Be Castle

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Downtown Burlington in the summer feels like walking into a living, breathing Old Navy commercial. 

All these attractive, well-groomed, well-dressed, well-heeled and sandaled kids of rich parents, walking around the Second Cup or Spencer Park.  I've already had a few conversations now with some local friends about the pressure - subtle, somewhat insidious - that this environment puts on you, that makes you feel that you're not quite good enough, that you need to better yourself.  And yet, the living standard here is immensely greater than anywhere I've lived before, and I'm only renting.  Ooorah....

But I keep seeing the young couples, the ones who look like they could be perfect Old Navy or American Eagle Outfitter poster children.  Blonde, blue-eyed, tall and slim, wearing the new clothes, great features, and looking at each other like they're in love, because, well, they are.  The sight of young couples used to inform my model for the experience I was looking for, and it used to make me sad, thinking I could never have what they have. 

And yet, I did have that, at 19 years old.  Cross "experience young love" off the bucket list for Jody.  And again, oorah....

I mentioned in my last that I'm throwing out my romantic model.  That's to say, I'm abandoning my desire to actively seek out the Female Me.  That's not what I need as a top priority right now.  In any case, she'll meet me halfway. 

What I need is to become, as Neale Donald Walsch says, the next greatest version of the grandest vision I ever had about myself.  That means embracing the "new".  I can't do that if I'm employing plans, boundaries, paradigms, and ideas about myself that no longer apply to the dude looking back at me from the mirror. I can't attract newness when I'm framing it based on past experiences.

It's time to become a success worthy of my surroundings. It's time to become one of the wealthy denizens of my hometown.  To become someone who contributes to the stature and prestige of where I live. Someone who can bring some authenticity to this living commercial.

In short, it's time to become Richard Castle.

I've already written about how I use Castle as one of my personal avatars.  But I was watching Season One on DVD the other day, and I realized it's time to step up my game.  In the episode "Home is Where the Heart Stops" (not the best episode title, I know), Castle and Detective Kate Beckett attend a charity gala undercover to try to flush out a gang of thieves who use these occasions to case their targets: wealthy socialites with expensive jewelry.  While Castle wanders off to chat with another guest, a woman approaches Beckett and says the words to this effect:

     Rich, famous, handsome, and single.  We call him the white whale.

And when I heard this line, I knew this is where I need to be focusing my energies.  This is who I have to become.  The white whale....not Moby Dick: even Castle was worried about that one when Kate told him about his moniker.

It's the Scarface thing: get the money and the power, you get the women. 

The trick, though, is just focusing on getting the money and the power....

Power kinda sucks, though, I'll take money, especially if it comes in for doing something that I enjoy doing.

Of course, with the MS now at 106,000 or so words - I added a few before starting this blog - I'm closer than ever, but there's tons more work to do. 

But back to being Castle.

He's funny, charming, witty, good looking, and successful.  He isn't used to losing - which he finds out the hard way near the end of Season Two - and has a reputation for being a ladies' man because, let's face it, the honeys ain't no golddiggers, but they ain't messin' with no broke (broke).....

And yet, Rick Castle's also got a daughter whom he loves and looks after very well, and had his mother move into his Westie apartment.  His actual lifestyle is far less racy than his reputation indicates, and he is driven by far higher ethics than he otherwise gets credit for.  He's saved Beckett's life at least twice at significant risk to his own, and he's helped put away real criminals using his lateral thinking skills and finding the story behind the crime that academy-trained cops don't often see in their cases.  In short, contributing to the well being of society, in his own fashion.

This is the type of lifestyle I need to create.  There are a million wannabe writers out there, and though I've written a book and technically published it, it's not with a publishing house.  That's my measure of success.  Self-publication lets you hold your book in your hands, with your name on it, lets you know that you can be an author.  Publication with an agent behind it and the full distribution and promotional machine of a publishing house lets you know that what you've authored is good. 

It's like Bret Maverick in the Mel Gibson movie taking part in the poker tournament: he won't know how good he is until he puts it to the test.  That's my ambition with my novel MS.  I'm going to see how good I truly am.

That's my only real goal as of now.  That's the one thing that justifies the daily mediocrity.  Government work is good, and if I pass my probation at month's end, I will be, for all intents and purposes, bulletproof.  I'll be a permanent government employee backed by one of the most powerful public service unions in Canada: I would have to put poison my office cooler in order to get fired. And yet, as grateful as I am to be employed, the job is mediocre.  The money is good enough to get me significant luxury and pay the bills, but not to the stratospheric heights I'd like to reach in my life.  My job can send me to Florida: my writing could send me to Monaco or Dubai or the South Pacific. And each day not spent adding even a little to that writing puts me one day further back from those adventures.

That's where I'm at.  Castle will be my final avatar, I'm sick of using them. After this, I've got to make Jody Aberdeen the guy that others want to be.  And the only way I'm gonna do that is to keep writing.

Here's a clip from the pilot, if you haven't already seen it.  FYI, my book launch will look very much like this one (with equal to lesser frequency of chest signage....most likely lesser).

P.S. Writer's Block, consider yourself pwned.   See the image on the left. 

