Land of Enchantment

New Mexico. Land of Enchantment.

This place has been calling to me for many reasons, depending on the year. For years. I neglected the calling. I was determined to do whatever it took to not do anything. Determined to prove right my despair and sadness and worthlessness I had felt. I didn't want to take a chance, for anything, for any reason. I wanted to stay safe in that horrible comfort zone of despondency. I felt like I belonged in that dreadful palace. I think judging by my previous entries here that I don't need to delve any further into that mad world my mind and soul and heart inhabited. Let's just say that it was fucking awful, and New Mexico was a dim beacon of hope. And I had to subconsciously avoid it.

Then something happened. I don't really know what it was. A combination of support and opportunity. An elixir of hope and madness. A little cake mix of a shed overcoat, tattered and ugly, and a new found ambition to BE more than I was, frosted with the fear of becoming what I was slowly turning into. I don't know what made me come here. What came over me to abandon my ills and sell what i could, borrow what was offered and drive 6 short miles from the only home I'd known toward a place completely unknown, with no true chance even presented to me. It was a sensation beyond hope, jut past it's influence. Something even more pure and divine.

Knowingness. Knowingness that it is time. It is finally time to DO something. THE time to do it. I wasn't ready in the years before. I was too hurt, too scared, and ironically maybe a little too cocky. But things fell together too perfectly. My road was open, even though maybe it always has been, maybe just covered by a flimsy thicket or copse of ancient oaks. Leaving wasn't as hard as I thought. The hugs and kisses from my family. The confident and proud smiles that i never saw from people I always needed them from. The proud handshake and shoulder slap. Even the teary eyed kiss goodbye from the best girl for me I've ever know, and I've known a few seemed more encouraging than smothering.

This was time, and I went. 3 suitcases, 2 backpacks and my aging computer packed full my aging arthritic  car. I drove and drank coffee, smoked cigarettes and listened to Pandora. I'd pull over for gut bomb gas station food and Life Waters. The miles passed faster than the time. I called my girlfriend, Nicki, and talked to her, crying under my sunglasses at her pride and support of me. I didn't know I'd miss her as much as I did, but I knew how much I love her. Ponderosa tree filled mountain vista morphed into smaller ones densely dotted with Pinons.

I arrived and unpacked at the house of an Emmy nominated sound mixer who would be shacking me up, if you can call living in a mansion in the hills of Sante Fe being shacked up. This was my home, and when I was home I talked to him about his incredible adventures during his career. Listened while he reminisced about old Hollywood, and while he grumbled about how things have changed. We talked about just about everything in the 2 months I've been here. I read his scripts and gave him notes, and he tells me everyday that he will read mine. But most of my nights here have found me lost and sad, alone on the bed I can't fall asleep on in a room that I can't write in. It's a beautiful house and the man who let me stay there has become a good friend, but it isn't home. These feelings are overwhelming when I don't have work, pushed and chased by worries of money and bills and my life back home; my real home.

I have worked in the movie business. I did it. It has been incredible and I know this is what I want to do, just not in the way of work I've done out here. This time has also sort of seemed to have acted like vision quest to me, because as wonderful and eye opening as it has been, it has been very very hard. It made me see things in a new light, and crap open the hard shell covering my soul. Funny as it also may sound, I even smoked some weed for the first time in ages and that gave me more insight than anything, including therapy and meditation. I have lived an unfulfilled life not because I was working in the movies. I have been living an unfulfilled life because I haven't been doing anything to make it fulfilling. It has been my choices as much as my circumstance. I have dwelled on my unhappiness and everything that I wasn't happy about myself with, tricking my mind into creating this unhealthy world to hide away inside.

The past two months have been the best two months of my life. The hardship is far outweighed by the experiences I have had, and the alone time to ponder things. I don't need to be here to do what i really want to do, and nothing is stopping me from doing all of the things I have ever dreamed of aside from how hard I am willing to try to make those a reality for me. And I know i can do it.

