Out of Focus

Four Years Gone: Stephen Mark Dobbs (June 5, 1943-October 25, 2016)

Four years ago today, in the wee hours of the morning, my dad died. Considering how little time I’ve spent in this tiny speck the Interwebs, the fact that I've actually mentioned his passing once is notable. It was nearly 17 months ago, on what would have been his 76th birthday, and before I clicked “Publish” on that post (just a couple entries back), I wrote several thousand other words that ultimately I decided did not fit that moment, for me, on his birthday, at that time. So, I saved them in the digital bowels of my computer.

And now, I’ve done it again: Thousands of more words about him, his life through my eyes, my life in relation to his, and of course, the peaks and valleys of our never-estranged but always complicated relationship.

None of those words exist in this post, but for some reason, this year more than any before—including when he died in 2016—commemorating my dad today, on the anniversary of his death, became imperative. For years now, if I missed a self-imposed deadline to post on this silent website, I would move on. My “Drafts” folder is enormous, and included therein are those thousands of words about Stephen Dobbs.

So on this fourth anniversary of his death, and with the full intent of publishing many (if not all) of those other still-not-ready-for-prime-time thoughts, I decided to memorialize him in the most straightforward way I could while still utilizing my own words.

When my family needed to submit an obituary to the Bay Area publications most central to his life—specifically the San Francisco Chronicle, Marin Independent Journal, and the J Weekly—I volunteered to give it a first pass. After some edits by my stepmother and one of my brothers, the final published version was not so different.

However, what I wrote initially, I wrote for myself and my dad almost more than for anyone else. I wrote it in a manner and containing elements that I believed he would have appreciated; little personal touches that likely possessed more meaning for me than others. My draft needed trimming for length, and therefore, many of those bits of color fell to the cutting room floor.

I’m not sure why I didn’t post my version here in 2016 when I wrote it. In fact, I never considered doing so until this morning when I realized that I would not finish the piece I was writing about him today.

One final note: My dad was a control freak, so of course, he had prepared his own obituary years earlier. It served as useful background for listing the various organizations with which he was involved. He also selected the photo he wanted to use, which offers an unfortunate, but accurate, example of his fashion sense and (I suppose) expresses the reality of his vanity since—as that tie illustrates—this is a photo from the last century. Nevertheless, it fits.

Therefore, with that preamble behind us and several minimal edits since I first wrote it two days after he died, I offer my Final Cut: The (mostly) unabridged version of the obituary of Stephen Mark Dobbs.

New Year, New Decade, New(ish) Focus: Beating Spider-Man to the Reboot Championship

courtesy Nina Matthews Photography

I’ve lost count, but math doesn’t lie.

Over the past four weeks, I’ve drafted this post at least a dozen times. It doesn’t feel like four weeks, but I began on New Year’s Day. It doesn’t feel like my fingers have crawled over this keyboard for 20 hours (or more), and I’m scared that it won’t read as if they have either.

Four weeks and more than 20 hours? That seems like a lot, right? I wish I could claim that I was meticulously crafting each sentence, utilizing my thesaurus to choose perfect words—mesmerizing you, kind reader, with my prose.

That would be an inaccurate claim.

These days, I care how people respond to what I write. During my younger years, I spent an inordinate amount of time not caring; just typing, barely editing beyond a spellcheck to get my rant into the world. (Of course, I always cared, but telling myself I didn’t was a wonderful cover for my insecurities.)

Now, I seem to have swung to the opposite pole. When I sit with an idea and find my flow, I try returning to that non-caring place. Whether I accomplish this goal or not—and regardless of where I started—part of my brain inevitably directs my fingers to stray ever so slightly, but enough to explore in detail something that for now should remain a simple signpost along the path to my ultimate destination.

Without fail, that tangent transforms from a single sentence into 10 paragraphs that require literary breadcrumbs to return to my unintentional fork in the road. Besides, this new thread can be its own thing. Meanwhile, if I've lost my own thread, where have I left you?

To those who know me beyond words on a screen, I realize your likely response to the above is, “Duh!” And yet, my difficulty curbing this practice continues to surprise me, which it shouldn't since my wife’s phone still describes me as “Superhero Tangent Man," 10 years after we met. (Avoiding tangents #1: A story related to our first date.)

