Confession: I’m wearing Depends today


Long story short, we had some mishaps over the weekend, starting with the peyote that I obtained for my Friday evening meditation and soul clearing/journeywork session with my karmic guide, Jennie Falcone. As you know, my routine before important keynotes is to go into seclusion several days before the event and spend that time fasting and doing spiritual work with Jennie, who in addition to doing journeywork is also a gifted healer and clairvoyant medium. To be fair, the peyote was my idea, and Jennie was against it, but I insisted. Big mistake, since there was something very, very wrong with this peyote. I mean the psychedelic aspects were all there — color trails, auditory hallucinations, weird naked Indians — but instead of the clean wonderful high to which I’ve become accustomed this stuff had some really bad physical effects in the intestinal region. Think ayahuasca times ten. Incredible pain, cramping, lots of vomiting and liquid you-know-what. Plus I was tripping my brains out so I started imagining that my insides were melting and pouring out of me. Then I remembered hearing a story about how peyote buttons could contain some kind of dormant bug larvae and I started to think that this had happened to me and that the bugs had come alive inside me and now were trying to eat their way out. I’ve had bad trips before but this was way beyond that.

Anyway, Larry was called, and he sent his medevac helicopter over and flew me to his compound in Woodside. He has a private hospital on the grounds and a team of physicians. They determined that it would be necessary to flush the toxins from my system using a series of high colonics. I’m not going to go into details but imagine you’re tripping on peyote and a team of people in white uniforms ties you up, straps you to a stretcher, flies you in a helicopter to some laboratory, then starts shoving hoses up your ass and flushing you out. I thought I’d been abducted by aliens. Katie, meanwhile, had been called and she just stood there in the corner of the room going, “Oh no, oh no, oh no.” This was Saturday night into Sunday morning. By Sunday at noon I’d pretty much recovered and wasn’t seeing colors anymore, just seeing the walls breathe, and by last night I was able to hold down a bit of clear miso soup and also to remember parts of my keynote presentation. The rest I’ll have to do with teleprompters. Fingers crossed.

However, the intestinal effects have not entirely subsided. So Annalisa, my colorist and couture consultant, was brought in and she has managed to create a kind of slim-fit Depends that she swears will not be visible through my jeans, as long as we go up one size to a 28-inch waist and add a relaxed-fit cut. Phil Schiller (speaking of relaxed fit) will be in the wings ready to take over if anything goes wrong. Katie and Annalisa will be in the green room with backup underwear. It’s now 6:30 in the morning and I haven’t really slept since Thursday night. But I’m really, really excited about the new products we’re going to show today. Oh, one more thing: Don’t stand behind me.