Rainbow's Edge - Part 1

After dad announced in no uncertain terms he couldn't cough up the large for NYU fall semester in 1974, I met with undergrad film chair Haig Manoogian and delivered the bad news like an Al Qaeda chieftain after 48 hours of Mossad interrogation.

Haig was visibly rattled as he shook his head, waving his cigarette about, "This is not good, Bruce. Not good at all."

He asked about financial aid and, like the naive dope I am, I told him my dad owned a company and our family probably didn't qualify. My foot still throbs from where the bullet hit -- fired straight from my lips.

Haig took another drag and looked me right in the corneas, "That's too bad, Bruce. We're gonna miss you this semester. What are your plans?"

"Get a job, I guess."

"Well, let me know if I can do anything for you. Don't be a stranger, okay?"

I thanked him for his support and told him I'd be, "Back in the spring, makin' pictures like Capra (his favorite)."

Haig smiled ear to ear like the Armenian elf he was, shook my hand as vigorously as a Saint Bernard wags its tail anticipating a blood-dripping slab of porterhouse, and I was the out the door.

Never to return.

Well, not exactly. But I'd never take another class at NYU. I'll get around to why later. I promise.

Thus began a period of hustling for money and foregoing my screenwriter fantasies for as long as I could stand it.

I hastily took a part-time dead end job at E.J. Korvettes in Paramus, NJ selling cameras, a position boldly advertised in jobs section of the Bergen Record. My boss, a disenfranchised and sardonic 30-something wiseacre whose name I will never recall, pushed me like a slaveship rowmaster to hawk an inferior 35mm snapshot camera hastily slapped together by some Japanese no-name sweatshop Nikon wannabee (the equivalent manufacturer today is some money worshipping Chinese back alley basement fly-by-night with a name like Gold Sky Camera) so I could make an aneurism inducing extra $0.65 per sale.

"That's your commish, above and beyond your hourly swag. The sh-t adds up, lemme tell ya," my boss implored, gold upper incisor momentarily blinding me in the bright overhead fluorescent glare.

I watched with utter nausea as he seduced sucker after sucker who wandered up to the counter to buy this piece of crap that, "It's like our special this week, I ain't lyin'. Better than a Kodak Instamatic. I swear on me mutter. Look at this craftsmanship. Can't beat that with a pogo stick." I did everything humanly possible not to hurl on the spot.

I collected my first paycheck, around $38 after taxes for the fifteen hours I groveled, and was gone like the Great Plains Buffalo, calling in sick for the rest of eternity. I should have learned my lesson. Sales was not my cup o' Joe.

My next humiliating gig was as a waiter at a pseudo Japanese hibachi restaurant, Ichiban, that I referred to as "itchy bum" to my friends. It was run by a whiter than Wonder Bread middle aged restauranteur named Ted, tall (compared to the midget help), with droopy war-worn eyelids, a long wrinkled sullen face that rarely cracked a smile, always sporting an open collar button down dry-cleaned cotton shirt, to whom owning a Japanese eatery was little distinguished from a Popeye's franchise. He was into making money and not overly obsessed with haute cuisine.

Ted played the role of bartender to keep an eagle eye on the hired asians who performed all his drudgery: Japanese sushi chefs who were little more than Key West buskers who juggled knives instead of multicolored rubber balls, sexy Korean, Japanese, and Chinese waitresses who knew how to smile coyly to run up big alcohol tabs (the more drunk you were, the less you cared about the lousy undercooked dog scraps masquerading for cuisine), and an occasional male waiter (moi) when he couldn't find any women to work the tables like geishas in a Kyoto tea house. The only other white person was some local high school senior who bussed tables at the snap of a snap-on nailed finger and who disappeared like a comet in a Nevada night sky, silently and in a wink, at closing bell.

Ted was of the opinion that, "Orientals all look the same. Black hair and slant eyes with funny accents. What's the big deal? Who gives a goddamn?"

Apparently no one because no asians ever ate here. At least during my "I spent a lifetime there one month" tenure. That should have been indicative enough of how excellent the Japanese food was, but I was clueless and, like I keep admitting, a dope.

Only loud, beer and mixed drink swilling middle class caucasians indistinguishable to me from Ted and his ilk ate at Ichiban. People who couldn't even pronounce the name. The oily businessman clientele got wasted every afternoon and pinched oriental asian butt while the women would blush, cover their mouths, and giggle. I did everything humanly possible not to hurl on the spot.

