Daddy on the Edge of Rediscovering Daddy

Daddy forgets a lot of things.

Birthdays, where I left tools, whether or not I closed the garage door before I left the house (and then I have to drive back and check - it's been closed...every time), but lately, I managed to forget something pretty frigging major -

I forgot who I was.

The reason behind this amnesia was the last house I worked on. It's been called The Pit, My Little Crack house, Casa del Fakakte - It was The House That Ate My Soul. What started out as "a little paint and cleanup" turned into a major re-build, and every day there was more and more found that needed to be rebuilt. As the job grew, it got hungrier...and angrier...at me. First it came for my optimism. I always try to see the glass as half full as opposed to half empty. The House took my glass and shattered it on it's crumbling rubble foundation. Then it came for my physical strength, my self esteem and my sanity. It filled my every day and invaded my dreams on a regular basis.

I became a machine - working 7 days a week, sometimes 12 hours a day, dealing with new, ridiculous, often ludicrous circumstances on an almost daily basis. Work was all there was. Work. Deadline. Code. The Domino Effect of lining up all the different trades in order so that they can all get their work done. Over the last three months, waking up at 3am to a brain that was already thinking at eight miles a minute was a nightly occurrence. Wake up at 3am, assess how fast my heart was beating, followed by focused breathing and prayer to slow it down, then toss, turn, drift in and out of semi-sleep, focus on breathing some more, and then give up and get up at about 5:30. This was my every day.

And it sucked. Boy oh boy, did it suck.

You know those times on Star Trek, where the shit has hit the fan so bad during battle that they divert all available power to the shields? The only thing they don't take power from is life support. That's how the job was - divert every part of yourself to the job, stopping only long enough to feed yourself, sleep and hose yourself off on occasion. Every day, bit by bit, things start to slide. The things that make you "You", fall by the wayside. Writing this blog, spending time with my family, volunteer work, performing on stage, my physical health - all of those things took a back seat. Now, you can do that for a couple of weeks, maybe even a couple of months without too much damage. But this was months, and months...and months - and that can fuck with who you are on a basic level.

It's basically done now - ironically, I'm now at the "paint and cleanup" stage - and not a moment too soon. This job has had a detrimental effect on me, and I need to heal - spiritually, mentally and physically. This is a part of that healing - writing this blog. "Daddy on the Edge" was one of the casualties of this job, and I am trying to breathe life back into it slowly. I want to thank all of you who have kept reading - especially those of you who I don't know personally. ;)

I also want to thank those of you who read my alter ego's work in the Nyack-Piermont Patch. If you are unfamiliar, this is the place where Daddy lets his parental, less acerbic, G-rated prose roam free. If you haven't already, you can check out my latest article here.

Another part of Daddy that had nearly been lost forever was the performing side. Regular readers of this blog will remember back in April, I devoted a week of this blog to "Haywire", an original web series created by Scott Klein. Klein took the "Best Suspense Feature" award in 2009 at the New York International Independent Film and Video Festival for his feature film, "Cry" and has brought that same sense of suspense to Haywire. Daddy managed to snag a regular role on the series, and it was one of the few things that kept me sane over the past year. Web series episodes are generally about ten minutes in length. You can watch nearly the entire first season of Haywire (previews included) in less than an hour and a half, and it's definitely worth watching. You can view the series on Koldcast TV by clicking here or, for those having technical trouble with Koldcast, you can view Haywire's YouTube channel here.

These are a few of my favorite things. These are a few of the things that make Daddy, "Daddy". Daddy wants to stick around here for a long, long time and that's where y'all can really help me out. It has been determined that I need a new line of work. If you like any or all of the links above, sharing them, "liking" them, tweeting, favoriting, commenting, hitting the "Google Plus One", forwarding them - doing anything that you can do to help spread the word and popularity of these projects might actually enable me to make some real money off these gigs and quit my day job. And that, my friends, would be a lifesaver.

Thanks for being a part of my world,

Daddy