You may have noticed that I’ve not posted to this blog in several weeks. Artistically, creatively, this feels bad in two ways: the first being a feeling that I’m withholding something of potential value from my dear, beloved audience. As in, I feel like I’m letting some people down by my lack of production. This may come as a surprise, but I actually have real people (not bots! (well, some bots)) reaching out asking when the next post will be ready. The second is that this lapse in attention generates negative inertia, i.e.: I’m losing the momentum of posting that I had, and now I’ve got momentum for not posting.
My avoidance of posting comes from a few different angles in my life. The first is: this blog doesn’t really have an assigned ‘subject’. The subject is whatever I’m posting about. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to write about. Another excuse for the lack of posts lately is that I experienced an emotional struggle so tense that I was mentally paralyzed beyond an ability to compose much of anything, even spoken sentences.
When other folks mention their mental struggles, I often find myself bristling at being unwillingly exposed to someone else’s troubles— as though we all don’t have our own to fumble over. But in an effort to be vulnerable, to offer the example of normalcy of peaks and valleys during our lives (and to write/talk about them) and to maybe even make some sense of all of this for myself, here goes.
I’ve suffered from dark thoughts/depression since my teenage years. I remember immense feelings of sadness creep into my psyche, and a dark cloud of self-doubt consuming my being for several days at a time. This wasn’t something I was comfortable sharing with my parents, I didn’t want them to worry. I didn’t want to be a bother, or a source of a problem for them, or for them to feel any sense of blame for ‘how I turned out’.
Now that I have significant feelings to confront, and a much more complicated life, I’ve been inclined to seek support. My parents are becoming involved in my wellness journey, which is not necessarily something that I really wanted.
There’s not much more discomforting than pontificating on the idea of suicide with the people who gifted you life in the first place.
~~~
When one of us is on a journey where the answers are not “out there” but within
us, these are journeys to be experienced in solitude.
With the exception of offering a fresh perspective, what outcomes can you expect from an outside source? During life’s untamed challenges, I believe the only way through it is alone.
My parents have always only ever been profoundly supportive of me and the crap I wanted to do. Throughout my life my parents have shown me nothing but love and support. Sometimes that love and support comes in the form of a swift kick in the ass, but I chalk that up to more of a Universal Law than assigning blame to the people involved. So, if my folks don’t really have anything to do with causing this quandary, logic would lead me to assume that they don’t really have anything to do with a solution, if there even is one.
BUT— when we suffer, it can affect the people around us. When we find ourselves drowning in emotional turmoil, it can feel like we’ve fallen out of the boat on the river-trip that is life and we’re in the water, cold and flailing. The current has complete control over our direction, and we can’t hear the pleas from our would-be saviors above water. We run low on oxygen, unsure of when or how much air we’ll be able to swallow next. We can’t even confirm anyone in our party is even aware we’re underwater.
Oh, but the party is certainly aware that someone is not in the boat they’re supposed to be and is instead underwater.
Blair would try to offer reassurance to me, and I would ruminate over what I thought she said. It was like talking through walkie-talkies, and hearing radio static over every other word, “I (would) hate (if something happened to) you… You (don’t) deserve this…” She would be offering the utmost support, and my brain could not comprehend her words as such.
As much as others “want to help” there is just no way they can. Unless it’s a physical task such as doing some dishes or watching some kids for a few hours. There is nothing a supporter can do to actually improve the progress of their loved ones who are struggling. Just like how people who are struggling with something in their life, like addiction, they themselves must acknowledge that they need help to pursue such help.
When someone is lacking self-compassion, the only compassion that will ultimately help them has to come from the self.
This is not something that can be done by anyone’s parents. As a parent myself, when one of my children is struggling with something, many times it is easier to simply do the thing myself than to have the patience to watch them fuck it up infinity times. I know this attitude radiates throughout the general culture of parenting. We saw this in the Varsity Blues Scandal of 2019, where parents and university administrators conspired to falsify college admissions.
On the descent from the peak of emotional turmoil, a friend asked something along the lines of, “do the things you’re thinking about actually make sense and are they significant?” and I did not hesitate to answer that my whole career journey has been entirely unhelpful to my emotional well-being. But what I didn’t mention was more significant than that, I’m noticing that our collective attention spans are short-circuiting. You might often hear the term bandwidth, and people referring to how much bandwidth they have, usually a dearth and not an abundance.
Do you know how annoying it is that there is a movement among millennials to self-diagnose themselves with ADD or ADHD? No fucking duh, hombre, all our attention is fucked!
We don’t pay attention to each other as well as we used to. Our society is so distracted that we don’t acknowledge each other nearly as succinctly as pre-internet days. I have no doubt that we all have some real neat things going on that if people were paying attention, we'd be quite amazed, but we don’t afford that with each other, not in the same way. I feel like I can be modestly entertaining when people are acutely paying attention, but when their attention is divided, the effect is minimized. And I feel minimized. I pride my humor on being multi-layered through a subtlety that seems lost in the radioactivity between our wifi, 5G cell towers, Bluetooth, microwaves, etc.
If my mindfulness journey has taught me anything, it's that all we really have is our attention.
No doubt that you’ve read or heard or thought about the adverse effects of all this wonderful technology that now binds our society, but I think the worst effect of them all is the cauterization of our attention that is just too precious to offer to our fellow humans walking this earth and is somehow better spent in the matrix.
Even trying to talk to our spouses, how many times have you had to wait until they were done doing something on their phone or computer? For valid purposes, I’m sure, but we still find ourselves waiting on each other to finish time with our devices before attention can be devoted to real-life loved ones.
This isn’t just about being on our devices, it’s about what the devices are doing to us.
Is this good? Do we like this?
