By the time of Donald Trump’s inauguration in January 2017, I had decided to go home to Massachusetts to watch the Super Bowl with my family. Still, I was besieged by a full-on blitz of emotions: despair for the state of the country, painful/joyful remembrance of Nana Kay, and a grudging yet undeniable excitement for the game itself. I had no idea how to reconcile those feelings. It’s weird that a human brain can experience them all at once, like an unsettling piano chord played by a cat hopping onto a keyboard. The notes don’t “go together,” per se, but they’re definitely happening at the same time.
I posted about my ambivalence on Facebook, along with the conclusion that maybe if I donated a little money to causes that fought against the president’s racist, sexist, transphobic agenda, it might do more good than any harm I’d be perpetrating by cheering for the team I’d been brought up to love. My friend Emma suggested that it was likely other people felt the same way, and that we could form a campaign suggesting they donate, too. We decided on the hashtag #AGoodGame as a way to encourage other people to donate and track their donations.
We got three responses to the campaign online:
“Cool! I’d love to be a part of that!”
“Your [sic] a pussy. You shouldn’t even watch football if you don’t like it.” (Which is silly. People do things they have qualms with all the time. Life is full of deciding when to make compromises and when to take hard-line stances. If you can make a clean, immediate break with every institution that gives you a moment’s moral hesitation, you are rare and admirable. And also, most likely, you are insufferable at parties.)
“Why not make a statement by refusing to watch the game?”
I grappled with the third point, with limited success. The immediate but unsatisfying response was “I want to watch the game.” In part, the fund-raiser served to back-justify that decision, which would have been enough if the question had been just about me. But in a more substantial way, appealing to the consciences of people who were going to watch the game anyway seemed like the best way to do the most good.
It’s very hard to get people to not do something they’re intent on doing. An effort to boycott the Super Bowl would have made a negligible effect on the ratings (and that’s being generous). And, considering the difficulty standing against the NFL, it made sense to activate people’s desire to stand for something. No one’s individual viewership would make or break the National Football League. Anyone’s individual donation could help the NAACP or the ACLU (or any of the other myriad charities people chose as their cause). But also, my grandmother was dead, and if watching football once a year was an inextricable part of my long-term grieving, then so be it.
My dad picked me up at South Station a few hours before the game began and brought me back to my parents’ house, where my entire family camped out in front of the television. As the first half unfolded, the Atlanta Falcons had begun, for lack of a better term, beating the ever-living shit out of the Patriots. The score sat at 28–3 (in favor of Atlanta) as Lady Gaga began her halftime performance, which is not an auspicious football score. At least it didn’t get worse before the time the second half began. Gaga didn’t somehow manage to torch the Pats’ cornerbacks for a long touchdown on a post route.
The night, to that point, had felt like a joke at my expense. I’d neatly triangulated a way to manage my warring family and football and political emotions, only to watch my team get smushed into the turf by their opponents. It was a fresh kind of anguish I had not anticipated. Let this be a lesson to me, I thought, about trying to have your cake and eat it, too. Losing felt even worse than winning had two years before. That’s usually how that goes.
Most Super Bowls are not especially competitive football games. So I didn’t anticipate a comeback. At best, I hoped that the Patriots would put up a few points in garbage time for the benefit of the charities people had pledged money to. Then the improbable happened, which you know if you follow sports at all and don’t care about if you don’t. I’ll spare you the play-by-play, but the Patriots clawed their way back into a competitive game, taking it to overtime.
The #AGoodGame hashtag was full of jubilant New Englanders and flustered Patriots haters. People donated in amounts as low as $1 a point or as high $100 per touchdown. When all was said and done, we learned, thanks to Emma’s expert data analysis, that over $100,000 had been donated, which felt satisfying and encouraging. But in the moment, I felt defiant and righteous, like Diddy and Nas wearing crowns of thorns in the video for the song “Hate Me Now,” which is kind of a deep cut, but you can Google it.