I did my time, got paroled, and walked a free young fool, still not quite disappointed in humanity, with a pep in my snappy step, whistling a Zep tune, playing air guitar, insouciant and non-plussed as can possibly be. Yet I was 18 years old, broke, desperate as a woodchuck in the Siberian tundra, living with ma and pa, possessing no job skills or prospects, existing on fumes and the kindness of high school cohorts and neighborhood rabble. I was as pathetic and downtrodden as an Indian leper.

The next turn of events was unthinkable and from out of the azure.

My father asked me to work for him. I started the next day as vice president of Toshihiko Sakow Associates, Inc.

That same day I started working feverishly on my first feature length screenplay, a sci-fi epic loosely based on Frank Herbert's inspiring masterwork, Dune, titled "STARCHILD". This was ambitious and outright audacious and would teach me some serious lessons right out of the box.

Thank the heavens for nepotism. How else would the kids of the captains of industry and sordid trust fund brats without an ivy sheepskin possibly eke out a spoiled, privileged existence (like I was one of them -- NOT)? I was about to find out in a full-on, totally gnarly way.

The Phoenix and the Vortex - Part 2

On the mean streets of Flushing, Queens I had become the easy scapegoat prey of immigrant junior Aryans, struttin' home boyz, and San Juan-ites who were anxious to deflect the non-stop assault on their peoples and re-focus it on the skinny, big-eared, funny looking, crew cut Jap kid who skulked Parsons Boulevard like he "f-ckin' owned the motherf-cker!" More like I was perpetually lost, the criss-cross of streets, traffic lights, and cookie cutter apartment buildings all coagulating into a grand gestalt of confusion and endless wandering.

I would cross a concrete playground of swings and monkey bars on route to the grocery store for a carton of milk and, like the ghost shadows of Kowloon, suddenly be surrounded by a circling pack of sneering, tongue-wagging dingo pups, all chanting racist obscenities at me in 360 degree LucasFilm Surround-Sound, words I did not understand, like Tojo and slant and ones I knew all too well: dirty Jap. Then, like a swarm of buzzing locusts, they would descend upon me, pummeling their clenched fists into my gut, kicking, and grabbing and ripping my clothes as I swooned to the asphalt screaming, "Stop! Stop it! What'd I do? STOP!" As fast as they mysteriously materialized, these pre-pubescent cub scout KKK hooligans would vanish down shadowy alleyways and disperse to the wind like dandelion pollen.

I would crawl back to my building, up the elevator to my parents' threadbare two bedroom abode and collapse into my mother's open arms blathering like some compromised Pollyana, wetting the sofa and her skirt, her tears staining my brown corduroy pants as she stroked my hair and hugged me. When my dad came home he would order me to fight back, and I would gush like a Galveston jackrup rig puncturing the motherlode.

So disappointed in his son's distinct lack of Bushido warrior instincts, and fearing that his boys weren't quite masculine enough for his liking, some years later Dad enrolled both my brother and I in a judo class at the New York Buddhist Church on the upper westside of Manhattan, a Japanese-American Jodo Shinshu sect enclave and community center. Kevin and I wore pathetic white belts and uniforms as we were intoned with military extortations by the judo sensei to "Flip! Fall! Roll! Counter! Stand up!"

It must've been obvious to all casual observers that Kevin and I had far much less than our hearts invested in this endeavor, for we dreaded going Saturday mornings, preferring to watch Hanna Barbera cartoons to being treated like Marine Corp bootcamp maggots by a short oriental drill instructor with throbbing veins on his nearly-absent neck. As a last ditch desperate effort to preserve these two paying students and not lose face, sensei promoted us to yellow belts after four tortuous sessions. I could care less if he plucked gold bullion coins from his arse. This was not for me.

By 1965 my father was growing war weary of his 4 year commute into NYC each day, marching like some ancient Roman peasant through subterranean catacombs in the belly of the beast with their abrasive urine odor and passed-out derelicts scattered to and fro. He was hustling for work like a junk-addicted hooker scours johns with a spare Jackson on Manhattan's far westside, and his rent and overhead was devouring his profits faster than he could say, "antidisestablishmentarianism."

