There is something comforting about a “behind the scenes video”(another series from Numb3rs is coming soon) where there is the confidence of something already in place, but what is the point of this website, this blog, if not to wander into what it takes to make a movie, a short, a poem, a novel — to talk about the fears, the mistakes, the confusion?

I’ve lost interest, I guess, in the orderly journey that people like to present re their creative process. Maybe it happens like that for some others, not for me. Half the fun is the mess I encounter, the lack of order. What better way to help each other keep going when the whole damn enterprise looks hopeless, when our lives look hopeless, when pretty much everything around us looks hopeless?

So the below video is the beginning of my journeys on making “The Yellow Kite” and “GrassRoots,” not to mention my novel, “The Liquid Motel” (more on that later), which has been the reason I’ve been so little on the blog this past week – I’ve starting another rewrite on the damn thing. Perhaps in the next little while I’ll explore more adventures in fictional prose.

A little embrassing? Yeah. Pretentious? Who cares? But isn’t this just too much stuff to be doing at the same time? Maybe. But more to the point (so to speak) who am I to write a novel? Nonetheless I’ll try to be honest as I stumble along, chronicling all of this as best I can. Maybe it will be helpful, maybe it will allow for some mocking chuckles. Whatever.

Away we go…

It has been a complicated and not altogether wonderful week for me, and Thursday’s Maserati blog has somehow helped bring the thing into focus. Yeah, I’m drawn to power and beauty, even as I have experienced it to be so unsatisfying. There’s always something more needed around the stuff, isn’t there? To be even thinner, or younger, smarter, richer….

And isn’t there at least the smell of violence around power and beauty as well, which is perhaps why (wrongly, I’m sure) I suspected the Maserati guy in the back seat had a gun? I mean, why do all those beautiful models on those billboards and in magazines look out at us with such disdain? Why does a knockout guy make so many girls’ knees tremble? And even that nice boss, doesn’t he/she have the power to destroy our lives if we tangle with him/her in the wrong way – our salary, our self-esteem, even our homes gone if her/she so deems.

And then there’s the more subtle violence I have been encountering this week – a desire to express myself more elegantly, more effectively, more beautifully – build the website, add some better graphics at the top and see a little less of my mug, drive “more traffic” to my little world here or (even better) — make a movie (a beautiful and powerful one), change the lives of those around me. How can any of this bring violence? And yet here I sit, feeling that violence has been visited on me this past week, even as I have just been wanting to evolve, to grow – not to own a Maserati or a gun, but be a “poet,” sculpt myself into a better human, maybe become more “beautiful,” more “powerful.”.

Then it hits me that there is no difference, really, between me and my Maserati friends, because what I was (what I am) simply isn’t enough. I ache (and therefore work) for something more — the opposite of the Maserati, perhaps, but internally, where each of us really lives (it’s not the cut on the finger that matters, after all, but the pain being felt inside). And in that place a strange and amorphous battle has been being waged by me and it hasn’t been much fun or much more productive than, say, a Maserati.

There hasn’t been peace and quiet this week. I’ve been going 185. But where the hell (really) was I intending to go?

Yes, it’s true. I’m really so terribly upset by where we find ourselves after all the hope of the last election. Yes, I feel completely betrayed. I understand why many still hold out a conviction that things are going to get better, but I don’t think so, not for a while, not for a long while. I see no signs, other than that the powers-that-be are tightening their grip. And that one of those really feeling the squeeze of that grip is our young and articulate president. Will he be able to take on these forces? I don’t believe so. So why not just give up? What’s the point in even trying if a guy as enlightened and together as Obama can’t make a difference? Why even keep writing or making movies or doing anything other than just join the nasty guys, make all the money we can, eat really well, but cool stuff and then die in a soft, big bed?

First of all, I’ve kind of been in that rich and privileged world. I mean, where did Obama summer this summer? Weird, huh? Martha’s Vineyard. I’ve been there (a lot). I’ve done that a lot. I’ve been to mucho Washington parties and socialite events down Park Avenue and to a hell of a lot of stuff in Hollywood and, frankly, much of it is just plain weird and a little boring. It’s boring the way I suspect the royal courts used to be boring because it’s all just pretty much about power. It’s not what Pete White talks about in my little video, “Stuff, Happiness, Special People,” where – as he describes it – people who are on the bottom rung hang with the people they like (because there’s no other reason to be with them). And they avoid the assholes (because there’s no reason like money or power to be around them). What human is becomes clearer near the bottom and near the top it’s all about getting even more on top, which means the human part gets muddier and muddier.

I admit that all that glitzy stuff is exciting and heady at first (like drugs.) But it can get real nasty later on and then you start to feel empty (like you’re not really human.) At best, it’s boring. At worst, you want to jump out a window.

But for me just rummaging around as best I can in what it really is to be human, to try to share it with those around who are interested, whether it’s here on the blog (I’d love to get more comments and I promise I’ll start responding more – I’m just learning how to do this stuff.) And that’s the other thing, venturing into new stuff – for me that’s this blog — it’s walking down the street and just talking to someone like “The Tattoo Lady,” who looked liked if I approached her she’d just stare me down and instead spoke delightedly about someone she loved. Amazing.

So, in short, two or so months into this adventure of a website, on first asking my cat, Sophie: what’s the point, I think I’m beginning to understand what she was trying to tell me.