Since I stopped drinking my love life has taken a really serious hit. Romantic encounters that seemed like a really good idea at three o'clock in the morning on the Lower East Side? Less so in sobriety.
I knew I just loved comedy, and I think it was my parents who initially brought up the notion of me trying to do stand-up. I think I actually tried writing jokes just at home, just kind of sitting around. But it seemed like a very real way to step into the world of comedy. I felt I could do it, so why not?
All the times, all the very many times, I had been forced to thwart and stifle my own nature seemed to gather together then, in that hot and dismal corridor. I heard a rushing sound in my head and felt a pressure in my breast, like floodwaters rising behind a flimsy dike. Before I knew I did it, the soup bowl was rising in my hand as if elevated by some supernatural force. Then, its yellow-gray contents were running down the nurse's pudgy face.
So many things that seemed crucial and excruciatingly hard ended and then didn't matter anymore, forever after
I looked down again at the sign in my hand - ENJOY THE RIDE! - and it seemed, suddenly, to be just that. A sign.
and even the trees we walked under seemed less than trees and more like everything else.
The question of who is right and who is wrong has seemed to me always too small to be worth a moment's thought, while the question of what is right and what is wrong has seemed all-important.
It is just as necessary to forgive ourselves as it is to forgive others, and the principal reason why forgiveness seemed so difficult is because we have neglected to forgive ourselves.
. . . It all seemed to him to have disappeared as if behind a curtain at a theater. There are such curtains that drop in life. God is moving on to the next act.