I met you in San Diego to the sound of Arcade Fire and Shakespeare under the eucalyptus trees. 

Part of me still believes our first days together will be the best I will ever have: Writing by day and performing at night; a 30 waist with an iPod shuffle clipped to the belt loop; my ten-speed Peugeot splitting lanes up University Avenue as dusk gathered its pink tinder in the west an hour before curtain. 

I think of those early years now as I write this in the small one-room East Hollywood apartment that I promised would be merely our temporary lodging but somehow became the ten-year home we shared and from whose threshold I now bid you farewell to welcome another decade. I would not have designed it this way, but here we are. Life does not shy away from surprises. Nor did you.

I count my inventory on the carpet stains…

We drove North out of San Diego expecting to move back east. But over a drink in my old midtown haunt that now no longer exists you urged me to remain in California. The day we arrived back in my Los Angeles hometown for good an idea that would change my life broke open onto loose leaf the way nothing else ever has, still to this day.

I put on an apron and we worked overnight shifts at a diner in Hollywood slinging hash to drunks and chasing them up Cahuenga at 4am when they tried to run out on the bill. We took the studio apartment in East Hollywood with the popcorn ceilings for a song and within two months we got a nice phone call which invited us to a rehearsal room in Cleveland where I could take my turn at the wheel as Romeo. We did the show again in Boise where the sun would set just as I stepped out from stage left to find Juliet on her balcony. 

When we got back to Los Angeles the play we’d written earned us the ego-raising hazing ritual of the couch-and-water tour. Our play opened in West Hollywood at a 50 seat theatre. The Hollywood Reporter said some nice things, but we were back to that small room with the bad carpet looking at the popcorn ceilings for ways to keep the lights on and the wolf from the door.

You took a gig writing poems on a 1936 Remington typewriter in a tent at the Coachella Music Festival. You took a job at a bar in Hollywood that didn’t cater to drunks. We always walked the mile and a half to work even though we had a car. On the slow nights, we’d scribble on napkins. They were mostly slow nights and we preferred it that way. More Shakespeare called and you left the bar again and lived for a summer in a cabin with a lake view.

You booked your first TV pitch that year. But it would take another year before anything would start and then another year before it would fail. Then you landed your first feature pitch. Again, it would take another year for anything to begin. 

That’s what they never told you: harder than the writing, harder than the hustle, was how difficult it would be to summon patience in the face of slow, brutal uncertainty. 

(Were you trying to teach me something there?)

In between the waiting, we gathered stains on the carpet. We wore our apron and cleared tables at weddings and taught Shakespeare under industrial lighting. We took our coffee cans to the CoinStar to buy Christmas gifts and we tried to love the people we were lucky enough to meet, mostly stumbling, mostly flailing. 

One time I’d paid off my credit card balance in expectation of a paycheck that a day later I learned would never arrive. I didn’t sleep and by dawn I was dry heaving into my girlfriend’s toilet. 

Some of the shit we had to swallow. 

In the between, we doubled the size of our theater. We tore down sets and built new ones. My plays would visit big cities and little towns. I would try to go to all the openings if I could, once landing in Prague just before curtain, bleary-eyed and wild. There was no real money and there was no promise of more forthcoming. But the love in all those rooms was exactly what I’d bargained for when I signed up for this strange strange way.

When it was gracious enough to come, the work took me from taking notes at a Chabad Shabbat in a Crown Heights synagogue to Sunrise at Angkor Wat in Cambodia. To do the work I stayed in motels with wasps in the shower and suites at the St. Regis. I got used to seeing sunrise over descent into Hong Kong and my friend’s couch in Brooklyn and the post office on Congress Avenue in Austin. I rode a motorbike all over an island in the Gulf of Thailand, and I sweated up I-5 in August with a busted AC to make an evening rehearsal in San Francisco. 

But we always went back to the little room in East Hollywood that we once got for a song. Never quite earning enough for long enough to justify an upgrade. The coins clinked in the coffee jars. The popcorn ceilings spun silken webs in the corners. My furniture, all second hand, wove a story of friends who offered me their pieces when they moved up or moved on: The desk, from a musician; the couch from an actress and mother; a hutch my father built in the 70s. The carpet got older and there was always another method of brewing coffee to learn that would contribute to the stains. The keyboard would click and the songs would go out into the world, occasionally surviving atmospheric incineration. 