So my father did what every other smallville Royal Oakie in the Big City does when he's married, has two brats to fertilize on a daily basis, and a yearning for fauna, flora, grass (non-smoking kind), and an escape from bus exhaust, surly deli weiner-meisters, and Sihk taxi honkers: move his ass to the burbs pronto. Which is exactly what he did in 1965. He moved all our sh-t just across the George Washington Bridge to the NYC commuter town of Fort Lee, New Jersey, where silent era cinema gods like Mary Pickford, Mack Sennett, Tommy Edison, and D.W. Griffith ("D.W." to his friends) shot quickie 35mm one-reelers for celluloid-ravenous and adoring legions worldwide at the turn of the 20th century. In an unusual move, the old man rented two apartments in the newly erected, monolithic steel and concrete Horizon House (sounds eeriliy like a rehab center to me), Building Number Three, one to live in, the other for his burgeoning design office.

The daily beatings ceased. I would continue my elementary indocrination sans blood-thirsty gang rivalries and territorial gambits. The mini-me Adolfs, Jesuses, and Jermaines would be stunned by the absence of their favorite asian whipping boy and once again have to rip each other a new one, just like old times. I would enjoy some suburban respite, free to doodle Marvel-style to my thumper's content, unafraid to venture alone to the 7-11 for milk, candy, and comic books (the bonafide Dickensian serials of my era), and act for once like a normal kid doing mostly normal things normally. I was safe in suburb heaven once again. Until the next tsunami of sh-t hit the fan, natch.

The Phoenix and the Vortex - Part 1

The week before I was to register for my junior fall term at NYU Film my father, Toshihiko, sat me down and told me the bad news: he was having a bad year and couldn't afford to pay my tuition. This wasn't entirely a surprise and wasn't the complete mind-bending soul-searching catastrophe that would push me into a massive, coagulating funk and escalating ever downward spiral. It was more like: hey, I can take some time off to sew some cowboy seeds, bum around like Kerouac and Kesey, earn some cold hard large, take some girls on some non-Dutch dates, pray I get lucky, and finally focus on screenwriting.

My father had been a minority small business owner since he moved our family from Detroit to Queens and a year later took over a small Manhattan industrial design firm whose owner, fallen on hard times with waning health who wanted out of all the pressures and hassle of running a business rat race, literally handed it over to him, hook, line, and ball and chain in 1961. He took over the lease and kept all the furniture and equipment and it was like: adios! Hasta la vista, maricone. It was the start of an entrepreneurial run that would keep my father struggling, nail-biting, and sleep-deprived for the next 34 years.

As anyone whose family is engaged in a small business enterprise would certainly and instantly suss up to -- even scream aloud if given the correct amount of water, air, and sunlight --surviving is no small Jobian task; in fact, it is a 24/7/365 test of mettle, persistence against aneurism-inducing odds, ingenuity, fast-talking snake-oil salesmanship, and an absolute disregard for normalcy, sanity, and 9 to 5 safety in a "regular job" with benefits and a clear exit strategy (retirement, old age, disease, taxes, and death).

When I imagine my father as a 20-something, working as a house boy in Detroit for two men in an "open relationship" and ridiculed for being a catamite, so he could save every penny to buy art supplies: brushes, pencils, paints, and art board. As a Japanese-American just released from an Arizona World War II desert internment camp and relocated 1,500 miles from his father's missionary career at a Buddhist Church in California, he was absolutely clueless about what these vicious taunts meant and, once cognizant, turned redder than a radish dipped in pig blood. He was a neurotic homophobic ever since.

Dad attended Cass Tech in Detroit, a high school that embraced the visual and performing arts. Amongst his classmates was Edna Galoolie, a starving and stunning theater ingenue who would later change her name to Ellen Burstyn and win an Oscar for her portrayal of a working class single-mom waitress in Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, directed by Marty Scorcese (a bizarre twist of fate and lost opportunity that haunts me like a wraithe to this day). He kept in touch with her over the years, telling me how loose she was an ambitious working-her-way-up actress.

In high school he was left back a couple years because his English was less than Shakespearean, but I understand he was very popular and fancied himself a crooner in the style of Sinatra and Crosby, often singing ba-ba-ba-boo drivel at high school sock hops and soda jerk joints with jukeboxes. I have already noted he was a be-bop Bird and Miles and Ella junkie, saving up pennies to nab the latest vinyl from those hep cats in downtown Motown, playing them till the grooves filled with dust and static and those jitterbug scat lines and mellifluous sax riffs burned into his brain stem.

