Brea or Tar Quotes

“The hangovers are the price I pay. Each skull-splitting excursion down my personal rabbit hole to hell is a guilt tinged reminder of every little fuckin' thing I've ever done wrong and never made amends for.”
― Dan Johnson, Brea or Tar

“Here's the reality, guys: you save up for years to go 'Out West' and you spend everything you have in six months living in a roach infested hole in K-town, paying for "casting workshops" so you can meet managers and casting directors who don't give two shits about you. You cut your hair a little bit or grow a moustache and you have to get new headshots because people in Hollywood fundamentally lack imagination and can't even begin to fathom 'who you are as an actor' unless your headshot looks exactly like you do on the day of. And headshots cost $300 to shoot (on the cheap end) and $100 for make-up artists and $100 to retouch and $100 to print. Plus, you need a car to get around because mass transit in Los Angeles is a goddam joke. You need to get into class so you can learn how to unlearn all the shit you learned in college theater. Meanwhile, you're in love with the city because it's new and warm all the time and there are beautiful women everywhere. But you start getting this creeping sensation like everyone is a facade of a human being and beneath every beautiful face is spiritual rot, careerism, graft, nepotism, bull shit, lies, fakery, a need to be seen and an overwhelming whorism. But don't worry, guys, because you can always get a job working as a bartender where you can sneak booze from the well and forget for a few minutes what it's like to be on the bottom of the totem pole. That's a lot of fun, especially when you discover that cocaine means you can drink forever and not get too wasted until later. You'll get a DUI eventually, but fuck it, right? Around this time you start to get bitter. Really bitter, which you'll mistake as an 'evolution of your art.' You start looking for edgy rolls. You get a dumb haircut and try to make yourself look ugly. Maybe you hit the gym or start doing improv. Something to give you an edge. You start seeing young kids coming into town all bright eyed and bushy tailed and you say 'good luck' when you mean 'eat shit and die.' You wake up one day after endless commercial auditions that you really need to make rent but can't seem to book because you 'come off as an asshole' or don't smile enough...”
― Dan Johnson, Brea or Tar

“You can imagine my horror when my mom parked the car on Grand and opened the door. We were dead. I already imagined the Merlot soaked claws of a thousand bums tearing me limb from limb then tobagganing down Second Street on what remained of my torso.”
― Dan Johnson, Brea or Tar

“Bright eyed, bushy tailed and fresh faced. These kids were Lawrences and Robbies that hadn't been in the league long enough to mature into Larrys and Bobs. They still had that earnest, hopeful glow like someone who cared was watching. Fame and endorsement deals would start flooding in if they could just squeeze out a triple.”
― Dan Johnson, Brea or Tar

“I grew up in a day and age where hitting .250 in any given season made you a god. It was a smaller game back then. You had to hit smart and run well. There was mind to it. Then they put in a jackrabbit ball and it became a thing of brawn. You had to pitch the seams off the goddam thing or knock it into the stands every game if you wanted to be anyone. The people want that action and maybe you can give it to them for a time. But your fame will not last. It's how you play the game day in and day out, through cold streaks and shit-hole road trips. You better enjoy every goddam bus and rain delay and asswipe motel and old loud-mouthed manager and drop to the minors. Because that's what this is. It ain't glory. It's a long, ugly haul. And at the end of the day you may be a hero or you may be a washed up never been. That's all.”
― Dan Johnson, Brea or Tar

“Heartache is the life force of my people, the agent that ripples eternity and causes history to arc into big crashing waves. Heartache may pass and disappear. Heartache is still there, it is merely invisible, plotting. Heartache is the constant. Heartache is the through line, the central core on which we all radiate, the agent of change. Heartache can neither be created nor destroyed, only transmuted. Heartache is the score and the game; heartache is our eternal currency.”
― Dan Johnson, Brea or Tar

“But you can't escape from heartache. That's the rub. It always finds a way back.”
― Dan Johnson, Brea or Tar

“We brats bear the hurt of war. We insulate it and keep it warm. Our bodies and souls are receptacles of an unimaginable heartache. We have a way of looking out at the world from behind the walls of an emotional castle built to protect a lonely treasure.”
― Dan Johnson, Brea or Tar

“Lies told fresh in the night fires of our dwindling solstice. A yarn becomes a legend. Tobacco spittle sears on charred logs. Light like foot lamps in a Bowery cabaret. Shadows fall upwardly to dance on a white forehead. All ablaze but the sockets of the eyes. Dark rings hold their truths. A good man turns wicked by the light of a Sturgeon Moon. Mephistopheles one and all. Savage saturnalia.”
― Dan Johnson, Brea or Tar

“Mine will never be things of purity, strictly one or the other. I am multitude and mosaic. I will give of myself to this kindred land where no thing will ever be exclusively one or another. This is the boundary where all things merge in shades of mixture.”
― Dan Johnson, Brea or Tar

“Diagnosed ill and off-kilter, poisoners, dreamers, madmen, lunatics, loners, sad ones, bad ones, star pegs in square holes, movers, shakers, mass debaters, tokers, pokers, instigators, conformity haters, subterfuge vessels and assassins of the vassals who lord over free and intelligent men with a dollar held high so that we jump until we die and know not of the pleasures of this life and the freedom of a soul unrestrained from the prison where the only fate is to hang.”
― Dan Johnson, Brea or Tar

“Amidst the comfort of flight, we have lost track of its miraculousness. We embark on great journeys spanning many hours and meridians of mercator space. We purchase tickets that guarantee our arrival. For a nominal charge, we are assured that our possessions will appear intact and, if not, someone will be held accountable. Then we proceed through immense palisades of machinery that guarantee our security before sampling terminal cuisine and stepping aboard a tube that will ascend into the stratosphere and descend again. But it's more complex than that isn't it? In all the history of mankind there has never been something as wonderfully utilitarian as flight. We, the heirs of millennia of humanity, are spoiled by this convenience. The vastness of our trek is disarticulated by altitude. We know not the hardships of insurmountable spaces, only the seeming ease of the shortcut. Our trek westward is not that of our forefathers. It is much more insidious. The perils are intangible, but just as lethal. The intense pressure and friction of prolonged human contact. A lack of space despite our seeming mastery of it. The constant rubbing. The back and forth shoves that push us closer to the chasm. These are the realities that sublimate themselves into a vast subterranean tension. Unseen, but surely felt. The unspoken dread. The unacknowledged foreboding. It eats at us. Demands that we come to grips with what we've become. Acknowledgement.”
― Dan Johnson, Brea or Tar