Temperance

Temperance Playlist

A few months into the production of Y: THE LAST MAN, I’m in my office, casting a new role— Roxanne, a tough-as-nails homicide detective turned cult leader who turns out to not be a homicide detective at all. Roxanne is the leader of a cult of young women she’s recruited from a domestic violence shelter and organized around the principle that men are the worst. We find out later in the season that she is a former employee of the PriceMax where they are all living. In the old world, she was obsessed with tv cop dramas, and in the wake of a global pandemic that kills half the population, she decides to reinvent herself. While the rest of the world is mourning, Roxanne is living out her wildest Olivia Benson dreams.

During casting, I watch a tape from an actress I’ve long admired — Missi Pyle. She’s more beautiful than I imagined Roxanne, and I’d always thought of Missi as a strictly comedic actress. She played an alien in one of my favorite movies, Galaxy Quest, and she gets the shit kicked out of her by Queen Latifah in Bringing Down The House in a fight scene that’s so spectacular that I’m including it here even though it has fuck all to do with Temperance.

Missi’s tape blows me away. Yes, she’s beautiful, but she’s also fearless. Yes, she’s funny, but she’s adept and mercurial, and her choices are deeply interesting. As Roxanne, she sets her jaw in a tight snarl and fixes her eyes directly at the camera. I’m laughing and I'm scared. She's perfect. I'm transfixed.

I also know that I’m not just casting a role, but adding a person to a family. There is almost nothing more important to me than the work environment I invite people into. I’m not interested in making anything with assholes, and I mean that. I love collaborating, and I love actors. I don’t want anyone to come in and mess up the beautiful thing we’ve got going up in freezing Toronto.

I get on a zoom with Missi and there is an instant connection. She’s funny, warm, collaborative, smart, and she’s got a daughter who’s right between my kids in age. Missi is excited about the material and up for the challenge. She’s hired. 

Missi, Amber Tamblyn, and I all have children around the same age who have been uprooted from their homes so their moms can make a TV show. We pod them together, and our incredible nanny, Kinga, becomes the mother hen to all four of them (this show would never have been made without Kinga Michalik who is truly the most magnificent woman in the world). The kids become a little family, pulled by Kinga in a wagon all through the snowy city, and Missi, Amber, Amber’s husband David Cross, Zack and I become a little platonic polycule.

There is nothing to do in Toronto during Covid outside of work. Canada was hit hard by SARS, and though they fucked up on the vaccine front (by eliminating their ability to produce their own vaccines mere months before Covid hits), they do not fuck around with Covid safety. Nothing is open. Nothing. There are no restaurants, gyms, bars, museums, theaters. There is nowhere to go except the boardwalk around the lake and it’s freezing cold and dark as hell most of the time.

We work incredibly hard, and we also drink. Drinking helps with the fear of disease, it helps with the stress of show running, it helps me cope with feeling responsible for holding actors hostage in Canada far from their families in an ensemble show where they sometimes go weeks without working. Drinking alleviates the sense of doom I sometimes feel when I find my husband asleep in the middle of the afternoon, or staring glassy-eyed out the window. He is also suffering, but I am ill-equipped to take that on, because I’ve got a 24 hour job and I’m saving every last ounce of energy I’ve got for the show and my children.

Missi becomes one of my closest friends, and remains so to this day. She is a radiant, hilarious, brilliant woman. She tells amazing stories, she’s irreverent and adventurous. She’s an amazing mother and an awesome friend.

The other thing about Missi is: she drank like I did. And she quit sixteen days after I did. We are both free spirited non-joiners who became reluctant and then later enthusiastic joiners of an orthodoxy that cleared a path to a better life. Now, instead of sitting in my backyard drinking, we do witchcraft, go on hikes with our dogs, dream up projects where we get to work together again, attend not-so-secret meetings of other anonymous persons, make up stupid songs, and cheer each other on.