Lots of change is coming, and I am very grateful for my time here. But it is time to forge ahead, and create the change I need to change into the person I truly am and want to be. Thank you New Mexico. Thank you film industry and thank you painful loneliness. it opened my eyes to my own self destructive patterns and ugliness, and it is time, a joyous time, to live my life to my highest and most blissful potential. I am proud of myself, truly proud without a thought of arrogance. I did it. Now it's time to do my own.

Geode

What else can you do once you've given all you have to give? A broken heart is not symbolic, or rhetoric or metaphorical as anyone who has truly been broken hearted can attest. It's a deep, physical and emotional pain. Pain that inspires the saddest and happiest of times to pendulum thoughts from joy to fury. Tears run to the lips and power the muffled screams of frustration and loss into a tear soaked pillow. A smile makes room for quivering sobs and boats of distraught breathlessness. The ache, the actually void in your chest tightens and tugs and convinces you that you will die, that you deserve to die because the most important person to you in the world is gone, and you will never be the same.

That which I gave is gone. She took it, along with the joy of my soul. My heart has been torn from my body and discarded and I knew it could happen yet she had so much potential to offer, under all her fear and pain and anger that i thought I was strong and good enough to strip from her like a tattered shawl. A shawl? No. A plate of iron, encasing her physical and metaphysical body, attached to every nerve ending and tendon. Permanent save for the devastatingly painful removal that if done right, slowly, would not hurt as much but would hurt for much longer. To look into her eyes and see the dim fire of her spirit ferociously attacked by the demons of the hurt and ruin she lived through cracked my solidity and poured my own into her. All of it and it was fighting a good fight, making steps as one piece of heavy armor clanged to the ground with such conviction and weight it simply settled onto the earth rather than bang and spring around till gravity calmed it's freedom. These plates fell harder than gravities stern will, and fell in the smallest bits.

And so soon did I love her. So soon and so completely and relentlessly did I love her. She was good, but so hurt it hurt me, and she hurt me. I knew with all my heart that if I showed her what she meant to me and the earnesty of me wanting to help her that she'd allow herself to feel and show and embrace the love I felt from her towards me. When the walls came down the passion and love was almost overwhelming. Sadness is in reality, and those rare moments were unbroken geodes. The beauty of what could be with a little effort was so close, and so fucking apparent and real in in our hands but it never broke past what could be.

There will be a part two because I have so much to say but my heart can't take reliving it enough to finish right now.

Shitty entry #1

A sad day begins when the alarm chirps in your ear without giving you so much as a startle before you swing your legs over the side of your bed, in a dark room, and cry into your sleepy eyes onto your shaking hands. The day starts without hope on a bed worn to a slope because the only person who lays in it for more than an occasional night is myself, and the edge i lay on is the same edge I wake from every night.

Digging for change to afford a cup of coffee and most of the time not being able to. Brushing my teeth with an electronic toothbrush that no longer works because i can't afford the two batteries it needs to spin. Putting one leg at a time through jeans as old as the job I wear them for, catching my toes on the holes and flinching at the prospect of making them larger; winter is coming. Placing a meager lunch of baked chicken and an apple into a King Soopers bag I reuse till it tears apart, and reaching for the keys to a car that at any second could fall apart while I'm driving and maybe hurt me or someone else.

8 hours pass as they do, sometimes fast sometimes slow. Always sadly and always by the end of the day having succeeded in sucking me dry of every ounce of ambition and hope I have.

A drive home with a mind so given in to the concept of unhappiness the hour in traffic isn't remotely bothersome because it delays the moment I open my door. My door to an empty house that reflects my fuckitall attitude.

I've turned sour. I don't have a skip in my step. I don't have goals anymore. I don't care. The terrible reason behind this is so stupid, but I have been hurt by every single woman I have ever dated. Every fucking one of them.

