Furiously Happy (30 page)

It's not that I'm afraid of homeless people any more than non-homeless people. I'm afraid of something much more complicated. I look at them and think, “Is that my future?” Because that's what I'd become if I got stuck and was forced to be around people without a break. Screaming and terrorized and stuck huddled in a doorway each day. Lost. Never moving. No options. It's how I feel now, except that I'm blessed to be stuck in a room with clean sheets and a bottle of pills that I carry with me that I hope will give me the numb courage I'll eventually need to call a cab and go to the airport and do a myriad of things normal people don't think about, but that I obsess about over and over until I've taken that taxi and gotten lost in the airport one hundred times in my mind before I actually have to do it for real.

I panic that I'll get stuck. I stand at the door of my hotel room and look out at the real world and I'm terrified that I'll just stop. That I won't be able to leave. Or to call a cab. Or to get on the plane. That I'll be stuck, forever, like those people in the streets.

I'm lucky because I have options. I have medications and therapeutic tools and breathing techniques. I have friends and family I can call to come rescue me if things get too bad. And I have the Internet. That sounds weird, but Twitter is a lot like having a large, invisible gang of equally messed-up people who will hide with you in bathrooms and make you laugh under the pillow fort you've built in a lonely hotel room. Many of them suffer from the same fears, which keep them similarly isolated, but we've found a way to be alone together.

There's something wonderful about experiencing life with friendly strangers and stranger-friends who all fit in your pocket. They celebrate your successes. They send you videos of hedgehogs in bathtubs when you are down. They tell you that you are not alone.
And suddenly? You aren't.
They turn horrific experiences into ones you can laugh about with your friends, these odd strangers who walk with you, keeping you company late at night during a panic attack. Or when you're awkwardly sitting alone at a table in a public place and accidentally mortify yourself, which is—coincidentally—exactly what happened to me that weekend at the conference.

Since the hotel I was staying in didn't offer room service I'd been surviving on the peanut butter crackers I'd brought with me. But on the final day I decided I needed real food before I had to do my speech, so I decided to brave the world and go to the restaurant attached to my hotel. What followed was a humiliating series of events, which would have left me devastated had I not been able to laugh about them with Twitter. (And that's the awesome thing about introverts. They're often on their phones or computers so it's like you're with friends even when you're alone.)

In a nutshell, I tried to take a subtle selfie of how awkwardly alone I was in the dark restaurant but I forgot my flash was on and then when I tweeted the picture my phone made a loud wolf-whistle. In my rush to leave, I tripped on the edge of their fancy koi pond and stepped on a fish. The fish was fine but my right shoe was a mess so I tried to use the ceiling fan in my room to dry my shoe but it was taking too long and I couldn't go speak with a shoe that was making squelching noises so I stuck my shoe onto the fan blade because I thought inertia would force the water out. It seemed to be working until I turned the fan up too high and my shoe shot off the blade and hit me in the face. It was like I was being kicked in the head with my own stupidity.

But Twitter was there through it all, reminding me that if I did actually get my shit together no one would know who I was anymore.

And that?
That
is why I love the Internet. Because they turned a really horrific moment into a memory I could laugh about later because I was experiencing it with people who could commiserate, or at least appreciate it as a terrible train wreck. And it was good. And terrifying. And I survived even though I had to go onstage with a slightly squelchy shoe and then hide in my room immediately afterward.

I continue to do what I do because that is life, and because one day I'll maybe get used to this. Maybe one day I'll have the same reaction to life that I have when I'm locked in a plane or onstage. Maybe I'll be able to relax and enjoy my life without letting fear keep me from living it. Maybe one day I'll easily acknowledge the frank truth … that I have no other choice but to breathe and move forward.

 

Things My Father Taught Me

•
Always pull a tank dog out of a hole by the tail. Also “tank dog” is a fairly awesome name for an armadillo.

•
You can't leave a donkey in the car. But you CAN take it into a bar. And then you can never go back to that bar again.

•
If you have too much grass, and your neighbor has too many goats, you should just rent some of your neighbor's goats to eat your grass. But make sure you get all female ones because otherwise you'll end up with too many goats too. Too much grass and not enough birth control: that's how goats are made.

•
If you want to learn the Native American way to skin buffalo you should let a bunch of them come live in your yard. Native Americans, that is. Not buffalo. Honestly, we barely had room for all those goats.

•
The grass is greener on the other side of the fence but only because most people don't have a bunch of rented goats in their backyards. Those fucking goats eat
everything
.

•
You can trade three goats for one slightly used kid's motorcycle.

•
You can trade one slightly used and now vaguely crashed kid's motorcycle back for those same goats if you just make sure to trade really bad goats the first time around. They should change “You can't handle the truth” to “You can't handle these goats” because it's more realistic. Goats are terrible to handle.

•
When life gives you lemons you should freeze them and use them to throw at your enemies using some sort of trebuchet. Also, you should never ask your father what a trebuchet is because he will show you. It's like a catapult but more complicated, and inevitably it breaks or the goats wander into its path and run away dazed.

•
On the other side of fear is freedom. And usually fewer fingers than you started with.

•
Everyone is born with extra fingers. God expects you to cut a few off during your journey. Otherwise he wouldn't have made power tools so awesome.

•
If you toss a freshly killed deer on the kitchen table with its stomach on the tabletop and its front legs on one side and back legs on the other it'll look less like it's flying and more like it's just badly failed at the hurdles. It's a bit funny and horrible all at once. Much like life.

•
Always shoot first. Because bears don't shoot. They just eat you. You'll never win if you wait for the bear to get the first shot. This is all basic hunting 101.

•
There will be moments when you have to be a grown-up. Those moments are tricks. Do not fall for them.

