I was just BS’ing on the internet (there’s a shock, right?) and came across a messageboard thread entitled “What are your broken dreams?” Being a maudlin, sentimental sort of douche, this is the kind of thread that speaks to me. I’ve always been sorta fascinated with the stories of people on the fringes of things. The guy 3 rows back who saw Lincoln get assassinated at Ford Theater. The guy who worked on one episode of Saturday Night Live, got half of a skit into the show, only to have Chevy Chase ad-lib all over it, and then get dismissed from the writer’s room the next day. The Cup-of-Coffee minor leaguer who finally got called up by Detroit to take a couple pokes at the ball in the 8th inning against Cleveland. It’s those stories that always tug at me, of people close enough to the spotlight to feel how hot it is, but not close enough to actually get any shine. Salieri, not Mozart. Zmuda, not Kaufman.

So I waded into the thread to read about a bunch of 20-something guys telling total strangers online about the dreams they had growing up, and which of those dreams are still within their grasp, and which of them are like eggshells around their feet, cracked and blowing away. Lotta people wanted to be an astronaut with the powers of Superman, of course. Lotta people wanted to sit on their lawns in an inflatable pool surrounded by their lottery winnings, sipping fruity drinks and getting sunburnt. One kid wanted to invent video games, and he stocks shelves at Wal-Mart. Another wanted to be an astronomer but the inability to wrap his head around anything beyond Algebra totally kneecapped that ambition.

Getting paid to make people laugh is pretty damned close to my dream.  Entertaining people is pretty much all I’ve been prepared to do since the first time I found out I could make people giggle in the middle of my 1st grade reading class. But doing it inbetween Metallica songs was not how I dreamed it would go down.

The NBA is my first broken dream. I worked at this one from age 8 until age 15. I got pretty good. Made all-star teams, got voted MVP once, scored 30 in a game more than a few times. My skill-set might have gotten me a scholarship had I been around 6-5. I had pretty good swingman game, decent enough handles and court vision for a 2 or a 3. People used to compare my game to young Charles Barkley. I wasn’t anywhere near that good, of course, but it was a decent comparison point so far as the style of game went. If I was around 6-5 or so.

I’m 5-6. and a half.

Mom drank coffee and smoked while pregnant with me. All my siblings are around 5-9 to 6-1. Except for my oldest sister, who mom smoked and drank coffee whilst carrying. She’s 5-2. I goof on mom for this, because a lot of people did that sort of thing back then. I mean, I could blame her for being short, but that’d be sorta dumb. I don’t think I’d have reached 6-5 if she’d drank nothing but V-8 and ate Special K for breakfast every day. It was a different time back then, and it’s not like she didn’t love me or anything. She just contributed enough genetic makeup to make sure I was built like R2-D2.

Sometime between 10th and 11th grade my assistant coach tried to get around school rules regarding how early you could start recruiting and practicing for the following season by holding “open gyms.” I brought one of my streetball friends to a practice. He abused my assistant coach in the post for most of the “open gym.” The assistant got really flustered, angry, and started flagrantly fouling my friend. My friend smashed his face with an elbow. A fight broke out. I was cut from the team the next year for not showing proper dedication to the goals of the team. Not having anything to do all winter, I laid on the couch and watched sitcoms with mom while eating corn dogs and frozen twinkies. Hence the earning of my nickname the following year.

I also used to think I could break into screenwriting. Entered a bunch of contests, tried to get some agents. Nothing. I used to think it was my location, that because I wasn’t centrally located in Los Angeles, I couldn’t get any spotlight on these blockbusters I was churning out on my pirated copy of Final Draft. But really, it’s that my scripts weren’t that good. Plots were clunky, dialog sounded realistic but there was way too much of it and everything read like a self-indulgent 20-somethings attempts at being deep, filtered through bad imitations of Kevin Smith and Quentin Tarantino’s filmographies. Which is what they were.

I registered all of them with the WGA. Pulled out what I thought of as the most solid all-around script about a month ago. Lifetime movie at BEST. Maybe not even that. I thought it was so important-feeling, so insightful and enlightening then, the raw voice screaming out, trying to teach the world the all-important lessons I had learned about life and love. It was just screaming, really. Nothing deep or important. Just “SOMEONE MAKE ME FAMOUS PLEASE I DREAM ABOUT MY NAME ON A CREDIT BLOCK.” That’s all it was. And that’s why it reads so facile and hollow now. I wasn’t in service to any of those stories. Those stories were in service to getting me a paycheck. I wasn’t a writer. I was a hack. And the worst kind of hack on top of that - the unpaid hack.

