Please Don’t Look at Me

please do.

This is not a self-help book.

It’s a spiritual garage sale.

Everything’s out on the driveway. Some of it is broken. Some of it was never mine to begin with. You can have any of it for whatever you think it’s worth, and if you find something in a box that makes you go oh no, that box is also for sale.

Before we start, you need to meet the other guy.

There is a man in my head who does play-by-play. He has been on the air since roughly 1985. He calls every conversation I’ve ever had, live, with color commentary, and then he runs the highlights again at two in the morning when I’m trying to sleep. He does not editorialize. He just describes, in detail, with excellent recall.

And there he goes, folks. He said “you too” to the waiter who told him to enjoy his meal. Let’s see it again from the reverse angle.

I have spent my entire life trying to find a volume loud enough to drown him out. Amplifiers. Costumes. Bits. Rooms full of strangers. A woman’s bouquet, eaten. That search is the actual plot of this book, and everything else is just where it happened to take place.

So. The deal.

What follows is a collection of wildly inappropriate, occasionally exaggerated, deeply uncomfortable truths, told by someone who probably should have known better and absolutely didn’t. It all happened. Some of it is heightened, because that is how I tell a story. Some of the commentary was whispered to me by my anxiety wearing a fake mustache. All of it is emotionally true, especially the parts I wish weren’t.

Laugh at my expense. I insist. If you’re wondering whether it’s okay to laugh at the worst parts, yes. Maybe only the worst parts.

The moments in here are the ones that left me gasping, blinking, humiliated, and kind of sticky. I still have not figured out what they mean. I just stopped being able to carry them alone.

So I wrote them down and made them your problem too.

That’s the whole book.

So please don’t look at me.

But also?

Please do.