comfort zone

I have watched as old friends have children and shift into parents. They suddenly speak in a new tongue and participate in entirely different activities. The glimmer of the people I once knew barely shows behind that other entity. Slowly as they become a reflection of the events in their child's life and not their own, the relationship we had becomes a figment of the past. It is presumed that my only wish is a front row seat for the show over some coffee, a flurry of colorful pictures, and invitations to kiddy events.

Now, it has dissipated in recent years, but I remember every occasion my brother would visit he'd give me one of those big brother bear hugs, which would be promptly followed by the moment when he'd push down on my shoulders in an effort to get me to shrink. For a great many years he kept trying to have me remain ten-years-old. This was that me he knew best and the one he could maintain in his mind.

There's a lot to those little boxes people put each other in. It's an easy way to keep things organized, neat, and orderly. It's a way to keep time from getting away. It even helps us know who to invite to what sort of event. When people grow it complicates things, it seems to make others uncomfortable, and it shows wear in the foundations of relationships. Sometimes people get so cubby-holed and their lives become so stagnant that they have no choice but to change, to grow, and to do things that don't seem like them selves.

I'm sometimes seen as that quiet writer type with the little notebook, the cryptic responses, and supposed elusiveness. I definitely spent a good number of years camera shy, which may account for my pursuing a behind-the-scenes career. This last week, however, I was an actor. I can really only attest to this because I got up in front of an audience with three fellow cast members, memorized many of my lines, and got paid for doing just that. We were involved in a prepared stage reading of an award winning play.

Taking yourself out of your comfort zone affords you the opportunity to express parts of yourself others might be blind to. It also opens you up to see yourself better. Being involved in this was such a welcome change and seriously invigorating. I think sometimes we impose these boxes on ourselves. Sometimes we will only let ourselves reach a certain distance and grow just so far before we figure we're there.

take two

I've been here before.

I was six years younger and several shades greener, but this is hardly unfamiliar.

With the dissolution of that short film and the late-summer feature, the opportunity presented itself. It's time to seriously look for investors for a feature film - again. I had the first meeting with my producing partner yesterday.

The upward climb starts now.

When I tried this the last time, everything was riding on this for my business partner and me. He needed a financial miracle and I yearned to dive into the deep end of the industry. As the years have passed I've discovered that nothing is the all meaningful "IT". I've come to realize that IT is what you get when you put everything together. IT is always being created. This was a hard lesson to learn.

Here we go again.

okay, whatever

Don't get depressed about not being where you want to be. This nagging feeling of anxiety is actually called ambition. Ambition is your friend.

-Atom Egoyan, independent filmmaker

The short film came back into my life yesterday.

I had written it off. I was sure nothing was going to become of it at this point.

This gets me thinking about the strange ways I relate to projects and productions. Sometimes I feel as though I write about filmmaking like single people write about their myriad love relationships. Take for example how many ideas never get beyond that initial burst of inspiration. Maybe it was never meant to be. Then there are those projects that weave in and out of your life, but never get very far while still remaining significant and personal. Then there are the ones that wake you up in the middle of the night, because what they've got to say just can't wait until morning.

And finally there are the actual productions - the marriages, if you will. They fall apart due to poor planning, bad communication, money issues, and the like.

So, the short film was back briefly. I heard from the writer-director guy, who I'd recently written again. I wanted to hear about his abandonment of his own project. I was told he hadn't done so, he was planning on seeing it through, and that the script was almost done. Lies, lies, lies.

Oh, and now he isn't leaving town until the third week in August. That would have been fine information to have before, but after his three week absence from communication and somehow taking four weeks to edit thirty pages out of the script, I decided I'd had enough. "So you're bailing then," he wrote during our instant message session. Nice.

Creative endeavors are a nasty beast.

cleaning house

About eighteen months ago I was interviewed by a local grad student who was doing their thesis on a film-related matter. I didn't realize when I met her for that thirty minute chunk of time that the transcript of our conversation would be available on-line.

It is.

I just came across it.

And I decided to read it.

Without removing all of my surprisingly plentiful vocalized pauses, I initially found myself sounding like a lesser version of myself - less confident, less assured, less grounded, a bit nervous, and maybe a touch stoned. It took a second read-through to recognize that this objective, fly-on-the-wall stance I was receiving revealed that I have indeed grown in a myriad of areas personally and professionally.

Perhaps some of this has been evident in the writings here.

Paradox is the wrong word for it, but there's something startling about listening to oneself in this way, spending a few moments with a younger incarnation of oneself.


The person I was reading on that page is someone who I don't fully understand. I suppose I am more assured, more confident, and more grounded.

I've similarly been rediscovering my past against the better judgment of Don Henley:

a voice inside my head said don't look back

you can never look back

-"boys of summer", 1984

Even after a period last fall spent clearing out the clutter, then attempting to move into a more streamlined existence, I still look around the house and watch so many things collect dust.

And I hate dusting. It's nearly as pointless as owning a leaf blower.

There are so many facets of old me sitting around - the me that comes from a family of pack rats. I had a grandmother who had enough stockpiled in her basement for a couple nuclear fallouts. I have a dad who I watched continually fill the garage with random containers and whatnot. To his credit he was a re-user before it was cool and long before my parents became obsessed with watching and re-watching "An Inconvenient Truth". But it's the drive to accumulate that runs in the family. I know, I know - capitalism, consumerism, blah-blah-blah.

What I've got are neatly contained memories, if you will.

This is from the writer perspective now. I've been working on an old script. I hadn't tossed together a new draft of it in five years. It's always been very personal to me and quite painful to write. But it's got a lot of baggage and it has the burden of having been written by a weaker writer.

