Timmy was larger than life. At 490 pounds, if Timmy were Clark Kent, it’d take two phone booths for him to change into Superman.

He and his friends would go to Taco Bell and order “like sixty, seventy tacos. And it would blow their mind, man!” He thought it was funny. Because it was. Everybody loved Timmy. He was profane. Profound.

In fact, I made a short documentary called, what else, My Cousin Timmy which was my best effort (fresh out of film school) to portray his larger-than-life life. [watch free on Vimeo - 17 minutes]

Taco Bell antics aside, it turns out he was (quite literally) morbidly obese. He died five years after that doc from complications related to his “fat reduction surgery”. (I’m sure there’s a more medically accurate name for the procedure, but that’s what he called it).

And now he has reached from beyond the grave and sent me some ghost mail. As in, I found a letter from him postmarked 2004 (sent from prison, natch) that I had never opened. A ghost letter from my first cousin, who arrived on earth the same week as me, my Doppelgängerster.

You, dear reader, might ask “Why did you keep hold of an unopened letter for two decades?” Was it due to some oversight? Some misfiling, perhaps? Laziness? Overwhelm?

Am I ashamed I did not open it back in 2004? Of course, I am. Outraged. Embarrassed. Shocked. What can I say? My 33-year-old self was completely self-consumed. Maybe depressed. I thought, at the time, that I had enough problems — I didn’t need to add Timmy’s even bigger problems (a four felony count was outside my jurisdiction.)

And so today I slice open the sealed envelope. And unfold the ghost letter (see below).

His neat, cramped handwriting catches my breath. It takes me back to the apartment I was renting in the Los Feliz neighborhood of Los Angeles (technically, an ex-girlfriend’s apartment I was subletting, only she didn’t realize she was my ex-girlfriend at the time). I was drowning in debt and staring down post-film-school defeat. Penniless, mooching off old emotions. It was all I could do to keep the power on.

It’s not that I didn’t want to open the letter back then. It was just one of those things that when it dropped through the slot on the door next to the bills and rejection letters, it was all just a little too much for me to bear.

I probably felt the letter contained an urgent request for something I could not do — to save Timmy, somehow, to offer him hope, to give him a chance at a better world. Hell, maybe even to break him out of the clink.

What Timmy didn’t understand (what I didn’t understand until right now) was that *I* was also in prison. A prison of unfulfilled dreams and squandered promise. Of potential that had grown dusty and delinquent at the ripe old age of 33.

At least Timmy got 3 square meals and an allowance. I recall him boasting to me once that he got paid “Fitty doll-ers per hour!” for his job inside the prison. When I gasped with envy—that was two grand a week, two grand that I desperately needed to keep my ex-girlfriend and the power company happy. When I exclaimed that was a proper fortune, he quickly corrected himself—“Shee-it. I meant fitty doll-ers a month!” But he said it with the same enthusiasm that made the two sums seem equivalently awesome. He said he made extra money making tacos by turning his toilet into a grill, which I still don’t quite understand.

As you can see from the letter, I was wrong. He wasn’t writing me to add to my problems. He was writing to be the solution to my problems. Like some sort of big house agent, making deals for me to direct music videos with some of the talent he had hooked up with on the inside. He was hustling sure. Not for himself, but for me.

Damn.

If Timmy had survived, I’m sure he’d have been a reality TV star. A YouTube star. Maybe even given Tiger King a run for its money. Timmy had so much love and heart, despite all his felonies, his robust figure, his lips that had been bitten off and sewn back on (I recommend watching the doc). Nothing stopped him, not even the morbid weight he wore so lightly.

And he was determined to turn his life around. As he said in the doc, “Livin’ the way I am now, I might not even live to see forty.” Which was devastatingly true.

In order to get the weight-reduction surgery, he had to demonstrate to the doctors he was all-in by losing a hundred pounds the old-fashioned way. They were worried that at 500 pounds, the stress of surgery on his organs was too great. This was decades before Ozempic and the promise of massive weight loss without invasive surgery.

So he figured out how to drop a hundred pounds and got the surgery.

From what I heard, Timmy was stable for a few days post-surgery, probably getting around to all his usual nonsense. And then one night he stumbled into the too-small bathroom of his too-small house, opened up his mouth and said “oh shit” one last time. The surgeon had somehow knicked something vital in their rush to staple his stomach and the bleeding never stopped. He collapsed into a coma and passed away a few days later.

At his funeral, I played his video. Everyone got a kick out of it. Laughing and enjoying it, which I figured would have made Timmy proud.

I wasn’t laughing, though. I felt I’d failed Timmy in some way, particularly when he was working so hard to turn everything around. I on the other hand didn’t know whether to mock him or celebrate him, embrace him or avoid him. I think ultimately I felt like a coward when I watched them lower his XL coffin into the ground. But Timmy didn’t care what people thought of him — he was always comfortable in his own skin. Which is a beautiful way of being that I’m still trying to learn.

