When Old Habits are Life and Death.
...AND THEN I WAS GONE FOR ANOTHER TWO MONTHS.
Sorry about that. Between evacuating due to the Oregon fires and overworking myself as I am eternally wont to do, things have been hectic. Work/Life balance is something I have struggled with for a very long time. In fact, I would bet good money my inability to get a handle on it contributed to the very subject of this blog; cancer not as a disease so much as an accumulation; of bad habits, bad contracts, resentments. In my case also addiction. My name is Corey and I'm a workaholic.
Whatever I do, I do it 200%. Anyone who has worked with me on set, or been my friend, or my lover knows this about me. I am all-in 24/7/365. I want to do all of it, all at once and all equally well. This is partially motivated by my committment to excellence, perhaps a touch of competitiveness to taste. It's also something I chalk up to a damaged superego and its abusive injunctions; the "coulda, shoulda, woulda," effect of deferred achievements fuled from fatherly disdain– my lack of material accumulation confirmation of his own parental shortcomings. The relationship between my own flagging potential and his sneering condescension in linear lockstep. Convinced I could turn his sneer into a smile the day I condemed myself to a McMansion in the suburbs, my entire sense of my own worth shrinkwrapped in utility to the holy market. I was an '80s kid, reared on hard-work and underdog spirit– if things weren't working out, if my life wasn't where I thought it should be, well it's because I wasn't working hard enough; wasn't hungry enough.
"No," was simply not in my voccabulary. Opportunites not to be cast off into the fountain as common enough to waste a wish on. That which came from the hallowed externality of the market was, by virtue of the holy zeitgeist, more valuable and more to be trusted than my own pursuits, after all if anything I was producing out of love and passion was indeed worth anything to anyone surely there would be some monetary value springing up around it like acorns to the oak. It's next to impossible to shift four decades of conditioning. Add to that 20 years as a Hollywood cultist, accustomed to the predations of the industry, blood sacrifices demanded to get anywhere–only we call it, "paying one's dues."
Two months, eight weeks, however one conceptualises it, can fly by just like that. What have I been doing? Trying to get back to work. Going to my MRIs and CT Scans. Nurturing a relationship that sometimes feels encased in Eocene ice. Ignoring my body telling me that I can't push myself as hard as I did before the Cancer; telling me with exhaustion so thick I can't get out of bed on some days. Telling me with vomiting spells. Nagging me with headaches, with caducous fatigue. Entreating me with blood clots in my heart. Brandishing the cosmic 2x4 in nuclear MRI Mayday returning "mildly enlarged lymph nodes" in my chest. That bit of news finally put the breaks on my kamikaze dive back to bad old habits. Yes, I rememeber now. Cancer got into my lymphatic system and could show up anywhere. I'm a walking game of Russian Roulette. I need to slow the fuck down; that's what I was supposed to be doing. Still, there's such an overwhelming sense of lost time. How did I stagnate so badly? How did I fall behind? In some ways I feel like I am now doing the best work I have ever done, yet I'm still sporting concrete chucks. Was Michael Jordan kind to himself, or did he kick his own ass into the stratosphere of greatness? What resonates more, kindness, or fairness? Am I being fair to myself? I just shot my first job in two years, doesn't that count? I just celebrated a birthday that two years ago they told me I wouldn’t see. How do I square the circle between survival, self-care and having a life I feel is worth living? How do I get back to work, do my bit, meet my responsbilities as a man should without running myself into the ground? How does anyone make it in the contemporary American market milieu without blood sacrifice? Other people have cancer, survive it and go on to thrive. Why aren't I? What is missing?
Mono No Aware, part V of the memoir, has been immensely difficult to write. Maybe it's that I'm out of practise. Maybe I'm holding it to a meticulous perfection– I understand why writers who've been in the business a long time, secure an advance; an anxiety sponge to soak up the acid of life's entanglements. I think it's more that I have overloaded my plate, become unfocused, handed my discipline over to the needs of others, strayed from the creative's aecetic path. I have subsumed my personal value to material externalities and as usual the costs have been too high. There's something to atone for, right on Yom Kippur time. I will fast and give myself a fresh start, re-establish my creative boundaries, re-build practise, pour from the saucer and not from the cup; the cup is mine.