Dispatches from the Island of Misfit Toys

Today was my 44th birthday. Having not written here for nearly a year, it seemed as likely an event to warrant climbing back into the blog saddle as any.

It wasn’t a splendid day. In fact, without sounding too emo, I considered suicide more seriously tonight than I have in decades. I won’t do it, of course. After a certain age, willfully kicking off while all your parts still work just seems foolish. But tonight, the concept held the kind of peaceful allure it hasn’t had since I was a teenager. Tonight, an end seems fantastically desirable.

I’m not sour because I’m a year older; big fucking deal. By the time my actual age catches up to how old I feel, It’ll be well past time for me to go. No, it’s simply life. I’m fantastically broke, and day after day, prospects vanish like dreams at dawn. Contingency plans give way to furtive hopes, and there never seems to be a break on the horizon.

Creatively, I’ve been working for the last several days on a great gig. I’m the DP of a mainstream thriller that has the potential to lead to more real-world work. It’s been refreshing to shoot for a director who appreciates my skill. But, without telling tales, today the entire job went very, very sour, and the director and I are now sitting in a bucket filled with broken glass unsure of how to climb out.

It’s on the personal level, though, that things really fall apart. I moved into a new loft which requires more work than I can possibly complete. I had to put my favorite cat, Basil, to sleep. And day after day I feel utterly alone. The women I want either don’t want me, are already taken, or are unavailable for some other reason. One really fantastic girl told me, “I figured out why I can’t date you. It’s because I’m afraid it might work.”

As the kids say, fuck my life.

I do have friends. Some good, some annoying, some great. One of my best friends is a girl hopelessly in love with me whom I keep at arm’s reach because I can’t reciprocate.

This, dear reader, was NOT the plan.

Being a huge Douglas Adams fan, I somehow imagined that 42 would be a great year. I thought, at the very least, I would come away a little wiser. Of course, I imagine Douglas himself thought his 50^th birthday would be a pretty big celebration as well.

The truth, as always, was a bit more grounded in reality than my expectations. I had considered a bullet-point list of all the ways in which November ’09 – until today sucked donkey balls, but that just seems self-indulgent. Let me simply state, for the record, that it was the worst year of my adult life.

In fact, to even come close, you have to dig down into some of the major life trauma from my teen years, and I think I speak for all of us when I say we want to do that like we want to… well… suck donkey balls.

Of all Douglas Adams’ characters, I’ve always felt the strongest kinship with Marvin, both in outlook and demeanor. It was a satisfying moment in So Long and Thanks for All the Fish when Arthur and Fenchurch take the aging android to see God’s final message to His creation, written in fifty-foot-high letters of fire on the side of the Quentulus Quazgar Mountains. The message reads, “We Apologize for the Inconvenience.”

Upon reading the words, Marvin utters his only positive sentiment in the entire series. “I think,” he says, “I feel good about it,” and he dies. When I read that, my reaction was, Yes. That’s it. That is the way life works.

So I’m not entirely unprepared, emotionally, for years like this.

However, while I’d rather watch Lost again than re-live the last year, there were some highlights. I met Mischief, and she’s flat-out terrific. I produced a movie, Kiss of the Strangler, which I’m very proud of (although it’s technically not finished yet, and hasn’t been released), and I, uh… well… I’ve got a lot more room in my closet!

In honor of saying goodbye to 42, there’s a brand new podcast from Rob Burnett and myself at our new site, MoreHumanPodcast.com. Go. See.

I’m oh-so-cautiously optimistic that things are looking better for 43. Hot Video seems to want another movie. I’ve gone into business with an old nemesis, and so far that seems to be working well. I’m not starving. Today. And neither are the cats. And for the moment, we have a roof and a bed.

So 42 has come and gone.

And the rest is silence.