harry potter was a wizard, so why couldn’t I be one. or at least write a story about a boy that was a wizard like harry.

for years i’ve considered myself a writer that has yet to put the pen to paper. whenever i had to write a paper in school, i felt like the spirit was moving through my hands as i put the words that formed in my mind down on the paper that i was to turn in. disappointed time and time again with the returned result of C’s as I guess my tricks of making the periods slightly larger than normal to push the document longer so I could meet the arbitrary requirement of length the teacher had set in place.

year after year has passed, and this ego about writing has grown, shrank, gone on holiday and had panic attacks that set both of us in motion with a flurry that once the dust settled, amounted to nothing yet again. I would walk away, telling myself I hadn’t failed because it wasn’t over yet, but the graveyard of half finished projects would tell a different story……….

….if ghosts were real….

……they totally aren’t.

we all agree that they aren’t so we can stop worrying that they will haunt us late at night as we try to fall asleep and instead lie awake wondering what could have been. Continually I am surprised when truth is stranger than fiction, and the results of my labor do not seem to warrant the rewards I have come to expect for my life through the culture and community around me.

I don’t know how to write. That last sentence kinda proves otherwise, but i more mean I am not very experienced with writing or putting ideas together in a way others can follow but I have always idolized entertainers. When I was a kid i was apart of choirs, and would sing for church or school and even some state-wide choir that you had to be nominated for. I often wonder if I had continued that path, would I have been something big? Even for 15 minutes, it could’ve been better than winning the lottery.

Have you heard about the lottery curse? It’s a pretty high percentage of people that win the lottery lose the wealth and in some cases get murdered. I feel like we all know that there’s friends and family that would instantly feel like you owe them some debt or reparations for the gifts they’ve given you, but in reality it’s much worse. I don’t think I would have a problem with dropping off the face of the planet for a couple years and just enjoying it, but I also know I’m totally gonna talk about it in public at some point because i’ve got the trait some would only describe as “stupid honest”.

There’s somethings I wanna write about, and there’s some philosophical conversations I just can’t really even put into words at the current point in time, and being stupid honest is one of them. I’m working on it, but overall I think it’s a good trait that if more of the world had it, we would be better.

But anyway, I sang until like 10th grade or something. I did piano lessons for part of that time too, but I believe I felt like i had too rigid a framework around “practice” that killed my enjoyment of it. I needed someone to be enjoying it as a hobby with me, finding music and listening, maybe even learning with me. I remember picking up a guitar repeatedly, my dads guitar, and sitting there hoping he’d see me and in that moment he would take some interest in putting me on the right path toward learning. Looking back, i just wanted the basics, and his method was to hand me the book and have me learn it. Looking back now, at 32 i have picked it up and learned it on my own. It has been very fun and part of that was having the desire to produce the entire emotion of the music myself. To be in a moment, having an out of body experience while your continue to change chords and sing the lyrics is the closest to a “religious” experience as I have had.

I got into theater around 6th grade, did plays and puppetry and eventually moved to a school around 10th grade which had a video production program. Once I learned to edit, (and coincidentally found recording videogame play)I found an art form where I could curate the emotion of others. To be exact, I just enjoyed a class that let me mess around on the computer, but once I found that I was fixing other peoples problems and being asked for (by name) to come help on projects it felt like the world had picked me for a task. It was in a moment where I had signed up for a film festival, the group that formed obviously was not enthused to be working together (we weren’t really a friend group, we found each other as a kind of “leftover solo entries”)and we struggled to figure out what to make. Eventually the teacher kind of gave us a direction (mystery, “where’d he go” type story) and we wrote the bones of a script. I became the defacto lead of the project, not that I wanted it or that I claimed it. Again, it was obvious this group was just going through the motions and it wasn’t going to be a great film. So i planned out a shoot day, we showed up. Did I say planned? Ok we showed up and I improved a shotlist. I didn’t know what I was doing. I remember at one point we took a break, and a couple of us went outside and had what I could only describe as a smoke break. Like one of those hard days, you are stressed and you are finally coming up for some air, and we walked outside of this guys house and stood there talking. We didn’t smoke, and didn’t have anything to do other than just stand on his porch talking but i know it was a stress release for both of us to just not think about the mess of the project.

So imagine finding a shaky “First Home” tape of a couple in their new house—sunlit rooms, laugh-filled moments, the kind of private home video you’d stumble on and instantly believe in their happiness. You watch a quick montage of their mornings together, coffee and kisses and lazy weekend drives, until they share a good-night kiss and the screen fades to black. The next morning, she wakes alone: his side of the bed is empty, his coffee still warm but untouched, and the house is eerily silent. Neighbors and even the police assure her he “does this sometimes,” but their reassurances feel off, like everyone’s deeper in on a secret. Panicked, she calls his brother, who meets her in a diner and coldly reminds her that her husband died years ago—that this is the episode she fought so hard to leave behind. Defeated, she checks herself into the psych ward, where a nurse dials her emergency contact to say she’s stable. The voice on the other end thanks her and hangs up—it’s her “dead” husband, boarding a plane with her best friend, disappearing into a new life they’ve engineered together.

Ok, I am gonna admit I had AI rewrite what I wrote to explain the plot of that. I mean, it was dumb and we were dumb and that’s the whole point of being that age and make stuff. The year before I had helped make a superhero film about a guy who’s superpower was he could pop popcorn with his mind. This year, the group that didn’t even want to be together, made a story about a marriage that started happy and in the end split with deception and a plot that honestly is really rough. I can see why we didn’t win. But oh man that moment, when I was sitting in an audience with my family and school mates with a big screen showing the films. We got to the like, i don’t know, eighth film of the evening and it was mine, and I could feel it was bad while watching it. Not that like the technical parts were glaringly bad, but just the actors were bad and the story was bad and too serious for the environment and we didn’t have any life experience to draw on to make any of that believable. But that moment, when the reveal of the husband being alive. Idk, cinematically it did have some style with color correction and a montage with music to reveal his deception with all the friends and neighbors, but I think the real icing on top was the moment that it showed him actually walking in an airplane hanger to a real airplane. That moment, the entire audience gasped. I honestly don’t really even know if it was the reveal that he was the guy on the other end of the phone, or the fact we had this real plane (like a 6 seater plane in a small hanger) and the production value of our film shot past every other film in the entirety of the competition that got the gasp.

But yea, the audience reaction became a drug I didn’t know I was chasing until 7 years later I’m standing backstage of an esport world championship and a team wins and the crowd erupts as the confetti cannons explode that i realized i was high again.

To press a button and hear an audience applaud, to play a song and hear an audience erupt, well…i’m the real man behind the curtain from Wizard of Oz.

i guess i am a wizard.