Jay Elias | You can take it with you

"I have wasted Time, and now doth
Time waste me"
- Richard II

2002-09-26- 8:17 a.m.

Bygones Have All Gone By

“‘I’m a writer,’ Wade said. ‘I’m supposed to understand what makes people tick. I don’t understand one damn thing about anybody.’”
-Raymond Chandler
I can’t watch movies anymore, at least not on video. This seems to me to be a fairly serious problem, seeing as I’m in the movie-making business.
It is worse than that really. I’m finding it difficult for me to watch television shows. The dramatic ones just get to me too much, and I start to feel this pressure building inside of me. Perhaps I am just empathizing too strongly, but the tension of the dramatic moments feels like an impending heart attack in my chest. I’m only safe watching things I’ve seen before and dumb comedies. And I mean really dumb; I’ve started to catch myself getting worked up over the dramatic moments in episodes of Friends.
I’ve been back in New York from visiting my folks in Maryland for Rosh Hashanah for two weeks. I felt oppressed by a sense of unreality while I was there, a sense that whatever I was doing was separate in some way I couldn’t fathom from my real life. My first impressions from this real life that I have returned to are beginning to convince me that I’m going insane.
My visit to my native state for the holidays was marred early on. The State of Maryland has finally seen fit to revoke my driver’s license. They have done this, mind you, over two years since I received my last ticket. In fact, they never would have gotten around to it if I hadn’t gone in to renew my license. When I went and tried though, I was informed that I still had five violations in two New York counties still unpaid, and that not only would I be unable to get a new license until I resolved these issues, but I would need a letter from the State of New York to show to the Maryland MVA before I could even get my old license back. This is all my fault, of course. I knew about all these violations, and I simply chose to ignore them, because I could and because I didn’t have the money or didn’t want to spend it on paying tickets.
So I did what I always do: I ignored the problem, just letting it lie there waiting. These problems weren’t ones that disturbed the daily rhythm of my life. I could go on, day by day, not worrying about things like these tickets because none of the ramifications of that made the next day harder. So here I am, unable to get my driver’s license renewed although I haven’t had a ticket since the spring of 2000. Oh, and I owe $1,200 to two credit cards I don’t have anymore, and $300 to Con Edison, a utility I don’t use anymore, and $470 to Sprint PCS who haven’t provided my cell phone service since 1999. And it isn’t like these are debts I can even think about starting to pay. I barely have the financial resources to keep up with my rent.
I’ve managed this life for four years, ever since I came to New York after college. But now, as I close in on my twenty-sixth birthday, I’m disgusted by this, and by myself. How have I permitted this to happen? It was okay, I suppose, to goof off about my finances when I was in college. My favorite trick was to run up months of long distance bills and then accept one of those phone offers from telemarketers to switch right before my current service was about to be terminated. It was understandable that I would live a lifestyle beyond my means when I first moved to New York. I was just starting out and had no permanent job, and my hopes of having all my apartment issues solved died when Lynn and I split two and a half months after I came. I ended up having to spend three months looking for an apartment full-time, to come up with installation fees to every utility, to replace every stick of furniture I had once owned and sold when Lynn and I moved in together. It would have been tough anyways; even when I was working full-time for a network series, my salary was five hundred and fifty a week. Before taxes. Imagine trying to live alone in Manhattan while working seventy hours a week on that for a second.
But here’s the thing: it is four years later now, and I haven’t learned a thing. My salary has increased, but so has my rent, and at a nearly equal pace. And I haven’t gotten one whit more responsible. I’m still taking too many cabs, and spending too much money when I go out, and ordering too many meals delivered and buying way too many cds and smoking two packs a day which now cost a ridiculous seven dollars and fifty cents a pack. And the end result is that nothing has changed. I’ve still got no savings. I’ve still got tons of debt, more now than I had then. I still live paycheck to paycheck, and even worse at times like now, when I’m on hiatus and living off unemployment. I buy myself new clothes maybe twice a year, and I’m talking about single items, not a full day at Macy’s. What I have to wear consists of what I bought myself in college, a few items I’ve picked up across the last four years, free t-shirts from productions and rental houses, and what my mom and brother buy for me on holidays. The same mismatched sticks of furniture I got when I first got my own place in New York. The same ancient stereo I bought secondhand my senior year of college. I tried to save up this spring for one of those mini surround sound systems they sell at The Wiz for two hundred and fifty bucks. I had eighty dollars in an old cigarette case stashed. I blew it all on my trip to Cape Cod. I still haven’t gotten gifts for my friends who were married over a year ago. And I was in the fucking wedding party.
This isn’t any way for a twenty-six year old to live.
And if that is the truth, it means more than simply changing attitudes. I need to change my life. I need to do something substantially different. Because right now, I am twenty-five years old, and I am waiting for my ship to come in. Which is fine; I’m working hard, and making contacts and moving slowly along the ladder. But my ship will still be at sea when I turn twenty-six. And it could go on like this. I could be twenty-seven, twenty-eight, and then thirty and thirty-five and still working hard and making contacts and waiting.
I’ve denied myself a great deal to get where I am today. What I’ve done, what I do, costs me. It isn’t simply money; I pass up time with my friends, chances at love, memories of days spent in places other than fifth-floor walkup studio apartments and a stomach that doesn’t churn with tension because it has been fifteen minutes and someone’s Starbucks triple espresso with nonfat foam hasn’t arrived yet. Somewhere out there are mermaids, singing, and perchance they would sing for me. I believe this. But I’m not looking for them. I’m right here.
