MY THIRTIES

It's tough to write about my thirties because not much happened... I was addicted to pain pills but it was more a crush than true love, and I could take 'em or leave 'em... The problem was I had several bottles (first bags) I purchased and sat watching old movies ("Journey Into Fear" mostly) and instead of popping the pills I'd bite off pieces, and they made me more uptight than anything else... (When you're uptight alone you don't chew out people, you chew out yourself, argue with your own mind, remembering things and people that pissed you off and argue with them what you should have said then but didn't, which is why you're pissed in the present, remembering...)

I had two kinds of these pills, regular and extra strength, and if the regular didn't work I'd take the extra and vice versa... Soon I knew which worked when and why and what felt good and what to take after what didn't work will now that I took the other (and if you took the wrong pill and then took the right pill, the buzz from the wrong pill backed up the buzz from the right one)...

But that uptightness I felt on the pills was a contented uptightness and I didn't write much... Actually that's not true... I wrote a lot but nothing means anything now...

I filled steno notebooks with plays and poems and prose about mobsters and assassins (the plays were about normal people though, and the poems about me) and I remember one morning after writing all night, driving to the next city (in Southern California "cities" are separated by mere blocks) and I went through a drive-thru, got a "breakfast burrito," went home and slept and slept and I believe it was all just like that for the first five years of 2000 (I was born in 1969 so my age is about equal with the decades)...

And what's the point of all this? Well it's just that I miss a lot of things, but I don't remember much of my thirties... although they weren't entirely wasted. I began writing screenplays in 2003 and haven't stopped since... None have sold, I never win contests, nothing will become of any of 'em (most likely) but 13 scripts in eight years times isn't bad...

And I'm pill-free except if I pass a kidney stone... Then I need 'em, and take more than a nibble...