It was January, 1990. After a year and a half at USC, where I felt stuck, lonely, uninspired, bored to tears, and with my marrow steeped in misery, I dropped out when I got the dream job everyone I knew (okay, no one) at film school envied: I was hired on, full-time, with a film crew at Disney Studios. Full benefits, including screen credit, and donuts on Fridays. Before nine months was up, I’d be in a conference room at Paramount Studios, standing at the end of a long glass table, pitching ideas to talented, impressionable, well-connected men sitting in high-backed leather chairs. Later, we would all turn cigars in our fingers, laughing like old buddies, though we were hardly acquainted. I knew then: all my childhood dreams were well on their way to coming true. And I knew it. I just knew it. It was an unforgettable warm, summer night in Southern California. A hot wind was blowing off the desert, up and over the San Gabriel mountains, and then down, dreamlike, sending old crumpled call sheets spiraling up in the air between the Hollywood sound stages.

A month later I would be penniless, broken down on some highway, a thousand miles from home. A thousand miles from everyone and everything. The Internet was a decade off, and I had no minutes on my ATT charge card. It was a severe lonesomeness. Any dreams I had in film were no more lively than the abandoned drive-in theater in Oklahoma that I had stopped at a few days earlier, to get some shots with my Olympus 35mm SLR. Still photography. It’s all I had: a few rolls of unexposed film and the dream of one day being able to afford to develop it. That and my brown leather jacket -the only thing keeping me warm in that beat-up old Honda. The nights had gone cold, and they’d done it fast. I’d wake some mornings and the windshield would be iced over -on the inside. The fog from my breath all night would condense on the glass and then freeze up by daybreak. I’d have to scrape the ice off with that useless ATT card, and then scoop it off the dash.

That was twenty years ago. Today, the weather is warm, clear, and nearly always so. I live in the suburbs outside of San Diego. I have a pretty wife, a nice house, a couple of reliable vehicles, and even a few cute kids. I run a little construction business where I build patio covers made out of aluminum pressed with a nice, dimly-satisfying wood-grain finish. All the technology of the future has arrived, and I now have all the workings of a Hollywood movie studio on my phone! -so I can do all that, when I get around to it. I’m a little busy now, with life, barbecuing hot wings and drinking a beer at sunset. I’m cooking 28 perfectly slathered and sauced wings. That’s 14 for each of us, me and my wife. We had some left over from the kid’s second birthday party last weekend, you see. So, too many hot wings. I can’t complain.

Looking back, I can tell my passions were like a tiger or a lion, or some beastly chimera that had me down and bleeding, and was just dragging me from kill site to kill site in play or jest, or to brag to the other carnivores, Look what sorry prey I fell this morning! And it was so easy! And so weak, so infirm! ‘Tis nothing to brag about, but ‘tis pretty to watch it bleed...