WriMoBloPo 2019 Day 4 Day 1: So Many Drafts, So Few Posts

NaNoWriMo began four days ago.

I am not writing a novel, but last week, I planned to utilize NaNoWriMo as motivation to create my own, let's call it, NoBloWriMo. Or AarBloWriMo? Hmmm ... maybe WriMoBloPo? Maybe I need to keep working on this. I digress.

I'm not writing a novel. I'm writing a screenplay. For a film. Or two, because there's also this TV series. Or three? Because one of the scripts--originally a short film--might work better as a play.

Or one. I should stick to one. Because right now, I have none.

Or blog posts. Once easy, they have become impossible, even as every single day, something smacks me in the face, and that voice inside says, "Let's write about this!" They used to be easy, and not because I ever expected to turn them into anything other than random musings. Now, they've become impossible even

I never intended for this space to be an online journal. From that first post more than 15 years ago (Oy!), I simply wanted a place to express the random musings occupying too much space in my over-opinionated, infinitely-interested brain.

Somewhere along the way, as various work and life events (and Twitter; I actually do, in fact, blame those early days of Twitter!) got in the way, translating those thoughts into (coherent?) words on the screen with any regularity became too big of a challenge. Plus, I found a new, more private and introspective outlet.

My blog was not an online journal, and any possible need for it to become one evaporated when (after years of failed attempts) I not only started but also managed to maintain my offline journal. Credit due to Julia Cameron's The Artists Way, for her concept of "Morning Pages" led to my daily journaling practice of the last 10-plus years. The only habit I have sustained with greater perfection is avoiding even a single drag on a cigarette since the day I quit smoking nearly 25 years ago on Jan. 1, 1995.

(Second tangent: SHIT! Anyone out there nearing 50: Is it just me? Or does absolutely everything you encounter or contemplate first and foremost remind you of how old you are? Consider that rhetorical ...)

The first rule of "Morning Pages": Don't worry about doing them wrong! As Cameron writes, "There is no wrong way to do Morning Pages–they are not high art. They are not even 'writing.'" Still, I have never eliminated from my consciousness the idea that I must be doing them wrong. From discussions with several others, I'm not alone.

In Cameron's universe, this practice demolishes the barriers otherwise blocking one's creativity; it is the key to helping creative artists recover from what blocks them.

I have dozens of journals, filled with whatever word strings my OCD brain has spit into them. My routine has evolved over the years, and rather than "three pages of longhand, stream of consciousness writing, done first thing in the morning," I tend to use a timer, set to 30 minutes, which usually generates four-plus pages in a standard Moleskine notebook. However, no organization or planning, simply dumping whatever comes out onto the page ... well, that's what I do.

I wish "first thing in the morning" was possible. Once upon a time, during that other life of mine B.K. (before kids, natch), it was. Now, there are breakfasts to make, OIT treatments to prepare, kids to dress and take to school/daycare, and of course, none of that considers escaping my own waking-up sleep-haze, or those minimum requirements to start my engine (water, eye drops, coffee, bathroom, etc.).

Rarely does any of it progress smoothly, but I usually still manage to start them before 8 am, which could be "first thing" if a couple little people weren't ensuring that the day starts no later than 6. (Let's not even bring-up how fucked this past Fall-back weekend was!)

I show-up. I write ... or scribble ... or form stings of letters that reasonably resemble English. And yet, they don't break down my barriers, so ... am I doing them wrong?

My intent this NaNoWriMo is mostly just about a different "WriMo": I want to write more and not just say I plan to write more. On one hand, most recently, I've worked on incorporating the lessons of Seth Godin's The Dip, "quitting" the unnecessary things that distract and steal time from my main goals and (therefore) needs. But for some reason, maybe due to its utterly private and risk-lacking nature, I feel some compulsion to not quit this blog but rather to reinvigorate it; or at least, to post to it.

If you found your way here, and to the end of these roughly 900 words signifying ... something: Hi. Thanks. Hopefully, at the end of NoBloWriMo ("November Blogging Writing Month") AarBloWriMo (Aaron's Blog Writing Month--problematic acronym!) WriMoBloPo ("Write More Blog Posts"? Not great, but will do for now), I'll realize precisely what I'm want to say here, and maybe more importantly, I'll stop spending time on the seemingly endless drafts I've started, sometimes finished, but never published for the world to see.

