Tuesday, January 21, 2003


Today is my 30th birthday. It's is 5:30 AM right now, and colder than a witch's tit--outside the sun has not risen. The heat just came on from the radiators, turned on by the landlady upstairs as she gets ready for Tuesday--they are hissing and burbling like uncomfortable dragons in front of me, as I sit in the dark of the living room, lit up only by the laptop.

30. I'm a little surprised to be here, but I feel ready for my 3rd decade. I have a wonderful wife, a stable home and the freedom to work on interesting and compelling projects...it is in many ways an unimaginable distance from where I was at 25, though at 20 I wouldn't have been surprised to be here, as I was cocky and unbowed by the world at 20.

I'm working full-bore on the HBO project right now, and it is very exciting--it's been hard, with the holidays and then with food poisoning, to get the momentum I craved, and I have to admit that it has been a struggle. I think the silence in this blog over the last month or so has been due to that tension between my creative life's need for quiet and my own need to simply get shit done--they aren't always congruent, as most times art and commerce are not.

Still, it feels good to write here, and to commit to work, and to have the ability and the drive and the opportunity...not everyone is so lucky, if you can call the luck you make yourself 'luck'. Enough of it is happenstance that I think that totally qualifies.

With all that said, I will return to writing--I have a book that is starting to reveal itself, a script that is almost overdue, and a stack of correspondence and schmoozing that requires my attention. However, I will do what I can to return here more often, not just in the form of short quips and songs about cheese.

I mean, I'll keep that stuff in as well. I'll just try to open up the dialogue a little bit.