I don't exactly know where I'm going with this one, so if it peters out after a paragraph, forgive me.

I got another audition for today. It's for a student film and it comes with a shiny toy inside. The CD also casts for shows on some major cable networks and one of the Big Three (the broadcast networks are the new applicable trifecta for that moniker, but really, I suppose there are four). I bring my headshot, do a one-minute, silent physical comedy routine that I worked up (on the list for today), and she keeps my headshot for other stuff.

I've been cleaning up a massive mental train wreck the last few days, and this audition kind of helps me focus my attention on something. The unstoppable force finally met the immovable object, so to speak.

The Unstoppable Force: my inexplicable, nagging, grinding, perpetual need to pursue an acting career. This noodling little worm of an idea has grown and grown and grown into a behemoth of epic proportions (Think: the massive worm that lives in the subway in the opening sequence of MIIB). I can't not do it. I can't decide to do anything else. I always come back to it. It never leaves me alone. "There's a lifetime of exploration here!" it says to me, "A biannual community theatre production isn't going to satisfy you!" I haven't got the theatre bug. It's the gat-danged theatre Spanish Influenza. It turns me back toward performing every time I look away. Every time.

The Immovable Object: the inevitable reduction of every career into cheerless drudge work. First, let me be clear: I have no evidence to support this massive fallacy, but it is my immovable object. I have forever assumed (by whatever incomplete anecdotal experience) that a career is a lever-pulling exercise. No matter what your path, ultimately where you go in the morning and from whence you come in the evening is a sap, a shunt, a leech on your joy. It is an incontrovertible fact that this is. A man who works is a man who trudges.

Welcome to the scene of the accident.

I am trying to make a career of the thing that gives me the most productive joy I've ever experienced.

See the problem?

And further evidence is heaped on this terrible conundrum when you consider these facts: We're basically broke, and the money is trickling in just fast enough to keep us from dying of financial thirst. I'm fighting tooth and nail for every chance I can get to stand in the background and watch other people do what I'm really interested in doing. Drill those two things into my subconscious, and throw on some icing that reads, "You're living your dream, stupid, what's the problem?" and we've laid the penny on the rails.

You see, I'm a study in contradictions this way. I believe I'm living my dream, but really, by loose analogy, I'm on the bench and I'm not even wearing my pads. I'm on the field, yes, but not in the game. But I'm living my dream! I automatically compromise. Somehow being on the field, not playing, is supposed to be equivalent to running every down. Are we still on the same page?

So here I am, facing the two irreconcilable truths that I have held, in unsynthesized dissonance, and facing them with no intervening confusion. There is no physical distance between me and my dream. There is no other job, there is no moral ambiguity, no insurmountable road block. There is merely this single collision:

I am deathly afraid that even my most passionate drive in life will be reduced to cold, gray, lifeless slavery.

Since the unstoppable force is dependent on my ability to allow it to drive me (contradictory, I know, but go with it), it is far easier to believe that the immovable object will win this battle...that I will persevere, receive great blessings, find my name in proverbial lights, and hate every second of it.

Now, mind you, this cataclysm has been playing out in the backrooms of my mind, not on the tabletop in front of me, where I can observe the obvious contradictions.

So I've paused, balked, reconsidered (driving my poor wife quite mad in the process) making both me and her wonder how much I really do care. The half-moon logic is this: If everything will eventually suck, why not withdraw, adjust, preserve what goodness there is, and let my dream live on unsullied, forever a fiction, but at least unproven to be drudgery.

Less poetically: why not move away, get a clock job, and let acting be the happy "what if" for the rest of my days, so that the imaginary Something can remaining fictionally joyful?

But what's the reality?

I'm scraping out a living on the almost. I'm so close to my aspirations that I can literally touch them (some days, be touched by them--my back still hurts, Mr. Radnor (still my fault, I know)). Every time I'm on set, or on location, I'm watching the ones that have succeeded do the job that I want. I'm not living the dream, I'm three feet from the water, it's 115 degrees, and I've got a rock on my legs. Of course that's going to be a trying emotional experience. This is why the magic of going to the studios has worn off. This is why the posts here have been so meatless and brief. Talking about it is wrenching in its own, special way.

If you'd always dreamt of teaching and you showed up on campus to be the janitor, how would you feel? If you dreamt of being an architect and you clocked in as the pencil sharpener, would you not itch with unfulfilled longing? If you thirsted to write good fiction and wrote tag lines for movie posters forty hours a week, would you not pull out your hair?

I'm not justifying my dissatisfaction, I'm making the necessary comparisons to understand my situation in corollary. I need to do this, because I can be so blind and stupid, always looking to be the grown-up, slogging through the [inevitable] schleppy career and putting on a brave face. You see how it goes?

I have assumed, for my entire life, that I could not overcome the black hole of career depression, so when my "career" is depressing, I don't ask why, I just go, "Naturally," and try to convince myself that it's awesome in order to lift myself out of it...fully aware of the impossibility of this task.

Well, no more. I say, "No, damn it! This will not continue!" I will be an actor, God willing, and it will be fabulous. I will no longer waste countless hours rationalizing how a mediocre industrial picture or a day as an extra should be fulfilling to an actor. I will give my best to those days, certainly, as only is right to do, but at the end of the day, no more, "That's what I've wanted to do all my life, why am I not beaming?" It's not what I want to do, anymore than I want to be a secretary for a casting director. It's a part of Hollywood, and it gives me flexibility and income. That's all it is. It's not acting. It's not craft. It's not what I'm hurtling toward. It is not an immovable object. My life is not Revolutionary Road. I'm on the bench, and I need to remember I'm on the bench. The adrenaline of being so close to the field is wonderful, but I'm not on the field. I have to keep hold of some perspective. I do extra work, I ride the bench. I do auditions I suit up to play. I get cast, that's when my name gets called and the crowd looks to see who this new guy is, loping onto the turf.

I haven't been cast yet. I've been paid to talk in front of the camera, and once upon a time I convinced myself that this was the same thing. No. I was only kidding myself, dumbing down my ambition because I thought I needed to be realistic. When I play characters is when I thrive. Characters do not inhabit industrial films. Those folks are avatars, just the expressive representation of a broader, already definite entity. The mouthpiece. The person on screen has no freedom to deviate in their arc. A character can, does, should deviate, and has the freedom to do so.

I want the characters and nothing less.

I know what I want, and I know, for dead certain, that I don't have it yet.

And that, boys and girls, is satisfaction in itself.


And it only took me 25 years.


I guess that didn't peter out, huh?