Staying Hungry When Your Life is Full
I weighed in this morning at 224.5 lbs. It’s the heaviest I’ve been since I lost the sympathy weight after our first child was born.
Last time, my heft resulted from a back injury, lots of business travel, and the cupcakes my pregnant wife would bring to the office. I was pudgy - like Ned Beatty in Deliverance soft. (And we know what happened to him.) I’m much stronger now, but the scale reveals the inconvenient truth that my biceps, triceps, and glutes are Wagyu-caliber marbled.
It’s all diet, and I know it. I work out with a trainer on Mondays and Thursdays and I walk at least 15 miles per week. But what, when, and how I eat breaks all the rules. Oddly, it’s me living my dream that causes this fitness challenge.
If you work a 9:00-5:00 job, you can mostly digest your dinner before you nestle down. But my schedule is staggered five hours to the right. To even stay awake for comedy shows past 10:00 p.m., I drink a cup of coffee at 3:00 in the afternoon. After the show, I’m totally wired and nowhere near ready for bed. When I get home, there’s a pan of brownies on the counter, leftover pot pie in the fridge, and an open bottle of red wine begging me to finish it off. Who am I to resist?
So I jam 1,200 calories down my gullet at 11:30 p.m. then watch Golf Central and fall asleep on the couch. An hour later, I’ll brush my teeth, get in bed, and set the alarm for 6:15 a.m. so I can wake the kids up. At which point, I’ll slam three cups of coffee to get myself going.
Coffee up, cabernet down. I’m like a preppy Elvis, and it’s starting to show.
This weight gain is actually an indication of how lucky I am. I’m doing exactly what I want in life, if maybe not quite at the level I’d like to be doing it. I make audiences laugh then return to a beautiful home where my wife is in bed sleeping with the dog and my two healthy children are snuggled in upstairs. I can’t imagine not doing both comedy and parenting at full speed.
But fuck, man.
I think my body is a metaphor for life in the primo zip codes. Last year, I said no to a half-dozen golf or ski trips: Vail, Bandon Dunes, Ireland, etc. It’s not that I don’t want to go—I love to golf and I love to ski. But if that’s all you do, that’s what you’ll be good at. As worthy and healthy as these pursuits might be, they’re not what I feel called to work on.
In a world of opulent distractions, I’m trying to stay hungry. Why? Ernest Becker, author of The Denial of Death might suggest that I’m striving for immortality. The pursuit to play bigger rooms or get millions of people to listen to my podcast, he would argue, is an attempt to prove not only that I existed but that I mattered.
This is certainly true on some level and part of the “dignified madness” that makes us uniquely human. Within a generation or two, 99.9% of us will exist only as diluted DNA in the double-helices of our great-grandchildren, if that. We know this, if only subconsciously, and we fight it every day.
But I honestly think it’s something else also—not just a futile pursuit of immortality but the genuine embrace of mortality. The opportunity to be who we want to be is right here, right now, and there’s no guarantee it will be here tomorrow (kind of like the leftovers in the fridge). So whether there are 30 or 3,000 people in the audience, the function is the same. My life will not mean any more or less if I get famous or if my podcast finally gets the recognition it so richly deserves.
Why not stop and smell the flowers? This is smelling the flowers. The whole reason I chose this path was to avoid the deathbed remorse of wondering “what if I had given the creative life a full swing?” or regretting that I had not been a better dad or husband.
The pursuit matters. My kids will never be this age again and as porky as I am right now—hopefully temporarily—I will never be this young or healthy again. So I’m gathering rosebuds, I’m busy being born, and all that shit. Like Frost in the snowy woods, I have promises to keep and miles to go before I sleep.
But before I go to bed, I think I’ll finish the rest of that pot pie.
Carpe diem.
Other stuff…
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Notes is a new space on Substack for us to share links, short posts, quotes, photos, and more. I plan to use it for things that don’t fit in the newsletter, like work-in-progress or quick questions.
This is fabulous and true. Eat the pot pie. Drink the wine. Maybe walk a few more miles. :)
Seneca said it so well: "What matters most is whether one is extending one's life or merely delaying one's death."