Against the Current

POV: You put a bunch of work into the world, and the feeling of liberating your thoughts is cathartic and terrifying. Quickly, the latter feeling eats up the former. So you make less work. And then you find something more important to do.

Something.

It’s always something. Work, errands, cleaning, living, lying, making sure that you’re liked. It’s always something. Something more important, that requires all of you. There’s no time for anything. Especially not yourself.

In the past four years, I’ve started a business consulting agency, tee-shirt brand, improv school, blog, and I’ve been running a 100-seat performance venue for independent artists. I stay that busy for one reason—to clear all the routes I can to a life that is more interesting than it is ordinary.

The perk of being a creative professional is that you get to wake up and decide how you’re going to make a living each day. The bitch about being a creative professional is that you have to get up and decide how you’re going to make a living each day.

It’s not all paint-drenched smocks and play readings. With every gig, every show, I’m battling a monster determined to beat me into a cubicle. Eventually,I started making decisions about paying bills, not crafting skills. And as you can see by that last couplet, my prose is like way off, bro.

Art has become my job. Not work, but a job.

Fitzgerald ends The Great Gatsby by calling us “boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” Some say that it’s his way of calling the American Dream dead-on-arrival because who we were is who we are. But, it’s the mystery and hope for the future that emboldens us. It reminds us that anything is possible. It’s why people think Gatsby is a masterpiece*. It’s also why people made Dick Wolf a freaking billionaire.**

My self-produced drama, “Can I Make It?” has had a fantastic 20-year run on stage, small screen, and the occasional industrial film. But now, adrift in the reruns, I have become content with the success of survival, convinced that the road already traveled is juuuust fine.

It is as boring as it sounds.

So there is disruption afoot. I don’t know what that means yet, which is cool, I think. It will flow in as blogs here and ebb out in my projects. Or something like that. Again, I’m rusty.

But I’m happy to be here.