Fuzzy day

My brain's a bit unfocused, right now. Dunno why. Guess I'll spend the day just reading research materials and books I have to build up my background for POS. Doesn't help that Brendan's still pissed at me for my freakout. It's like he doesn't really understand me or how I work or anything about me. And he's a part of me. Little twerp.

Doesn't help I'm in a mood where I'm doing a bit of self-flagellation for not being a good steward of my life. I look back on so many opportunities handed me on a silver platter that I either ignored or couldn't understand at the time. For instance, I got accepted to NYU's graduate school of film in 1979 and blew it off because they wanted me to go the full 3 years (and because I really wasn't emotionally capable of handling a city as intense as NY just then). I was embraced by one of the premier graduate programs in film and I didn't find a way to make it work. What an idiot. Right now I'm thinking I should have used the money I got in my severance package from Heritage to make a GOOD short film, and that might have helped me shift the course of my life and everything would have been perfect.

Or not. I don't know. If I hadn't followed this path, I probably never would have finished "Bobby Carapisi" and gotten it published. Or been in a position where I need to write POS right NOW or never get the chance, again, and been able to focus on it...tho' the prospect of complete financial ruin might also have been avoided.

Instead, I built my vague plan around my writing and worked to get it out there. I contacted producers and agents and entered competitions and joined organizations and participated in seminars and took meetings with people who promised everything and delivered nothing and accepted feedback and even rewrote one of my award-winning scripts in ways I didn't like just to suit the notes of potential producers at a major studio and I kept writing and writing and writing...and now I have 5 books and a novella published and know the majority of my 29 screenplays are better than 95% of the crap that's floating around Hollywood and all the attendant nonsense of an ego based on fact, for a change...and as a result, I'm homeless (sleeping on a day bed in your mother's living room only means shelter), broke and have no idea what to do next. The only thing I have going for me is, "At least I'm still trying."

But right now my mood is such that the only thing I can answer back is, "What a pile of horse-hockey." (To quote the great and glorious Colonel Sherman T. Potter of "MASH" fame and who reminded me so much of Harry Truman, it was funny.)