I suspect this little piece is for the few folks who still follow (on occasion) my little blog here. I had for so long kept it going a couple of times a week. But my life (as I’ve tried to make clear here) has been overwhelmed by finishing cutting my movie, Grassroots (an endless job, which is almost done, though) and shooting TV and just trying to live a life. And yet, not appearing here at least occasionally ( a couple of times a week) feels strange. Why? Why does the internet matter to me? Why does writing here tug at me so? What about the rest of you? Whoever you still are checking in here?

My life is so full and rich and complicated and yet…

Maybe it’s because real life evaporates. Moves on instantly. Beautifully. Dreadfully. But it leaves only memory in its wake or a few buildings or whatever, which seem so important (those buildings) when you’re building them, but quickly fade in importance when some joy shows its face, or some pain – something that is really, real, ephemerally human.

A lot of my smart friends sort of mock this blog stuff, bemoan the loss of the “days of paper,” of ink, of “thoughtful” writing, of slow and easy thinking.

I don’t.

There is something about all this cyber change, this digital chaos, this energy, the nasty and cruel connection of the web that invites a future very different from the past, that invites us to wake up into something different than what was there yesterday – vastly different.

I’ve missed not being more active in my own little digital playpen here. I’ll be back. I will. I’m here now…

Now I’m gone…

But I’ll be back.

Soon.

Okay. So I was a little embarrassed, putting up the below video. To talk about projects that “will happen” is always dangerous. Who knows what’s going to happen, really? What if they never come to pass? What a fool I’ve been, then, right?

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?