When the Pats pushed the game into overtime and eventually won, I thought of my grandmother and cried again. What the fuck, football? It is illogical and infuriating that twenty-two guys running into each other on a field can be so evocative of the memory of a woman who had never even played the game. And yet, that’s how it was. And that’s probably how it always will be.
When the Patriots again made it to the Super Bowl the following year, Emma and I revived the #AGoodGame drive. I took the Amtrak home to Massachusetts to watch the game with my family. When they lost to the Eagles, I felt disappointment in the team, happiness for the people of Philadelphia, connection to Nana Kay, pride at raising money, and dread at the prospect of waking up at five thirty to take the train to New York in time for work. It never gets less complicated, I guess.
The Patriots won the Super Bowl again in 2019, and the feelings (as well as the fundraising effort) came back. Nana Kay has been gone for more than four years now, but the heightened tension of the big game always makes me think of her. I swear I don’t know if my heart will be able to handle it if Tom Brady doesn’t retire soon. But unfortunately, it’ll probably also wreck me when he does.
The Unsung Virtue of Telling People What They Want to Hear
Hotel lonely is a special kind of lonely. It’s not just solitary; it’s unfamiliar, too. You’re not used to the shower’s water pressure or the mattress’s firmness. Even the order of the TV channels is unfamiliar. TNT comes right before Fox? I am a long way from home. But ultimately it’s the solitude that’s the worst. It makes you do weird things.
There are plenty of songs about life on the road, mostly classic rock songs, unless I’ve failed to grasp the subtext of some jazz. But I never related to those songs, because I don’t have children to miss, and I don’t do cocaine, and most of the songs mention being very successful and having throngs of adoring fans, which seems a little braggy to me.
When you pare away all the famous trappings of life on the road, you’re left with fast food, travel delays, masturbation (not mentioned explicitly in most of the songs, but a central part of the experience nonetheless), and accidentally packing too few undergarments. Whenever I accidentally step in a puddle of water next to the bathtub at a Holiday Inn Express and have to pull off a wet sock I sing to myself, “There I goooooooo . . . turn the paaaaaage.”
At least when you’re in a touring band, there are other people around to hang out with or fistfight (if you’re in Oasis) or get married to and/or cheat on your spouse with (if you’re in Fleetwood Mac). As a comic on the road, you’re often alone or working with people with whom you have nothing in common. Personally, I was rarely interested in finding an audience member to sleep with and was never concerned with finding a local to buy drugs from, so I occasionally disqualified myself from my peers’ late-night activities. Usually after my sets, I ended up back at the hotel room, where it was too early for bed but too late to pretend I was going to use the gym.
Still, the classic rock wisdom about the postperformance feeling holds true: if the show went well, you want to keep that high going. If the show went badly, you want to cheer yourself up. That’s the common explanation for why so many performers suffer with substance abuse. Drugs, from what I’ve heard, can make you feel good until they very much don’t.
After a rough breakup in 2012, I had a long stretch of shows booked out of town, and I was dreading the late hotel n
ights, not just alone, but with no one to even text goodnight. To insulate myself from myself, I started a blog in which I promised to write a postcard to anyone who asked me for one. I got over three hundred requests, which took me a year and over a hundred dollars in postage to complete. By the end, it got a little annoying to scribble out vague messages to strangers, but annoyed was better than despondent.
After I finished my postcard project, my go-to move to feel like part of society while on the road became Twitter Pep Talks. Twitter, which I’ve mentioned in previous chapters, is a social network that C-list celebrities use to complain about airlines, and white supremacists use to try to ruin the careers and threaten the lives of women, people of color, and Jews in media. But also, lots of regular nonmonsters use it to talk with friends and keep abreast of breaking news and avoid admitting they’ve aged into the Facebook demographic.