Oh man that letter tho.

It’s basically a pitch for me to direct some rap videos for some of his fellow inmates who were going places. He said that it’d “be a good opportunity for you to finally get in some ‘real’ money.” Which, as he somehow knew, I sorely needed.

The hardest part for me to read is the “P.S. Really Consider this” with smiley face. Not only did I not consider it, I didn’t even open up the letter for 20 years. That’s a tough thing to admit.

But even as I go and beat myself up, it’s dawning on me as I read his Ghost Letter that Timmy believed in me in a way that I could never believe in myself. Until, well, now.

Whew. Need to wipe the tear from the eye on that one.

Thank you, Timmy. For that faith. For always looking at the angles. For trying to figure out how to make me a star. Even when you were behind bars, you still were dreaming of how to make everything better. Even if it killed you.

Turns out you’re the star, Timmy. And you always have been. Thank you for having my back all this time. From behind bars and from the great beyond.

I love you, cuz. I hope wherever you are, you’re still living very, very large.

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The trip began as most long and arduous trips do with a pre-emptive visit to the bathroom. Whether you need to or not. After all: better safe than sorry.

This time, though, it wasn’t a forthcoming bladder issue I was worried about. Nor a, um, solid-waste bladder issue.1 Instead the contingency I was preparing for was the dreaded

… vomitornado.

I took careful measurements of the height of the lid of the toilet. Whether the width of the stall allowed for proper kneeling—without touching the side of said stall (editor’s note: it did indeed). I practiced the stall door latch a few times as well as rehearsed the basic ingress and egress of both the stall and the bathroom proper. File this under “never can be too careful.”

Never too careful in specific because I didn’t know if I’d have use of my legs for the next several hours. I wasn’t sure if I could walk. Or crawl. I wasn’t even sure if I’d be able to open my eyes.

I was minutes away from drinking the mythical Ayahuasca brew and all I knew about the tea was that it is off-handedly referred to as a “purgative.”

And not because the mythical brew puts you into purgatory (though I certainly wouldn’t rule it out) but because it makes you purge — as in retch, vomit, boot, puke, or ta-da! a technicolor rainbow out your mouth. So this was less of a last-chance bathroom break and more like a pre-flight inspection — I wanted to know what kind of equipment we were flying with before I entered the storm.

I had never tried Ayahuasca before. I didn’t even know it was a tea you drank.2 I assumed it was at least a snorting event, if not like a smoke-and-snort two-fer. But nope. It was a room-temperature, dark-brown, curiously-strong-smelling3 beverage extracted from a rare conjugation of a mystic root and an even more mystic vine. Let’s just say: mystique, achieved.

I, of course, didn’t know this until my coolest new friend in my new Rocky Mountain town invited me to an extremely special and sacred tea ceremony.4 I didn’t know the tea’s intertwined history in the Amazon jungle where it had been discovered and re-discovered over generations.

Before her invite, all I knew about Ayahuasca was that made you feel like you had died. I imagined gasping like a fish out of water and then writing on the floor. I heard stories of power-puking, bucket after bucket. Which can lead to a fate even worse than ego death: a brutal heartburn up and down your digestive tract. As someone who already leans pretty heavily on TUMS, I was very close to dismissing the ride altogether: clearly, the cost-benefit was out of wack.

But that was before COVID, before the mid-life crisis, and before the consequential—and rather intense—journey of self-discovery and self-healing that brought me to this very moment. A moment where for the first time in my life, I could feel things. I could get experience them. Let them flow through me. Come online.

Some people called these feelings … “emotions.”

I felt sad. I felt angry. I felt really fucking sad. I felt really fucking angry. Also: lonely. Frustrated. Detached. Empty. Self-hating. Disassociative. Disappearing. And at least 37 more. Apparently, once the cats are out of the bag, emotionally speaking, they’re awfully hard to put back. I was a wild stallion of emotions, each pulling violently (yet somehow also: seductively) in opposing directions.5 It was hard on me. Hard on my wife. Hard on my family.

So I was down for pretty much any tool, medicine, or steam-punk-powered crank that had the power to crack open my soul and massage my heart until it started beating again. If it took a night of purgative discomfort to get there, then so be it. They never said a mid-life crisis was for sissies.

The Ceremony

Due to the sensitive nature of this type of tea, I will keep all the details about the who, where, and how sub rosa. Rest assured that it was the real deal, and it was in a safe space with experienced hands at the wheel of the celestial ship. As (apparently) we (now) say, it was a strong and safe container: a loving group holding space, maintaining peace, and liberating us from distraction and doubt. They know who they are and I cannot thank them enough.6

A note about the tea

It ain’t grandma’s iced tea. It ain’t Lipton Iced Tea. Heck, ain’t even like a Snapple. This tea was, as they, say “some’in else” —like the root and the vine are a cosmic being who is several orders of magnitude more more than you could ever imagine a sentient-being being. You are supposed to gulp your glass down all at once,7 no stopping, without leaving even a super-tiny drop. As they explained, the power of the medicine is so valuable that even that tiny drop could heal a human soul.

