Two Tribes

    The OLN show Departures is one of my favourites. 

http://www.departuresentertainment.com/about.html

Two ordinary twenty-and-thirtysomething guys from Ontario, Justin and Scott, along with their videographer buddy Andre, set out to travel the world for a year, to finally do what so many people say they want to do, but never do.  The first season was supposed to have been the only one, I think, but the show was such a success, the network picked it up, and now the trio makes a living from wandering the Earth.

    A recent episode featured a stop in Ethiopia, where their local guide took them to a part of the country, in the south, that remained largely untouched by development.  There, a traditional tribe was having a bull-jumping ceremony, as part of a celebration of an arranged marriage for one of the tribesmen.  It's not glamourous - the ritual involves flagellation and some animal sacrifice - but what always gets me about rituals like this is how insular and together everyone is.  The tribe moves as one, even though they all scatter separately in the day to day living.  The sheer harmony of the scene even brings Scott to tears at one point, and this is a guy who's charted more of the world and its plethora of experiences than most of us will ever see in a single lifetime. 

   A recollection from a broadcast of The Moth that I heard two years ago comes to mind.  The American storyteller recounted his work in Rwanda, and how he had a time when he was simply not feeling well. When one of the locals found out, he gathered the entire village together for a ceremony.  The storyteller, in mock humourous fashion, tells the tale of the ceremony.  Highlights: a goat was sacrificed, and he was made to strip naked and have the blood smeared on him. He was brought out into the sun at noon where everyone in the village engaged in a dance ritual that made him feel delerious and disoriented, and by the end of it, he felt elated and much better than how he was. 

   Later on, in another part of Africa, he recounted the experience to another tribesman, who said that his had something very similar to what he had experienced.  He told the American that it was far better than having the Western psychiatrists there.  When asked why, the tribesman responded that the ceremony had several holistic elements that would heal most disease: going out in the sun for the light and heat; moving around rhythmically to get exercise; but most importantly, getting the whole village out to show that whatever you were going through, you were not alone.

  By contrast, said the tribesman, Western psychiatrists brought people into a closed dark room indoors, sat them down at a cold table alone, and made remember all bad things that had happened to them.  "That's when we knew we had to get these people out of the country as soon as possible," said the tribesman.

  That day-to-day living here in the West lacks this harmony is old news, but the trend is changing. Aside from the Boomerang Generation of kids who move back in with their parents in their late twenties and thirties, friends cluster together in the same neighbourhoods, if not the same houses.  Blended families are practically the norm in most urban and suburban centres.  City planners now design neighbourhoods that facilitate closer social interactions, and hotspots like the Second Cup where I'm writing this in downtown Burlington are becoming more commonplace in new suburban housing developments: locales where you can gather and connect with human beings.

   People you meet and connect with eventually become part of your social networks, but really, what I feel we want is not a network, but a tribe.  That's what I want, anyway.  And it's what I have.

   I have two tribes: my family and my friends. Unfortunately, as I make the move home for a few months, I will lose proximity to one tribe in favour of the other.  I need them both, much more than I really appreciated until recent days.  Obviously, thanks to the advent of the internal combustion engine, the phone, and the Internet, we're always connected.  An hour's drive away, an instant by phone or email or Facebook. 

   And yet, that doesn't satisfy completely.  Having my two tribes separated by distance sucks, and neither of them will likely relocate anytime soon to one location or the other. 

  I have a dream archetype that I wrote about a year ago, in which everyone I know and love in the world lives in houses on the same street in the same city.  In that dream, there's nowhere I can walk- the market, the mall, the park, the cafe - where I don't run into someone I know or am related to.  I'd love to have that in real life.

Grandpa and me at  Mom's old house in Trinidad,
 Guessing something like 1982.

   Maybe this is genetic. Mom and Dad's families both lived within the same square kilometre in Trinidad, at a place called the Junction just outside of Princes Town.  Everyone knew everyone else around there, cradle to grave.  Unless soemone there was actually crazy or violent or deliberately anti-social, no one ever experienced the isolation I've felt in recent months.  I'd love to have that kind of community coupled with the diversity of life in Canada and the prosperity of the city in which I'm still residing for the next month.

   The common occupancy of the same shared physical space matters: for the time that we're together in the same place, that's home.  Here the West, we're so used to treating "home" as just the place where your stuff is, but I feel at home at Michael's house, at this 2Cup, at my soon-to-be-former apartment, at Mom and Dad's, out with my friends. Even that transitory space between each person when we're all walking to the bar or a movie or some other gathering place together is, for that time, our space, and feels like home while we're in it.

