Portrait of the Artist...as a Young Man?

So I was watching the David Milch interview, and I kept thinking, “Wow, that could so easily be me!” I mean, he looks about my age, has been writing for decades, which means he probably started when I did
--Come to think of it, he did start about when I did, because the nephew of Steven Bochco, the creator of Hill Street Blues and NYPDBlue, among others, was in high school in Williamstown at the time I was discovering what playwrighting was all about… and Hill Street was in the ascendancy, and that was Milch’s big break --

And he loves his work for the same reasons I did – where the process takes the writer in creating interior and exterior worlds for characters to operate between, the ceaseless commitment and humility (yes, I do have a little when the right muse is visiting) in “finishing the hat (Sondheim/Sunday)”…

But then again, I think what he’s talking about is how he commits his acts of love, and if you believe the actors that talk about him, that’s what they describe. So how is that any different from what I’m always trying to create in my work (and, with occasional errors, in my life)?

Towards the end Milch said that his roads have always been interesting, because he knows how to look, how to walk them, and he never thinks about where they’re going. Had I stuck to it, that could so easily have been me – I mean, he got to where he is, and he thinks like me, talks like me, and creates like me…

And yet I wouldn’t want it… Not for a moment to diminish the quality of his work, which has moved me for decades, my roads have also always been interesting, for the same reasons, but my roads are all over the world, in real moments of living history, and every once in awhile I get to get my hands dirty building some order where it is desperately needed, which is why I’m so thrilled to be in Deadwood right now…