The FYI File: Honesty, Grace, and "MAD"-ness

Today marks six months since my last post, a new record for lengthy absences since I started blogging three years and three months ago. Resuming this is not “something that has slipped my mind”. It’s been on my mind constantly, and my failure to do so has illustrated the inertia and creative frustration that has dominated my life for most of 2014. Hence, a no-frills entry to bring us up to the present.

My feline son, Toby, looking especially angelic on 08/22/14.

Just Checking In

This past Spring, after I posted the clunkily titled "I Honestly Know Me: An Evaluation of an Evaluation", I found myself freaking out that I had just revealed way too much about the daily failures of my adult life and sunk into the scariest territory of all: humorlessness. At the time, I was writing down a lifetime's worth of experiences that lead to my self-diagnosis of Asperger's Syndrome, all part of massive preparations, several months in advance, for scheduled neurocognitive testing in July. I was reading John Elder Robison’s Be Different: My Adventures With Asperger's and Rudy Simone’s Asperger’s On The Job at the time, books that were crucial to my self-understanding and self-empowerment. I was inspired by these incredible Aspergian authors to record my own experiences and put them aside for future use in a book. I hoped that fearlessly yet humorously delving deep into my personal experiences, as John Elder Robinson and Rudy Simone had done, might just help fellow undiagnosed Aspies identify and appreciate their uniqueness, as opposed to the more commonly realized experience of suffering in silent confusion. (This is not to suggest that all undiagnosed Aspies endure such struggles: I suspect that most successful people in the entertainment industry, including nearly all of my favorite artists, are fellow Aspies.) Due to a desire to save what I was writing at the time for the potential book-to-be, I found myself without anything to say on the blog. And my drive to find something fresh to write about quickly dissipated when a close loved one was diagnosed with cancer.

In the months since, I have witnessed incredible bravery and strength and sacrifice as my extraordinary aunt has fought valiantly against terminal illness with her sister and children beside her every step of the way. It has been a truly awesome demonstration of humanity at its finest, one that I have been honored to witness. But I would still give anything not to have seen such exemplary integrity, and to instead be in an alternate reality without cancer constantly striking the world's bravest and most inspiring people. My beloved aunt continues her battle, and in the months since it began my family and I have said goodbye to a young friend who died in a matter of days after finding out he had cancer. His loss was felt the world over, for he lived and touched lives on nearly every continent. These past few months also saw the passing of my Mother's Mother. Though just a few months shy of eighty-nine years old, my grandmother's death blindsided all of us who expected her to be with us for another decade, at least. My grandmother was a deeply spiritual person, as am I, and I have felt and continue to feel her near ever since the time of her passing. But this blessed comfort does not change the radically altered landscape for all of us, and particularly my Mother, who have only ever known this world with our beloved Nana in it.

09/20/11: My mother, her parents, and their beloved dog, Blinky, on my happiest of birthdays.

I went into 2014 predicting a year that would be profound and beautiful and a happy end to seven years of bad luck that plagued me since I graduated college in 2007. I cannot say that this year brought with it the euphoria that I hoped for. But it certainly has been profound, and I cannot deny that it has been beautiful, for I have learned more about appreciating life in the present tense than I ever have before. It was not until I was sixteen years old that Madonna’s Ray of Light album/era introduced me to the notion of “living in the moment”. And it would take another sixteen years before I truly understood the vital, urgent importance of taking that approach to my and loved ones’ journey here on Earth. The moments shared with my loved ones in 2014 are among my most cherished moments of all. And each has made me realize how incredibly blessed I am.

"MAD" About Her

Despite the sadness, I would also like to celebrate how many happy times there have been in the six months since my last post. Among the most purely and unoforgettably enjoyable of these experiences was being interviewed for Matteo Maccarinelli’s MAD For Madonna, an upcoming documentary about Madonna’s passionate global fanbase. I was honored beyond words to partake in this film thanks to the fan popularity of my "Vogue Boy" video, because I knew it would give me a chance to speak from the heart about the artist who has had the greatest singular impact on shaping my creative output. 