    Because as much as I may require an intervention for my Facebook habit, for all of my own lone wolf time, I never want to lose the daily real world contact with my tribe.  Never again.  I think next time, I'd much rather share a place with my own bedroom and a common area than an entire place to myself.  Some people are built like that or they're just plain used to it.  After a year of this, such a solitary lifestyle is no longer what I want or need.

 When I move back out, it'll either be with a bunch of buddies sharing a house or something, or my own place that I'll share with my next girlfriend in a city near enough to everyone I care about.  I needed this year to centre myself after my ex and I split, and it's done that, but everyone in transition reaches a point where you no longer want or need to be alone in order to discover yourself.

   Surround yourself with the people you love. Home is wherever you can all be together, the same shared space, even if the space itself changes. And when you're feeling dis-ease, your tribe will bring you out into the sun, they will lift you up, and they will restore your well-being, just by being there for you.

 Only there'll be no need for goat sacrifices. We'll just get pizza.  Pizza's good.

Dare the Universe

Blog Evolution

To make any blog more searchable, it helps to include a few words about what it's about.  It's also preferable not to have those keywords all appearing at once in the title banner.  Hence, why I've resorted to the tag cloud, visible in the module on the upper right corner of the homepage to Dispatches.  I did a quick skim of all the entries to date and tagged according to what I saw. By the numbers, this isn't as much of a divorce blog as I thought it was.  We'll see how it evolves from here.

The Secret, on Amphetamines

Thursday, I returned home from work.  Another busy week, yet more mediocrity. 

The reason I'm perpetually unsatisfied in most jobs I've held is that most of them have been office work without much room for creativity, and I'm a creative person.  The most creative office based job I ever had was at the virtual concierge where I worked before lucking out on the government position.  Even that gig was heavily regulated due to the nature of the service we were providing.  I stick with administration for the same reason that food servers with other passions stick to waiting tables: it's the only means of making money to support their basic needs they've ever done while bigger dreams are still pending.

I'll also flat out state that the Public Service, from a creative standpoint, is a zombie apocalypse.  It does many things well, but encouraging innovation, imagination, and outside-the-box thinking is not part of the deal.  Nor should it be: you need to conform to existing processes and suppress all independent thought or desires to change the system, because there's only so much you can change.  Again, nothing inherently wrong with that.  But  I can decide is where I want to stand in relation to it all.  I'll do my job, but I need to get out before I, too, get zombified.

So, I returned home from work and decide to pop in The Secret. 

Now, most of my science-y friends and more rationalistic buddies don't necessarily buy into the Law of Attraction, or the way it's presented in The Secret. Fair enough. What you have to realize is that this DVD was my introduction to the concept.  I have it practically memorized. So even though I have my own doubts from time to time,  The Secret is part of my own belief system. Thus, telling me not to watch it, or to discount it on empirical grounds, is like telling a Catholic not to attend mass, or a Muslim not to bow to the east. Many scientists are devoutly religious, keep that in mind.  And I have had some rather anomalous experiences the methodology that prove, in my subjective experience, that the Law of Attraction exists, and works as advertised.

And one such experience occurred that night. 

I decided to do some visualizing of my own.  Scheduled to pay a visit to my talent agency on Saturday to activate my profile and start getting auditions for film and TV work, I started to fantasize about such a gig. 

Since this opportunity landed in my lap, I've had various fantasies and daydreams of success in commercials, film and TV which I won't share here, frankly because I don't trust that some well-meaning but skeptical readers won't shoot them down on practical grounds.  Watching The Secret, I decided to indulge in these daydreams. 

Two minutes - two minutes! - after I began my reverie, the phone rang.  It was the agency.  On a hunch, they wanted to see if I could audition for a major restaurant chain the very next day!  Normally, they'd wait until I was completely set up, but they were in a bind and were willing to chance a long shot.

I was stunned.  Chalk it up to coincidence all you want, it was a wake-up call of the biggest sorts. 

And I ended up turning them down.  A manager at my office was retiring the next day, so my absence from the office would have been conspicuous.  Or so I told myself.  They said "no worries", and I hung up the phone.

Next day, I went back to work.  Long story short, I wasn't nearly as needed as I thought I was. 

Today, I went in, and finalized my setup.  And I found out I had a great chance to have landed that part had I gone to that audition.  Major.  More where that came from, sure, but I've learned a few lessons from this.

