Man if I don't post this meme no one will ever know how woke and down with caring about people I am. Dammit. How will anyone ever know?
I could just try to live my life being nice but damn I really want to post a dank ass meme about it. Well fuck, guess I'll just smoke my Xanax Vape and listen to my Post Malone vinyls while dancing to Drake in the freeway traffic after I finish making my tide pod spaghetti. I wish I could afford a house if only I didn't eat all that avocado toast in my youth.
Now to go bankrupt Applebees and be blamed for it by simply not eating food from there. Next up Hooters.
I don't know why they even call them that. Owls don't have titties. They aren't even mammalian.
Sometimes, like most people my age, it seems I wake up with the perpetual fear that my best days are behind me. Sometimes that is a relief considering how exhausting some of those days were and other times that thought scares me to death.
Back in May 2016 I went though one of the strangest most bizarre experiences of my life and was only held together away from death because one of my best friends in the world was their to keep me from going so far off the edge as to turn my 30th birthday into my first funeral.
When I got back to Alabama I had a lead on a steady job at one of the local news stations . . . that fell through.
When I got back to Alabama I had a girlfriend whom I loved who had a kid I wanted to take care of like a father . . . 4 months later I realized what some of my friends had already told me and cut it off after I'd started to pick out a ring.
Three months prior to moving back to Mobile I found out that the very mentor I'd had since I was a kid, who got me my first production gig when I was a kid back in 1999, had died of a horrible disease.
Two years prior to that incident my Father had died violently.
After moving I was able to work on some great productions such as "Gerald's Game" and "Get Out" and even a cool commercial shoot for the State of Alabama I've still never seen but hope to one day. After I realized that they were going to cut the film incentives and a lot of productions and production friends were leaving Mobile for places like Birmingham and New Orleans I realized I needed a regular job which brings me to where I am today.
Last week a project I helped out on I had the pleasure of seeing on a giant screen in a beautiful theatre. The person who made the film had told me I was an inspiration to their passion. A theatre full of people clapping over a small film made almost entirely out of passion reminded me why I even got into film and media in the very first place. I'd spent nearly a decade making films for other people through the tedious process of mountains of paperwork and even larger mountains of egos I'd completely forgot what it feels like to fuel a passion project for little to no money but for the love of the project itself. That moment alone threw as spark back inside me I hope becomes as big as the fires that were inside me when I initially moved my ass from Mobile to the West Coast.
I've been working and writing a side-project I'm deeply, deeply, deeply passionate about but the quicksand of this fast paced world and the depression that sinks in when I see the domino effect of things I've lost in the recent years seems to sink my abilities to put the hammer down onto the steel and deep into the anvil to make this thing. Despite all my setbacks I am determined to finish it and this project fuels my passions away from my hobbies, friends, and the bottom rung of Maslow's needs I currently am only a step or two above subsisting on.
“For what it’s worth... it’s never too late, or in my case too early, to be whoever you want to be. There’s no time limit. Start whenever you want. You can change or stay the same. There are no rules to this thing. We can make the best or the worst of it. I hope you make the best of it. I hope you see things that startle you. I hope you feel things you’ve never felt before. I hope you meet people who have a different point of view. I hope you live a life you’re proud of, and if you’re not, I hope you have the courage to start over again.” - F. Scott Fitzgerald. "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button".
"All are lunatics but he who an analyze his delusion is called a philosopher." ~ Ambrose Bierce.
Keeping my access to the internet as light as possible over the next couple of weeks reminds me of the famous Kurt Vonnegut story "Harrison Bergeron" about a man who has been weighted down against his full potential so that society is more balanced. Eventually Harrison breaks from his chains.
I feel like our dependency on machinery and social networking is doing essentially the same thing to all of us. It's funny when satire aligns. Although in a society as richly detailed and nuanced as America or the rest of the world somewhere our strange predictions tend to line up properly if not exactly regardless of our efforts to push them there. Perhaps it's just the osmosis of god crafting the universe out of our dreams reflected in our arts.
The older I get I realize that the human psyche, or perhaps just mine, is like its own organism almost separate from my body experiencing the world outside of itself. This blog, my poetry, my writing experiences, my lifestyle, so far when I pause and stop the momentum of my brain it separates in a serene void of endless reflections I can pick apart ad nauseam. This experience used to sicken me to dizziness but now I find it an exhilarating ride to pick apart my own mind in this way.
The thrill of life has deadened somewhat inside me to a point I cannot explain anymore. I've felt and done quite a lot and can remember almost all of it. Life in the thick of things can be like a gross sisyphean ouroboros task. We're constantly working with no goal or purpose in mind hoping that at some moment in time you'll be able to reflect and then eventually die looking back on a life as ghastly full of memory as an old storage shed where you can say yes . . . I did that thing, kissed that girl, saw that band, ate that dish, viewed that piece of art with my naked eyes, wrote that poem, danced until my feet bled, I was alive . . . but our fear at the end of it all will still be that it wasn't enough.
I'm spending this month dealing with social media and my need to be noticed as little as possible despite still being pulled back here and there.
You are alive now. There is no no past, there is no present, there isn't even this moment, there are only the moments in between that fold deep into your psyche and section you off to be the person you are which is just a moment in time for someone else.
And I hope that moment you become yourself makes someone else happy and in turn they return the favor. After all that is what love really is isn't it? Love is just by nature someone noticing the beauty in you that you cannot notice yourself and you noticing the beauty in them that they cannot see themselves. That's all love really is.
Do you remember the last time you kissed someone and it made your soul float?
