Self-Inflicted Wounds: Heartwarming Tales of Epic Humiliation

by Aisha Tyler

  To pass out and wake up alone in the dark is one thing. The damage may not be that bad. Maybe people cleared out without noticing you on the couch. Maybe you were just part of the scenery, one more jacket in a pile of discarded coats. Maybe you were resting your eyes before leaping up spryly for another round of Jell-O shots. Maybe you were meditating.

  But if someone has tucked you in, you are completely fucked.

  How I let this happen, I have no idea. As an adult, I have become supremely disciplined in social situations. This circumspection is not innate, but rather the aftermath of a lifetime of egregious drinking errors. Having made the terrible mistake of being the MVP of a party1 several times in my twenties, and having experienced the relentless mockery that follows, I know better than to give others even a sliver of an opening. And much like the hazed freshman who becomes a fearsome Pledgemaster her sophomore year, I am a kind but relentless teaser of others when they themselves falter. It is not that I am mean. It is just that passing out is such a party foul, such a calamity of one’s own doing, such a perfectly self-inflicted wound (and one I have experienced multiple times) that it demands notice. No one made you drink that much. No one made you do shots on an empty stomach. No one made you curl up in the corner of the futon like a milk-filled kitten. You have chosen this set of actions for yourself. And you have no one to blame but this self-same selfy self. I know this from painful experience.

  So for me to have done this was such a shock, such a foundation-rocking misstep, that for a good couple of minutes I wondered if I was hallucinating. Certainly I, a grown woman, her humiliating college years far behind her, someone who owned a car and the license to drive it, could read, write, and eat with a fork, could not have possibly made the series of specific and terrible mistakes required to result in waking up, cement-faced and groggy, on the porch of a rented house in Palm Springs. This was some other giant black woman, and I wanted my life back.

  The worse part of this was how happy I was right before I fell asleep. There is nothing worse than having lots of fun one moment, and then, in what feels like the blink of an eye, sucking on the penny-tang of humiliation the next. It is like you got to the bottom of your ice cream sundae and found a mouse turd. You were so happy one bite ago, and now you wonder how you can ever go on living. And the ice cream is gone, the Jimmies and nuts too, and there is nothing to do but continue, yet all the color has drained out of the world, and it is a dark and joyless place.

  I know how it happened. Of course I do. I hit the bullseye on all the clichés. Didn’t get enough sleep the night before. Didn’t eat enough at dinner. Tried too hard to demonstrate my knowledge of French wine by drinking a lot of it with my pinky held aloft. Entertained every challenge to do shots. Thought I was tougher than a twenty-year-old scotch. Thought I was tougher than a fifth of Maker’s Mark. Believed I was strong enough to rest, for just a moment, on a highly plush piece of outdoor furniture. Nothing but arrogance at every turn.

  These moves were a series of critical errors, strung together into a terrible necklace of self-destruction.

  The worst part about this whole debacle was that the party was a sleepover party, and I had to see all of these people for another twenty-four hours. Sleepover parties are a double-edged sword. Because you don’t have to drive anywhere afterward, you feel safe enough to cut loose. Usually the group is a group of friends, and small enough to feel welcoming, so you feel even more comfortable about really letting your hair down. And because you know you can just stumble off to your room or bunk bed or beanbag chair at the end of the night, there is really no reason at all to behave yourself. But because you feel so comfortable, so free to get your rage on, you are more likely to do something you will really regret, and you don’t have the crowds of a nightclub or street mob to fade into after you have embarrassed yourself. If you fall through a plate glass coffee table at a vacation rental in front of ten people, it’s pretty much guaranteed all ten people saw it. And will remember it. Forever.2

  And then, of course, there’s the next morning, when everyone is bleary-eyed and stumbly and groping for coffee, and they all congregate in the kitchen to drink juice and compare notes, and then you come in. And everyone remembers whatever ridiculous thing you did last night, and while it seemed hilarious at three in the morning in a haze of bourbon, now it just seems sad and a bit tragic. And you wish you were home in your own kitchen, where you’d have no one to answer to but yourself, but you are here, and people are avoiding your gaze, and you still have another twenty-four hours to spend with these people, and you want to die.