Promises, promises.

(Wishing I could wish) Happy birthday Dad: An overdue memorial, first in a series?

Seventy-six years ago today, Stephen Mark Dobbs was born in San Francisco. I write “Stephen Mark Dobbs” because my dad was a fan of using full names. If he mailed something to me, he inevitably addressed the envelope to “Aaron Marc Dobbs.” (Let’s not discuss the weird middle name thing right now, OK?)

My dad turning 76 makes no sense to me. How could it? I still haven’t fully absorbed that ...

In under four months, I will be 48.

OR ... by the time my dad celebrated his 48th birthday, I was 20 and completing (in a manner of speaking) my third year at UCLA, while he and my stepmother had converted me from an only child into the eldest (by far!) of his four sons.

OR ... that my two grandmothers (born just six months apart in 1922) were 49 when I was born.

OR ... my grandfather was only 75 in 1994 when he lost his battle with leukemia. How could my dad be older than his father?

OR ... that I no longer have a living father.

My dad didn’t make it to 74, much less 76, because on Oct. 25, 2016, he lost his own health battle. His never surpassing nor even reaching my grandfather's age does nothing to lessen this confusion.

I often describe my 1996 move to New York as something that took a long time to happen very quickly, and 20 years later, almost to the day, that also depicted my dad’s decline. Today, over 2 1/2 years later, I still struggle with his death, even more than I did when my youngest brother called to say he had died. The iconic opening of “A Tale of Two Cities” described my 2016 perfectly, with the presidential election only landing at number three on my personal tragedy chart. Just four months before my dad died, my wife’s aunt Evelyn--simply the kindest, most selfless and generous person you could ever meet--had lost her battle with cancer and also passed away.

Fortunately, those two heartbreaking events bookended the arrival of my son Elijah (named for Evelyn).

I miss my dad terribly. Or, I miss having a dad terribly. I still vacillate between the two, wondering if they are one and the same or, in fact, quite different. I suppose both are accurate, but on any given day, one feels stronger than the other.

Watching Elijah transform from newborn to infant to toddler to the crazy, wonderful, curious, hysterical almost-three-year-old (consistently ignoring my pleas to stop jumping on the couch) makes me miss my dad even more. My five-year-old daughter Ruby provides as much wonderment and awe as Elijah, but I did not identify with my dad observing her at 2 1/2 as I do now watching this little boy.

When I was 2 1/2, my father was a few months shy of 31. It’s hard to imagine myself at 31 with a baby, so I see myself in Elijah, sometimes even more than picturing a shared experience with my father. And yet, I want to connect with him about those moments, when I was entering into actual personhood, and he couldn’t have known what he was doing, even when he thought he did.

I had a complicated relationship with my dad, which certainly doesn’t make me unique, but the confusion over missing him versus an idea of him certainly extends from this dynamic. Beginning with my teen years and for most of the following three decades, our relationship ebbed and flowed. Sometimes, I wouldn’t speak to him for a few months. I practiced an enormous amount of subconscious (and ultimately self-sabotaging) rebellion against him

And so my struggle most often translates to one of guilt: Do I have the right to miss my father? When I so frequently pushed against him for so long? Who am I to wallow in sadness and loss when I failed to foster a closer adult relationship. If anything, I did the opposite. Hell, 400+ miles to Los Angeles wasn’t far enough, so I moved to the east coast!

And yet, years of therapy have taught me that it’s not that simple. So ... I struggle. And whenever I get frustrated at Elijah, I feel like I’m being hazed for all the times I caused my parents such agita. And whenever I’m holding him trying to get him to fall asleep, I wonder what my dad would think during similar nights with me, as he stared at his perfect little boy, dreaming and hoping for a magnificent life in front of him. I doubt my dad would ever have thought to himself, “I hope I don’t fuck him up!” like I frequently do. Yet, not since at least my pre-teen years do I recall feeling a closer connection to him than I do in those moments, even though he’s no longer here. I shouldn’t be surprised that the inability to discuss it with him feels like such an enormous loss. And still ...