He was driven as an artist enamored with American cars and sketched and painted them feverishly in dusk-till-dawn marathons, with a youthful joie de vivre and spark that must have shone bright as the twin suns of some Heinleinian solar system quintillions of light years yonder. I dare say he must have been talented because, right after graduating Cass Tech, he landed a job at Chrysler Automotive in their fabled styling department. My father got the job of his teen wet dreams and hobnobbed with the Caucasian auto design royalty of America. By golly, he was made.

I'm not sure why, but my Dad must have tired of toiling his young life away in the ghetto of big three automotive haute couture for minimal remuneration and even less creative satisfaction. Maybe the big wheels weren't ready to let some greasy, slant-eyed Jap kid from a country we just atom bombed to submission get the one-up and raise his people's creative profile and aspirations. As I understand it, he soon took another job at an industrial design firm in Detroit, Sundberg-Ferar, and must have grown tired there too of white authoritarianism and humdrum dead-end assignments designing furniture knobs and utilitarian kitchen appliances.

In a heartbeat, Dad hopped a plane and traveled to New York City with a job offer to work for a toy manufacturer, Deluxe Reading Company, on a humongous 24" plastic and vinyl doll that was the rage of its day, Suzy Smart. He stayed in Queens with his Philippino Chrysler-alumni best bud Rey Isip's family while mom packed and rented our tiny home in suburban Royal Oak, Michigan. I took my first propeller plane ride from Detroit to New York at age 5 and distinctly recall seeing an Oz-like cityscape of tall, sparkling, majestic skyscrapers on a crisp autumn day from a bird's eye view 2,000 feet up. I had no idea my life was to be forever transmogrified from a tree-lined small town hamlet to a brick and asphalt purgatory of hunters and the hunted.

With ambition big as a baleen whale frolicking in the arctic circle, after a year he said, "Sayonara, ku-ichi!" to the toy biz and joined an industrial design company on West 37th Street but, after arriving, realized he had stepped into a fecal quagmire of partners (called "associates") bickering over money, clients, bills, credit, cash flow -- all the mundane business matters that need attending to that people who wanted to be artists contemptuously avoided like oozing punjab lepers on their front stoop. The owner asked Dad to simply take over the reigns as he'd decided to ditch the merry-go-round and take safe harbor as a salary man in another firm.

Pop must either have had some incredibly mentalist foresight and sensed limitless opportunity, or otherwise he was more doomed than a mentally challenged quadrapalegic in a relay race during the special olympics. My mother would swear to the latter (and does to this day, her mantra being, "Your father had no business being in business."). I think he was young, naive, filled with ambition, with a gambler's penchant for quick fortune and blue sky optimism, for he seized the moment and took over the company, changing its name to the improbable and impossible to pronounce Toshihiko Sakow Associates, Inc.

I can't say the acorn fell far from the big-ass oak tree. Like flies drawn to the flame and feces, I would drop deep into the bottomless tar pit of over-ambition many a time in the years to come. It's like alcoholism or dwarfism or sickle cell anemia: it's all in the chromosomes, dude (and Dan would turn to me suddenly with a straight poker face and proclaim with one twisted mouth corner in his best Newark boyz-in-the-hood parlance, "How you know you got chrome-zomes, boy?" Chunks would just blow out my nostrils and I would get the full-on acid reflux cackle till-my-ribs-almost-burst laugh spasms every time).

My old man hustled his ass off over the next decade and made a go of it. He traveled all the time, flying to conventions in Chicago and other far off and mythical (to me) cities like Boston, Vegas, San Fran, and Dallas, wining and dining potential clients at the better HoJo's and Steak and Brews, kissing babies (some well over 20), and squeezing out odd-job product design assignments for companies like Mattel (Barbie catamarans!), Panasonic (easier for white ghost gaijin to pronounce than Matsushita Electronics), Royal Typewriter (relics from the age of coelacanthes and trilobytes -- not to be confused with kilobytes), plastic hamster tube cages, and consumer electronics ad-nauseum (radios, cassette recorders, LED clocks, stereo components, you-name-it-he-done-'em).

I know. You're shaking and scratching your head (perhaps even noodling your gonads), wondering aloud if I have lost my mother-lovin' rose-colored marbles, and muttering what-the-f--k is the point of this incessant, non-stop, flow-of-conscious bullsh-t off-topic rambling?

