Tibetan Fodder
It’s Tibetan funeral tradition to break the back of a dead body, tie it into a tiny little package and lay it out as food for buzzards. Sounds like my whole life. Lauren just made a whole list of things she needs to accomplish, and it’s to her credit. I know that I have a thousand things I need to do, but if I ever tried to sit down and make that list, I’d never finish. So in typical Dave fashion, I’ll keep the important things amorphous so it’s not as bad when I don’t get them done. At least it’s some consolation that if I did make that list, I could always add to it “be a groin grabbingly lazy procrastinator “ and put a nice big check next to it.
It’s now a routine. Here it is. I listen to a song that makes me feel inspired. I come home, scribble out a couple lyrics I find amusing, bang out a couple chords on my piano before giving up and playing “Let It Be” (in the case of my guitar, I strum a couple chords before giving up and playing “Blackbird”) I read something that makes me bubble with ideas. I come home and start writing some dialogue, but as soon as its similarity to a poor man’s David Mamet scene becomes apparent, I delete it and turn on my X-Box 360. I hear about an audition that sounds like fun. I get excited, and then learn more about the project and realize it’s a piece of shit. Strewn between these moments, I work at CPK and refuse to wash my dishes. This is my entire life. Less and less do I feel like I’m OWED a successful career (a feeling that came from my do-no-wrong days of high school) and more and more I feel like it’s hopeless to have hope.
Because here’s the thing... Not only do I have a shitty work ethic, requiring all my ducks to be in unrealistically straight row before I even ATTEMPT anything difficult , but the more time I spend in this town and the longer I engage in tawdry professional intercourse with this cold, limp body called Hollywood, the more I learn that a GOOD work ethic, even if I had it, wont guarantee me anything. There are a thousand untalented dickwads with their fingers up their noses/ases and the spotlight on them as they poke around, while at the same time there are a million talented folks out there who are denied any semblance of attention. So it isn’t like I have much justification for really giving it my all. Right now I don’t know that I am, and it isn’t that I don’t want to do this... it’s just that it’s so numbing. It really is.
But I’m not worried. I’m going to continue to do things the way I always do and in 15 years I’ll either be a success or a failure, and either way I’ll forget I ever thought enough about the subject to write any of this drivel down. It would be nice though to imagine in 15 years being able to comfortably buy my son his first car because I’m a success instead of imagining in 15 years finding strange and exotic daily nutrients from eating newspaper because I’m a failure.
Today I was thinking about Garret Hodge. I haven’t seen or spoken to him in over 10 years, but I miss him. I remember the last time I saw him, and I was flooded with the feeling that I wish I could have told him then that he was going to die in his early 20’s. It would have meant so much to just say “Listen, you are a sweet, wonderful guy, but you don’t have all the time you think you do. Change the world in these next ten years, do all you ever dreamed of, because you aren’t going to live past 24.” But then I started thinking about it, and I realized I wouldn’t want that information myself. I wouldn’t want to know. Of course I wouldn’t want to know. No one WANTS to know. But it’s just strange to think about the situation from each perspective. On one hand, I wish I could tell that tall, goofball guy that he was going to drown in a pool as soon as his early adulthood began, but on the other I completely understand how terrible it would be to know that about yourself.
Personally I think my heart is going to give out. I can feel it. It doesn’t hurt, but I can feel it beating sometimes, and maybe it’s my imagination (or my Burger King addiction), but sometimes I think it’s taking more energy than it should. I should get it checked out, but of course that only exists on my unmade checklist of things I need to do.
But however I die, whenever I die, I don’t think I’ll feel like a failure in the moment just before. I don’t think I’ll wish I accomplished more than I did. Because that isn’t like me. I mean, I don’t DO anything, but I never feel that bad about it at the end of the day. As long as I made someone laugh today, that’s enough. It really is. And I hope no one sobs at my funeral about my “untapped potential”, because my potential was anything but “untapped”. It’s been tapped, shaken, tossed, squeezed and kicked. The fact that it remained POTENTIAL was only because I decided there were games of Halo that weren’t going to play themselves. It remained POTENTIAL because I got too much of a kick out of being a slacker. Believe me folks, it was tapped. I just wasn’t broken.