In the betweens we pitched tents in Joshua Tree. We rediscovered yoga and the Dodgers. We ran a streak of 950 days in a row of daily meditation before finally forgetting once during the pandemic. We turned the whiskey tumbler upside down on the bar top one day when we recognized the hurt we were trying to inflict and the erosion of spirit behind the numbness and hangovers. That particular glass remains dry today. 

We grew our hair like a merman in hopes that it might take a piece of the sea with us whenever we came up for air.

And in the betweens…

I stood best man for a best friend. 

Officiated the wedding of my oldest friend. 

Greeted my niece with a poem.

Read for my grandfather at his memorial. 

Became a crisis counselor. One night per week I’d pour a pot of tea and try to be a beacon of empathy for anyone calling from the ledge. 

All the writing, all the shit and glory… it was practice for these moments.

In the last month of my thirties I kept a notebook next to my bed to recover my dreams. I run a planchette over the half-waking scrawl…

In one, I retrieved a dog I’d lost. 

In another, I stood on a Chicago dock as a massive steam ship took off at a hundred miles per hour across Lake Michigan. The ropes from the ship sifted through my hands and fell into the water as it sped away. 

The next. A box in the corner. Inside: a build-it-yourself piano.

And then, with no context, “To her left sleeps her husband, to her right, a gun.”

In another, I played a demented game of hide-and-seek with a cast from a play where the game was to try to kill each other. 

In one of the most recent entries I was leaving my childhood home for the last time, but I was an adult. I fell into the fetal position by the rear tire of our Chevrolet Suburban because I didn’t want to have to go.

My dentist tells me I clench my teeth at night.

My regrets of the past ten years are that for the big things, I thought I was never ready, or didn’t deserve them. Usually, I was wrong. I could’ve done with a little less self-doubt, and a lot less self-punishment. The disappointments I blamed myself for dominoed onto too many who I wish I was kinder towards. I’m grateful to those who still helped walk me home anyway. 

Just as when I took my little place in East Hollywood for a song, when you cross a threshold you do not yet know what it will ask of you. I’ve learned that you can expect the road to appear and disappear as seasons wash and then mar and then reveal the way again. But above all, if you do not carry love with you, you will not find it when you arrive. 

Perhaps I would not have designed it this way with the small room with the stains in the carpet, but what the hell do I know? As far as I can tell this is my first time doing this thing. 

So as I wake up on the dawn of my forty-first year, a new moon in the sky, the year of the mighty metal ox rearing its head, with half an idea plucked out somewhere in the cloud, and a ukulele in my trunk waiting to meet the sting of salt air on the central coast, I am grateful for my popcorn ceilings. 

They always held me, as they always held the rain. 

Writing is another kind of marriage. It is a relationship. 

Say to your writing on the day of your vows, “I will love you in sickness and in health,” and it will say the same to you, sickness and health. And it will say to you, “I don’t ask for much. A few hours in the mornings or evenings. A rested and sober mind. Healthful foods and a little exercise to stay clear. A stack of books that I may never finish. And dash of faith and a little elbow room to surprise us both from time to time.”

And like any marriage, some days the other will earn a little more to support the other, and some days the other will have to do their part a little more. Just as I supported my writing early on, saying, “I will work this bar job for a few years, I will cater this or that event to bring in some money for a little food, for a room where you can find quiet hours to do whatever you want to do,” she will sometimes say to me (my writing is definitely a she) “buckle up, my love, I’m going to take you to see the world, and if you want you can finally buy those headphones you’ve been eyeing for the last year.”

And then on the other end of that season, she’ll come to me and say, “Well, it looks like there won’t be a renewal on my project, so I’m not sure what’s next. We saved a little though, and I will try to make something else in the meantime.” 

And I say, “okay, my love, I will return to teaching as much as I can, and I’ll do my best to provide those few hours a day for you in the mornings or the evenings so you can do whatever it is you want to do. And now that I’m teaching, maybe you can sit in from time to time and learn from my students, or share what you know with them, too.”

And then one day she comes to me and says, “my love, I found something, but it isn’t going to make much money. Are you mad?”

And I say, “No. What is it?”

And then she tells me, “Actually, this one might end up costing us money.”

And I say, “Are you sure this is the next one?”

And she nods, yes. 

And I smile and tell her that I trust her, and that I’ll make sure she has her time and hours to do it. 

“All I need,” she says, “is a few hours in the morning or the evening, a rested and sober head, a downed internet connection, healthful foods and a little exercise for clarity, books… and maybe this time? A few hundred dollars, maybe more, for a stack of paper, envelopes, postage stamps, a website. Is that okay?”

