Sunday, October 14, 2012

I Have Lost That Fighting Feeling

My cat is contorting herself in order to lick the salt out of an empty seaweed container.  She has her rear paws on my bed and her forepaws on the night stand, her face buried in the rigid plastic.  There is nothing I want as badly as she wants those salty remnants.  I think this is my problem.

When I was younger I wanted to become an established, respected grip in the New York film industry. I called people I barely knew on holidays to find work.  I dragged my weary body through two and three feet of snow for $100 a day for weeks on end.  I worked for free for as many as 14 or 16 hours.  I would start work at 2 in the afternoon and get home at 6 in the morning or start work at 2 in the morning and get home around 4 in the afternoon, sometimes though, it would be for $150 a day.  I lived in a building with rats and roaches, then with a crazed, drunken Australian and a guy who kept a 3ft square meat freezer in his bedroom.  I did all of this because I had a goal, an honorable pursuit.

Now that I have mostly achieved this goal (I say "mostly" because I am unsure how respected I am, I figure people think I am an okay technician) I feel I have gotten soft.  I live in a pretty nice apartment (albeit with roommates) and don't really have to worry about my bills or whether I can afford a new book or not (most of the time).  Because I have all these things, I have stopped pushing myself.  The fight has gone out of me, and the idea of a new fight is wearisome.  The biggest difficulty I have had so far with writing has really been disciplining myself and actually doing the typing, but I know the hard part is to come.  The mailings, the rejections, the revisions, and possibly failure.  What if I can't get the fight back when I need it?  What if I need it now, just to finish the thing?  

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