On a professional level, I have trouble writing Twitter off entirely. The viral Modern Seinfeld Twitter account that my friend Jack Moore and I cocreated was an embarrassingly strong kick in the ass of my career. If you don’t know what that is (and why would you?), Jack and I wrote 140-character pitches for episodes of Seinfeld, were it still on the air. The account accrued about 800,000 followers, including some people within show business, and it opened a lot of doors for the two of us. And personally, Twitter is (kind of) where I met my wife. I owe a lot to Twitter, which is humiliating. It’s as if I found a hundred dollars at the bottom of an open sewer I’d fallen into and then later I fell in again and found a diamond ring, so I have a lingering fondness for that particular sewer despite the rats and human waste that it exists to facilitate.
Technically, I didn’t start doing Twitter Pep Talks on the road. The first time I offered them was the night of a canceled gig in New Haven. A promoter had offered me a couple hundred dollars to headline a show in Connecticut, which fell through on the day it was supposed to happen. Emotionally speaking, the timing couldn’t have been worse. I’d spent that whole year writing submission materials for various TV shows and not getting jobs. I had booked a stand-up set on a late-night TV show, and they postponed my appearance because the network thought my material was “too dark.” Then, in the wake of that, I sold a piece of writing to a prestigious magazine, which was squashed by an editor the day it was supposed to run online. And on top of all that, I couldn’t even do a fucking gig in Connecticut that was barely worth the cost of gas and tolls to get there in the first place.
When the show disintegrated on account of low ticket sales because “the website went down” and also “nobody in New Haven had any idea who I was,” it pile-drove1 me through the flimsy folding table of my previous self-esteem low onto what I assumed was the floor of my confidence.2 I felt professionally adrift and unaccomplished, convinced that what I’d achieved to date was all I would ever be capable of. A mentally healthier (but physically the same, at best) version of me can look back on that period and realize it wasn’t that I was hitting the ceiling of my potential; I was on the verge of breaking through a wall—but there was no way to know that at the time. On the plus side, the producer promised to PayPal me the money for the New Haven show anyway. Conversely, he didn’t. (If you’re reading this, I’m on Venmo now! You blew me off so long ago that there’s new technology! But the offer for you to give me $200 still stands!)
The first time I offered pep talks online was the night of my canceled Connecticut gig. I was at home and feeling low. When I opened Twitter, my initial impulse was to ask the internet for help. I wanted to hear a kind word or two. But, ugh, that seemed so needy. And things weren’t that bad. Thanks to a patchwork of freelance gigs (tutoring, stand-up, magazine writing), I had enough money to pay my bills. I had lots of great friends I could turn to in a crisis. I am, despite my tendency to miss birthdays and weddings for work commitments, reasonably good at keeping in touch via text message. I wasn’t even suffering from depression. I was just . . . bummed out.
Solitary and needy, I wondered: What if instead of asking for something, I offered something instead? That way, I’d still get to hear kind words, with the caveat that I would be the one saying those kind words. And maybe that would help other people a little bit, which would, in turn, make me feel better. I’m generally in favor of doing things for others as a means to feeling better about myself. There’s a limit to how much I can complain before it starts to make me feel worse. The inverse is not true. There’s no amount of volunteer work you can do that will make you think, Oh, no. I’m a monster.
My first pep talk offer got about thirty requests, a mixture of friends and strangers, all of whom I answered as specifically as I could.
“You are a [sic] smart and successful while remaining creative and generous,” I replied to an acquaintance.
“You rock a tasteful level of stubble and dope shades,” I tweeted, like a dweeb, to someone whose photo featured a tasteful level of stubble and stylish sunglasses.
The pep talks did, in fact, make me feel better. It was like an instant, straight-to-the-vein version of my postcards. I felt plugged into a community, and it was really heartwarming that people were comfortable indulging my awkward and tender premise. And my tweets seemed to make other people feel better, too. Over the past several years, I’ve kept doing the pep talks, usually when I’m in a hotel after a show, wired or moderately despondent, depending on how it went. It always improves my night, even on the evenings when I nod off midpep and have to finish in the morning.
Probably the most valuable thing I’ve learned from years of encouraging friends and strangers on the internet is the value of telling people what they want to hear. Obviously, there are exceptions to this rule. Giving someone only positive feedback when they really need some tough love is like letting a child maintain a gummy bears–only diet because you don’t want to deal with the tantrums that come with forcing him to eat broccoli. Sure, you’re avoiding a little interpersonal strife, but translucent colors are not the same as food groups! That baby will grow up to have no teeth and squishy bones!