How can I say no? So I say yes.

Come what come will. Let’s have an adventure and be wrong as often as we are right.

https://www.boardaghost.com/

here we are now, entertain us

Perhaps now is as good of a time as any to reflect on what it is like to feel stupid and contagious. 

This week was the twenty-sixth anniversary of Kurt Cobain's death. On April 8, 1994 A VECA employee found Cobain’s body when he arrived to install security lighting. The coroner concluded that Cobain died on April 5 from a gunshot wound. On April 10 fans held a memorial at Seattle Center vigil where a recording played of Courtney Love reading a portion of the suicide note aloud. Kurt opened the letter with a salutation to Boddah, his childhood imaginary friend. He closed it with a Neil Young lyric, “it’s better to burn out than fade away” which Love resolutely warned her listeners to not adhere to because , as she put it, “it’s a fucking lie.”

What is there to say about Kurt Cobain's death that 26 years of revision has not already uttered? Well, last week Pearl Jam released their newest album Gigaton. And when Cobain’s contemporaries are still making work it's hard not to wonder what he'd be making today. Eddie Vedder's voice always draws me back to my adolescence. 

Joan Didion recommends that we stay on nodding terms with our former selves, lest they show up unannounced one day strapped with a bomb on their vest and a list of demands. I can picture my former self, maybe 13, holding in my hands finally the album TEN. There's a slight crack on the jewel case. I nod to him often. 

In those days the luxury of a Compact Disc was in the ease of skipping songs. And though we didn’t know it, the CD was the last audio medium to truly give meaning to the term album and the pairing of artwork and music like a cut of medium-rare Kobe with a young Tempranillo. The concept of album is now only a concept. Listening to an album from start to finish is not just a pastime of our youth, it is a pastime entirely foreign to newer generations. We once only listened to the music we could buy or else borrow. We’d listen to even the forgettable songs that we have not thought of in years. I think back to that boy in his wallpapered room— he hasn't thrown out his Legos yet, nor developed a taste for coffee, but here he was listening to “Jeremy” the album’s sixth track, about a young boy who shows up at school with a gun and shoots himself in front of the class as a response to being bullied. It's morbid nostalgia to think that a school shooting once only involved a suicide and not a murderous rampage first. Today Eddie Vedder would have to pen a different song about Jeremy where the business end of the gun was first turned on the world. 

And this brings me to TikTok—Generation Z's answer to escaping existential malaise. In this quarantine- and yes “this” because I fear there will be several more installments of quarantine— I decided out of two-parts curiosity, one-part boredom, and one heaping dose of procrastination, to download the latest sensation application. I expected to be befuddled and confused as I was when I ran a similar experiment with Snapchat a year ago. Instead, on my first tour through the app, I found no barriers to entry as long as I knew how to swipe my thumb. I passed enough time for a full PT Anderson film to barrel through one wall of my apartment and out the other.

TikTok is an impossible conflagration of sex and cleverness driven mainly by Generation Z and I found myself unable to look away. Upon arrival I was summarily served to a thirty second video of a teenage girl sitting shotgun in a parked car while her mother was in the driver’s seat, aloof to the prank about to be pulled: The girl began lip syncing to Mulatto’s verse on the song Nasty Nasty— “I like em nasty, suck on that di%k without asking…” The mother in the video reacts, horrified, and tries to grab the phone to shut it off, the teenage girl laughs and continues the lyrics, “He put his thumb in…” and then the video starts over. It’s possible that the video was staged, but it is tempting to believe it is real. I find myself in the mother’s shoes, watching her daughter make innuendo for a broad audience of strangers on the internet, trying to stop her from doing it. But staged or not, the teenage girl was doing something right, at least in the currency of social media, if such a thing exists. The video has over one million likes. To issue a like all you have to do is touch the heart with your thumb. To move on, you merely have to swipe up.

I spent half the length of Boogie Nights swiping up.

As I scrolled, I began to understand the pattern at work: See Something, Do Something. I found a series of 15 second videos which promised to teach me four simple moves in order to learn an optical illusion shuffle dance to a mesmerizing beat. It looked simple enough, even my two left feet could handle it. Of course, what the fifteen second tutorial omits is that it is really helpful to have years of dance experience to execute the steps. 

