Well, here I am. 30 fucking years old. I feel a strange mixture of being proud, ashamed, happy, sad, confident, peaceful, and anxious. The path of my life has not taken me where I wanted it to so far, but at the same time it hasn’t been that bad either. I did not get to move out of my parents’ house and live a life of solitude and productivity in my 20s like I truly wanted, I did not get any of my screenplays produced or win any screenwriting competitions, I did not become a world renowned novelist or filmmaker, I don’t make a living off my artistic work, I still have to work a regular job like everyone else, I have no long-term girlfriend that resembles Farrah Fawcett and never will, I have no “career” that has anything involving “upward mobility.” And I do not have a Wikipedia page, I’m still just the same nobody I’ve always been. There is a lot of romance about “making it” in your 20s, whatever the fuck that means anymore, and I haven’t made it at all. Not even close, haha. These are all massively disappointing things, but I’ve still had some good moments so far, and my life isn’t “over” yet (as people often joke about when hitting 30).
It feels depressing, but also not that bad. If I had spent the last decade smoking crack, abusing opiates, drinking alcohol, and doing absolutely nothing with my life like many of my contemporaries do, I suppose I would have ample cause to be ashamed about how my life has ended up, but I didn’t waste my time. I did my best under the circumstances, and where I am now — still stuck in my childhood bedroom, still stuck living with my parents — is not the end of the world. My dream has always been to live alone so I can do more creative work and be more productive without other people I’m around constantly making noise and being generally detrimental to my goals, but that was just not in the cards for me in my 20s (and most likely never will). But still: I managed to squeeze out a certain percentage of work under these shitty circumstances totally at odds with the right working conditions I would prefer for myself, and because of that I am proud. I wrote and published a couple novels like I always said I would in my teen years. I wrote a book of short stories. I wrote a couple screenplays. I made a couple movies. I managed to con my way into being cast in a couple commercials (including ones for Amazon and Google), with no agent at all, just sheer auditioning and luck. I got to do stuff with some pretty good looking women. I got my own coupe, and I drive that motherfucker around everywhere. I didn’t get to go to Amsterdam like I always hoped I would (covid fucked everything up right as I was about to leave), but I did get to travel to Germany and Poland, I saw Hitler’s grave (now a parking lot) and Auschwitz. I got used and fired from a job by a very cruel, shitty racist white man, and learned all about how capitalism and business works (and certain white people lol). I cut ties with a few insidious people I thought were my friends. I started doing stand-up, quit because of the pandemic and inconvenience, but will do more eventually. I almost died in a couple of car crashes but didn’t. I read all of Proust and Tolstoy. I shook hands with Earl Sweatshirt. And so far I have survived a pandemic and my mental health is not too bad under the circumstances, even though everywhere I look around me most people seem to be mentally unwell.
To be completely honest with you: I never thought I would make it to 30 in a million fucking years. I always thought I’d be one of those people who died at 27. In fact, if you asked me what my life plan was in any year prior to being 27, that was pretty much what I expected for myself. I always thought I’d go out like Jim Morrison or Jimi Hendrix. I know that sounds funny to say, but that’s really the truth. Not even because I mess around with drugs or do anything crazy of that nature, but it just felt like a fitting thing that would happen to a person like me, haha. I just never thought I would be lucky enough to make it to 30, you know what I mean? I assumed my luck would run out at some point and I’d die somehow. So all of this shit now just feels like extra gravy to me. Life is meaningless and nothing matters, and any day I have now feels like a real gift. “We wasn't supposed to be alive, no funny shit,” as Earl once said. I feel that to my core very deeply. I’m amazed I’m still here right now to be honest with you.
So what are my plans moving forward? I don’t plan on being one of those people who makes it to 97, shitting and pissing their diapers daily, a total burden on everyone around them, and goes out like a silent fart no one hears, but we’ll see. I have no real reason to stick around on earth past a certain point, but there are a couple things I’d still like to do before I dip.
