Would you believe it? We are halfway through Be a Man, Macho Man Randy Savage’s debut rap album. Halfway through, my average ranking of its tracks is just over 2 out 5 stars. 6 out of 7 songs have included the word “butt.” Halfway through his life, at age 29, Savage was wrestling for his father’s promotion out of Lexington, Kentucky. He wouldn’t debut in the WWF for another 4 years.
Writing this, I’m about to turn 35. I hope to be a few years out from my halfway point, but it’s coming soon—or else, of course, it’s already passed.
At some point in the second half of 2021, I started thinking about death pretty much every day. There were several contributing factors. The stored mental injury from a year and a half of pandemic. Family members in poor health. A second bad drug experience that was too similar to the first. And I hurt the big toe on my left foot, which was eventually diagnosed as arthritis.
When I was 25, I didn’t really get why most professional athletes retire in their 30s. At 35, it’s entirely clear. On one Friday in June, my toe was fine. On Monday, having danced for hours at my cousin’s wedding in dress shoes, played 18 holes, and jogged through the Atlanta airport, I was in more pain than I had ever been. My toe couldn’t stand the weight of a bedsheet. 48 hours in, though medically it was never a consideration, I’d come to terms with amputation. Anything to stop the pain.
The toe hobbled me for several weeks. Every step was a sting. I didn’t leave the house. The fact that I’ve worked from home since March 16, 2020 helped with this. My life was my bed, chair, couch, and toilet, with brief ventures to the shower and the dining room table. In these painful, sedentary weeks, I felt like shit.
It took until that summer to fully appreciate that the brain, like my arm or my left big toe, is just another piece of meat. I thought I understood what people meant by the connection between mind and body, but what all this taught me is that the dichotomy is entirely false. I have a body, and that’s it. Sure, there are plenty of times I’ve hurt myself physically but felt mentally fine. I’ve also sprained an ankle and been able to hop around on the other one no problem. But I’ve also gotten sick. Food poisoning. Chicken pox. The flu. Problems that knocked out the whole system. The brain fog and depression that comes with a bad illness is terrible, but it never truly shook me, maybe because they were tied to conditions that I believed to be temporary. This time, with the foot not getting better, with me losing all the happy chemicals I’d gotten from being a fairly active person, with me suddenly noticing all the ways that everything was getting worse, I started to get scared.
My grandfather was a funny guy. He’d do so many stereotypical old man bits. He was gregarious, to a fault at times, especially with women waitstaff. Near the end of his life, dementia took that from him. One Thanksgiving, he couldn’t even look me in the eye. He’d shrunk into himself—cowering, shivering. He got scared.
I’ve lived a very charmed life. I can imagine fears far greater than the ones I’ve experienced, but there’s lightyears between thinking and feeling. We all live on the spectrum between the best and worst things we’ve ever felt. When life’s pendulum swings hard bad, we trust that a balancing swing toward the good is coming. But that’s not always the case. My grandfather’s pendulum took a bad swing and broke. He got worse and worse, weaker and weaker, more and more frightened, until he was nothing at all.
For me, it was like this. You know that sinking feeling when you realize you’ve fucked something up? Imagine that, only it’s so strong and persistent that you pass the point of buoyancy. You sink and sink until you begin to lose hope in surfacing, and even more than that, you begin to believe that there is no bottom.
Luckily, I did shoot back up. I’m okay. If I squint, I can convince myself that feeling all that made me wiser, more empathetic. I’ve noticed myself getting more emotional, crying at happy endings of movies, feeling the frisson when a favorite song hits its final chorus. Maybe all that bad shit helped me understand how beautiful the beautiful moments really are. How much more wonderous is a simple, good thing when you have true horror on the other end of the spectrum? I can convince myself for now. Of course, I may never shake the nagging doubt that all of that doesn’t matter. Of what importance is the best thing I’ve ever experienced when I could be stuck in the abyss’s gravity well, tracing tighter and tighter orbits until…
Of what help is Macho Man Randy Savage’s song “Macho Thang” in all of this? Not much. However, there is one line that we might distill into a discount salve. In his second verse, Macho raps:
“Everybody’s movin’ with their hands in the air.
I like the girl over there with the long, blonde hair.
Shakin’ her thing like it’s the end of the world.
She’s lookin’ our way, her and all her girls.”
There’s an important reminder in these terrible lyrics, especially for cowards like me. It’s that, when living through the end of the world, we can choose to shake our things like we’ve never shaken them before. The major, recurring fault in my life is that I take things too seriously. It’s helpful to remember that even life, the most serious thing, is pretty fucking absurd. If I must fall, what’s stopping me from twerking my ass off all the way down?
1.5 out of 5 Google searches for “derealization” and hating what you find.