Visionless

Maybe the problem with this life is that there is no vision for it.

Unlike other places, other moments, I don’t know where I’m going with it. I can’t even pretend I do.

In my first San Francisco, I was an artist in hiding. Working between the hours of 5 pm and 9 am on plays and productions and short films. I lived across the street from the dirty wedding cake facade of the Ritz Carlton and was rising from the ashes of alcoholism. Even the trope of learning from the failure and shame of my inability to find a way to stay in a marriage with a woman I loved had its place in the artist’s experience.

In New York, I was a playwright, moonlighting in advertising and not giving a shit. Doing it myself and staying sober with the help of friends, living cheap, and then dating my hot redheaded landlord who took my breath away in public when she wore tall shoes.

In LA, I was a writer on the make married to a woman on the verge. We were coming off good gigs and had the heat of work on us still. Imminent parenthood was enthralling and full of hope even as we were trying to figure out the landing. Unemployed, living on savings, writing scripts between ad jobs, pleased with the space of our two-bedroom apartment at the corner of Crescent and Sunset, driving through West Hollywood in a British Racing Green Mini. That was us. Top down. Unafraid of the sun on our pale skins.

The second tour of duty in San Francisco was a natural extension, but one that cemented us to the road that we’re struggling with now. I was an East Bay dad, living on the side of the water where bohemians could still afford a space to work. First in Oakland where I wrote plays by hand in a spiral notebook. Then in the shade-dappled world of Lafayette where I left behind the theatre and bore down on the career until we were in a house and had a bank account that looked fatter we ever thought it could get. (Ironically, the more we had the more we wished we had — a curious problem where the relief of the scratch causes more itch.)

I’m just in a place I’ve never been before and never imagined being. So odd as we come toward the last bit of working life that I can’t stop.