Be kind and nice to me (it's so damn mentally exhausting finding just the right verbiage) and hear me out. Pretty please with maraschino cherries?

My father is my personal hero, the nemesis of unspeakable (and hard to pronounce) evil in the free world, a cathedral of light and hymns in the scorched ravages of Chernobyl, the guru who taught me so many life lessons and priceless blood-stained and hard-fought truths and self-realizations. I will never, ever, ever be able to repay his mountainous, boundless kindness and unconditional love. Although I tried my damndest before he passed in 2000. Guess I didn't try hard enough.

He was a 5'3" (same Napoleonic size as me) artist and entrepreneur, with the gift of gab who made friends as easily as George W pissed-off liberals and middle eastern theocracies, who people felt instantly drawn to for his easy, good natured self-deprecating humor, twinkling brown eyes, modesty, and utterly arresting used car sales skills. He was smoother than a newborn's butt cheeks, and could be hilarious and kidding around one moment and serious as nails the next. The eldest son of a Jodo-Shinshu Buddhist Japanese missionary who was left behind In his hometown of Fukui because his parents thought they would return home in less than 5 years, but got trapped in America by WWII and never left. He was talented. Driven. He fought each day like Muhammed Ali against George Foreman, Moses against Pharoah, and General Patton against Rommel in the dusty Sahara, until he utterly and completely gave up in 1996 and slowly broke my heart.

I loved and admired my father beyond all words, as much as any child could love their parent for giving them life then teaching them how to live it. His presence beats in my heart every living moment of my life and I am so sad he left me alone to battle on.

Raconteurs, Chain-Smokers, and Dramaturgy at NYU - Part 2

The spring semester of my second year at NYU, I signed on for the Advanced Screenwriting Seminar with screenwriter Robert Alan Aurthur. I was somehow admitted even though this class was meant for seniors. Once again film chair Haig Manoogian just waved me through as though I had a Speed Pass at Six Flags. Ever since I made the 5 minute color sound short MORNING, I was suddenly a "chosen one", a member of the inner circle who had the backing of the powers that be. This had happened to Scorcese, Amy Heckerling, and Marty Brest when they made their career-breaking shorts while undergrads. It was, pinch-pinch, happening to me and undeniably felt good.

There was nothing typical about this class. It had only a handful of students (around 6-8, I think), including an NYU film production teacher, Barry Sherman, shocking unto itself. When I saw Barry I knew this would be a worthwhile class. The other students were serious about screenwriting, as serious as I'd become, sort of a late-to-the-game born-again speaker of tongues whose new parlance was FADE IN.

The classroom was more like a closet, with hardly enough room for a round table and chairs. Not your typical Economics 101 auditorium, complete with podium and stadium seats for slumbering students with cassette tape recorders (I fell asleep in every economics class while taping it to listen to and jot down notes later).
Robert Alan Aurthur's claim to fame was writing Grand Prix with Steve McQueen and directed by John Frankenheimer. He was one of the pioneer television writers who worked on STUDIO ONE in 1948 and the Philco Television Playhouse in the 50's. While he taught this class he co-wrote and co-produced his last movie with director Bob Fosse, ALL THAT JAZZ, starring Roy Scheider. He died a few years later, but I'll always remember Bob Aurthur.

ALL THAT JAZZ was a great movie, filled with visual and visceral spectacle, panache, bravura, and very much dedicated to the Broadway theater where Fosse is a legend. Scheider was Fosse's doppelganger, broadly playing a famous broadway musical director caught up in a whirlwind, chaotic production that he pours his heart, soul, and every waking minute into, played out against the backdrop of his personal life and the trials and tribulations of a life in show biz. Despite the desperation and the breathless on-the-edge-of-a-razor portrayal of this lifestyle, there was a sense of the all-or-nothing, this-show-will-be-your-last (and was, in Aurthur's case) attitude involved in every artistic creation. If you haven't seen it, flawed as it may be, I urge you to catch it.

Fosse brought to the screen an amazing multi-Oscar winning musical starring Lisa Minelli, CABARET, a stunning, groundbreaking translation of the hit Broadway production set in Hitler's Germany in the 1940's. It captured the seedy underbelly of a society decaying into fascism set against the bright colored lights and leave-your-troubles-behind escapism of entertainment.