In The Library of Esoterica Tarot Jessica Hundley describes Temperance:

This is a card of balance and moderation, harmony through equilibrium. Temperance asks for patience and points to the need for both a stable personal foundation and an openness to collaboration and community. The water in the chalices flows in both directions, outer world to inner consciousness to outer world and back again. Temperance teaches us to practice planting a foot in each of these realms, the material and the spiritual. Temperance is the calm at the center of the storm, offering peace by balancing the scales. Temperance asks us to take the middle, path where the ground is stable. Temperance reminds us that the rational and material, creativity and dreaming, and the desires of the body and the expansion of the mind are all of equal importance, and should be considered in equal measure.

Recently, I zoomed with Missi to talk about the Temperance card. I knew Missi was the perfect person to talk about Temperance with because we’re both addicts with a voracious appetite for all the things. This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity (we both have ADHD!) Enjoy!

Missi appears on the zoom and her hair is blown out, curled, and enormous. It's incredible. She looks like a beautiful pageant toddler.

Eli: What’s this hair?

Missi: This is from your friend Justin’s show.

E: It’s incredible. (she flashes me) Also, you have incredible boobs.

M: These are top of the morning boobs. Listen, when you can’t get a baby to come out of your uterus…

E: There are upsides?

M: There are upsides. There’s no tearing of your vaginal situation and your boobs don’t get sucked on… 

E: Your Vaginal Situation is the name of my band.

M: I’m so grateful to your friend for giving me a job. And the movie I did with Margaret Cho just got into Tribeca! All of a sudden, I’m feeling like maybe I don’t have to quit acting just yet.

E: That’s amazing! I definitely don’t think you should quit acting.

M: I don’t think you should quit writing. I’m experiencing… it must be depression? It’s like you can’t get out of bed? But I’m also tired. I just worked. Whatever.

E:  I think it’s okay to be tired. But it could also be depression. 

M: I guess I don’t really need to talk to my psychiatrist. I can just talk to you.

E: I’ve diagnosed you with depression.

M: Also, I have one too many creatures living in my house. And by one I mean five at least. Let’s talk about Temperance.

E: What comes to mind when you think about “Temperance?”

M: The world we’re living in now is so focused on getting things out fast. It isn’t just produce, produce, produce. It’s everything. You can get anything you want in a second. Now you can make a movie on TikTok in a second. You can make something and throw it out there. And you can get your clothes and your groceries… is there an Amazon Now button? You just press it and somebody shoves it in your face? 

E: You press a button and you get hit with like the razors you just bought? They drop out of the sky?

M: Laundry detergent just smacks you in the head.

E: What is your relationship to moderation?

M: It’s… it’s not great. When you gave me a Temperance card for my birthday a little over a year ago, I was like, “I don’t want Temperance! I want something now!” I’ve always wanted stuff now. Even when I was younger. I always felt like I was running from something. Like I’m running to this place that I dream of where everything is gonna be okay, you know? And I don’t want to stop and actually have to put all the ducks in a row to make it okay. Cuz I don’t know how. I think a lot of us don’t know how, we don’t have the tools. The quick fix has always been “have a drink” and then it’s okay… for that moment.

E: The problem with drinking is that you need more and more and it works less and less. But when it did work? Girl… it was the best.

M: Yeah and I think you and I had it even worse. There’s so many people who are like “I got shit faced every night” and then their body just shuts down. But you and I are similar. We know how to succeed… we’re functioning alcoholics.

E: My relationship to moderation is that I do not have one. Obviously that’s why I can’t drink. Trying to moderate drinking did not work for me. It just wasn’t worth it to me to have one drink. Part of that is maybe the way our creative brains work? I think moderation is something that very few artists have, because you have to be able to jump into something insane and pursue it with a delusional irrationality not knowing if it will turn out to be anything good.

M: It’s so true. It works really well when you’re young, when you don’t have any responsibilities, but then as an adult you’re like, I still want to live in this fairy tale but I also kind of want to live in the real world. I want a family, I want children, I want a house, y’know? I want to be able to function in the real world too. And then you have to figure out how to do that. There’s no stability or routine unless you make it yourself. Even the biggest, longest jobs in this business don’t last that long. Even the long running, twenty two episode shows that ran like ten seasons…

E: That was before my time.

