The Return of The Return
"When life itself seems lunatic, who knows
where madness lies? Perhaps to be too practical is madness. To surrender
dreams — this may be madness. Too much sanity may be madness — and
maddest of all: to see life as it is, and not as it should be!" - Miguel
de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote
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I have been absent from this blog for a good long time now. Other things have occupied my time. My novel, basic survival, crippling depression, agonizing pain and the desperate search for some relief from it, and surely more than that.
Do not think I have forgotten you, my dozens of readers. Oh no. Not a day goes by that I don't think upon this little collection of personal history and attempts at witty observations. There just never seems anything to say. Not worth putting down anyway.
But here I am. Once again attempting to give my audience something to chew on while I myself go over what I write again and again hoping I'm not embarrassing myself any further.
Lets see, what has been happening here south of the border that may interest anyone. I have found a stable place to live, with mostly stable internet access. Both of which are vital to survival (making money, having a place to sleep thats not my car, etc).
Tessa does well. She has taken to hunting small animals in the massive yard surrounding the apartment. Since allowing her the freedom to go off the leash on occasion the number of rodents in area has gone down dramatically. My sweet little killer. She is like the feline version of Ted Bundy, she lures you in with her charm and beauty and unassuming demeanor and before you know it you are in the jaws of a killer.
The sequels to 'The Subcontractors' are coming along but I fear I gave myself too much to do at once. A collection of short stories and a full length novel. I'm still not sure which to go about finishing first. I'm also not certain I can use the title of one of the stories due to rights issues with Paramount Pictures, those who hold the rights to 'The Ghostbusters' and the cartoon 'The Real Ghostbusters' which had an episode entitled 'The Collect Call of Cthulhu', which I wanted to name one of the shorts in the collection. I still have no idea if I can use the name or not.
In stranger news 3 different production and distribution companies have approached me concerning the film I wrote and directed sometime ago, 'Hollow'. I've been playing phone and e-mail tag with various departments and representatives for over a week now. I wonder if they do this on purpose, or if its just how bureaucracy in Hollywood works. Some of both perhaps.
Mexico itself has been and continues to be largely good to me. I get mistaken for a local by just about every tourist I run across. The last time someone asked me for directions to something right in front of them I answered in German. That provided me with more than a little bit of amusement and confused the fuck out of those poor folks from Wisconsin.
Soon I shall have to renew my passport, an expense I had not anticipated. It was just one of those things I took for granted. Getting back into Mexico is easy-peasy, getting into the US with an expired passport ensures that I either won't be allowed in or I'm going to get the rubber glove treatment every time I need to check my mail. Or Trump might just close the border entirely for who knows how long. If I'm in the US when it happens I will have my car and whatever cash I have on me, if it happens while I'm here I will have to find new ways to access my accounts that don't involve crossing the bridge to the ATM as I do every month.
I guess I could continue this by relaying tales of strange dreams I have been afflicted with for a few months now, or how news such as interest in my film should make me happy but instead fills me with an unbearable dread. I have come too close to success in my career over the years only to have it pulled away at the last second. Come to think of it my personal life is much the same. I have met in my life exactly 3 women I would have married. I did marry one of them which turned on a dime from the only thing holding me together at the worst time in my life to despair so profound the only cure I could conceive involved filling every chamber of my revolver and putting it in my mouth with the hammer locked in place. The only thing that kept my finger from the trigger that day was my mother. She was dying, and had less than 3 months to live. I could not bear the thought of forcing her to bury her only child while she was facing her own mortality.
After she had passed there was nothing stopping me, but moments like that. Moments of clarity where you can see exactly what it takes to achieve your goal, in my case to end my pain, are few and far between. I had lost that clarity, replaced instead by my inane attempts to return myself to some sort of normalcy. Instead I became unhinged in a different, less obvious way. When my mental fog had cleared enough to see what my life was becoming I once again attempted to focus on one of the few things that has helped me keep focus, if not sanity, in my life; my goals, my career. I poured everything I had including what savings I had into making a film, and somehow convinced a very eccentric, very talented group of people to follow me off that cliff in the hopes that we were creating something that might go somewhere. Might mean something to someone. It was never going to be a blockbuster, if was never going to be a hit, but it had a story to tell and I couldn't have told that story without the people I had recruited to help me produce it. Now it seems like it might actually go somewhere, and here I am terrified that once again the thing I have worked so hard to achieve will be taken away at the last minute yet again.
Of all the things I hate about the human condition, the one that I despise the most in myself after a lifetime of hard learned lessons is hope.
Don't worry, I'm sure my next entry will be much more humourous than this. Looking back over this post it strikes me very much like the first draft of a suicide note. Its not, don't worry. I'll wake up tomorrow with my cat curled about me somewhere, search for wherever my glasses ended up as I crawled to sleep drunk, and begin my day as I always do. Wishing I had the clarity of vision I once, for a brief moment, possessed.
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This post and its
original content copyright James Radcliff, and has been brought to you by Mexico,
tequila, and generally poor decision making. If you would like to donate to
support this bizarre little travelogue, feel free to do so via Patreon or
PayPal. As always, this strange and debaucherous adventure has been brought to
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