As my biological clock turns its unstoppable hands to the dreaded high noon of middle age, I find myself feeling like Woody Allen's character, "Mickey Sachs" in his film "Hanna and her Sisters". Now, this is not to say that I am some kind of potentially-suicidal hypochondriac facing a philosophical crisis that forces me to re-evaluate my entire belief system....far from it...well maybe not so far...but, well, different . Different in the fact that I don't have red hair or wear horn-rimmed glasses and that I am much taller than Woody Allen, but all of the rest kind of rings true.
For perhaps three years now I have suffered from this annoying pressure in my chest...sometimes it's more obvious, sometimes it's barely there at all...but recently it has begun to drive me crazy. It's like having a ten pound weight on your chest. That simple. It's annoying. It's distracting and it's uncomfortable. It never goes completely away. It keeps me in a constant state of odd anxiety. When I am stressed out it feels as if I am being bear-hugged by a professional wrestler. This feeling became ever-present following my divorce, the loss of my apartment, the overwhelming stress of a seemingly never-ending film project, and having a crazy stalker who wanted to chop me up in tiny pieces with an axe because I once called him an asshole. That's when this started and it's never gone away.
Yesterday I went to the Doctor to have this issue looked into for the second time. I was given an EKG and then sent for a chest x-ray...next week I get to go back and have blood taken for a number of tests. These are the joys of getting older. I've also recently started taking joint health capsules because my body has begun to feel as if I'm in the early stages of rigor mortis. On top of this other shit, it has become painfully obvious to me that I now need glasses. I was the final hold out in my family who didn't wear them....but now I must join the spectacles club. I always thought people were exaggerating when they said that when you hit forty things really start to change. Isn't forty supposed to be the new thirty? For me it feels like the new fifty at the rate I'm going. Who doesn't love squinting all the time while feeling as if they are being squeezed in the clutches of a giant?
I tried to watch the Charlie Kaufman film "Synecdoche, New York" the other day and I started to feel extremely uncomfortable and had to shut it off. Have I become like his character, Caden Cotard? If I'm like that pathetic bastard I'll just saw my own head of with a goddamn hacksaw right now. Something about that film struck a nerve and that subsequently began to irritate the shit out of me as I watched the movie. It was all very neurotic, and, if anything, I've tried to be much less neurotic and self-loathing these days. It irritated me that I could even slightly relate to that character on any level at all.
Recently, I have been re-evaluating the mess that I have made of my life up to now and I have tried to focus my energies in a wiser direction than I have previously. This means learning new technologies and focusing my attention on things that are more important than making exploitation movies about shit monsters and retarded zombies. This is a daunting task that looms ahead of me and can seem overwhelming at times. This isn't the zany predicament of Rodney Dangerfield in "Back to School". This is more a case of "get a new direction or you are seriously fucked". I'm forty one years old and still live with room mates. I don't own a car. I don't have dental insurance, and if I don't remedy that particular problem very soon I'm going to look like the fucking Terminator by the next time I leave a dentist's office. And no, I don't mean that the dentist will make me look like Arnold Schwarzenegger, I mean that my skull will be half metal when they finally get through with me.
Perhaps you've seen the famous still photograph of silent movie comedian Harold Lloyd hanging precariously from the the hands of an enormous clock face, dangling dangerously over the ledge of a towering sky scrapper in the film "Safety Last". This image might put things into proper perspective concerning how my particular biological clock seems to be ticking. Man hangs from clock on a sky scrapper at least twelve stories up...said man is fucked unless he has incredible luck and determination to survive his predicament. That's Harold Lloyd on the clock tower in a nutshell. That's the iconic Hollywood image. That's what I feel like right now.
At this point I'm simply scrambling to finish my book so that I can focus on learning the technology that will help me stumble my way into the field of animation in some capacity. Why animation? Well I've been a cartoonist all of my life, I'm a trained voice actor and I've made two movies...the choice seems obvious...it's just too bad it wasn't as fucking obvious ten years ago as it is now. Now I must concoct some way to wrangle enough student loans to get myself into terrible debt while also pretending that I'm the new Walt Disney. Oddly enough "Daniel West" could easily be an anagram for "Walt Disney" if it weren't for that pesky "Y"....there's always that pesky "Y"...as in "Y" the fuck didn't I think of going into animation before I was 41 years old?
Jesus, listen to Grandpa bitch and moan like a neurotic crybaby. Fuck me for being such a whining pussy asshole.
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