Kind of sounds like the George W years, huh?

As a teacher Bob Aurthur was no-nonsense, I don't give a flying f--k about your feelings, seat-of-his-pants, acerbic, jaded, vitriolic Hollywood-despising victim of countless ruthless, nasty, egomaniacal, stab-you-in-the-back Hollywood producers, the ones who smile in your face as they twist the flat blade in your gut while smoking a Havana.

Bob was grizzled, war-worn, with deep wrinkles on his face, haunched posture, sagging droopy fat deposits beneath his weary middle-aged eyes, horribly out of shape and about 50 pounds overweight, with tousled, salted brown hair and fingers and lips stained yellow with nicotine. He coughed a dry, hacking cackle often during class. This did not bode well for long term wellness.

During each 2 hour marathon that commenced with Nazi train schedule precision at 7pm, Bob chained-smoked filterless Camels during class, and I sat transfixed and disgusted as a huge empty gray metal ashtray in the center of the table was filled to the brim with stinking ashes, sputum, and butts. Even worse, all my hapless, nicotine-addicted classmates took this as their cue and permission to light up and help fill that goddamn bowl. It was enough to make any semi-normal person hurl their half-digested chow mein and Dr. Pepper.

From day one, Bob lit up a Camel and declared non-chalantly that he was going to conduct this class as though he were a movie producer. He wasn't interested in telling us what was good about our scripts, he definitely wanted to let you and everyone in the room (perhaps all mankind) know what sucked, what mistakes you made, why your piece of sh-t script would never be produced, and why you should think long and hard about your assured non-career as a screenwriter and very seriously consider accounting, working the fryer, or becoming a sous chef at HoJo's. Plus, he wasn't going to be the only one blowing acidic wind. He wanted every last person to chime in with a deafening chorus of ego-crushing, emasculating, seemingly non-stop castigation and humiliation.

Not fun.

His class was a self-declared smoke-filled war zone of vicious attacks, like wolves circling wounded, bleeding stags beneath the dark forest canopy, snipping and growling, snapping for slimy pieces of rotting, fetid flesh.

One student named Jonathan (good thing I can't remember his last name), was reduced to a sniveling, bawling, tear-stained bundle of shredded nerve endings by the end of his 30 minute "feedback" session. His voice quavered, hands trembling like some pathetic Parkinson's patient. He became apoplectic and reduced to stuttering Turretts after that class, like some shell shocked Vietnam hellhole prison camp vet who sits and stares at the shadows on the walls, mumbling incoherently.

I sat during these sessions in utter and absolute shock, speechless, gripped with fear at what I would endure as I watched student after student take hits like the nose tackle guard of the New York Giants during a blitz. I hardly participated in these verbal lashings while others relished the opportunity to publicly castrate and verbally annihilate a fellow student, only to be attacked even more viciously by their previous victim in another session.

This was madness. It was beyond brutal. This was a sadistic bloodletting. I was witnessing a breakdown of society into cannibalism and anarchy right before my bloodshot eyes. Was Hollywood truly this ruthless and insane? Or was Bob Aurthur exorcizing his own demons and inner torment by orchestrating this neo-nazi butchery with clueless students? I couldn't tell and, to tell you the truth, I was scared crapless.

During the semester I worked on an autobiographical comedy about growing up absurd in New Jersey on COPLEY AVENUE, which became the script's title. I sweated every line of dialogue, trying to capture the parlance and rhythm of my friends' argot who populated this sophomoric teen stagger down memory lane. I was so nervous about being put through the meat grinder of Bob's ascerbicism and my fellow classmates' venting, that I didn't hand it in until the very end of the semester.

I was flabbergasted beyond words when Bob said, "Bruce's script has the best dialogue that's been written all semester." I pinched myself over and over again, trying to wake up from some kind of hypnotic stupor. I just couldn't believe that praise was being emitted from Bob's bloody shark jaws. I was dumbfounded, confounded, silently ecstatic, and quite willing to take the master's gospel as some sign from the Universe that maybe, just perhaps, yes, it could even be remotely possible that I had a shot at this vicious ego crapshoot.

Yoda had spoken. The floodgates sprung a leak in the mighty dike. Rays of rainbow light shone down to illuminate the deep, dark abyss of my sad-ass existence. At least for a few glorious nano-seconds.