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My friend Brian is both a Buddhist and a Bro. He seems like your typical, straight-acting, CIS, sports-obssessed, white boy until you get to know him. He bought me Infinite Jest as a present the day I stepped down running The Annoyance Theatre NY. He taught me how to ride a 150cc scooter and achieve Zen in the art of it. And when I got deservedly pissed off about something the other day, he told me, “It doesn’t matter if you’re right.”

I often want an apology from the world. I can’t fathom when people behave irrationally or rudely or in ways that go against my sense of justice. This doesn’t mean I hate when people make mistakes; on the contrary, owning up to wrongs is something I value above all and am working on myself.

But, when the world fucks me over, I want retribution. I want to duke it out. And a part of me wants to see it burn.

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I’m terrible at buying things. I always screw it up.

Let’s start with my blisters. I failed to buy the same pair of shoes this week three times. I went to Macy’s after my stalwart pair of black boots I’d had for three years burst a hole in the bottom during a rainstorm. I slogged my way up to the shoe department and threw down for a size 10 pair of waterproof Timberlands. I wear a size 10 shoe…normally. But, as I later found out, Timberland shoes run big. But I ran out the door, late to some appointment, assuming the shoes (though a bit loose) would be fine. By that night, I had blisters on both feet from them rubbing against the heel, my feet jostling in the enormous shoes.

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They say it’s the mother of all emotions.

I woke up today, a week since switching to a new antidepressant called Abilify, and felt a switch had flipped inside me. Very simple: the glass was no longer half empty. I was looking at the same things as before, but instead of seeing them as less than what I needed to feel whole, they felt like blessings on top of a sturdy foundation.

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It all started to go downhill under the fluorescent lights of the Supermarkten in Amsterdam. I had eaten a mushroom ‘space cake’ about 45 minutes earlier. It was starting to kick in; I could feel the blossoming rush of awareness. But the setting was all wrong. I was supposed to have reached the Vondelpark (the central urban park of Amsterdam) by then. Instead, I was in checkout lane hell.

I had packed gourmet cheese and a nice bottle of red in my backpack. I just needed to get some good bread to compliment it. But it was Sunday, and learned only after I’d eaten the ‘space cake,’ that all the local bakeries were closed on Sunday. I was dead set on getting bread though, so I went to the supermarket. They only had stale bread for sale. But I could feel the wonder-clock in my head beginning to tick, so I made peace with the day-old loaf, grabbed it and tried to get out.

The checkout line was endless. The Dutch do not rush. They ask each other how it’s going and so on and overuse the word “Ok.” Panic began to creep into my awareness. If the trip hit me here, full throttled, I’d be doomed. I needed to be in nature!

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“And I think Jesus would want me to tell you all, right now, that I’m gay,” I said from the pulpit of the church.

What followed was the deepest silence of my life — 200 bodies coming to total stillness and shock as I walked trembling back to my pew. It was the fourth, final day of the sacred retreat called Kairos that I’d attended with my Catholic High school Senior class. We’d been told that morning to “Live the Fourth,” and express our newfound selves. I volunteered to give the Homily at mass and then publicly came out of the closet. My peers were for mostly supportive afterwards, though the priests told me that while they were very happy for my ‘life discovery,’ Jesus would want me to be celibate…advice I did not end up taking.

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THIS STORY IS NOT SAFE FOR WORK OR FOR THOSE TURNED OFF BY DESCRIPTIONS OF HARDCORE GAY SEXUAL SITUATIONS.

I’ve visited three gay bathhouses in my life. I’ve also gone to regular bathhouses, like Korean and Russian spas, which I find restorative. Those spas prohibit any sexual interaction, though that didn’t stop the guy giving everyone a blow job in the sauna one Tuesday afternoon at King Spa in Niles, IL. Or stop what happens every “Men’s Only” day at the Turkish Bathhouses on 10th street in NYC. But this story is about bathhouses set-up strictly for the pleasure and purpose of gay male sex:

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At Burning Man in 2007, a French man in a maid outfit coached me how to eat dark chocolate. Savor it. Mindfully let it melt in your mouth. Let the chocolate work on you. He talked softly in my ear, coaxing patience when I wanted to chew already. It took 15 minutes to fully dissolve. It felt like a nearly orgasmic experience.

In the present day, as I was typing that last paragraph, I very unconsciously gorged on an entire bar of 70% cacao dark chocolate. His lesson didn’t stick. I still eat food like a monster.

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I fell down a flight of stairs, blackout drunk, on Deck 3 in the crew quarters of the cruise ship. I awoke at the bottom of the stairwell. Spongebob Squarepants was standing above me, surrounded by his supporting cast. I thought, “I’ve gone to Hell, and this is what Hell looks like.”

It wasn’t Satan though — it was just the cast of Nickelodeon on the cruise ship I was performing on. They helped get me to my quarters. Spongebob, out of costume, was Australian and had great auburn hair (I remember thinking about how nice it looked as he hauled my ass to bed). Later, I learned he’d had preemptive laser hair surgery when he turned 18 to combat the history of hair loss in his family. He didn’t want to jeopardize his destiny of becoming a children’s TV star. I don’t remember his name, but I do remember how much I liked his hair.

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Today is my 31st birthday.

As a kid, I hated it being sandwiched between Winter Holidays. My Mom went to great lengths to separate my “Christmas presents” from “Birthday presents” so I didn’t feel jipped. Mostly everyone else forgot I had a birthday.

Finally, I took matters into my own hands to make sure people would remember my birthday. I’d party-plan epic adventures, like organizing 20 friends to play laser tag at Q-ZAR in Rohnert Park, California. I’d hand out epic driving directions to my city friends on the last day before Winter break (this was almost pre-email).

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No right or wrong; only weak or strong.

Disclosure on this article: I give full credit to the incredible teachers I had at The Annoyance Theatre for teaching me the basis of many of these concepts.

My favorite type of improvisers these days are the ones that truly themselves don’t know what they are going to say next.

The audience can see this — they can tell when someone is living in the present moment — alive! Yet, I find most improvisers are stuck onstage planning three steps ahead, three beats ahead, sometimes three scenes ahead — trying to manipulate or control where the scene or show is going and thereby exercise some level of control over the chaos. I find it tends to kill the funny.