Well, hello again! Excuse my absence… reality got in the
way. As much as I would like to while away my day writing my blog, doing my
shop, policing my family, or spending the day outside in the Palais Royal,
sometimes my life gets in the way. As much as I like to pretend that I am
“normal”, alas, I am not. This week as I was packaging up all of your purchases
from the sale, my beautiful little feeding tube started to interrupt my life
and I had to “tend” to it. Hell on earth is an understatement. Not to bore you
with the details or the gore… let’s just say that I survived… barely.
Painkillers are my new best friend. I don’t even need them anymore as the pain
has subsided… but I’m gonna continue our friendship, regardless.
While I am recuperating for the 100th fucking
time, let’s continue our Proust Questionnaire with my friends because at this
juncture they are far more interesting than this chick over here in Paris with
stupid ALS.
Today’s Q & A is from my friend, Jamie Brisick. Truth be
told, Jamie is my first crush. I was 16 or 17 years old and I met Jamie at the
beach and fell head over heels in love. How could I not? He was a dashing
intellectual… surfer. Usually intellectual and surfer do not go hand in hand
but in Jamie’s case, he was exactly that. On top of this, he was also the
funniest, wittiest, most handsome man on earth… still is to this day. But don’t
tell him that I said any of this. For our 1st date, if you could call
it that, Jamie took me to Zooma Sushi in Malibu for dinner and as the waiter asked for our
drink order Jamie looked at me and said, “Care for a Fresca?” I was in love. I
like to call him Dogface just to keep his ego intact. Jamie went from surfer to
editor of Surfer Magazine to brilliant author penning 2 books. His latest book,
Becoming Westerly, is a beautiful
tribute to a delicate subject. “BECOMING WESTERLY is much more than a book
about a celebrated surfer who becomes a woman—in this case, a dude who becomes
a diva. Brisick presents us with a case study of narcissism, of the pathology
of celebrity, and a detailed look at the complex world of competitive surfing.
It is a funny and painful book, too, and one I greatly enjoyed. —Paul
Theroux, Mr. Bones: Twenty Stories, The Last Train to Zona Verde, The Great
Railway Bazaar and Mosquito Coast
Discover Jamie more through his website, http://jamiebrisick.com,
and I am sure you will become as smitten with him as I was am with
Dogface.
Proust Questionnaire for Jamie: What do you regard as the lowest
depth of misery?Jamie’s Answer: For me, the lowest depth of misery has been doing something that feels wholly out of line with who I am, what I believe in, what makes me happy. This can come in many forms. I have felt it in a shitty relationship, where I feel like everything is compromise. But most terrifying for me has been when I've felt it in my work.
I'm spoiled. I've been fortunate enough to align
work with the things I love. But every once in a while that gets skewed. A long
while back I took a job as the editor of a surfing magazine. I thought it would
be "playing in the sand box." Instead, I inherited a nightmare of
Excel spread sheets that were far beyond my skill set. I was exposed to the
harsh truth of compromised magazine making: advertisers called the shot. I was
also expected to be a kind of glad-handing puppet/frontman, a smiling and
baby-kissing politician of sorts. That felt dishonest. It felt like I was
trying to live someone else's version of me. That was miserable.
As a writer I feel this on a simpler, more immediate
scale when I take on a gig that I have no connection with. Writing is tough
enough as it is, but writing about something you don't care about is torture.
It's a microcosm of falling out of your own flow, losing your mojo,
disconnecting from your instincts and intuition.
I have experienced severe loss (my brother many years
ago, my wife just recently), and that's more painful than any of the above. But
I wouldn't quite call that misery. That's something else.
Thank you, Jamie. You never disappoint.
Ellie’s
Question: What is your favorite charity?
Jamie’s
Answer: Waves 4 Water. http://www.wavesforwater.org/about/story