It’s now a routine. Here it is. I listen to a song that makes me feel inspired. I come home, scribble out a couple lyrics I find amusing, bang out a couple chords on my piano before giving up and playing “Let It Be” (in the case of my guitar, I strum a couple chords before giving up and playing “Blackbird”) I read something that makes me bubble with ideas. I come home and start writing some dialogue, but as soon as its similarity to a poor man’s David Mamet scene becomes apparent, I delete it and turn on my X-Box 360. I hear about an audition that sounds like fun. I get excited, and then learn more about the project and realize it’s a piece of shit. Strewn between these moments, I work at CPK and refuse to wash my dishes. This is my entire life. Less and less do I feel like I’m OWED a successful career (a feeling that came from my do-no-wrong days of high school) and more and more I feel like it’s hopeless to have hope.
Because here’s the thing... Not only do I have a shitty work ethic, requiring all my ducks to be in unrealistically straight row before I even ATTEMPT anything difficult , but the more time I spend in this town and the longer I engage in tawdry professional intercourse with this cold, limp body called Hollywood, the more I learn that a GOOD work ethic, even if I had it, wont guarantee me anything. There are a thousand untalented dickwads with their fingers up their noses/ases and the spotlight on them as they poke around, while at the same time there are a million talented folks out there who are denied any semblance of attention. So it isn’t like I have much justification for really giving it my all. Right now I don’t know that I am, and it isn’t that I don’t want to do this... it’s just that it’s so numbing. It really is.
But I’m not worried. I’m going to continue to do things the way I always do and in 15 years I’ll either be a success or a failure, and either way I’ll forget I ever thought enough about the subject to write any of this drivel down. It would be nice though to imagine in 15 years being able to comfortably buy my son his first car because I’m a success instead of imagining in 15 years finding strange and exotic daily nutrients from eating newspaper because I’m a failure.
Today I was thinking about Garret Hodge. I haven’t seen or spoken to him in over 10 years, but I miss him. I remember the last time I saw him, and I was flooded with the feeling that I wish I could have told him then that he was going to die in his early 20’s. It would have meant so much to just say “Listen, you are a sweet, wonderful guy, but you don’t have all the time you think you do. Change the world in these next ten years, do all you ever dreamed of, because you aren’t going to live past 24.” But then I started thinking about it, and I realized I wouldn’t want that information myself. I wouldn’t want to know. Of course I wouldn’t want to know. No one WANTS to know. But it’s just strange to think about the situation from each perspective. On one hand, I wish I could tell that tall, goofball guy that he was going to drown in a pool as soon as his early adulthood began, but on the other I completely understand how terrible it would be to know that about yourself.
Personally I think my heart is going to give out. I can feel it. It doesn’t hurt, but I can feel it beating sometimes, and maybe it’s my imagination (or my Burger King addiction), but sometimes I think it’s taking more energy than it should. I should get it checked out, but of course that only exists on my unmade checklist of things I need to do.
But however I die, whenever I die, I don’t think I’ll feel like a failure in the moment just before. I don’t think I’ll wish I accomplished more than I did. Because that isn’t like me. I mean, I don’t DO anything, but I never feel that bad about it at the end of the day. As long as I made someone laugh today, that’s enough. It really is. And I hope no one sobs at my funeral about my “untapped potential”, because my potential was anything but “untapped”. It’s been tapped, shaken, tossed, squeezed and kicked. The fact that it remained POTENTIAL was only because I decided there were games of Halo that weren’t going to play themselves. It remained POTENTIAL because I got too much of a kick out of being a slacker. Believe me folks, it was tapped. I just wasn’t broken.