Things Unknown, Until Now, by Many, About Me

An Unexclusive List

“Unsplash Write Something Awesome. book” by Baron Fig on Unsplash

1. I was a lawyer for twelve and a half years. Although I did a lot of my early humor writing early in that period, I didn’t do any for about the last nine years of my legal career. I thought this would leave me permanently unable to “be” a writer thereafter due to what I thought was all that “lost time.” Then I realized I had done nothing but read and write all day for a living as a lawyer, so my intervening law practicing actually left me in pretty good shape to write humor (after I decompressed for a while) because it taught me to think, read, and write clearly and unequivocally, which you need to do do be funny in writing. Also lots of lawyers are masters of foul language and dick jokes, so I learned a lot in those respects as well.
2. I once spent the night in jail, or, to be more particular, a juvenile holding facility. There were three forty-person-capacity cells. They were divided by race into a “white” cell, a “black” cell, and a “Mexican” cell. I am pretty sure that’s unconstitutional. I spent a night and most of a day with a seventeen-year-old awaiting trial for attempted murder and another in for armed robbery. They taught me to play dominoes and got my meals for me because they said I would get jumped in line. I was in jail for throwing an epic high school party at a golf course that got busted in spectacular fashion. They thought that was awesome. Pretty nice guys in a way.
3. I did stand-up for a few weeks when I was 27. My first night ever I killed. I bombed so bad the next night I blacked out during my set though I had nothing to drink. I kept at it and had some ups and downs. One night I brought some friends and killed again. I hung it up after that. I enjoyed it, but it wasn’t my forte. My main joke was a bit about whether it would be embarrassing to attempt bestiality only to discover that the animal you were trying to hump was actually a human being in an animal costume. I don’t know why, but it worked. It was called “furprise.”
4. I was so seasick and hungover once that when I emerged from the boat’s head holding a bag of used toilet paper (that we were not allowed to flush), I looked so terrible that two other people on the boat threw up immediately upon seeing me. That caused me to throw up again. Then everyone else got sick. It was like the pie eating contest in Stand By Me.
5. I had an 1986 Mazda RX-7 in college. One night at a red light a Mustang pulled up to me. I raced him. We exited the road we were on and turned right. I was going too fast for my old tires and bounced over the median into oncoming traffic. There was no traffic oncoming or I could have died or worse killed someone. I pulled over and the Mustang drove back by, to check on me I guess. He gave me a thumbs-up and drove off.
6. I almost fell into the Grand Canyon when I was 10 years old.
7. I swallowed a dime when I was on a school bus when I was 10 years old. I am unsure whether it ever came out. (I guess I was a really stupid ten-year-old.)
8. There are about four things I’ve done in my life that I regret so much that they pop into my head every few weeks and I still feel bad. Does everyone have those?
9. I’ve walked out of two movies in my life: Casino and Attack of the Clones.
10. I once reported my car stolen in college. Six days later, after a big snow melt, I found it on the roof of a parking garage where I’d left it. I had to call the cops back and “unreport” it. They sent a cop to my house. He was pretty disappointed in me as a person.
11. [BONUS!] I used to have a three-legged yellow lab that I adopted more or less explicitly to meet women. Seven years later he had totally failed in his one job. Then I brought him with me on my first date with a veterinarian I met on Match. We were married 18 months later. So he finally did his job. Then he died eight months after our wedding.

Thanks to Mike Range for tagging me on his version of this. Sorry for the late addition. Now to r.j. kushner Kristen Pyszczyk and Devin Wallace to chime in…