Seth Rogen - Yearbook

Dear Hiveans	Liebe Hiver	Queridos Hiveanos
Today I'd like to share my favourite excerpts from the book "Yearbook" (goodreads) by Seth Rogen, who is a Canadian actor, comedian and filmmaker (wiki)	Heute meine Lieblingsauszüge aus dem Buch "Yearbook" (goodreads) von Seth Rogen, einem kanadischen Schauspieler, Komiker und Filmemacher (wiki)	Hoy mis fragmentos favoritos del libro "Yearbook" (goodreads) de Seth Rogen, que es un actor, cómico y director de cine canadiense (wiki)
Normally I don't read comedy, so this is an exception. Warning: these excerpts contain some dark humour, stories about drugs, and strong language, and they may not suit everyone.	Normalerweise lese ich keine Comedy, also ist dies eine Ausnahme. Warnung: Diese Auszüge enthalten schwarzen Humor, Geschichten über Drogen und derbe Sprache und sind nicht für jeden geeignet.	Normalmente no leo comedia, así que esta es una excepción. Advertencia: estos extractos contienen algo de humor negro, historias sobre drogas y lenguaje fuerte, y puede que no gusten a todo el mundo.

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My grandmother was born while her family was in a caravan fleeing Poland as World War I was breaking out. She got to pick her own birthday when she was a little girl because her parents didn’t know her real one, which is some real Depression-era shit. How rough was Poland for Jews at that time? So rough that when they arrived in Winnipeg, a city in Manitoba that has swarms of mosquitos throughout the summer and debilitating ice storms throughout the winter, they thought, This place is fucking great! Let’s stay here.
[...] Because they grew up in the Depression, they would steal EVERYTHING. Every time we went to McDonald’s, they would empty the napkin dispenser and put them in a giant box that my grandfather kept in his van. If we were out at dinner and you heard my Bubby say, “Oh, this is a nice plate,” you knew the next time you ate at their place, you’d be eating off that plate, because she straight jacked that shit. Knives, forks, you name it, they swiped it.

The night came, and my turn to take the stage was fast approaching. I honestly don’t remember being that nervous, probably because I was 12 fucking years old and wasn’t even mature enough to be nervous. I’ve definitely gotten more in my head as I’ve gotten older and marvel at how I used to just barrel into these situations without much fear or anxiety. Kids can do that. It’s like those very young Chinese acrobats you see, flinging their little bodies in the air, being thrown around, completely unaware of the stakes. If those kids knew what a torn ACL was, they wouldn’t be letting those motherfuckers toss their little asses around like that. And if I had known the pain and shame that goes along with putting yourself out there creatively and being rejected, I probably wouldn’t have been so excited. But I didn’t, so I was.

Yes. My house was messy. I wouldn’t say dirty but kind of…cluttered. There were always little piles of things everywhere. I’m not saying this is a Jewish tendency specifically, but almost every Jewish parent’s house I’ve been to is like this. Nothing is put away. Everything is laid out in organized little stacks that are everywhere. Jews like to see all their belongings. We like to know what we’ve got at all times, just in case we gotta pack up shop and get the fuck out of town.

Jews have a lot of odd traditions. They wear kippahs, which are funny little hats about the size of the palm of your hand that, I’m sure NOT so coincidentally, fit perfectly over a bald spot. Am I saying a major tenet of Judaism was formed to protect the vanity of balding Jewish men? Yeah. Yeah, I am. They get circumcised, which I guess I’ve grown to have mixed feelings about. Do I have animosity toward my private parts? Not really. Do I sometimes wonder what it could have been like to have a penis that lived on in its natural state? Sure. I also think of my phantom foreskin, out there somewhere, penisless, and then I think, It’s probably better off. I think a lot of Jews wonder what it would be like to experience a foreskinned penis. Is it better? Is it worse? Is it, in general, warmer? It would, by definition, be more penis, which is probably something every guy would be on board with. I’ve thought about starting a business where I sell prosthetic foreskins to Jews so they can feel what it would have been like to have non-Jew junk. It would be called Gentile Genitals and it would make a fortune.

• 😂

I was a soft kid, and I was generally scared. And by soft I don’t mean just, like, mentally soft. I was literally soft. I had a Pillsbury Doughboy quality to me. I seemed flaky and delicious, like you wanted to poke me and make me giggle.

• Great dose of self-irony.

About five years ago, my wife and I bought a house in Los Angeles that has a distinct water feature behind it. And a few months ago, I was scrolling through an obscure C-grade porn site when, among the dozens of thumbnails filling the screen, one caught my eye. It appeared to be the water feature from my new backyard. I clicked on the thumbnail, and there it was: our new house, with four Russians having a very uncircumcised orgy in our water feature. The clip seemed about ten years old and only had a couple thousand views. I had a lot of thoughts in that moment, but the most prevalent was I did it. I looked at ALL the porn there is on the Internet. It’s the only way to explain the statistical improbability of me finding this clip. The truth is, if you live in a house in Los Angeles, odds are some porn has been shot there, and if you live in a house of any kind anywhere, somebody has definitely fucked in it, so the presence of cameras doesn’t really make a difference on a sanitary level. At least I got to see some of the people who fucked in my house before I lived in it. Odds are you didn’t. I consider it a gift.

