It was amazing. 

Lazy Then Locked Out

I was depressed for a couple months, got medicated again, could not figure out how to log into this account... then in the last few weeks, I booked a role that I particularly wanted. And when we had our first zoom meeting, I learned that it is being made with a grant from the Venice International Film Festival, and will be premiering there. So my mom, fresh from a breakup, said we should go. I found a transatlantic cruise that could leisurely get us to Europe the day before the festival starts, and now it is set.

The project will be shot in VR, and is a comedy. Everything is in my wheelhouse. I get to wear some prosthetics, so today was a costume fitting, but I will also be showing up early tomorrow to finalize that. The director asked if I could get there earlier than call time. The only thing that was holding me back from showing up when the crew does is the maintenance of social norms, so I will just be there at the start of the day tomorrow. And there is a gym nearby, so I can get properly stretched in the morning too.

My music and standup are going well. The main issue I currently have as I gather all my bits together is that I keep referring to a set list, which takes attention away from the audience. This is bad, even though I do riff on it and get some laughs in there. So I have a little under three months to get on stage as much as I can, then on that cruise, I will have nine days at sea, during which I hope to steal unused stage space and do enough rehearsing and organizing of my bits to maybe have my routine figured out.

Then we will dock in Barcelona, fly from there to Venice, and attend the oldest film festival in the world.

This could be how I break into the industry. The director was pretty practical in how he talked about it, but apparently few have tried a narrative project in VR, certainly not comedy, and definitely not in the way that we are. It is a cast of 24 people, each of us with our own lav mics. 

Dress rehearsal is tomorrow, shooting the next day. 60 people total on set for the shoot day. Very exciting.

Approaching Valentine's Weekend

Well look who came crawling back to his blog like the worm I am. Off the edibles, so I have been getting stuff done. Music videos with Frozen Soul? Check! Finished editing a tolerable version of the comedy doc pilot while sleeping in my mom's convertible in the midst of snow and ice in a Waffle House parking lot after flying in for the aforementioned music videos because the hotel prices kept going up, but I was not gonna pay 3x the rate when I knew I would have a full day to recover for the shoots anyway? Check!

I have focused more on the music. Yesterday, I tried following a friend's advice and being sad onstage. This came in handy because a song I am working on is called Breakup. But it perhaps worked too well? People (not everyone) thought it was real. Or is that good? People think that about She Was Kind too... But it is a downer, so I maybe need to up the absurdity at the end. I have a show tomorrow night (Valentine's) where I plan to just play the one song, then another on Monday where I will be filling ten minutes. Since that will be after Valentine's Day, it seems like a pretty good time to lean into the breakup song, but I dunno.

I bought a season pass to Universal Studios Hollywood, and that amount of stimulus with that little effort on my part really had me craving edibles again. Very fun time. And a great way to avoid being sedentary. A full day of that followed by a movie at AMC? You got a stew going.

Whiny New Year from Me!

Ugh, sober again, and therefore horrifyingly aware of the carcass I have been towing about via my abdomen. The other night, I had to get up like four times to pee, and like, I started to worry about prostate issues. But then I remembered that I have just been eating more food and drinking less water, so probably, my body digests the fluid differently when working with solids. Also, the extra fat can compress the bladder. Yes, the same affliction that plagues the pregnant also plagues me, but I am not sure that I have much to birth as a result.

The pilot I was editing has gotten little response, which makes me assume that it sucks. The most common refrain is that people want to know more about me. It seems that this is a part of life where I need to act like my actual self, which happens to be larger than life, despite how tempered I try to be in my chomps at humble pie. One step to making this happen is to film more of me. I made a few little music videos last year, but that did not last. Part of the reason is of course that I am shooting in horizontal, which means that there is more of the screen to occupy besides my own lil' self.

New Years reflections? Remember how I used to do those? Nah man, I need something to happen. Or just to stick with sobriety for longer. I become a worse person on cannabis, but the alcohol actually destroys. And an issue with the alcohol is that the cannabis products greatly increase the potency of the booze.

Still working on songs, still figuring out what shots might work, and still haunted daily by the world news that can be so paralyzing. They keep kidnapping, killing, deporting, imprisoning, prison camping folks, and here I am just trying to help maybe keep kiddos literate via entertainment?