and 5 free AG1 travel packs with your first subscription purchase.
So learn more, check it out.
Go to drinkag1.com slash Tim.
That's drinkag1, the number one.
Drinkag1.com slash Tim.
Last time, drinkag1.com slash Tim, check it out.
This episode is brought to you by 8 Sleep.
I have been using 8 Sleep pod cover for years now.
Why?
Well, by simply adding it to your existing mattress on top like a fitted sheet, you can automatically
cool down or warm up each side of your bed.
8 Sleep recently launched their newest generation to explode or melt down the age for end in
the age 6.
And we have water, ice, heat.
Nothing could go wrong.
I'm looking forward to it.
So Rick, I was hoping perhaps we could start with a discussion of your physical transformation.
And I'd love for you to perhaps just describe to people, I mean, you're in my mind the picture
of a fitness in a lot of ways now and we've been paddle boarding before and you, similarly,
what my ass every time we go out, I'm always impressed.
There are a lot of things contributing to my lack of competency and fear there, but where
were you and how did you end up undergoing this physical transformation?
Because you've lost how much weight at this point and how much fat I was in.
I lost at the peak moment, I lost the between 135 from me walking up a flight of stairs would
be an aerobic activity.
And an aerobic activity.
Yeah.
So I had to work hard to stay in the anaerobic space or the aerobic space, you mean, in the aerobic
space.
So I'm stepping below that and getting caught in here.
Yeah.
I was thinking of all your legs.
My hands, my hands burning, all of my, I tried to wrap them in napkins.
I didn't mention those my get hot, but sorry, I digress.
So to stay within the aerobic threshold, you had to work very hard.
And again, my health changed, but I still stayed very heavy.
And after two years of time, I probably lost a little bit of weight, but not much, but
I was much healthier and much more alive and much better than I was before.
And after that period of time, Phil said to inspire a great song, reading poetry.
So let's say being in submerging yourself in great art and the more you can do to get
out of the mode of competition, where you're looking at what other people are doing, if
you're wanting to be better than them or be inspired by them, the only way to use the
inspiration of other artists is if you submerge yourself in the greatest works of all
time, which is a great thing to do.
You know, like if you listen to the greatest music ever made, that would be a better way
to work through to find your own voice to matter today, then listening to what's on the
radio now and thinking, I want to, you know, compete with this.
Right.
There's more like a stepping back and looking at a bigger picture than what's going on
at the moment.
Being a someone who is not very well versed with music, I don't feel highly literate when
it comes to music.
I enjoy music, but hanging out with you and Neil Strauss, certainly I feel like I'm lacking,
perhaps vocabulary and a lot of references.
Are there any, for people who feel like they're in my shoes, are there any particular albums
you could offer as a starting point?
Not the end all be all, but just as a starting point for appreciating good world-class
contemporary music, meaning not necessarily could be classical music, but are there any
recommendations?
I would just start by looking at pop, or I knew about heavy metal.
I was a fan of music, and I loved heavy metal.
I loved hip-hop.
So it was more that coming at it from this appreciation and as a fan knowing what I
wanted to hear and knowing that, especially in the case of Slayer, Slayer were an underground
metal band who had two albums, I think, whatever it is, now it doesn't mean we can necessarily
be the best in the world at something, but we can be our best at that thing, the best
version of ourselves.
And do things that never dreamed of as possible for us.
What advice would you give, and I'll ask this for a couple of different ages, but I'll
start with your 20-year-old self, what advice would you give your 20-year-old self, if
any?
Try to have more fun.
Why do you think you weren't having as much fun as you could have at that point?
I think I was more driven, and I didn't want to say almost like I felt I had something
to prove.
I don't know if I did have something to prove, but I felt like doing the work was the
most important thing in the world as opposed to doing the work and enjoying the process,
and being able to step back and see what it was.
Not just be so deeply into it that, I feel like I missed a lot of years of my life.
Because that is my way.
And you've written extensively about your childhood.
You had in many respects an extremely difficult, painful childhood and will probably unwind
some of that.
Now you've written extensively about it, and you've also mentioned about writing memoirs.
And if this is a misquote, please call me out.
Quote, I've said it's hard.
Here's how hard.
Everybody I know who waits deep enough into memories.
Of your body.
I mean, you're a body person.
I'm a body person.
I feel like you take somebody else's suffering into you, and it changes you.
It transforms you.
I had this idea of being a poet starting when I was five or six years old that I wanted
to be a poet.
It was this strange, just thing because there were no poets around.
No one had ever, no one I knew had ever met a poet.
What was the feeling that elicited that desire?
Is it just these tangible brilliance and some type of wordplay?
Me doing whatever it is that I'm supposed to be doing.
So I was scared.
