Why am I in Los Angeles?
This is a good question, and like all good questions it deserves a good answer. Instead, I’m going to give this answer:
I’m following my dream.
Just writing a sentence like that makes me want to gouge out my eyeballs and puke blood. It’s a gruesome scene, true, made moreso because odds are there’s milli vanilli song on in the background as i gouge/puke, maybe not. Why that kind of scene? Because the sentence is that kind of saccharine. Cavities are caused by sentences like that. Do you like rainbows? ice cream? puppy dogs? Good for you. Why is it so much easier to write about eyeball-gouging than dream-following?
First, and foremost a clarification. It’s not my dream dream.
Not in the sense this is something that pops into my head when I fall asleep. I don’t have those kinds of dreams. Well, not good ones. My dreams are either weird, or terrifying. If any of my nocturnal dreams came true I would probably have to re-evaluate the perks of being alive.
In last night’s dream I caught some kid videotaping me. I chased him down and forced him to give me the tape. I played it back, and it turns out that he, and hundreds of other people, had been taping my life all along. Maybe I’ve been more freaked out upon waking, but I can’t think of when.
Movies were the activity that brought my family together, back when I had a functioning 4-piece family. We still go see them, but in pairs. It’s weird to think that a 4 piece that you took for granted will never exist that way again. Not even as a three piece. Kinda like the Beatles, only not separated by death, just separated by the fact that being someone’s family member is just like everything else, impermanent.
Writing is the thing that I think I do best. My final year in college someone pointed out that there are people that write movies for a living. On some level, I suppose I knew it. I just never thought I could be one of those people. It seems obvious, but it was news. I also didn’t understand the college “credit” system until my third year. I just thought you took classes for four years and then you went home. The leading film school had a summer program, I checked it out, and decided that this is what I want to do.
What I felt I needed to do first was help out a family member with his dream. That turned out to be the wrong decision. Most wrong decisions take moments. This one took five years. Actually, I guess it didn’t. It wasn’t a decision that took five years to make, it was just a wrong decision that I made every minute for five years. Sorta like that game: A minute to learn, a lifetime to look back and think: FML.
Some days I think I learned a lot of valuable lessons in those five years. Some days I think I learned one lesson: Don’t spend five years helping anyone out with anything. They’ll never appreciate it, and you’ll end up hating yourself (if you’re lucky. If you’re unlucky, you’ll spread that hatred around a little bit.) It’s sort of a crap lesson to learn. I’d’ve been better off learning something cool like patience or Karate.
They say that hindsight is 20/20, but I think that’s actually not true. When I look back on my life up until this point it doesn’t make any sense whatsoever. Maybe I can see the senselessness of it clearly, when at the time it seemed purposeful. Hmm. Could that be what that saying really means?
“When you look back on things, you’ll see that it never made the sense you thought it did. You’ll see it clearly, with 20/20 vision.”
I hope not. If that’s the case they need to stop saying it because that ish is bleak.
So. I’m here in Los Angeles. My goal is to be a successful filmmaker. It seems like everyone else here has the same goal, but I think that’s okay. I have a plan. Panama!*
*Everytime I end a sentence with “a plan” I think of that thing where if you write
a man a plan a canal, panama
it reads the same backwards and forward.
Whoever first discovered that must’ve felt pretty cool, but how do you follow it up? Probably a desk job somewhere. That sucks.