My Scumbag Mind

It's a weird thing.

I always have one thing to do each day. It's an important thing.

I go. I do that thing.

And then my brain stops caring about anything else after that.

I try to do other things. A lot of times, I get other things done. But that's about it.

Again, this is personal stuff. I always get business stuff done when other people are involved. But personal daily chores can be, well, a chore.

The concept of the "most important task of the day" was something I did when I burned myself out a while back.

It's a horrible issue I'm dealing with.

I mean, it's not drug addiction. And I know most people constantly wait till the last minute of the last day of their last life to do the things they truly wanted.

And I think I might have become like this after reaching some seriously huge personal goals. Writer's block is different for someone who's written fifteen feature length scripts as opposed to someone who's on the third feature length script.

It might be different for someone who started a blog, and never got pass their second post as opposed to someone who underwent a whole yearly webcomic.

But I don't like it.

I don't like it when people tell me to relax.

I don't want to relax.

Full potential only relaxes after the muscles are stressed out.

Taking time to smell the roses.

Maybe I shouldn't.

Maybe I need to surround myself with people who are so goddamn talented, I want to kill myself when I am in their presence.

I guess it could be who I am.

Oh, you like hip hop? Let me talk to you about Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath.

Oh, you like rock? Have you heard that new Bobby Shmurda song?

I don't know, maybe I'm bitching a little too much. This is life. This is what you do. I always take a step back and think about what those Italian Renaissance Men would have done with current technology and opportunities.

I've procrastinated on getting a new gym membership. I might sign up on March. That depends on a couple other things.

It's good for creativity, but it's really bad for marketing.

My best ideas come at night. My best tweets happen at night. There's a lot of people in India and England that think I'm funny because I'm tweeting jokes in their waking hour.

Water and fire, but not firewater

Next time you have the urge to do something self-destructive, I'd suggest you see someone else doing it.

Watch a video of someone punching someone else in the face.

Watch a video of two guys screaming at each other.

Sit in the comfort of your home, dorm, or living room and realize what an ass everyone in these videos is making of themselves.

And realize that that could be you if you were out to do such a thing.

Watch a video where a man complains about being a man.

Watch a video where a woman complains about being a woman.

I've had the urge to address the issue on the division of the sexes lately.

But, I've done my research and am immediately discouraged by such an outing.

And opening your mouth and generalizing a small faction as an entire group makes you seem like a buffoon.

Because you don't really hate women.

And you don't really hate men.

There was that boy that you really got along with. You thought about asking him to hang out, but you didn't, And you know if you were to write a sexist post, and this person were to see it, you wouldn't be able to forgive yourself.

And same applies to everyone. You know Hitler knew some cute Jewish girl in his life growing up. He probably wanted to talk to her, but never did, and someone else did and married her.

He probably thought about her when he killed himself.

There's a lot of people in unfortunate circumstances who are in denial of what needs to be done, so they lash out when they should be working on themselves.

J. Cole's been making a lot of sense. "Cause I know every poet just wanna be loved".

Originally, I thought he said "deep down, every boy just wanna be loved", but that works as well.

If you hire a star player, let them be a star player. No one cares about your boring fucking opinion.

Your boring opinion fucking sucks. Do cool shit to do cool shit.

Jennifer Aniston's movie career isn't doing as well as she wants it to. Because I don't think Jennifer actually watches movies. She doesn't have an urge to do cool shit. She did all her cool shit making Friends. She needs to make cool shit again.

But cool shit is intimidating.

It's intimidating to ask for more as an artist.

It's intimidating when people tell you you'll never achieve something to go on and achieve it and ask for more.

I think this where the root of most people's fears come from.

Pete Carroll got cocky. It's who he is. He did it with the Longhorns. He did it with the Patriots.

Part of his cockiness won him the ring last year. Part of his cockiness was why he was so good with USC. But, he has to accept that there's another side to that, and if he wants to keep doing what he's doing, that's just a part of life he has to accept. He probably did a long time ago.