I wrote four other versions of this post before settling on this one, just starting over each time and pulling a little piece here and there from before. Those different drafts, each with its own focus ... maybe I’ll save for tomorrow, next week, next month ... or never. I don’t know. One day at a time and all that, right?

I miss my dad. I miss having a dad. I miss being a kid. I miss my 20s and my 30s and even, in some cases, the first half of my 40s. I feel like this life in 2019 can’t possibly be the same one I remember from San Francisco in the 1970s and ‘80s; or Los Angeles in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s; or moving to a pre-9/11 New York in 1996; or any number of highs and lows in the 23 years since.

I know my struggle with the remnants of our relationship is not my dad’s fault, per se. Our relationship was as it was, and I live with this ongoing seesawing confusion because of and in response to the environment of his own upbringing and development. I try hard to honor and celebrate the good memories, acknowledge the bad ones, and be grateful for all that I learned having Stephen Mark Dobbs as my father for the first 45 years of my life.

Writing Remains Hard: The All-in-One Sequel, Remake, and Reboot

Hello. Anyone there?

I’m back. Or, am I? Hard to know. I’d like to think so, even though I’m not sure what being back means; what I’m back to; what the results might be.

Hell, I started this post two weeks ago. I spent a lot of time away from it, thought I’d finished it, left it behind for a few more days. and here we are posting on some random Monday. (FWIW, 24 hours ago, that “Monday” read “Sunday.”)

I launched this incarnation of Out of Focus 15 years ago, but for over a decade, my little corner of the interwebs occasionally sputtered a bit, but mostly settled in to a state of inertia. I can’t say how many times I have attempted to return to this space. Many? No. Many many? Closer.

I often asked myself, Why bother? If I feel so compelled to write, should I not focus on other work? Producing words possessing the potential to earn income? Whether that means working on just one of my multiple unfinished screenplays, or pitching and writing freelance pieces like this or (just a couple weeks ago) this, would it not make more sense to spend my limited time, effort, and emotional energy on work that has at least the theoretical prospect of generating income? My greatest successes on the job front currently remain in the growing-ever-more-distant past, and writing begets writing! Right? (So writers tell me.)

I will never develop, achieve, nor drift along with that often-elusive flow if I just dip my fingers into the stream now and then.

But, let’s say I do choose to make a go of it and pursue more writing opportunities of any sort than I have so far. My clips? They’re old. This blog is so old, I missed its Bar Mitzvah. I don’t even know that it wants its learner’s permit.

The last continuous, albeit brief, period of my feeding this site was my 13 for ‘13: Thirteen posts during the summer of 2013. (Unintentional synchronicity.) I've produced more children (two) in the past 5 1/2 years than blog posts (one). Sure, the kids are a co-production, and their existence complicates my ability to find time to write, but of course, I can turn that around and say, "But Aaron, you can't find time to write; you must make time to write."

I’ll never earn anything from my writing if I have no recent writing to show. And even more important than the age of my work: Has it aged well?

Some? Maybe. I found a Seinfeld spec script that I wrote 25 years ago, and considering both its age and my then-age, I surprisingly didn’t hate it. In fact, I actually thought it was, dare I say ... good?

But the rest? I have great difficulty reading most of it. During my periods of greatest prolificacy, I edited far less. That was my “style.” (In many cases, such as mine, “style” is what bad writers use as an excuse for bad writing.)

So, I have to start somewhere. Might as well be here and get something for my ongoing $8.95 per month contribution to Endurance International Group’s revenue stream.

Actually, all this hemming and hawing about not writing seems silly considering that I have, in fact, written hundreds of thousands (probably even millions) of words over the past decade, but few were meant for public consumption. I have a number of posts meant for this space that died before publication. I never finished them, or they no longer felt timely, or while editing I decided they were crap. But even those attempts only represent a tiny minority of what I mean.

More than 10 years ago, I first attempted to work through “The Artists’s Way,” Julia Cameron’s 12-step program for those of us addicted to artistic procrastination and creative blockage. Over the past 3,356 days, I have written my version of “Morning pages” virtually every day. Some months, keeping up with this practice has proven too challenging. For example, five months encompassing the end of 2017 and early 2018 produced a dark age lacking any evidence of how vital this endeavor had become to my daily well-being. But that period aside, I estimate well-over 3,000 entries included within my 50-plus Moleskine notebooks.

