Passive Inactivity

“…And there’s these great leagues, semi-pro leagues, particularly in New York, Central Park, Brooklyn, The Bronx, and you see all these guys, and you go to these games, and they’re cool to watch because you see little flashes of what I’m sure the scouts saw in them. But it’s not quite there…They’re not quite fast enough…They don’t quite throw hard enough…There’s just a little bit too big a hole in their swing…”

—Marcos Bretón, Ken Burns’ Baseball: The Tenth Inning

Photo by Adam Andrew Corre

It’s what scares many of us.

Semi-pro.

Not being good enough.

Figuring it out too late.

I’ve struggled with that my entire life. Worried I’m not going to be good enough or succeed greater than my parents did. Isn’t that what each generation is supposed to do? Do better than the last? Ever since I entered this “adulting” world, however, I’ve teetered on the edge. And that edge is mostly madness at this point.

I haven’t been able to get into any groove. One word here, blank spaces there. One sentence here, a paragraph of nothing on its way. Whether it be writing, acting, singing, podcasting, producing, directing, photographing or landlording, I have fallen way short of the adulting standard.

I will say that I have grown fond of that term, though. “Adulting.” It basically sums up what it is we all do. The only difference between adolescence and adulthood, um, excuse me, ADULTING, is that we have to be less pouty, more disciplined and more professional on a social and business plain. We never grow up, we just become professional children who are adulting, always looking for that moment when we can be a kid again and no one will give us shit for doing so.

So, even though I’ve struggled myself, I certainly take solace in the fact that we all kinda hate this shit. The problem is, I haven’t forced the discipline on my being. The fact I’m even typing words right now is a HUGE FUCKING DEAL. At least to me. You may not give two shits, but then again, you’ve made it this far.

I know I need to take everything going on in my life like a “man.” Like how an adult would take it. Whether it’s family ailments, relationships lost, cities left, debt collecting or tenant evicting, I’m not supposed to take it as emotionally as I do. 

Yet why do I cry so fucking heavy all the time?

These are seen as “effeminate” qualities. My oversensitivities have always been seen as such. Even as the image of the “modern man” has evolved, certain things do not go by the way side, but as far as I’m concerned, I’m just an overemotional human being that may take things way too seriously sometimes and whose decisions to ingest as much THC as I have has probably led to those general oversensitivities being WAAAAAAAAAAAAY the fuck overamplified. Calm the fuck down indeed.

Ah, the elephant in the room. The marijuana. If you’ve known me before and never known this fact for sure, I’ve just laid it all out for you. What? Should I talk talk about my recovering alcoholic father? How I’m supposed to have the addictive gene? How before I self-medicated in my adult life I was on 60mg of Ritalin from the time I was 4 till I was 20? And no, that 420 was not pun intended. That’s just how it worked out.

So all those facts are true, and that sentence and this one are redundant. My distractions are clear, the tangents evident. But I’m not going to apologize for shit. So what if this ain’t completely structured yet? I’m getting there, and I had to start SOMEWHERE. I got home sad about a lot of things in my life and I’ve been translating all of my energy towards making all of that sadness even more negative. Regardless of any shitty things going on in my life and in my family, I only make it shittier as I sit drowning like Alice in her own tears, the level continuing to grown farther up my head.

Welcome to Sam Maxwell’s page, and welcome to it in 2018. It may be the bare minimum but at least I did that, because I haven’t done shit lately.

This is where I currently stand.

I’m everybody’s rebound. I’m hot till I open my mouth. I’m a semi-professional screenwriting, blogging and acting, ADHD, whiskey-drinking, weed-smoking, overdramatic, hopeless romantic horndog of a New Yorker. I haven’t completely found myself yet at age 33, but at least I’ve gathered the above. You have to start somewhere.

Fuckin’ A.