If you live a certain lifestyle that comes with blowback and repercussions, you're just going to have to decide that this is a part of the life you chose and it's going to be a part of your day now.

Walt Disney declared bankruptcy several times in his career. But he accepted that in order to do the things he wanted to do with his life, that was just something he had to deal with.

Walt Disney went to his grave fighting over money with his brother so he could make his projects. Again, that was something he had to deal with, and no one acknowledges, and he is an artist who will live forever because of it.

He would rather do that than work at a nine to five.

Working eighteen hour days and gambling your savings, your significant others savings, all over something that no one thinks will work. Disney's folly.

Take some trial, and a little bit of error. Figure out what you want. Give yourself a little space to fall. Don't make full blown predictions yet. The puppies and the porcupine picked the Seahawks. I'd like to think the Patriots would get disqualified for some cheating method that has yet to be discovered, but I'm not gonna worry about that.

Worry about you. Get what you want.

And make sure you'd keep doing it after you were rich.

A lot of shitty reality television celebs stop being artists after the money came in.

Chase the wrong thing, and you'll get it.

Disclaimer

I've been having a lot of fears regarding this blog.

I had this fear that I might say something that someone would discover that would jeopardize my later well being.

And I've decided if that you were someone that I'd come across that feels this way, I don't want you in my life nor in my career.

Good day sir.

The Most Important Thing

You know, I've been doing my best to be consistent with coming up with ideas. Any idea. One idea a day since 2007.

It's been rough sometimes.

Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.

I like to plan out how the ideas get executed. I always told myself that if I wasn't loyal, the idea well will dry up.

But at this time, I notice that not everything works all of the time. Sometimes, it doesn't work out.

You move onto other things. You live. You learn.

But, I notice that a good eighty percent of the time, you need to work on the idea and finish it when the passion comes in.

That can be hard for those endurance runs. Those multi-day film shoots. Those multi-month editing sessions. Those yearlong distribution deals.

That's why what you're working on has to be good. You have to respect yourself as an artist in that way. You gotta call people on their bullshit when they give you some whack shit that they themselves have no financial responsibility in. Your sanity is not worth giving up for a minor role that probably won't get your foot in the door.

Next time a child star goes crazy, look at the last movie they were in. If I was in So Undercover or Shipwrecked, I'd lose my fucking mind too.

So many people would rather kill themselves than speak in public. Let alone speaking in public when they're ten. 

Not just speaking in public, making people laugh in public. Shit's hard boo.

And you keep doing it until you're in your late twenties. Laugh Factory. Stress Factory. Feeling like a depressed product. Of course you do.

People are full of shit. If you make complaints, I'm bringing up your resume. Complaining about Christopher Nolan when you shoot cell phone videos vertically, go fuck yourself.

Don't give in to validation. Validation is overrated.

Whatever, fuck your friends and your retweets. No one is going to give it, you're going to have to take it.

No one wants to be criticized over a piece of shit they weren't even a smidge passionate about.

And if your friends are doing you a favor and working on your thing, you have to make it meaningful. You have to be Phil Jackson about it. James Cameron, Napoleon. Be in the trenches with your boys.

If you're the leader of a project, you gotta be passionate. This might be my opinion, but I think the passion overrides everything. I think you have to be smart and literate about what you're working on too, but the passion has to come through. It comes through in the little things. You listen to people. You figure out what your team's strengths are and try to accommodate for it.

A lot of people don't care. And then everything falls apart. They don't listen to people. There's something off about what they're working on and they think they can deflect blame onto everybody else. Nobody wants to work on it because deep down they think it sucks, but you're not doing anything to make it suck less.

Don't be offended. I did that too. Learn from it.

Budget is always gonna be an issue. Always will be. But if your enthusiasm comes through, you can overrule that.

Enthusiasm comes from truth.

It's that joke that addresses something "that's so true".

