THE FINAL MIX

I’m here on an overnight flight from Kauai to Los Angeles. It’s 3:14am (LA Time) and everyone around me is sleeping. For whatever reason most of those people (save my lovely wife) are super old and when they sleep, their mouths hang open in a “not sure if they’re dead” kind of way. It’s chilling. And since I can’t sleep on planes, I get to witness this. Like the last living human man on the airplane of the damned. To stave off my horror, I thought I would try a little bloggy-poo.

I am returning from six beautiful days in Kauai where Audrey and I lived like Roman Gods. We threw everything on the floor. We ate whatever we wanted. We ordered drinks with stupid names and even stupider prices. I barely peed in a toilet all week, finding the pool at the Hyatt to be a perfectly acceptable place to relieve myself. It was heaven. And now the return home and the zombie flight and the having to use normal toilets again… it’s all so sad.

We went to Kauai because I looked at a calendar. And that calendar, which included all that I’ve been through in these last few months and all that I might begin to go through in the coming months (if we get a show ordered), revealed this time… this little chunk of time… when it might be okay for me to have vacation. The first real one that Audrey and I have ever taken in our entire time together. Does that seem crazy?

As I’ve mentioned before Audrey and I have had to work pretty hard over the years. Circumstances, a few bad decisions and a lack of a convenient trust fund or family money to bolster our accounts meant that we’ve both been working shitty jobs since we graduated college with our useless theatre degrees. I cooked in restaurants, Audrey managed a costume shop and we both worked at theme parks, did corporate entertainment and shitty little regional theatre plays to make ends meet. Basically, we didn’t start making any real money until the last five years when Audrey settled in at her job and I started writing for television. And during that time we had a number of other circumstances come up that precluded any real vacation time. Basically life happened… a lot… and HARD. So back to that calendar…

It was a couple of weeks ago and I was feeling pretty tired. The process on both pilots had nearly completed. HOW TO BE A BETTER AMERICAN had ended kind of sadly (that’s another blog) while THIS LITTLE PIGGY, its confident and smiling older brother, was shaping up nicely. The grind of casting, pre-production, writing and re-writing along with the near constant negotiation of network and studio politics had really taken its toll. So I called Audrey to ask for permission to spend money, something I’ve been doing since the first time I’d bounced a check way back in the early part of our relationship. But before I could begin to make my case she agreed. Quickly. Too quickly. The kind of quickly that often, in my experience, precedes a trick. But there was no trick. We had the cash and she too wanted a break. So quicker than I’ve ever spent a penny we booked ourselves an ocean front room and some airfare to a beautiful little island in the Tropic of Cancer. The only thing left was the final mix.

The final mix is the very last step before you turn in your pilot to the network. You go to a mix stage (in our case on the Warner Bros lot) and fix all the little sound things that have been bothering you for weeks. You make this actor’s slurred speech a little more intelligible and that actor’s weird non-lingual utterance disappear with the magic of digital editing equipment. It takes several hours to complete. Then the studio comes and watches the show and they have notes, the very last notes you’ll get on this thing that you’ve been working on so hard for so long, and then you feel sad. At least I did. Sad about the little things that just can’t be fixed. Sad about the shots you wish you’d had the presence of mind to get on the night. Sad that no one noticed that extra who was mouthing your leads dialogue in the party scene. But mostly you just get sad that it’s all over. You and your friend thought of this funny thing together. You wrote it down. Some people with money to throw down the toilet liked it. You went through a long and tricky process. You shot it and edited it and color corrected it and mixed it down and now you have to hand it in and just wait. Well having found myself in this position once before (after we completed the first version of Piggy last year), I wasn’t about to wait it out in Culver City.