I used to want to kids. Not anymore. I used to want to get married. Not anymore. I used to want a lot of things. Not so much anymore.

I'm over it. I'm pissed off and hurt and I don't even want to write. I thought it would help but all its doing is hurting more.

Tug

I remember a time when I used to write. A time when I would jot down any idea through words or quick scribbled drawings, and put them all in a box or folder I kept with the proud intention of one day, when I was on my way, taking them out and sorting through them all to make more ideas. Every idea, no matter how absurd or poorly worded or sketched was kept and treasured. In those days I cared. I believed, and knew with all my heart what my true calling was and I was excited for it. I just KNEW I could do it, because out of every small obsession and passion in my life this was the one, my creative motif, that has stuck and never left me. Like a stray cat that no matter the neglect you show it, or beat or chase away, it is always there, somewhere, waiting again for the day for you to care and love it again because that time changed it's life.

As the years have gone on, so have the contributions to my tattered accordion folder of almost every single catchable idea I've had since I started writing them down. But the yellowing pages of dream worlds past and heroes and stories of love and hope, of devastation and monsters and fantasy outnumber the fresh but crinkled notes of my yesterdays. It seems like my life is shrinking. My tears flood my passion for everything I enjoy away. I don't feel like it serves a purpose. It seems like my only audience is myself and I don't deserve it. Not anymore. Not after how I've neglected it.

And still I feel it. I feel this tug on my heart that I have a purpose. That all of this struggle and emotional armageddon has landblasted the rocky foundation for me to build the world I want for myself upon. This tugs at my soul. It pulls like a child wanting to go to the park and ride their dirty bicycle under the warm sun and singing birds would tug at your sleeve as you ready for work. I also remember the day when I tugged on my imagination in this way, coaxing it to come play with me.

And alone i sit in a cold condo typing slowly with saddened fingers on a laptop that like everything else I seem to own, is slowly and visibly breaking down. The people closest to me, including my therapist tell that my own arch enemy is myself. I am nemesis to my own happiness. I take each setback and failure and wave a filthy white flag, and almost always before I've even fought back. The red eyes of my nemesis stare down on my submissive stooped shoulders with confidence and hatred, Hatred for the world in which it can't affect and lust for the pain it can so easily afflict upon me.

So pity has been the water for my soul. It makes me feel like people care about me. When I am down, when I am at my most desperate and weak do people reach out. Then do they acknowledge me and my company. Pep talks keep me company, but it's a friend wearing the clothing of my disappointments, the rude neighbor who drives the car you sold him because you couldn't afford the payments. 

So alone I sit. Where do i find the strength to tug at the sleeve of everything I know I can be? What do I have to do? Never mind what I have to do, how?! How the fuck do I do it? 

All I've ever wanted is to be in love with a woman so madly in love with me we could stop the expansion of space and break the reaches of time with only a look into each others eyes and touch of our lips. All I've ever wanted was to have the time and freedom and success to turn my ideas into reality and show it to people, share it with them. To watch an audience member look to his girlfriend through the darkness of a theatre, slouching against his shoulder and wrapped around the arm that holds her and kiss her tear streaked cheek. I want to take people places, make them feel things and maybe awaken something inside them dying like it is with me. To have someone buy my art and find something in it to relate to or appreciate.

I want to be happy. I want to feel real hope, a sign that things will turn around if I just push a little harder. I want to keep my faith in my god and my spirituality because it has kept me alive when there was nothing in my mind else to live for. I want to share this abundance of love inside me, a love this world is parched for, with the people in my life, the world around me and leave something behind. I want to have legacy greater than one of unkept potential and wish-i-did memories. For today, I just want to stop crying, and hold someone that I know is out there for me close to my heart and feel my pain dissipate from her loving and healing touch for me, and fill her with my love, and for that moment however long or fleeting stop the world so I can catch my breath.

Where to begin?

Where to begin?