First of all: realistically, I will never get to move out of my parents’ home like I always dreamed of. I’ll never have that great big condo in the sky. That dream is over. My parents can’t afford to help me past the basic things I am grateful for, like electricity and food. The banks and corporations have purchased all the houses in Canada and raised the prices to 9999999999 billion dollars, which I will most likely never have even if I were to work very hard and try my best. So in terms of that dream of independence I’ve always had: it’s over. I have to just live out my prison sentence here with my parents, take care of ‘em when they’re old like I’m a fucking Japanese person, and then when they’re gone I will finally get to live alone here. That’s if I don’t die first from climate change or whatever else. It sucks, but it’s not a big deal and some of my favourite artists had similar experiences: Ozu lived with his mom and did filmmaking on the side. Proust lived with his parents I think. Eric Rohmer was a teacher and did filmmaking on the side. I have to just continue what I’ve already been doing and try to squeeze out more orange juice under these imperfect circumstances. It won’t be 100% perfect, the glass might never be full, but whatever I extract will have to do.
Secondly: I will most likely never be a widely successful filmmaker in the manner I wanted to be. No one is gonna fund any of my ideas, so that’s over. I will keep writing my screenplays, and self-publishing them, but I don’t possess any hope about any of them actually getting made anymore. The truth is that I was born into the worst possible time to be a guy who likes movies of a certain caliber. The future is here and it is “female,” and it’s all about “content,” lol. I don’t think there’s any real room left anymore for a guy like myself and the stuff that I would like to make. I’m not complaining, I’m just explaining how it is. Something like Street Players would probably never get made in the 2020s, perhaps in the 90s, but not now. The culture has shifted to an absurd degree, and I don’t think men or male energy or perspective or whatever you want to call it is really wanted in cinema anymore. You can see this clearly by looking at what types of movies are successful these days and who gets funded: there aren’t any filmmakers like Tarantino to look up to anymore. There are no auteurs. It’s mostly just corporate backed horseshit. Even something like Euphoria that is considered controversial in this day and age isn’t really: the creator is the son of a successful filmmaker. He’s just some trust-fund loser who was born into his position and benefitting from nepotism (just like how Judd Apatow got one of his daughters on the show), it’s not like HBO found some unique and crazy person with a vision like Harvey Weinstein found Tarantino in the middle of nowhere, it’s all happening exactly as it should and it’s predictable. Sam Levinson is taking shit that was already successful and truly groundbreaking at the time (like 1995’s Kids) and doing a remix. We live in a culture that is not interested in producing anything new or pushing the form and craft of filmmaking (which is still in its infancy if you think about it: just over 100 years old is not that long for an artform). It’s become more about recycling and investing in what already worked due to economics. Since around 2017 or earlier, I think most people with money to back projects have become pussified and are afraid of taking chances on stuff that would probably be cool. It’s not about making art people might disagree with or get hit by the wrong way, it’s now about maintenance and preserving whatever resources they’ve got. No one wants to rock the boat, artistically speaking. Everyone is afraid of losing their job and blahblahblah. There might be a couple mildly transgressive things here and there, but there will never be another truly groundbreaking piece of work with a super high budget like Apocalypse Now or something made by someone with a real ego and a heavy ballsack ever again.
But that is all a ramble on limitations. I have to focus on the possibilities. On the bright side: I can always still make mediocre movies with low-budgets (that no one cares about or wants to see), like any other indie filmmaker. Which is fine, because it’s always been that way for independent cinema. But I’m not sure that’s a direction I want to take for myself anymore. In all honesty I would much rather continue the path I’m on of writing truly great scripts I could never actually afford to make myself, and at the very least self-publishing it. It is not fulfilling to me at this age to go back and write something I could have written as an early 20s guy, something I’m only doing to fit a certain budget. I feel like I’ve done this a million times now and it’s just boring. So my options as a filmmaker at the moment are: 1.) just keep writing scripts and not worrying about the budget, and 2.) Write something super low budget that I could afford to make myself/with a reliable team. I’ll have to see which of these appeals to me in the near future. I’m always working on some kind of writing project, so maybe I’ll write something low-budget I want to make, who knows.
