THE IDEA COSMOS and self realization

[T.J.Parsons]

I have just finished watching the movie "Southland Tales."

As much as it is eerily similar to an idea that I have been working on for years... and when I say eerily I mean it gives me chills makes me mad yet satisfies me that someone got it out there at the same time. I cant help but to like it .. it is haunting , fun, appeals to the part of you that likes every movie genre. Richard Kelly seems to be inside my head...lol.

No but seriously. I think that there may be a vein, a cosmos of ideas that people think very similar depending on where they grew up and what they were exposed to, environmental factors etc. In his and my case we are both originally from Virginia, are a few months apart in age, and even went to competing high schools. He went to USC, Ca film school and I went to USC, Sc film school. I'm sure you can guess which one is the bigger success at the present....lol our styles and influences seem to be the same. Our techniques are similar. When I see the subjects and ideas that he implies on screen I can't help but to root for him, almost like we are on the same team, kind of like with Patton Oswaldt (also near where I'm from not as many things in common though).

Anyways this month , the month of my birth I am doing some life searching and wondering what its all leading up to. I work a mediocre day job for not much money, struggling everyday in a very geographically and culturally isolated part of the United States. I work on my own short works and overly ambitious projects over extended periods of time with very little resources. Usually I end up watching similar ideas getting put on a screen before I finish them, but I do however enjoy their success, deep down. Ideas are free floating around. It takes the right people, money, and hard work to harness them and fashion them into condensed vibration of color and sound that we like to call film.

I have one of the three (hard work), I'm out of money and the people it takes to make a dream get realized. and quite honestly at times I feel like I want to give up. I have been working on my new film "Traveler" for a little over ten years, enough time for people around me to roll their eyes at they very mention of it. I’m not going to lie; this script has been giving me a pain in the ass for a little over a year and a half and its the artistic equivalent of taking everything thing out of the refrigerator that strikes your fancy while, taking care when you mix them into the final product that they don’t taste like poop. In my mind I feel like a lot depends on making it right. Perhaps this is my only chance or last chance as it were. Just because I don’t have money I still should be able to get my message out (just painstakingly writing around every production hang-up). That’s just the way I have been thinking of this damn whole thing.

I sit here on cusp of a major life change. I am stuck in this place (internet) that was invented for free exchange of ideas, and I sift through advertisements, hacker generated personas & artificial friends, spam , viruses, bulletins , chain letters and chain comments perpetuated by kids too young to get on the internet unsupervised, forwards and other wastes of electrons created on a rapidly depleting fuel supply. I'm just trying to stand out a 'lil, find a way to an send an idea on its way, raw to be smelted and pounded into reality, things I want to say, and things I want people to hear that I believe in my heart people will accept or understand on screen rather than coming out of my mouth, a problem I’ve had to crippling degrees my whole life.

As my life gets shorter by the day I always ask myself... Will I, should I give up? The reality of a home lifestyle and a factory job surface, things that friends and family say " don't have to be permanent" but deep down my whole life If been fighting getting locked into the lifestyle of a 50+ hour a week repetitive job coming home and going to sleep. And that’s all she wrote. Many people do that and are happy. But deep down I know what I am, and what I am capable of if given a chance. The what ifs and the one day I’m gonnas. Are far from my vocabulary and I never want them to be. I’ve seen too many people loose who they are to this. I don’t want to wake up on the porch in 20 years and think that I've wasted my life. Though now I feel like I'm dangerously close. So I set my ideas free any way I know how: Film, blogs, stories, art, painting, digital images, music, soundscapes etc

It was also recently relayed to me by a friend after asking if I would finally give up and go quietly. He replied "it's not in your nature." I find this a little comforting after doubting myself for months. I will fight with every scrap that’s left in me.

I am scared of the future. I always knew what I was gonna be. Now I just “am”. I will always be fighting money or not, having help or not, just to put those ideas out there to any one that will open up to them. But I relish the fact that others, like minds out there in the cosmos are homing in on things I think about everyday. I look forward to one day meeting those that want to combine efforts and make tempered steel out of condensed similar ideas.
I know you are out there. I believe deeply.

Until then, watch a movie that I didn’t make (Southland Tales) and somehow feel close to me through someone else’s work. Maybe you will get inspired. Maybe you will be appalled. But remember that movies are such a strange medium as they are sometimes not all about making money as we tend to forget. Not all about the hottest “it” actors. And sometimes more about sending a message encapsulated in time that needs to be said.

Hats off to you Richard Kelly,
Maybe before I’m 40 we can meet again on a different playing field than we did at first. But thank you for giving me something to think about, peppered with some hope and humor.



Thanks for your time in reading this extra long blog,

TJPARSONS