M: It never happened for me either. I never worked on a job for longer than like six months for the first fifteen years of my career. I’ve only done a couple of shows where I came back and did a second season—

E: You burn bright and leave ‘em wanting more.

M: I was so afraid of dying last year. I was so afraid of living with the feelings I was feeling. When you talk about Temperance, I think about the consequences of imbalance. What ends up happening is if you don’t temper, the balance is off. When the balance is off, you can try to fix it with a quick fix like alcohol, but if you don’t fix it, you eventually are going to have to or you die or you get a disease. There is work that has to be done.

E: The universe will force you to moderate if you can’t do it on your own. Have you always been a person who had a hard time with moderation even when you were young?

M: Yeah. If I ate too much, I’d go run a marathon. I’d party and then I’d train for a marathon. I’d train for a marathon and then go dance and drink and then I’m like, “Why are my hips broken now?”

E: I have that problem too. My psychiatrist was like, “Do you do anything that’s just for fun?” I was like, “Sort of?” I sort of do things for fun, but everything is always to the max. Like, I really like to exercise but if I don’t feel completely physically broken by the end, I don’t feel like it counts. That doesn’t seem good.

M: Wow. I didn’t realize we had so much in common.

E: We’re very similar, my friend.

M: The thing that killed me was I desperately wanted a child. And for whatever reason, my uterus was like, “Fuck you.” I couldn’t stop drinking to get pregnant. I never drank when I was pregnant though. I got pregnant the first time I tried and it lasted about eight weeks. I had some scar tissue in the lining of my uterus from a surgery when I was eighteen, which I didn’t know until like eight years after the first miscarriage when I finally saw a good fertility doctor.  My sister used the same doctor, so at least somebody got a baby out of it. I did end up adopting a child. 

When I got out of college I was like, “I don’t know what to do now.” In college, somebody made a schedule for me. It’s a really interesting time for people. I don’t know about you, I was lucky enough to know that I wanted to be an actor, and to get an agent right away. I don’t know how people do that now. I was always figuring out how to make it work. My brain never shuts off. That’s what the alcohol did for me. You have to find other ways to turn your brain off without a substance. I’ve just started meditating again. Out of eight days I’ve done four, which I think is pretty good!

E: That’s my meditation ratio as well. 

M: The thing I’m really trying to do is be honest with myself. If I tell someone I’ve done something, then I have to do it. That’s the way I get shit done. Like I’d lie sometimes and say, “I meditate” and then I’d have to go do it, because I told someone I did. All of this is just for me. Last year was the hardest year of my life. I worked very little, though it’s funny that the one movie I did got into Tribeca! Wanna go to Tribeca with me?

E: Yes.

M:  You cannot go where you want to go in the material world unless you bring the spiritual world with you. There’s no quick easy way. You can shoot up to success sometimes, but you’ll burn out. You won’t have the tools to survive. You won’t know how to handle it.

E: I think you and I both have workaholic tendencies, perfectionistic tendencies. What made last year so hard for you?

M: Well, my ex finally moved out and started taking my daughter half the time and it really broke my heart to be in the house without her.  It was an excruciating pain that I didn’t even know existed. And then so many things just got dumped on top of it. I felt like I would just drown. It was heartbreaking that I couldn’t fix the relationship with my ex.  I had wanted a child so badly but I kept miscarrying.  I finally adopted one and it’s been so challenging. I love her so much and she didn’t come with a manual as they say. She's prone to huge outbursts of anger, which I try not to let trigger me, but sometimes they have. And then I feel so guilty when I react in anger myself. And then she was gone half the time when she was with her dad who I also could not figure out how to have a relationship with. And that, in addition to not working and being scared of money and being unfulfilled and finding my worth often times been super tied up with whether or not I was hired and working, and the state of the world just was a big dumpster fire... I found myself throwing up my hands and saying hey yo and my God, I don’t wanna be here anymore. 