Then I found another popular series where a girl smiles at the camera for about ten seconds as a rave song plays in the background, and at the ninth second the lyrics moan an ecstatic “mmmyeah” which the girl lip syncs to while grabbing her hair and rolling her eyes in the back of her head, feigning orgasmic pleasure. The video ends and instantly begins again. 

The videos were not all sexual, many were impossibly clever. A teen would tape their iPhone to a drill to create a spinning effect, or else tape their iPhone to the inside of a dryer, or they might pull a prank on their parents. The video that recurs the most is of a girl walking into the frame wearing a robe or sweatpants, hair in a bun, and when the beat of the music drops, she jumps. When she lands she is now fully dressed, hair done, and make-up applied. It’s a clever way of showing the costumes we put on to express ourselves. 

TikTok quickly learned that I spend a lot of time on the dog videos, and so gave me more of what I craved. A dog staring at the camera, jowls all adroop, with the FaceTime tone ringing and a caption explaining to whom and for what purpose the pup is making the call— “calling dad because my tennis ball is under the couch” or “calling mom because dad flipped my ears back and won’t put them back.” These, I could watch all day. And if not careful, I might.

Finally I found videos of a ping-pong ball traveling through a maze of dominoes and hairdryers traversing a two story house and ending up miraculously on the billiard table sinking an eight ball. 

It is all pornography. No, not pornography. It’s a pornography compilation with the burdensome foreplay and pillow talk trimmed on the cutting room floor. Videos that take David Mamet’s maxim taken to the last possible degree: get in at the last possible moment, get out faster.

I’m still amazed how quickly time passes on these applications. Undeniably, it is a drug, and one that is quite powerful. And like any powerful drug, while under its spell I feel a temporary lift on the ban of immortality. In those moments I cease to age. I can pretend I still have time ahead of me and anything is possible. I can become beautiful in a single leap. Somewhere in the dim recesses of mind, I know I cannot, but that “cannot” is not so loud anymore, not so present.

Visiting Instagram an hour later felt like visiting MySpace in 2010. The images did not move, nor tantalize, nor reveal or impress. It felt like AM radio after a concert. A cup of decaf at seven in the morning. It felt much like what it feels to hold a cracked jewel case of Pearl Jam’s TEN and think, “without a CD player, do I still have use for this?” The answer might be yes, but why then does the compact disc remain in a plastic bin in my closet?

The easiest thing in the world for me to do would be to pass critical judgment on this new phenomenon. I can toss a stone and hit a dozen studies that show that social media use is crippling the mental health of young people. I imagine TikTok, which is Instagram on amphetamines, will only increase or amplify these findings. The harder thing for me to do would to become curious, to ask why this application is taking off with the new generation.

When authorities first announced the quarantines, they advised us using the terminology, “Shelter In Place.” This, understandably, caused some trauma for Generation Z who has been practicing “Shelter In Place” exercises for years in the event of a “Jeremy” at their school. This was quickly re-branded to“Shelter-At-Home.” And for a Generation to be told they are no longer safe at school and now no longer safe outside their homes, I understand their resistance to foreplay. Time is short. Get to the point.

Or maybe things haven’t changed as much as we think. The 13 year old in the wallpapered room also holds a tape cassette purchased at a Walmart outside of Little Rock. No crack in the plastic. On the cover is a smiling baby floating in a pool, unaware that he will drown in the coming minutes if not for help from without. Cobain paints the picture on Side A in the opening stanza of the anthem of my generation:

Load up on guns, bring your friends

It's fun to lose and to pretend

She's over-bored and self-assured

Oh no, I know a dirty word.

I should be on a silent meditation retreat right now, and yet here we are...

I should be on Day 4 of a Ten Day Vipassana Retreat in the desert. Instead I’m on Day 25 of Self-Isolation. Breath in… and breath… oh god, oh god… choking… oh god…

I’m trying to map my level of alarm onto my 2020 calendar.

When exactly did I start taking the virus seriously as it pertains to my day to day? And when— perhaps we are all asking ourselves this— should I have taken it seriously?

On a scale from 1 to 10. 1 being mostly consumed with day to day bullshit, making sure I’m up to date on my stupid podcasts, the primary election, washing my hands— “meh— when I get around to it.” And 10 being where the majority of your day is driven or challenged by the virus. Level 10 also includes perks such as navigating anxiety attacks, terrible sleep patterns, Lady M level hand washing, and panic-binge-reading commentary on the Imperial College report, running the long distance social distance marathon. I’ve been at a 10 for a little over three weeks.