And, yes, you do drink that last drop even though at this very mid-gulp moment you are no longer certain that it will be a one-way trip to the tummy for this tea. The mouthfeel, so to speak, is that of seven Red Bulls chained together with kerosene. Somehow my stomach caught wind of this appalling discovery, and reported up to headquarters that “We have never dealt with a beverage, taste, or so-called mouthfeel like this before. Fair warning mouth if it’s a return shipment.”

Gentlemen, start your engines.

My stomach and I did manage to keep a lid on everything long enough to digest the tea. I am not a doctor (I swear), but I believe stomach digestion is also how alcohol gets into the bloodstream. By my calculation, it takes at least a minute after drinking alcohol for me to feel drunk. Which should be just enough time to return to my chair without tripping on anyone.

It was. Within minutes, I was riding.

Now I theoretically could still move my hands and legs, but for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out why I’d want to do so. It’s like walking past one of those old-school TV stores, where 25 TVs were on, all showing the same spectacular moment: national championships, a new president, a man on the moon. The sort of image that transfixes you for ten minutes, you just standing there, gawking. It could put a root in you. I had the same feeling now: what I was watching in my mind was way more important than anything happening “out there” in the physical plane.

The Show Inside

Now I shall recount my drug journey. If that is (understandably) not worth your highly valuable blog-reading time, then please skip to the end. But if you like the gentle pleasures of one man telling another about the trip he’d done and the sights he’d seen and how he’d garnered a new understanding of his life—and, hell, let’s just go ahead and say it — all human life as well.

If that’s your bag, then I promise: you’re in for a real treat.

So the beginning phase of the experience is, for lack of a better term, architectural. It is similar to the “psychedelic” animation above (which literally was the first result I got when I googled “psychedelic gif”).

In the few minutes since drinking the tea, something had shifted inside of me. Instead of staring at blank blackness, the sort of thing I’d normally see when my eyes were closed, now I was staring at a vast landscape of Mayan pyramids of intricate craftsmanship.

When I tried to drift closer, each stone of the pyramid revealed itself to be, of course, its own pyramid. It was like I was moving but without the part where I actually got anywhere.

It was a bit unsettling. And I also thought this: “perhaps the tea is a purgative not because it was so hard on our stomachs. But rather because it makes you motion sick. While sitting absolutely still.”

Okay, so it’s not a fact. Just a pet theory invented admittedly in the embrace of a powerful hallucigen — so maybe someone can chime in the comments if they have direct experience with this situation.

But everything darkened. Receded from sight. Which was comfortable. Cozy. Relaxing. And …

Back in the womb. Yep. For real.

It was dark. It was warm. There was a thin aperture of light. I was a baby. Not exactly the same baby I’d been before. For one, I still had my current intelligence.8 I had my same life experiences, my same understanding. And yet, here I was back to being born all over again.

It was there in my mother’s womb that I met my other, my Shadow.9 He was a black leathery creature, like a human dragon. Less menacing and savage and more … well … cute. It was almost as if he had just been pretending to be really dark, as if that might make him seem deep. Wonder where he got that from?

And then—fwoosh!—I was like totally being born. My Shadow, however, stayed behind. It turns out that in this experience (as well as in real life) I was a very large baby. Too big, in fact, for all of me to make it through intact. Cleaving off a piece of me and it behind. In the permanent darkness. Furious at being unborn. Furious at being hidden. Furious at being forgotten.

In real life, I had been choking to death on my umbilical cord. While my mom and dad were waiting for me to come join them on earth, I was slowly suffocating until my heart stopped. My mom was rushed into the operating room to have an emergency C-section, in order to save the life of the mother and child. I was born with the taste of blood in my mouth. My mother barely survived the bloody birth. I’m not sure I ever did.

And then in my vision, I was calling after my brother. And this time, my Shadow brother came to me. To join me. To be born. To be safely, joyfully, finally delivered.

The doctor handed my newborn brother to me. This toothy baby looked up at me with his dragon-dark eyes and pitch-black scales (like I said: cute).

I asked the doctor what his name was.

The doctor replied, “He has no name. You must name him.”

I tried to resist, but, ayahuasca-fueled visions being what they are, I finally relented and accepted my fate.

The first name that came to me was “Kevin”.10 And that’s because in real life, there’s this guy “Kevin” who is the biggest prick I know. To be clear, naming my cute baby Shadow after the biggest prick I knew was the sort of inter-psychological warfare we’d been waging for our entire lives. It was time to stop the fighting and ego-gouging and soul-punching.

