A Thursday Kinda Rhyme

This morn I try to start anew

With some words I hardly ever stew

I’m not sure why it only manifests in rhyme

It feels like, and this is an easy one, there’s no other time.

All I can do is write in rhythm

Or a Sam Maxwell version of that at least.

Neither a script

Nor a book

Nor a songwriting hook

Is the path I chose to get my creations going on this Thursday day of December.

There has been a considerable lack of typing in my life

But you already know that

‘Cause that’s all I’ve really written about on here.

When I write poetry

I don’t always stay fancy free

I blend in and out of the rhyming state of peace

Sometimes you just want to rush off without anything locking you down to one singular symphonic sound, one specific inflection that matches with another consonant’s pairing with a similar inflection.

But sometimes

There’s no stopping the rhyme

No matter how cheesy

Or how it feels like a crime

Back to time

The issue we stress over most

It’s not like I have a lot of it to roast

So, I bid you farewell, all you folks of the earth.

Or at least the corner of it that came to this circle.

Enjoy your Thursday.

Here’s some funk music.

The Great Divide

I find myself only wanting to write about how hard it is for me to write these days. That can't be a good thing. Instead of writing, I scroll through my Twitter or Facebook feed, one post after another making me more and more numb. Watching other people's content scroll by my eyes, nonsensical yet beautiful, yet I struggle to sidle on in.

There's too much of it these days. I know I have trouble even keeping up with my own ideas, let alone anybody else's, whether it be articles or books or movies or television shows. I can't fucking take it all in. And everybody has yet another thing to recommend to me. I try to sleep after waking up too early, with loads of youtube videos to scan or articles to read or movies that I haven't seen (yes, I will admit, such as "Serpico.") Yet I sit up in bed and go to the easiest thing. What trivial Mets information can I come across today on #MetsTwitter? Would it kill me to write that piece on the blog I've been thinking about for years now, or that script I need to finish/draft a second time? Why in the fuck can't I FOCUS?!

This is what I've been told my entire life. You need to FOCUS. Calm down. Stop getting so distracted. Yet distraction after distraction comes my way and our ways as a whole. If we take the modern baseball ballpark as an example, it is strictly designed not for the folks who love to pay attention to a three hour game but to get as many people in as possible even if they definitely cannot pay attention to a 3 hour game. I can't fault this design in capitalism because everybody's gotta get theirs while they are here before who knows what's next. Yet all I see is an acknowledgment that it is an entire collection of people who cannot even be bothered to focus on one thing for too long. It isn't just me. It isn't just the people who were diagnosed at a young age who can't seem to focus too long. Advertisements of the moving picture nature tend to not be more than 30 seconds with the official knowledge that you only have a maximum of that amount of time to get the consumers' attentions to what it is you are trying to communicate.

I have gotten to the point where I am fed up with my lack of focus. I'm also fed up with everyone else's. I am told I have one of the worst attention spans yet I try to have a focused conversation with certain people and there isn't even a remote chance to get anything done or discussed. My body and brain, probably without me even realizing, says, "If the whole world isn't going to focus, then why should I?"

It is hard these days for me to focus on the positive. All I can do is see how far behind I am. How I've gotten to this 34th year of mine (I'm 33 for those I just confused, because I AM INDEED finishing out my 34th year on this Earth before my February birthday) having self-medicated on a cannabis carcinogen when all I needed to quell my anxiety, depression and lack of focus was a big, deep breath. That deep breath seems extremely hard to come by. Maybe a healthy dose of certain substances, but the moderation I have been looking for so I don't feel like I'm going insane on either side's extreme has not come as I've preached finding it. Here's the thing, though, and a positive to take away so I'm not so fucking down on myself all the time: 

I'm actually currently doing it. Besides the fact I'm actually writing right now, I am getting into a healthy pattern of going to the gym, and I am staying disciplined in places I've had a hard time as an adult staying disciplined.

What ends up happening is that you get into a crazy cycle of skipping for now the adulting that you desperately need to stay sane in this world, smoking yourself to a stupor and keeping yourself in a perpetual state of suspended adolescence, where the childlike anxiety and insecurities some can suppress once you mature and come into your own as an adult just bob in the water like a ship out to sea. That has been my experience. The worst right now is trying to remind myself the adolescent mess I have made out of my life and the snail-like trail of disgusting childlike behavior I have left behind cannot get fixed in one day. Fifteen years of that will not go away in only 3 weeks of working hard. This is the most important thing I can do right now, otherwise I will stay angry and frustrated for the rest of my life.

There is a great divide in my head between wanting to get things done and actually getting things done. The only way to shake the negative as much as possible is action. I want to write about movies, I want to write movies, I want to write about music, I want to make music, I want to have fun, which is hard for me to do these days; but even if I write about my anxiety, insecurities and my struggle with focusing (and no, I will never take pharmaceuticals for that ever again...)

...at least I'm writing.

The bright side of life.

10 Minutes

A dude I know keeps saying all it takes is 10 minutes a day to keep working the writing muscle. Ten minutes. I guess I’m on 30 seconds. I’ve been putting it off and saying, “not today” and giving myself shit the entire time. What does it really take? Why can’t we motivate ourselves to do the shit we know we 1) have to do, and 2) what we WANT to do? I actually like doing this. I like performing and I like writing. And yeah, I’m just free flowing and throwing it up here but it doesn’t matter how shitty or great or amazingly awful it is. I fucking did it. And if any of you pay attention to me whatsoever, you’ll notice I haven’t done a lot of writing over the last few years, let alone hardly at all over the last year. And most of you, because I’m lazy or who the fuck knows, haven’t read a single word I’ve written into a screenplay. I haven’t drafted properly and I haven’t worked to produce somehow, some way the crazy ideas stirring around in this head. People seem to like some of them when I bring them up in elevator-type pitches. Some more than others, but pretty consistently across the board unless people are bullshitting me. But there’s only one way to find that out. Fucking produce.

5 minutes.

There are distractions and there are more distractions. One after the other. There are piles of shit that was a snail’s slog of disgusting adolescent mess I left behind me that I just left back here in New York to desperately go to Denver to hang one more time with the man I didn’t take enough inspiration from while he was alive. And now he is gone. My dad has passed and all I can do is be thankful I got to soak him up as much as I did before he anything but quietly went into the sunset. I can now take all the positivity he left me and the support he gave me while cancer was eating away at him to make myself a person not only I am proud of but one he would have been overly thrilled to see. He won’t be able to in the flesh, but goddamn it, I have to do what I can to force myself to practice and work every muscle I believe I am talented at. And that starts here.

10 minutes. Peace.

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.