Third: I’ve never had a long-term partner/girlfriend, and it’s looking like that will never happen. I am officially throwing in the towel on committing to bitches😂. I can’t find anyone that seems cool enough to sacrifice my life for. And I’ve also spent the first third of my life living with other people and being around their horseshit and noise, so I’d prefer to limit the amount of noise and conflict in my life moving forward. Unless I find someone cool, but I highly doubt that will happen. She would have to be pretty damn perfect for me to sacrifice the tiny amount of peace I have left in my life, and no one is that good. When I look around at the dating scene these days I see nothing but awful girls that just aren’t worth getting involved with. They’re all heavy drinkers, they have no values, they have those whorish lip injections they think make them look better for some reason I can’t comprehend, they think the world owes them something and bring nothing in return to the table, etc. It’s a mess. There’s simply no one out there for me. The older I get, the more I realize I am completely on my own. I guess it’s taken me 30 years to fully internalize it, but I finally have. I’ve got absolutely no one to talk to beyond superficial shit, because no one understands me or wants the best for me.
I can’t even really confide in my parents because they don’t see the world like I do. For example, they don’t seem to consider that the things they want for me, traditional employment and such, are totally absurd and the opposite of what is going to happen by the end of this decade. Almost every industry is dying and on its way out, and they want me to work jobs that have nothing to do with what I actually want to do. As much as I try to explain to them that we should be investing in land, we should be getting a generator, we should be working on some kind of property we can escape to when things go badly in society, we should be working on growing our own food/food storage in general, I am talking to a brick wall. We never see eye to eye on stuff even though I know I’m right and they’re boomers, so I can’t really communicate with them beyond surface level things. It’s understandable, money is all the boomer has ever known, so I cannot really fault them for not comprehending where we are.
Anyway, I started rambling there lol. Like I was saying: my plans moving forward. What is there left for me to do? Nothing and everything. Like I said, all this time I have left now is just the gravy. I have no expectations anymore. Some of the anxiety I had in my 20s about “things going right” is gone now that the world has gone to shit, and continues to collapse further everyday. I no longer feel the pressure I did in my early 20s to “make something of myself,” because the whole decade has gone by, I tried my best, and nothing happened. I understand how the world works now a bit more and I don’t take my disappointments personally. That’s not to say I am giving up or quitting in any way, just that some of the anxiety about it has dissolved, which feels nice.
Fourth: travelling. I don’t know if I will actually be able to, but this is a big one for me. I’d still like to go to Amsterdam like I planned in 2020 before covid fucked everything up. And Vienna, Japan, Scandinavia in general if there’s time. I’m not sure any of this will happen, but we’ll see. This is just thinking out loud here.
That’s about it I guess. Now that I’m ending it, this one seems a bit anticlimactic. But I guess that’s because life itself is anticlimactic. I made it to 30, I don’t know what to say haha. Sorry I don’t have any cool wisdom for you. All I can truly say is that I didn’t expect to be here past a certain point, so whatever happens or doesn’t happen is cool either way. I could die tomorrow and I would be able to accept that, lmfao. Even though I still have hopes and dreams and it’s worth trying in life and blahblahblah, it would be a relief to die peacefully, to tell you the truth. To not have to wake up at 6 o clock in the cunting morning to work at a job during the apocalypse where I have no upward mobility whatsoever would be nice. To not have to go on Instagram and see smiling successful white people on vacation anymore when I’m stuck in Canada shovelling snow in minus 900000000 weather would be nice. To not have to come home after a long day of work and feel too exhausted to do anything other than sleep for 12 hours when I’d prefer to work on my novel all day would be nice. My life right now is mostly just serving other people and finding small windows of time for myself when I can. Sometimes I feel like I’m honestly looking forward to dying someday, and won’t do anything to bring it on faster, but I will be happy whenever the fuck it happens. Either that or a life where things were cooler and I had my own apartment and I got to just make art all day and make a living off it, that would be so clutch. But it seems like that’s not gonna happen for me right now, so I have to just make do and try to keep moving forward.
If this sounded too negative or cynical at all, I hope you understand it was not my intention. I’m not being that way on purpose. I see myself as a realist, not a cynic. It’s just that life in the 2020s is dark, so it comes off that way naturally more often than not. Truthfully, regardless of whatever goofy shit that happens: I am happy to be alive for now overall and part of this dumb experience, and looking forward to however much longer I survive. Thank you for reading my stuff and supporting me in any way, I appreciate it.