So I turned to the doctor and said:

“His name is Heartfelt.”

It didn’t feel like my normal M.O. It wasn’t clever. Or a subtle allusion. Or a joke. It was a weird name for a brother. To be honest, the name surprised me. And I also thought it was perfect.

I cuddled the baby in my arms, my shadow child. For the first time, I didn’t see my Shadow as a rival, a hated enemy, a destroyer of dreams, of relationships. Friendships. Connection. My life-long battle with my shadow had laid waste to so many opportunities for true connection, true vulnerability, true trust.

This time I saw my Shadow for what he was: a scared, lonely child.

So I talked to him. I told Heartfelt I knew he had been scared I’d forget him:

And so you threw tantrums. You sabotaged my dreams. You pushed me to greed and gluttony and a mean sort of selfishness that repelled everyone in its path. And I’m telling you I understand why you felt you needed to do that.

And I’m also here to tell you:

you don’t have to do that anymore.

And here I smiled at him and swaddled him more and continued:

I promise that from now on, nstead of trying to protect my dreams from you, I will now ask you lead them.

Yes. You. And in fact, I am going to dedicate my most beloved creative project to you.

The dragon baby looked at me askance, which is a pretty sophisticated gesture for a newborn. My trance-self continued:

Seriously. I make a promise, I’m going to dedicate my book to you the second we wake up from wherever we are.

My trance-self tapped my trance-heart and wrote the dedication right then and there.

For my beloved brother Heartfelt,

whose journey mirrors this book:

from struggling alone in the darkness

to finally dancing in the light.

I love you.

And so I did

After an immeasurable and un-measurable amount of time, I did come to, so to speak. I was awake. I could stand. Even have a light supper despite it being a million o’clock. And eventually found myself back at home. Where I immediately opened up the word processor app I use to write my novel and typed that dedication.

Ver-freaking-batim.

The beginning of a beautiful friendship

I’ve since drank the tea a few more times. Each experience wildly different. Perhaps I’ll share what else I discovered over a coffee sometime. Or, heck, you never know: a blog post.

So as they say, your mileage may vary. As well as the legality and, more importantly, the safety of what you might imbibe. So please be careful out there—always trust and verify the provenance of your vegetable of choice. My lawyer brother-in-law also wanted me to add that we are not endorsing a lifestyle of enlightenment for everyone.

Even if it’s a good ride, it might not have been the ride you needed, nor were prepared to take. It can leave your spiritual house shaky, perhaps in need of a complete overhaul. So it’s definitely not for everyone. You have to, if you’ll pardon the phrase, have a real thirst for adventure. With no guarantees of what lies on the other side. Or even if you’ll make it there.

But if you do find yourself with the sacred privilege of being able to share that holy tea, please—for my sake—drink every last drop.

Because the medicine will do miracles, man.

It certainly did one for me.

Footnotes

3

And not in the good way:

At the time, I too wanted to become rich and powerful. So rich and powerful that I already had a title prepared: I was going to become known as The Producer of the 21st Century®. As the TPOT21C, I would not only become the most prominent producer of films in the coming century (being the world’s most successful film producer was just table stakes) but literally the person who produced the entire century.2

My goal was to be an agent of change. So trying to be an agent of talent seemed like a reasonable place to start.

Now, working in the mailroom isn’t quite as sexy as it sounds. First of all, there’s a lot of, well, mail. Lots of memos. Fan mail. Blind script submissions. And yes sometimes boxes of candy to some long-forgotten film star still on the agency rolodex. To be clear, there was a ritual where the manager of the mail room would inspect the Star Candy and take it for himself if he so desired, or if the candy was found wanting, he would pass the bounty down to his Right Hand Guy, who then would pass it to his Right Hand Guy, and so forth and so on, from one right hand to the other. Safe to say the Star Candy never made its way to me.

A mailroom summer intern had a lower status than the following:

• the agents

• the assistants

• the agent trainees (non-interns who were slaving away in the mailroom for years—to them, we were just tourists, inconsequential whipping boys)

• the receptionist

• the FedEx guy

• the UPS guy

• the deli delivery guy

• the security guard

• the valets

• and the piece of gum on the bottom of the valet’s left shoe.

The Agents never came into the mailroom. Each agent had at least one assistant, who as a recent graduate of the mailroom, loved nothing more than poking their head into the mailroom and yelling, “I remember when this was a fucking mail-room!” before returning to their desks to be bullied and belittled by their bosses. If you ever watched a nature documentary, you’d surely have been able to follow along.

There was one agent trainee, in fact, who was a Harvard-educated brain surgeon. This is not a metaphor. That was his actual job, before, for some reason (maybe he decided brain surgery was too bourgoise?) he decided to leave that line of work to work in a mailroom: basically trading a scalpel for a mailcart. His parents must’ve been so proud.