As my 2 1/2-year-old son gets into everything, keeping him from scribbling in or ripping pages out of those notebooks has been challenging. So the other day, I pulled them off their easily accessible shelf, organized them by year, packed them into boxes, and took them to storage.

Should I have bothered? What do I do with them? Why have I kept them? I don’t know, but I can’t throw them away. At least not yet. Collectively, their existence sparks a lot of joy.

And I guess I feel the same way about this blog, which as I noted in my second post in Feb. 2004 took its name from my column for the The UCLA Daily Bruin. My time at the paper was both my first ongoing and consistent writing for public consumption as well as a major contributor to my never finishing my degree at UCLA. (That’s a long story for another time, however.)

My first published article elicited hate mail. The writer called my silly column “drivel,” and decried *The Daily Bruin* for giving such content a forum in its valuable pages. To be fair, the piece was, essentially, “drivel”: An unnecessary (and pretentious) attempt to announce my arrival as a critic and columnist to the UCLA community, presented in the guise of a dream featuring 1990’s most famous film critics welcoming me to their ranks and yelling “I’m right, you’re wrong!” at each other.

When my editor showed me the letter, I felt crushed. I hadn't even written my first review yet, and I've already received hate mail? The letter-writer was a stranger to me, and nobody else cared. If anything, everyone thought someone taking the time to write and mail (1990 here!) a letter about my column was a bit crazy. I still wrote reviews, participated in major press junkets, interviewed celebrities, attended the Spirit Awards and Oscars, and in 1992, the incoming Editor-in-Chief and Managing Editor drafted me as Editor of the A&E section. That single piece of hate mail had no lasting impact on my tenure there.

And yet, more than a quarter century later, not only do I vividly remember that crushing feeling, but here I am writing about it.

For me, that’s even more reason for my return to this secluded corner of the most public of spaces. So I’m back. For now. For today. Hopefully tomorrow? We’ll see. A few times each week, at least? That’s the minimal goal.

But no promises.

And I don’t really mind if nobody reads this. When I wrote that first column at UCLA, I wanted people to like it. I wanted people to like my writing. I wanted people to like me. But I wasn’t writing for me.

Now, I am.

The Return of the Birthday Post (My 6th Jack Benny Birthday)

Maybe the third time’s a charm. I mean for this post. I started it last night; restarted from scratch earlier this evening; and now as I get ready to close-out another birthday, I’ve started over once again. Why is it so hard? I can’t say.

The “birthday post” was long the one consistent and reliable mainstay of my little corner of the Interwebs, but then in 2014, even that didn’t happen. I posted nothing to this blog between Sept. 21, 2011 and Sept. 21, 2012, yet I managed to still take note of my birthday. I regained a bit of irregular momentum (Can I ™ that oxymoron? I love it!) in 2013, but all of 2014 passed by, and for the first time in this blog’s history, not a post – birthday or otherwise – exists to note that 2014 ever happened.

Failure.

My fidelity to the “birthday post” is odd, certainly to anyone who knows me well.

An Appreciation for Susan Smith

"Aaron," yelled my boss. This was not unusual. Her dark, wood-paneled, windowless office was about 20 feet down the hall from my little nook that looked out onto San Vicente Blvd.

"Yes, Susan?" I called back.

"Come here, please." Also, not unusual. But once I got there, pad in hand: "Get your dad on the phone for me."

"Excuse me?" fumbled out of my mouth.

"I want you to get your dad on the phone for me now," she answered.

"Uhm … why?" Granted, I was only 23 years old, and I had never held a job as someone's assistant before, but I was still pretty sure such a request was at least a little unorthodox.

"I want to tell him something. Just get him for me," she said before taking a sip from the warm Diet Coke that had likely been sitting next to the large bottle of Advil for several hours.

I turned and walked back to my desk, passing Susan's other assistant who asked, "What did she want?"

As I sat and dialed, I uttered in disbelief, "She wants to talk to my dad."

Unfortunately, my father answered the phone, I explained to him that my boss wanted to speak with him for reasons unknown, and then I let Susan know he was on the line.

