July 20, 1998.

I mean I know those years actually happened (though as I read my journal from that period I would say a good half of the gigs I mention I have no recollection of) but I don’t know how we did it, day after day after day. Man were we busy. A couple weeks before this entry, one of our cats had died, another was on death’s door with a failing liver, we were in the middle of the process of pitching a variety show to execs at Comedy Central, preparing to move to Nashville, and we were playing several shows a week, most of them out of town, while still working full-time at a law firm.

That period of time felt very much like the beginning of something big, but it was, looking back, the beginning of the end.

Four years later, after it really did end, therapy and meditation and a lot of hard core self-examination helped me reconnect with my love of the work and loosen my intense attachment to the idea that it must lead to fame and fortune. Every once in a while in the last 10 years or so, the various successes of LIzZie will arouse that old familiar feeling of inevitability, that you just have to bear down harder and harder and it will happen. It’s not true, it’s not productive, and it eventually destroys the work, so I have my guard up against its return. But now, reading this and being reminded just how extreme that feeling was back then, how it controlled every aspect of our lives, I realize I don’t have to worry. I will never be that crazy again, it would kill me, not just the cats.