I don’t remember his name. Nobody remembered his name. Because nobody even knew his real name, because everybody exclusively referred to him to his face as

Dr. Mumbles.

Yep. That’s right. The guy who could have saved your long and short-term memory after a horrible car crash and perhaps even your sense of smell to boot? Now reduced to dodging oily Subway wrappers thrown by non-Harvard-trained-brain-surgeon assistants who snarl things at his passing mailcart like: “Tw*t’s that, Dr. Mumbles? I c*nt hear you.”3

Long story short: if Dr. Mumbles as a trainee had it bad in the mailroom, as an intern, I had it worse. In fact, I have only one positive memory about that entire summer (and it wasn’t babysitting child actors trying to score Camel Lites on the mean streets of Beverly Hills). And that was shopping for my younger sister’s birthday gift.

As an intern, we got only a tight 30 for lunch. So right at 12:30 on a bright sunny June Friday, I left the mailroom and sped-walked down Rodeo Drive. My sister, living in San Francisco at the time, had a birthday the next day. Normally, I’d be screwed and wouldn’t be able to get the gift there on time. But, as turns out, there was one lone perk to working in the mailroom: free overnight Saturday Delivery, if one knew how to charge the postage to the partners.

So in my double-breasted olive suit (I did mention this story took place in the ‘90s, right?), I scoured Rodeo Drive, in search of something affordable that would delight a soon-to-be 23-year-old. I knew where I had to go: that Sharper Image competitor with the decidedly less sharp name: Hammacher Schlemmer. They were the purveyor of the “Unexpected Gift.” I had no idea how accurate that would be.

These were the stores that specialized in the type of high-end gadgets that occupy the uncanny valley between “Why didn’t I think of that?” and “Who the hell would want this?” But to my mind, they surely had something “unexpected” to delight a birthday girl, or so I figured.

Sure, there a perfectly good Tiffany’s right next door, which would have a more “expected” gift for a 23-year-old young woman. But have you seen what a mailroom summer intern makes? Hammacher Schlemmer and its arsenal of plasma-globe egg timers and bowler-friendly CD player holsters would have to do.

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When I arrived at 12:38 (only 22 minutes to complete my mission and be back at my trusty mailcart), I was met with an ominous discovery. The store, as far as I could tell, was being held up. The front glass double door was locked. There was a very large, possibly Uzi-toting bodyguard with a blonde ponytail inside on the other side of the door, his back to me. There were a few other large men in suits scattered throughout the store. And in the middle, stood a masked man.

I wasn’t quite sure what my moral duty was at the moment: citizen’s arrest? Call 911? Run for my life? But I knew what my brotherly duty was—I had to get a gift, and I was down to 19 minutes before mailroom discipline would be applied.

While I was busy with my moral calculator, there was a commotion at the door: an elderly couple trying to leave right in the middle of the robbery. To my surprise (and might I add: morbid disappointment), they were not macheted in twain by Pony Tail Guy. Instead, he deftly unlocked the front double doors and allowed the elderly customers to slip out.

Which was the same moment that I, dear reader, slipped in. Like Dr. Mumbles confidently slicing into a diseased cerebellum, I sliced into the store, because robbery or not, I had a birthday gift to procure and time was running out. Fortunately, the bodyguard / violent marauder didn’t punch me, stab me, shoot me, or even slap me; instead, he locked the door behind me.

I was in.

The store was empty of all customers, save for three large bodyguards stationed at the front door, the back door, and in the middle of the story like an NFL Free Safety, ready to reinforce whichever perimeter was breached.

“By whom would said perimeter be breached?” and “To what end?” were questions that had not entered my mind. I was 12 minutes into my mission: existential questions were a luxury I no longer had.

So while I power-shopped for an unexpected gift in a clockwise fashion around the store, I noted a few other facts: there was a British banker in a three-piece suit by the cash register with a Secret Service-style earpiece. To my right was a 12-year-old boy, dressed in red and black leather. To my right was the aforementioned masked man, who also over-indexed in the leatherware department. He wore a fedora up top and what I now recognized to be a surgical mask over his mouth. The mask was white. His skin was whiter.

And then he spoke to me.

“Do you have any writing pads?”

I realized three things at once:

1. In my suit, I somehow looked like I worked here. Like maybe a manager, maybe even a regional manager of Hammacher Schlemmer Worldwide. That was cool.

2. This masked man’s voice was much higher-pitched than expected.

3. This was not a robbery, but in fact, its opposite. It was an unexpected gift. An unexpected gift from the gods.

The leather. The British Banker. The oddly-aged boy. Yes. I was speaking to the one and only Michael Jackson. Who thought I was the manager of the store in which I was now sealed inside of. And so, not sure what else to do, I gave Michael Jackson a tour of “my” store.