I pin point 3/11 as the day the shit really hit the fan— at least in my corner of the world. I remember it well because it was the night of my theatre company’s Gala at the Formosa Cafe. We’d been planning it for almost a year and we had a very exciting cabaret night in store for donors and friends. We rolled out the piano and imported the Marie’s Crisis/Don’t Tell Mama’s vibe directly from the West Village into West Hollywood.

When I arrived that night I was already trembling at a level 6.8 slash 7. We got there early to set up and learn the sign-in system and the app to buy raffle tickets and go over the agenda for the evening. Everyone had different thoughts on how serious we should take the virus. Some weren’t worried at all, others were already practicing elbow bumping in place of hugs, some folks straight up declined to show. But before orientation was over our phones vibrated with the news that Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson were infected by COVID-19. And then just a few minutes after that we learned that the NBA cancelled its season, which was awkward because one of our hot ticket auction items was season tickets to the Clippers. As our first patrons arrived Trump was giving his first flame-out address to the nation about the pandemic.

I washed my hands and put on a pair of surgical gloves for the rest of the night. It was a fun night. We sang Broadway songs over a piano. The open bar kept everyone properly sauced and dancing. A photo booth shined in the corner, documenting what would end up feeling like the last night of the world.

The next morning I would take out the N95 mask I bought a year ago in Thailand. I would search for the mini-bottles of hand sanitizer my sister puts in my Christmas stocking each year as a joke. I’m unbelievably impressed that I didn’t throw them out. (Thank you, Courtney).

That was when level 10 began. That was when I started counting Clorox wipes, not sheep, to find sleep. That was Day 1.

I rewind the tape from there…

The latter part of the prior week I was at a level 6. I normally go to yoga 3-4 times a week, but in the lead-up week to the shit hitting the fan I only went once because I was concerned that yogis might be shedding virus all over the locker rooms and studio. The one time I did go I brought hand sanitizer and tried not to touch my face during class (which is really hard for me because it’s hot yoga and I sweat like a fountain). That night I went to CVS and saw a whole row of Clorox Wipes for sale. I thought, hmm, yeah, I should think about getting more of those.

Dear reader, I did not get more of those.

I was also scheduled to do a reading of my new play at SF Playhouse in the mid-March. I wrote to them asking if they were concerned over the virus and they assured me that things were going ahead as planned. I also wrote the Vipassana Center in Joshua Tree to ask about precautions against the virus. They wrote that they were planning ahead, and sick participants would be asked to leave.

That was the second half of the first week of March. I continue the rewind…

Super Tuesday (3/3) stands out in my memory when my alarm hovered around a cool Level 5. I had the opportunity to vote by mail but I opted to vote in person even though I was starting to worry about group gatherings. I prefer the experience of voting in person, I like thinking that my vote instantly counts. But I figured I’d be in and out. I’ve been voting in my neighborhood for almost a decade and Super Tuesday was the first time I had to wait in line for more than three minutes.

I waited an hour forty-five.

And the guy in front of me in line was coughing every ten minutes or so. I was wary. I knew the virus was on our shores. I tried to keep my distance. I voted on the touch screen, which I felt nervous about. I sanitized my hands right after voting. I turned down an invite to a Super Tuesday watch party.

The weekend before Super Tuesday I registered at about a Level 4. I considered attending the Public Enemy concert downtown at the Bernie Sanders rally. But I decided that a group that large would be a bad idea. But I did attend a small rally where Marianne Williamson spoke on Monday night. For several reasons which I won’t go into right now, I wish I’d done something else that night. I was washing my hands every chance I could already.

Rewinding further…

In the last week of February I had a good, if peripheral, understanding of the toll the virus was taking in the world but I did little to alter my own behavior. As far as I knew it wasn’t in California just yet. More pressing concerns were if Elizabeth Warren would knock Mike Bloomberg on his ass a second time, or if Biden would win South Carolina, and by how much. On February 21st, I went and saw Maria Dizzia’s brilliant turn in What The Constitution Means To Me at the Mark Taper. I even rode the Red Line Subway downtown to see it. Not a single thought to hand sanitizer.

It’s safe to conclude that when I took that subway ride, I was at a level 1.

But when should I have taken it seriously? Instead of Day 25 of self-isolation should I be on Day 50? Which conditions would be necessary for my imagination to sell the immediate adoption of significant daily life changes upstairs to my prefrontal cortex? It appears that the absolutely bonkers death toll in China and Italy were not enough which… um… concerns me about me.