• Too much information? Yes.

Weed

I grew up in a perfect-storm-type situation when it comes to being someone who developed a love for weed. I’m from Vancouver, which is and always has been one of the most liberal cities in the world when it comes to weed. Also, I loved hip-hop music, which, aside from a few odd lines here and there, was pretty much telling me to smoke weed all the time. And finally, I was (and still am) a white person, so statistically my odds for really getting in trouble for using it were (and still are) small.

I used to think a lot about why I smoked weed, but, honestly, I stopped. Because I realized the only reason I was thinking about it was because of the negative stigma, and the only reason it has a negative stigma is that it makes it easier for white people to control nonwhite people, which unfortunately is also the reason for a shitload of other things. There’s stuff that makes our lives better that hasn’t been stigmatized, and nobody gives those things a second thought. Nobody thinks about why they have a strong desire to wear shoes. Nobody says that people who wear shoes are denying reality. Instead, the consensus on shoes is that we use them to adapt to reality. If we don’t wear them, our feet will hurt. They make our journey more comfortable, and we don’t judge ourselves for wearing them. They don’t make walking any less “real.” Nobody’s ever like, “You’re not really experiencing walking. You’re under the fog of footwear.” They’re like, “Yeah. Our feet aren’t made for walking in the environments we’ve settled in as a species. Wear shoes.”
That’s why I smoke weed. It’s additive to my journey. It makes getting from here to there manageable and comfortable. There’s this odd concept of functionality that people apply to some things but not others. Our feet need cushioning. Our skin needs protecting. Our muscles need exercise. Our asses need wiping. But our brains? Don’t touch those! They’re perfect, and if you’re having a hard time with yours and are smoking weed, it’s bad! Unfortunately, as well designed as people are, we just aren’t completely cut out for this world we live in. We need shoes, sunblock, exercise, toilet paper—and weed.
People criticize weed for changing your view of reality. But sunglasses literally change your view of reality, and nobody gives them a hard time for it. Weed is my sunglasses. Weed is my shoes. I’m not quite cut out for this world, but weed makes it okay.

This is a good explanation, and - overall - I agree. Notwithstanding the above each and every drug or mind-altering chemical contains risks.	Dies ist eine gute Erklärung, und ich stimme ihr im Großen und Ganzen zu. Ungeachtet dessen birgt jede einzelne Droge oder bewusstseinsverändernde Chemikalie Risiken.	Es una gran explicación y, en general, estoy de acuerdo. No obstante, todas y cada una de las drogas o sustancias químicas que alteran la mente entrañan riesgos.

I arrived at the Amsterdam Airport Schiphol at around 11 A.M. I was supposed to meet my friend Ben at the Vondelpark at 3 P.M., so that we could then go and check in to our hostel together. Now, I guess it’s important to note that neither of us had a cellphone that worked in Europe, because I’m not even sure that shit existed back then. We just made a plan and were supposed to do it, which seems reckless and terrifying in retrospect. These days, I text my wife while I’m in line for popcorn at the theater to make sure the seat-finding process is going okay. The fact that I flew to a different continent and was just supposed to meet my friend at a certain place at a certain time feels like something out of the Middle Ages. It’s like when you hear that NASA sent people to the moon with a scientific calculator; that’s what meeting someone without a cellphone seems like to me now.
I found a train, made it to the city, and walked toward the park with my gigantic backpack strapped to my sweaty back, making it to the downtown area by, like, 1:30 P.M. I had some time to kill, so I headed to a small, dark Moroccan weed café. This was my first time buying weed in a legal setting, and when you’re me, that’s something you never forget. It’s a fucking dream come true. The normalization of something you’ve been told your whole life is highly illicit was oddly validating. Also, I was a HUGE Pulp Fiction fan, which was probably most Americans’ first introduction to how those weed cafés worked. And it blew my fucking mind.
“I’ll take a gram of your strongest marijuana, please.” It felt fantastic to say. I wish I could say the smoking of it went as well. Now, I grew up smoking very good weed in British Columbia, but this was next-level shit. I felt like the monkey touching that obelisk in 2001. It was the future.