For not only the purpose of this blog, but the purpose of this writing and a question I struggle to answer every single day. Where do I begin? It's legitimate, because I have grown and learned without teaching of a mentor. My teachers have been my experiences, sadly. My parents forgot or never knew that a child needs to be cared for more than knowing what not to do or to simply be told "school is important, so you won't have to end up like me." I needed to know from someone who knew about how to go about the beginnings of things, other than to "roll with the punches" and "never give up." HOW DO I DO THINGS? HOW?!

I think that part of starting things is defined by the many, many ways you can go about it. Science and even religion tells us that by nature beginnings are frantic and delicate. That things may be in an order of chaos but there is a fragile harmony in that and should a slight variation happen than things would be different than they are, or could be. If you haven't noticed after reading the preceding entries, I have no self esteem, no courage for my own sake and live in perpetual fear of things I have no control over and many things that I do. You may have placed together that I am trying, and just barely being successful at NOT failing, which to me is grin inducing progress.

But I want more, I know I can do more, but where do I begin? How do I GO? I am so afraid at not being good enough to myself, and to others that I would rather not try. There is irony in that the people in my life believe in me, and most would love me the same rise or fall. These same people want to help me, but I am so afraid. I keep making excuses to procrastinate everything, literally everything. From washing dishes to writing a script to drawing. My inner dialog of fear driven desperation tells me all I need is time to sort my thoughts and time to be bored. I know I do, doesn't everyone at least want time to gaher themselves and have time to find themselves?

Like most things for me, I need to make time to change things. I need to find a way to motivate myself for the sake of myself to start doing what i believe with every bit of energy of my being what I was created to do. Created to be, because what I am is good enough. It is as I believe everyone is, absolutely unique and irreplaceable. I have to begin with myself. I know that now. I have to begin by being who I am, accepting it and embracing it and the possibilities of being that person. As I wrote that last sentence I felt guilty. Guilty for giving myself praise or attention away from others. What is wrong with being happy with who you are? I don't know that answer...

To begin at the beginning of what I want to do, which is the start point of every decision I make, which is myself. A broken car will get you nowhere, and a broken being is just as helpless.

Puppy I called Hope

Today is like most Sundays. I wake up grudgingly, wanting not to face my reality. Wanting to live among my kaleidoscope dreaming and be at peace within my imagination. My legs swing over the edge of my mattress and away from nurturing sheets and plant sadly on the small bits of laundry I have yet to do. Another chore. Another neglected duty. It seems like I would rather mope about the things I need to do than do them. This is also the case for the things I want to do.

I have a full case of paintballs near my gearbag, as well as an open invitation to play with former pro players and do so for free. I have a caddy full of brushes and paints and a number of canvases and wooden planks to create images with. I have a large binder full of sketches and written ideas and dialog and character concepts and a computer I bought for the purpose of writing and editing. Everything is there but me. I am someplace else, hiding away amidst the rubble of the life I've lives and the skins I've shed. Hiding away because this is yet another change and the most painfully recognized change of my life. I am finally being me, finally becoming myself and that fear comes out a womb of anger and sadness and resentment that I had to discover this person, at such a late age. That I had to be locked up in a spiritual sarcophagus because ME wasn't needed by people, that I wasn't important. I was tricked into this admonishment. As tearful as I am that I am a disenspirited body while my fragile real me is hiding from the world I was in and partially created, I am happy that I am at least healing enough to have the courage to bring myself about, and thankful that I have had the help in getting here.

A cup of coffee warms away the fogs of war in my mind and body. For as routine feeling as this Sunday morning has been, it has a new tagalong. A new sensation with it; a wonderful stray emotion that thought it would try me out. An emotion that should never be homeless, but maybe this emotion was mine and ran away because I neglected it, and like a loyal companion came back when tail wagging, loving as ever and not only forgiving but accepting. The wagging tail of Hope.