E: I am so glad that you are here. You are one of the best, most caring and loving mothers that I know. The way that you love your daughter so fiercely, the way you'll drop everything to play with her, the way that you look at her... I really look up to you. In all things, but motherhood specifically. You adopted your daughter by yourself, but you met your ex a few months into her life, and he's been around since she was about three months old. He didn't actually adopt her officially until after you guys had broken up. I know how difficult that was for you to let him adopt her, to share her with him when legally you didn't have to. You did that for her. Because he is her dad and he loves her so much too. I know how hard it's been for you, but my God, if that's not the most selfless maternal beautiful thing you did. You did the thing that you knew would break your heart, but it would be the best thing for her.

M: You saying that right now makes me want to cry... Everything had just come to a screeching halt. It was the first time in my life where I had to reckon with the fact that maybe I wasn’t going to be able to make a living as an actor.

I had started saying to myself, I don’t even want to be an actor after doing your show. You really did ruin me. I did a bunch of really cool jobs in the beginning of my career, medium parts in big movies that were fun and memorable. Didn’t realize it at the time that it was so special. But then I did your job, it was what I wanted so much to do, and I’d just not ever been able to get parts like that, and then she [the character she played, Roxanne] was on another level. Somebody wrote something about her in a review the week before episode 8 came out, and then after episode 8, they wrote like, “holy shit, we had no idea” It was so well done that it duped this person. Do you know what review I’m talking about?

E: You were amazing in that part. Holy shit.

M: You know what fun that was. It was so fun and then after doing that it was like, this is life, I experienced something fun that was the ultimate of my game, and I got to shadow a director which is something I had always wanted to do, but then to go back to other stuff, it was like, “I don’t know if I can keep doing this.” There’s work I have to do in my own creative realm. I’m a workaholic to a degree, but because I’m a perfectionist I’ll sit and not do anything—

E: Oh, yeah, same. I mean, also, just for the purposes of the storytelling of this interview: we met four years ago doing Y, we became a little pod, we worked really hard but we also drank a lot because there was literally nothing else to do.

M: We were in the middle of the pandemic.

E: We were in the middle of the pandemic, nothing was open. It was colder than Hell. I guess Hell is hot, if you believe in that sort of thing. But anyway, it was the coldest place I’d ever been…

M: A witch’s tit in an iron bra.

E: And then, we quit drinking at the same time, and we both got diagnosed with ADHD.

M: You didn’t know before that?

E: No!

M: Oh my God, I didn’t either!

E: I know! We’re going through very similar things. You also like to tell the story of when you decided to stop drinking and when you tell it, you say… well, tell it:

M: I was sitting in your little office upstairs at your house, and you said, “I haven’t had a drink in sixteen days,” and you had a little poof in there and I had to sit the fuck down. I was like, “What? You!?” It made me laugh because… I mean, in Toronto, you had childcare during the week. Your job was so stressful, much more stressful for you than it was for me, but I had my kid in Canada—

E: Well, and you didn’t have a partner there—

M: Still don’t have a partner.

E: Well, maybe this newsletter will go out to the world and—

M: Get me a partner?

E: Someone will read it and say, “I must be with this woman!” If you’re a reader of Witch’s Mark…

M: If you want to be with this woman…

E: Reach out!

M: If you’re looking to adopt a chinchilla…

E: If you’re looking to become a chinchilla’s step-father…

M: Or mother!

E: Or step-mother. 

M: Anyway, what I love though is that every weekend you’d be like, “When are you coming over?” And I’d be like, oh god, we’re gonna go for it. I’d say I can’t get over there right away or else I’m gonna… I mean, I’m older than you too, Honey. My liver is significantly older. 

E: We went for it. Oh man.

M: Whatever it is, that hole inside of us… does everybody have that hole?

E: I think we have a bigger hole than other people. Talk to me about your holes.

