(Love) I Hope Its Not Finished Yet.

I’ve always envied the guys who can get laid easily, you know, the rock stars, the assholes, the Hank Moody’s of life.  We all want to be that guy, I want to be that guy. But its not who I am, and as much as I wish it was, I’m also grateful for not being that guy, because I’m a different kind of guy.

I’m the guy that girls fall in love with. Not every girl, grant you, but over the years, some genuinely amazing girls, and women, have fallen in love with me, and I with them. All of them, without exception, have been the type of girls, and woman, that many men would kill to be with. Some (more than I’d like to admit) have been young, some have been smart, some have been girls-next-door, some have been wild-ones, some have been MILFs, some have gone on to great success, some lead interesting lives that will one day be the stuff of legends.

I honestly cannot say what it is about me that causes this. I’m terrible at picking up women. I cannot see a woman a bar, or store or on the street and strike up a conversation. I’m not wealthy or connected or a sharp dresser. Yet, every so often I meet someone, usually because they approach me, and it happens – we start dating, the sex is great, then it becomes more, and boom! Love.

Eventually, it ends, usually badly, because I attract women who don’t do gray areas. There is either love or loathing, and not much in between. At first, I either feel grateful to get out, or totally heartbroken, then, over time, be it days or years – and it has been both on different occasions – I settle into acceptance and forgiveness.

I miss all of them, on any given day. Each is special to me, and brought something unique to my life. Then I feel lonely and wonder if that lightening will ever strike again. Sometimes it takes years, during which I just float between long periods of enforced chastity and casual sex. During those times I wonder if I’ve finally gotten too old, to jades, too whatever to ever be loved like that again.

I console myself with the thought that I have probably been in love and loved deeply, by more of the most amazing women than any man has a right to hope for in his life time. If it never happens again, then I should still count myself lucky, because I have had more of the best in life that money cannot buy, than almost anyone.

It is a poor consolation when I’m lonely. Perhaps when I’m truly old, in some distant time, it will be enough. Maybe then I will regale younger people with my stories of romance. But not yet. Now it feels lonely to not be loved in that special way by someone I love back.

I never know when or where it will find me next, except to say it will not find me at home, alone with my cat, on my couch, writing or reading or watching TV. Yet when I go out, to a bar or shopping or wherever I may go, with the vague or specific hope of finding that next great love, I always come back home empty and unfulfilled.

Until the time that I don’t. The time I least expected it – and I hope the last of those times has not passed, not yet. I don’t feel like I’m finished. Not yet.

Detoxing Life

When you've been around the sun enough times, you start to notice patterns. If you're the kind of person who considers one's only life, you probably notice them in your own behavior. I certainly have begun to.

Recently, my relationship with my best friend has blown up in my face. After being inseparable for a couple years, a single incident ballooned into a seething mass of text messaged blaming me for everything from the death of Christ to the election of Trump. To which, my emotional response was to shut down and walk away.

Its not unknown to me that my friend has been quite toxic for sometime. Having faced some personal hardships over the past couple years, they turned inward with guilt and self-loathing. I have forgiven much of their behavior for sometime, but there is a limit, and when the overblown and unwarranted blame and recriminations were directed full force at me, I decided it was time to let of the friendship.

To be honest, I've felt for sometime the friendship was one sided. They were getting more out of it than I was. I was supportive and understanding and consistent in as their life spiraled out of control. While they... Well, they spiraled out of control. I was there source of stability, and I got very little in return, except this feeling of nobility for being that source when everyone else around them was everything but.

Then I began to see the bigger picture. This is something I do. Something I've done for as long as I can recall. I pick up strays. They always seem to fun, exciting, interesting people and we become great friends, or lovers (the first ones I can clearly identify where early girlfriends) and over time their neuroses come out until the  relationship become toxic and I bail.

I feel guilty about bailing, after all, we have history. More importantly, I've allowed them to become dependent on me, they count on me. I'm also an enabler. My constant forgiveness of their flaws allows them to justify their behaviors. I make them worse.

I've done this my whole life. Its a pattern that takes years to play out sometimes, so it can be hard to recognize, but now I have. I'm not really sure how to stop it, since I don't really see the signs early on, but I'm aware now.