  When you are trapped at a remote location on a Saturday morning after a Friday night of self-immolation, surrounded by everyone who had warmed themselves at your blazing pyre the night before, there is only one thing to be done: apologize as best you can, hold your head high, and act as if curling up with your head on a hose caddy is something you do all the time at home; that you are eccentric and prefer sleeping outside because you are rugged.3 These are lies you tell yourself, and others, to cover up for the fact that you passed out, that everyone knows you passed out, and that you are grateful no one wrote the word “jackass” backwards on your forehead with a Sharpie.

  This approach is universal, and helpful any time you ever blow it in a major way—workplace faux pas, ethnically insensitive joke, slamming into your boss’s car in the parking lot, accidentally touching your mother-in-law’s breast at Thanksgiving. You can slink away, tail between your legs like a dog who just urinated on the baby’s bassinet, and die alone in a corner, or you can straighten up, look them dead in the face, and say, “I did this. I’m not proud of it, but I’m owning it, and I am going to look directly into your eyes and apologize, while holding your gaze so long and with such defiant pride that you will start to wonder if perhaps it is you who has offended me in some way. And then I will leave here and humiliate myself terribly in front of others, because that is just what I do.”

  I did apologize to each and every attendee of that party. Individually, and with great remorse, because I am polite, and also because I needed to find out if I had flashed my boobs at anyone the night before. Thankfully, at least half of them were as drunk as I was, and remembered nothing, and the other half were too kind, or too embarrassed for me, to hold it over my head, dismissing my contrition with a “don’t mention it” and sending me on my way, and I was grateful, relieved, and very, very hungover. And the party continued through the weekend and my trespasses were forgotten, because the very next night someone got even drunker than I was and actually did flash their boobs at everyone, and I sighed a sigh of sweet relief that I hadn’t gone that far.

  At least, as far as I could remember.

  But I acknowledged my mistake. I moved past it, I made direct if truncated eye contact with everyone there, and I pushed through the pain. And that is all that can be asked after one has humiliated oneself in an enclosed space with a group of near strangers.

  The person who passes out at a party is a living emblem of poor life choices. The person who passes out at a party is tragedy personified, and to be avoided lest one becomes like them. The person who passes out at a party is the most unfortunate person in the world,4 and their impulse is to slink into the shadows, never to be heard from again.

  But the person who boots, passes, owns it, apologizes profusely, and then rallies is a phoenix risen from the ashes to rage again. That person is a champion. And also delightfully polite.

  Maturity. Now that feels like winning.

  ( 32 )

  The Time I Vowed to Stop Drunk Tweeting

  “A wound will perhaps become tolerable with length of time; but wounds which are raw shudder at the touch.”—OVID1

  “People are never, ever going to forget this. Crap.”—AISHA TYLER

  The night we killed Osama bin Laden, I tweeted some pretty irresponsible stuff.

  I admit we were all caught up in the excitement of it all, the heady “look what we done” drama of the night, and we h
ad killed this terrible mass murderer who was responsible for the loss of so many lives, after looking for so long, and after all those whiffed chances and missed opportunities we got the monster. By we, I mean the president, his close advisers, and some very brave and badass highly trained operatives doing dangerous shit very far away from home. Much in the way that “we” have won the Superbowl when the ’Niners were in the midst of their dynasty, “we” killed Osama bin Laden.

  Yes. By “we,” I definitely do not mean me.

  But I was excited. That guy sucked. And it was late and I had some wine, and I did some really ill-advised online jubilating that in the light of day, which was like a few hours after I did it, I really wished I hadn’t.

  I mean, he was a bad guy. He had signed his own death warrant a thousand times over. But do you really want your definitive statement about the killing of another person to be the tweet

  2

  Good lord. Have some composure, lady.

