Attempting Normal

by Marc Maron

The truth is, I can’t read anything with any distance. Every book is a self-help book to me.

That shouldn’t be part of my process—decoding my own writing—but it has been for my entire life.

I need to complicate everything to protect myself from success and to remain complicated and overwhelmed.

People don’t talk to each other about real things because they’re afraid of how they’ll be judged. Or they think other people don’t have the capacity to carry the burden of what they have to say. They see the compulsion to put that burden out in the world as a show of weakness. But all that stuff is what makes us human; more than that, it’s what makes being human interesting and funny. How we got away from that, I don’t know. But fuck that: We’re built to deal with shit. We’re built to deal with death, disease, failure, struggle, heartbreak, problems. It’s what separates us from the animals and why we envy and love animals so much. We’re aware of it all and have to process it. The way we each handle being human is where all the good stories, jokes, art, wisdom, revelations, and bullshit come from.

This is who I am: I overthink and I ruminate. I’m obsessive. But what I really want is relief. Most people are the same. We’re all carrying around some shit. When you hear the things that people have gone through and realize you’ve gone through the same, it provides an amazing amount of relief. It gives us hope. And I think that’s what we’re supposed to get from each other. The hope that, maybe, just maybe, we’re going to be okay. Maybe.

You had a huge humility wave that started coming. I’ve always [thought] that your progress [came from] taking away more and more layers. Taking more of your defenses away from yourself.

Sometimes I wish my imagination were fueled by something other than panic and dread. But I don’t have control over my gift.

Love is love and being in love is being in love. Wherever your loyalty is, whatever rules you think you won’t break in your life, sometimes you just can’t fight being in love.

We all have the right to cherry-pick the advice given us in order to do exactly what we wanted to do in the first place.

Not that she’s a bad person; she’s just a bit boundaryless and draining.

It’s very hard to determine the validity of a mood disorder when someone is as plain old narcissistic as my dad.

The bottom line with my old man is that he is an emotional terrorist. I love the guy, but it took a long time to seal up the damage from the paternal storm that I went through to get to my island.

But after a divorce, or years of bad blood, or a supersaturation of shame, or just old age, parents think the statute is up and they will dump some toxic garbage on your psyche’s front lawn.

So I was never going to be a dog person; even my masochism and desire to revisit childhood trauma has its limits.

Pain makes me know I am alive. Joy and comfort are awkward and make me want to die.

Worse than the feeling of loss that comes with a breakup is the feeling of losing. Loss is a state of emotional injury that you can get past; losing is a feeling of humiliation and defeat that stays fresh.

The pretension was thick, as it always is with unknown and struggling artists. Most of their energy is dedicated to crafting an aesthetic disposition in preparation for the day when people actually begin to buy their bullshit, if they ever do.

I had been into Reed’s Bowie-produced Transformer album, but when my buddy Rob gave me 1969: The Velvet Underground Live my mind was blown. So simple, so layered, so nasty. I had to have everything they did. They represented a gritty New York psychosexual dark good time that I missed and yearned for though I probably couldn’t have cut it had I lived through it. That’s what your heroes do for you—lift you victoriously above the dirty work of life and conjure a different way of being.

This was what music was to me, magic. But it was a kind of magic I wanted to actually touch myself. It’s the irony or maybe the tragedy of being a fan that it’s not enough to let the music enter you like a drug or define and shape the world for you. You also want to somehow touch it and have it affirm you in more direct ways, whether you’re playing a riff like Chuck Berry or singing like Buddy Holly or buying Keith Richards’s guitar—or actually meeting your idols.

Everything does suck most of the time and there’s a fine line between bitterness and astute cultural observation.

“They were in Carl Jung’s office,”

He must have seen me coming. He was an empath. He understood my uncapped personality, my propensity toward improvising the mystical, and hanging hope and power on inanimate objects. “Carl Jung was in Los Angeles. How did I not know that?”

Suddenly, in my mind those curtains were an aperture for a room where a master sat doing the big work. The very mind that helped establish the fact that we are innately propelled toward something bigger than ourselves, and that spirituality is a primal deep craving based on univer...

As a self-employed creative type it is remarkable how many activities I will engage in other than being creative and self-employed: cleaning, scouring, organizing, emailing, tweeting, anything.

I had a lot of expectations and felt like some part of my self was on the line. That’s how insecure I am. The thought of being rejected by hummingbirds was too much for my sensitive artistic ego to deal with given that I was spending all this time putting together these feeders. All this time being about a half hour.

I have no patience for contemporary handlebar mustaches. They anger me. They look indulgent and ridiculous. Anytime I see one all I can imagine is the guy twisting away at the waxed curls in his mirror like a villain of self-avoidance. If you have a handlebar mustache, that is pretty much all you are. You are a delivery system for a handlebar mustache.

They’re magic. It doesn’t always work but the good stuff, or at least the stuff that resonates, should engage your heart in a way that can reflect, sate, define, amplify, provoke, or relieve what seems like chaos or confusion in your life.

The moment that I knew in my soul that nothing I was doing in my head had any bearing on actual events or possible outcomes, I was suddenly free.

“Do I want to die to this song? It’s a good song but do I want to die to it? What song would be a good song to die to? I should make a death playlist for my iPod for when I have time to decide before I die what song I want to hear.

amazes me that we are all on Twitter and Facebook. By “we” I mean adults. We’re adults, right? But emotionally we’re a culture of seven-year-olds.

Anal pain and chaos does not equal feeling alive. I should learn and remember that, in all areas of my life.

When you hear “the hood” it means someplace you wouldn’t go, where you aren’t wanted, but you might be tolerated and it’s cool, there might be trouble, but it’s cool. Oh, and black people are crazy and wild and don’t live like us. Some of this is true. Some blacks don’t live like me, but then some white people don’t live like me, either. It’s called poverty. Many poor people live in broken-down communities, and in most states, certainly in the South, some black people are kept there by layers of historic segregation, racial and economic. I am not racist but I’m a nervous person. It is not ethnicity or race specific. It is a case-by-case feeling. If I am confronted by something that I don’t understand, it frightens me or makes me uncomfortable. Whether it be a person, a place, or a thing, I get nervous. I don’t think that’s an inappropriate human reaction. Nervousness doesn’t become racism until you hear yourself saying things like “Oh, shit, there’s a lot of them.” Then you might need to check yourself and follow where that thought goes. You might be on a slippery slope.