The Traffic Island of Success.

So I'm down. 

Carpet underlay down. 

A worm's patio down. 

Satan's wine-cellar down. 

Subterranean. 

I shouldn't be. Its just a lot of things are happening at once. My mum is still in hospital, originally with a sprained ankle, now with a mystery virus. Information is spotty, as is her answering the phone. That's her third hospital stay in the last year. They'll name a ward after her. She gets wheeled in and says "The usual please, Mike." and a junior doctor presents her with an IV drip with an olive in it. All this during a Pandemic. She didn't have Covid when she went in - she was tested. I hope she doesn't have it when she leaves. 

My financial situation - and that is a grandiose term for it - is the worst its ever been. Which is annoying as I keep working on projects that promise me the distant glimmer of gold but never deliver. I have never worked so hard on as many disparate projects as I have since lock-down started. Lock-down never really lifted for me - I haven't left the house except to go to the Co Op in the last six months. I know people consider it a human right to go to the pub or a restaurant or two weeks in Alicante with the kiddies. You see them on the news indignant and pink at the airport, baffled as to why the smooth running of their holiday has been compromised by a global pandemic. "We knew it was global - but whats that got to do with Spain?"

I go for walks around East Belfast - ranting expeditions that see me abused by passing motorists in the rain - but that's it. I've been charting the progress of a flattened pink baseball cap on a zebra crossing near Barnados. The movement of the traffic is slowly allowing it to nudge towards the traffic island. I've started wishing it well. I hope one of us makes it, mate. To the traffic island of success.  

I'm working on short stories and a couple of films. Apparently for my own pleasure. Somebody wants me to write something about the children's television show "Rainbow". I've been asked to write some short Zoom dramas. I write a weekly animation but recognise nothing of myself in it. I'm supposed to be helping someone write a comic. I've written character back-grounds for the producers of a film but I haven't heard a word from them in two weeks. 

I'm tired. Its raining. I'm listening to "Youth" by Soft Cell. So as usual I don't do myself any favours. I'll be 50 next year and I'm still working towards my big break. Ha ha. Fuck. 

Its true to say that I took the first forty five or so years off. I was both lazy and cowardly and that's not a good mix in a hustler. A shy panhandler dies on your driveway. But for the last five years I have worked non-stop in a burst of sustained existential terror. The sudden realisation that "middle-aged" is very much a euphemism and that I'm far nearer death than birth does tend to focus the mind. I have no children. I have no belongings. I have no money. When I die I'll leave behind nothing but a few memories and a very sad Susan. Its been playing on my mind a lot recently. So I routinely throw myself into things.  I want to get anything done. I am flailing about, thrashing like a drowning man, clinging to lumber in the mad black sea. 

Yesterday I had a Zoom call, along with five other hopefuls, about a short film I was hoping to make. The person leading the call had been a producer but she no longer makes things. But I was interested in getting her feedback. 

I turned up a half hour late. I got the time wrong. I'd been pacing round the room and waiting for it to start and it never once occurred to me to check the time. This sort of self-sabotaging behaviour might be said to be a pattern, but I'm pretty sure its unconscious. Though deep down even I'm out to get me. This buttered no parsnips with the ex-producer. And she HATED my treatment. Loathed it. Teeth were bared. I was stripped down like tainted wallpaper. While the other hopefuls looked on in horror (or glee - though I may be projecting) she tore me to ribbons, actually taking time out to read my treatment to the group. And she was right. The treatment - a one pager description of the film I hoped to make - contained precisely nothing of the film I wanted to make. My film was a tragedy on the healing properties of communication being curdled by wilful ignorance. It was a parable on toxic masculinity, but it contained humour, tenderness, satire, rounded characters and snappy dialogue as well as ugliness and violence. The treatment contained only the ugliness and violence. It sounded like some weird macho thumbnail sketch, like Punch and Judy with three Punches and one witless, should-have-seen-it-coming Judy. It was a rubbish treatment for a very different film. A film she hadn't read. All she had was this terrible treatment, so I got the treatment right back. I learned a valuable lesson, though it stung. The flesh was off me. I was humiliated. I was crushed. 

I woke up this morning feeling as though I'd been found in a pub car park sans teeth and wallet. 

Its raining. 

I'll be my old, jolly self tomorrow. Or I wont. 

Its just too many things. But it just had to be raining. I'll be fifty next year. Something has to happen soon. Its funny but everyday I DO wake up hopeful. How long for? Where is all this hope coming from? Like a dog with a stick in my mouth and my head through the railings you'd think I'd eventually work out to drop the stick. Drop the fucking stick, man. 

I'm still doing the jokes. When will they run out? Cause nothing's funny.