While heading back from a meeting yesterday, I was told by a co-worker that a friend at Comedy Central had inquired about my "drug problem." Cursory investigation into this rumor's origin confirmed my suspicion: a special friend who once fired me appears to have landed upon a more comfortable answer to the question "why did you fire him," drawing upon information conveniently available to the public via any conversation or blog entry that composes my transparent life.
When you're honest with dishonest people, they can't believe their luck.
For those of you who don't know, by asking me or reading here, I sometimes use recreational drugs. For those of you who care, and who trust me, I did not get fired for having a drug problem. I have never used drugs while working, excepting bong hits or cocktails while shooting improvisational non-profit videos with people I think are my friends.
If I ever did use drugs while working, indeed, if I had a drug problem when I wasn't working, I would tell you without shame, just as I've always told anyone anything they want to know, because I'm an honest man and I'm good at what I do, and if I do it with a mouse up my ass, then maybe that's a crime to the mouse and maybe it's not and we can discuss it all you want.
I did drink a lot of coffee on one writing job, when I was writing for a certain someone for whom an episode a day just wasn't fast enough, and I felt I needed a stimulant to fill the tank inside me that had previously contained my soul. I didn't even have time to drink during my employment on that job. I got fired for a very different reason than being on drugs or being bad at my job. I got fired for a reason that's got to be incredibly hard and not very fun to explain. I won't speculate or go into any more detail than that because I'm a professional, and I don't slander. It would only make me seem, well, like I was crazy.
Let's change the subject.
Young writers: sometimes, in this business, you meet bad people. Reversed people, dishonest people, what the less enlightened would call evil people. They're really just mentally ill people that choose to be ashamed of their illness and strive to make that shame yours instead.
As an example, someone you know might be truly dependent on chemicals, through no fault of their own, due to run-of-the-mill mental illness. They might wake up, go to work and go right back to bed having spent the entire day on mind altering pills designed precisely to keep them from being who they really are, because who they really are is basically unemployable. They might have to legitimately spend every day, on a doctor's advice, using government approved medication, constantly upping their own dosage, dilating their pupils more and more just to keep a little light in their ever-darkening lives. And while there should be no shame in this, because being crazy isn't any more a choice than being gay, some people make the choice to be ashamed, and that's when they become bad people. In this example, they might tend to compensate for their shame by diagnosing a lot of the people around them as being addicts. This would make a reliable safety net for them whenever they felt threatened.
Some people are crazy, for real- not crazy like me and my friends, who call ourselves crazy to keep ourselves in check. Some people are bona-fide crazy people and they live with a very real shame, a very real fear of being "caught" being crazy, being "pitied" for being crazy, and they will do anything and say anything, and hurt anyone, or suck anyone's dick, to keep that day from coming.
It's not the crazy that makes them bad, it's the shame. These are people that feel like they have to claw at the world with white knuckles just to keep from flying off into obscurity, and they wish you felt the same, because then they'd be normal. Unconsciously, they know there is a reason why nobody will work with them, in spite of their talent and charm, and behind closed doors, they often find themselves curled up and bursting into tears. They claw at their melting bodies and brains and they convulse to try to get their record to stop skipping but nothing works.
So they put on their makeup, take a deep breath and step outside into a world that they believe hates them, and as far as they're concerned, it's time for the rest of us to make it up to them. Time for us to pay their piper. Their pain is going to be yours, by hook or by crook.
If you ever find yourself working with someone like that, get out fast and stay quiet. Get fired- it's as easy as telling them how you feel, so do it, because if you quit, you don't get paid. Be professional; don't slander them, even if it gets back to you that they've been slandering you in one of the lowest, least professional ways.
Pain is a living thing that wants to spread. When you get hurt by someone, you want to hurt them back. You might even want to hurt others. But can break the cycle if you choose to break it. Feel the pain, feel the urge to spread it, and realize that the person who hurt you, by definition, is overflowing with it. They don't need to be punished because they're already serving a life sentence. It is no concern of yours, even if they keep talking shit and it keeps getting back to you.
Don't blog about it. Don't post anything about it in any forums. My friend Dino once posted details about working with a certain fading starlet, and her celebrity husband, while burying the hatchet with him over drinks, confided that they had flirted with the notion of taking up their Brazilian masseuse's offer to hire thugs to physically beat him senseless. They had a whole plan. They had thought about it enough to plan it. In their minds, it was what Dino deserved. For talking about them. In a way they didn't want to be talked about. In a way not approved by their publicist.
Don't talk about these people. Let them talk about you, let them say what they want to say and hope the truth will find a way to the surface.
Just take the opportunity to improve yourself. God knows you're not perfect. Practice counterintuitive actions: forgive the unforgiveable, love the poisonous, empathize with the unbelievably psychotic. You're not exactly sane yourself, you know. Nobody is, and if you can accept that, you can grow.
The universe comes predisposed for balance; if you want bad people to feel bad, it's as easy as doing nothing.
Like honesty, it's hard at first, but in time, it's as easy as just not lying .