Or are you so old now that those moments are just mysteries to you faded away beyond memory to a place of bitter nostalgia for the days when you were slightly younger but always forgetting how ignorant you really were back then?
I would not do this life over. I would only try to do it better now going forward and perhaps slower for my health.
Who is Daniel Louis Krone . . . simply the reflections of other people's perception of him. He is really nothing more than a shadow of a full connection he may never understand even though he's certain he once did.
"I could write it better than you ever felt it." - Fall Out Boy.
"You only hear the music when your heart begins to break." - My Chemical Romance.
Why did I begin this fruitless blog writing exercise with quotes from two bands who most would say aren't as important or worthy of quotes compared to other titans of musical writing such as Tom Waits or Bruce Springsteen?
I could have opened it up with crazy quotes such as . . .
"The eggs chase the bacon around the frying pan and the whinin' dog pidgeons by the steeple bell rope..." - Tom Waits "In the Neighborhood" or some such noise.
But if you need a kind of lyric-less musical palate cleanser while reading this I'd recommend "4" by Richard D. James cause that's what I was listening to while writing this.
Almost a full year ago I sent in an audition tape to play a character in a new Stephen Spielberg film called "Ready Player One", a character by the name of Wade Watts, whom I've come to find out is the lead.
I'd completely forgotten about this until recently last week while stuck at work I decided to slay my procrastination by cleaning out my laptop and found my old audition recording with copies of my paperwork for the submission on my laptop. No sense in dwelling on that now. Or drowning myself in the preverbal 'what could have been world'. I've been in that world. I've swam around in it and I assure you it's not a nice place to be. I didn't get the part, I'm sure most of you have guessed that by this juncture, but I'm happy to say I did shoot for the moon. Missed horribly. But I aimed right at that fucker.
I've spent over 10 years working in film and T.V. working a verified cornucopia of hats as a 'jack of all trades' from focus pulling to editing and from editing to acting and from that to script doctor I've done all kinds of wild and interesting things that will nowhere near give me any sense of fame (which I don't want) or a trajectory for a career path whose outline probably looks a lot like an Umberto Boccioni futurism painting but in my old age will maybe give me the kind of menagerie of stories I desired so much to tell in my pitiful youth by the time I became old.
However despite all that I still feel, like so many people I'm sure do, trapped in a machine trying to escape the pains of their past.
This past week has been nuts. It's been so nutty in fact I've taken time out of my busy nutty schedule to sincerely reflect on my future and how I want to proceed in this muddy swamp filled with machiavellian monsters known as the prestigious "entertainment industry".
Like most people in this business I love the work but hate the pettiness, thanklessness, and egotism this industry attracts sometimes. I don't like to suck up to people and if I ever do a good piece of work I hope no one will ever suck up to me. Well that is to say if people ever see the good piece of work I've done because it's now dawning on me that I've done something quite good and soon if I play my cards right people will see it.
I can't talk about that too much, too many hands involved, but that is the crux of why I'm even writing right now. My past like a pack of rabid wild animals have caught up with me all at once and a part of me is frightened and a part of me is deeply elated by the prospect of these metaphorical hell hounds gobbling me up.
A project I spent years trying to develop just e-mailed me back with a resounding "YES", well more of a tepid yes, but a yes after waiting so long on a project that I thought was DOA is something more than I ever would have expected.
And
. . .
At the same time
...
Another project I helped develop when I was back in LA came back. It's basically finished but this time a ruff cut of the film was sent to me for notes and I've been making those all week. This is a film I tried to find financing for while managing a gas station in Orange Beach over this past Summer. Which is quite an odd thing to try to do and even odder after all this time to see that project completed...holy fuck!
And it ain't half bad, and might be, what's the word I'm looking for . . . poignant.
. . .
And this next one is painful.
An essay both I (from my point of view) and one of my very best friends (from his POV of course) got finished regarding the time I was put in the hospital for 4 days on my 30th birthday. For those of you that don't know the full story it's a very long one and an incredibly painful one especially for me to remember.
I can't say I cried when I read my friend's account about me. I can honestly say I cried throughout reading the entire experience. It was like re-living dying again emotionally. But it was beautifully well written so hopefully it can be shared in time.
...
It snowed here in Mobile. That's something that very rarely happens.
. . .
A film I worked on, though just as a tiny cog in the machine, still makes me a little proud that it might actually get a Best Picture nomination and that's something I'm not sure I could accomplish even randomly like how this all worked out if I still lived in LA.
...
All of these and all manor of other things too numerous to recall happened all within about an 8 day period. It was like a whirlwind sucking me back into a life I thought I was leaving behind but now fear I may never be able to escape.
...
It's funny how things workout and it's also very funny how things don't. My failures are even more impressive I think than my successes. I've always felt I was hanging by a thread on the fringes of my own industry barely hanging on for relevancy like a gremlin on the wing of a plane. But upon reflection in this strange place called Alabama that I've grown more accustom to seeing as a home . . . maybe god just likes to gaslight people and send them all the strange feelings at once. But I sit here with some amazing opportunities, still struggling, and saying to myself . . . this thing called life isn't speed chess. You've lived a lot rushing around. You can breath. You can take a little time with this next move. Your past as it is will always haunt you and will only grow thicker as you grow older so if that forrest in your head, a sea of older rancid memories, grows thicker than fill it up with all manor of new wild things to then reflect upon once again when you are older than you are now.
...
“Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. We're the middle children of history. No purpose or place. We have no Great War, No Great Depression. Our great war is a spiritual war. Our great depression is our lives. We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires and movie gods and rock stars, but we won't”