I spent weeks preparing for my film debut, fearing how I would come across to people who had only ever seen me as the child in the video, worrying I would let them down with how I had turned out. I simultaneously feared that in my state of anxiety I might forget something important I wanted to convey, or just blank out altogether and make myself, and in turn my allegiance to Madonna, a joke. I was so worked up by the day before filming that I couldn't sleep that night. But twelve hours before the interview, I saw a shooting star overhead while outside listening to Madonna’s “Superstar”. And about eight hours prior, a single leaf fell from a tree and glided down near me as I watched the sun rise. I felt the Universe was letting me know that things would play out just fine. And indeed, they did. 

I only got about two hours of sleep before the cameras were to roll, but my adrenaline was pumping and the filming itself was even more enjoyable than I could ever have imagined. The dialogue prompted by the wonderful interviewer/co-filmmaker, Madeline Herec Poirier, yielded a number of unexpected insights that were as beneficial to my understanding of my relationship with Madonna as they were, hopefully, to the film itself. In deciding what I would wear onscreen, I unearthed my favorite Madonna t-shirt, from The Confessions Tour, which I had retired in 2010 after being photographed in it when I met my OTHER favorite living artist, Dario Argento. I opted to resurrect and immortalize this t-shirt on June 6th, 2014, an incredibly well-timed day for filming as it was exactly three years after I uploaded my childhood video to Vimeo. I’m obsessed with dates, and with fate, as anyone who’s read this blog for long enough knows. And filming my interview three years after "Vogue Boy" brought the experience full circle in the most divine way possible.

My sister Jen took this post-filming photo, perfectly capturing the elation of that beautiful June 6th!

There But For A Goddess Named Grace

Speaking of dates and divinity, today marks three months since I began to (also) worship at the altar of Grace Jones. I’d deeply respected her since I discovered her in the '90s and much later became enamored with several of her singles after I fell in love with her in Richard Wenk’s vastly underrated Vamp. But this past June 29th, I decided to finally take a long delayed, well-worth-the-wait dive into her discography. I was inspired by the artwork of one of my favorite blogs, GangsterSaysRelax.com, to start with her 1982 album Living My Life. By the time I reached the closing track, “Unlimited Capacity For Love”, which has since become my favorite, I knew I was about to become a HUGE Grace Jones fan. Ever since that fateful summer evening, Miss Grace Jones has become my most-played musical artist of 2014, dominating my use of Spotify and YouTube for the entire summer before I was fortunate enough to be gifted several of her albums and the DVD of her One Man Show for my birthday on September 20th. I was not surprised to find that the music of Grace Jones is so brilliant, but I was surprised to find that it is so spiritual, and indeed the combination has been key in making her body of work the soundtrack to an unprecedentedly monumental year in my life. This is not to suggest that I’m not still constantly listening to Madonna, Donna Summer, Diana Ross or ABBA. But if Grace has overshadowed these long-time favorites in 2014, it’s because I’ve got a lot of lost time to make up for. And making up for it has been an utterly sublime pleasure.

Jump to 3:05 to witness the overpowering energy that obliterates inhibition and arouses empowerment in everyone who comes into contact with Miss Grace Jones!

Just Like Starting Over

And now, I close with a confirmation: I have Asperger’s Syndrome. 

Of course, you probably don't need me to tell you this if you’re a longtime reader of this blog familiar with the passions, obsessions, and/or writing style of "Aspies". But if you’re not, or if you’re someone like me who can’t rest easy without the validation of a medical professional, I’m happy to say that my diagnosis is official. Following up on several hours of neurocognitive testing at a top Boston hospital on July 10th, an incredible neuropsychologist told me on July 22nd that she agreed with my self-assessment and formally diagnosed me with Asperger’s Syndrome and co-morbid anxiety disorder. (Anxiety tends to go part and parcel with ASD, but my anxiety is severe enough to warrant a separate mention.) Out of respect to this incredible doctor who inspired and empowered me, I’ll withhold further details except to say that it was an entirely positive experience. Insurance challenges notwithstanding, I urge anyone who suspects they are an undiagnosed Aspie to pursue neurocognitive testing: my neuropsychologist's report was, without a doubt, the single most accurate assessment of me that has ever been written. 