M: Let me tell you about my gaping hole. Which one? Anyway, it’s that desire for connection, belonging, a desire to be loved for who you are. Last year I became a yoga teacher because I was like, I have to connect somehow to something deeper than me. Also, I gotta make a couple dollars. Every religion, every philosophy is basically saying the same thing. You can’t get what you need out there, you have to get it from inside. The connection is in here, and for you and I, we feel it so strongly when we create. I feel it so strongly when I play a character, like that episode, episode 8, I bonded with the crew and the cast in a way that I never had in my life. There was a day when I was driving the big trucks, and we were all just having so much fun together! It was fun, we were all having fun. There were so many days when it was just me doing crazy shit and we were all having so much fun, and they would do anything for me. I saw what it was like to be in that place, I’ve never been the number one on a show— it made me want to have millions of dollars and give everyone on the crew a car or something.

E: People loved you because you’re a real collaborator and you’re game, and you respect and understand how much they bring to the table. You’re one of the bravest actors I know. You’ll do anything. If you trust the people around you, you’ll just go for it. 

M: It’s a really tough business for all of us, and the last few years have been so painful. Your strike, our strike, and the weird AI shit, and living in a society where we’ve become so binary. It’s ridiculous to imagine that you’re just gonna throw people in one category — you’re this or this, especially politically. And we’re all slaves to our little phones. It’s hard to get perspective, and it’s hard to find connection. I think all of the wisdom that we’ve garnered from all of the ancient traditions is just “Temperance.” You have to go within, and you cannot cheat it. 

E: Temperance has always been a hard card for me. I’ve always said if I could have one super power it would be moderation. Other people would choose flight or x-ray vision but I would choose to be able to have one glass of wine or one brownie and be okay with it.

M: Do you see Temperance just as something you consume?

E: No, I mean, at first glance that's how I felt about the card, but the deeper intention is what you’re talking about. Your spiritual life and your material life have to be in balance, but it’s hard! I think balance is incredibly difficult for artists in particular because, I don’t know, I can’t be fully present all the time. A lot of the time I’m thinking about some fictional world. That’s part of my life. I’m always in two places at once. That’s why it’s hard for me to meditate.

M: Here’s my question. You’re talking about a world that doesn’t exist. But it clearly does exist. Because all stories are true. What is reality? You obviously have a family — two kids and a husband and responsibilities and an extended family and friends. What ended up happening for me in the last couple years was just a winnowing. We were all running around and doing this, this, and this and then the pandemic happened and we all had to stay home. For some of us it was obviously very hard, but it was also like “Oh, I don’t have to do all of those things, and why am I doing them? What is the necessity?” There’s so much that we do because we think that we have to and we’re not even sure why, and that goes against what we want. I was thinking about food and drink and so many of us eat and drink in shameful silence. Like I eat in the middle of the night and it’s becoming a bigger and bigger problem.

E: You are the tallest most beautiful woman in the world. And if I looked like you, I’d eat in the middle of the night too.

M: I just don’t gain any weight on my top half.

E: Well, who cares about the lower half?

M: All I’m saying is: why do you build all the tiny houses?

E: Because I love to feel creative and only when I quit drinking did I realize, Oh no, I don’t have any hobbies. My hobby was drinking. 

M: I think you have more energy than anyone I know.

E: I feel that way about you! You never stop moving!

M: I don’t make shit like that. I just have a million animals.

E: Even the tiny rooms started off as a way to get out of my own head, out of my own way. But even that, I couldn’t moderate! I had to make ‘em for FIFTY PEOPLE!

M: I was so curious about that. Did you want to make them for all those people?

E: I loved making every single one.

M: Was it like, “Oh fuck, I don’t want to leave that person out?”

E: No, I mean, I feel bad because there are still people I didn’t make them for who I would love to make them for, but now I’ve burnt out a little.

M: When you have a party it’s not for eight people, it’s like a hundred and eight people are invited. And they’re all your closest friends! As I’ve gotten older, I’ve gotten messier. I think I might have like executive functioning disorder?

E: Isn’t that ADHD?

M: Probably. Let’s be fucking honest. I have all this stand-up that I’ve written and I can’t get through it, I can’t sift through it, because it’s in all these different places. It’s audio, it’s written down. My friend who’s a stand-up was like, “Let’s get together on Thursday and go through it.” I’m so scared because I haven’t put it all together. I don’t know how to get the time to do it. I should just start saying the jokes and have him help me find the punchlines, because if I don’t let him come over, it’ll end up being another year before I do anything about it.