•
Refrigerators are good for keeping homemade moonshine less gross. Freezers are good for keeping rattlesnakes less angry. Garages are good to hide in when your wife finds either.

•
If you leave the freezer open, the rattlesnakes will thaw and bite your hand. (I'm not sure if this is an actual fact or just a way for my father to get my sister and me to close the freezer quickly before letting all the cold air out. This is such an electricity saver that I'm considering using the same tactic on my daughter. But without the actual rattlesnakes. Because that would be insane.)

•
Don't make the same mistakes that everyone else makes. Make wonderful mistakes. Make the kind of mistakes that make people so shocked that they have no other choice but to be a little impressed.

•
Sometimes stunned silence is better than applause.

•
You don't have to go to some special private school to be an artist. Just look at the intricate beauty of cobwebs. Spiders make them with their butts.

•
Be happy in front of people who hate you. That way they know they haven't gotten to you. Plus, it pisses them off like crazy.

•
You can make a hat out of a cat's face but that doesn't make it a good hat. Unless you line it first.

•
Don't sabotage yourself. There are plenty of other people willing to do that for free.

•
It's okay to keep a broken oven in your yard as long as you call it art.

•
If you're going to buy glass eyeballs you should buy them in bulk because you're going to need more. Glass eyeballs are like Pringles. No one can have just one. Mostly because you seldom taxidermy one-eyed animals. Unless maybe you make them wink at each other. Or make them pirates.

•
If you stick a couple of giant glass eyeballs made for taxidermied cow heads inside your glasses you will freak a bunch of people out. You'll probably also fall and break your hip. But it'll totally be worth it.

•
There's a point when roadkill is much too decomposed to be used in taxidermy. It's several weeks after a normal person would expect.

•
You can make a very convincing taxidermied Sasquatch out of a deer's ass. They don't sell well in the taxidermy shop but it's very entertaining when gullible people get an inch away from a deer's butthole to stare at it with wonder and skepticism.

•
Most Sasquatch sightings are probably just deer who are walking away from drunken hunters.

•
Normal is boring. Weird is better. Goats are awesome, but only in small quantities.

•
Hand me those eyeballs.

 

I'm Going to Die. Eventually.

“So,” said my psychiatrist, “what's going on today?”

I took a deep breath. “I'm going to die.”

“Oh,” she replied, eyes opening in surprise.

“I mean …
eventually,”
I added.

Her eyes narrowed. “
Right.
So, everything is normal.”

“It's not normal.
I'm dying.
You're
dying. WE'RE
ALL
DYING.”

She crossed her legs. “That's a normal phase of life.”

“Dying?
No.
Dying is like
the opposite of life
.” I crossed my arms. “Aren't you a medical doctor? Because I think you should know that.”

“No,” she replied. “I meant that thinking about your mortality is a normal phase of life.”

“I can't trust anything you say right now. You just found out you're dying and you're obviously in shock.”

She raised an eyebrow. “I
already
knew I was dying.”

“Oh my God, I'm so sorry.”

“
No
,” she said. “I'm not dying
now
. I'm just the regular kind of dying. It's called ‘aging.'
And that's a good thing.
Each day is another chance to enjoy life.”

“It's also another chance to get kidnapped by a serial killer,” I countered. “Or to end up at the bottom of a well.
Or both.
That's probably where serial killers dump their victims. Which is probably why we don't use wells anymore.”

“Hmm,” she replied absently, writing something on her notepad. “What about wishing wells?”

“You know, I always assumed that the dead girls in the wells were the ones giving out the wishes. And that's why my wishes never came true.
Because dead girls don't give wishes.
”

“Huh.”

“You know,” I said, “I feel a lot of silence coming from you and it's feeling a lot like judgment.”

She put down her pen. “Okay. Is this fear of death a real thing that we need to discuss, or…?”

“Not really. Just coming up with small talk. Which is sort of weird because I'm paying you to talk to me and yet
I'm
the one having to come up with topics of conversation.”

She paused. “Do you want me to come up with the conversation?”

“I'm just saying, you could try a little harder.”

“You seem a little defensive today. What's going on with you?” she asked.

“Okay.” I took a deep breath. “The entire time I was driving here I was thinking about what I wanted to talk about today and for once
I'm totally doing okay,
and now I don't know how to entertain you for the next forty minutes.”

She glanced at the clock. “
Thirty minutes,
actually.”

“Yeah. I've been meaning to ask you … why do therapy hours only last fifty minutes? Because that's sort of fucked up. What if I tried to pay you with a five-dollar bill and I told you it was a ‘therapy six-dollar bill'? That's not a thing anywhere other than therapy and I think that's probably because you guys know you're dealing with crazy people so you're pretty sure you can get away with it.”

She tilted her head to one side. “Is this really what you want to talk about or are you just being defensive again?”

“I'm being defensive.” I sighed. “
Damn
, you
are
good
.”

“Yeah.” She nodded. “It's my job. You don't have anything you want to talk about?”

“Okay. Here's one. Every time I walk into a public bathroom I do it cautiously and tentatively because I'm always convinced there will be a dead body in the toilet stall. Every. Single. Time.”

“Why do you think that is?”

“No idea. I almost never find dead bodies but I do find a lot of
potential
dead bodies. Those are the black plastic trash sacks abandoned on the side of the road. I always want to open them because I'm convinced there might be a body in there, but then I don't because I'm not responsible enough to take care of a dead body. I mean, like, to call the police and have them take care of it. Not like ‘Here's your new goldfish so take care of it.' You don't have to take care of dead bodies. That's one of the few positives about them. If you don't feed a dead body it doesn't look at you accusingly, and it never gets deader. In fact, dead bodies make much better pets than goldfish because someone has already killed them for you so there's not as much potential guilt attached.”