I’m murder at slam-dunk contests though. So long as the hoop is around 9 feet.  And I do help write a weekly radio drama series now. I did my first solo episode last weekend, about zombie apocalypse survivors stranded on ross island here in Portland. They break into a hospital to retrieve some antibiotics. It’s some real comic-book action type stuff, and I think it reads pretty well. Probably because I didn’t come up with the story, my friend Aaron did. But still, it reads like I’ve moved from Kevin Smith meets Quentin Tarantino to Joss Whedon meets James Cameron. Badly xeroxed and stepped on by a couple hundred people, but you know what I’m saying. It’s the Charles Barkley comparison of my writing “career,” broken dream that it is. It’s still not where I want it to be, but looking at how I did all those previous scripts wrong is helping point me towards making these little zombie chronicles work right.

I can’t even play basketball anymore - my hips essentially atrophied in my really fat period, and I’ve developed a strange little affliction where my knees try to pick up the slack my hips aren’t carrying, and it causes serious, intense pain in the back of my knees that render me almost immobile after about 15 minutes of a game. I’m probably in the best physical shape of my life now, and I can’t actually play the game anymore. I can ride a bike for hours at a time, I can do a bunch of pushups and situps, but 15 minutes of the game I spent so much time trying to perfect now makes me slump into a chair like an octogenarian and wince for an hour straight.

I’ve lost my court vision, too. The very last game I ever played was at Lents Park about a year ago. I played for 10 minutes. My team lost 15-6. I had maybe 2 assists. 6 turnovers. My passes were all late. My jumper is the only thing still there, and it’s a broken, tattered thing, too. I didn’t get enough lift on my last shot attempt, partly winded, partly in agony. The shot descended back towards the asphalt, a good 3 inches from the front of the rim. The catcalls from the got-nexters ushered me offstage. I left my old ball resting against the pole holding up the backboard, went to my car, and drove home to shower. The end.

The job I do have isn’t either one of those dreams. It changed, it shifted on me.  I actually did get to achieve my dream of entertaining people for a living. It just didn’t happen in the form and fashion I thought it would, and not on the scale I was dreaming of. But it DID happen. And how it happened is a pretty good story, too. I’m appreciative. Very appreciative. Don’t  mistake this as me singing the song of settling - I’m lucky to get this close to the dream and not have the sun melt the wax and send me plummeting back to earth. It’ll happen soon enough. I’m circling a sick sun. When Adam Carolla can’t hold a job for longer than 2 years, you know eventually I’m gonna have to wake up sooner or later. But I’m gonna smile with this sun on my face for as long as I can, so long as you’re still smiling, too.

But some days I wake up, like yesterday, not appreciative, but frustrated because the dream I just left behind on my unmade bed includes crossing someone up just beyond the 3-point arc, getting enough distance to one-hand a perfect alley-oop pass to the sort of beanpole kids I used to run with, who made all-state teams effortlessly, almost blasé in their mild appreciation of the physical gifts they’d been blessed with. They backdoor their defender, go up, and flush the pill like I had sent a butler to deliver it on a silver platter. I jog back to my defensive position with a smirk on my face. I’m 6-5 and nobody called me Fatboy and I’m working on my triple double and trying to find my mom in the stands. She toasts me with a V-8, lip of the glass parallel to the patch on her upper arm, sticking out just beneath the replica jersey with my name on the back.

It’s a nice place to visit every now and again, I guess. But it ain’t home.

Peter (Paul Rudd) is a Real Estate Agent who doesn’t have any guy friends. He loves “Chocolat” and pronounces it correctly, which is to say, like a poof. He’s not gay, he’s just soft and squishy and utterly unfamiliar in the ways of man, lost when it comes to stuff  like noncommittal grunts and fist bumps and why 5 spades beats trip queens. When coming home early to his fiancée Zooey (Rashida Jones,) he hears a veritable henhouse full of her friends clucking about how he’s a clingy nightmare waiting to happen, and decides he needs to go get himself some man-panions. So Rudd taps his little brother, a gay personal trainer played by Andy Samberg, who keeps accidentally channeling Mark Wahlberg with his performance. Or maybe not, considering the role.

I Love You Man is a movie that should have come out about a year ago, when the concept of something as insipid as “man-dating” still had some traction. That concept  takes a frequently funny buddy comedy and dresses it like a misguided tribute to a stillborn cultural meme, when it’s actually closer to a minor-key inversion of Wedding Crashers. Not only is it good enough to get Segel and Rudd the cover of Vanity Fair, it gives you a chance to ogle Rashida Jones for about 90 minutes.