  When I woke up the next day, I was filled with regret. I should have shown more restraint. I wished I had thought about the tweet before I tweeted it. Stepped back. Realized a whole lot of people would see this thing, and I might want to consider how I would feel if my grandchildren read it, and how I would explain it to them if they did.3 And I realized I wouldn’t be able to. It was improper. It was undignified. And it was way too late to take back now.

  Luckily, the Internet is full of stupid, like to the gills, so it’s not like in the grand scheme of things I was going to stand out. The Internet is where stupid goes to find stupider so it doesn’t have to feel so stupid. My tweet would pale in comparison to the idiots who think the Apollo mission was staged on a Hollywood movie set or that aliens embed secret messages in cell phone waves or President Obama was born in Kenya and is part of a terrorist sleeper cell bent on overthrowing the American government and establishing Sharia law. Me and my momentary lapse of judgment pale next to the guy with the potted meat and the tinfoil hat.

  But here is the thing about Twitter. Like its home, the Internet, Twitter is forever. You can never, ever, ever take it back. You can delete a tweet from your stream, strike it from your memory, end your Twitter account, and never visit the Internet again, and years from now, decades, centuries even, when whatever life-form is still alive and sentient on this earth strikes up their computing device, your infernal and incendiary tweet will be waiting for them in some forgotten, dusty corner of the interwebs, proclaiming for all the world that you are still, and have always been, a complete idiot.

  It does not matter that it is easy to tweet, or convenient, fast, or even brief. Brevity is the soul of wit only if you have wit to begin with. Anything that seems ribald and cutting at four in the morning when you have been nursing a bottle of Bailey’s Irish Cream will, by the light of day seem a) sexist, b) racist, c) stupid, or d) all of the above. You cannot beat Twitter. Its sole purpose is to capture the things you have said and amplify them across the Internet in a terrible game of Telephone. Only when your tweet comes back to you, it isn’t a distortion of what you said, but exactly what you said, and just as terrible as everyone thought, and there is a picture of your penis attached along with a very poor joke about cats and fire hoses, only both are metaphors, and you didn’t use the words “cat” or “fire hose.”

  You didn’t mean it. You shouldn’t have written it. You regretted it the moment you clicked that little blue button. None of this matters to the Internet. The Internet feels no sympathy. This thing you have said is out in the world, and what’s worse, it is being passed around actively by dozens, even hundreds of people, who do not know you and do not care to know you, and so cannot apply any kind of “I know him and he’s really a nice guy” temperance to their interpretation of what you said, instead flying to the exact opposite “Oh my god, this person is pure evil and must eat kittens for breakfast and should be bound and thrown into a river” kind of place, from which there is no return.

  Here’s the truth. As helpful as it may be, and as important as it may seem, the Internet hates you, the people that live inside the Internet hate you, the troll that lives under the bridge hates you, and they are all just waiting, just dying for you to make a mistake.

  So what should you do? You know the answer to this. It is simple, pure, and utterly impossible.

  Don’t tweet.

  I realize this is completely unrealistic. How can you not tweet? How else will people know what you ate for breakfast or what you are listening to on Spotify or what your gamerscore is? Ridiculous. Not tweeting is not an option. I am a dolt for even suggesting it.

  So the second option is to never, ever tweet when you are drunk. Not even a little intoxicated. Not even after you have used alcohol-based mouthwash.

  I have written tweets I thought were lazy, not funny, boring, dry. I have tweeted silly things, maudlin things, and things that upon retrospect were pretty self-involved.4 I have tweeted stuff I thought should have been reworded or retracted. But it is only when I am drunk that I tweet stuff that I know will be a source of deep and abiding regret when I am old and my brain is hooked up directly to the Internet via nanochips and a web of fine copper wires. It is then that I will be haunted, day and night, with the images of my vintage tweets, floating back at me like traffic signs on a lonely highway, reminding me just how easy it was in the olden days to write something in 140 characters that you would never say in real life, and then set the hellhound of your own destruction loose upon the world.

