Water Your Corpses

Somewhere in this process, highly scientific and researchable “things” happen (which I will spare us both from learning), and the dirt becomes nutrient-rich fertilizer. Food for seeds. Grounds for growth. The goddamn cycle of life.

This is how we must view our work. Some art blossoms and thrives. But the projects that wither on the vine are just as precious. They mustn’t be discarded, but tossed, with care, upon the compost heap to mingle and decompose with every other fetid petal until the very molecules of the ideas are inextricable. Compost piles smell like ripe shit, literally hot and wet. The instinct is to avoid them. Take the long route round. But doesn’t manure...kind of smell good? Isn’t that fecund offal brimming with more life than your blank page? How can we expect to compose if we don’t first decompose?

Anyone who has composted knows that it takes time. You have to balance out your clippings and food stuffs. You have to turn and churn the pile. It doesn’t just happen. My first attempt produced a wasps nest inside a barrel of brown banana peels and many high pitched screams. This is to say, our failures won’t be reborn unless we tend to them.

College began with a whimper as my pre-med dreams were dashed upon the rocky shores of second semester Organic Chemistry. However, a stem sprouted from the dirt in the form of the best job I’ve ever had; acting as an elderly man for nurse training simulations. Three days a week I’d grab my white wig, tweed jacket, and walking cane to pretend to be a geriatric husband visiting his wife in the recovery room. My job was to be as annoying and distracting as possible as the nurses-to-be tried to treat my ailing wife. When, like clockwork, smoke poured under the door and the fire alarm blared, I’d panic, screaming at the nurses to save my wife. I’d then stumble and crash to the cold floor, the blood packets hidden in my cheeks spraying across the sterilized linoleum, as the nurses wheeled the patient beds around my lifeless body. Over the course of two years, no one ever saved me. I was left to burn alive every time. I like to think that I’m partially responsible for failing dozens of aspiring nurses who just didn’t have the bedside manner. While this job eventually flat lined, it brought me to short-form improv comedy, the only true art form.

The longest running live comedy show I hosted in New York (Literati) was first booked at Union Hall from a cold email to the venue programmer. It was then swiftly unbooked when she re-read my email and realized that I was not late night writer and White House Correspondents’ Dinner comedian Michelle Wolf but the plucky unknown upstart Michael Wolf. The concept festered until we found a new venue, then a podcast format, then a script stage play, and eventually, a decade later performed a new, final version at The Kennedy Center.

Regrettably, The Kennedy Center has recently undergone some administrative changes, and I’m no longer as eager to wear the free hat I received bearing their logo.

I could go on listing my failures, and so I will! Double time. The three achingly earnest albums of sob-folk music, too easily searchable on bandcamp. The slam poetry endeavor that started with journal entries screamed over post-rock and ended at the Bowery Ballroom when I ruined Keifer Sutherland’s date night. My promising cross country career, a shiny junior high runner, a tangle of long limbs in a silky singlet. They say I had promise until my coach called me fat and made me realize, for the very first time, that I owned a body (flawed). The absurdist web series where I cleverly cashed favors and cast multiple future Emmy and Oscar winners just a few years too early for it to do any good. Playing house in New Jersey for a semblance of stability, all of which crumbled when I could no longer talk golf and lawns to the neighbors. A promising pilot pitch with every meeting canceled by the strike.

And even now, as I write this, I sit in a strange sublet surrounded by unpacked boxes of my life, struck dumb by the heat-lightning end of decade-long relationship, my first marriage, my only tether to the human world. New hormones pump through my blood because boy was yet another valiant attempt that never quite panned out. Even though I’m too afraid to say it, too afraid to tell anyone, let alone my co-workers (until this moment. Oops. Sorry!).

Today these defeats don’t feel as potent. Even a year ago I might have wailed and gnashed my teeth, rattled my fists at the dark storm clouds of heaven, and torn my flesh to ribbons (Note: I am not dramatic). Maybe it’s the fresh chemicals, maybe it’s the thousands in therapy, maybe it’s Maybelline (sponcon), but I’m starting to warm up to life. And life, it seems, is spent in the graveyard. Microdosing death by fucking up my life again and again and again. Burying the bodies. Each one wears my face. But I will tend these graves. I will honor the dead. I will kneel and pray at the tombstones of my failures that the worms do their work and my corpses turn to fertile compost. My sundress flutters obscenely around my ankles. I will tend my garden.

In time, perhaps next spring, we’ll stroll between the plots and spot the thin green stems of something new sprouting from remains.