I was scared by how dark things that I brought to darkness with me.
You get to Southern California from where I grew up, and you're like, where has all
this been?
Everybody's worth a donchered and people's teeth are great, and nobody's missing any digits
or anything.
Everybody looks so amazing, and everything's so beautiful.
And you're like, God, I've never seen anything like this.
A golly.
And so you certainly a writer and poet of great note at this point, I tried drinking
it.
We can't stop.
I mean, I just somehow, I had crossed some line where I just couldn't stop drinking.
And I went to get help, and I went to satin church basements, and I hated everybody I saw
who was sober.
I just hated them.
They just seemed like, you know, the guy selling incense at the airport.
I just didn't like them.
They just didn't look fun.
And I just, that were so nice too, is like getting a minute or so.
They're, hi, you know, welcome.
I'd be like, oh, God, I hate these people.
And finally, the last time I drank, the last night I drank, I had gotten together for
like, it was the longest amount of time sober I'd had since I was 15.
And I got together 90 days sober by going and, you know, sitting in church basements and
talking to people who were sober.
And I got a 90 day chip.
And then I had to give this talk.
I had to get in this truck pulls up with these Goomba guys from this 12 step meaning.
And they have ginger ale.
They have a jack.
They have a way to tow my car.
They give Dev potato chips.
And it was just like, you know, all I have to do is just find some space in my body and
just wait for a minute.
And so I started to notice things happening when I wasn't been over the day like a dog
over like a bone that was about to be stolen.
You know, like that, when I could just, I could just like sit there for a moment.
And so I began to get a space in my body.
And I began to get, I began to hear not the voice of God.
I would call it, I would have some leanings like I would be thinking, I should have just
killed myself.
Like literally, this is what I'd be, I should have killed myself.
My husband would marry some nice girl who wore berets and my son would have this great
mother and his life would be better if I weren't there.
And I would hear this voice and my head that was like, you need a sandwich.
Why don't you get a sandwich?
Why don't you make yourself like the biggest sandwich you can make?
And I'd be like, oh, great idea.
Like I just started to have these small, good ideas that were not like anything I'd ever
heard when I was afraid before.
Yeah, then I had all these crazy spiritual experiences.
And like one of the things I had this great sponsor, Joan the Bone, God, I loved her.
She was so great.
She was kind of girl who lived in a crying, I just started trying instead of sitting there
with my arms crossed and my lower lips stuck out and my baseball cap pulled down over my
eyes.
I just started trying shit that people who were happier than me suggested I should try.
It was so simple.
And so one of the things I said to her, she said, you've got to pray for what you want.
What are you praying for?
I pray to stand it.
Yeah, not to kill myself, not to get it.
Just stand it.
Just to get through the fucking day, that's what I'm praying for.
And she said, okay, well, you got to pray for what you want.
What do you want?
I said, I made $9,000 this year.
I would like some money.
Please.
She said, well, why don't you pray for money?
I'm like, you can't pray for that.
She's like, well, why not?
I said, okay.
So I would literally get on my knees the morning and say, keep me sober.
I would like some money.
I'm not even making this up.
And I would get on my knees and say, thank you for keeping me sober.
I would still like some money.
Three weeks later, after I started this, a true story and you can look it up.
I get a phone call from a guy who says he's from this foundation.
He's giving me $35,000 that I'd never applied for or asked for.
That somebody just put me up for.
And I so thought it was, I thought it was my friend George playing a trick on me and
say, you don't fuck to you, George.
And I hang the phone up.
And the guy calls back and he asks me on selection, for instance.
Just decided that somebody just sent me a text before we started recording.
And so the entire country has a lecetyle dysfunction, which I thought was pretty clever.
Oh my God.
Why didn't I think of that?
Oh my God, that's so great.
That was a clever turn of phrase.
Yes.
Oh my God.
No, it really is.
So finding God in all things.
Finding God in all things.
So that means when the car breaks down, instead of thinking you're cruel fate has come to
hurt you.
So what you do actually, Tim, is in the morning I do a prayer and meditation thing for 20
minutes, where I do like centering prayer for maybe, I don't know, five, six, seven minutes.
And then I read a scripture and I meditate on the scripture.
And then I have a bunch of people I pray for.
I have a list of people I pray for and things I pray for.
Then at night I do something called the examine of conscience where you, it's not like
going over your day and making a list of good things that happened or whatever and then
repenting for the bad things.
It sounds like that, but it's not that.
What it is is you kind of press play on the recorder of your day.
So you think, I woke up and so what did I do?
Where was I?
What mindset was I in?
You close your eyes and you try to review your day, literally like you're watching a movie.
