Civilians

March 25th, 2010Blog0 comments

The other day I was hanging out with a good friend of ours, shootin the shit about relationships. “Do you think that you could date a civilian?” she asked. By this she meant “someone that doesn’t work in the entertainment industry”.

That night as I lay snug and smug in my bed, I chuckled to myself over her choice of words. “Civilian… Ha ha ha…” This was the same nomenclature used on The Sopranos when stray bullets or stray kicks to the head happened to hit innocent bystanders: “He killed a civilian!” It sets a tone: There’s them, and then there’s us. As Tony Soprano would say, “We’re soldiers.” And it’s kind of cool to be a soldier — like you’re in on a secret, like you’re a band apart.

Then the next morning I woke up and had a change of heart. Maybe over the course of the evening I was visited by three ghosts and then forgot about them, but the idea of “us” and “civilians” really started to bug me.

Some old British dude once wrote something about holding a mirror up to nature — that the storyteller/actor/writer/day player’s objective is to communicate and reflect the truth as he/she sees it in the outside world. It occurs to me that we need to live in the world in order to accurately reflect it in our storytelling. That is, separating the world into us and them tends to be antithetical to that objective.

I think it’s part of human nature to want to group ourselves apart, to feel special. We’re still tribal animals. We want to feel like we made the right choices in life.

But I don’t know, man — it’s way too easy to lose touch. How do you stay connected with the rest of the world when A) Most of your friends are actors, B) You don’t spend time in an office, and C) You don’t really hang out in the real world anymore — plus you live in LA, which divorced itself from reality back in the 1920s.

It’s really easy to find yourself trapped in a bubble. And if that happens, you move further and further away from the world and all the fantastic truths that it contains. See M. Night, who I think is a great dude but seems to have drifted off on an ice floe into his own world.

Basically, I gotta keep myself connected. Take a cooking class or something. Meet more people, civilians or not. I think if my friend asked me again if I could ever date a civilian, my response would be an unequivocal “YES”. I’m a big fan of living in the real world and remaining a human being. It’s hard work for anybody, and if I’m going to put out stories that connect with people, I need to hang out with them and keep my ears open.

I feel pretty grounded though. I’ve never been a very cool guy, but ironically that now seems to be a part of my newfound coolness. But it also occurs to me that the truly cool never have to call attention to their coolness.

Also, one may think that they’re cool but they’re really just a dog wearing a sweater and sunglasses: