Now, This Is Living!
Reflections on this Substack's 1st birthday — and its author's 41st
“There is no such thing on earth as an uninteresting subject; the only thing that can exist is an uninterested person.”
- G.K. Chesterton
I used to have a joke in my stand-up act that went:
I don’t understand the debate around abortion. “Does life begin at birth? Does it begin at conception? Does it start at 6 weeks, with the first heartbeat? Or is it at 24 weeks, the point of fetal viability?” Um, hello??? Haven’t we all seen the mugs? Life begins at 40!
As I write this on the cusp of completing my 41st year as an individuated unit of consciousness embodied in an organic life form called Scott Rogowsky, relishing these scant remaining hours of being legally permitted to verbally state, “I’m 40,” I take it back. It’s not a joke.
The mugs were right.
How could anyone possibly think that anything other than earnestly wrestling with a foundationally transformational midlife crisis could be considered “living”? You think you’re living as an embryo? Wait till you prematurely propose at the Waldorf in Cabo!
I can’t believe more than half the country’s state legislatures are locked in battle on the abortion issue — arguing over weeks? They’re off by decades! If floating around in someone else’s stomach is what you call ‘living’, then I want to know what you call getting blown in the bathroom of the Rainbow Room at your cousin’s wedding! No one has lived until they’ve shared a shrimp cocktail and a prosciutto-burrata pizza at Bond 45 with their rabbi’s daughter.
Tell you one thing… In these past 365 days? Not a single boring moment among them.
There have doubtless been countless instances in my first forty years of life when I was bored. Excruciatingly so. Math tests where I gave up after two minutes, resigned to white-knuckling my way through the next forty-three. Interminable car rides home from hyperextended holiday dinners, trapped in the back seat with Delilah’s long-distance dedications holding me hostage from sleep. Any time I’ve tried watching Frasier.
Maybe I was too busy with work this year to feel bored? In January, I co-founded a company called Savvy, serving as Chief Marketing Officer and hosting the interactive game shows that we stream live on our mobile app. It’s hard to be bored while building the next-gen entertainment platform poised to make good on the promises merely teased by that other game show app from like 15 years ago WHAT WAS IT CALLED I CAN’T REMEMBER???!!!!
That’s not to say there haven’t also been times when I was bored by my work:
Copywriting for my cousin’s temp agency right out of college and ultimately getting fired for daring to add a touch of color to the listings —“What do you mean the hospital client was upset with some of the phrasing in their listings? ‘Sponge-bathing old fogeys’ is part of the job description!”
Professionally blogging for an e-comedy site in the early 2010s, which mostly consisted of scouring competitors’ websites for clickbait posts about strange people doing stupid things and reskinning them as clickbaitier posts of my own.
I was even occasionally bored while running my vintage clothing shop in Santa Monica, on those miserable, rainy days when hours might pass without a single jingle of the door chime. What I would have given in those lonely moments for a bum muttering about “the final judgment” while threatening me with a kitchen knife — or a freeloader asking to use the toilet.
But these days? Bored? Impossible.
I’ll prove it.
As I type this I am screeching through the lower stratosphere somewhere east of Los Angeles and west of New York. Barring an invitation to join a future stunt-casted Blue Origin mission to sub-orbital space, these are the highest heights and fastest speeds I will ever experience in my earthly form. Even if my TV console crapped out, even if the inflight wi-fi went down, even if I had forgotten a book, and headphones, and computer, and notebook, and didn’t have access to any writing utensils or any means of “entertainment” or “diversion” of any kind for these six hours suspended above the clouds in the belly of this metal bird, I still wouldn’t be bored. Because?
Because, for one, I could spend a marvelous six hours meditating on the sheer magnitude of my altitude — HOW DID I GET UP HERE?? I could contemplate the human engineering that designed the jet engine, propelling me to ethereal elevations inconceivable to the 120 billion Homo Sapiens who lived and died before the advent of the aeroplane, who could only dream of sharing the skies with God’s favored, winged creatures. I could think about Da Vinci and his valiant efforts in manifesting the flying machines that would eventually peel away from the vellum of his sketchbooks and lift up, up and away, across the centuries to this fresh moment. Even a genius of his stature couldn’t have predicted the technological evolution that has afforded humans the privilege of simultaneously binging Biscoff cookies and The Office from 30,000 feet.
Because, for two, I could stave off the bare scent of boredom by spending those same six hours grounded in Deep Gratitude. An excerpt: I’m grateful for the cosmic series of clerical errors that conspired to produce my existence — randomly springing forth, when I did, with all ten fingers and ten toes as I did, to the most unconditionally loving and supportive parents that I did. I’m grateful to the woman formerly known as Tobi Steinberg for making the prudent decision, nine months prior to my taking birth, in graciously acquiescing to the connubial urges and circumcised advances of one Marty Rogowsky.
I’m grateful that these two perfect strangers had the parents they had, who provided just the right conditions for them to grow into the reproductively attractive partners they would eventually come to recognize in one another. I’m grateful for their felt sense of a common ancestry — too distant and dusty from its ancient origins in the Judaean Desert to fully rationalize, yet close enough to bind them in the enjoyment of lox, eggs, and onions.
I’m grateful for the mutual friend who set them up on a blind date, for the blind fate that brought this friend into their respective lives, for every cause that triggered every effect that ultimately brought me not only into this world, but to this moment — on this JetBlue flight from LAX to JFK. I’m grateful that the great Jim Gaffigan is seated across from me, and for the knowledge that if this plane were to go down, I could posthumously ride his celebrity coattails in the ensuing coverage.
TMZ: CRASH CLAIMS BELOVED COMEDIAN,
VAGUELY RECOLLECTED VIRAL QUIZ SHOW HOST
Perhaps my new-onset boredom allergy is a side effect of reaching middle age — a byproduct of the alchemical reaction between “fear of death” and “fear of dying a whiny, ungrateful bitch.” Perhaps — in riding the crest of my admittedly belated realization that, contrary to previously held belief, I may not actually know everything — I have authorized the opening up of over one billion acres of virgin coastal territory for offshore drilling (cognitively-speaking).
Reading Viktor Frankl, Mickey Singer, Iain McGilchrist, Don Miguel Ruiz, bell hooks, Sapolsky, Kingsnorth, and Harari. Hearing Laraaji and Scoochie Boochie and Dylan’s gospel trilogy and Scott Walker and Jonny Fritz and Electric Warrior by T. Rex in its entirety. Discovering “song-poems” and Beyond Vaudeville and The Rabbi’s Cat (Le chat du rabbin). Parasailing in Tahoe. Scuba diving in Mexico. Time-traveling to pre-colonial Polynesia and Mesoamerica. Getting engaged. Getting disengaged. Keeping a betta fish.
These experiences are among the many that first coalesced for me in my forty-first year — on top of giving away $2 million worth of Bitcoin as host of an in-app quiz show for Robinhood, befriending (in the loosest definable sense) legendary amateur baseball catcher and professional football quarterback Tom Brady as MC of the Topps booth at Fanatics Fest and The National, marketing the nationwide release of an electronic table-top party game featuring my voice in the component and my likeness on the box, bootstrapping a tech startup, and starting this Substack.
Rogo’s Modern Life was the 40th birthday gift I gave myself on this day last year, with an inaugural post reclaiming my long-dormant identity as a writer. This very essay (soon coming to a close!) marks my sixty-eighth piece of published content, including podcasts and videos and all sorts of posts about all manners of things. It almost doesn’t matter what I’ve been writing, it just matters to me that I’ve been writing. And despite the many grueling hours I’ve spent in unadulterated agony, damned by dangling modifiers and tormented over the syntax of single sentences — ALL FOR WHAT??? — it’s been my greatest pleasure to get this stuff out of my head and onto the digital page. I’ve never felt more alive.
I’ve saved a final expression of gratitude for you, dear reader. Thank you for your continued interest in my work, here and elsewhere. Expect much more yet to come. I’ll do my best not to bore you.