And where you see moments of grace or luck or even something, you know, a good sandwich,
something yummy to eat, you're a chemical anatomic workers, like 1242.
And he was just funny as a crutch and told these amazing kind of tall tales like out
of Mark Twain.
But he also spoke in poetry like he would say like a woman with an ample behind he'd say,
she has a butt like two bulldogs fighting in a bag.
And for him that was a compliment.
There was nothing insulting about that that he used to call me.
I'm a little skinny thing.
He used to call me a gimlet ass.
Poke you need, you need some tower on that ass.
You need, you got you a gimlet ass.
I don't even know what that is, but I knew it wasn't good.
A little flat butt or he would say it's raining like a cow pissing on a flat rock.
You can scan that by the way.
It's raining like a cow pissing on flat rock.
What do you mean by scan real quick?
What I mean like like Shakespeare is a ambic pentameter or my first love poem that was
ever written to me.
I saw you on your horse today.
Your eyes like eggs your hair like hey, that's like my it's a ambic pentameter.
It's da da da da da.
That's, it doesn't matter what it is, but you can hear it when I say it, right?
That it's raining like a cow pissing on a flat rock.
That you hit that flat rock.
It creates, for one thing, it creates a whole landscape in which cows piss on flat rocks
and people stand around the marble.
Go, my goodness.
Look at that.
Then you attribute that to the rain.
It's a metaphor.
It operates way beyond the bounds of propriety.
It's not how you talk in church.
You're not supposed to talk like this.
So the minute you say this and somebody laughs at it, you have them.
They're in your boat.
They have transgressed by laughing at your joke.
Well, daddy was just the master of a stoolsfully musk-look like shit.
He's been dead 20 years.
And you know, I mean, she just can't stop herself from saying like the most horrible thing
you've ever thought.
And so I think between the two of them and just growing up in Texas, the idiom, the language
I grew up with is epically beautiful.
And the need to not be boring when you speak.
People will, I'm a stompa mud hole in your ass.
That is so much better than I'm going to whip your ass.
It's just like, yeah, right.
My friend, Dooney, got in a fight once for the guy in a bar and the guy said, and he
told the greatest story about it.
It was actually the guy he decided to stab.
He went out and was trucking, got a knife and came back with like a Swiss army knife.
And he starts, he hates it.
And this guy who was a state congressman, by the way, I won't tell you his name.
But he starts chasing him around this bar.
Well, to brandish a weapon in a place where alcohol is served as a mandatory, I think
10 years sentence.
It's not, it's frowned upon.
And he's chasing this guy around and wanted somebody says to Danny at one point, that's
a little video knife.
You got through, you said, well, notice he don't want to get stabbed by it.
And then he runs out.
And then we hear the sirens.
So here comes the say, here comes all, woo, woo.
Dooney runs out, he gets in his truck and one of those mall cops.
He guys runs out and dooney says he stands in front of my truck in front of my headlights.
He's got a belt buckle that will pick up HBO.
And he holds his hands up and goes, halt, halt.
And dooney just puts it in first gear and hits the guy.
I mean, he doesn't hit him hard, but he knocks him down and then leaves and gets pulled
over and his convinced he's going to prison for brandishing this weapon for trying to hit
this guy.
But anyway, it turns out he had to call the guy to apologize, the guy's daddy knew Dooney
standing.
And he said, only once you do his apologize and do it like apologize, you know, I'll blow
the guy like, I don't want to go to jail.
Of course, I'll apologize.
But here's the punchline that's written.
This is what makes Dooney my still my best friends since I was 15.
Don't you want to say that though?
The next time somebody happened, I didn't know it was you.
The next time you do some horrible things.
Next time I get and I really stupid, I know my girlfriend.
That's what I'm going to use.
Don't say I didn't know it was you, honey.
I don't know.
Only in the state of Texas do you have that story.
It's just got all the elements of a Texas story.
How could I not love it down there?
I mean, oh my God.
Let's talk about revision.
Revision.
Well, who doesn't?
And I thought about that and I thought, God, he's right.
Tall story's written, Dad, but I mean, people I read, you know, every writer I know
is written a bad book.
Okay.
So maybe it's just supposed going to be a bad book, but it's the book that's standing
in line to be written.
And I think I became willing to fail to just say what happened.
Hopefully what it looks like is just clawing through a line at a time or a sentence at a
time.
I think one example I give in the art of memoir is that when my mother is driving me
to college and I think the sentence I started with was something like mother drove me
to college in her yellow station wagon.
We stopped every night at the holiday in and got drunk on screwdriver.
I can't remember.
Might have said puke and drunk kind of screwdrivers.
I somehow was able to remember being in that car.
The thing about my mother's yellow station wagon was that it didn't have any air conditioner
and so the daddy's oysters coming up out of the fryer or what's going to keep you from
getting it.
