It's Official, I'm 40

Heya folks
Today I turned 40 years old. It's funny because I didn't think I'd make it this far without a wife, kids and a home. Things have certainly changed. To a guy at 40...maybe it's just me, it doesn't effect me all that much. I think if I really wanted all that, I wouldn't have come out to Los Angeles and pursued a film career. Quite honestly, the mental state I was in saddled with boozing didn't really allow for anything serious. I don't consider myself a driven person, but a driven person seems to also be extremely selfish. Unintentional of course.

I have so many other things I need to tackle right now. For one thing, I'm not sure I've fully recovered from the years of killing myself with alcohol. I still get foggy and dizzy. I blank out for a bit. Kinda' scary stuff. The other is that I have to be more serious in this business if I intend for it to be my life. I think, and this could go for a lot of other people too, that I don't really think I invested in myself as much as I think I do. For instance, there is a chunk of change right now sitting that I could loan from. I borrowed against my 401k to make a short film (for which it has been long paid off). Well, I took a tiny amount. What is preventing me from taking a bigger stake in trying to make this movie I want to make now. Simple answer: fear.

Yep, at 40 risks are seen a lot different than when I was 22. At 22, fresh out of undergrad, I got massive student loans for grad school. None of it phased me, since I was only 22 and thought I had plenty of time to pay it back. What I didn't count on was that the struggle to make it in Hollywood doesn't pay this type of money unless you're at the top of your game. And at 22, you aren't even in the game. So I spent a ton of time fucking around, getting drunk and bitching and moaning about a college girlfriend that left me. It was that pathetic. No one...and I mean it, NO ONE likes a whiny bitch. The only people who could stand those people were drunks. You see where I'm going with this.

So now that I've sobered up, the reality is...I DO need to invest in myself. Much like I feel we all do. NO ONE believes in what you do unless you do. A friend once asked me if I knew why it's so lonely at the top? Never been there, wouldn't venture a guess. She said it's because the fall is greater and no one wants to balance that high. High risk. High reward.

Do I think I'm in that group that deserves to be around the highest echelons of filmmakers. I think so. I think, well, at least in terms of the nuts and bolts, I should at least give it a REAL try, instead of what I've been doing. Which is letting the rest of the world pass by to the middle. And I see that I have a lot of options now. It feels really great that through a dark tunnel of youth, there is still hope.

I think I'm going to like my 40's.