Godard is Dead

Godard is dead. The British paper says it was a voluntary departure. Over here nothing is voluntary. If it doesn't happen against my will, it didn't really happen.

I dreamed so much last night I woke up exhausted. Good dreams, bad dreams, strange dreams: I was running through a field so green it had to be Scotland though it may have been Central Park, and I was singing "I'm free, I'm free, I'm finally free" but I didn't feel free, I felt slightly concerned. Then I had one where I shat my pants in a rented car or I shat my pants then got into a rented car, and I thought I can wait ‘til I get where I'm going to deal with this, but then I realized I was downstairs from my hi-rise city apartment so I should probably just go back up there and deal with it now.

Then there were the twenty-five interstitial dreams starring ex-wives, employers, old friends etc. There was even tennis and donuts, my unconscious splashing over the retaining walls, running down my legs like menstrual blood.

I'm struggling. Not because anything bad is happening, but because life is seasonal, and right now the crops I am growing are struggle crops. I'll grow smooth-sailing, coasting-downhill crops when the weather gets cooler. I should only be that full of acceptance. The truth is I'm wandering around in my boxer shorts muttering and bumping into walls.

It's my own fault. I thought I could get away with a vacation. I feigned normalcy in a foolish act of self-deception. I figured, let me spread some of this screenwriting loot around and play the swell-- take a beach front or at least beach view Cape Cod vacation. See the family or what's left of it.

So, I ordered up a nice sea-grass sprawl on the old Airbnb (or in this case Vrbo), and treated my spinster sister to the good life. A three-story four suite hotel of a house for me, the ex, the son and the older sibling, planting my triumphant flag in Plymouth Mass like Miles Standish all those years ago.

I let 'em know that my brother may be gone, but that slot machine known as the movie business is still paying out to one of the Swerdlow boys! That's right you bums, the junkie is back on top and doing Pilates! You counted him out, but like the mighty Phoenix blah blah blah.

I don't know if I was really thinking all that, but I hadn't seen my family in three years and it seemed like the right thing to do and I deserve a vacation and I work hard (I don't really) and all that bullshit. So, I whip out the debit card and get it done, and for ten days leave my Los Angeles life behind.

I wake up each morning and meander out my bedroom door into what can only be described as verdant green, take a five-minute drive to a little kettle pond where I splash and wade like a happy Jewish bear all alone in the healing waters, the woods silently humming all around me. It's magic! I'm half Henny Youngman half Henry Thoreau.

I play tennis in the afternoon, buy fresh local seafood and cook wonderful lunches and dinners for all, and at night we watch the U.S. Open and laugh. Everyone gets along, and the ways we do drive each other crazy are bearable.

I don't write a word or touch my computer for the whole trip, something I never do, but strangely I don't miss it or feel guilty. I simply set my work aside, even my ideas about my work, and play the everyman on vacation.

But I am not an everyman, I am a kook! I’ve had to claw and fight and scratch my way to structure and consistency and I can't just cough it up for something as meaningless as leisure!

I get back to Los Angeles, get a bad cold (that isn't covid), and suddenly my glorious little porch office is no longer the word-friendly confines it has always been but a strange sputtering purgatory where unfinished novels go to die. Even my kid’s film is unaccommodating and I'm like oh fuck, what I was I thinking. I'm not the jockey, I'm the horse. And not even a racehorse, a plow horse. I need a bit in my mouth and a harness on my back or I lose my mind!

Okay, that was the over the top but I do need six hundred to a thousand words of prose and a few pages of screenwriting and some daily exercise. STRUCTURE. ME MUST HAVE!

Everyone said, that's great that you're not writing, you deserve a break. Bullshit! I can't handle breaks. I can only handle ritual and repetition and if it isn't repetition to the light, it will be repetition to the dark. Luckily, I kept in it neutral and the only pain I suffered was the pain of leisure, but I have learned my lesson.

These words are my spiritual practice. The way I calibrate my life. The daily writing of them allows me to deal with the painfully unstructured past. It's my program, my surrender, and though I want them to be good and find a life out in the world, I have to keep making them whether they do or not.