EXCERPT

INTRODUCTION

Over the years, I’ve gotten a lot of suggestions.

Some are intriguing. My brother-in-law suggested I spend a year growing my own food in my Manhattan apartment.

Some are intriguing, but possibly come with a hidden agenda. A friend – I think he’s a friend -- told me I should spend a year without human contact.

Some definitely come with an agenda. My wife keeps suggesting that I spend a year giving her foot massages. I usually counter-offer that we could try all the positions in the Kama Sutra. The subject is generally dropped after that.

The suggestions come with the territory. For the last fifteen years, I’ve attempted to live my life as a human guinea pig. I’ve engaged in a series of experiments on my mind and body, some of which have been fruitful, some humiliating failures. I’ve tried to understand the world by immersing myself in extraordinary circumstances. I’ve grown a tremendously unattractive beard.

My career as a human guinea pig began with a piece of furniture. I was working at Entertainment Weekly magazine in the mid-1990s, and the La-Z-Boy company had just created the most pimped-out, excessive chair in the history of human seating. It pushed the concept of leisure – or sloth, if you are feeling moral – to unheard-of extremes. It had a butt massager, a heater, a built-in fridge for you to store beers and cheese sticks, a modem jack -- everything but a toilet and an outboard motor.

I figured the only way to address this magnificent monstrosity was to road test it. See how it held up under severe conditions. Being a committed journalist, I offered to spend 24 hours watching TV in this La-Z-Boy and then write about it.

The experiment was actually a bit of a bust. Somewhere in the middle of a Law & Order marathon at 3 a.m., I fell asleep for five hours. But I glimpsed the possibilities of this type of journalism offered. I was hooked.

Since then, I’ve put myself (and my patient wife) through a battery of experiments, the highlights and lowlights of which are in this book.

To understand the global phenomenon that is outsourcing, I outsourced everything in my life. I hired a team of people in Bangalore, India to answer my phone, answer my email, argue with my wife for me. This, by the way, was probably the best month of my life.

To explore the meaning of Truth, I decided to practice something called Radical Honesty. I spent a month without lying. But more than that, I vowed to say whatever popped into my head. No filter between the brain and the mouth. This, by the way, was probably the worst month of my life.

To slow the descent of my rapidly plummeting IQ, I read the Encyclopedia Britannica from A to Z.

To try to understand religion, I lived by the rules of the Bible, from the Ten Commandments all the way down to stoning adulterers. 

I’ve been told – many, many times – that there are easier ways to make a living.
Which is true.
But I’m addicted to these experiments. I’ve come to believe that if you really wanted to learn about a topic, you should get on-the-job training. You should dive in and try to live that topic. If you’re interested in Rome, you can look at maps and postcards and read census data. Or you can actually go to Italy and taste the pesto gnocchi.  As the old saying goes: To understand the Italians, you must walk a mile in their loafers.

If you’re passionate about the project and committed to the possibility of change, there’s nothing like it. And these experiences have, in fact, transformed my life for good. I may not keep everything from each experiment – after my year of living biblically, I decided maybe I should stop stoning adulterers and I put away my robe and sandals. But I do still observe the Sabbath, I still say prayers of thanksgiving every day (even though I’m an agnostic, go figure), I still try not to covet and gossip, with varying degrees of success.

The goal is that the pain of the experiment will end up making life better in the end. And that my wife will forgive me. For, as I’ve been told many times, she’s a saint. A saint, I might add, who doesn’t tolerate these experiments lying down. (With the encyclopedia project, for instance, she fined me $1 for every irrelevant fact that I inserted into conversation).

Partly, of course,  I’m drawn to these experiments because I’m a writer. And a writer who is cursed with a relatively uneventful upbringing. My dad was not a carnie or a drunk or a spy. My ordinary life doesn’t merit a book. So I put myself into extraordinary situations, and see what happens.

One of my literary idols is George Plimpton. He’s the Dante of participatory journalism. For the sake of the story, he’s been sacked by a Detroit Lions defensive lineman and punched in the face by Archie Moore. Before him, there was John Howard Griffin, who chemically darkened his skin to see how it felt to be a black man in the 1950s South. And even before that came an amazing 19th century journalist named Nelly Bly. Her experiments ranged from the madcap -- when Jules Verne’s book Around the World in Eighty Days came out, she decided to try to replicate the stunt – to the serious – she had herself committed to an infamous New York insane asylum to expose the abuses there.

And when I read the encyclopedia, I found a whole other breed of heroes who experimented on themselves for actual science -- usually because no one else would volunteer. There’s a great 19th century doctor named Jesse William Lazear, who allowed himself to be bitten by a yellow fever-infected mosquito to prove that the insects were spreading the disease. He died proving himself right. And there’s Sasha Shulgin, the Thomas Edison of psychedelics. A true mad scientist based in Berkeley (of course), the 84-year-old chemist has invented 230 different hallucinogenic drugs. He then ingests them himself.  “It is like opening a door to a hallway that has unopened doors for its entire length, and beyond every door is a world with which you are totally unfamiliar.” 

I haven’t taken drugs since college. But I know exactly what he means about opening doors. That’s what I’ve tried to do in my career and in this book, The Guinea Pig Diaries. I hope you like what I’ve found behind them.





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