I want to be less accessible

I think I want to be less accessible. I want to be less connected and reachable by strangers i’ve never met. I want to know less about my high school acquaintances’ auto shop and the difficult decision he had to make buying cribs for his baby that’s on the way. I want to hear my friends recount the whimsy of a random weekday off without hearing the phrase “well you saw my grid post” or “did you see my story?”

Oh fuck here we go. Another millennial with the hot take that social media is making us worse. I mean yeah. Kind of.

I deleted all social media apps from my phone and completely deleted my twitter in including my porny show off twitter and bluesky. Apart from substack I only had reddit on my phone as a way to keep up with news, trends, alerts and, if I’m being completely real, hot hairy dads posting pole and face for DL validation from people like me on /gaybears and /fathairybears. Every morning, in the same way I would browse instagram or twitter, I would endlessly scroll reddit as a habitual salve on the wound that is my day. This, as you may have guessed, only made me feel worse wondering why, in the same way I had felt like shit after scrolling socials, I suddenly feel that same sense of dread and disconnect. So I deleted it.

In the day to day I get bored on my phone. swiping across pages of apps searching for something too waste precious hours of my day on. Youtube reels of dropout tv shows and true crime videos like ‘I didn’t know my son was a murderer.’ But those are easier to check out of. They provide very little and once I grow a littler weary, it’s very easy to log off and put my phone away.

I no longer feel the sting of fomo or the shame of inadequacy by comparison. I have no frame of reference to compare my weekend to, apart from basking in the glow of my own personal peace. When friends reach out it feels more intentional. They didn’t just see my name pop up in a story grid in their pocket. They thought of me and texted and we make plans to go get lunch or go skating and it feels nourishing. It feels real.

“What do you even mean by real?” you know exactly what the fuck I mean. An organic human connection with an intention to spend precious time together. Devoid of the posturing or curation of a social media presence or the incessant need to document and categorize our experience for the consumption of others. I’ll take a photo and then it lives in my pocket for months. One day years down the line it’ll pop up as a photo memory and remind me of that fun time we had and Ill call you and we’ll chat and say “it’s been too long” and we’ll have a day together chatting about how everything has changed but how we still feel the same. And in these small romantic happenstances bookmarked by the bustle of day to day survival and highlighted by the love we share for one another year over year and decade over decade, we’re together even when we’re apart. We’re living. We’re discovering. We’re growing.

I think you should delete your instagram and get off twitter and abandon snapchat. Go to a fucking gay bar and work up the courage to flirt with a stranger. Respect your own privacy and keep your own peace. Slow down and meander a bit. Let the hours wash over you in wonder and stop maximizing your hustle you stupid alpha loser. Take a fucking breath and start living.

Or don’t. Who the fuck am I to tell you what to do. Just another profile on another social media site trying to sell you an idea and a character.

I love you.

-Eric

Today I am okay

This is going to straight up be a journal entry. Profundity being subjective, enjoy whatever it is I’m about to say. Treat it like you just rummaged through my room and you found my journal with a big ‘ol ERICS EYES ONLY on the cover but you’re so taken by the idea of knowing my inner most secrets so you crack the spine (its not a new book no idea why it’s making that sound) and you dip into my waters.

Is this a little horny? sure. Are we role playing? kinda. As with profundity, sexual arousal can be subjective. I have jerked off into a shoe.

Today I am okay. Im slowly finding my footing back into a new version of my life that I hadn’t anticipated. My brother unexpectedly died a few months ago and its completely changed the way I live. Yes theres all of the ‘you never know how much time you have’ and ‘seize the day’ and ‘tell people you love them’ sort of echoey platitudanal phrases that we confront when faced with death. How could you not? The sudden loss of someone is almost hallucinatory in the way it fully just shakes your shit up and plops you right back into your struggles months later. In this shake up I am changed. And speaking of reiterative phrases, how could I not be? I loved him very much and I look back at our last text and I think about his laugh and I think about his pain in life and the joy that he experienced and the movies we watched and the shows we saw and the dreams we shared and guilt we carried and all of the messy shit we took from emotionally immature family dynamics and the complex difficulty of life and the beauty of being two gay guys. 14 months apart. I wish we had a future to see each other grow into the people we hope to become. But we don’t and that is okay.

I spent years so stressed and worried about the future. What my life will become and what dreams would come to fruition in my life. What goals I would accomplish and how I would pivot if those dreams never came around. Will I die tomorrow? What would that look like and how would people manage? I hate to be a burden. God I hate to be a burden. But the unfortunate thing about that line of thinking is that it does nothing but speculate on versions of your life that don’t exist. Maybe they will one day but who fucking cares. What is your life today? By pulling myself into the present moment as vigorous and as intentional as I can, I get to live my life. Flowing through the whimsy of sporadic decisions and working on my goals. I get to experience today without interruption in whatever form that day is going to be for me. Same goes for the past. Languishing in the what if’s of decisions gone by and the shame of mistakes and and treatment of others as well as myself, I’m pulling myself out of my current day to fixate on an immovable object. You cannot change what has already happened but you can affect your present moment to reflect a future that you want to inhabit.

