Writing Free

Reblog: 99 Life Hacks to make your life easier

Mind = Blown

shialabeowulf:

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This is an insult.

It is very difficult for me to act consistently like a mature adult.

I am arrogant. I am condescending. I am petty. I am self-righteous. I hate to lose or even seem like I lost.

Yet I have long-ago discovered that, when arguing with people, they tend to be more open-minded and prone to reaching a mutually agreeable resolution if you remain calm, objective, and even deferential at times.

But really, any time I have to deal with some of these fucking idiots, I’m always on the brink. And sometimes the best way to get away from the ledge is to step off of it and see how far you fall.

With that in mind, I’m allowing the sociopath normally hiding in the corner of my head to write the following open insult to no one in general but many people in particular —

I don’t like you. I don’t respect you. I don’t appreciate hearing your opinions. In fact, I have never heard an opinion escape your putrid lips that hasn’t bolstered my already immutable image of you as a festering sack of feces polluting the lives of anyone unfortunate enough to wander into your radius of stupidity.

I would call you retarded, but that would be a callous slight to those individuals who have no control over the physical impediments of their brains. Your impediment is in your poor judgment. And your lack of taste. And your complete refusal to use logic or reason. I often wonder if your inability to feel any type of empathy and the dim expression that’s always painted on your simian face are indicators of autism or if you’ve made a conscious decision to be as ignorant and selfish as a bawling child shoving a toy into his own anus so he doesn’t need to share it.

Watching your decision-making process actually reminds me of watching an ape lying on its back and urinating into its own mouth. It’s revolting, and yet it’s spectacular in its absurdity. I find myself asking the same questions when witnessing either event. Why would you do that? How could you possibly think that makes sense? Should I call a professional to help you, or are you so far beyond repair that I should just throw you a banana and let you enjoy drowning in your own filth?

I have no hope for you. You have no redeeming qualities. You are a total negative to humanity and to this planet. Even when the day comes, hopefully not far in the future, when your bowels release your ample waste one final time and you sink back below the dirt in which you have wallowed most of your pathetic life, the ground under which you are buried will become so toxic that the only thing that could possibly grow from it will be cancer and incompetence.

If, by some blessing, tomorrow you are struck and killed by a bus as you saunter across the street as oblivious as you always are to the decorum the rest of our population follows, I would laugh. I would laugh, and I wouldn’t feel remotely sad. I would call my friends, and they would feel odd and conflicted because they aren’t as sociopathic as I am, but when they try to give you a half-hearted eulogy, they wouldn’t get very far because nobody likes you.

Nobody likes you, and nobody cares about you except for me. And all I care about is that your life is as miserable and insufferable as you have made the lives of everyone who has the misfortune of your disgusting image stained on their memories.

That is all, and now you have my permission to fuck off.

I suck at OKCupid

Drinking. Problems.

Earlier this year, I finally had a little success getting some scripts written. It is one of my greatest embarrassments that I moved out to L.A. over three years ago and still barely have any written material that I’m proud enough to show anybody, much less submit to a contest or fellowship. Thus it was a great feeling finally to be closing out script after script, even if they were just first drafts, even if they were just shorts and webisodes, even if initial reactions to them had just been lukewarm. I was getting writing done. Progress was happening.

It wasn’t a conscious or active decision, but I then let my foot off the pedal and decided to celebrate my meager accomplishments in the only way I knew how—by drinking until my mind was obliterated and then going out and doing all the things my happily married friends claim they never spend any time missing.

It’s March now, and I feel like I’ve never stopped celebrating, although I’ve long run out of reasons to celebrate. I’m certainly not writing.

Accomplishing the goals I set for myself is a very broad, level happiness. It’s foundational. It brings stability and makes me feel secure. It’s the type of happiness you feel after staying patient and disciplined long enough to see the fruits of your hard labor.

The happiness I feel in anticipation of an ungodly amount of drinking is different. It’s sharp. It spikes. It makes me want to drop whatever I’m doing and just get started. Nothing gets finished. It’s the type of happiness you feel the moment you realize you’ve just met someone amazing with whom you’ve made a special bond. It’s a crush, that feeling the cynical would call infatuation and the uneducated would call falling in love.

Getting drunk, to me, feels like love.

