Point taken, nerd.
But I hate these meds because the hangover is fierce. When I saw the film Memento, in which handsome Guy Pearce wakes up every morning with no memory of his own life and follows a series of prompts he’s written for himself on Post-it notes, it felt like my own documentary. Except instead of handsome Guy Pearce it’s drowsy and pudgy Mike Birbiglia tripping over everything in his path. The first forty-five minutes of my day are like an electronic doll down to its final 3 percent of battery life. My words are slurred, my body is in slow motion, a single sock hangs off my foot. The rest of my day is spent thinking about where I’ve gone wrong.
Half of the time I feel empty. A quarter of the time I feel… okay. I never feel full. I don’t have enough gas in the tank for passengers. I’m constantly refilling with coffee, the liquid false promise that joy is on the way.
I try to experience joy. I listened to this TED Talk about how to find joy and the speaker, Ingrid Fetell Lee, said that one thing everyone enjoys is confetti.
And I thought, I hate confetti. To me confetti is just garbage you throw into the air. That doesn’t seem positive.
So I sleepwalk.
I had cancer.
Lyme disease.
I’m prediabetic.
I have high cholesterol.
I dislike joy.
I’m not exactly handing off A-plus genes here.
3
I DON’T KNOW ANYTHING
I’m not ready to “teach the children.”
I’ve read hundreds of books; I’ve retained very little. In third grade they taught us photosynthesis and I thought, This is not gonna stick.
It hasn’t.
I’m not 100 percent sure why it rains.
My brain is like a Snapple cap. It can hold one piece of information at a time.
I can’t even snap my fingers.
I don’t know anything for certain. I think it’s entirely possible that consciousness is a hallucination. How do I explain that to a kid?
“Hey, kid, see that juice box? Don’t be so sure.”
I can’t explain existence. I was raised Catholic, but I didn’t really believe in God. I believed in my mom, and my mom believed in God. It was like I was in this weird three-way with God where I thought, It’s okay if he’s here while you’re here, but I’m not gonna do anything with just me and him. To be clear, I’ve never had sex with my mom. Or God. Or had a three-way. So it’s a true metaphor.
I had so many questions in Catholic school, but that only made it worse. In sixth grade I asked Sister Kathy, “What happens in heaven?”
She said, “Heaven is whatever you want it to be.”
I thought, That’s just me masturbating all the time.
She also pointed out that “God is always watching us,” and I thought, He must be watching me do that too.
So I would try to cheat to the camera. I wanted to give God a good angle. I always thought if he happened to glance at the monitor at that moment, I would want him to think, I’ve seen a lot of twelve-year-olds masturbate, but this kid is good. I had so many questions as a kid and what I probably needed was therapy, but Catholics don’t believe in therapy. They believe in confession, which is a cross between therapy and a glory hole.
I don’t go to church anymore, but every once in a while I’ll pray. Mostly when I’m in a jam. I never pray when things are going well. When things are going my way, I think, I am God! To be clear, I don’t assume the prayers will work. I think of prayers like tech support. Unless I get a person live on the phone, I’m not sure it’s getting to anyone. And if you do get someone live to answer your prayers, that’s when you know you’re dreaming, or dead.
And maybe what they taught me in Catholic school was true. But ultimately anyone exercising faith in any religion is just guessing, and you have to assume that some people are guessing wrong. I think God might exist, but I’m pretty sure he’s not a white dude with a beard. If God is white, how do you explain Asia? Or Africa? I don’t remember the passage in the Bible where God said, “I shall make you in my image and likeness, except you four billion.” If God is white he has an Asian fetish. I don’t go to church, but I regularly attend the Museum of Natural History. I know that’s not considered a holy place, but at least they have fossils. If church had fossils of Peter, Paul and Mary (the folk trio or the saints), I would think, This story checks out. But the Museum of Natural History displays these massive fossils held together by some kind of dinosaur crazy glue. And even with fossils on display they don’t claim to know the absolute truth.
One time Jen and I were at the Museum of Natural History staring at this dinosaur skull that was the size of a small motorcycle and we noticed this sign underneath that said “These are all intriguing hypotheses, but the fossils do not give us enough evidence to test whether any of them are correct. The mystery remains unresolved.” And I thought, Come on, guys, give yourselves a little credit here! You found the giant dino skull and the giant dino leg bones and the dino arms, all in the dino shape in the side of some mountain in Montana. You’ve shown your work! We need that “mystery remains unresolved” placard over there on the Bible, and the Koran, and the Book of Mormon. Can’t we agree that all religions are just hunches? We should rename religions “hunches.” As in: “Which hunch do you belong to?” “I’m of the Catholic hunch. We have this hunch that the son of God came to earth and died for our sins so that he could open the gates of heaven.”
