D-Whirled

I got two strange phone calls this morning. The first was from one of the assistants at my former company calling to tip me off that her boss (a senior executive I essentially slaved my ass off for two years) was pitching me for some new available D-gig. It was nice to hear that she still held me in good regard and my name wasn't totally trampled to smithereens back at the Big Man's. I wanted more specifics and my tipster promised she'd sniff it out. I'm not holding my breath. The thought of going back to D-life still sours my stomach, but if it were an interesting or lucrative enough opportunity, I'd at least take a meeting. Because like most of my generation, I'm just a broke kid collapsing under debt.

The second call was from Frankie, an adorable bisexual Queens-to-L.A. transplant whom I've known since our first week of college. We'd climbed the D-ladder together over the last half a decade and she was one of those very few people I knew in the business who remained true blue and honest with me the whole way. I'd picked up a message from her on my way home from Bonnaroo and our phone tag ended this morning. She needed my advice.

Frankie wanted to know whether or not she should accept my old job at twice the money I used to make. My stomach fell to the floor as the figure rolled off her tongue.

The fact that she was offered my job doesn't bother me in the least. She's an intelligent woman with great taste in material that I'd also go out and party with any night of the week. I'd hire her in a minute. I tried to give her as honest an assessment of life with the Big Man as I could and concluded that it would probably be a great career move for her to take the gig. After all it is a prestigious company. The name carries a lot of weight.

It's the second half of that sentence that makes me want to turn on some Death Cab for Cutie and slit my wrists in a warm bath.

Just another one of those days I've been having as of late when my jealousy of all the money my peers seem to be making at their various endeavors rears its ugly head before I can talk myself down off the ledge by remembering that my poverty, my debt, my instabilty are all choices I make for myself on a daily basis and that if I really wanted to I could just suck it up and find some bankroll-padding job that could make me breathe easier in the short term but only crush my soul in the end and prolong me once again from doing what I believe more and more with every passing day that I was born to do.

Write.

It's a choice. A sacrifice. A gamble. A choice. A sacrifice. A gamble...

The one thing I can say about hearing things like the Big Man offering Frankie my old gig is that it kicks my ass into a whole other gear. Because, in case you hadn't noticed, I'm an insanely competitive person. And no one puts more pressure on me than me.

So I need to write faster and sell this screenplay. Winning another tournament along the way would help too ;)

(Stay tuned for more tales of southern-fried hippie madness from Bonnaroo... Part II will appear later today.)