I Ain't Gonna Beat Myself Up

It would be easy to scold myself for the way I’ve behaved over the past five months. I’m not gonna deny it: I’ve done nothing but party. Oh, sure, I’ve managed to check a couple of items off the home improvement list. But aside from that, my life since I started collecting Unemployment Insurance last December has been all about sleeping ‘til noon; figuring out where to go on any given night; priming myself with Martinis and pot; meeting cute boys who are way younger than I ever thought I’d be interested in; taking them home; and scoring coke to snort with them before we fuck.

It would be easy to view this binge of hedonism as a waste of time, but I’m not gonna go there. For long, I mean. Or more precisely, that’s not how I’m gonna let it stand on my permanent record.

Sure, I beat myself up every day, now that the golden goose is about to hit menopause and stop laying – but at the end of the day, I’m not having it. I’m not going to look at my first opportunity to live in New York without having to report to a demeaning position as some bourgeois snob’s assistant as a waste of time. In fact, the more I chastise myself, the more I realize how important this whole period has been.

Woulda, coulda, shoulda – how productive is that game in the long run? Ultimately it’s just another form of procrastination. The more I beat myself up for procrastinating, the more I’m procrastinating.

All I know is this: When I finally got a chance to sit in the apartment I’d been working on since February of ‘04, really getting a chance to look at the environment I’d created for myself, I became overwhelmed with how much I’d gone through just to get to that point. And I collapsed. I collapsed into someone who slept until noon and wondered what kind of things he should do now that he finally had the time to think about who he wanted to be now that he was in New York and didn’t have a day job.

Despite the neighborhood; despite the smelly chicken store next door; despite the crackhead in the hall and the dealers on the street corner, I decided I liked my new digs. This was an important revelation, because if I had decided I didn’t like the new digs – if I suddenly started to view them as some sort of desperate measure or mistake – then I could’ve triggered a major depression from which I might never have emerged. Luckily, I liked what I saw, in spite of the obvious flaws, and so I was able to turn my thoughts inward instead of projecting them onto my environment.

Turning my thoughts inward – THAT’s what started a low-grade depression, leading to prolonged partying. I thought I had it all planned. I thought I’d give myself December and January to just “check out” and party. But the party kept going… through February, through March, and on into April. But I have to say, here at the end of April, the partying has tapered down and I’m ready to face whatever’s next.

D’ya hear that, universe?!? I’m not afraid of having to get up at 6:00am again, if that’s what it takes. Of course I’d rather not have to do that, but on the other hand – I’m not so keen on continuing to sleep until noon. And until I’ve wrangled the appropriate connections in NY; until I’ve determined an exact plan of action; and most importantly, until I’ve secured the financial means to do whatever I want – well then, there’s nothing better for me to do than go land another JOB.

It doesn’t have to last long. I don’t have to take it seriously. But I’ve only just begun to establish my NY identity. I have a lot of work to do just to get to the point where I’m launching anything. In the meantime, I need to earn cash flow; I need to wrap up the home improvements; I need to take a writing workshop or two; and I need to apply for grad school.

I have a plan. Just because I didn’t set the world on fire in December doesn’t mean I’m going to fall on my face in May.

I’ve always been the sort of bird who foresees, vaguely, where he’ll be within any given amount of time. There’s always a +/- ratio, to be sure, but my inner voice is pretty dead-on. Truth be told, I knew all the way back in December that I wouldn’t emerge from this break into the long-term “place” I’d like to eventually inhabit here in New York. Instead, I foresaw it as exactly what it has turned out to be – a break, meaning an opportunity to take stock and get back into the headspace I inhabited way back in L.A., before I had to make this sudden move. It would be ridiculous to be hard on myself for not having taken over New York simply because I had six months of bare-bones checks in the mail to live off. Sure, other people might have played it differently, but guess what? At least half of that probable set would’ve partied even more, or watched even more TV, or even succumbed to total drug addiction. There’s no sense comparing myself to others, now is there? Especially if those others are only probabilities…

I played it the way I played it. May hindsight provide me with eventual 20/20.