Now that I have written this book, I realize that a lot of my issues have been created in my own head. Like I said at the start, writing a book is like doing therapy, and I feel like I’ve made really good breakthroughs. First of all, I can say without a doubt that I am not a terrorist. I mean, I knew that from the start, but given what the media and movies have been saying about people who look like me over the past thirty years, I was beginning to question myself. If I wasn’t a terrorist, why was I playing so many of them on TV? Why was I feeling guilty going through airports? Why was I so good at ululating at weddings?
Furthermore, what I’ve learned from reflecting on my travels and writing this book is that most people are inherently good. However, there are also people who just don’t get it. They are out to hate and judge you just because of the label that you fit. There are those who will think that just because I’m of Middle Eastern descent that means that I have it in for America and am just waiting for the right opportunity to open up a can of jihad on this country. They won’t look at the fact that the majority of Middle Easterners and Muslims really don’t hate America as much as Fox News would have you believe. And technically, I’m not even that Middle Eastern, given that I grew up in the United States. If anything, I’m Middle Eastern light. I swear, look at my picture on the cover of this book. I’m not even that hairy! I’m bald, but even worse, I’ve got receding eyebrows. How the hell do you get receding eyebrows?
I knew I was Middle Eastern light after September 11 when the airport profiling never happened. The only person profiling me turned out to be me! After a while, I started to get offended that they weren’t stopping me. I felt like running through the airport just randomly screaming Middle Eastern and Muslim names in hopes they would stop and search me: “MOHAMMAD, ABDULLAH, RAHIM!” But I’m sure that my receding eyebrows would have kept me out of trouble. “You can’t be a terrorist. Look at your eyebrows. Come on through, buddy.”
I’ve come to live my life with this philosophy: Chances are that at some point you will either get hit by a tree or eaten by a bear. I haven’t done the scientific research to prove this, but I know that something random will happen at some point in my life. This happened to me between the time I wrote this book and the time I edited it: One Tuesday I awoke to several messages left on my phone by my mother. You know something bad has happened when you see three messages from your mom at seven in the morning. When I called her back she gave me the bad news. My brother Kashi had died.
This was a shock to my family and me and it hit us all very hard. I rushed to my mom’s house, where he lived with his seven-year-old son, and found him passed away. This was the hardest thing I had ever experienced in my life, and as we sat in my mother’s living room discussing the funeral options I decided to repeat what I had done so much of in my life: travel. I had shows to do in Chicago that weekend; I figured I should stick to my work, since there wasn’t much else for me to do. I told my friends I had read once that Brett Favre played in a football game when his father died, and that my brother would have wanted me to stick to my schedule and do the shows.
As I got closer to Thursday, when I would be traveling, I began to have my doubts. Still, I got on a plane from Los Angeles and flew to Chicago. It wasn’t until I landed on the tarmac in Chicago at noon on the day of a show that it hit me: How the hell was I going to be funny when my brother had just died? Why was I running, and what was I running from? I guess it was a coping mechanism, trying to convince myself that life goes on and not allowing myself to mourn. I got off the plane, called my manager and asked him to get me out of the gigs. I was coming home. That weekend I was able to be home with my family and I was so happy to be there and mourn and hug and cry and give myself a chance to feel the pain. In the weeks that followed, I leaned on the love of friends, family, and strangers to get me through this hard time, and I also was surprised to see how many other people had lost loved ones unexpectedly. My wife sent me an article claiming that a twenty-second hug has healing qualities, and so I went around hugging people for as long as I could. It took a tragedy like this to remind me how much love is in the world and how petty we can become if we forget it.
So I say to you people who are reading this book, be nice to one another. Why hate someone simply because he has a different belief or different skin color? It’s amazing how far out of their way people will go to differentiate themselves from their enemies, when the reality is that we have so much in common. For example, did you know that both Jews and Palestinians eat falafel? Did you know that both Muslims and Christians believe in Jesus? Did you know that Iranians, like Americans, enjoy pizza? If we could stop fighting one another because of color and race and religion, and concentrate on who the real enemies are . . . our children! If we could just get them to go to sleep!
What I’m saying is if we could all concentrate on the things we have in common and celebrate those things together, then we might succeed in making the world a better place and looking up, so that the next time a tree is about to fall on us we could zigzag and survive. Only to later be eaten by a bear.