As much as I feel guilty about leaving these people behind, I have to accept that in the end they are hurting me. They drain me, the abuse me, they take me for granted, and they occupy a place in my life that could better be filled with healthy relationships.

I like to think I never completely cut anyone out of my life, that if they got better, maybe some therapy or something, I would welcome them back. But the truth is, I don't know, because either none have exercised their demons or those who have hold a grudge against me for leaving or for being their enabler and simply don't want me around. Either way, these breaks seem to last (I'm not dead, and I'm eternally hopeful that I'm wrong, so I say "seem to".)

Now that it is done, I hope to fill the void left by healthier reciprocal relationships. I'll let you know how that goes.

Writing

I've written a screenplay.

It feels good to say that. What I've written is the first complete draft of a story that  I've been trying to write for literally years. Now, finally, its written, from beginning to end.

And its total crap.

I don't mean to say I wrote a terrible story. I like my story, but it isn't done, its still forming.

My whole life, I've loved movies. Human beings tell stories, fictions, to entertain, but also to teach, to share moral ideals and greater truths about life. When you tell us this is right or this is wrong, we nod our heads and say, "ok, sure," but it doesn't really sink in. When we experience those things, we truly know what is right and what it wrong.

Stories allow us to experience without actually doing. Our brains are wired in such a way that imagining something is as powerful as living through something. So, story allows us to share deeper truths in life in a visceral way that we truly can learn and grow from.

Movies and TV are only the latest way which people have developed to share stories. The greatest stories still are with us from eons past. Ancient myths, plays, ballads -- the best ones survive.

People complain that there's a lot of junk TV and terrible movies, that "its not like when I was young." Well it is. There are more channels now, and more theaters with more screens, and more ways to distribute a movie or TV show. The total volume of media produced has increased, and a lot of it is bad, and will be forgotten. But that has always been true. We just don't remember that from our childhood, because those stories didn't stick.

Shakespeare wasn't the only playwright of his time. He was just better, so his plays survived and are passed down. Homer wasn't the only story telling poet of his time, but he was one of the best, and his stories contain universal truths, so his are passed down. Long after we are dead and gone, most of the stories produced today will be forgotten too, including mine. Some will be remembered and retold, they were among the best.

About 5 years ago, I tried my hand at acting. I took classes, I auditioned, I worked as an extra for money and to see behind the scenes how movies were made. I even got cast in a few no-budget short films I'm too embarrassed to watch. Along the way I read scripts.

I'd tried writing at various times through out my life. I'd been told I was pretty good, that I had an interesting voice.  But I never succeeded in writing anything more than a few pages long. I didn't know how. I've had a certain story floating around my head since I was about 15 or 16 years old. Its still there (it isn't the one I wrote this time). But I couldn't seem to make writing a novel work for me, I didn't know how.

Scripts, they made sense to me. I knew movies inside and out, so I could read a script and see how it would play out on the screen. The format worked for me. So I began writing again, confident that this new format would allow me to express the stories in my head.

My first serious attempt got me about halfway finished before I doubled back and started rewriting. Eventually, it fizzled because I couldn't get to the end, I kept doubling back to the beginning. The idea stayed in my head. A few others have grown along side it, and a few months ago I began trying again, only to find myself doing the same thing. My script has been a quarter to half written a dozen times.

Finally, I learned an important new thing: Just write it.

My habit of doubling back, fixing and rewriting and editing before I was done was stopping me form finishing. I was judging the work before the story was complete. So I buckled down a week ago and started writing, for three hours a day. I didn't got back and read what I wrote, or think "does that work?" "What if this happened instead?" I just let it stay as is and kept moving forward with the story.

Some interesting things happened when I did that. I thought I knew my story so well, then I'd write a scene I never imagined and it fit and expressed an idea better than any other way I'd planned. Characters started saying thing I didn't expect them to, because they stopped being me, they became their own people with their own voices.

Last night I finished my first full draft of the story, from beginning to end.

It isn't ready for the light of day. Its rough, it needs to be rewritten, it has lots of problems, which is why I say its crap. But the entire idea, the whole plot is there now. More than I've ever managed before. So now I am confident that I will in fact finish it. It may not be great art, but it will be my art and it will be complete.

Then I will move on to the next one, and the one after that. There are at least four in my head now waiting to be be written. But right now, this morning I can truly say, I have written a screenplay. And that feels pretty damned good.