I obviously tell a huge amount of drug-related stories throughout this book, and while most of them were events I look back on fondly, I feel like I should include a few exclusively cautionary tales about the devil’s lettuce, reefers…

Weed ... again

Flying sucks. Flying early in the morning on no sleep sucks even more. And flying early in the morning on no sleep while incredibly hungover is something that so obviously fucking sucks, if you find yourself doing it, you really only have yourself to blame.
A few years ago, I found myself doing this for the billionth time, wondering how I could be so stupid again. But this time…I had a plan. Someone had given me a weed brownie. A very strong weed brownie. Some of the only times in my life where I truly thought, Wow, I am TOO FUCKING HIGH, have come after eating weed food. Once I ate a weed lollipop at the Golden Globes and got so high, I had to leave early. Weed brownies, in general, are wildly unpredictable. They range from being bad-tasting brownies that do nothing to heavy narcotics that make you feel like a character in Trainspotting. I ate the brownie on the way to the airport, which would ultimately be the first of a few bad decisions.

Later that night, me, Lauren, and Jonah Hill found ourselves waiting for an elevator to go back to our rooms. Because Vegas is a horrible clusterfuck at all times, it was taking forever for an elevator to come, so we were psyched when the doors finally opened. But there was a giant security guard standing there, blocking the entrance.
“Sorry, this one’s private.”
Then a voice came from behind the guard. “No, wait!” Eddie Griffin popped out. He eyed us. “Actually, let them in. I wanna ride with them.”
I’ll take this moment to say there is very little rhyme or reason to which celebrities have security and which ones don’t. I’ve seen some of the biggest stars navigate the world relatively easily with nobody helping or protecting them. I’ve also seen untalented comedians who nobody really gives a flying fuck about have huge security details, but I won’t name names. Back to Eddie Griffin and his huge security detail.
😂

The most awkward elevator ride I ever went on was at the Oscars. I was about to present an award and found myself in an elevator with Heath Ledger’s parents, about thirty seconds after they had just accepted his posthumous Oscar for The Dark Knight. I stared at them silently and awkwardly as they stood there, holding the statue. I felt like I had to say something, and to this day I regret my choice: “Congratulations!”

Acid / LSD

My first experience was great, and I did the perfect amount. But there was this nagging thought in my head. It’s not a great thought but one that I stand by: You haven’t really done a drug till you’ve done a bit too much of it. Luckily, the next year, at Burning Man, I did too much acid.

All this likely begs the questions: “What’s wrong with you, Seth? Why do you do so many drugs and why can’t you stop talking about it?” And the best answer to that I can come up with is “They give me insights into my own thinking, feeling, and behavior in ways that I haven’t found elsewhere, and they’re super-fun.” It’s really nothing new. People have been getting fucked up for thousands of years. There’s something about removing myself from my normal baseline of operation that feels exciting and adventurous. And shared adventures can be incredibly bonding. I think I also keep yapping about drugs like acid, MDMA, and shrooms because of how incredibly fucking bothered I am that they’re viewed as these big bad wolves compared to alcohol, which is both way more prevalent and way more shitty for you. Like, if I told you there was a drug that you drank and it made you have fun for like an hour, then it made you dizzy for three hours, then you blacked out, then the entire next day you had a terrible headache and generally felt like shit, you probably wouldn’t be clamoring to try it. But alcohol is so mainstream that it’s somehow overcome the fact that it sucks, which is also how I hope to be described one day. But in all seriousness, if I have two glasses of wine, I feel like shit the next day. And the sugar and carbs are objectively bad for your health. I’ve done so much acid that the desert itself crashed like waves on a beach; it has no sugar, no carbs. In fact, the next day, I felt fucking fantastic.
Psychedelics are like microscopes for your soul.

• I agree, though many people don't like what they see through such microscopes.

If you’ve ever met a Jewish person, there’s a good chance you’ve heard them talk about Jewish summer camp. If you’ve never met a Jewish person, I recommend it. They’re great, and they don’t make bread out of baby’s blood, unless the baby has EXTRA-tasty blood. Jewish summer camp is somewhat mystifying, mostly because of the degree to which Jews just fucking love it. The fact that the combination of the terms “Jews” and “camps” hasn’t diminished our enthusiasm is a real testament to how psyched on the whole notion we are.

• very dark humor…

Which is also what it’s like being Jewish. Whether you like it or not, it’s in you. It shows up on DNA tests. They can find a severed finger and determine if it was once attached to a Jewish hand. It’s not like other religions in that way. Even if you don’t believe in Judaism, you, my friend, are still a Jew. You can’t really opt out of it. Maybe that’s why Jews are Jewish. It’s more vague and casts a wider net than other religions. “I’m a Hindu.” “I’m a Muslim.” “I’m Jew…ish.” Less commitment is involved when “ish” is in the mix. I’m not starving. I’m hungry-ish. I’m not freezing. I’m cold-ish. I’m not a Jew, but I’m for sure Jewish. Who isn’t?

This book contains some very funny stories. It didn't convince me to read more comedy, though.	Dieses Buch enthält einige sehr lustige Geschichten. Es hat mich allerdings nicht davon überzeugt, mehr Comedy zu lesen.	Este libro contiene algunas historias muy divertidas. Sin embargo, no me convenció para leer más comedias.

Have a great day,
zuerich

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