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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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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.

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When I close most of the improv classes I teach, I quote one of my favorite things Mick Napier, the Artistic Director of the Annoyance Theatre, ever taught me: assuming competence.

So often we enter learning situations with a losing perspective. It may be feeling like we need to “fix” something wrong with ourselves. Or, feeling like we’re we’re up for the challenge…but only to the point of initial discomfort, at which point we decide we’ve made our maximum effort and that’s the limit of our abilities. My friend Annie yells at me for not working hard enough at the gym — I flex my muscles till I can feel them warmed up, but she insists that the muscles must shake for them to actually improve!

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After my mother died, I went through the things in my childhood bedroom. I was going to be home for awhile, and I didn’t have much to do, except feel pain. So, I rummaged around a bit.

I found the cassette tape my mom gave me on my 18th birthday. It was an audio recording of my natal astrological reading from a famous astrologist in San Francisco, delivered shortly after I was born on 12/29/1985.

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It’s traveling season. Everyone and everything will likely be insane at the airport.

So, I’ll share with you tip that make some people’s day and possibly upgrade your airline experience at the same time. This tip was taught to me by the illustratious Brad Moore, who is a kind and smart man and also a contender for the Mars 100 project to save the human race.

It’s so simple and human; it’s mindboggling.

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I was in Cyprus, standing over an ancient cliff, looking at churning waters below.

My body would not do it. Physically, all the nerves in my body resisted. Alarm bells! The drop was two, maybe three stories, and you had to jump far enough to make it to the deep water, or you’d land on the rocks. It was enough to stop me cold. My body wouldn’t jump. No, no, it would not.

“JUMP!” My friends were screaming at me from the crystal waters below.

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I was depressed about Donald Trump winning the election, and I decided the antidote was apple picking:

I sequester two of my best friends, Annie and Joey, into joining my escapade. I borrow a car, plan the five-hour roundtrip route, and pow-wow an itinerary with my WASP-y friend Sam, who went to Bard College. It would be an Americana-ish adventure to distract me from feeling like a stranger in my own country.

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How do you talk to people when they aren’t on receive?

Commiserating with my friend last night at Old Town Bar in NYC over the state of affairs in the US, he urged me to talk to people. The solution, he said, is to get out of our online echo chambers and reach across the political spectrum to anyone you know who doesn’t hold your values and try to start a dialogue.

But what if people aren’t open to listening? What if no matter how gently or forcefully you try to broach a subject and get a dialogue going, your words are just going in one ear and out the other?