Digging a hole and filling it with your past

 In our youth (when we were beautiful and interesting) Laurie and I made a movie together. "Milk of Amnesia" (AKA "Oedipal Breakfast") is a lot of things to us: a major achievement, a source of ongoing disagreement and a financial millstone around our neck that took years to shed. It is feature length and professionally finished. It is far from perfect and arguably not close to what we had originally envisioned but it has it's charms. It was a labor of something like love (maybe a "toil of like"?) - Laurie worked at a motion picture lab, and I worked at a video equipment rental house and studio. We made this film on a shoestring, using volunteer unpaid crew and talent. It took two plus years. It was a slow motion marathon. Once it was done, exhausted, bored with our new toy and afraid that any further exposure to it would doom our marriage, "Milk of Amnesia" was relegated to a pile of film cans and tapes in the closet beneath our stairs. Our kids never asked about it. We blissfully forgot.  Like an itch that was never scratched we would poke at it every few years and think about breaking it out to show somewhere. Crowd source funding of course took over and we are transferring it so we can run it in a theater. People seemed interested.  It feels both good and uncomfortable. I don't like messing with the dead. I had put this part of my life away, and it was pretty easy not ignore the pile of cans in the closet.I am hoping that it doesnt dredge up any bad sediment that had settled under us. Digging it all up it is delicate.

First Light.

There is some hope. The ice caps are melting and the carbon dioxide levels are higher than ever but there are young people who have skills and kindnesses to offer.  Ned graduated from the UW this week, with degrees in Informatics and Economics. He made the Dean's list for most of his time there and was on academic scholarship.  Laurie and I are very proud of him. Tom is finishing his first year of high school at Garfield, and is a good kid. Where does this go?  I don't know but these two are much loved and will hopefully be part of the solution to the problems their preceding generations have left them.

Arbitrary Milestone in my Personal Decrepitude

I am turning fifty-eight years old.  It is a mildly disheartening feeling. That's forty years since I graduated from high school and the world seemed large and open and any direction seemed ripe for exploration. I, of course did none of that, I graduated from college, came back to my home town and never left. I did meet, fall in love with, coerce into marriage and reproduce with my favorite person ever, which softens that blow considerably, but still my life has been one long and continual settlement for the least amount of hassle. And now it is mostly over. The growing number of age related maladies and self inflicted sins of indulged, feigned ignorance are taking their toll. The death of friends, and contemporaries are now commonplace. Illnesses arrive in people I know like a lottery with an ever shrinking pool of numbers. My parents generation have shrunk to my mother in law, who sweetly struggles with her loss of memory, trying to valiantly hold on to what she can, and my own kind, sometimes mercurial mother who has given it up and now waits for a quiet exit while watching Filipino soap operas with the attendants. Fifty Eight seems old. Words and names seem to escape me. Thoughts which once came like a sprinter going downhill are plodding like walking in deep snow and mud. I partially blame the dopamine of the iPhone for it's faux pleasure in trivial information at your fingertips. I realize the internet is full of inspiring tales of people who do great things after their prime earning years. I know that there are amazing things still available to me. I know that I could be that person, but I also know I won't be. Some day I will wish I were this young again but all I can think of is that I wish I could do it over again  with the perspective that I have now. The world that now takes shape upon waking in the morning no longer feels boundless. What is left feels broken and increasingly shabby, like a piece of carrion fought over by scavengers.

There is a certain disappointment here.

The Unbearable Tragedy of Gravity and Mortality

Notre Dame burned today. Something so beautiful had to be destroyed because everything must be taken before the end.  The great disruption continues, the waking nightmare that never stops. The hours  on hours that we stare unblinking at our screens waiting for the light to blink out. The glitch in the matrix has been seen. The ghosts are nearby. Everything is destined for the whirlpool. I don't want to fall, but the ladder is rickety and I must go higher. My friend Lorraine died April 4th. The cathedral burned April 15th. What waits for us in May?

Burning Elf 2018 : the lower the expectations the bigger the bonfire?

Burning Elf 2018 was as enjoyable as a wholly invented sub/alt Xmas social event could be.  It is interesting how it has become the beloved holiday family tradition  for other people.  When those who are children today look back on their lives as 110 year olds in their cryogenic post nuclear holocaust life enclosures on Mars, and remember the sepia colored golden holidays of their youth, some will have the ridiculousness of a flaming 7 foot tall elf burned indelibly into their psyche.

People came, ate my sadly mediocre chili (next year Laurie cooks all three, mine were sub par this year) and of course we burnt the elf. I was tired of feeling like it looked too human, so made it look like a robot this year, which of course made it more human looking and so a little creepy. The firework were sadly also unimpressive: the extravaganza I bought was unusable because of overhanging trees. All in all a solid 7.5 on the elf scale for 2018

The Futility of Trying to Escape Las Vegas....Ray's Mutation Worsens

Some of my favorite crew folk drug me forcibly back to Sodom and Gomorra for a shoot that in reality was about 12 minutes long.  The staggering faux opulence, the frantic, desperate yearning for entertainment and carnal release on the part of the great sea of sweaty masses is frightening to the rotting stew of my moral compass.   And apparently Ray's ear mutated in front of the Belaggio.

The carrots from our Garden

The carrots from our garden are small and stunted and look like something from Dr. Suess. That is all.  No apocalyptic ramblings, not nihilistic commentary about the Trump administration. Just our carrots looked kind of weird but we ate them anyway.


Also, my job takes me to strange places and I do odd things. Here I walked around the new billion dollar Expedia campus with a small crew, then interviewed nice humans about how cool it was going to be.  Enjoyably, I was not the sound guy on this shoot, just a lowly grip. It is great to watch another audio person work and see where I am lacking. Eric, the other audio guy is very funny and a swell guy to talk to. All his methods are known to me but of course, slightly different.  His gear is shiny and newer than mine, but substantially the same.


It is also great to just be responsible for c-stands and the moving of heavy objects. I seriously doubt many people want to be a grip in their declining years. It is sometimes physical work that takes mental concentration for short bursts followed by what seems like endless "standing by". I gripped in my youth, and while I list myself as an " Audio/Grip " for small crew application, my heart is not in it.






Oh, yeah, I also started the burning elf head. When doing paper mache from flour and water I am always disgusted by how goopy, sticky and strong flour and water are. It is like fix-all that you can technically eat. People who are Gluten adverse are really just smart: what must this glop do to our insides? I never want pancakes after I work on one of these heads. It is a stupid process but one that I enjoy.