Failure Of Imagination is possibly responsible here. And by that I do mean the collective imagination. I have a lot more to write on the subject, particularly as it concerns Global Warming, but here’s a primer: if we were at all late to act on instituting significant lifestyle changes that carried serious economic downsides not to mention downright pain-in-the ass lack of accustomed conveniences when the wave of death was already rearing its head… then we do not stand a chance against global warming. Full stop. For COVID-19, we should’ve been thinking 2 weeks or a month ahead. We lacked collective imagination to do so. For Global Warming, we need to be thinking a decade ahead. For Global Warming, we are riding the subway on February 21st thinking, yeah, it’s happening, but it’s not here, it’s not worth shutting down the theatre over. Actually, February 21st is probably too charitable. We’re closer to the beginning of March.

What do we do when the time to act is behind us? We hang on. And hope to ride it out. And hope to learn.

But one of the things I cannot do right now is devote substantial energy to following the news. It’s all bad. It’s all bad all the time. And the news pours into every screen every moment of the day. I think about how lucky previous generations were to get their news twice a day— once in the morning, once in the evening. How much healthier it might’ve been.

And health is on the forefront of my mind.

So. While I’m not exactly experiencing higher states of consciousness (most days I’m lucky if I can keep a string of four thoughts together at once) I am trying to do some things to keep me sane.

In lieu of a Vipassana retreat, here are some of the things I’m doing outside of writing and teaching.

What I’m Reading: A Sport And A Pastime by James Salter. This book might be a little too sexy for those currently stranded without a partner. The Guardian praised it as a book where the “sex is as good as the prose.” And yes, you’ll want to spend a lot of time with both.

What I’m listening to: Lo-Fi Hip Hop. Spotify Playlist. This has been an excellent new addition to my writing music. I accidentally clicked on it when it showed up in my IG ads and I kinda just went with it. I’m glad I did.

Podcast Episode: Making Sense. #194 The New Future Of Work. Fascinating conversation with Matt Mullenweg, founder of WordPress, about remote work (as he calls it “Distributed Work”). As those of us who are still lucky enough to have work we are all scrambling to make remote work work, Mullenweg has been running his companies on a fairly exclusive Remote Work Only for years. He walks you through the 5 levels, and sells the significant upsides of a more autonomous workforce.

Game I’m playing: Inside — excellent horror puzzler. If you haven’t tried the og LIMBO yet, start there. The ending is just WEIRD.

What I’m Watching: One Man, Two Guvnors. If you missed this hilarious play on the big stages, the National Theatre has put out its full production for streaming on YouTube. An excellent laugh.

Hang in there lovelies.

I can’t believe I have to even write these words.

Let me perfectly fucking clear: I voted for and supported Bernie Sanders. But I’m getting my elbows into this pit right now. Stop with the shit against the Warren supporters.

The online cruelty needs to stop right the fuck now.

First of all, NO ONE in Elizabeth Warren’s position would’ve dropped out of the race. Not Bernie, not Biden, not Obama, not JESUS — Politicians drop out for TWO reasons: they are out of cash or their best days are behind them. Those were abso-fucking-lutely the case for Pete and Amy. NEITHER were true for her.

Some polls had her winning Massachusetts, and other polls had her in second place in California and Colorado. She was in play in Texas. In a best case scenario she was poised to take 200 delegates on Super Tuesday. You don’t scrap for 10 months on the hardest stage in the world to get to that point, see those odds, and understand the leverage those odds bring when you are fighting tooth and nail for things you believe in with your whole heart and then just throw in the towel. She wasn’t a Bernie surrogate, she was Elizabeth fucking Warren.

And she had 29 million CASH on hand from (among other things) her SPECTACULAR MORTAL KOMBAT take down of Mike Bloomberg (which, btw, Joe Biden — and the rest of us — owes her a big fat THANK YOU for). Even without her Super PAC, she took in a gargantuan February haul. She was PAID.

And yes, her “path” likely involved a contested convention, and she said she’d take it there, but if you’ve ever been in a negotiation once in your life you don’t hedge your own opening. Of course she said it, she had to say it. Bernie said it once upon a moon! It wasn’t the convention she needed to get to, it was the next election, and the next debate when she could shine again— when it would be just her and two men on the stage. And she would’ve brought a tarp, a bucket, and a hammer. Actually, spite her enough and she just might stay in until that debate, just for the show.