It has a strange way of making things seem achievable. Hope has a way of making you smile when things seem desolate. Hope is the little puppy that never ages, that never dies, and never stops loving you. So today on my unkept patio I was inspired to do something, and this blog was the first thing. I had to write about this, because it wasn't expected, and it was so pleasant to wake to Hope at my bedside rather than will it and wish it to return to me after half the day has gone, just to get me through the rest of the day.

I have all these tools and blessings, these gifts and they sit alone in overgrown foliage, dusted with neglect and dirty but like all blessing still pristine if given the proper cleaning and use. The only thing missing from these tools doing their job is the mechanic to bring about their potential, and that is me. The real me. These tools are mine, custom made for my talents and waiting for me.

Now maybe Hope can help Me get the courage and trust to return from hiding and be the glorious, complete person I was born to be. To be the best person I can, and with Hope and these tools that I've never lost but need to hone, to be guiltlessly happy.

Breakfast nooks

The best thing of working the job I have is the amount of time I have to be able to daydream. I can spend hours of my day set adrift on memories or captivated by my imagination, but I can do nothing but jot down sloppy hasty notes and sketches.

I always window shop my life. I dream about how things would be if they were exactly how I had always envisioned them, how I would be and how my life would be down to the daily routine I had. Some details have changed throughout the years, but a few principle players have always been in tis story aside from myself and my romanticism; children and a wife.

Each day I imagine, in my perfect life, before any other finicky detail, I start my day by waking my sleeping wife with a kiss, and open my door to see my two kids (or three? this detail changes a lot) running down the hardwood floors, slipping with their little white-socked pajama feet at a full sprint to me. I wrap my arms around all of them and smile, telling them what i just told their mother,

Good morning, I love you so much!


The rest of the life I always thought I'd have involves running through my extensive country property with my dog, following that with a short swim. I'd go inside to the smell of breakfast and crayons as my wife busily gets our kids homework and supplies into their Dora the Explora and Yu-Gi-Oh backpacks. I walk to the sunlit breakfast nook with a steaming cup of coffee and watch adoringly at this daily routine that I'm sure so many people take for granted. My wife would catch my eyes and give that smile that means "I'm glad you love this as much as I do, but for the love of god I'd be even more glad if you'd help me find their shoes" and pull her tangled morning hair, beautiful hair away from her eyes as she reaches down to kiss them all before shooing them to where I sat to do the same.

Then she and I would kiss and make love in the shower, sharing an understanding, a passionate symbiosis between and premeditated longing that we both knew exclusively would occur as soon as we went about our professional lives. Would she have a job, would she not? In my ideal life that decision would be one she made out of choice not necessity. I'd work and make more than enough to support my family. It's true that when daydreaming or dreaming you associate the faces of people you've met or more frequently, know, to the roles of characters in your dreams. My wife has obviously had many faces, as I've grown and my relationships and fantasies have changed, but her energy has always been constant. The love that radiates from her.

My job would be that of a Renaissance Man, doing all the things I have passion for and working tirelessly at becoming adept and recognized in all. From painting, to writing novels and scripts, to directing and producing films to taking photographs and working with preservation. The idea of money has never come up, only comfort. A nice stone and wood house in the mountains laced around with trees, built into the architecture of the landscape and within a short bike ride to a lake. My ideal life is successful by the joy of the people I share it with and the joy of doing the things I was gifted with, not of how many things I had or how absurdly wealthy I was. In my life I'd be wealthy and successful by most standards, but my pride would be in my family, friends, and the work I did, not the monetary compensation for my creativity.

And I close this daydream by clocking out my time sheet, and trying to stay composed at least until I can get onto the highway. I could have had my dream earlier, but I wasn't taught so many things, and taught so many things wrong. I didn't even have an idea of who I was and that I even mattered until very recently. I can still make it happen, and I will. That thought while I drive home helps drive away those helplessly sad tears.