THE GRAND ILLUSION OF ALONENESS

When I find myself in times of trouble, since I do not have a Mother Mary, literally or religiously, I am way too often left to my own devices, like, well, this one to figure out the true nature of my torment.

Writing for me is usually exploratory surgery. I’m going in to see if I can figure out why I am experiencing so much pain. 

My specialty is humor, but lately, as I seem to mature at the speed of the internet, I find myself of late being a specialist in the dynamics of the human heart.

What the heart is to emotions, China is to people. There are just so many of them to deal with and when emotions collide, as they often do in the mainland of you, it can be both explosive and implosive.

As co-humans, we tend to be overly sensitive to the fact that we are alone in the universe. With that infinite, cosmic son of a bitch mystery thing hanging over us night after night, it often serves as a reminder of how small and insignificant we are. 

Thanks for that, God.

Nighttime is usually the time where we either burrow ourselves in our bed bunkers or simply retreat from the grim bloody battlefields of our everyday life.

It is when we sort things out. Try to create perspective, a battle plan for the future.

But anxiety being the incessant, loud-mouthed brat that it is, is no more cooperative than it is during the day.

 Most of my life is spent ignoring its never-ending direct from the backseat question, “Are we there yet?”

When we have a partner, odds are they really don’t want to talk about your fears again, any more than you do. Marriage, when it doesn’t work, is just a song on repeat where the same tune is simply starting to wear us down, Guantanamo style.

If your heart is made out of vinyl, the song will eventually start to skip or disappear altogether.

Our souls, after all, are all analog.

Feeling alone is a much different beast when you are physically alone. On an average day, my brain bugler sounds his retreat early, like around 5 o’clock and I find myself running like a frantic, arm flapping Jerry Lewis in all directions, just to get away from myself, who, I am at the moment, disgusted with.

My inner parent who makes a nightly appearance tends to resemble Allison Janet in “I Tonya,” who dispenses love with a serrated rusty knife and whose habits, in between chain smoking and bird whispering, is to punish me for being a failure.

In truth, when we are alone, we are never, ever alone. We are populated by family memory weapons of mass destruction who appear to us in the form of anyone who has ever been dismissive or outright cruel to us and just like that life becomes a string of pearl harbors and we simply kamikaze ourselves into battleship smithereens. 

Our dreams are quite the horror films too. They often magnify and twist the nipples of our most sensitive nature which makes us feel spectacularly unsafe and defensive during what theoretically should be our most restful states.

Sometimes the only thing that will snap us out of our torment is the torment of someone else. Like when children are mowed down on a St. Valentine’s Day massacre.

That kind of outsized tragedy is usually enough to pull us out of the grips of our own punishing ego and give us perspective. Tragedy is the ultimate sermon. 

It’s a vivid life parable that comes equipped with pictures. And screams. And unbearable, inconsolable sadness. 

We are all master emotional electricians and when shock hits us, we know precisely where in our basements to go in order to reset our fuses because we have been there so many times.

Sadly we need sadness in order to bond together, to give us perspective and ultimately, if all the stars align, to inspire change, despite the obstruction of the men who we HIRED, to do it for us.

The idea that most politicians, and by this I mean the GOP, represents you and your well being is the childish illusion that we live with because that is simply not true and the grown-up part of you knows it. 

Any human being who does nothing after Sandy Hook is simply not a human being. Any human being that tries to take away your Medicare, your social security or even your NPR is not a human being.

So who, in the end, stands up for us, especially when we are in times of trouble?

Who is to be our bridge over troubled waters?

The answer is simple.

It’s you.

You may not be able to take on the world, but you can take on the path that you walk on.   

You can adjust your point of view. You can recalibrate your intent. You can turn to your heart instead of focusing on the vice that you put it in. You can stop punishing yourself for all the terrible things that you, in fact, did not do. 

If the crime does not fit, you must acquit.

And it all begins by evicting all the ghosts who haunt you. 

You have to become, like Trump, your own inner slumlord and give all those emotional squatters not 60 days, but 60 seconds to start packing and get the hell out.

You have to wipe the slate clean, turn those dark thoughts into erase clapped chalk dust and do what you have not done in years.

Breathe.

We all have a talent. A skill that we just know how to do that gives us enormous pleasure and unless that is compulsive masturbation, I heartily recommend that you turn to that skill which once it is employed will begin to remind you of who you really are.

You have to blow up the hard ground of you in order to excavate your way to the truth of who you really are, without the assistance of the fears and anxiety chorus from hell, which way too often provides us with the wrong soundtrack for our lives.

For me,. my salvation is writing. I begin each day by doing what I am doing right now. 

Direct mailing my heartfelt message of the day.

Then I go off and do what I do best.

I write some more.

It so happens that I work in Hollywood, as I have for almost 30 years, but I don’t write FOR them. I write for my wallet and for my battle scarred soul.  I am in fact my own soul provider and so are you.

I write with the intent to become as transparent as I can possibly be in the hopes that the war torn invading army of you just might see similar wounds so that we can perhaps become make reservations someday as fighting battalion, party of one.

I have no idea how often I succeed at this kind of ambitious recruiting.  Unless I get feedback, which thankfully I often do. That's when I can truly gauge the effectiveness of what I’m doing and figure out who I am impacting in life wars,

And I never stop. 

This year alone I have already produced three new scripts, a feature and two pilots and my play, my first, is about to get its premiere on June 8th at Theater Harrisburg. PlusI was even lucky enough to get a new series, which I co-wrote and co-created with many dear buddy Paul Reiser, There’s Johnny, up and running on Hulu. Soon I will shoot yet another comedy short and send it out to film festivals because it is FUN and there is no executive hovering over us saying the one word that is not allowed on my set: 

No.

And yet the reality is, I fail, often spectacularly and most of the time. You don’t get to see all of my sputtering, bi-plane nose dive moments and that can create the illusion that I am a success.

What you don’t get to see are the deeply personal David struggles like the one I'm in right now which centers on the first woman that I have truly loved in what feels like centuries, who does not want to be in the kind of relationship which I happen to specialize in. 

In truth, she was never open for business and I foolishly thought that love would conquer all. 

Based on match.com pictures alone, I would say the only unconditional love that women of a certain age welcome is the one lavished on their dogs, saddled up horses, oversized wine glasses and the idea that the UFO of the heart unmasked is some kind of sweep-you-off-your-feet prince charming who also happens  to be the CEO  of a multinational corporation.  

One or the other will simply not do.   

To win over a middle-aged woman's heart it has to be reigning men.

But I am here in spite of it all to praise life and to encourage love, not to bury it and even though I am barely standing on legs made out of gelatinous chicken fat,  I want to encourage you all to move on and crawl your way to to the true Bethlehem of your most persuasive and demonstrative creativity.

Warning;  that will mean taking risks.  You will most definitely have to relocate from your safe place.

Just because you are willing and able to pry yourself open and perform open heart surgery that does not always mean the patient will survive.

And even if the patient lives, there will be months of painful rehab, the possibility of profound depression and worse, a perennially empty wallet.

But if you don’t do it,  I guarantee that your life will be profoundly emptier.


You have no choice my children, but to live and despite appearances and all obstacles that lie ahead, fully.