He and I spent the next ten minutes evaluating a “space-age” dog hair removal comb. A dust-buster on steroids. One of those click-clack silver ball things that always showed up in movies to indicate that the man behind the desk was a deep thinker who thought a lot about kinetic energy and the power of a steady beat.

I carefully demonstrated each of these display items to the King of Pop. And I became more bold in my interactions. I pretended to brush his sleeve and explain that it was a “Spot Remover,” which he, let the record show, giggled at. To be clear, I touched his arm, in my pantomime of how one might remove dog lint. I was now physically connected with the world’s most famous person alive. How could I not touch him?

I then showed him how to click-clack the pendulum ball thing, and he would like to stop it really quick, right after I started it, and then start it in the opposite direction. Like we were playing a game. When we got to the giant dust-buster, I laughed and turned to the quiet 12-year-old boy and said “See? This is a Big Spot Remover” and pretended to vacuum up the boy.

At that very moment, let’s just say, the vibe? Well. It did change.

Boy did it ever.

The kid stopped moving as if the dust buster electrocuted him (which, again for defamation and libel purposes, it did not.) The bodyguards stopped moving. The British banker guy at the front swiveled around, his finger already on the coiled mic at his ear.

The King of Pop took a step back, and audibly said, “Oh.”

As if he had been struck in the guts in some mild, but purposeful way: like he’d unexpectedly turned into a shopping cart on his many, many visits to Chimpanzees’R’Us or wherever he liked to while away his day.

I could tell he was frowning beneath that totally normal surgical mask he wore.

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I stepped away, suddenly remembering my madcap mission, my whole reason for being here—quick time check: just 14 minutes left of cruelly short lunch break!—and gently guided Mr. Jackson to the cash register.

Michael was surprisingly suggestible — he ended up buying the specific notepad I recommended: the one with a suction cup that sticks to the inside window of a car or hearse or whatever he was being driven in. The British Banker paid the actual Hammacher Schlemmer employee (who was, as far as I was concerned, now my employee by law, so total was my command over this Official Celebrity Incident).

The rear bodyguard opened the back door. An unmarked white minivan (my hunch? Honda Odyssey, just because they’re so darn dependable. And if you need a get-a-way undercover minivan to stalk the alleys of Beverly Hills to whisk away the King of Pop from an army of fans, paparazzi, and plaintiffs’ attorneys, at the very least you’d think you’d want it to be dependable, right?)

I stared at the Hammacher Schlemmer employee. We made the sort of meaningful eye contact that only two complete strangers can make: “Did you just see that?” while also simultaneously communicating “Oh hell yeah, I definitely just saw that.”

After a dazed beat, I asked out loud, “Has that happened before?”

He laughed. “You wouldn’t believe.”

I nodded, letting the flood of new visitors stream past me through the now unguarded and unlocked front doors. Not one of them knew the out-right miracle had just transpired in these hallowed halls of Hammacher Schlemmer, Beverly Hills branch.

That I had just been … well … hanging out with the King of Pop.

But here’s the curveball: despite making this my first choice for birthday shopping, despite basically breaking into what I thought was a robbery in broad daylight, despite being Michael Jackson’s personal shopper: Hammacher Schlemmer just didn’t have that perfect unexpected gift I knew my sister would love.

So instead I did what I should have done in the first place: go to Tiffany’s, ask for the cheapest expected gift, groan when said cheapest gift is still a hundred dollars, and scoop up a sterling silver bean necklace for my sister and stroll back to the mailroom.

A good fifteen minutes late. And I could not give a f*ck.

I didn’t make any excuses. I didn’t make any apologies. I had just been part of a celebrity supernova—for MJ at that time was quite literally the most famous person in the world by a long shot. He was Taylor Swift times Donald Trump to the power of Bad Bunny plus Lebron James. Famous and infamous all at once. A voice of an angel, and a rap sheet filled with some of the worst crimes imaginable against children. I don’t want to sugarcoat anything here: Michael Jackson was a predator who used his fame and wealth to sexually assault young children.

The really stomach-churning part? for all I know, that young boy that I pretended to vacuum was also a victim of Michael’s.

So what do you do with his music? How do you square that horrifying behavior with some of the greatest jams ever written and performed? Specifically, what do you do with my all-time favorite song of the 80s, Billie Jean?

True story: according to Quincy Jones, producer of the best-selling album of all time Thriller, one day Michael came into the studio humming a new bass line.

Quincy says, if it’s stuck in your head, go play it.

And so Michael does so. He gets a bass guitar and starts playing it.

Quincy starts nodding: Nice groove. Any idea for a lyric?

And Michael says, It's about this woman Billie Jean—

Quincy nods, A love song. I dig.

