So I’m sitting here in this quasi-Charlie Kaufman moment, in front of a blank page, staring at myself from across the room, fingers idly by the computer, trying in vain to come up with a cohesive thought to stretch across a few paragraphs. It’s an odd sensation, mentally projecting yourself across the room to watch yourself. It’s as out-of-body as finding yourself at a John Mayer concert and realizing, at age 26, you are by far the oldest one there.

I saw “Adaptation” a few weeks ago, thus the Kaufman reference. I am not going to write a review, insofar as a plot synopsis and whatnot, since even if I tired to, god knows I wouldn’t be able to complete my task at hand, much as the general arc of this entry is in and of itself consistently alluding me. Still, the movie lingered with me that night, and it has kept itself lodged in the back of my head ever since.

It seems to me it was an almost kharmic necessity to see this movie at the particular time I did. I wasn’t supposed to, after all. The original plans were to go into NYC and hang with my friend Alissa. Alissa, however, had other plans, so I hitched on with the Commander, who was only seeing the movie because the week before the flick had been sold out. We sat in the very front row, which would have been vomit-inducing if we had been seeing something like “The Two Towers” but was merely FRICKIN’ HUGE and distorted in that way if you’re ever worn those goggles which supposedly show the equivalent of a 19’’ TV in front of your eyes, but you just end up looking like the member of Devo that they kicked out of the group for looking too weird.

Back to the movie…a lot of people have given very back-handed compliments to Nic Cage, with a variation of “Well, now that they took the mandolin away from him, he didn’t suck…” but to me, he’ll always live on for his performance in the greatest “bad” movie of all time, “The Rock”. For about a year the Commander and I hardly went a day without going into some interaction from this movie, usually at the slightest (and I do mean slightest) provocation. I’d go into some here, but really, we cleared rooms with in then, and I need all the readership I can muster.

So this movie…bottom line, it hit me like a ton of bricks. Both this and “Being John Malkovich” appealed to me in exactly the same ways, a sort of off-kilter sensibility that an off-kilter (according to the latest polls) guy like myself can snicker at and feel home in only to completely pull the rug out from under me and hit me with what Jenny would refer to as “an emotional 2x4” (her reaction coming out of Sam Mendes’ “Cabaret” a few years back). “Malkovitch” for me personally was about flawed people looking for happiness in others because they were so miserably upset with themselves that they had virtually ruined any chance of personal happiness. “Adaptation” for me is even broader in scope and more personally relevant---how do we locate, identify, and nurture a sense of passion in our lives? (Passion, in this case, is in both the sensual and intellectual level). The movie is surrounded by people hampered by their lack of passion and their constant search for it. People stand to lose their homes, their vocation, even their lives, in the desperate search for it.

Man, this movie...This variant of “follow your bliss” is hardly earth-shattering, but it’s the way in which Kaufman both externalizes his id and ego that makes this particular journey so interesting. Screenwriting credit is given both to Charlie and his fictional twin Donald. “Fictional”, of course, is a fluid world for Kaufman, and in a sense, Donald can be persuasively argued to actually exist. The movie doesn’t simply state that the Susan Orleans character creates passion inside of Kaufman, he already has it, but in shutting out the Donald side (the free-spirit, the commercial savant, the personal who acts as opposes to thinks) he has in fact shut off access to this passion. Donald is motion, Charlie is inertia.

The idea that we ourselves have conflicting sides which stunt our inherent passion is to me both simple and illuminating. It gives me personal hope of unlocking such potential and passion within myself. For myself, I get more passion out of writing everyday than I have in years. Theatrical design and directing also tapped into this passion, but writing itself has become the locus these days for me. It gives me motion, it prevents my life from becoming inert, along with my friends and family. Who knows, maybe someday I'll make a few bucks doing it? The feedback I have gotten (except for the “eat dog crap and die” I got a few weeks ago) has only served to fuel that fire. It's like Donald says, "We are what we love, not what loves us." The latter can be important, but it's not THE most important.

Hopefully, it’s just the beginning.