And what quality is that attention that’s been freshly drained by the blue-light-Meanies?
So instead of writing blog posts, I’ve been pacing around my backyard pondering this…
And what am I doing with my attention? Am I putting my energy into something that will help me? Am I ignoring something important to me and instead procrastinating by exploring all of these wrongs that I’ll ultimately find out have been doled out by myself in the first place?
This creative pause has affected progress on my screenplay too. Since almost a year ago I’ve been making (mostly) steady progress on my first feature length film script. The assignment I gave myself was to write a screenplay about the Lewis & Clark Expedition as a stoner comedy.
A couple years back, I read Undaunted Courage by Steven Ambrose, and as the Corps of Disco makes their way up the Missouri river, encountering Native tribes along the way, the author mentions that the Corps and the Natives would sit down to a ‘smoke circle’ upon first engaging. I couldn’t help but wonder, surely, this tobacco would be different than that they were used to from Virginia…
With the mission of the Corps of Discovery massaged from ‘finding a direct water route (across the Rocky Mountains) from the Missouri to the Pacific Ocean’ to the much more realistic ‘find cannabis and bring some back’, I had the foundation of the story I wanted to tell.
Probably because of the lack of violence on the part of the Natives, the folks who the Corps encountered are largely ignored. Even Sacagawea’s value to the trip is widely misunderstood and misrepresented to this day.
Even though this trip “opened up the west” to development by western civilization, (and only one mf died!!) the Corps of Discovery was largely considered a failure—mainly due to the nonexistence of a navigable water route across the Rockies (which, from the available maps at the time could have been foreseen). This excursion was not really celebrated or remembered by the public until it’s centennial.
I think this history is important to tell. Considering a history of Americans displacing Indigenous communities, the Lewis & Clark Expedition encounters a vast and diverse population of American Natives and offered myriad of moments for values to clash, social norms and expectations to be violated, means of understanding of the world around us turning more fluid than we’d hoped to imagine, lifestyles and livelihoods directly conflicting—all swirling together in a cauldron of potential hilarity, stirred by the spoon of dread.
Without giving too much away, the ironies presented in the story are simply too good to keep to myself. On August 20, 1804, one of the younger members of the Corps of Discovery at 22-years-old, Sgt. Charles Floyd succumbed to appendicitis on the banks of the Missouri River.
The Corps had yet to reach any Native tribes and had not passed out of ‘unrecognized territory’ yet (the trip was barely started). Had poor Floyd experienced his appendicitis in the comforts of civilization, sadly he would have met the same fate as the medical procedures at the time were pretty much limited to administering leeches and mercury.
In fact, modern day archeologists confirm campsites of the Corps of Disco by finding mercury deposits in ‘decommissioned latrines’.
~~~
In the process of bringing my first draft together, I realized that exercising my creativity was going to be the only thing that would help me get back to a tolerable mental state. But in exercising my creativity, I feel obligated to address that I’ve been avoiding exercising my creativity. I guess I had to admit that I’ve been ignoring an important part of myself. My feelings come from a sense of self-betrayal (that I’ve maybe tried to cast off onto other people, I’m no saint), from avoiding and procrastinating on a project that I really care about.
To get back in, you must admit you were out.
In creativity, the only sin is to avoid it. The only fucking up you can do as a creative is to not fuck anything up.
So the betrayal that I was trying to convince myself was coming from an external source, was actually betrayal that was self-administered this whole time. And in the process of figuring this out, I’d lashed out to loved ones, ignored responsibilities and wallowed in self-pity. Sadly, none of which helped my mental status, and only caused consternation with everyone else involved.
This deep sadness was a response to something I was doing to myself. As hard as I tried to point fingers that these feelings were triggered by some external source, the harder I pointed, the sharper the pain in my chest from my own fingers.
When I opened my script back up, I knew I had holes to fill in. Earth to lay down and grade, landscaping to …scape. But once I started, my confidence slowly returned. As slowly and steadily as the tide, my self-worth first nibbled at my toes, then congregated around my ankles until I felt some semblance of the resonance of the water outside of my body influencing and synchronizing with the water that hydrates my body.
I don’t really consider myself a fan of “dark humor”, and for the most part, I feel like most self-described dark humor enthusiasts actually more enjoy shock humor—which to me is just as selfish and annoying as offering one’s unsolicited emotions. The people doing the joking don’t have to suffer the shock of their audience, but merely get to revel in it. What’s absolutely abhorrent about “dark humor” is that oftentimes the joke is but mere bait in the exchange between teller and audience, and the real joke is the audience’s reaction that the teller gets to feed off of.
But the Lewis & Clark Expedition offers plenty of fodder for dark humor. Sgt. Floyd’s death is mentioned several times throughout my draft. It’s handy for the characters to reflect on and serves comedic perspective of dark happenings. The vast array of more likely, untimely demises in the West also offer a humorous perspective of the young man’s peril-- he could have been castrated, scalped and burned at the stake by the Sioux, or shit his brains out of dysentery, or drowned in the river, or gored by a buffalo, or lightning stricken, or annihilated by a drone strike that found a time-defying wormhole… But what kept poor, young Sgt. Floyd from seeing the beauty of the Great Falls of the Missouri, or the vastness of the Rockies, or the shore of the Pacific Ocean, or witnessing unrestrained kindness from folks who don’t speak his language, or reveling with his party that such a journey had been conquered, was a tummy ache.
It's easy to see what the poor fucker missed out on, and not even of his own doing.
If I feel guilty about the lapse in posts, I can’t imagine how guilty I’d feel leaving a whole story unfinished. And how many other stories might be affected by my own unfinished story.
Stay true to y’all’s’selves out there, it’s harder than you’d think but if you don’t, it can really fuck your shit up.
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