so you spend all of your money on books that keep piling up but you never read or sweatshirts that remind you of ones that your mom wore when you were young or pants that fit you so poorly you’re not sure you even know what your body could look like or a dozen boxes of the same incense because it’s the one scent your roommate doesn’t hate and you’re finally a big enough person to compromise or pieces of art that will sit in a pile in the corner until you one day live in a home with enough space for all of the ephemera attached to your long line of personalities.
Biking around New York City is a beautiful way to tell your friends and family that you don’t care if you live or die without having to use too many words. Half of the people on the street think you’re invisible while the other half see you as a target. The beautiful and dangerous yin-yang of existence. Riding around unlocks buried memories like a road being built in front of you while you walk on it in a video game. The mental map of my life in the city populates in real time.
Make one left turn and we see the coffee shop where a famous writer read me her AA apology letter, which sitting through was worse than what she actually did to me. Cross the bridge and there’s the apartment of the woman who said I was the fattest guy she’s had sex with. Head a few blocks north and pass by the bar I spent 5 nights a week in for years that is now a fake fancy Mexican restaurant. Little do the people eating overpriced breakfast tacos know that this is where I was once covered in fake blood and my friend rubbed his penis on my head during a comedy show. Head uptown towards Penn station which is one of the only places I’ve ever been drunk. I laid in the middle of a walkway, screaming at my friends that the soldier holding a rifle was going to shoot me because I was drunk. We’re all glad that’s behind me now.
Delivering to people’s homes gives me one of life’s greatest gifts: getting to see how people live. I’m obsessed with it. I want to see how every person I’ve ever met decorates their home. What’s on their walls? What kind of couch do they have? Do they own a goofy headboard? Do they have a clear rack to show off their sneakers like a 15 year-old hypebeast? What’s their candle or incense situation? What type of lightbulbs do they use? This is more important to me than who someone votes for. Plus you can usually deduce a person’s political stance from the way that they decorate their home.
Seeing how someone chooses to live feels way more intimate than having sex with them. I have an app on my phone where I could have sex with a woman while her husband watches tonight. I don’t have an app where they’ll show me how they arrange their living room. I know it’s possible to catch glimpses on Instagram or YouTube or Tik Tok but it’s not the same. I watch all of those celebrity house tour videos but there’s no feeling to them. That’s how everyone acts anyway. Regular people have propstyled and organized their entire lives into little corners that are always ready for a photoshoot just in case they get famous suddenly.
I don’t want to see The Curated You. I want to see You You. It’s the same with photos. I’m not particularly interested in how you look while you’re posing for a photographer. I want to see how you look at a party while you’re talking to someone you may or may not sleep with later. Candid photos show the person you truly are.
I don’t know if I’m in a good place just yet, but it finally feels like the train has left the bad place it was stationed at for a long time. All I had to do was upend every single facet of my life with an insane amount of effort. The funny thing about your dreams coming true is that you still have to keep living once they do. I had no idea there could be more than my meager desires but I guess I’ll just keep trudging forward until I can’t anymore.