It All Comes Back to Liza.

I was thinking today about the period of time when I was logging and editing Life in a Box and all my living expenses were covered by the film’s budget, a period of about 2 1/2 years that I spent in front of a computer in Jersey City, Nashville, and San Francisco, when not only did I make a feature film that I’m extremely proud of, I wrote several short stories and a screenplay. It was a really fruitful period of art-making for me. I think what made that possible was that I didn’t worry about money during that time. I knew the bills were paid, rent, and I’d have a little left for cheap entertainment and a few beers on the weekend. I literally had no worries. My life was basically perfect.

Now I have all this idle time. I do a little writing every few days, but it’s slow-going and it’s a struggle to stay focused. Worrying about money occupies way too much of my brain. I hate it.

Which reminds me of this bitter, hilarious op-ed in Huffington Post that a facebook friend posted. I sort of in my head substituted “artist” when she wrote “writer,” and it’s all still true. Nothing is supposed to be about money, but everything is about money.

And that, because I'm gay, reminds me, of course, of this. My favorite movie ever.

Words.

I just now successfully resisted the urge to have a second beer. Though I’m temperamentally and philosophically opposed to abstinence of almost any kind, I’m also not at all in support of my beer gut.

I had a wicked cold that started late last week and just today started waning. I always get whatever nasty shit virus that’s going around, without fail. I just had a cold (though that one wasn’t as severe) when was that? when I was getting out of the drug study, a couple months ago I guess. Time is so compressed this summer. I don’t even have a clear sense of how long it’s been since M and I were together.

Speaking of that, I don’t know if it’s obvious how I stumble over language when I refer to that relationship. I have this obsession, ever since the complicated unraveling of my relationships with J and R, with precision, which I think mostly has to do with a desire to be scrupulously honest. For instance, I don’t think it is accurate to say, “When M and I broke up…” We didn’t break up. He rejected, or maybe more accurately, sent me away. By the same token, when I’m talking about the end of my relationship with B, the man I was involved with for 6 years in my twenties, I don’t say, “When B and I broke up…” I say, “When I left B…”

But does the expression “to break up” necessarily mean a reciprocal action? I always thought it did. Breaking up is something 2 people do, not something one person does to another. But then, I guess most separations are to some extent 1-sided. Am I making a meaningful distinction?

My Dream Life.

So, as an addendum to the previous post about goals, here’s the life I simultaneously aspire to and struggle to let go of wanting. My dream life has acquired detail along the way, but this is basically the life I’ve wanted since I was about 13, when I first started thinking about New York and a life in theater:

I live in Manhattan, somewhere below 14th Street, in a small apartment. I like small spaces. I make a living from my creative work, writing, performing, etc. I can afford to eat in decent restaurants, and to go see plays and movies and live music, take cabs every once in a while. I prefer to cook and eat most of my meals at home, and sometimes to have friends over for dinner, but when there are shows I want to see I don’t want to have to worry about whether I can spend the money, even if it’s Broadway.

Schedules vary from project to project, but I might spend my mornings writing, and go to rehearsals in the afternoons. Evenings, I might be at the theater if I have a show running, or I might have friends over for dinner, or just spend the evening at home, alone.

I can afford to travel a bit, nothing too extravagant. I prefer travel on a modest budget; modes of transit and choices of lodging are more interesting. Some travel might be built into my theater work, when shows tour, etc., which is even better. I never enjoyed traveling more than when J and I traveled with Y’all, such amazing generosity and hospitality we always received.

If there’s one luxury I would be tempted to indulge in, it’s to hire a personal trainer. I feel old and out of shape. I want to be stronger, to look and feel better.

That’s really about it. It looks very humble now that I write it down. I just want to make a decent living doing what I love, what I’m good at, what I feel compelled to do. I’ve never had a taste for fancy stuff, cars, clothes. I don’t particularly like dressing up, and I don’t like expensive furniture because you have to worry about messing it up or breaking it.

Summer Cold.

It's cool outside this evening. I just checked the temperature and it's 79 degrees, which is undeniably wonderful, but a little eerie in July.

Rough day. I have a nasty cold, I feel trapped in my room, and I was hungry all day because nothing in the house looked tasty to me and I didn't feel like going to the store. MP brought me a cheeseburger from P. Terry's for breakfast which cheered me up, and finally about an hour ago, I drove to El Chilito and had two fish tacos and a beer.

We're in the thick of the initial planning and preparation for the Lizzie Borden festival performance: casting, hiring a director and musical director, cutting the show down to a 45-minute presentation. All these crucial decisions at a time when my confidence is so battered, and now I'm sick. I know I'm a big whiny baby, but I just ... that's how I feel. Sad and lonely and overwhelmed.