  Nothing particularly terrible resulted from this regrettable run of tweets. I was not reprimanded huffily by a follower, received no calls from my family or emails from colleagues. Instead, I was just struck by my own regret, and the sense of agony I would feel if what I had said had ended up in print, or was analyzed elsewhere on the Web. These weren’t meant to be official statements or repeatable quotes; they were the midnight ravings of a lunatic. But no matter, because we as a nation now take every tweet, every offhanded Facebook comment, or shotgun aside as the gospel truth of a person’s sense of the world, when in reality most are typed late at night when people are intoxicated or sleep-deprived or just got in a terrible fight with their spouse. Most of what is posted online, especially on Twitter, which by its very nature is brief, temporal, ephemeral—is disposable. But nowadays, when something posted at noon in Buffalo can be duplicated a thousand times across websites by one p.m., nothing is disposable. Like that awful see-through dress that refuses to die, nothing will ever disappear into the ether again.

  So let us all say it now, together once more, so that it sinks into your head and sears itself brand-like into mine: the Internet is forever. Forever like sequoias, like fossils, like mountains, like Old Tjikko,5 like atoms, like interstellar dust, like the ever-expanding universe.6 You can delete it, you can disavow it, you can strike it from the record, you can beg, borrow, plead, and disable your account, but that tweet is out there, shot through the Internet like a virus, and you can never, ever, take it back.

  We are so cavalier nowadays with what we say, tossing out offhanded jokes and saucy commentary via smartphone, typing madly with the thumb of one hand while drinking vitamin-enhanced water with the other. We do not even take the time to type the thing that will be our undoing with both hands anymore, which is probably why we are so quick and so very eager to hit the “post” or “tweet” or, more accurately, “detonate” button, because how can something that was so easy to type, so facile to concept and execute, be a danger to anyone, including ourselves? Easy things are soft, they are gentle, and they present no danger.

  At least that’s what you tell yourself as you take a cell phone picture of your naked torso in the mirror of your filthy, laundry-strewn bathroom, and then upload it to Facebook accompanied by a tinkling cloud of LOLs.7 Whom could it possibly hurt?

  You, and only you, and you repeatedly, and you will have none to blame but your wayward, thoughtless, and downright reckless right thumb.

  So think before you tweet (or post, or
text, or email, or upload video, or anything that gives others any information of any kind about you or your life), and end up tortured in a hell entirely of your own making, at once delightful and ghoulish, spending eternity drowning, much like Homer Simpson under an avalanche of donuts in his personalized Hades, under a torrential and endless deluge of your own 140-character idiocy.

  Man, I should tweet something about that.

  ( 33 )

  The Apologia; or, Shut Up Aisha—a Far From Comprehensive List of My Verbal Gaffes

  “All the hours wound you, the last one kills.”—LATIN PROVERB

  “I’m screwed now, may as well keep going.”—AISHA TYLER

  I always say the wrong thing. Luckily, I have made a career of it, or I would have no friends at all.

  It actually comes in quite handy for a comedian. A big part of our mental energy is spent breaking down the brain-mouth barrier, the mechanism in normal people that keeps you from blurting out the first thing that comes to mind, the on-off switch that says to normal people, “Hey there, why don’t you examine this statement before you just fling it out into the world like a word grenade?” Most people have this mechanism in their head, and it keeps them from putting their foot directly into their mouths most of the time, unless they have been drinking or are overly emotional or a character in a meet-cute rom-com blockbuster.

  Comedians do not have this mechanism, and those that do spend a lot of time trying to override it. The only way to be spontaneously funny, to be verbally sharp, to be quick on the draw, is to never think about what one is about to say, to not ever hesitate, but say that thing, as loudly and theatrically as possible, and pray. You open your mouth, turn on the faucet, protect your eyes, and stand back. Most of the time this works, and you are quick, irreverent, off-the-cuff, and hilarious. Occasionally, it backfires terribly and you say something you really wish you could take back, or worse, something that others are going to force you to take back through angry correspondence and the Internet version of a pitchfork mob. You hope for the little mistakes—ones remedied by a simple apology, rather than something you have to call a press conference for, issue multiple statements, and then donate money to an anti-defamation league or animal welfare charity. You pray for the tiny trespasses. After a while, they are your only friend.