The last six days in paradise have given me a lot of time to think. True, most of that thinking had to do with whether it’s gross to drink hard liquor before lunch ( it is… wonderfully gross) and whether I should put on the 50 sunscreen or just say fuck it and throw the 30 on and let the demon sun do it’s worst. But there were plenty of times that I just found myself staring at the ocean too. I mean really fucking staring at it… like a crazy man. It was the quietest I’d been in years and it was kind of strange. See I’m the kind of person who always needs to be using my brain. I read two or three books at a time. I see tons of movies and watch disgusting amounts of TV. And then I write. And then I hang out with friends or do chores. If I don’t have a magazine to read while I’m on the toilet, I will read the back of a shampoo bottle. This is the life of a man with full on ADD. So suddenly finding myself with nothing to do but sit on the balcony of that hotel room and watch the waves crash was sort of amazing. And terrifying.

I started thinking about where I’d been and how I’d arrived here. I thought about what I could have done better on the pilots and what we got just right. I thought about what it would be like if we got a series and what it would feel like if they finally said “No thanks”. In short I started getting kind of existential. Of course checking Nikki Finke’s heinous blog and watching my pilot’s fortunes get “hot” and “cold” and “hot” again wasn’t making things easy either. I’d come here to relax, but what I was doing was what I always do: getting worried. I am the kind of “funny person” whose insides are mostly alternating layers of self-loathing and doubt. Even my recent successes seem like trickery. Like God is just setting me up so he can REALLY screw with me. And let me tell you, if this is the kind of person you are, then waiting on judgment about your pilot is the perfect situation for you to really spiral out of control. I started seeing signs of my eminent failure everywhere. Here’s a great example…

One morning while we sat on a terrace eating some breakfast and watching the ocean, a crazed woman with binoculars came running at us babbling madness. I clenched the plastic fork I was using to pick the good fruit from the stuff I hate, thinking I might need to poke a bitch if she got too close. “Did you see it?! Did you see the whale?!!” Now living in LA, I have grown accustomed to the mentally ill bringing things to my attention that are clearly not there, so I didn’t exactly jump to my feet and scan the horizon for a fluke. But Audrey did (she’s more trusting… she might be part angel or something…. it’s kind of gross actually) and, sure enough, she saw that fluke. Saw it flapping about in the blue Hawaiian sea. But not me. NOT ME. I was so sad. I really wanted to see that fucking whale. I unclenched the fork and followed the lady to a pair of mounted binoculars that the hotel provides for children to look out at the passing boats and such. I squatted there scanning the water for a few moments but the whale never resurfaced. Just my luck I thought. And just another sign that NBC was NOT going to pick up my pilot. It’s obvious right? You can see the connection. Anyone can. I know, it’s crazy. I’m crazy. I can’t help it.

Later that day we were baking in the sun down by the pool and we noticed a crowd gathering down by the beach. We assumed the whale was back and dashed down to the shore get a look. I was stoked. Here was my second chance to see some serious nature AND assure my continuing career as a television writer. What we found instead was a hotel employee driving a tiny tractor on the sand. There was a chain attached to the tractor and that chain was attached to a decaying carcass of… yep… a whale. Not our friend from the morning, but some old, tired whale who’d probably departed at sea weeks ago and washed up (inconveniently) on the Hyatt’s little beach. They were dragging the thing, now just chunks of meat, across the sand to a hole they’d dug where they intended to bury it. Meanwhile, a huge fat woman in a muumuu stood by mumbling some kind of prayer in Hawaiian. It was crazy and sad and hilarious and kind of great all at the same time.

Now, normally I would have taken this as further confirmation of my less than fortunate status. As a sign that I was, once again, going to be close but not get the cigar. But for some reason, maybe the pre-noon cocktails or the trade winds and sunshine, but this whole thing just started to make me laugh. Instead of spiraling further, I suddenly felt better. Because it occurred to me that it’s all a joke. There are no signs. There are no omens. It is what it is. It’s all just stuff happening to you and because of you and in spite of you. Sometimes you get the majesty of a live whale in all its glory and sometimes you get part of a spine and some gnawed on bits of blubber with a fat lady praying over it. Either way it’s kind of great. And either way you’re alive and stomping ground and things could be so much worse. Then we sauntered back to the pool and I ordered a Mai Tai. At 11:23am.