With polls and cash like that NO ONE DROPS OUT.

Second of all — if you think ALL OF HER SUPPORTERS would’ve jumped ship to Bernie, then YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND WARREN’S SUPPORT. Her whole point was that she was able to present a progressive platform for progressives and progressive-curious. And she was DOING IT. Supporters like her not because she is “female Bernie” or some nonsense, they like her because she is an extraordinary politician, and fucking sharp, they like that she follows up talk with plans, and she’s a pragmatic progressive, and unifying, and could crack heads. Not all of her supporters were warm on the idea of political revolution, if you can believe it. If you have serious doubts that a bunch of her support would've gone straight to Biden, given the options a day before Super Tuesday, then you don’t really understand her supporters.

In fact, on Monday, some of her support probably DID slip to Biden.

And can we talk for a fucking minute about BIDEN? This dude out-performed every single expectation he had. This should give any progressive a gracious moment of pause. Without spending a single dime, without a single campaign office in some states, with precisely ZERO ground game, Biden crushed BOTH Bernie and Warren.

Can we talk for a minute about how Biden is actually winning? And that he did something really spectacular? Biden’s outsized performance has nothing to do with the wonderful and smart voters who backed a once in a life-time candidate.

For all the progressive talk about how the 1% pits the 99% at war with each other to take our eye off the ball, we sure seem to forget what color our fucking jersey is right now.

Stop the shit.

Lest we prove the world right that the real goal here is not to win but only to divide.

Eve Ensler said at the Sanders rally in San Jose this week — perhaps a little too charitably — that we should break the myth of the Bernie Bro. She said — with roaring passion — that the men she’s met in this movement are kind, and gracious, and open, and wonderful.

Can we please act like it?

My “Sober January” experiment of 2018 has officially rolled over into yet another year.  

When asked why I am not drinking I now demure some version of,  “I’ll probably have a beer again someday, but just not now.”  Most of the time I feel that I am serious about this claim. But now that two years have passed I suspect I might not be telling the whole truth.

A year ago I posted that my 2018 sobriety had surprised me.  I hadn’t planned it.  I just rolled over one month into ninety days, into six months, into a year.  I didn’t have a lot of *reasons* on hand to run this experiment.  Instead, the reasons gathered *as* I ran it.

In 2019 I was a little more conscious of how nicely another year would stack atop the former.  Part of my reason to  abstain from alcohol was to square this personal game of jenga.  

But as I waded through my second year without a single hangover other reasons gathered around me.   I did some math on the difference between a year with a couple mild hangovers here and there and a year without them at all. 

I found that Thirty Calendar Days went back in my pocket. 

I'll explain. 

Here’s the thing: I still believe I’m a “Grey Area Drinker.”  I wrote last year that I didn't necessarily identify as an alcoholic.  The line isn’t terribly bright for me.  I’ve attended AA meetings in the past, and though I find them extremely powerful, I wasn’t sure they were for me.    

What is a Grey Area drinker?  Well, some might call this high functioning alcoholism. Another definition might hear this refrain a few times: “Yeah, I should probably cut back.”  For me?  I don’t like having just one drink but I also don’t like having ten drinks.   I like having three to five drinks.  That’s my sweet spot.  

And I really prefer five.  

I didn’t often wake up in a ditch or going 65 on the freeway, but I did often wake up feeling not my best, and occasionally with my clothes and lights still on.

The “Grey Area” of an appetite for three to five drinks usually puts me into some hangover the next morning, however light, however gone-by-noon-ish-funk, however just-a-little-hungry, blah, no-big-deal, fine-by-afternoon, I-got-this.

These mild, light, “barely noticeable” hangovers really don’t feel like a big deal.  And taken singularly, they probably aren’t a big deal.

Here’s the but.

Even if I only do this twice a week, this means in one year I will have (52 weeks x 2) 104 mornings that are low energy, low emotional intelligence, higher irritability, which usually means slightly higher stress.

Again, taken alone, each of these is probably not a big deal.

But morning til a little after noon is about one-third of my day.  And when I add up all the twice a week small hangovers as a third of my day, by the end of the year I have spent (104 x .33) one calendar month in mild hangover.

And this equation does not account for the large hangovers that invariably come throughout the year.  Nor the hours spent numb or buzzed.

That is thirty-some days blown in blah.  One month out of the year where potential is blunted.

I keep saying “I’ll have a drink again one day.”  And part of me believes it.  I’m kinda waiting for the right event.   The right time.   The right reason.