I never thought that, at thirty three years old, I would be living with my family with a dusty college degree and no money, no job, no experience, no prospects, and no idea of how to change all of that. I struggle with severe impairment in executive functioning and long-hidden learning disabilities that were revealed in my testing, the combination of which, along with my anxiety, has left me reclusive, afraid to drive, and struggling to function in society as a normal adult. I share all of this in solidarity with others like me on the autistic spectrum, (once) undiagnosed adult Aspies who are, in my neuropsychologist’s words, “incredibly bright” yet unable to apply the gifts that they possess the way everyone around us seems able to.

The gift that I possess, which has kept me from being swallowed up by the inevitable depression that comes from such grave realizations, is the ability to write. For months I have felt robbed of this ability, paralyzed by medical and financial crisis and overwhelmed by fear and confusion. But after six months, I am determined to find a means of taking this gift that I have been given and utilizing it. I have to believe that I can still pull myself, my partner, and my family out of the rut I ended up in after years of living my life as an individual with undiagnosed autism spectrum disorder. With the support of my incredible loved ones and, I hope, a return to regularly writing for this blog, I think I might just have a shot at turning the challenges that haunt me in 2014 into the salvation that defines me in 2015.

My all-time favorite performance of my 2014 theme song:
"NEVER stop the action!"

FYI File: Fantasy, Nostalgia, and "The 2014 Project"

Now that this blog has been given its third and final (I swear!!) name, I thought I would shake things up a bit. Nothing so crazy as dropping the pink text color or updating the general appearance to a post-1997 look, of course. But there's a lot I've been wanting to say, so rather than post a succession of lengthy blog posts, I thought I'd post this variety pack of short ones. 

The Twentieth Anniversary of My Obsession With Anniversaries

The hits package that redefined my life. Like, seriously!

January '14 marked the 20th anniversary of my obsession with anniversaries. My first-time viewings of Starman, The Shining, Dawn of the Dead, and Working Girl on blistery and/or snowy Friday nights in January '94 mobilized in me a 1980s nostalgia that never went away. But it wasn't just the movies I watched that month, it was also buying THE album: Totally 80s, the 2-CD Razor & Tie compilation that was advertised on TV all the time before becoming the soundtrack to most of my life in the sixth grade. From 1994 on I was fetishizing every aspect of '80s pop culture while lambasting everything I could about the '90s. However, happy Friday nights ritualistically spent at the local multiplex limited my aptness for thrashing then-contemporary film. 

It is now a time capsule for what the world looked like in March '94,

but The Paper also remains grown-up Hollywood fare at its most brilliantly entertaining.

For the Class of 2000, 1994 was the year when the sixth grade ended and the seventh grade began. Thus the year closed with my being knee deep in adolescent angst, which only kept me going back into the past. I continually found myself disappointed by reality, so I was constantly choosing fantasies that were constructed in another era. My pre-pubescent childhood had been so happy, and the spirit of the '80s was so inextricably linked to my own soul, that I lamented the decade until it became an over-idealized Heaven that I dreamed of dying and going back to. I was not unaware of this being unhealthy, but that didn't make it any less painful to push forward, not when I discovered that being a teenager was to be a lot less pleasant than I had been imagining in the '80s. Instead of forging a new path that would make childhood dreams come true, I clung to the past as an escape while reality came crashing down in the present. And, for better or for worse, I've been inclined to do this ever since.

I related to Tess McGill when I was twelve. I still do now.

And I'll bet many of you reading this feel the exact same way.

A Sorta-Facade On The Verge of Sorta-Crumbling

There has been so much that I have wanted to communicate through this blog over the last fifteen months, but during said fifteen months my life has been in a major state of upheaval. Actually, it was in upheaval when I started this blog back in 2011. But way back then, things in my life were just starting to turn upside down, and the coinciding mini-phenomenon of “Vogue Boy” allowed me to escape reality like never before. For a moment in Summer '11, it felt like my dreams of being an artist and a star had been instantly realized when that video achieved its peak popularity in one weekend. It was during that delightfully manic moment that I quickly decided to become a blogger, and my early entries here are thus defined by an optimism, and even a sense of fulfillment, that apparently represents me at my purest.  

