Life, big picture life and everyday life, is composed almost entirely of revolutions. Some revolutions you fight, most you just complete, traveling along invisible rings that always seem to bring you right back around in the end; except there isn’t one, not to the rings themselves. We don’t see the curves, there are no markers, and rarely if ever does someone define the starting point for us. We just keep dancing our fucked up ghost dance of contracting circles, moving in towards the fire and back out again until the last ember turns to hash and we follow suit.

The good news is, once you accept your revolutions, I think the ride becomes a lot more fun.

Before thirty I’ve pretty much done the American landscape; the East Coast, the West Coast, and the Dirty South. I was born in Los Angeles, spending the bulk of my childhood in Bell Gardens. I lit out for New York City in my teens to become a professional wrestler. I drifted back across the Southwest working the independent circuit. After my pro-wrestling career ended I landed in Tennessee. If you’re going to wind up in the south I recommend Nashville. It’s about as metropolitan, or cosmopolitan, depending on your tastes, as it gets in this part of the country, with Memphis and Knoxville just close enough to experience every few weekends.

Experience is often the prime directive. And I have. I’ve whipped myself across this country like an Aboriginal throwing stick and now the arc is about to be completed. It’s time to return to the beginning. In a couple of weeks I’m going back to LA.

It’s a one-way trip.

You see, I’ve done just about as much as I can do here, creatively, personally, and professionally. The majority of the money I’ve seen in the last three years has been from screenwriting. It didn’t take me long after my first story was optioned for film to realize that even at its lowest level screenwriting beats the shit out of mid-list publishing. Calculating the income ratio of working screenwriters versus working literary authors doesn’t take sophisticated technology. You don’t need a fucking app for that. So I started paper chasing in two industries.

Like anything else, it has been a grind. I’ve done series work. I’ve dabbled in script doctoring. I’ve written half-a-dozen features in the Australian market that (thus far) have not seen cameras roll. Largely because of that fuck Hugo Weaving. Although I blame Hugo Weaving for pretty much everything that goes wrong in/with my writing career. And while we’re on the subject, damn Leigh Whannell for taking good Australian jobs away from hard-working American writers.

Through it all, waiting and grinding and hoping and grinding some more, in the back of my mind and quite often on the forefront I’ve been aware of one essential truth: Hollywood is still where the money is.

For years I didn’t want to be another asshole trying to make it as a writer in LA. Trust me, it’s far worse to be an asshole not making it as a writer in LA. You hear your friends, your siblings, when they’re young and idealistic say, “I’m going to go to New York and become a novelist.” Or, “I’m going to go to LA and sell my screenplay.” Then they graduate, they get real jobs, they start families, largely in the Midwest (I don’t know why). They lead lives that are remarkable in a Capraesque way. But when you consider how few souls actually commit to that first ideal, you realize there’s nobility in every aspiring screenwriter from Somewhere Else waiting tables on the Strip. There’s also immense desperation and sadness, but I won’t be waiting tables so we can agree to split the difference there.

I’ll be sharing my first LA digs with filmmaker Earl Newton. And just to be clear, we’ll have separate bedrooms. So we have one to sleep in when the hot monkey stink of our raw, beard-scraping love fills the other to an overwhelming degree. No, really, we’re just going to be housemates. Earl is a friend who has found himself at a similar place in life and in his career, so it only made sense for us to collectively establish a base of operations from which to strike at the retread heart of Hollywood.

I’m boiling everything down to the essentials right now, selling off my worldly goods and material possessions like a crack addict Siddhartha. I’m trying to get my mind clear, my body sharp, and my portfolio looking supremely fuckable as I travel west to do better work than I yet have and achieve something beyond what I ever thought I would. I’m not sure what either of that will yet entail, but I’ve got a few numbers, I’ve got a few ideas, some of them even writ down on pieces of paper.

I don’t know what’s going to happen, but it’s going to happen about a mile from where the sun sets, they make caramel corn from scratch at the Arclight, and every weekend some ordinary citizen has the chance to be FBI Agent Johnny Utah in Point Break Live!

If nothing else, the ride, it shall shake the teeth from my gums.

Welcome to the revolution.