Which is part of why I never wanted to have a kid. I don’t think my hunch is better than yours.
littlefishnobody
for a third grade science project
i monitored the movements of fish
as i played for them several genres of music
and observed: there is a swish
in the hips of woman and man
that moves back and forth and back and forth
and back—all the way back
to our ancestors the fish.
but i am nothing as useful as a lover
or scientist.
i don’t know anything.
what if human beings are just tiny asteroids?
what if human beings are just tiny volcanoes?
what if life on earth is just a bazillion-charactered play
and mass extinction is a much-needed intermission?
and who am i?
i am littlefishnobody.
4
I HAVE A CAT
I had never been a cat person, but when Jen and I moved in together in 2006 after a torrid and turbulent courtship I became stepfather to Ivan and Miss Lucy.
Miss Lucy was a black cat that Jen had adopted from a shelter, and Ivan was a gray cat, possibly a Russian blue, though there’s no way to know for certain since he was adopted as well.
“Russian blue” is an exotic and sexy designation a lot of people try to attribute to their cats, but Ivan deserved it. He was beautiful as hell. So much so that we would constantly tell him how beautiful he was. We actually called him “Mister Fantastic,” as though a distinguished Russian human name wasn’t quite enough.
When we’d see him we’d say, “Mister Fantastic!” as though we were surprised that he showed up in the living room, which was one of only two options for rooms that comprised the prison of his life.
We’d sing songs about Mister Fantastic. When he would dip his head in water, which was the cutest goddamned thing you’ve ever seen, I’d pull out my guitar and we’d sing, “Mister Fantastic has water on his head! Water on his head, he’s got water on his head!”
We’d compliment him profusely. “Mister Fantastic! You’re so long!”
As if longness in cats were a regal and admired quality.
There’s a detail about Ivan and Miss Lucy that’s so unbelievable that I’m reluctant to even write it. Before Jen and I moved in together, Ivan and Miss Lucy had spent ten years in the same apartment living like complete strangers. When Jen was in bed, they would cuddle up on either side of her but never
on the same side. Jen would always be sandwiched in the middle. Ivan and Miss Lucy never cuddled or had meow conversations or fought or even stared at each other. That always struck us as the strangest choice. Imagine being stuck on Mars with only one other human being and saying, “Look, man, I’m just gonna do my own thing.”
But something changed when Jen and I moved in together. Ivan and Miss Lucy fell deeply in love. They cuddled on the couch and purred and licked each other. They shared bowls of Seafood Classic. They became inseparable. So, to this day, though it’s corny, we say, “We taught Ivan and Miss Lucy how to love.”
When Miss Lucy was maybe ten years old, she passed away after several increasingly grim trips to the vet. She had a variety of old-cat lumps and diseases, and we’d inject her with what we understood to be some combination of chemicals and fluids. They’d help for a few days and then, ultimately, the pain would return. It was tough to tell if the treatment was helping her or torturing her and prolonging the inevitable. Finally, one day, at West Chelsea Veterinary in Manhattan, we decided it would be unfair to keep Miss Lucy alive any longer. We stood by her in an examination room while the vet gave her a lethal injection.
A few months later Ivan started to take ill. He was eighteen years old, which is actually very old for a cat. His stomach couldn’t hold food down, so we were switching his food every day. Chicken broth on some days, and on other days we’d liquefy his food in a blender. He needed blood transfusions. And then he would be okay for a while. But there came a time when nothing we were doing was making him feel better.
Jen and I sat down with the “feline quality of life scale” and we both knew in an unspoken way that it was time to let Ivan go.
We hired a veterinarian to come to the house because it felt more humane. At this point, Ivan wasn’t really moving and he had parked himself under a desk in our closet-sized office. There were two injections. One to make him subdued and one that went into his organs so that he’d stop breathing. So we crawled under the desk with Ivan and held on to his paw.
It’s hard to tell a cat he’s not going to be alive anymore if you don’t have a strong belief that anything follows this life. So we lay there with Ivan and said, “We’re with you, Ivan. It’s okay to let go. We’re with you. We love you. Thank you for spending your life with us. We will always remember you.”
We cried perhaps harder than we had ever cried. Often at funerals there’s a sense of restraint based on family dynamics and self-consciousness. But when Ivan died it felt like we cried for all the loved ones we had lost in our lifetimes, all the friends and family members we have lost over the years, and some we worried we would lose too soon. “Thank you for spending your life with us. We will always remember you.”
& When the cats died of old age…
your eyes gathered light
& grew feline in the wink.
You grew me a beard
for fuzz to pet
& I said,
“Hey, Beard-o!
I missed you while we were sleeping.”
After Ivan died I grew a beard so that Jen would have something to pet. Two years later, we adopted Mazzy.
5
I HAVE A JOB
It always seemed that a career and a child could not coexist, a sentiment that has never gone over well with my zombie loved ones.
My brother, Joe, said, “Mike, you can have a kid and a career.”
I said, “Yeah, Joe, but it’ll be worse.”
If we’re being honest with ourselves, kids hold us back. My best example of this is the history of women…
Stay with me.
I feel like women are smarter than men, and they make, on average, twenty-one cents less on the dollar.