And then I wake up the next morning, and that feels like headaches and nausea. I don’t get out of bed until the sun is already setting, missing out on the only consistent source of brightness living in L.A. I open my wallet and cringe at the numbers on the receipts crumpled in there. I spend the entire day reacquainting my brain with functioning, and then I go to bed again with the self-imposed burden of knowing two days have gone by without any steps taken toward that distant place of success in my mind.

Of course, that’s not the entire story of my failing grade in Hollywood. I wasn’t popping 30 mg of Adderall XR a day to curb my drinking. But the stress doesn’t help. The distraction doesn’t help. The guilt and the shame don’t help. The pressure I put on myself might’ve been too high, and the drinking to alleviate it doesn’t help. Chasing women around bars doesn’t help. Making snarky comments on Facebook statuses from people I barely know doesn’t help. Taking a picture of a sandwich and putting it on Instagram with a Lo-Fi filter and the sunburst doesn’t fucking help.

And yet — is that the answer? I’ve already given up a steady income, a wonderful relationship, traveling with my friends to all the places in the world I’m dying to see; all because I thought those held me back from being able to do what I needed to do. Am I to give up one more thing that I love? Of course I could do it in moderation, but what’s the point? My love isn’t drinking. My love is getting drunk.

I have always subscribed to the belief that you can’t be creative without a full life, but the further I immerse myself in my creative pursuits, the emptier my life feels. Are these hollow sacrifices that I’m making? And if I’m doing it wrong, what is right? Should I get married and knock out a couple kids? The stress hasn’t helped.

It’s March 2013. Year 4 of the L.A. Experience. I know incredibly more now than I did when I first got here, and I’m still laughably far from figuring it out.

The only thing I’ve discovered is what I’d long already known: this helps. Blogging, I have found, is not writing. Not the writing I’m trying to do, but it’s close. It begets writing, which begets more writing. Just as progress begets more progress and success begets more success. Momentum is so critical to accomplishing goals, and every drinking binge drags that to a crawl if not an utter stop. Yet how much would I have to write about if all I did was right? Doesn’t great inertia build even greater momentum?

I’m not sure what to think. All I want right now is a drink.

Destruction

The greatest power that exists is the power of creation. I learned that from a children’s cartoon when I was a kid, but that doesn’t make it any less true. Creation is the highest form of power.

I am not a creator. I wish I were. I wish words and ideas and characters and motives and circumstances coalesced fluidly in my mind and flowed through my fingertips onto paper as perfect, pristine narrative. But they do not.

I am a creature of destruction. I am a destroyer. I am The Destroyer. I tear things down, I wipe things out, I bring civilization to ruins and dance gleefully in the rubble. There is beauty in entropy.

And when my task is complete, I move on and let those with true power paint their masterpieces on the canvases that I wiped blank for them. I don’t look back; I don’t monitor their progress; I don’t admire their results. I know if I return to find their creations lacking I will again simply do what my nature is to do.

What does it mean to be an aspiring screenwriter?

Writing. Lots of writing. Rewriting. Hating your script. Hating yourself. Rewriting. Begging your friends to read your script and give you notes. Waiting. Rewriting. Reminding your friends you sent them a script to read. Waiting. Reading their notes. Hating their notes. Hating them. Rewriting. Sending your script out to contests, agents, managers, producers. Waiting. Nothing. Sending it out to different contests, agents, managers, producers. Waiting. Getting feedback. Hating feedback. Hating the industry. Questioning why you moved to LA. Drinking. Drinking. Drinking. Meeting an arbitrary friend of a friend of a former co-worker who happens to be a producer and agrees to read your script. Waiting. Hoping. Praying. Checking back with him. “Sorry, I lost your email. Can you send it again?” Son of a bitch! Rewriting. Waiting.

All while you work crappy jobs for crappy pay while dreaming of finally selling a script so you can stop asking your parents for money.

#LIVINGTHEDREAM

Childhood Super Powers vs. Adulthood Super Powers

As a child, I wanted the ability to:

1. Fly like Superman
2. Read minds like Professor X
3. Become super strong when I’m angry like the Hulk

As an adult, I want the ability to:

1. Look like Superman, without working out
2. Never need sleep like Jack Bauer
3. Become super erect even when I’m drunk like every teen dad from my Ohio high school

If I could only have one, though, I’d pick never needing sleep. Then the super boner thing. And then flying.