We All Die Screaming

Who would have thought that listening to a guy who was Silent Bob would change my life?

On November 7th, we packed up a car and drove to Halifax, Nova Scotia to see writer/director/personal idol of mine, Kevin Smith. Known for his sophomoric and self-deprecating sense of humor, Smith is the everyman who made it big in Hollywood after parlaying a $30,000 credit card debt into his first film, Clerks. He has gone on to write and direct a score of films, written comic books, published memoirs, started a podcast empire, and done just about everything that's worth doing in today's entertainment landscape.

One of his many talents is a flair for public speaking, and his Q&A events are usually sellout affairs where his fans can ask him anything they wish and he'll respond in frank (and often hilarious) fashion. It's always to be expected that there are a few great questions and the inevitable dumb ones, but I don't think that even Smith was prepared for what unfolded this past Monday night.

As I stood in line waiting to ask what I thought was a kick-ass question about Degrassi Junior High (one of Smith's obsessions), the first gentleman in line on the other side of the auditorium asked a seemingly innocent question about comic books. What followed were 60 minutes that I will never forget.

Smith talked about the success he's had in Hollywood despite being "nobody special" and a "real idiot". He talked about his adversarial relationship with critics and his initial feelings of being hurt when some of his projects were received with less than glowing praise (they were shit on). He explained how he started as a wide-eyed kid looking to make art when he first wrote and directed Clerks, but somewhere along the line he got involved in a co-dependent relationship with the critics who hated him and began to judge his own worth as an artist on what they thought of him.

He then deftly segued into talking about his father and how he was an upstanding man who wanted nothing more out of life than to get married and have kids. He was, by all accounts, a wonderful human being (who never fucked a kid - a measuring stick in today's society) who lived a good and decent life and wanted nothing more than to have a happy family.

Smith then told us how, on the night of his death, his father sat bolt upright in his hospital bed and started screaming that he was on fire and needed water before eventually falling back and dying before Smith's brother's eyes.

"If a man that good and decent dies screaming that he's being consumed by flames, what's in store for the rest of us?", Smith asked.

It was there that Smith got into the meat of his monologue.

"We all die screaming", Smith asserted. He questioned why, if that's the case, would we ever be afraid of putting ourselves out there and just doing what we want to do without fear of being judged? Why wouldn't we try every cool thing that we ever dreamed of instead of being held back by the words and judgments of others? Why do we care what other people think?

"Follow your whimsy", Smith implored. The words hit me like a sledgehammer.

As cliched as it sounds, I felt as though Smith had a direct line to me with every word that spilled from his mouth.

Several years ago, I was a relatively successful blogger who had a readership of several thousand people a week. Around the point where I became a father for the first time, I stopped writing almost entirely and I told myself that I just got to a point where I didn't feel like sharing my life with the world anymore. It was a good excuse, and one that I believed for a long time.

As I stood and listened to Smith speak, I realized that I had stopped writing for myself at some point and that the words I committed to the electronic page became more about me trying to make others happy instead of keeping my creative passions alive. I constantly worried about offending someone or too often using language that might fall on the salty side of things. Were my topics too risque? What if someone's kid reads this? What if it's boring? What if nobody but me finds it funny?

What if people just plain don't like it?

Several times over the last three years, I have tried to blog again with little to no success. The problem was that I always went in with the thought of, "What will people like to read? What do they want me to say? " dancing in the back of my head. I would write for a couple of weeks with some frequency and then give up because I didn't care about what I was producing. I was writing pablum prose that was easy to digest, but lacked any real flavor and certainly didn't represent who or what I was. I was scared that people weren't going to like what I put out there, so I just stopped putting out anything.

That's not going to happen again.

Mr. Smith, you have lit a fire under my ass the likes of which I haven't felt in a long time; if ever. Your urging to "go out and create something without worrying about its success" resonated with me to my core. I've had so many things I wanted to try in the past, but didn't because I was scared they would fail.

Now I just don't give a fuck.

The coming months will find me trying my hand at several different projects; podcasting, YouTubing, running a pop culture website, writing the half dozen children's books I know I have somewhere inside me and maybe even learning how to play the banjo, who knows?

Even I know all this can't be done at once, though, so like Bill Murray in What About Bob? I'm just gonna take baby steps and start with something I know: blogging.

I'm not going to lie; I really missed it.

I'm creating again, and I'm creating for me. If you'd like to follow along, you're more than welcome to do so; but be aware that while you follow me, I'm following something else.

I'm following my whimsy.