I’ve had a little bit of time to think about things lately.  This year has been (so far) the largest upheaval and time of change for me.  And now it’s time for some complete honesty with total strangers.

January rolled around and not much had changed from the previous month, except it was colder and I was more broke.  It didn’t matter to me.  I had moved to Tennessee in late August to live with my friend Phil and his daughter Taylor and get more serious about this whole “making movies” thing.

Moving to Tennessee meant scaling back, living with most of my stuff packed up in boxes and stored away until some nebulous future date when it would be “okay to unpack.”

It was still a pipe dream from where we stood.  Money was extremely tight.  On one hand, we didn’t care because we were able to at least make the bills from either my programming jobs or some ad sales.  On the other hand, we were stuck in that cycle and it was starting to feel like we were bouncing on a pogo stick at the bottom of a 3,000 gallon barrel.

February rolled around.  Out of a continual frustration from getting hit by spambots on our sites, I implemented a mutating form system.  Then we got the call from the investor at the end of the month, sent through that very same form system I had just finished.  We weren’t sure if it was a spambot, we’d seen so many of those it could’ve easily been one.

Then all of a sudden, we were making Tenebrous.  A script I had written in a fury over one weekend because I needed to vent out some things and tell a story.  And then we were in pre-production then principal photography.  It was looking better.

Then my friend’s brother died suddenly (see one of my previous posts on this).  It was a hard blow to me.  I felt some of my own mortality catching up and tapping me on the shoulder, clearing its throat and saying, “Um, excuse me?”

But I didn’t turn around that time to look.  I should have.  Before I knew it, Phil was gone.  Everything seemed to take on the hue of a bluish-green.  Time stopped for a bit.  My mortality returned, this time with more of a love tap on my shoulder blade and saying, “Now that I have your attention, you mind turning around and looking this time, schmuck?”

So I did.  And I thought about all those choices I made that put me here.  Would I change it?  Not for the world.  Am I going to continue on with the work Phil and I set out to do?  Hell yes.