Mystical, People.
Again, I must say that I am humbled by all the emails and DMs of appreciation and personal stories about the show’s impact on your lives. It all means so much to me as I try to wrap my head around what I have done in the last 16 years.
I am grateful. I have to tell myself that often. It is not a feeling I sit in naturally. I rarely acknowledge it. I should. It is grounding and enables me to maybe appreciate the life I’ve lived and survived.
I tend to blow right through things. Just keep moving. Doing what’s in front of me. Staying engaged in whatever it is no matter how mundane. I put a lot of pressure on myself always with all things. All in, all the time. Just moving from thing to thing. In the world, or in my head. No downtime. No pause. Limited gratitude. I do feel the buzz of completing things and getting through them and enjoy the release of the cortisol and rush of achievement but I don’t really settle, live life. Appreciate it. Be grateful.
My brain tends to go to anger a bit. Which I haven’t really experienced in a while. I’m not sure there is such a thing as angry gratitude. I think that’s conflating the last step of moving toward humility with the goal of it. Just to be grateful.
I think of my life, what got me here, all the people that misunderstood me or made it difficult for me to succeed, didn’t believe in me. From where I am now, there’s still a bit of ‘fuck them’ in my gratitude. A sense of winning. Then I realize that I was never really competing, I just wanted to be in the game. Actually, preferably, on a field adjacent to the main field.
The winning was just me arriving at me and working from that place and somehow succeeding. It doesn’t have to be rooted in any kind of fuck you but that comes and goes. I guess that’s just human.
The mystical. I recently went on Andy Richter’s podcast and he got me talking about back in the day. The Comedy Store, cocaine, Kinison. It has been a while since I traversed those neural pathways and I guess with the portal opened I went a little out there.
I had some kind of revelation that is only relative to my mind at that time. Many of you know the story. I documented my journey into cocaine psychosis thoroughly in my book The Jerusalem Syndrome.
When I was at The Comedy Store losing my mind I was one with the place. I was all in. I lived there. I was a true believer in the power of the place and the system Mitzi Shore had created. I always felt there was a dark energy there that went back to the beginning of modern show business. My mind was generating its own mythos about good and evil and the place that Mitzi, with all her mystical powers, was overseeing. I believed that the beginning of the apocalypse would start in Hollywood. I had full concepts of how. I believed I was in a struggle between good and evil that was universal and my time spent there with Kinison, a true power of megalomaniacal darkness, was informing my prophecy in progress. All I knew, in my psychotic state, was that Mitzi, The Comedy Store, and some of the comics that came out of there were essential in the final unfolding. Crazy, right? But…
The two people that revolutionized the podcast medium and unleashed its potential on the world were me and Rogan. Both of us of products of The Comedy Store and Mitzi’s system.
Do with that what you will. It was fun to ride that mystical bus for a few hours.
Today I talk to Seth Meyers. Great guy, great talk. On Thursday I talk to Mike Birbiglia again. Also a great talk.
Enjoy!
Boomer, Monkey and LaFonda live,
Love,
Maron