Not a lot of rock stars have gotten in trouble lately. But a lot of comedians have.

Because it's a comedian's job to tell the truth. Truth scares people.

Anything that lasts the test of time speaks to a truth. A vibe.

Something that makes you give a fuck.

Can A Blog Be Finished?

You know,

I've been working this blog for a little bit now.

I actually started a couple prototype blogs back in high school. They were little interesting things, but I discontinued those for a myriad of reasons. Reasons that don't seem significant now. Reasons that I should have walked out of, had I had the hindsight that I do now.

For the last year or so, I've had the trouble of creating content for this blog.

I don't like the current community at large with their hashtag activism and their fake insincere bullshit.

I don't like the term "entitled", but I will say this about my generation:

We're not the kind of people that will play through a losing game of Madden/FIFA/NBA 2K.

When things get bad, we turn it off. I include myself in that.

We try to change the law when it's convenient for us, and change it back when it's inconvenient for us.

Again, this could have been happening for thousands of years, but this is something I've noticed within ourselves.

And being that we (not just my generation, but society as a whole) are sore losers that cannot tolerate different opinions on subjective matters, it's hard to create content in a non-scorn environment.

I remember, I think it was a while ago when the World Cup was going on. A lot of Americans proposed that soccer/futbol have either a shot clock or a smaller field to make the game more exciting. Someone on Twitter voiced their opinion saying that this game should not change its rules, since it would be doing so for people who did not enjoy the game in the first place.

A rant like that is fine, but one must then understand that if you don't want people who despise your sport to change it, you're going to have to live the rest of your life understanding that there's going to be things that you enjoy that other people do not like.

Anyway...

A lot of blogs on the Internet that seem to go for years without any new content do so under the terms that blogs are never really finished. If there's always tomorrow, there's always going to be the need for a new blog post.

That can be intimidating/stressful for an individual that does not write under those guidelines. We are a scumbag inconsistent society. Perhaps inconsistency is needed for society at large to function, but we will complain about movie sequels and yet be angry at a blog for changing its style away from what it originally was.

You outline a novel. You plot a novel. You finish a novel.

You plan a film. You have a lot of meetings. The transition from pre-production to production is the hardest. Once you get over that hurdle, you deal with filming. Kubrick compared it with writing a novel over a furnace while taking a break to write other parts in a blizzard.

Then a film goes out to distribution. The distribution model was different in the 1940s, which was completely different in the 1970s, which was different in 2003, which is an everchanging math problem now. You can't figure out those answers in a book. You can only do it from experience.

Once a book on current film distribution is released, the game has already changed.

But even that's doable. That has a conclusion.

Blogging doesn't have a conclusion. It just keeps going on.

And it's not like a tweet. Tweets are simple. Popcorn is simple. Sugar is simple. Simple carbohydrates. They digest easily.

And most websites about maintaining a blog always focus on businesses that maintain blogs.

Who the hell seeks enjoyment on the niche business examples they use for blogging?

Why are you people creating a YouTube channel for oddity businesses? That's so lame. I feel it in my gut. My inability to care.

Really? An entire YouTube channel about lawncare? And you're angry and looking for ways to create content for this? And you wonder why you can't have numbers that can compete with Austin Mahone? Honestly?

VladTV stretches their interviews, and they're actually interesting most of the time.

Lawncare. A YouTube channel on lawncare. And you're complaining about a lack of viewers and how hard maintaining a YouTube channel is.

I need Sam Kinison to scream "It's fucking lawncare!".

I'm sorry, I'm just whatevered out by some people.

They opened up with a crappy idea.

A lot of times when you pursue something, the idea is the best part and it goes downhill from there. Hitchcock said this, and he's the greatest filmmaker ever. A YouTube channel on lawncare? No, I'm not done, I can't deal with this right now.

Can't you just do a normal sketch comedy channel and that have it be sponsored by the lawncare people? That could work. Why do you go and do things with which you know you're not going to get out of?