I did a lot of reading today, anyway.

Goals.

So there are two schools of thought regarding goals, right? There’s the idea that if you want something, you should visualize it, imagine that you already have it. Put yourself there; make everything in your life about realizing the dream. And there’s the school that says don’t get hung up on where you’re headed, live for now. (Sorry if I’m trivializing anyone’s philosophy of life here.)

Whenever Dolly Parton is asked for the secret to her success, she says, “Work hard and dream big.” I used to find that very inspiring. You hear it over and over in different words from different people, and it has the ring of truth. Dolly Parton is one of the most successful entertainers and songwriters in the world, so it must have worked, right? The problem is that you know there are millions of people out there who believed the same thing and it didn’t bring them fame, success, whatever. But they don’t get interviewed.

You have to believe in yourself, you have to believe that you have something important and unique to offer, and that it is inevitable that you will find your audience. It’s only a matter of time. Keep at it. It’s a powerfully motivating frame of mind. But it does not account for failure. Failure is not an option, as they say. Okay, it’s not an option, but it is the most likely outcome, and then what?

“Work hard, dream big, and remember that more likely than not you will never have the kind of success you dream of.” It loses its ring.

I’m more inclined to the second philosophy -- or at least I say I am -- which is to work at letting go of those dreams, learn to relax into the moment, cultivate contentment with whatever happens. It’s the Buddhist view, and it has brought me some peace in the last 10 years. If my happiness depends on a certain outcome, then I might never be happy, right? And I want to be happy.

But I’m realizing now that perhaps the only way I’ve been able to find any contentment with the present moment is by seeing it as a moment on the way to a moment that I’ve been visualizing since I was 7 years old and that I still want so bad I can hardly see straight.

My urge for fame, I think, is one and the same with my urge to create. My urge to create is the only thing that consistently makes me feel like life is worth living. Love, beauty, pleasure -- all the things I’m drawn to -- come and go. The urge to make art never leaves me.

New York.

I just watched a documentary called The Heretics, about the women who published the magazine Heresies, a feminist art magazine in the 70s and 80s. It’s making the rounds of the festivals now, and I have a screener. And I’m reading the recent Edmund White memoir City Boy, which is about his life in New York in the 60s and 70s. Both the film and the book are about, well they’re about many things: art, politics, memory, aging, but mostly what I’m getting from them is how great New York was for artists in the 70s.

I have to be careful about romanticizing New York. I’m on my way back there, to a city very different from the one I landed in almost 30 years ago at the age of 20.

My First Published Essayn't.

Update on my dispute with the magazine editor:

After saying on Monday or Tuesday that we should call it a day (this was when he saw how much I had revised his revised draft), he emailed a few hours later and asked for help deciphering the document I’d sent him showing my changes to his draft. (I had used Word’s “compare documents” thing, and he was flustered by all the red and blue.)

We went back and forth a couple more times. He insisted that he’d made only cosmetic changes to improve the flow, but it seemed obvious to me that he didn’t understand or agree with what, to me, was the main idea of the essay -- he had changed or deleted most of the language pertaining to that idea. I don’t know how we could have resolved our differences without sitting down together and looking at his changes more closely, but there was no time for that. He was frantic about his deadline.

What a frustrating experience. I’m trying to be more flexible, more open, because my rigidity about artistic integrity might be one of the main reasons I can’t make a living. So this seemed almost like a test of my new attitude. I was flexible. I think I met him halfway. But he didn’t budge.

He put a lot of time into the piece, and I would have tolerated a lot of his revisions in order to have a first magazine article in print. That meant a lot to me. But, on the other hand, I didn’t want to have my first published piece be something I didn’t even know how to defend because I didn’t know what it was about. Especially when the topic, gay sex cruising, is so controversial and would surely generate questions and argument.

This was quite a struggle for me. My impulse early on had been that he didn’t understand the piece, but I questioned that feeling. It’s not like I enjoy cutting off my nose to spite my face. I fretted and pondered and fretted some more, and, after two more days of back and forth with the editor, I told him that I thought we were at odds regarding the main ideas of the piece and, since we didn’t have time to do a closer rewrite together, we should call it quits.

He wrote back and asked me to show him one example of a change he'd made that altered the meaning. I went through his changes one by one and sent him a list of all the changes I was troubled by.

I guess what I got out of this whole experience is an unpublished essay and a magazine editor who doesn't like me. Sweet.

(Just to be clear, he made a lot of changes, small and large. Besides deleting a couple longer passages, sentences and paragraphs, a lot of his revisions were simple changes in word choice. Sometimes his change of a word changed the meaning of the sentence. Other times he added stuff that was way off base, either in style or content. The essay was heavily revised.)