AUTHOR-TURNED-JACK-IN-THE-BOX-OF-ALL-TRADES NOTE: As I mention periodically throughout this now-long-running column, I’ve drawn roughly a third of the essays direct from my last dozen years of philosophical Facebook posts. That is where – up until I joined Substack – I tended to leave the majority of my life’s breadcrumbs that didn’t wind up in the “the work” proper (books, stories, songs, and now motion pictures).
So it was fascinating to stumble upon this piece – again from 2016, a major turning point in far more lives than mine – which seems to wholly anticipate what I’m doing right now. Little did I know how much was still ahead. Or how much I still wouldn’t know, eight years later!
(Extra note: the giant interview I refer to in S.j. Bagley’s Thinking Horror journal came out to roughly 60 pages of manuscript, maybe 40 in the actual publication itself. And the fact is, I could easily fill another 60 pages just from all the nutsy stuff that’s happened since, NOT EVEN INCLUDING what’s in these last 126 installments!)
That’s the crazy thing about life. It just keeps happening, whether we’re paying attention or not.
I’m at that fascinating late-game stage of life, where the pull of chronicling the past for posterity is almost as hard as the constant push forward to make new art, blaze new trails, forge new experiences potentially worth chronicling later.
I'm a forward-looker by nature: constantly, restlessly pushing forward toward the next fucking thing I can invent, pull off, and get away with. But as a result of this, I have SO MANY TRUE STORIES that have resulted from that lifelong devotional misadventure. And the more I'm pulled back to remembering, the more appreciative I am of the insane life I've been lucky and determined enough to live.
Between the flurry of podcasts I've been doing of late, and the already-novella-length career-spanning interview I'm still doing with S.j. Bagley for THINKING HORROR (and these goofy Facebook posts), I feel like my autobiography is nearly two-thirds written or digitally captured. Between that and the actual work itself, I don't know how much more of a record of having-been-here I could possibly leave.
Except for all the shit I HAVEN'T DONE YET.
To me, the most exciting shit of all.
So looking back is both hard and swell, and I'm glad to do it. It reminds me of who I am, where I came from, how I got from here to there, and all the amazing people I've danced and fought with along the way.
But they're just context for the most interesting dances and fights of all. The ones still coming. The ones I'm doing right now. If past is context, future is potential, then the present is experience in action.
I love all three. But frankly, what I'm most interested in is seeing how much more I can get away with -- here, in this life -- before the buzzer rings, and I'm out the door.
So HERE'S TO BEING IN THE PRESENT! Where everything actually happens. With stories of previous presents to tell.
And a whole lot more to do.