Michael says, yeah, sort of. But she’s pregnant [ed. note: And here, I’d like to think Quincy stops nodding. I can’t imagine Quincy wants Michael anywhere near Family Law issues in his dance songs]. And she tries to tell everyone I’m the father, but I’m not the father [again, I imagine gentle knowing laughter here]. You know me, right Q?

Quincy nods again, but this time it’s a long, slow, painful nod. Because he did know Michael. He likely already knew the dark shit that was rumbling in that artistic genius's head.

Quincy would say later something to the effect: I thought this Billie Jean lyric was the dumbest idea I’d ever heard and that we’d record it, then let it naturally hit the cutting room floor as it got beat by better tracks for the album.

But instead:

And here he stops and grins, pointing to what looks to be a diamond-plated record on the wall, or whatever plaque they give you for making the most popular man-made thing in any and every category one could make a man-made thing. That sick and twisted mind had made the most popular song of all time.

But my point is, that in this world—much like in the inner workings of talent agency mailrooms—there are bad people who do bad things. And how do we square that with their art? Just look at New York liberals and their disgraced mascot Woody Allen, if you don’t know what I mean. What was loved is now hated, what was celebrated is now denigrated, and what once brought joy now brings pain, anger, and grief.

As for me, per usual, I’m somewhere in the middle.

My compromise is this: to me great artists like Michael Jackson, who have a gift that is so obviously transcendent, so obviously not of this world, these are the seafarers of our time—they have journeyed to the very edge of creation itself, stood on their toes, and peered over the edge and seen something far beyond.

Out there, beyond the cultural event horizon, exists something beautiful—a melody, a riff, a plotline, a vision. Artists bring these discoveries back down to earth to share. Now just because the messenger is a deeply flawed and harmful criminal, does not mean the message is invalid. Much like Magellan or Columbus or countless other explorers—we only know what they found, what information they gathered from the other side. We didn’t cancel America because Amerigo Vespucci got too friendly with the deckhands on those transatlantic voyages (again: not a real fact). Just like the discoveries are independent of the discovers, perhaps so too is a creation separate from its creator—even if it is his delicious bass line and perfect voice that make that creation so irresistible.

Sometimes it feels that just being alive, we’re all stuck in a mean-spirited mailroom, having our dignity torn away by cruel neighbors whose power rests upon the randomness of wealth.

So while it may feel we don’t get much for free on this big rock, every once in a while we do: a creation that is so rare and powerful that when we find it, we know that it belongs to all of us—it’s not just the property of the damaged human who made it.

A diamond so pure that it can pass through the hands of its imperfect discoverer and still dazzle and delight today.

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Thank you and Michael, please play me off …

Other posts on What’s the Worst That Can Happen!? that you might enjoy:

• My adventures at adult crying camp

• My adventures with Ayahuasca tea

The crying was thanks to the Hoffman Institute in Petaluma California, where me and 38 other willing adults were secluded from the outside world (some might say rudely cut off) for a week: no phones, no computers, no TV. No alcohol, no cannabis, no mushrooms, no horse tranquilizer: nothing stronger than Advil (and not the hospital kind that secretly has cocaine, or so say my sources at the Joe Rogan Experience). No books, no magazines, no music, no social media, no video games, no crossword puzzles. No exercise, no prayers, no work. And they were very clear about this: no sex with one another, and no sex with oneself.3 Basically, anything I use during my day to distract myself from the pain hidden deep inside was gone.

They never exactly outlined how they would find out about some of these, ahem, private activities, but the intention was clear: I was on my own, emotionally speaking. All the small and big ways I numbed myself daily were now officially off-limits. Which meant in my case, there would be no YouTube videos of suburban kangaroos fighting to get in the way of me feeling really, profoundly, bone-shatteringly sad.

The other wrinkle was that me and 38 other strangers were intended for the most part to remain anonymous. (Yes we signed NDA’s which did not stop me from trying to convince everyone I was a famous influencer dentist in real life.)

We were known by the names we were called when we were young kids (“Hi everyone, I’m Jace!”), and we weren’t allowed to talk about our jobs, our fame, our fortune, politics, sports, media, etc. We had to connect to each other like young children do - being funny, being vulnerable, playing, sharing our simple activities together, and not, I repeat, not talking about our internet startups.

Each day was a mix of big group sessions, small group sessions, one-on-one sessions with our teachers, and lots and lots of time in the prison of our own thoughts.

The food was (seriously) quite good, and the ranch was spectacularly beautiful and relaxing—golden hills and oak trees and a hint of sea breeze at sunset. The hours were definitely long - from 7:15 in the morning often until 10 pm at night. Despite the emotional turmoil it unleashed, I had no trouble sleeping, which felt a little bit like winning. (They didn’t say anything about not keeping score).