At this point, I've spent the last month and a half completely deconstructing it, shattering it into its finer pieces much like a film editor. Instinctually I feel that it's what it needed. What's interesting to me is that as I've been working on it, it's slowly morphed into something quite similar to what it was. So, it's been a cathartic experience to re-live this story, but also to re-live my own, reading old missives, excising old newspaper clippings, and digging deeper into why any of it matters to me.

Speaking of lightening the load, the short film seems to have hit a complete stop. To borrow a phrase, the ball has been in his court for nearly two weeks. I feel I've made my best effort to be supportive of this project, but after a while he's exhibited a lack of interest or commitment. I think I'm done with it.

I do have to wonder, though, how any of this will look in hindsight eighteen months or maybe five years down the road.

america is

It's always the old to lead us to the war
It's always the young to fall

-Phil Ochs, "I Ain't Marching Anymore" (1965)

It's July fourth.

The fourth of July. Independence Day.

It's a summer day that came and went throughout much of my childhood. I watched the festivities and celebrations from afar with underdeveloped and under-tapped critical thinking skills.

It was one of the three major days during the year that my dad would unfurl the stars and stripes from whatever storage place in the garage it called home. Depending on where we were living at the time, he would display it inside a prominent window, hang it from the roof near our balcony, or draw it up the flagpole like a lynching of a forgotten ideal.

In the afternoon we'd probably barbeque some dead animal, munch from the family size bag of potato chips, and quench our thirst on iced tea. There'd be innumerable treats to choose from, with the dessert being the booming, bright, and colorful fireworks display with the other hordes of the blanket spreading clan. This would be a rare opportunity to be out past dark. All of these celebratory things could surely give an impressionable child the idea that things are great in the good old US of A.

I come from a military family. My grandfather was at Iwo Jima. He was a marine. What I know of him wouldn't fill a chapter in a book, but I know he was a wartime painter who crafted many a battle scene in all of its wartime raw imagery. He was also a poet and author, who became the subject of a poetry essay I put together in ninth grade. Even though this was my dad's adoptive father and not a blood relative, the five dollars he'd give me for writing book reports for him when I was seven years old I call out as the reason I love writing to this day.

My dad was in the Air Force and then the Navy. My brother followed in the familial footsteps and has become far more career military than anyone suspected when he enlisted nearly twenty years ago. There was a regimented nature to our household complete with hospital corners on our beds and a need for my dad to come into our rooms on weekend mornings doing a loud rendition of revelry.

There was always this overwhelming threat when you pushed the limits of acceptable taste or behavior in our household. It always seemed to come up. Military school. I would be hard pressed to count how many times I was "this" close to being "sent away". Thinking about it now, I haven't a clue if these these things really exist. Whatever the case, I feel that I grew up in a microcosm of my perspective of America. We're in constant need of creating little soldiers to go off to war.

We just finished watching the recent John Cusack film, "Grace is Gone". It's an intimate, affecting drama about a conventional Middle American guy who's lost his wife in Iraq and can't muster up the strength to break the news to his children. There's an underlying anti-war message that shows the complexity of fighting for what you believe in, but then having to deal with the detrimental effects of believing in it on a more personal level. I found it to be quite powerful and I highly recommend it!

It should be clear from reading my blogs that I apparently loathe all holidays. More definitively it's probably more the blindness which people seem to approach them. Most of them become a consumer event. We are told to shop, shop, shop! Perhaps it'll keep us from realizing that the holiday we are shopping under the auspices of represents the death of soldiers or the pillaging of a Native Culture.

It's not as if I shy away from July fourth. I just don't like to celebrate it, except in contradictory ways. For example, last year we watched a documentary about the 2000 election. I guess America and I are in the midst of an angry argument. In the way that once things go sour in relationship it appears that the whole thing was always so bad. I know it's not the whole picture. It's the photo negative of that sanitized show we saw at Epcot Center last February. It's the one that has Ben Franklin chatting it up about the great history of the US. It felt like one extended euphemism filled patriotic propaganda show.

So, it's Independence Day. That should stand for something.

I have no answers.

Let's just say that freedom is more than just a figment of our collective imagination in need of pursuit.

Then, what are you doing with yours?

mini wheats

Dear Static,
Here is your Work Horoscope for Wednesday, July 2:
Sometimes being a brainiac is a liability, and this is one of those times. Go on instinct alone. Your emotions can overcome details that your intellect gets stuck in like quicksand.

There are so many unsettled and out of control things swirling about in my life at present that this could conceivably be applied to several of them. Food for thought.

Or perhaps not!

else where

I spent the better part of the evening in a tree house.

That's not something most adults can say. Not very often, at least.

It was one of those sturdy, well-structured affairs like they have in the movies. They're usually the "property" of some spoiled corporate brat. The key difference was a complete lack of children, slingshots, and "no girls" signs. In their place were the adult comforts like an excess of pillows, electric outlets, i-Tunes, and plenty of vino.

Oh, I failed to mention the frequent circulation of upwards of twenty people!

This gathering was in celebration of yet another friend's departure from town. Having lived here for the last five years and off-and-on another three years before that, there's always an exodus. Plenty of others get their ticket out. I sit back and watch this town become so many other's springboard.

So there we all were passing around the bottles of pomegranate wine, champagne, and some others, nibbling on the vegan scones my wife made, sharing close quarters with a few friends, strangers, and whatever lies in between. These are merely titles that we wear or brandish upon others.

During a localized lull in conversation I tuned my ears around the "house". Our departing friend is fresh out of college and several of the others have the same predicament. It didn't surprise me to hear somebody going on about not wanting to be represented by their major.

This feeling clearly doesn't go away. It changes shape as people yearn to be more than their job title or represented by more than their credit rating. I was thinking recently that there might be more power in recognizing what you're not than what you are. There's a lot to be said for negative space. It provides a new perspective at least.

Like a tree house.