The-blog-formerly-known-as-RobWorld has been a tremendous outlet in the three years since since then, for it has allowed me to unlock and release parts of myself through the written word in a way that I could never do within the format of a screenplay. But for well over a year, I have not been inclined to do any unlocking or releasing, for I have discovered that my life experiences are a lot less vivid in my mind after I make them public here. And, as evidenced in past entries, my memories, and the role they play in shaping my creative output, are too precious to me to be sacrificed.

On some level, I've gotten more screenwriting done by not blogging. But on most levels it has denied me an outlet that I need: not only to write, but to be read. I might not have a huge readership on here, but the feedback I've received in personal messages has been too awesome to be ignored. There is no better feeling than knowing a handful of people were affected by work that they personally related to, or which made them look at a movie or a person or a similar life experience in a new light. I don’t know if I’ll start writing again more regularly, because I thought that that would be the case last November....and it wasn’t. But I think this has a lot to do with my wanting to make every post an event, in turn defeating the purpose that this blog serves, for me, in the first place. I am a hopeless neurotic, still in the middle of a challenging and annoyingly long life chapter, and I need a place to let all this shit out. Some people go to therapy. I go to the stage. And that’s exactly what this blog is to me.

From Sixteen To Thirty-Two: "The 2014 Project"

Like the film itself, I'll NEVER forget the first time I saw this trailer!

When I was sixteen, I realized that Wes Craven's Scream was released exactly eighteen years after John Carpenter's Halloween, which itself had been released exactly eighteen years after Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho. Years later, I would realize that Val Lewton and Jacque Tourneur's Cat People’s limited release in December 1942 meant it was the movie that launched this every-eighteen-years cycle. Since then, I’ve been anticipating "The 2014 Project", a film that would, like the aforementioned four films, inject the horror-viewing experience with enough wit and suspense to change the cinematic landscape and redefine the genre for another two decades.

The most bewitching of Hollywood films and

possibly the most influential horror movie ever made.

Since the late '90s, I have secretly hoped that the Universe would see fit to choose me to write this 2014 horror film, and much of my creative life has been spent preparing myself to be worthy of such an opportunity. Alas, I've proven far more adept at writing screenplays than actually getting them made into movies. And without ever seeing your work on some screen, one can hardly feel like a real screenwriter. So last year I attempted to put work of which I remain as proud as ever temporarily behind me, and to instead take a stab at crafting "The 2014 Project". I spent the entirety of 2013 working on eight different scripts, each of which I had hoped could potentially reinvent "the American horror film", but none of which ever made it to their respective finish lines. By New Year’s Eve, I was forced to admit defeat. I was proud of the work I had done, and confident that one day the characters and story elements from this arsenal of partial completion would find their way into my future projects. But by no means did I come close to striking the gold that I was digging for.

If every attempt at crafting a pure suspense picture was even half

as effective as Halloween, the world would be a much better place.

It was not until the very end of 2013 and the very beginning of 2014 that a burst of renewed inspiration and ambition (my favorite cocktail) launched me on a new path. My dream, in this easy-to-shoot-but-hard-to-distribute world of modern indie filmmaking, was that the work flowing out of me would find its way into the right hands, and a quickly-realized project (Cat People, Psycho, Halloween, and Scream were themselves low-cost/high-speed shoots) could theoretically find its way onto a VOD platform or into an early 2015 film festival. But nearly a third of the way into 2014, I'm inclined to believe that that dream will not come true....and I'm okay with that. It’s very likely that a great horror film will come along and make the impact I was hoping to make while I'm still pining away, and if that happens, I can finally say I was right all along. And hopefully, if that happens, 'my little horror film', whenever it makes its way to the screen, will still earn itself a place in the hearts of like-minded movie lovers. But for now, I think I'll put my faith in "The 2032 Project": I have good reason to believe I might be capable of writing something worthy of comparison to the aforementioned films when I'm fifty. In the meantime, I intend to enjoy the writing process instead of mourning my failure to be where I thought I would be when I was half the age that I am right now. 

No movie-going experience has come close to the first two times I saw Scream on the big screen. And I'm 99.44% sure that this will always be the case.

Furthermore, assuming that the every-eighteen-years cycle really does extend into this century, I'll be keeping my eyes peeled for the film that will ultimately redefine our collective concept of modern horror movies. There are already a few potential contenders in the pipeline, and 2014 has only just begun...