First, office work assimilates people: people become bureaucratized quite easily. This happens in the private sector, sure, but government's particularly nasty at that because everything's hyper regulated and monitored.  Just visit any family court.  Remember the episode of The Simpsons where Homer actually files for divorce from Marge?  Who could forget the immortal words of comfort of the court clerk (who looked suspiciously like Lunch Lady Doris)?  "These things happen. Eight dollars".  This lady actually exists, I'll tell you.

As physically safe and mentally simple as government work can be, it steals the spirit of the artist, one bit of ectoplasm at a time, until you're nothing but an overweight, cardigan-wearing zombie, more concerned with potluck parties and the weekly lottery pool than trying to do anything more creative and passionate.  Don't rock the boat. Don't ask too many questions. Don't take risks.  That becomes your life, if you can call it living.

Second, bureaucratization causes you to lose sight of your own big picture.  No adventure would be considered risky if you weren't willing to lose everything, but it takes balls of pure adamantium to actually do it. 

Had I gone for that audition and booked it, it would have been worth the one day off and the potential wrath of my boss to get the start of a new career and several thousand dollars which would help me pay debt and travel.  But on the phone, having to make a split second decision, the reflex to play it safe that I've developed over a year of government work was all too automatic. 

In order to be an actual risk taker and not some guy who blogs about it from his all-too-comfortable swivel chair on his lunch break, you've got to actually take risks.

Finally, there's always more where that came from.  I'm not only talking TV auditions, here.  I'm talking full-time jobs.   In retrospect, I got everything backwards ass.  I took the risk of leaving full-time work to pursue my passion when I was supporting my ex, and now play it safe as a single guy with no one depending on me. 

Switching that around means daring the Universe.  It means being willing to sacrifice a sure bet for the slippery chance at your own fairy tale.  It means knowing that just as you step over the chasm, a step will rise up just as you're about to fall and catch your foot.  And another, and another, until you reach the other side.

The last time I decided to really take a risk was in 2007. That was when, supported by my ex, I quit my job at the distribution centre where I had worked since high school with nothing else lined up to replace it.  And all along that chain of events leading me to this writing, never once did I end up starving, or on the street, or having to tuck tail and move back in with Mom and Dad.  On the contrary: money and work always showed up somehow, in various forms, just in time to keep me going.

That's not to say it didn't have a price in debt or stress, but overall, Serendipity has looked after me.  I just forget about her in weaker moments, as do we all.  Fortunately, Serendipity is a forgiving lady. And hot to boot.

I'm not quitting my office job, to be clear, nor am I going to slack off.  But I am extending the same rule I had when I started: never let it interfere with my greater ambitions.  There are always other jobs, but precious few big dreams, the latter of which have only the narrowest of opportunities to become reality.

I have no illusions that I will become a major Hollywood star or anything, nor am I giving up writing to do this, but I am definitely open to the possibility, and am willing to be passionnate about any work I get and see where the passion leads me.

And next time they call, I am saying "yes" to whatever gorram audition they have for me.

Eames the Forger says it best in Inception: "You musn't be afraid to dream a little bigger, darling". 

Surely,  I can dream bigger than my desk.

Ordinary Stories

   More entries coming soon, but I've been mulling some things, and that I'd like to mull about out loud to the Internets.

   Inspired by a recent entry on Julius' blog, I've been doing a lot of thinking about this blog's many autobiographical qualities.  As a rather direct chronicle of the past year, Dispatches and its previous incarnation, Jody's Quarter Life Adventure, tells the story of my renaissance, my new start in life after my divorce, and the new experiences I've had since.  Really, though, even the past year, the past decade, is but a part of my life overall. And I've had some interesting episodes to say the least.

   Like Julius, I'm fascinated and baffled by the motivation that inspires ordinary people to want to share their life stories with those who would listen, even those who could care less. Then again, some of the most interesting people I've learned about in the past year include Allie Brosh, who I've only learned about through her blog and who has really made me feel more all right with my own eccentricities (she has them too, and so do most of her 30,000 readers).  Though I only have 13 "official" followers, I know many people read my entries, and take something away from them that helps them.  That's my hope, anyway.

   Every person's story has to have some value outside of that person's own life.  You can't break everything down into objective, quantitative terms: do we all have to be John Nash to deserve to have our stories told? Howard Hughes? Temple Grandin? Out of six billion lives on the planet, does no one else have value? 

   If life has no inherent meaning - which I believe it doesn't - and if it's thus contingent upon us to assign meaning to it, then ultimately there are no ordinary stories. Very few boring stories: just maybe boring storytellers.


