It's the "a story" that bugs me. To the people I went to school with, I was a happy kid, then a depressed teenager, then I disappeared never to be heard from again in the most amazingly weird car my town had ever seen. To the guys in my engineering classes, I was the angry dude who transferred in, taught them welding and then threw my life away by never joining them at Boeing. To the guys in the club, I'm the guy with the annoying girlfriend that skunked Switchblade Symphony and then succumbed to the 9-to-5. To the people I knew in consulting, I'm the former club engineer who couldn't take the pressure and ran off to join the circus. To the guys I know in location audio I'm the guy who bailed on TPS reports but can't quite hack it mixing live so I have to mix post. To the guys I know in post I'm that dude who is wasting too much time on writing a novel. To the guys I know from screenwriting I was a promising talent that eventually threw in the towel when he failed to get anything made after seven years.

We won't even discuss Reddit. Well, we'll say this - I used to get hate mail making fun of me for not being Unidan.

Again - you don't get to pick your perspective. It's really easy for me to see myself as a failure from seven different directions but the fact of the matter is I mixed Death Cab before they were Death Cab, Slash between GnR and Velvet Revolver and Christina Aguilera on a Wendt X5. I've been featured in Mix Magazine, The Economist, Wired and the Daily Beast. I optioned two screenplays, am represented for fiction by one of the best boutique agencies in the world, ride an Italian hyperexotic and learned to skateboard at 40. And I'm "daddy."

The whole line of thought is toxic - if I had to pick a narrative out of the mess above I'd be hosed. Everyone else will pick based on what they can see, not on what they know and if I choose to worry about that I'm choosing to fret over meaninglessness.

I get what lil is trying to say - "look for meaning in your life." There's a hell of a difference between "meaning" and "story."

Seen Julie & Julia? For Julia Child, it follows the heinously boring period between not working for the OSS in India, China, London and Istanbul and not becoming the country's foremost expert on cooking to two entire generations of women. It's literally the "huh, I'm bored, maybe I'll edit a book" chapter of her biography.

I'm a storyteller. I can make anyone's life interesting or boring, purposeful or meaningless. Turning this process into some sort of Zen exercise accomplishes nothing.

I finished the car and drove it 1800 miles. I arrived at 4am, having successfully navigated a vehicle I built from the frame rails up from home to my uncle's house and to college. I had 36 hours before I could head to the dorm... and literally nothing to do for the first time since 8th grade. So I slept until noon, took a shower and watched a Johnny Quest marathon until the sun set.

I still tell that story.