Overnight Guest's Journals - The Unreal World

August 26, 1999

Day 4 of being $24.50 in the hole in my checking account. I don’t get paid until Thursday and the check probably won’t clear until Saturday. Thank GOD the bank reversed the $90 in overdraft charges from last week. Remember when one parent used to say no and you’d go to the other? That’s also a wonderful technique in business when you have NO leverage at all based on contract or otherwise. The bank did sort of screw up and I only overdrafted about $17.00 that time, but TECHNICALLY they didn’t have to get my money back…I just asked around until I found someone who WOULD give it back. (I think I probably accelerated my parents’ divorce by getting conflicting answers and letting them sort it out. I’d usually end up getting what I wanted while their argument transformed into something wholly different.) I’m a little relentless at times. In my business you can only spend so much time focusing on the word “no” or “can’t”. 9 times out of 10, those words are empty…(just about as empty as the “yes”’s, but hey…that’s what I have a union for, right?

As a whole, I think people in Western culture (myself included) spend a lot of time thinking about negatives..so much in fact, that we find it inconceivable and somehow wrong if we spend an equal amount of time pondering the positives. It’s not frivolous behavior to endeavor to maintain a positive state of mind. Now, this doesn’t mean we run around like flower children, just waiting to be blindsided by reality, but it is unreal that we voluntarily crush ourselves like we do. There’s a happy medium somewhere. If anyone has Lenny Kravitz’s most recent album “5”, there is an outstanding song on it, the first track, I believe, which talks directly to this. I think it goes something like, “Tired of all the negativity that’s goin’ round, we spend our time on things that bring us down, let’s all get together and make a joyful sound.” I’ve become more and more enamored with Buddhism the more I read this book. Western religion is so mired in guilt and regret…even if you aren’t religious, persay, it has become so ingrained in our culture to maintain a state of dissatisfaction, that we completely overlook our wonderful lives until it’s far too late.

I’m working in this really sad, frustrated office. No one plays any music. People guiltily sneak around to say hello to co-workers, afraid to be caught being pleasant. Ugh…I hate corporate America more and more with every encounter. Where is this going to lead us? All this speed and efficiency should be lowering our workload, shouldn’t it? My vote is that we revise our workweek to 30 hours a week…take advantage of all of this extra time. A FOUR DAY WORKWEEK! Damn…this wouldn’t affect us THAT much, would it? We are a consumer driven economy, right? Well, give people more time to consume! Raise salaries to match! Freedom to work more? The American dream! Then again…the more free time we have, the more time we might spend with our kids…the more we might start to think…the more troublesome we might become to “the man”. Hell…the concept of dressing casually at work has already caused a major disruption in the corporate food chain. People are actually feeling COMFORTABLE at work, god forbid.

Bah…an essay written on freedom by an actor? Kind of a waste of space. Freedom to me means I got to play my Playstation with my buddy last night after walking about 4 miles in a wildlife reserve around noon and rollerblading on Newport Beach for a couple of hours around 4. Life is good…even when I’m broke? (See the balance?) Signing off…