Which life is more exciting?, or: The Thing About Being in a Coma, Pt. 2
Hella Immaculate is thoughts/FEELINGS, peculiar music, and actions to improve our world, from me, writer-performer-comedian Dave Maher.
Thank you for reading! I love my work, and you make it possible. I believe directly supporting artists we love is the way to a future of vital and varied art free of corporate dorks.
If you enjoy what I do and want more, join me on Patreon. Even $3/month validates me more than is healthy. Or send a friend the most popular edition of this newsletter or the funniest episode of my afterlife podcast!
That is Party Jenga with me as the bottom piece. This is essay 2 of 4 in a series roughly overlapping the time I spent in a coma, October 22-November 17, 2014. Here’s Part 1.
I have this achievement fixation, and my coma broke it.
I saw my life as an endless mountain to climb, and all the footholds were socially approved Markers of Success. For a comedian, we’re talking: late-night talk show appearance, Netflix special, develop your own sitcom. I obsessed over a future I was certain would include glamour, fame, celebration, and every other form of attention.
I don’t have that certainty now, and I’ve started to question the authenticity of those dreams for me. Now I’m all “t-shirts over TV,” and I see my obsession with glitzy, socially impressive achievement as something to shed.
Since the coma and especially in the past couple years, I can feel myself outgrowing it. Then again, I fell into the coma at 30, and mid-30s dreams are bound to look different than early-20s dreams, so maybe I’d be adjusting my dreams, coma or no coma.
But the old dreams linger. There’s a voice that tells me I’m settling if I deviate an iota from the vision for my life I had at 23. The world felt full of possibility, like anything could happen any given Saturday night.
In actuality, my Saturday-night possibilities usually narrowed to three: get more fucked up, fuck someone I didn’t like, or go fucking trespassing. I felt like the world was my oyster, but I was just circling the seafood display in the grocery store.
This delusion bears out in the evidence of my actual achievements pre- and post-coma. Here’s a much-abbreviated but faithful representation of the ledger:
Pre-Coma Achievements
Made 2 improv teams at iO
Got an acting agent
Worked for Pitchfork
Started a podcast that was active for a couple years
Started a small, beloved standup open mic
Waitlisted for an Acting MFA at DePaul
Post-Coma Achievements
Took 2 one-man shows to the Edinburgh Fringe
Got another, better acting agent that got me on TV
Left day jobs for good
Appeared on “This American Life”
Performed a sold-out two-night-stand at Steppenwolf Theatre
Booked my own solo tour
I don’t know how those lists look to outside eyes, but on the full “Pre” list there’s just so much improv. And no shade to the art, but for me, listing improv shows as achievements feels like being an architect who specializes in sandcastles.
The “Post” list is more substantial, and not just by my personal standards. It forces me to accept that the changes I’ve made since the coma—sobriety and consistent artistic practice chief among them—haven’t just given me a deeper sense of the achievements that are meaningful to me. They’ve also enabled me to snag some on-the-surface Impressive Achievements.
So what’s the problem?
I miss the feeling of the delusion.
Forced to choose between a glamorous fantasy of a limitless future and a steadier reality of abundant possibility achieved through work, part of me would choose the fantasy. All potential, nothing actual. Still lying in the coma instead of moving through the world.
This Week’s “This Is Your Afterlife”
Bill Stern is very funny. His sketch group Cigarette Sandwich is a Content Machine. On their Patreon-only podcast, they’re currently playing Monopoly as if it were a Dungeons & Dragons-style RPG, and it’s such a stupid joy (though they take a detour this week to have me as a guest on an unrelated episode).
Bill is also one of my best friends, and he had one of the MOST FRONT ROW seats to my coma, which made it a formative moment for him as well. We talk about that, plus funeral pranks and his vendetta against anthropomorphism at the zoo (highlighted below). You’ll love him.
I’m also doing something new over at patreon.com/davemaher. I’m releasing each week’s FULL, UNCUT EPISODE there to patrons at any level.
I always end up trimming episodes down to keep them lean in the main feed, but I want to offer the full-length experience to those who want something deeper and more immersive.
With Bill’s full-length episode this week, you’ll get his “Relive 1 Memory” segment and his meta-commentary on the show’s format, which I mostly excised from the shorter version of the show. Whole new layers are revealed!!!
Wamp Wamp (What to Do)
Accept my gratitude for responding to my question last week about what makes you feel present in your life. I heard a “Hiking, especially alone” and a “the iPhone puzzle game Monument Valley.” That shit was genuinely comforting to ping and pong with you. Made me feel less alone, for sure.
Watch City So Real on Hulu if you’ve got it. I want Hella Immaculate to be global and extreme homerism bothers me, so I’m self-conscious about big-upping Chicago too much here. But I really am feeling the city more than almost ever, and watching this 5-part docuseries might help you see why.
It focuses on Chicago’s 2019 mayoral race, with a hard jump in the last episode to the pandemic/uprisings this summer. It’s directed by Steve James, who did Hoop Dreams, and it’s an unresolved, complex portrait of a tense, culturally rich city.
Donate to… you tell me! I’ll be honest. I don’t have an org to point you to this week, and rather than scrounge one up for the sake of donating somewhere—my first thought was the Georgia Senate campaigns, and I recognize their importance but I want to highlight more direct action, e.g. mutual aid, as opposed to electoral, plus at least the white guy seems hella sus—anyway, I’m curious where you’re putting your money, focus, time, and energy, so here’s what I’m thinking. This week, I’ll donate $20 total. Reply with what you donate and where, and I’ll post a summary of all of it next week. Let’s enlighten each other.
Over the PAST TWO WEEKS, we donated $70 to The Love Train to get family necessities to communities around Chicago!!
May I Play You a Sound?
Reminder: during this series, I’m including “coma music,” which is:
songs with lyrics about comas
songs that feel like a coma
songs from the time of my coma I remember vividly
songs from the various Dave Maher Coma Show pre-show playlists that convey themes of the show
Beach Fossils’ “What a Pleasure” is 3, 4, and 1 at a stretch. I listened to it a lot at my parents’ house in Cincinnati, where I convalesced. I think the best way to show my relationship to the song is a lyrical analysis. My thoughts in brackets:
Woken up and here I am [UM OKAY?! COMA MUCH??]
All too fast to understand [also applicable]
All the way across the sea [this is the point the song becomes definitely not about a coma]
Thinking thoughts of you and me
In my life, I've never felt so free
You're so far away from me
What a pleasure all this is [life is a fucking miracle, though I gotta be honest, there is a very specific window of time after traumatic events where you feel this acutely before the realization becomes more intellectual and disappears behind the mundanity of daily life. This song hit me in that window, so this lyric hit HARD]
I take it all the way [I’ll be honest, I just learned it’s this and not “I’ll take it all away,” and I’m a bit disappointed, so I’m gonna stick with my misinterpretation, which felt like God speaking to me, saying, “Hey, this isn’t gonna be around forever, better enjoy it.” Not really sure what I’m supposed to do with “I take it all the way”…]
Next week, I take it all the way,
DM