Before we even showed up, we had about fifteen hours of homework to prepare ourselves for the transformation. An SAT test from hell where you had to write lots and lots of essays about your addictions, your anxieties, your anger toward your mom, that time you stole gum, that time you drove a stolen car through a CVS, and all the ways that you disappoint yourself in the world. And once I started pulling that thread, it’s amazing how self-critical I could be. How when I lined up all my faults, my fears, my hurtful patterns, it literally numbered in the hundreds. Clearly, I was fucked.4

This is the beginning of what they call “Awareness Hell” - basically the place you get to after three years of therapy and you realize that you too have these weird things called “emotions.”

And then after several decades of being hidden in the dark, they suddenly come to the surface? Well, you can fact-check this with my wife, but it’s safe to say that spectacular sunsets aside, it’s not particularly fun living next to a volcano.

And then the process started. I was the last one in (I would like the record to show I had one minute left before it started). My flight from LAX to SFO was 5 hours delayed - yep with the one-hour flight time and it was longer than it would have taken to drive from LA to San Francisco. But it was all worth it.

The next seven days were definitely the hardest week of my life. The most intense. And the most transformative. This is for someone who had several generations of girlfriends dump him with the same message—“95% of our relationship is great Jason, but when things get emotional you completely shut down.”5

I made a lot of great friends, several of whom I expect to keep throughout my life. I had fantastic insights, profound realizations, and spiritual experiences of uncovering and healing from lifelong emotional wounds. But the thing I remember most was this - several people complained to me, in a perfectly nice, polite, and generous way, that they had found me to be distracting.

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Because I talked over you? (My pattern #18). 

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No, they said. 

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Because I dominated the conversation? (My pattern #43)

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No, they said.

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Because I tried to make jokes in order to undercut the seriousness of the moment? (My pattern #79)

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No, they said.

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Then what new horrible thing did I do that was so distracting? (My potential new pattern #114)

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Well, they said. It’s that you cried soooooooo fucking loudly. Which made me feel  my own crying wasn’t up to snuff. But it was also inspiring for me, you know, to keep going. If you were doing it that loudly, then surely no one would even notice my own horrible-sounding crying.

And so there you have it, unnamed-college-girlfriends-for-legal-reasons: proof I had finally got in touch with my (very painful) emotions. And more importantly than showing off to the ghosts of girlfriends past, I had figured out exactly what the source of the infinite well of pain I’d been hiding for so long behind jokes and grins and stoicism.

One of the hallmarks of pretty much every Instagram influencer I catch on my wife’s IG account who is not selling face creme made from the very old bones of vegan cows is this: babe, you just gotta love yourself.

Which is, turns out, way easier said than done.

Meaning: If I was a good boy, if I got good grades, if I was a BIG SHINING SUCCESS, then I would be loved.

I believed if I was a success my dad would love me.

I believed if i was a success my mom would love me.

I believed if I was a success my wife would love me.

I believed if I was a success my friends would love me.

I believed if I was a success my kids would love me.

And I believed if I was a success I would (finally) love me.

This was, in short, a huge breakthrough. Because turns out there was no amount of success out there that could ever consistently earn that love. Maybe I could find enough success (new job! new house! New Cannes Golden Lion!) to be loved for an afternoon, but then the next morning, I was right back at rock bottom, trying desperately to earn a few more scraps of love for the day. And when I failed in my pursuit of success (and as faithful readers of this blog know, boy have I failed a lot), the message was clear: the reason I wasn’t loved was that inherently I wasn’t worth being loved.

There was one moment, where we did a performance and I remember thinking, I’m going to show my classmates what I can do. And so I did a tight five on coyote urine (this is 100% true) and got the surprise laughter and applause I craved. I talked to my teacher the next morning at 7 am (turns out lack of alcohol and drugs makes that a lot more palatable) and she said about my performance the night before:

But, I protested, was I not supposed to kill? Was I supposed to bomb?

And she said, No. But I want to think about how you would have felt if you did bomb.

I said, I’d have felt terrible. And I’d have thought that no one would like me.

She raised an eyebrow, nodded, then flew off into the sky like the magical creature of subtle therapy she was.

I realized the basic obvious truth: I had to throw my entire toxic operating system into the garbage, dump super-acid on it, and set it into a spectacular bonfire, fines from the local park service be damned.

And then even better, I learned to replace this yawning, never-filled emptiness within me for the very first time (yes after a half-century on Earth), and love myself completely. For no reason. Whether I did good, did bad, or did nothing at all. Just because I am alive and inherently worthy of love.

So to celebrate, I’m finally starting this blog that has been on my to-do list since I got COVID the first time around6. Will there be cringe? For sure. Will there be some meandering moments? You betcha. But it will be real. Honest. And maybe even help someone else out there learn the secret I finally woke up to.7

And that, my friends, is worth all the crying in the world to get to.

And so that’s my first post, yall. Subscribe for more. And in the meantime, play me off, Johnny…

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