It's my big-footed sister who, as daddy said, nothing ever got between her and a bag
of groceries.
You know, she's going to get all the oysters and I won't get any.
And so it's really more about trying to occupy a former self because I think, as you know,
just as in trauma, the body remembers.
The body also remembers beauty.
It also remembers pleasure and love and those other things too.
So I'm Catholic and I was very active in recovery programs and I had a sponsor and I also
had, based on all of those efforts.
I had done a lot of the processing and recovery.
I had blown down to Texas when I was 23 years old and got my mother drunk on margaritas and
told her, you know, you tried to kill me with a butcher knife and it's not because I was
a bad kid and it ruined my life and what the hell was wrong with you?
What was going on?
You know, I had done a lot of that work before I...
When I tell people, when they tell me they want to write a memoir about some horrible stretch
of childhooders, really feeling lucky to be alive and feeling loved and feeling like,
not every day.
I mean, I wake up plenty of days and I'm, you know, mad as an old stomp pissant but most
of my days are pretty lit up and it's a lifetime of practice.
So I tell a lot of my students, my young students, you know, want to write about sexual assault
or trauma of various kinds.
Well, maybe why don't you get some treatment for this first?
Why don't you treat your heart first, treat your body, treat yourself with a lot of care
and see if this is what you want to write about right now.
Something you can write about maybe five years from now or something, you know.
What advice would you give yourself about therapy if you were talking to...
But when I looked back on things he said and it was insane.
He would have been fired.
He took some water in the bottom of the stroller that I've been putting her in and she was
soaked through to her skin.
Yeah, the rest...
She was perfectly reasonable to be, you know, now I understand I could have just emptied
it out and put her in the stroller and wrapped her up in a blanket that I...
I didn't know what it was but I just thought, well, I'll get her home and it'll be fine.
You know, I didn't feel like, oh my God, oh my God, I'm a terrible mother and I'm going
to wind up trying to stab her with a butcher knife which is how I felt when my kid was
that age.
You know, I didn't know that I wasn't going to be my mother.
I wasn't...
I didn't know that.
So scary.
That is scary.
Yeah, super scary.
And you know, it sounds like please correct me if I'm wrong but that you've learned
in some form or fashion or maybe many forms and fashions to wear the world like a loose
garment.
I wanted to know if you agree or disagree because based on my reading, okay, so your first
confession...
Absolutely not.
No.
Pre-set to you.
Wear the world like a loose garment.
What does that mean to you?
Well, I mean, I think it's not...
You know, the problem isn't whatever your mind is telling you the problem is the problem
is the fear.
And for me, the solution to fear is curiosity and presence.
And I can't be terrified and curious at the same time.
And so when I was walking the baby across the field, just all I was was physically uncomfortable.
I mean, I was thinking, gee, can I shove this thing and hold her moose, you know, and get
everything and get all this stuff.
How am I going to do, you know, and so I went crossways across mud fields.
So I'm shoving the stroller and carrying her.
I didn't know physically if I could do it.
I was sort of dubious.
I was thought, maybe I can't do this.
But all I had to do was do it.
I thought, well, if I get tired, I'll sit down and it'll rain on me a minute and then
I'll get up and go again.
Like, that's what we'll do.
But I don't know.
Here's the way I put it.
I tell people it's like I have a tritney.
It's like most of the time I walk fine, I run fine, I can, you know, squat more than my
body weight and do advanced Pilates for an hour and ten minutes and I'm tough as boot.
But there are days that I don't feel that way or there are moments where I get my knee
goes out and I fall on the ground.
All I have to do is honor those moments.
All I have to do is I have a heating pad.
I have a weighted blanket.
My kids have a pit bowl while I'll bring to stay with me while an idiot is my little
comfort animal.
You know, I call people, I still have a sponsor, I still have a therapist.
I don't talk to all the time, but I didn't have to be convinced to go into therapy.
I knew I needed it, but when I first started it, as you know, it was just so damn painful.
And I just, for those of your listeners out there, if you're having a hard time, I just
want to say it's like you lance a boil and the infection is draining off and if you can
just get by that.
It's going to tell you that it's endless, but it's not endless.
There's a bottom to it.
So did you ever smoke?
You never did.
I was never a smoker.
Ever slept.
I never slept.
And I was depressed.
I was probably postpartumally depressed and I was drinking.
By then I had started, I decided drinking would help me take care of a sick child.
Great idea, mirror.
It's like the bad mom in the after school special.
And so what?
And I remember, so when it came time to do Ignatian spiritual exercise, you were trying to
fight God in all things.
Where is God in that?
Where is God in a sick baby?
I'll tell you secret when I actually...
