My Garry Shandling Year

Be Here Now through Hey Now.

The Melt is a newsletter by, about and largely to entertain Jason Diamond. Hopefully you also like it and will consider subscribing and sharing this post.

The one thing I can definitively say about 2021 is that I’ve never been by myself as much as I was this past year. I wasn’t lonely since my wife works down the hallway from me and I like being able to chat with her between breaks—I've tried to enjoy this time we’ve had together because hopefully we won’t have another reason to work in the same space again anytime soon—I live in a great little part of Brooklyn where I know the names of a lot of my neighbors, love chatting up the baristas and bartenders and feel like I’ve helped raise the mastiff mix that lives at the auto garage across from me. I’m not lonely, but I’ve never been so alone. I realize that sounds like something a teenage goth might write in their journal as they blast the Cure or whatever teenage goths listen to now, but I promise, it’s not really as bad as it sounds besides, you know, the whole pandemic thing being the reason I’ve been unable to see people as much and as often my extroverted self would like.

Basically, to get you up to speed as much as possible without spending a lot of word count on things, my childhood was lonely, but I was hardly alone. As I got older, I was less lonely, but I live in New York, so the chances of not seeing anybody for more than a few minutes aren’t ever that great. I’ve never had many opportunities to be alone and I’ve never been that great at it when given the chance. I’ve spent time out trying to play Thoreau, renting or watching houses in remote areas in hopes of doing that very city-dweller thing of getting away from it all, but I felt out of my element. This year—my first as just a writer and not a writer with a day job that has an office or, during these pandemic times, has a Slack room that has to be on pretty much all day, all week—the first of my 40s, I had to learn how to be alone. And you know what? It was great. 

Now, before I go any further, I should mention that there is this idea that people, but especially men, tend to retreat from other people as they get older. That is 100 percent not the case with me. I want to talk to everybody. I love my friends. I enjoy having people over to my home when it’s safe and I’ve checked your vax card and taken a blood sample and also got your fingerprints, your mother’s maiden name, your father’s family’s point of entry into America and you do a little dance for me. Any dance. You pick. 

I mostly really like people. I tend to like being around them. Now you know that. The other thing you should know if you don’t is that I’ve been practicing meditation for over a decade now. I’ve had and still have ADHD. I’ve had it since before it was even ADHD—just plain old ADD. I’m obsessed with trying to find as much balance as I can and I don’t think anything has helped as much as simply sitting there and breathing. It is so simple that I’m pretty shocked somebody didn’t recommend it when I was younger. 

If you’ve gotten nearly 500 words down through this little essay of mine that any good editor would have smartly chopped down in half, you’re probably asking yourself what these two things have in common and why the hell the subject of this whole thing has to do with Garry Shandling. Well I’m glad you (hopefully) asked that! This year I learned that when you’re suddenly thrust into being alone more than you’ve ever been, you can find yourself getting seriously off track and following thoughts into all kinds of places. Now, I love getting lost in through. It’s part of The Process. But I find that in the era we’re in, getting lost in thought could also include getting lost doomscrolling on Twitter or anxiously checking the news over and over and over in hopes of—what? I don’t know. This was happening to me. Now that I’m on my own and I’ve set myself up as Jason Diamond Inc., I found my entire routine that I had worked so hard to put together was really dependent on the fact that at some point I was going to have to see people: the office, meetings, etc. I wrote earlier this year about my obsession with routines for the Times, and when that came out in April, I was getting back on course, but I wasn’t totally right. Something was off and I couldn’t fix it, and it had to do with my meditation practice. It sounds so weird to say this, but I was having a hard time breathing. Not in the physical sense, thankfully; but I couldn’t sit there and do something I’d been doing for years. I read books, watched YouTube videos, started DMing a few other folks I know that practice various types of meditation, but nothing was helping. I had a meditation block. 

Here, 800 words later, is where Garry Shandling finally comes in. 

I’m one of those people that first saw Freaks and Geeks and immediately felt like nothing had ever nailed a certain experience I recalled from my own childhood quite like the part when Bill goes home to an empty house, makes himself something to eat and watches Shandling do a standup set. I was a latchkey key like Bill, but I also babysat myself a lot, and found myself on a few occasions watching HBO at night as an 11- or 12-year-old trying to understand what, exactly, was so funny about The Larry Sanders Show. I liked it, but the truth was that I just really felt a sort of kinship with Shandling. His face was constantly looking like how I felt inside: uncomfortable with everything. Shandling has been sort of a guiding light for me since I was a kid. That probably explains a lot to those of you that don’t know me from anything beyond what I write, but I basically look at it like the three S shows molded my entire worldview at just the right time: Simpsons, Seinfeld and Sanders. 