There are some extenuating circumstances that make certain encouragements ring hollow. Blithe cheerleading isn’t a substitute for therapy or antidepressants or having enough money to pay rent. People suffering from depression can’t just hear “You’re doing great!” and go, “Oh yeah. What was I thinking? I am doing great!” And the obstacles many people are up against in terms of institutional racism, sexism, and other prejudices make many goals harder to achieve than they would be in a more just world. So I realize that as a straight, white, neurotypical, cisgender man with a modest savings account, I need to be extra considerate of others’ experiences. Otherwise, I could easily sound like the frat guy of guys who was never in a fraternity: “Bummer you got that DUI and wrecked your Lambo, brah. Now you have to ask your dad to buy you a new car.”
Still, I maintain that telling people what they want to hear under most circumstances is, as my grandmother would say “a mitzvah,” or as Martha Stewart would less Jewishly call it, “a good thing.” And yes, it’s hard to know what that means to any specific person, especially when that person is an internet stranger whose bio is brief quotes from Mean Girls or Twin Peaks, and whose timeline is full of retweets from progressive politicians. Sometimes a person’s message to me is something general, like “I could really use some pep, please!”
Here are a few general things that people like to hear and are often true:
As bad as things feel right now, they can get better with time and effort.
You are not alone. There are people in your life who are there for you and want to help.
You are already excellent, and you’re not done getting better.
There are very few problems to which those answers are not generally true and at least pleasant to hear. Yes, there are people who are truly alone, who have no one to reach out to for help. And sure, some people are vile Dumpster dwellers who are terrible now and are actively trying to get worse, so they do not deserve to be told the
y are excellent. I think, though, that the former group is rare, and the latter group is not inclined to ask a stranger for encouragement. They’re more likely to say to themselves (or others): “It’s weird how I’m so awesome but everyone still hates me. That seems wrong. Everyone who’s not me is so dumb.”
Sometimes the questions are more specific. Here are a few more I often get, and variations on the respective pep talk I reply with.
I have a job interview tomorrow, and I’m nervous. Unless you fabricated massive stretches of your résumé, they called you in because they like you, and all you have to do is be you in the interview.
This week is crazy with finals/work/family obligations/home renovation, and I don’t know how I’ll get through it. It’ll be hard, but you’ll do it, and then it’ll be done forever.
The world . . . it’s so bad. The world may seem like a shit volcano constantly erupting diarrhea into a fart-clouded sky, but lots of people are working hard to improve it, and you can be one of them.
This is of course not a substitute for activism or advocacy or charity. It does not make me a good person. There are plenty of people who are cheerful and encouraging while also being creeps or war profiteers or, I imagine, horse thieves. But I have the good fortune to get to travel around the country saying nonsense as a significant part of my career. It’s like eating pizza for a job. It’s fun, and I’m lucky to do it, but it’s probably not good for me. To me, the pep talks are like eating salad. It’s a little thing I can do in addition to all the pizza to make sure my body continues to operate. Because as an adult, I accept that I cannot live on pizza alone.
And look, sometimes it’s late at night and I’ve had one or maybe two drinks. And I’m overthinking everything that brought me to wherever I am, one hundred, or three hundred, or three thousand miles away from my wife, who is definitely asleep. Or maybe I’m right next to her and she fell asleep early, and I’m wondering what the heck I’m doing with my life anyway. Maybe I’m in a hotel room with sheets that feel like butcher paper and an air conditioner that fires up with a sound like a Transformer turning from bus to fightin’ robot every forty-five minutes. Maybe the shades don’t close all the way, and headlights from the highway outside strobe through the crack at all hours, so it feels like you’re sleeping in a discotheque or a science museum. At times like those it is nice to be able to offer something to other people, no matter how paltry it seems. And hopefully they think it’s nice, too.
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