I think women are smarter from birth. Have you ever talked to a two-year-old girl?
A two-year-old girl says things like, “Would you like to have a tea party?” A two-year-old boy smashes a toy truck against his head and says, “Now what?!”
And it doesn’t get better. I mean, marginally better. If I were a woman, I’d be furious all the time. I’d walk down the street shouting, “These morons are in charge of anything? How did this happen?”
The answer is: children.
And you might be thinking, Mike, a lot of people have jobs and kids.
Well, I’m happy for those imaginary people, but I’d like to bring up two more points:
1. It took me a long time to figure out anything I was good at. I wasn’t good at video games or archery or whatever the hell kids do.
2. If I don’t take the jobs that come my way, I probably won’t get any more jobs. If I pass on taking a gig, I risk the phone not ringing the next time. Not to mention, my job is on the road, and kids need stability. You know what isn’t stable? Everything on the road.
When I was twenty-five, my friend Chris, the person who cast me in my college improv troupe, told me he was thinking of moving back to Chicago from New York City to be a dad and a husband. We had just performed an improv show together after handing out flyers for it all afternoon in Washington Square Park and it had gone pretty well. So when Chris told me he might move, I was shocked.
I said, “Chris, you don’t understand. We’re gonna make it.”
Chris looked around the bar we were sitting in, which was filled with improvisers—a mix of already successful actors as well as aspiring performers, and he said, “I look at these people who have made it and I don’t want to have their lives.”
I said, “Chris. I’m looking at the same people, and their lives are exciting and fun and meaningful.”
And he said, “I’m looking at people who are trying to fill a void.”
Chris moved away and became a great dad. And I thought, What a fucking idiot.
6
THERE SHOULDN’T BE CHILDREN ANYMORE
I think the current children can finish out their term, but maybe we cut it off there.
Because the earth can’t sustain more people. We were given the earth and we failed. I live in New York City, a supposedly liberal city, but, if we’re being honest, we barely recycle. We have the garbage and the blue bin, which people basically stuff things into at random and say, “Is this anything? Here’s some batteries stuffed in an ink cartridge. Can you turn that into something else?” And then all of that waste is stuffed into trucks and shipped to Pennsylvania, which is fine until New York sinks into the ocean and we all have to move to Pennsylvania. Then we’ll all live in homes made of almond milk jugs and laser discs and we’ll vacation at Blu-ray mountain.
I’m genuinely perplexed by the environmental crisis and I don’t have the answer. Maybe we need to reframe it. Maybe we call it “Save God’s Earth” because, according to the book my grandmother gave me for my first communion, God gave us the earth.
He made it in six days… it would have taken thirty if it was a union job. He spent a day on light, which, as a filmmaker, I respect.
On the second day, God created the sky, which is currently overwhelmed with “light pollution”—the brightening of the night sky caused by streetlights and other man-made sources.
On the third day, God created the oceans, the land, and all the plants. He didn’t put millions of tons of oil and plastic in the ocean. He thought he’d save some stuff for us to do. And he filled the land with natural resources that we could grow food on and create energy from and then he thought, There’s an outside chance they’ll use up all the natural resources and start drilling into the core of the earth, but they probably won’t do that because that would poison the water for their children, not to mention the damage it would do to the plants I gave them. Those beautiful, nutrient-filled plants. There’s no way they’ll genetically alter those plants so that the plants no longer have all these godly nutrients.
On the fourth day, God created the sun, the moon, and the stars—which feels implausible.
The sun’s diameter is 109 times the size of earth’s—so that seems like a logistical challenge. That’s like if you said, �
��I’m gonna build a bicycle, a tricycle, and the sun.”
On the fifth day, God created the birds, fish, and other sea creatures. Surely, God thought, the populations of these species won’t decrease at an unsustainable rate from overfishing. And there’s no way people will want more fish than that such that they’ll squeeze the eggs out of the fish I made them to create billions more fish in fish farms.
On the sixth day, God created all the land animals and people. God dreamed that the animals and people would live in harmony and the people would only eat the animals when necessary since he already gave them all those plants and fish. I’m sure God thought, They won’t need to slaughter all the animals and keep them in cages the size of their bodies and then force them to eat their own excrement.
On the seventh day, God rested, which would hopefully set a precedent that people would rest once a week in church-like ceremonies, and the children who lit the candles at the ceremonies would not be systematically molested by men pretending to be super close friends with God. Seriously, they’re very close, and don’t ask too many questions.
But despite all of these catastrophic possibilities, God believed that if the people he created were brave enough to have faith in the possibility of his unlikely existence, they might also have enough faith in themselves to take care of the gift that he gave them, because if God spent six days creating the earth for these people, the least they could do is spend six days helping God clean up.
But until then—I’m not sure we should be bringing more of God’s irresponsible children into God’s beautiful earth.
Earth (in reverse)
One morning, I decide to spin backwards around the sun, says Earth.
One step behind
another behind another, I watch the chipper dance
of human beings in reverse.
The New One Page 3