Decompression...

A couple days ago, 2 to be exact, I parted ways with the children. The same children I've been going on about for some 8 odd months now. Kim and Val. They're finished this time, with a hard period after finished. The feeling now, in my personal camp after the re-write is that if I can't communicate what I'm trying to communicate about love and life and the choices we make in between and the consequences of those choices in 8 solid months, then this one isn't going to be the one that goes. Of course, add to that the quip that for every rule made in this town, there are dozens others to refute it, like some of the greatest films to ever be made taking years in the development pipeline, sometimes all you're left with is a giant creative clusterfuck. Of course, this one isn't quite in the pipeline yet. Yet.

So I turned it in on Tuesday, after something like a 28 hour home stretch binge. And before the 28 hours, there were literally thousands before it. Probably in the low thousands, but still, that's a lot of days, a lot of hours, a lot of minutes. On Wednesday, I woke up with nothing to do. I wasn't working. I wasn't going to the gym until 7, so I started lurking around my apartment, immediately decided to clean. And we're not just talking a random straighten/Fantastic/vaccum job. It meant first picking up the 9, count 'em 9 empty gallons of Crystal Geyser surrounding my computer. It meant dusting the coves and corners I haven't touched in months, years. It meant straightening clothes. It meant going out and buying vitamins, changing wireless plans, updating my calendar, shuffling bank accounts, making phone calls I've been putting off, making plans I've been putting off, and reaching out, actually reaching out. When I sit back and look at the day, it's staggering, this feeling, actually putting my feet back on the ground. Obsession can do that. If there's anything I've recently come to accept about myself, it's exactly that, I'm highly obsessive. Not the development, or the realization, just the full realization.

Today, I go to work, dinner afterwards. Tomorrow, I have a dinner. Saturday two parties. Sunday two more. Monday dinner. Tuesday Dinner, Thursday dinner. And between that, I'm teaching and learning to dance, really dance. Then I go back home for the holidays. And my immediate future is thoroughly booked. And that's good. And I'm going to take this time and let it sink, the work I've done, the direction I'm headed. And sometime at the beginning of January, things are going to slow, and some new obsession is going to take over, and we'll start in again. Because this is the cycle, likely for the rest of my life.

I don't really have any expectations, I think I've already burned through them all. Hell, I've been toting this thing since March, and it got some decent reviews in June, and I got signed in late August and now it's December and it's nothing like March and only a fragment of what it was in August. It buries its past, no doubt about it. And it buries anything I've done in the past, no doubt about it. And now it's out to a few of my insiders, and hopefully will be championed by my management, and hopefully it brings adventure to this life of mine.

I used to have this thing, this thing where I would finish a script and I was working 5-6 nights a week waiting tables and really grinding it out every day of my life. And when I would finish a script, I would think of its limitless possibilities and of how it could rescue me from the life I was living. I'd think of how it could transport me into some entirely new stratosphere of life. And that was a lot of pressure to lay down - hopes that something so fickle could be so saving. I don't envy the parts of my past that behaved that way. I think it's all part of the process, growing up in both realms...life and art.

Any number of things are about to happen. Either the team behind me loves it and they take it out and the town goes nuts for it and it gets bought and made and makes international stars out of everyone involved, or they tell me I wasted my time, and theirs, and that that be all-end all trip I'm constantly threatening -- touring the globe, becoming a soldier of fortune -- they'll tell me there's no time like the present. I don't know. The only thing I know, the only thing I can control is that I told my story, and it's shaped, and buffed and it's out. And now it's going to get read. And this is the important part...my happiness no longer hinges on how the world consumes my creative endeavors. And I'm not just saying that to say it. Maybe that's just the next step in the journey of self-obsession. I don't know when it happened, but it did, this shift, and it's welcome to stay.