Aint no rest!

I went to go visit Eddie Saturday night on a whim. I haven’t spent any time with him in months and I really missed him so I decided, why not? Poor Eddie! He was fucking exhausted from not sleeping in two days. The second he saw me he ran over and hugged me so tight I could barely breathe, and then spent the next 20 minutes crying. It was quite the shock to the system to see Eddie unravel like this but at the same time it was quite nice to finally not be the guy falling apart over the world ending tragedy of the week.

After he calmed down enough to tell me why he was freaking out, I started to freak out for him! The dude bit off WAY more than he could chew and he was seriously paying the consequences for it. He had 3 projects in post, 2 music videos and a commercial, and they were all due on Friday and 2 of them were already extended from previous deadlines! Apparently there was some drama with this company he hired to work on the music video and the freelance editor he’d picked up completely sucked at his job so Eddie ended up doing all the work ALONE!

I dragged Eddie away from his office long enough to eat and with the goal of getting him to call it a night so he could at least get 5 hours of sleep. We ate at the Swinger’s Diner and I ordered the usual, but this night I decided to add a milkshake. Poor Eddie was falling asleep on top of his food! It would have been so freakin adorable had it not been for, wait what am I talking about!? It was seriously adorable watching him trying to fight his exhaustion off like a 5 year old trying to stay up to see Santa! By the time I got him back to his apartment it was well after 3 so I decided my only recourse was to crash at his place (on his bed).

We woke up spooning and when I opened my eyes and saw him looking back at me I wanted nothing more than to make sweet man love to him, BUT I DIDN’T! Because that’s just all kinds of fucked up that I am sooo not ready to deal with at this point in time. So instead we exchanged pleasantries and I forced him to accompany me to breakfast! In the daylight I was able to get a good look at him and I was really worried about what I was seeing. Eddie sucks at taking care of himself! For some reason he can forget to eat and sleep for days because he gets so caught up in what he’s doing. And looking at him I could really tell that his crappy lifestyle was catching up with him in a scary way. His hair was falling out, his skin was all weird and blotchy and even though he’d slept 8 hours his eyes looked almost black from lack of sleep.

After twisting his arm (almost to the point of ripping it off his shoulder) I was able to get him to agree to some help. I have a friend that has recently decided to take a break from his job at a MAJOR animation studio to cope with the disillusionment of life as an animator that would totally be willing to help out here. I also had time to check out what he was working on with his music video, I really hated the music track (it was some kind of pop-rock-electroni-emo  awfulness that all the kids are listening to these days) but the VFX were right up my alley! I have been messing around with Autodesk Flame for awhile now (I have always been a HUGE 3DSMax user) and I KNEW I could totally continue what he was doing and I have been ITCHING to get my hands on a project that would really let me get right up in it! Eddie knows what I am capable of and he trusts me completely, so we called up my friend to give Eddie a hand in the office and he let me take the music video hard drive back to NYC.

When I get back to LA permanently my first order of business is to make sure Eddie never ends up like he did this past weekend. That was scary! I guess I am not one to talk though, because I haven’t really slept much since getting back to NYC yesterday. I have been working nonstop on the music video and I am LOVING the way it’s turning out! When I get in the zone like this I can go days without sleep, but that really wouldn’t go over well because of my need to stay alert at work. So I am writing this entry in hopes that it will wind me down enough to get a few hours of shut eye before attacking Eddie's project again in the morning.