Adventures in Television | ... and we're back!

… and we’re back!

Sorry for the radio silence. Of all the bad habits I’ve developed as an adult, sitting still and shutting up seems to be the worst of them. Everyone I know seems to be doing something, millions of somethings, all the time at a rate that I find terrifying. I used to be prolific as fuck. During my MTV heyday, I was used to churning out 40-45 minutes of stories for airtime each day, in addition to long lead reporting I was working on, in addition to stories I was writing for Spin or Vice, in addition to at home experiments in literary fiction and screenwriting. I was a one-man, tech-saavy cusp-riding creative machine. I had that feeling which is the best feeling you can have in New York City: that you are somehow present in some impossibly important great and fascinating now and that the velocity of life’s potential is carrying you in its thrall towards an unimaginably fantastic end. It’s fucking glorious. It’s physically palpable. It’s what addicts people to New York and their 20’s, or worse, both. Even your dreams catch the light of it.

But then it stopped. I stopped. And, in the weird, drowsy way crash victims learn how to walk again, I feel like I’m only now beginning to take my first steps back towards being a person. I turn 34 next month. I’m nearly broke. I’m mostly gray. I watch my colleagues and peers and friends mate and breed and actualize success in a way that brings me incredible joy. But mostly I sit in a vacuum writing and then tearing up whatever I make, okay with being my own worst enemy because then at least its me breaking my own heart. It’s a miserable way to live. Well, it’s not living, really. But it’s changing.

If I could pinpoint a time where it all started, it was an article I was working on on spec for ‘The Believer’. It was 2005 and I had just returned from an excursion to chaos doing coverage of the tsunami that hit Banda Aceh, Indonesia. It had been a weird trip, one filled with mass graves and nuclear air craft carriers and a look at the destructive power of nature that was so severe it struck a primal fear that I can only describe it as the sensation of seeing the night sky for the first time. I wanted to get it right, the whole experience, but got hung up on two things: if I told the truth I would embarrass myself and people I worked with. This was a big deal because, as experience with other employers has taught me, the work environment at MTV News was so hostile and intimidating that you got threatened constantly for doing anything that might bring shame to the great company brand. The other thing was that I just couldn’t get the first paragraph right. I was trying to capture the sensation of being jet-lagged and on a hallucination-inducing anti-malarial drug called Larium but the words just failed me. I wrote a whole account of the trip, disbelief, disgust, delirium and all. But I buried the thing because of that paragraph. I would write it over and over and over and over. And then I just stopped.

I spent the rest of that year hopping from conflict region to conflict region, Colombia, Katrina, Pakistan, Africa and I could write nothing but that first paragraph. Everything I touched turned to shit: shows I developed died in limbo, I wrote screenplays that went nowhere, I wrote stories and plays I couldn’t bring myself to submit to anything. Not that I didn’t try pouring my heart out or giving it the best possible shape. Quite the contrary. I just learned that what I had to say wasn’t worthwhile or important. I did everything they tell you to do if you’re trying to make something great. I shouted from a mountain top. But no one shouted back and the echo I heard was a keening negative feedback loop that made trying again very difficult. So I did drugs, went broke, alienated women, got weird and psyched myself out every time I picked up a pen.

It’s odd to see how prodigious the world is now, coming out of that hole. It’s foreign to see the demands it makes, especially that the internet makes, on young writers. I’m not sure how I can reconcile the demands for content with some kind of correlative quality. I’m now on to my second spec script in six months and four chapters deep into what I believe will be my first novel. But letting go of it is tough. Still there are some people who manage to feed the beast in ways I don’t understand. Maybe it’s a generational self-esteem thing: the gold star for trying kids can play zone, not man, and tweet/write/co-write/photoblog/socialize because they’ve been conditioned to believe everything is always gonna work out awesome. If you don’t know any better, than you don’t know any better to fear. And I miss that so much.

Nothing of any meaning belongs in or a vacuum. Imperfection is meant to be shared. Getting back in to clip of it is just taking me a minute.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BJ2En_1IfhI