SO that’s what the fuck I am doing. Will I sell a script? who knows. Do I want to? Absolutely. I want to write and to change people through my scripts. I want to see a big credit “screenplay by Eric La Febre” on some big critically and publicly celebrated film. I want to make enough money where I am comfortable enough for quick trips and spontaneous exploration. I want to pay off my debts and enjoy money I make. But I don’t have any of that right now. Nor have I ever had any of that and that’s okay. I am so privileged in so much of who I’ve become with what I’ve been given and I am so in love with myself and proud of the person I’ve become.

Be here today. With yourself and with each other and enjoy this moment. Enjoy the happenstance of where you are versus where you’ve come from. Thank the luck of your path and be curious about what’s to come from the place you're currently at. Everything is fucked for the most part anyways so what do we have if not the love we carry for ourselves and for each other.

My beautiful husband took this photo. I love him with all I have.

Hot and Heavy : One Year in Burbank

SO despite what the title of this post tells you, this installment of Eric is procrastinating on a script he’s currently working writing will be neither hot nor heavy. Ive been told sex and trauma sell so I have deceived you intentionally to get you to read this post. I know that’s unacceptable. I’m listening and learning and subsequently growing so just know I’m doing the work.

Last month marked our first full year in Burbank. Having moved here during the writers strike to look for work as a screenwriter, very smart and very brave, though no scripts have sold or rooms filled by my presence, Ive never been more motivated or ambitious than I am today. For so many writers, a pretty standard first goal is to get paid to write. Through my freelance podcast contracts, Ive been achieving that goal consistently and more robustly than ever before. I’m making new friends (I love being a fat gay guy) and trying to remind myself that I have a deep well of endless joy and love to offer the world. Everyday I remind myself that this same endless love and patience also extends to me.

This year has been a beautiful reminder that, despite the daily horrors and endless struggle, we get to nourish one another an enrich each others lives for the better. Through whimsy, through care, through joy, through heartache, through vulnerability, through strength and through softness, we are the ones who can cause change. Within our communities, despite it all.

For you perverts who were hoping for some smut from this sweetie pie, I’ll leave you a tasty morsel I pulled from twitter. Eat up.


A Procrastinative Post

Hello again, my silly and beautiful internet friends who happen to visit this website. I am primarily writing this post as a way to help flush out the foggy nonsense in my head while I work on a couple of work scripts I’ve got in the fire. Today is my Friday from my day job and I need to have a couple of things at least drafted by the morning and I’ve got a good start on them. However I am hitting that wall where my bed is feeling so dang comfy and my eyes are feeing just a little too heavy.

I know that I’ll finish tonight. Probably. Or maybe early in the morning with a nice hot cup of coffee. But also why shoot myself in the proverbial foot if I am already in a flow to write tonight? Then I’ll have to onramp the mental energy of getting into the space of writing. Honestly you’re so right, I should stay up and just knock it out! What would I do without you.

For reference, I only ever want you to imagine that this is what I look like when I’m writing my silly little stories. And if you think of me in any other way, please DM because I want to hear about it obviously. I love attention. I am a libra after all. If you even care.

XOXOXO FREE PALESTINE CEASEFIRE NOW

Hot Slut Update

I’m back, baby! And by that I mean I’m writing my second post for this landing page blog that I accidentally set up because the squarespace template looked really chic. So, in an effort to committing to the bit and embracing my mistakes both in large and small scale, here I am, sitting before my computer, a boy, and you, another gender, asking you to please read my fucking scripts.

I have officially started writing a novel. Kind of? It started off as a screenplay and then I realized I wanted to dive deeper into the characters so I decided to long form it and now it’s reading like a novel. Overall it’s an idea that I am still very excited about. The characters, the story, the vibe; since it’s still being realized, the excitement of discovering the story as it’s written is pretty exhilarating. That’s not always the case, obvs. I also started reading Frankenstein since I realized recently that I’d never actually read it. Knowing now that it was a story based on a contest of teenage boredom while caught in a storm at some cabin I’m like ‘oh so this is actually like teenage fanfic sort of?’ and that idea is cool to me. Mary Shelly was like, “had a dream about this monster that is also an allegory for Industrial Revolution maybe but either I win cause my story fucks.”

Feeling absolutely unhinged at thought of the state of every sector of our world at the moment and truly never more ashamed to be an american. Not that I’d necessarily feel any sort of national pride elsewhere but it feels like so many cataclysmic scenarios seem to be coming to a head this year and its a little terrifying to consider what the future has in store. Every month is more debt and more rent while we watch a genocide unfold across the world. Multiple even. But don’t worry because this election is the most important election of our lives just like the one before it and the one before that one and the one before that one. Good thing things have gotten noticeably and significantly better for the working class.

Anyways, if you're here and you’re reading this, I love you. Free Palestine forever.