E: I don’t do stand-up, but I know a few stand-ups. I think they’re all used to scraps of papers and voice notes and figuring it out. That’s gonna be great!

M: I’m a fucking missile, I go straight up. In everything. As I’ve gotten older, I realize I can’t do it anymore. I don’t have the energy. I’ve spilt my coffee three times in this conversation.

E: You’ve said, “I just don’t have the energy” or “I’m older now,” and I feel that too, but I think there’s also something about your sobriety and the honesty component. The more honest you are with yourself, the harder it becomes to do things you don’t want to do. When you’re in a place where you’re lying to yourself, I say from experience, it’s just easier to keep moving, to keep rocketing to the moon, and when you stop and you say “This is a problem for me and I’m gonna do something about it,” well, first it’s really fucking hard, but then when you realize that you actually can change, it becomes harder and harder to just keep pushing through things that you don’t want to do.

M: This feels like the crux of the conversation.

E: You and I are both people pleasers. You want everybody to love you and you want everyone to be happy, but a lot of times that can create a situation in which you don’t know what the fuck you want. And once you start asking yourself, “What do I want?” and making changes in your own life toward a better version of yourself, like choosing not to ingest poison to temporarily leave your brain behind, it just becomes harder to lie to yourself and say you’re enjoying something that you’re not enjoying.

M: We’re all looking for that thing that’s gonna bring us relief. The fact is, life is not meant to be that way. Life is meant to be lived in the moment. We’ve moved really far past that in such a short amount of time. We get our groceries delivered, we fly around on planes, we get to create and make art — people didn’t have TV before! Our lives were simpler. We told stories. My daughter always wants me to tell her stories at bedtime and I never want to but I always say yes, and then afterward I’m always so happy I did. We’re ingesting and ingesting and I think we’re looking to feel whole. We’re having this conversation on a computer, you could be on a barge in the North Pole right now!

E: I am. 

M: Just with a bunch of tiny rooms behind you.

E: I recreated my office on a barge. The thing you were saying earlier about the gaping hole being a desire for connection, I think that’s true and I think that modern life is constantly forcing us apart from connection. As Americans, we’re hustling all the time. Capitalism is alive and well in us. We all laugh about how everyone in Europe takes the summer off, but why don’t we take the summer off? That would be great.

M: That’s what we were forced to do in the pandemic. And a lot of us found that the world was really fucking empty or overwhelming and there was no one there to be with us. Not to say that we had it great before, I mean, we were shitting in outhouses! I think Temperance is about finding time on a daily basis to come back to the present, see where you are, and give yourself some fucking grace. I met this woman recently who was saying that people pleasing is ultimately manipulation. It’s for your own personal gain. I never looked at it that way.

E: For sure that’s what it is.

M: People pleasing is you being a puppeteer.

E: There’s also a narcissistic delusion that you can control how other people think about you, which you can’t.

M: You can’t…

E: But you can try! And I do.

M: It’s being a master manipulator on many levels.

E: You were like, “Eli needs to hear this, she’s a master manipulator!”

M: No!

E: I’m kidding, no, I think about this all the time because it’s true. I’ve realized that I get a lot of my self worth from external validation. I want, mainly men, but people to tell me I’m good, and then I’ll be good. But if I have to get that from within myself, it’s hard. Because the message that my self is giving me all the time is like, “You’re a lazy cunt.” I am getting better though. I’m getting better at not calling myself a lazy cunt.

M: Well, as you’re speaking, a) I’m in love with you, I think you’re incredible.

E: That’s actually how all of these interviews are supposed to end. With the person I’m interviewing telling me they love me.

M: You have impossible standards for yourself… Remember that time in Joshua Tree? I came into the bathroom and you were dancing to Beyonce and I was just looking at you, you’re just this person who has so many ideas. You have been given a gift but it’s also such a curse. You’re radiating ideas all the time and you’re creating things… if your tiny rooms were shitty, it would be like, ‘Damn it, where am I gonna put this goddamn thing that Eli gave me” but they’re not! They’re so beautiful that you almost want to… I would put mine in the living room if I didn’t think my daughter would destroy it. When I think about the fact that you’re at your office, creating these things, the things you do on the side… creating a tarot deck? You’re gonna write an essay about each card which is eventually gonna be a book! You should have a podcast!

