Even though my life in some ways could be summed up as a series of messes, I have few regrets, I think. That is, I spend a fair amount of time ruminating over spilled milk, but I tend not to get too committed to the idea that I shouldn't have done this or I shouldn't have done that, as then this or that other thing wouldn't have happened.
But one thing I do regret, in my sort of kind of way, was an opportunity that came up about five years ago that would have involved me sliding into producing. I think of it every once in a while, and I thought of it again today, reading this interesting profile about the head of Bravo by Susan Dominus.
Because my memory has the consistency of Swiss cheese, I can't remember the details much, but as I recall I was set up to meet with some director of programming at VH1. Like I said, this was several years ago, when VH1 played about as many music videos as MTV once did, and didn't really have much of an identity other than as being the ugly, less popular stepsister of MTV. As I recall, they wanted to reinvent the brand, and so someone there had come up with the idea of creating a kind of think tank of weird creative types, shoving us all together, and making us come up with ideas that would take the network to some sort of grand new heights. I thought it was a clever idea, a smart way of doing things, not something you encounter often in the world of TV production.
I met with the head, or VP, or whatever he was, and I met a woman who worked with him, who was very pretty, and very smart, and whom I liked very much. For reasons that I'm sure do nothing but testify to the black depths of my shallow soul, I'm better in meetings than I am in front of the computer. Something about shucking and jiving does it for me, I guess. How low I can go? In any case, I talked a lot of trash, as I am often wont to do in such types of situations, and I think at one point I informed him that he should hire me because he wouldn't find another woman who knew how to do this job, and I figured he was hard up to find a chick with balls to sink into his think tank, and I can't remember if he hired me then and there, but he hired me eventually.
Then, I went into the desert, and I got on a plane, and I had a revelation, and my life took another turn, and all kinds of other things happened, some of which were unspeakably awful and some of which were unspeakably wonderful, all of which changed me so radically that last night when I was watching a movie in which this woman said she had become a stranger to herself, I thought: That's about right.
Sometimes, I think about that job. If it would have led to something interesting, or if I would have been responsible for delivering "I Love New York" unto the masses. It's hard to say.
These days, there's something going on that I can't talk about, something that has caused me to consider things, things like U-turns and Ouroboros. Of course, choice is a fantasy. I'll go wherever the next wave throws me, hoping not to sink, or to swim, but to ride it.
