A few months ago, the great writer and Substack sage Sarah Fay asked me if I’d be game to participate in a series called 'Five Things I’ve Learned About America.’

The basic deal was that I’d record lil videos sharing things I’d learned.

Past guests included former US president Beto O’Rourke, inventor of rock and roll Alan Light, and multi-hyphenate Dennis Rodman.

I said sure and proceeded to record some loud shitty videos outside of a coffee shop.

Those were not up to snuff, so I got home and recorded a new set.

Somehow, this next batch passed what must have been a very low bar version of “the smell test” so I sent them in.

Then, I started to panic. In one of the videos, I’d shared a story about pooping my pants.

I messaged Sarah immediately:

If you have to send a message like “maybe the poop your pants one was not the right tone,” then yes Alex it probably wasn’t the right tone.

The next week was a living nightmare as I imagined Beto and the Five Things team laughing at how stupid I was.

My dreams of striking down the whole ‘must be born in the US to be president’ rule and becoming president were falling apart before my very eyes.

There I’d be, hand to god’s bible, swearing myself in when someone would scream, “Wait! Take a look at this! And then they’d play the poop your pants video and everyone would boo like it was WWE and my VP candidate who I thought was genuinely going to be a good friend knees me in the stomach, does a Stone Cold Stunner on me, and becomes president.

Hell even Stone Cold Steve Austin himself would be there and everyone would look at him like “can the VP use your move” and Stone Cold would crack open a can of Budweiser and say yea and then chug it while everyone clapped and clapped.

Anyways, that’s all done now. Sarah reached out and said the Five Things team loved the videos, poop story and all.

Was that true, or did everyone feel bad for me and decide that heaping any more negativity on someone so broken they’d send a poop story video was just not right? You tell me, viewer, you tell me.

The videos are below.

Subscribe to Five Things I've Learned for more Five Things learnings and check out their archive (not paywalled) on their website to read what others have shared (except Dennis Rodman’s which was deemed NSFA).

Asheville's Alex Dobrenko shares Five Things He's Learned about America.

“I am a writer, actor, comedian, guy. I moved to America when I was 7, from Ukraine. I was born in the USSR, and then it switched to Ukraine. We left in 1994 and came to America as refugees, as Jewish refugees.”

1. Sleepovers are completely normal.

“My parents did not understand them, and they could not comprehend why I would want to go sleep on someone else’s floor when we had a bed at our apartment. They actually thought that me doing that indicated that we didn’t have a bed for me at home.”

2. We take a lot for granted.

“By moving here, my parents gave me the gift of not being able to understand them, and I think that is a gift that all Americans have, mostly. We have the gift of not knowing what it’s like in other places.”

3. America is not perfect.

“There is a lot of darkness, there is a lot of issues, for sure. But, I don’t think it’s as bad as in Russia, as in other places, many other places… Even if this is all a lie, I think it’s a better lie to believe in than any other.”

4. We are more similar than we think (this is the poop one).

“I also think that we focus a lot on how different we are here, where actually we’re all very much the same, more or less.”

5. America is a land of opportunity

“There is so much opportunity here to disappoint your parents. My parents wanted me to be a lawyer or doctor, they would have settled for a professor. But I decided to go be an entertainer in LA, a writer, and I got paid to write the weirdest stuff. That’s not possible in other countries the way it is here.”

Comments

1. Pooped your pants stories - we all got em - let’s hear yours.

2. What have you learned about America?

5. Hi and TGIF (thank god its friday)

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