Anyway...

A lot of things end. Endings are good. The Lord of The Rings, despite having four endings, concluded.

I plotted Stickup. I finished Stickup. If I made it a once a week thing forever and ever, I would have never started. Finite's how I work. I like to split tasks in half. I can't split eternity without creating a nuclear disaster.

So, in the tradition of many a rock and roll farewell tour, I ask "Can a blog be done?".

Oncoming Overhaul

I think 2014 sort of was what I wanted it to be. I rubbed a lamp of a mediocre genie, and I got what I wanted. And that's okay.

I tried to pander to people who did not like the same movies/music I like. That backfired on me. You do things cause you think it's a step forward, but everything falls apart, and you feel like a fool for doing it. You develop an instinct for what you're willing to put up with.

I listened to chauvinists who wanted me to represent their minority in my projects while they demeaned other ethnicities with no sense of guilt or irony.

I listened to racist feminists who complained that my projects did not show a "truly" strong female character while they drooled over Fifty Shades of Grey.

I have tried multiple times, to write a bunch of stuff for this blog, but I have fallen in the cracks due to the nature that they were purely clickbait articles. Will I post them in the future? Probably, but not now.

I have decided, at this point, to refocus this blog moreso on new projects I'm working on/interested in. This blog was supposed to promote my other stuff, but I have decided that I would rather make it a blog I would visit as a visitor of blogs. I am willing to accept the consequences of what that entails.

I have been hesitant in my career pursuits by this fear of being open about my opinion.

You see a lot of stories in the news of people in high positions who get fired over tweets. I don't think anybody should get fired over tweets and remarks. You might use remarks as a reason not to vote for someone, but I think anyone who wants to fire someone over remarks is someone who probably doesn't have a real job.

People would rather fire someone over homophobic remarks than help out the LGBT community that's currently abused in Putin's Russia.

Cause people are fake. Don't be fake. Fake collects dust and gets replaced.

I've also dealt with other people that hate success or the steps that lead to success. Or they talk about how hard their life is. They talk shit about those at the top. Novelists that talk shit about Lord of the Rings. Rappers who talk shit about Tupac. While they have no body of work to counter examine with.

Tolkien and Tupac are dead. You gotta worry about yourself.

These idiots are trying to settle some past score. I don't care about past scores. I'm focusing on current championships.

And another thing, just because I don't tweet about whatever stupid holiday/tragedy is in the news, does not mean I don't care about said thing. Gossiping hens.

Hens get shot, stuffed, broiled, and fed to golden retriever puppies.

Anyway,

Understand that I love everybody and that I want everybody to succeed, and any point I will bring across in the future was probably done as a joke or a constructive criticism.

Again, it seems I'm addressing a hypothetical fictitious scandal that has yet to exist, but be what it may I am sorry. But, I cannot let this fear stop me. I'm going to repost some long deleted posts of mine (which I might later delete cause whatever)

But, I have decided that at this point, if my current or any future employers/sponsors/whatever would like to fire me over something I said, said job at establishment was not meant to be, and that it is the wishes of the universe telling me that it's time to move on.

Men Are Like Dogs

This is a little diddy called Men Are Like Dogs...

Men Are Like Dogs.

They can be cuddly. They can be adorable. And they can rip your fucking face off.

They need care. They need love. They can kill you even if you've given them all of the above.

A dog by its nature is a stray. He will leave you if you don't feed him and rub his belly. So don't complain and give a dog what it needs or some skank will smile as it feeds.

Dogs can help.

They can aid your health.

And when you step on their paws they go yelp.

A big dog can bark at the would be burglars. But if you like them vicious he might think you're a burger.

A small dog might be fun at parties. But they're not around when the home invasion's starting.

A dog can mess up and need discipline. But if you smack them in the face too much, you can get a row of teeth in your rear end.

Dog in the mirror men of its own best friend. Love it well and it will be like Hachiko till the very end.