The Pitch

On March 12, 2020, I had an anxiety attack. 

How could anyone not have one when even the good news seems bad? Over the course of 72 hours, most of the United States practically shut down leaving some to wonder what there is to do. If you wandered the aisles of your local grocery store, you’d see barren shelves as the latest cart tried to bump around you. Meanwhile, the number of surgical masks used for health safety increased, making a once endearing location feel like a scene from District 9. I wasn’t sure if any surface was safe to touch, and the feeling that this could be your last trip to the grocery store only made matters worse.

But where could one escape if somewhere as essential as a grocery store lacked that comfort? The news quickly told me about other things that the COVID-19 (Coronavirus) had impacted. California Governor Gavin Newsom reported that destinations with crowds of more than 50 people were now suspended. That meant that everything I used for escapism was dwindling away. Local theater was forced to shut its doors. The NBA ceased operation following news that Utah Jazz player Rudy Gobert was diagnosed as positive. Even film felt tainted when the one-two punch of Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson being diagnosed as positive was followed up by the news that Disney was delaying the releases of movies like Mulan and The New Mutants. That was it. I had nowhere really to find escapism without an asterisk next to it. Everything began to shut down, and I guess I happened to be one of them.

It isn’t that I can’t handle the news of Coronavirus. As much as I am looking for that bend where suddenly everything begins looking good again, it’s the sensationalism that sometimes surrounds me. To hear people openly state that a bare shelf of toilet paper is shocking only opens up my anxiety more. I am thankful that I have managed my anxiety in a natural, healthy way in the past few years, but something about people commenting on every small detail like it’s a meteorite landing on Earth is just overwhelming. I can process one bad thing. I can process two bad things. It’s when people evade rational forms of discussing it that suddenly I feel like cloistering. To me, there’s no good in panicking in a crisis and yet the world around me was doing everything to make me snap.

Accurate

That is why I had a panic attack, sequestering myself in my room for several hours and questioning the fabric of my life. As an autistic man, it feels overstated to say that it looks like panic or me attacking anything. It’s more that my brain begins to reprogram itself as it searches for answers. I need an order. To me, Coronavirus and its many dissenters were thrusting a wrecking ball into that wall. I needed to get out before it got worse. I am aware that there is a need to prepare for a bad scenario, but sometimes it becomes too overwhelming to make it seem like more than a flamboyant shopping list.

This is where things begin to connect… 

So long as I had access to writing, my anxiety could be somewhat in control. Having this feeling that I had expelled my brain of thought became the subject of my post-panic attack regrouping. How do I reach that peace? 

Well, the obvious answer is to get out there and write. As the owner of three blogs (The Oscar Buzz, Willett Reads, and Optigrab) and two books on the way (including “Esoteric Shapes: Stories About Life’s Meaning & Other Nonsense” out April 1, 2020), I should’ve had that market cornered. So, why did it feel like I had no way of really writing about my life following this pandemic? The answer is simple. The Oscar Buzz is about awards season coverage and I wasn’t about to use Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite as a jumping-off point for conspiracy theories. Willett Reads is dedicated to book reviews…

And then there’s Optigrab…

At the point of you reading this, Optigrab shall be no more. It was the home of my operations for 11 years, servicing as the place where I began to write movie reviews before branching out into TV, music, and podcasts. For most of a decade, it was enough to get me by. It got me jobs for websites like Cinema Beach and Readwave. I even attended the Sundance Film Festival because of it. By the end, there was still some merit but it was often reserved to live theater reviews that were based on my personal availability. It wasn’t really sustainable anymore, and that’s why I began to ask the question President Bartlett posed over 20 years ago: 

“What’s next?”

The assessment proved a few things about how I saw myself as a fiction writer compared to my nonfiction. In my fiction, I could see myself full of personality, willing to play with genre tropes and witticisms to make narrative far more interesting. Oh, how I adored molding it into a shape that I could proudly call my own. I didn’t see that in Optigrab. Worse yet, I never could see it happening even if I mandated it the following day. I had created a website with a primitive goal, and it was time to open my mind up a bit. Even if I held carte blanche over every last word on that website, it never felt like it could evolve from where it ended up. That’s why it ended where it did.