Recently, Pineapple caused quite a stir among some online journallers by writing about whether or not doing this made us “writers”. This was of particular interest to me. I live and work in a world where everyone from my co-workers to my friends to my local bartender calls themselves a writer, or a producer, or a director, or an actor. And the truth of it is that nearly none of us ever have had that appear on a pay stub. They say that one out of every five people in America has written or is writing a screenplay. And I feel pretty certain in saying that the vast majority of them aren’t professionals. One in fifty Americans would give the Writer’s Guild of America a larger membership than all unionized workers in the country combined. For the rest of us, we can at best be called aspiring. And we’re not about to quit our day jobs.
To many of my friends and most outsiders, I’m lucky anyways. I’m on the inside. I get to be there and see it happen, even if I’m only there to answer someone’s phone and fetch coffee and cigarettes, and I had to stand on streetcorners in the rain and ward of pedestrians to get there. I can look myself up on the IMDB. I can tell you how it feels to hold an Oscar in your hand. And it has only taken me four and a half years of my life to get there. These are the stories of my adult life. I don’t like to tell them much. I know one thing for certain: if I should fail, that will be all that they are. Stories for me to tell, in bars and at holidays. They won’t be my lessons, my schooling, my dues that I have paid. I don’t want to lie about this. This fear is no small part of what keeps me going.
There is a part of me, sure, that stays at it for the idealistic reasons. From childhood on, I’ve been captured by words, by novels, by movies, by the theater, by song lyrics that I despair will be forgotten as pop when they are modern poetry. Russell Banks wrote that “Literature is intimate behavior between strangers, possibly more intimate even than sex, and it occurs between extreme strangers who sometimes do not even speak the same language.” There are people out there, people as different as Thucydides and Hemingway and Dumas and Chandler and Mishima and Tolstoy and Woolf and Sebold, and not one of them can be described as being anything like the other, except that they all manage to bring to me the wonder and wisdom of their world, and touch me with it and change me with it. They have the power to alter lives decades, centuries, and in some cases millennia after their deaths, and to do the same while living. They do it by appealing to what all people dead, alive, and not yet born have in common: our imaginations and our souls. I can’t know that and not want to be a part of it. I don’t need their immortality, their fame or their fortune. I just need a little of their power, to feel that intimacy, with only one stranger if need be.
And lastly, I’m still here because of all I have given up. These sacrifices, these deprivations, are without meaning if I don’t put everything I have into this. I will have wasted my time, my efforts, my money, my sacrifice, and the most vital years of my life if I give up. Perhaps I am simply stubborn, or worse, unable to find the wisdom to cut my losses. I know that they say the house always wins. I aim to test that theory. I plan on riding her till she bucks me, and at the end, either I’ll bring home the bank, or I’ll know I left it all on the table. I intend on being phyrric, in victory or defeat.
None of this helps answer Pineapple’s question. I’m not sure if we’re writing or not. If you asked me why I started this journal, the best answer I could come up with would be this: I was watching New York One one morning, and saw them compare TeeVee as having a similar sense of humor to The Onion. So I started reading them, and then one day I noticed a link to Damn Hell Ass Kings. Being a good Simpsons fan, I checked it out, and ended up at Television Without Pity. For those of you who don’t know, they recap television shows, and had done recaps of a show called “American High” that I had loved but missed several episodes of. The girl who recapped that show, Erin, was brilliant and funny, and I found out she had a website. I read it all in one night, every entry. And when I was done, I was left with two thoughts: I wish I could buy that girl a beer, and, I could do this too. So I did.
I think a few people are glad that I did. About once a month or so, someone e-mails me about something I wrote, and I feel and I hope that I’ve achieved that sort of intimacy with a stranger that Mr. Banks spoke of. I can hope that because other journals have made me feel that way, from Erin and Pineapple to Sara and Hannah and Monty. And they are just a few of many. But that doesn’t help me shake the feeling that what I type here isn’t a form of written masturbation, a waste of time and effort. This is time that could be spent writing a novel, or an opinion column, or Police Academy 12. This is time that could be spent doing the dishes, or reading James Baldwin, or jogging, or even looking for mermaids to listen to. And it is all time spent for a sort of self-gratification; for having my words down on the page and out there to be seen without the discipline or the effort of putting them into a form where they would be published. I don’t have the answer to this question; I ask it of myself every time I sit down to write an entry.
I wish her question had instead been: Why do we write? I know the answer to that one in a heartbeat. We write because we must. If we couldn’t do this, we’d write on scraps of paper, or start screenplays we’d never finish, or scribble out plays we’d never stage. We’d write poetry and go to open mike night at coffeehouses. We can’t help it. Something is inside each of us that is dying to get out, to articulate itself. You may as well ask me to stop breathing. It would be no less unnatural. I can’t answer the question about what that means. I can just explain how it is, as best I can, with whatever gifts are at my disposal.
About my life, my hopes and my dreams, well, I can tell you a story. Shortly after I moved to New York, my friend Red and I made a trip to Atlantic City at one a.m. in a borrowed production van that had to be back the next day at two in the afternoon and three hundred and seventy dollars between the two of us. And despite our willingness to risk our jobs and our entire bankroll for one shot at a glorious evening, we each decided to stash a twenty in our sock before we hit the casino, so that no matter how Lady Luck chose to turn on us, we’d still have enough to get us back home with a chance to piece our lives back together. It is getting towards that hour, and I still want to go and play the cards that get dealt me. I just think it wouldn’t be a bad idea to stick a twenty in my sock.

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Doesn't Take Much and That's Messed Up - 2004-03-15
Like Water Under Bridges - 2003-09-08
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An Administrative Announcement - 2003-08-11
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