The New Normal
My friend Chris is a full-blown prankster. For fun, he’ll randomly ask questions like: “Would you watch 4 straight hours, no bathroom breaks, of gay porn if it meant ending the coronavirus for the whole world?
My response: “Girl on girl gay or guy on guy gay?” He responded with that blank look, you know the one when the chin drops, mouth agape, and eyes that say: “Come on dude, grow up.”
I said: “Hmmmm only if it’s a gang bang where Rudy Giuliani and Gavin Newsom get spit roasted by a gaggle of interracial studs. I want to see afros, hairy backs, and hairnets. And it has to be directed by a female or a trans!
Energy, force, and movement fuel directional shifts. Zeitgeist is the hip way of saying it. One area of pop-culture or social media that I’ve been paying attention to over the last five-plus years is this: “Get out of your comfort zone.”
Years ago I met Tait Fletcher at Legends MMA in Hollywood. Tait is/was a cage fighter, I believe he fought at 205 pounds, he has lots of tattoos, and he eventually grew a massive beard. He’s an inspiring man so I followed him on Instagram. He would do daily posts that challenged his followers to “get out of your comfort zone.”
I remember one time I was sitting in my driveway viewing one of his stories and it spoke to me so much that I turned off my car seat warmer. I thought to myself: “What kind of pussy am I for using a car seat warmer in California?” (Oh my back hurts!)
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That day pretty much started my commitment to stepping outside my comfort zone on the regular. Since then I’ve done the following:
- Traveled to India
- Road a motorbike from Saigon to Hanoi
- Wrote a 5-minute stand-up comedy set and performed it in front of a packed club
- Took an NLP course in Thailand (still trying to figure out what that was)
- Started and maintained my journey into Wim Hof cold water immersion
- Established a consistent lifestyle of exercise and mindful eating
- Leased an electric car
- Sold all my shit and left the country for a year
- Started and stopped three YouTube pages and two podcast
- Learned how to Tango Dance
- Have made a fool of myself in front of countless women (see above)
- Took a bunch of Jiu-Jitsu classes
- Learned how to sail a boat (hardest part by far is leaving the fucking dock)
- Got my ass beat on a pool table by a Ladyboy (not a perverted innuendo, he/she won best out of 5)
- Cured my back pain
- Walked down a dark dirt country road in Colombia alone at night (with a two thousand dollar laptop in my backpack and two thousand more dollars of camera equipment)
- Befriended a Monk in Chiang Mai (there’s nothing cooler than walking on a city street in Thailand with a monk, it’s like being in a Quinten Tarantino film. Or something like that)
- And over the last six months, I learned how to survive in LA without a car (I really took that car seat warmer shame to the moon)
There’s a ton more but I’ll stop this masturbation feast, and put the focus back on you, the reader!
I believe where we are today is a response to this whole “get out of your comfort zone” movement. Not by and large but you must agree, progress blossoms from pain. On an individual level and on a societal level.
If you want to lose your fat ass belly, you gotta sacrifice sugar. That means you’ll be saying bye-byes to your good morning sticky-bun routine. The one with the coffee! Jesus, not the mind-in-the-gutter one you’re thinking about.
If you stand for living in a fair country where we can trust each other, then give that, it will be returned to you.
So what then is the new normal? What does it mean to you? For me, it’s standing on my fulcrum. I got friends on the left, I got friends on the right, I’ll feed them both. That’s exactly what they need to find their middle. Or they can nuzzle up into their comfort zones and confuse that choice as their constitutional right to freedom. Either way, I’ll still feed them.
In conclusion: I don’t want to live in a world where I have to watch Rudy and Gavin get ganged banged by a bunch of gay dudes to end the Covid. That would put some unnecessary hurt on Rudy, guys getting old, he can’t balance that whole pleasure-pain thing like the young gun Gavin could.
I also don’t want to live in a world where Rudy and Gavin get to gang bang us.
I wanted to end this piece on that last sentence but it didn’t feel right, this post needs some wild-eyed words of wisdom to wrap a pretty little bow on it. Like, you’ll find your truth in life by being a prankster and asking provocative questions. But that comes off as contrived.
So, how do I end this?
Fuck if I know, I’ll just say thanks to Tait, and go buy some Bitcoin!