Avatars

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(Logic-Stoopid Ratio: 9:1 Mood: Smartypants)

With Avatar coming out on DVD, I'm surprised to find that most people don't know about the word itself.

The avatar originated as a Hindu religious construct, thousands of years old. It means "descent", referring to the physical appearance of a deity in the flesh, having descended from heaven to Earth. It is essentially an interface, or representation, if you will, of an aspect of divinity in daily life, for the purpose of interaction between mortals and the gods.

In 2010, we - as in Western civilization - have appropriated the term to mean a representation of a real person in another medium, like wearing a diving suit while exploring the ocean. Mostly, we apply this to computers - i.e. your chosen MSN or Facebook profile pic is your "avatar" within that environment, and users interact with you via that representation - and, of course, in the film Avatar, which makes literal usage of it, creating bodies that act as the medium of interaction between the research scientists on Pandora and the Na'vi people.

Purists hate it when we Westerners appropriate terms from other cultures for our own usage, but I've always felt there's a creative aspect to appropriation, a synthesis of ideas to create a new way of seeing an old concept. And we all use "avatars" every day, although many of them are as much a show for our inner selves as they are for others in our daily experience of life.

Your personal avatar represents who you want to be as much as who you are now (or who you think you are). I suspect that out of the ten or so Hindu avatars that allegedly walked the Earth, their devotees were as much looking to create in themselves the qualities of the particular gods that were made manifest in the flesh. With Facebook in particular, profile avatars express complex feelings that words cannot, while ensuring that the outsiders know it's you who they're looking at.

Then, there's life itself, especially when you're a teenager...

Most teenage boys' hero worship involves hockey players and quarterbacks, or martial artists. Not so much me: mine were all fictional characters on TV.

In Grade 9, I had transferred out of French Immersion and was starting out with a new group of peers. Given that I wasn't terribly popular before, and that I didn't want to have the same level of bullying recur at the new place, I decided to reinvent myself. So, I chose this guy...



I never completely grew out of the noble, upstanding, fish-out-of-water and terribly polite Mountie, but Due South's Constable Benton Fraser served the purpose of reinventing myself as an overall "nice guy", someone who you could be friends with and who would be nice to other people. Someone with a sense of order, Canadian, decorum, a quiet, polite hero. The nice guyishness has stuck, though I find it somewhat disturbing that ultimately he's almost undone by a woman two seasons in...oh well.

I also had small periods of time when I used to see things through this eyes of this science fictional character... Of course, Babylon 5's Captain John J. Sheridan was far more badass than I ever could have been in high school (or even now), but the idea was to teach me to build up some backbone, become someone who would fight for principle, even if, for me, the weapons came in the form of words. Plus, he was "The One" of Three people who had a destiny to change the course of the galaxy. He brought different races together, commanded fleets, saved Earth from dictatorial rule, and created an Interstellar Alliance between them. And they made a line of plush teddy bears named after him, in at least one episode, anyway....

Of course, university changed a few things, and when I joined Phi Delta Theta in second year, I realized I had to start looking towards the type of future that I wanted to be, and the man I wanted to become. And when I became Chapter President, a time that coincided with the release of my all-time favourite movie trilogy, suddenly this figure appeared from the shadows to claim his rightful place as my new avatar...



Now, choosing Aragorn as my avatar wasn't merely my usual delusion of grandeur acting up. Rather, I wanted to feel that I was someone who was headed to great things, that I could serve the Greater Good, help others, the realization of the "destiny" that I had started to feel I had in high school. From him, I learned courage, character, healing others, love and dedication, and fellowship. This especially became true after my buddy and pledge brother Michael described me as "the heart, and the butt, of the Chapter" (the guys didn't let me get away with taking myself too seriously. They still don't. That's what lifelong friends are for.)

Today...well, I've come back to reality. I'm not going to be a Mountie, a Captain, or a King. I'm 29 years old with less than half a year to my thirties. I'm single and not completely loving it. And I'm still getting this writing career off the ground. And though I may still have some greater destiny in store for me, I'm not nearly as sure of anything anymore, except that life will be what it is whether or not I like it, and it's all in how I approach it. I'm in between the guy who is looking for it all, and the guy who has it all. As such, it's appropriate that my avatars waver between these two (I'm tempted to photoshop them into a hybrid)...

Ted Mosby is a romantic, a dreamer, an overthinker, and a creator of his own destiny. We already know his show, How I Met Your Mother, has a happy ending: what we want to see is, well, howit all went down.

The other guy, Richard Castle, is where I hope to be in a few years. A successful writer, artist, and badass. A father, and yet despite having been married (and divorced) twice, he still has the ability to fall in love, as the on-screen angst with Kate Beckett will attest. It's the success that appeals to me, one that I look forward to so much.

As I said, the avatar represents as much who you want to be as who you are right now. I'm pretty happy when I see my Facebook friends shuffle around their profile avatars: they capture us at our best, even if they don't always bear our faces, they show who we would like to be. They express how we're feeling, what we're looking for, so much more symbolically and powerfully than words.

Whichever avatar you choose, make sure it says something about the characteristics within you that are now rising to the surface like lava bubbles, or the abilities you feel you need to attain by summoning the power of your chosen figures.

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