That’s in large part because I also looked at my social media and realized that while I love film, TV, and music discussion, it was only a small part of my bigger identity. It wasn’t just that my language had a rigid style that was going more for academics. It was fine, but I decided to look at the writers that interested me more on a writing platform. I am talking about Roger Ebert, Nathan Rabin, Travis Woods, and Emily Van Der Werf. In some ways, their most profound takes came from someplace more personal, of experience in everyday life. That is where criticism of media became more interesting than simply quoting text and processing a yay or nay vote. I am far from a terrible writer, though I began to accept that I am not where I could be in a personal form of expression.

That is where this blog comes from. As a devoted fan of Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place, I understood the value of becoming vulnerable. Over the past few years, he has become a far more inspiring writer by explaining why he’s so attracted to “flops” while giving his earnest take of them. Even his discussion of personal and mental health helps to create a portrait that makes me feel like I understand who he is. The same could be said for Roger Ebert, who always sounded like he was nudging you after a movie at a theater to tell you his opinion. This is a feeling that I wish my nonfiction captured, but I personally know it hasn’t. I haven’t done anything nearly as insightful as Emily Van Der Werf discussing her own transition while commenting on the culture she consumes. I don’t know that my life is nearly as interesting as hers. Then again, I don’t know yet if that’s the case.

It’s because deep down I realized how many topics I’ve laid to waste because they didn’t fit the model for Optigrab. I saw the rise of podcasters like Marc Maron, and yet that was all that fit into my world, presented in digestible content that was at times unsubstantial. I hadn’t presented anything that gave deeper reasoning for why something mattered. All I could conjure up was that Maron's interview with Barrack Obama was pretty good. 

I also never got to discuss a lot of them because they would look odd next to a movie review for Birds of Prey. In an ideal world, I could discuss my love of French New Wave cinema, Olympic athletes, The Golden State Warriors, Jimmy Carter, classic literature, the latest Coca Cola flavor, the collected works of Stephen Sondheim, or just how I’m feeling today. I’m more than a subject that I want to write about. I have personal connections to these things that sometimes tie back years to special moments that I feel enhance my opinion more. 

Yes, I'll probably be writing about this in a few months

On Twitter, I felt more comfortable churning out two dozen words on a subject, and I feel like it’s made me look scattershot. Sometimes my ideas connected, but there were others where it felt like they existed because I never allowed them to form anywhere else. I was desperate to get ideas out, but I couldn’t tell you how they were supposed to last more than a few minutes on the internet. In some ways, it only fueled my frustration with feeling like my writing never properly reflected who I wanted to be. While my fiction had gained a personality, my nonfiction was impersonal.

That is why I started this website. I am challenging myself to become the writer that I know I can be because I’ve seen traces of it. While this won’t change anything about The Oscar Buzz or Willett Reads’ output, this will hopefully find a way to get closer to my goal of exploring how media impacts our lives. That’s a bit difficult when you’re not willing to acknowledge yourself as the variable in the experiment. I am going to do my best to be more open with you, expressing interests that will include everything that I see fit. This may mean that some days will just be me rambling on about how Katherine Waterston is an underrated actress for 1500-2000 words, but others will hopefully give you a better sense of who I am and, better yet, more why media matters. I don’t plan to have an “agenda” as it were, though I do hope to expand your mind by sharing interests while hopefully getting some from you as well.

More than anything, I want this to be more of an interactive website than Optigrab ended up being. I take full responsibility for this error. I am not someone who has an easy time talking to others unless prompted. Still, I hope to work better towards that in hopes that I not only become a better writer but so that I can understand who I am as a person. I have long found inspiration from Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place but had no idea how to make my own version of it. Certain things will be experimental, such as my planned Patreon, but I hope that it makes me more confident on my freelance journey.

For those who are worrying about the cliffhangers left over from Optigrab, just know that I plan to incorporate them naturally. In most cases, they are reviews that will appear naturally throughout this website’s run. Meanwhile, The Madonna Project will be altered a bit, still running on a time schedule, but now presented entirely in essay form. It may make it more difficult but hopefully will add much more substance than my early run did. 

As much as Coronavirus has been a negative to society, shutting down everything that man has so much as gazed upon, it has lead me to this bigger revelation. If I plan to celebrate media in my life, I might as well explore it in a manner that I find enjoyable. Will this be more successful than the previous venture? One can hope. I feel that I have evolved enough as a writer to take this risk. I plan to make this a positive place, where any negative criticism isn’t presented with malice. Starting now, I am going to try and do something that I haven’t done in a long time. I’m going to make this a daily exercise on a quest to improve my writing and show just how many great things are out there. I hope that you’ll be along for the journey, sometimes guiding me towards exciting ideas that should’ve been in my life much, much sooner.