Earlier this year I embarked on a Larry Sanders rewatch. The rewatch got me searching Youtube for hours watching various Shandling standup sets, and eventually it led me to The Zen Diaries of Garry Shandling. For reasons I do not understand, I knew full well of the 2018 documentary, but for some reason I just didn’t watch it. I know it was directed by Judd Apatow, and Shandling was a dear friend and mentor of Apatow’s, but it usually ends up that some documentaries push me away from artists I already like instead of pulling me closer. Like it’s the closest you get to actually meeting your heroes, which, as you know, you’re never supposed to do. Yet the opposite happened. Not only did I blaze through the entire doc, but I felt some sense of restoration from the experience. There was something about Shandling, his obsessive work ethic, his dueling feelings about the absurdity of everyday life and the incredible beauty of it, and how he found a way to use the neurosis that he and I and probably every descendant of the shtetl have in some form, that spoke to me. But more than anything, he seemed to be, maybe not OK, but understanding of the idea of being alone. He seemed, as far as I can tell, to like people, but he also used his time alone constructively. 

I started to think about this, about Shandling’s way of doing things. Obviously he wasn’t a perfect person, but, I mean, look at me—I’m a damn flaw machine. The first place it led me was to read more about Zen meditation, which I’d read plenty about, but meditation is such a weird thing to read about. I often complain about how reading a restaurant critic’s reviews can be terrible because eating in a place is all about experience and we all experience things differently. People writing about something like meditation, especially when it’s written in those short, almost poetic little bursts comes from that person’s experience. My brain, your brain, none of our brains work the same. You read about meditation and you can come away with some wisdom, but me, personally, I do exactly what you’re not supposed to do when you close your eyes and start counting your breath: I overthink stuff. 

• Am I doing this right? 

• Did I screw this up?

• Is it OK for me to think about this a little longer? 

That might not be the writer of whatever book or blog post I read, it might not be you, but it’s definitely me. And that was the problem I started running into until I watched the Shandling doc. That’s when I started getting more interested in Zen meditation, which I don’t feel totally comfortable writing about because I’m definitely no expert. But maybe more importantly, and what I am writing about, is I decided that I really liked Garry’s journaling, the randomness of it all, the personal feedback, the honesty; the affirmations that brush up against self-help and cheesy, but really make a lot of sense. I’ve been keeping journals my entire life, but that has always been more of a sit down and really write something out. I don’t give journal thoughts that much thought, but I’m a writer and it’s hard not to overthink anything that involves multiple sentences spilling out of my brain. But the “Zen diary” idea, just waking up, collecting my thoughts, doing whatever I have to do for my routine and then just jotting down some thoughts and feelings was this wild revelation for me. It felt so freeing and helped me filter things out before meditating, before getting to work and before really facing another day in this very rough time. It was such a simple little thing to just not be online for a bit, sitting there with my pen and notebook and just jot stuff down without a care in the world. Was I expecting that to come out of watching a doc on one of my heroes? Absolutely not! All I know is that I found a way to embrace my ample amount of alone time. I started filling in the minutes and hours and days letting thoughts drift by more. Either that, or I pulled over my notebook, wrote it down and then got back to work. Later on in the day, usually around 5 or 6, I’d look back at my notebook, at what I’d written down, and think about whatever it was a little more. A little self-reevaluation to wind things down. It was nice. I started to feel free of something. The more I did it, the more comfortable with my new situation I got. My work was better and my mind felt better. 

From Garry’s diaries.

The point of all of this, 1600+ words later, is that this time we’re in stinks. It’s hard for everybody. Some of us are faced with more alone time, others, like my friends with kids, can’t catch a second to themselves. There was no way to do this year right, and we have absolutely no clue what the future holds. But something I realized this year is that there will always be inspiration, there will always be a thing or person or some moment that unexpectedly pulls you away from the moment and grants you a new way of looking at things, a new way of being and doing. It doesn’t have to be some huge, life-changing thing; it doesn’t have to be about writing or meditation or the creative process or trying to make it another day. All I know is that inspiration is always waiting for you and you just have to be open to it. And that’s the one expectation I have for myself in 2022: be as open as possible at all times. That, and maybe watch It's Garry Shandling's Show at some point.