Who Is Out There?

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No matter who you are, tell me to write more.  Don’t let me stop.  Please.  Please tell me you want something, NEED something good or wonderful or excellent.

Just as it would take an incurable Scrooge not to be somewhat cheered by the holiday season, it would take an irredeemable jackass not to be a little depressed.  I’m sure more than one person reading this finds the persistent warmth and whathaveyou in the air tinged with bitter chill and melancholy.

As for me, these days I’ve been quoting The Royal Tenenbaums much more than usual.  Chiefly: “It’s been a rough year, dad.”

Because it has.

I haven’t updated this blog in a month, and it’s been since the spring that I wrote anything really related to my life.  It’s all been Doctor Who and Bollywood.  Pop culture is the dominant lens through which I experience the world, and it’s easier to submit to that queer little hint of autism, that all-devouring media fixation, than to engage with a larger reality.  Mind you: the soundtracks we create for ourselves, the feelings we share by revisiting old favorite works, and the joy of discovering new pop art are all incredibly important.  But there’s a point where it’s really deflection.  And it’s possible I’ve been less than honest with myself for months now.

The real pigfucker of being a prolific and generally talented artist is that as long as you maintain a decent output, you don’t really NEED to be honest with the world, or, if you really place stock in your gifts, yourself.  So you carry on and you make things and you hope to GOD that you’re not embarrassing yourself, but you’re skating pretty smoothly until you have trouble making something.

Then the shit hits the fan and you have to face your own problems.  Or maybe you don’t, and then the shit not only hits the fan but clogs it up.

I have a crippling self-doubt that has prevented me from achieving all I’d like to as a professional artist for the better part of a decade.  I wrote a screenplay in August, which was a surprise to no one as much as it was to me.  I’ve written probably 50 first acts over the last, say, 9 years.  I never finished a goddamn one until August.  And that was because I was so ashamed at not having done so sooner.  Or maybe it was because I got out of my own way, or because I had a really good idea.  The point is, I don’t know, and that’s really worrying.  I don’t know why I do much of anything.  The old Peter Sellers bit about there not being anything behind the mask has been a fear of mine since I learned how to imitate people.  Of course, he was a genius and I’m just a person people tend to SAY is a genius, which has filled me with an absolutely appalling amount of shame.  Oh, if only he applied himself, I hear a lot.  If you just TRIED, you could do SO MUCH.  So of course I shut down and things don’t get done.  Conversely, if I hear no encouragement at all I feel a bit worthless.

In fact, it takes every bit of strength I have not to simply chuck out the words I’ve already written in this article because I feel like they’re not up to my standards, not finely honed, not well-turned.  Of course, then I reprimand myself.  I’ve been putting off writing on this blog for a month.  But does self-absorption like this even merit a read by anyone but myself?  Isn’t this mostly a website for tits and ass?

This is what it’s like in my head.  An endless series of contradictory spirals that overwhelm me into inaction.  It’s all very sexy, I’m sure.

My father’s been in poor health for months now.  Internal bleeding, horrible shit.  Not out of bed much.  I haven’t seen him as much as I’d like, largely because I’ve always been embarrassed at not being some massively successful actor/writer/thing, and then I get embarrassed that THAT’s keeping me from seeing my father, so etc., etc.

(Side note: someone please tell me if this represents some kind of pathology that is genuinely poisonous, because it occurs to me that it may be)

I’m the only one of my brothers who lives in proximity to my parents, and I’ve spent the last couple of years terrified that I’m going to lose my father.  Me, the son who was most LIKE my father.  The son whose mother and father sacrificed so much to put through school.  Every bad decision I’ve ever made, whether it was blowing through money or drinking too much or you fucking name it, has been rooted in the self-destructive impulse that just screams, “You think your kid is a genius?  Well, I’ll show YOU.”

Marrying Rosebud has been the one decision that I can say, unequivocally, was correct and good and right and makes me consistently happy.

Anyway, this summer it all came to a head.  My dad was in physical therapy for months.  Weak, fucked up and broken.  I visited in the summer, and I found that Shakespeare’s prophecy about old age bringing a “second childishness” was more than poetry.  I helped my father, a vast and round gentleman, out of his hospital bed and for the first time I understood what it meant to hear bones rattle.  His arm jangled like a bag of dice.  I had to help him to the bathroom, pull his pants down for him and excuse myself while he relieved himself.  I then had to come back in, pull his pants back up his gout-ridden legs and help him back to bed.  He was helpless.

None of this was, let’s say, “gross” to me.  I didn’t mind, really.  Once you start to see sex as more than two bodies fertilizing, you start to see the body less as a place of forbidden delights, and more as a place of simple function and, when the body fails, dysfunction.  Any and all magic is in the mind.  The body itself, miraculous as it is in construction, is not something to be feared, and once you move past sex you begin to understand that excretion, rot, atrophy, the black inner workings of the thing, are all just functions, calculations of the most basic kind.  What matters is what you do with the body, how it makes you and those you welcome into your intimacy feel.

At any rate, seeing this was dismaying, seeing a God laid low.  More heartbreaking was the fact that my mother is entering her retirement with dad at a time when he may never have been in worse or more fragile health.  Her mother, 94 at this point if I’m not mistaken, is on a shaky ground, too.  Her aunt kicked off in the early fall.  My mother remains among the most vivacious, brilliant individuals I know, and only recently have I noticed that she stopped dying her hair.  She’s silver all over, and slower.  Still goes to the gym, which impresses me greatly.

A friend of mine died recently.  Breast cancer.  We were not exceptionally close, but we delighted in each other’s company whenever we were so lucky.  Everyone at the memorial looked so YOUNG, so fetchingly attired.

So mortality is a part of my life now.  So what do I do with this knowledge?  Do I let it terrify me the more?  Do I turn this terror of losing everyone into an urge to MAKE SOMETHING?  Do I let these influences circle each other until doing nothing seems like it will at least make the noise stop?

I don’t know.  I want to believe I have the talent and strength of character to do something useful, or at least beautiful.  But I don’t know if I can.

I think I will.

I want to believe that the proper response to depression and confusion is the creation and propogation of beauty.  I want to think that my art matters.

Maybe this is a distress signal, blinking like a slow strobe in the blackness of the ocean floor.

Who else is out there?

Tell me what you want and I’ll try to answer it with everything I have to give.