"Mr. Dobbs?" (Susan was nothing if not mannered with strangers.)

"Yes. Call me Stephen," I heard my father say as I gripped the phone tightly, covering the mouthpiece while I listened.

"Well, Stephen," she said, "I'm Susan Smith, and you know, your son Aaron has worked for me for the past year, and I just want you to know that I think he's extraordinary. He's so smart, and I just know he's going to be very important in this industry one day."

Susan Smith passed away on Saturday. As anyone who worked for her can tell you, she was not always the easiest person to answer to, but as dozens of Tweets and comments on this Deadline story show, lots of people admire and love her.

I had a complicated relationship with her precisely because of such conflicting feelings. I learned a lot from her and other times she drove me nuts. She went through assistants rapidly. During my 26-plus months as her senior assistant, I had nine junior assistants come and go. Their tenures spanned from six months to six hours, figures that are neither hyperbole nor poetic license. (The first person to work in Susan's office with me, was Julie Plec, who left for and continued to go on to much bigger and better things, becoming a very successful television writer and showrunner.)

Susan believed in and supported me probably more than any other person in my career, and certainly more than any other boss. Her faith in me, even when unhappy with something I may have done (key word: "may") always seemed to remain unblemished and unconditional. She knew I never had the desire to be an agent, and she repeatedly wrote glowing recommendations for me as I searched for new jobs in production or development.

On the "Breaking Bad" finale - Walt didn't win: Don't forget Walter Jr.

(Obviously, spoilers present. 'Nuff said.)

The relationship between Walt and his son forms the primary foundation at the heart of "Breaking Bad." (Photo credit: Ursula Coyote/AMC)

I suppose I'm not surprised that many felt less satisfied with the "Felina" – excuse me, the finale – of Breaking Bad than I was. I've read tweets and posts that seemed even more enthusiastic; and others – including from huge fans of the series – who were obviously at least a bit disappointed. Many people have spent the past year or two proclaiming Breaking Bad as the greatest television show of all time due to its complexities and nuance. Yet now, their perceptions that the series wrapped itself up too neatly has led to dissatisfaction with its conclusion. Based on what I've read so far, most people imagine that since Walt's death seemed inevitable, there were only two possible resolutions: Walt would die redeemed, heroically; or Walt would get the comeuppance he deserved. And yet, that binary option seems to ignore that more complex and nuanced middle ground in which both may have occurred.

Linda Holmes, who writes NPR's "Monkey See" pop culture blog (a must read, in my book), expressed her own dissatisfaction with the episode stemming from her interpretation that ultimately Walt went out exactly as he wanted to, by his own design, allowing for his own megalomania. Even with his admission to Skyler that it was all for him – and not the family – and that "I liked it," decisions such as manipulating a method to pass along his money to his kids – thereby depriving them the choice of declining it --  was neither loving nor kindhearted.

Willa Paskin described on Slate why the finale was unsatisfying to her, or at the very least left her conflicted: "After everything, after five seasons in which the writers were clocking Walt’s every misdeed, at the very end, they turned out to be Team Walt. Despite everything he did, Walt was rewarded—not with life, too much had gone down for that—but with a death on his own terms. He died having provided for his family, without going to jail or giving up on his legend."

I really enjoy reading both Holmes and Paskin, along with the A.V. Club's Donna Bowman and the throngs of other great writers expounding on Breaking Bad, and yet unmentioned in everything I've read is the one element that formed the heart of the entire series, which also happens to be the one area where Walt irrefutably had no control and did not "win": His relationship with his son Flynn, a/k/a Walter Jr.

Trusting Douglas Adams on the Importance of 42: The 10th Annual birthday post on my fourth Jack Benny birthday

I did something different this year before sitting down to write this post: I read the previous nine. Since I began this blog in Feb. 2004, I can only claim one constant: Without fail, on Sept. 21^st of each year, I have written a post acknowledging, sometimes even celebrating my birthday. That's something I do much less frequently in the non-digital world, although this year, as I become 39 IV (or 42, that supposedly magical age that is the answer to "Life, The Universe and Everything" according to noted philosopher Douglas Adams), my wife is determined that we celebrate this day that marks my birth and recognizes my achievement in aging.