E: Nobody should have a podcast, honestly. Luckily we have each other, because I think that you are an artistic and creative genius. You are a deeply intuitive and fascinating person who…

M: Couldn’t get her ass up out of bed this morning.

E: The blessing and the curse of creativity is that you’re completely mentally ill. If you have a creative mind, you’re nuts. You’re NUTS!

M: That’s why you have to force yourself to be temperate, force yourself to moderate, because you can moderate. You just have to keep trying and giving yourself grace. The thing that has really helped me is a god of my own understanding. Every morning I say these two little prayers. One is “Let me listen more than I speak” and “When there’s hard stuff, be kind.” And then, “Let it not be about self-pity, fear, and self-seeking.”  The goddess inside me, that deity is connected to everyone else, the way that trees are all connected. If you can’t love yourself, you can’t love anyone else. We’re all just expressing the oneness in a different way. You can only get there by forgiveness for yourself and for others. 

E: Now that you are sober, what do you do when you want to let go?

M: I still vape a lot which is stupid. I don’t know. Coffee? Run? Masturbate?

E: It’s hard to raw dog reality.

M: Remember when I was with my brother and he was in the hospital and he was trying to take a shit? He had just had major heart surgery and he was trying to take a shit. And there I am with my fifty-four year old brother who’s a Christian and I’m… we’re just totally different people. He’s holding onto the side of the bed screaming, “I’m in so much pain!” There’s a nurse with a glove on and she’s breaking up the shit inside of his asshole, and I’m like holding him and he’s looking at me like, “Help me!” And I’m praying for him, “Dear God, your servant Paul here needs to shit!” And I didn’t have my vape pen, I didn’t have anything, so I just started to do a box breath. And I was like, “oh my god, this is amazing.” I felt euphoric doing the box breath. I had no other tools, my brother was screaming, and I just started breathing. I was able to get through it. It felt good.

E: I’ve started doing this thing with my kids when they get anxious. I say to them, when you’re feeling this way, instead of obsessing about the anxiety, why don’t we try noticing? So we say, “Okay, I’m noticing that it’s hot in here, I’m noticing that there’s a sound of a bird..” Or “I’m noticing that my brother really needs to shit, I’m noticing there’s a woman with a gloved hand up my brother’s ass…” 

M: Noticing, yeah.

E: Noticing and box breath, not quite as fun as getting wasted, but they have fewer consequences. Is your next chapter going to be being a cult leader?

M: I’ve met a lot of people who are just better at it than me, and that’s humbling as fuck. But I do try to ask my higher power to show me my next step, and let me not be afraid. A lot of it is a bit religious, but the thing that works for me the most right now is to believe there’s a compass inside of me that is deeper than all the fear and self-aggrandizing. You already know all the answers, it’s just about connecting into them every day. Asking for guidance is the thing that will take you exactly where you want to go. There’s a piece inside of you that’s been there since you were born. You know? The thing you were meant to do, and there’s so much shit piled on top of that but you just have to keep coming back to that little voice… I could only be a cult leader if I was on mushrooms all the time.

E: I think if you’re a cult leader you get to be on mushrooms all the time. Like that’s part of it.

M: And colloidal silver.

E: Yes, you get to guzzle colloidal silver until your skin turns blue and you die.

M: That was so goddamn sad.

E: That was a sad one. You’d be a way better cult leader than Mother God, I’ll just say that. She was not that charming.

M: All those kids she left behind? I miss you. Can we just talk once a week?

E: Yes.

Recommendations!

The Book: On The Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are by Alan Watts

Owning Your Own Shadow: Understanding the Dark Side of the Psyche by Robert A. Johnson

The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety by Alan Watts

The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness by Jonathan Haidt (Conclusion: Do not let your child have a phone or social media)