12/2/23
Newsletter 523
The Crack of Dawn
I’ve been living in my present house in Michigan since November of 2002. It’s a wooded neighborhood of dirt roads that is encircled by a road that clocks in at 7/8 of a mile, and has been my daily walk for 21 years. For perhaps 12 years I always went left at the bottom of my driveway, thus saving the one hill for the end of the walk. 7-8 years ago, I thought, “What happens if I go right? The hill would be near the beginning.” What happens? It changes the whole walk because it’s good to get the aerobics working early. Although I assure you, it ain’t much of a hill, it can still get me winded.
So, depending on which way I go, either directly before or right after the hill is the turtle pond – containing five different types of turtles, I’m told – and after that comes the “Curve of Sorrow.” This stretch of dirt road was simply a curve in the road in front of the turtle pond from 2002 until – I could check the exact date in my journal if I was home – but something like October 24, 2006. The universe decided to inform me of Buddha’s First Noble Truth, “Life is suffering.”
I was walking past the turtle pond, craning my neck, trying to see a turtle on a log, which I often did. Nope, not today. Then I checked out the houses that faced the pond. The last house with a beautiful raw wood balcony decorated with interesting carvings and was the home of the guy who told me there were five kinds of turtles in the pond. Right there in front of that house – BAM! – I was hit with a bolt of cosmic empathic awareness. In a flash I could suddenly feel the pain of existence for everyone and everything all over the world, everywhere. I connected into the horrible pain of the heartbreak of life and death. I felt a sudden deep empathic understanding of all of the grief and misery ever felt by everyone. Like Kurtz, I saw “the horror.”
Then I realized that my former girlfriend, Lisa, not only didn’t love me, but she never had. She had broken up with me a few months before and I honestly didn’t believe her. I said, “So get on the internet and find someone better.” The first guy she went out with – Leon – she fell in love with, or at least she said she did, and I foolishly believed her.
All the emotions that I had failed to previously feel in my life, I now felt like burning blades in my guts. I burst into tears – and I never cry – and I went completely limp and could barely stand up. Lisa did not love me. The film business didn’t even like me. I had recently returned from Bulgaria, having directed the unimpressive SyFy Channel movie, Stan Lee’s Harpies (2007), starring the unimpressive, Steven Baldwin. With great difficulty I brought it in on time and on budget, but it was the worst movie I’d ever made, and it hadn’t been any fucking fun making it, either. What was I doing?
Making shit like Harpies was insulting. I was 46 years old, and if I tried really, really hard, I might be able to get another SyFy movie. But seriously, this was it. My career had stalled out. My epitaph would be, “He was reasonably competent.”
I was crying so hard that I grabbed hold of a signpost to not fall down. I was wracked with uncontrollable sobbing, a horrible feeling that I’d never experienced before, or at least not since I was very young. This kind of psychic pain was unbearable. There suddenly was a hole right through my heart.
Having never been much of a drinker until then, I now felt that it was the obvious answer to all of problems. Besides, it worked for Hemingway and Fitzgerald, didn’t it? [No.] They wrote great books when they were drunk. I went to the corner liquor store, where I had been a few times (and would ultimately end up putting the owner’s kids through college) and bought dark rum because I thought it tasted good. Add a little Coke, and what the hell? Off I went.
Soon thereafter – and I just wrote about this – I was a guest at a low-budget horror convention in Virginia. My old buddy from Hollywood, Jeff Burr, drove in from Georgia to attend. Jeff had bailed on Hollywood not long before I bailed for the last time. Apparently, wherever he was in Georgia wasn’t too far from this convention (I didn’t know where I was. I flew to Lexington, KY, then we took a prop plane to Virginia). Jeff and I met up, then went to the bar and had a drink. I ordered rum and coke. I think he had whiskey. He asked how I was doing, so I laid all of the heartbreak and pain in the world on him. Jeff, who just died within the last two months, was a perennially upbeat, cheery character, with a Georgia drawl, a little like a character from Gone with the Wind. “Oh, you just can’t love that mealymouthed, Millie?”
I concluded my diatribe with, “And that’s why I’m becoming an alcoholic.” Jeff could not help but to wisely inform me, “You don’t want to be a drunk on rum. It’s all sugar. It’s the worst hangover. [it had given me terrible hangovers, but I thought that was just the price you paid]. Real drunks drink vodka.” I honestly had no idea. I said, “Really? Why?” Jeff said, “It hardly has any hangover. No kidding.”
I took Jeff’s advice when I got back to Michigan. Hangover-wise, vodka was so much better than rum that I didn’t stop drinking it non-stop, every day for the next ten years.
However, unlike Hemingway or Fitzgerald, I didn’t write anything good while I was drunk (although I did get a few good ideas, I just couldn’t write them).
My shit may not be so good now, either, but at least I can see the keyboard.
Good on ya.
So honest and heartfelt ❤️