It's been quite a year, too, with some amazing highs, a few discouraging lows, a bit of misery but also a lot of hope. Since I wrote last year's birthday post – just shy of six weeks after getting married – we went on our real honeymoon: Three weeks (give-or-take) to Australia and New Zealand, a dream vacation that we desperately want to repeat if only because that is nowhere near the proper amount of time to visit one of those countries, much less both of them.

Then in April, after another lovely little vacation – this one to Hawaii to celebrate my father's pending 70^th birthday – I parted ways with my job at a previously mentioned, very important cultural institution memorializing the tragic events of just over 12 years ago (that's called anti-SEO language, FYI). This was an important occurrence of mutual necessity. As I mentioned last year at this time, I wasn't feeling very much like me anymore; I was pretty removed from everything I enjoyed doing, especially professionally.

This summer has been challenging: I'm still looking for more consistent work and trying to write a much more frequently. As I mentioned in what I guess was my latest "Hey, I'm back" post, writing has become more difficult for me than ever, but I continue to plow through, and I think I'm more satisfied with most of the results. At least so far.

As I journeyed through the majority of the past decade revealed by those first nine birthday posts, I was a little amazed at how well they represent each of the periods of my life from which they sprang, sometimes more subtly than others, but in ways that kind of astounded me. Just last year – in an epic entry that subconsciously must have been due to my not having added anything to this blog for the entire previous year – I wrote that "I never intended to regularly use this space as a public diary." That was a very true statement, and that intent hasn't really changed. But when I examine what those nine entries represent, my intent obviously doesn't hold as much sway as I would think.

The first birthday post, in 2004, was full of exuberance as I turned 33. Ah, the worries and anxieties that show themselves over the ensuing years as I got older; they all seem silly now, although only in that I had them then, since so many likely remain. But it is somewhat amazing how young 34, 35 and 36 seem when you're turning 42.

Dammit. I'm not carrying the Jack Benny mantle all that well when I keep forgetting the appropriate public age.

The oldest of them all: The history (and rivalry) between Showtime & HBO (thoughts spurred by a conversation with Showtime)

Each time I interview another cable network programming head, the conversation gets my brain abuzzin' on larger stories among the film and television landscape. As I planned for and spoke to David Nevins for the third interview in this series at Indiewire, I kept thinking about Showtime in relation to HBO, much more so than I did the reverse. Showtime regularly appears to be playing catch-up with its bigger, more powerful rival. But over the last few years, especially as the competition for (as Nevins calls it) "premium television" has expanded well beyond the premium cable networks, the perception of that gap has begun to feel smaller. 

Homeland's first season won the Best Drama Series Emmy last year, and if not for the rabid excitement over Breaking Bad dominating the television firmament, I would bet on it repeating. Ray Donovan, meanwhile, has been another huge hit for Showtime, generating viewership upwards of 5 million (across all showings and platforms) each week, which approaches Game of Thrones and True Blood territory.

 I started thinking about the evolution of these rival networks, both among the oldest channels in the cable universe. In fact, Home Box Office – launched in 1972 – became the first cable network with national distribution in 1975. But Showtime? ESPN, CNN and MTV: All three were established and appeared on cable boxes after Showtime, in 1979, 1980 and 1981 respectively. Cable systems around the country began carrying Showtime in 1978, less than two years after its 1976 launch. That national reach was only bested by Ted Turner who created his "superstation" WTBS (at the time a local Atlanta station called WTCG) in Dec. 1976 by beaming it via satellite to still evolving local cable providers.

At the time, the cable universe was small. I remember our first cable box around 1980 had a lever that slid horizontally with numbers going up to 13 (mimicking the VHF stations) and then switching to letters A through Z. We didn't have 39 channels to start, but I remember all the over-the-air stations moving to that 1-13 spectrum and cable-only networks being in the letters. Channel 44? You're now channel 12. (As my Brady Bunch station, that was pretty important.) Channel 36 from San Jose? Hello San Francisco; we could now see it on channel 6. (For what it's worth, I wouldn't put money on these lineup memories … other than KBHK-44 definitely became channel 12!)

Cable provided better reception and a guarantee of never having to worry about your antenna. Plus, some public access stations developed along with regional broadcasters. And then there was HBO and Showtime.