But also, in 2019, I flew to Bangkok for my first ever Red Carpet Premiere of a TV Series I wrote for Netflix.  At the after party,  surrounded by a warm and supportive team that came together to celebrate a show a year and a half in the making, they were handing out champagne.  There was an open bar.   I passed.  I enjoyed soda water and looked forward to a clear-headed and long bubble bath in the beautiful tub in my room upstairs later.  

I’m finding almost everything is better with a clear head.

If I didn’t drink a glass of champagne at my first premiere then I honestly am not sure what the right occasion— what the appropriate reason— will be for me to crack open a drink again.  Perhaps my own wedding?  But also, why then?  Why that moment?

And it got me thinking that the drink itself is the event.  Recall Paul Giamatti at the end of Sideways drinking his 1961 Château Cheval Blanc in the styrofoam cup while shoveling fast food in his mouth.

There are really no reasons to drink, except to drink.  No event is intrinsically linked with alcohol.   We can just be damn clever with our associative brain power to make sure we can revisit that event often if we happen to like the event of drinking.   And the residue of doing this (if you, like me, happen to enjoy three to five) is the next morning when the direct result of that event is that we feel ”I’ll be fine” or ”just a little out of it” or ”just didn’t sleep well but I took a tylenol.”  

I’m finding I quite like doing things sober.  It’s nice to walk into a bar to meet friends and not worry about lugging a fifty-dollar-including-tip tab with me on my way out.  (The price of a gd IPA these days, sheesh!)   Eating out also becomes slightly more affordable again.  I drive whenever I damn well please.  Coffee is fantastic.  I was lucky enough to have a lot of set days this year next to beautiful beaches.  I got up every single morning to watch the sunrise when I normally would’ve been sleeping off a couple beers.  At my physical this year my cholesterol was lower than it has ever been— and alcohol is the only thing I’ve adjusted in my diet.  

My recommendation is the same as last year: if you’ve ever thought about giving the sauce a rest, you really only stand to gain.   

Run the experiment.  Roll a Dry January into a dry 90 days. There are a lot of companies that take a lot of your money by keeping you in a month of hangovers each year. Take some of it back.  

Run the experiment.  If you have no problem abstaining, that will tell you something.   And if it ends up being harder than you thought, well that's good intel also. And along the way you might enjoy the extra days you pick up in your pocket.

According to this app tracker I keep, I have saved about $6,000 and over 1400 hours over the two years.   The six grand is great.  But I really look at the 1400 hours.  That’s two months.  Time is our only non-renewable resource.  Consider where it goes.

In April, just before the Cambodian New Year, I found myself approaching Angkor Wat before dawn.  The starlit sky gave way to indigo and then over to sunrise as the ancient ruins emerged out of darkness in a golden wash. 

In July, I met my niece.

For both of these moments I was fully, completely there.  And those are just a couple good reasons to wait on that next drink.

Happy New Year.

Autumn is always a difficult season for me to write. I’m not exactly sure why— it is my favorite season. But I do have a few ideas. It could be a combination between the baseball playoffs and political elections that cause such distraction. It could be that the days get shorter and anxiety grows over how to spend your waking hours. Or— and I’m not at all against this possibility— the daemon which occasionally visits my desk checks out for the month of Halloween, and doesn’t bother to come back for the holidays. 

Even as long as I’ve been doing this, it still feels like every now and then I have to relearn the lesson of going slowly, writing poorly and being okay with it, that a day spent writing things that aren’t ever going to make the draft is so much better spent than a day banging my head against the wall over an idea until I’m exhausted and drawing sweeping and faulty conclusions about myself— not just the quality of the work— but of my actual self. 

Last week, The Scriptnotes podcast had an excellent segment on how to decide whether you need to drill down and keep your back to the wheel, or if you really need to step away from work. Both, as John and Craig explain, can be traps. “Tough Love” can masquerade as self-loathing and punishment. “Self-Care” can masquerade as excuses to never actually work. 

Most of the time, most of us are probably pretty good at telling the difference of what we need and when. But if you’re like me, and these autumn leaves bring uncertainty, I found this list of questions to be a wonderful guidepost. 

And it sent me back into one of my most productive weeks I’ve had since summer ended. 

Thanks, John and Craig. 

In time for Halloween.

It's up on your Netflix.  Add to your list!

This is the series I spent the last year working on in Thailand.  It's officially announced!  NOVEMBER 15!