A life in constant potential.

Leaving "Kansas" and the drug of dreaming.

🎧 listen to this playlist while reading.

I SEE IT now, everything I did wrong before. I thought I could “be” my way out and into everything, but I needed to just do. Less being, more doing. That is the late-learned secret.

IT IS NOON and I’m building my place with furniture. I’ve clipped my skin six times building this damn utility cart and it looks like my entire hand was given enthusiastic hickeys. I moved into my apartment in January and boxes of furniture have been waiting, wanting to be opened for months. I’m just getting around to it.

Now it is time for coffee and a good stare into the abyss.

MY WHOLE LIFE has been in a state of potential—the potential of doing something big with it. A life of potential is more fun than life. Like reading a self-help book without helping yourself after. You get the high of doing without doing anything. A dream-state. In dreaming of the thing, it feels like you did the thing.

A common anecdote used by manifestation junkies: that the brain is “unable” to detect memory from imagination. That if you think it, feel it, believe it, it will be. To live as if you already have what you want. Here is a fun example of that: Close your eyes and think of a freshly cut lemon in front of you. Observe every detail of it. Then think of slowly, very slowly, biting into that lemon. My mouth usually waters when I do this. There is no lemon, just the imagination and wish of a lemon, but the body feels it. In theory, by imagining you ate a lemon you’d start manifesting lemonade or something, I don’t know.

I was real addicted to this form of wishing. Closing my eyes and dreaming of the good life. It was actually better than living, as long as you didn’t wake up. Waking up is death. You wake up worried about money. You realize the thing you want happening to you isn’t even close to happening because you were dreaming about it so much it felt real, and because it felt real, you took no action. Dreaming is a drug. As is potential.

I LIKE LOS ANGELES. It is pretty and sad. It is sad because it is filled with people who were once told they had so much potential. And because the weather is pleasant, they stayed in that state of potential forever and one day woke up and they weren’t twenty anymore—nor thirty, nor forty, nor fifty. It is a city of people high on potential where everything is always about to happen.

I grew up in a small town in Missouri. There, life was always going to happen someday too—just not today, just not here. Good things were out there, somewhere over the rainbow, beyond fear. You’d look at a sunset with your pals and think, “we gotta get out of here.” It was easier to dream in Missouri because you had to. Just to make it out alive, you had to dream, because if frozen custard and Jesus was all life had to offer, there was no point in going on.

Short contextual intermission on my background, you can skip this if you’re not interested:

When I was younger I constantly read self-help books about the good life. I didn’t do anything for years and life didn’t get good. The high of reading the books was enough.

These are the kinds of books I would read at 13.

I always wanted to write books and make movies but I couldn’t take action. Maybe it was a lack of discipline or just plain fear, but this inability to take action towards what I wanted crippled me. So I quit. No writing books, no making movies, no nothing. It was 2020 and the plan was to download this app called TikTok and make videos for a year and by the end of that year, I’d have a portfolio to get a job at an ad agency. That was the plan. What actually happened was what I always wanted to happen most my life. About six months into filming two to three videos a day, suddenly I was a writer. I wrote and made internet short films for a living. I got representation at WME, calls from production companies wanting scripts, and a willing publisher for my book. Had I known I was six-months of locking-in from changing my life, well hell, I would have started sooner. This is why I have a complicated relationship with advice-giving, because the one time I gave up on a dream, the dream came true. So what is the lesson there, give up? I don’t know. Maybe it’s detachment. The reason I’m telling you this is once I left Missouri both figuratively and literally, I was in a much better place in life. In that better place, I fell into yet another life of constant potential. The potential of “making it” and creating not just internet stuff, but “legit” big-time Hollywood movies. The ego-high you get from a production company telling you what a terrific, wonderful career you’re going to have is a high that feels suspiciously similar to action. The drug of potential was so nice that I stayed put, and it’s been a long time now. I’ve woken up and things are better, but I was asleep for a while there in that sweet, hypnotic state of potential.

Dorothy sings about leaving Kansas. It’s hard to watch this movie now without seeing it as a tragedy. I always imagined after the movie, Dorothy grows up and gives everyone the finger and peaces out with Toto. But who’s to say…

MY POINT IS this: You must go. You must leave your state of potential behind. You must go somewhere over the rainbow. Dreaming about it from “Kansas” feels good, but the drug of potential isn’t good for you. It feels good to want, dream, and yearn. In a way, it feels just as good as getting what you want, dream, and yearn for. The same way you can taste a lemon that isn’t there. But this is a dream. You must wake up from it and go. You can’t stay in Kansas anymore. You must go, before it’s too late. Before it gets nice to just think about it.

And I see now, as I sip this damn fine cup of coffee, that it’s not the being that matters, but the doing. Instead of being a writer, I just wrote. Instead of being a filmmaker, I made a movie. This is leaving Kansas.

a rainbow that appeared on a run last week in Austin.

“Courage. As long as we got the courage to get out of this town and never look back, we’ll be okay.” A girl named Olive said that to me once, and then I never saw her again.

If I were old, I would say the secret is this: Don’t dwell on the dream too long. Don’t dwell on what you don’t have. Dwell on what you have and take action towards what you don’t.

THE COFFEE IS empty now and my quarter-built utility cart awaits me. The cardboard boxes of furniture surround my kitchen like a mini-city. For no reason at all, I woke up last week and started opening boxes and setting up the rest of my place. That whisper that I must do, became a scream. So I opened one box at random and started. This is doing. This is leaving Kansas.

AND NOW I sit at 9:33 pm eating a cherry pie with whipped cream and ginger tea, naked, completely naked, watching Shameless on a lousy projector I bought off Facebook. Everything is all right. I am grateful for my little miracles. Tomorrow I won’t be anything. My job is simply to sit at my desk and start, to open up another box, and leave Kansas all over again.