  Poignancy exists, and joy, in the words of obscure writers, of which I'm still one, though I hope it changes.  In the meantime, interesting, ordinary stories are everywhere.  And though they're each unique, they are also shared human experiences.

  A 21 year old woman in Britain is diagnosed with terminal cancer, so she moves up her wedding to her fiance in the hope of creating "the best day of her life".  But it's such a common tale - touching, heartbreaking, deeply rich in human experience - that when I google "terminally-ill bride" to get the link for the story, I find numerous other entries for different people touched by this same kind of transformative experience.  I first see the story on Yahoo! News one day, and I remember it.

   A few days later, I hear this song on the radio, and the vision of one such dying bride falling into the arms of her new husband and choosing this song for their first dance plays out in a cinematic high definition in my mind's eye.  And it's so poignant it hurts.  Imagine a moment of such...honesty, to be among those teary-eyed guests in the presence of two people, savouring each instant of time with each other before an end that could come anytime. 

   I just made that moment up, true.  But these real-life human experiences happen all the time.  And many of us never hear about it, save for those who are witnesses, and those who choose to share.

  How many of us have failed to be transformed by stories worth hearing because we never heard them?

  My experiences aren't, for the most part, all that dramatic, but they are notable, and over the next few weeks, you'll start seeing more accounts of my 29th year.  This has been so transformative for me, someone has to benefit from my story, even if it's just me telling it, and knowing someone else is reading it.

  That's the hope, anyway

Shadowy Seasonal Spin Cycles

Underlying the commercial side of Halloween is its origin. Samhain is the reason for this particular season, and I won't re-explain the significance of this (neo)pagan observance here. Its origins, however, remind us of the cycle of life and death. The harvest is as much a symbol for death as it is a literal reaping of the crops, where we reflect on what we've done and what's happened. 

Halloween was low key for me this year, with one party and a Sunday spent at home on a ghost walk through the beautiful Church St. Cemetery in Brampton with Mom and Dad.  During that visit, my mother and I watched a DVD from motivational speaker Debbie Ford called The Shadow Effect. Shadow work is a conscious acknowledgement and introspective study of all the qualities of your being that you hide from others. The parts of yourself that you're ashamed of - your fears, your past transgressions against others, your guilt, your regrets, etc..

According to Ford and other experts, whenever you react unusually strongly to a slight provocation; whenever you indulge in something that you rail against publicly (see NY Gov. Spitzer, or Rush Limbaugh, or the Catholic Church), or sabotage yourself, that's your Shadow getting tired of being suppressed and ignored.  Those are dramatic examples.  The rest of the time, the Shadow acts in millions of small ways that compromise you, leading to boredom, routine, the inability to escape from vicious cycles of behaviour, finances, health. 

That which we bury in the earth will grow back. Always. Don't believe me? Watch Dawn of the Dead.

I'm familiar with shadow work. Much of my twenties has been about looking at myself critically and as objectively as possible. This work is never done. It's not intended to "cure" all your ills or eliminate the darkness: those who war against their own darkness really war against themselves, and will never feel whole. Rather, it's to embrace the totality of your being, light and dark. It means understanding that for you to live in a nice house, every now and then you've got to take out the trash and sweep the floor. It's the way of things.

Monday being the start of a new month, I figured that some shadow work on myself was a great way to mark a new beginning. Everyone could use some honest-to-Zeus introspection.

Among the other creatures hiding in the dark, I discovered Stuckness. I was stuck. Existentially bored. And the goal wasn't to slay Stuckness, for he's a part of me, but to cure him.

Arriving at the Goodlife Fitness after work that Monday, I sauntered into the mall, up the stairs past the usual regulars, and into the locker room. I changed in the same spot near the same locker, and headed out to the floor to do the same cardio-resistance routine I've been doing for months.  All I could see was drab routine: my work, my exercise, my weekly calendar.  Blah, blah.....blah.  Was this really life? 

Then I saw that the spin class was starting in ten minutes.

I see it every time that I'm in there - seemingly crazy people, dripping with sweat, killing themselves on the bikes to pretty catchy techno music and rock and roll - and I'd always promised I'd try it once.  Still, the tricky part about a routine is that you're at once sick of the normal, and very comfortable with it.  I'd fought the impulse to go for weeks, despite having reached plateaued in my weight loss around 215 pounds. 

But Monday night, the thought of another boring 45 minute elliptical session kicked me in the ass, and I took the leap.  I walked in, met the instructor, set myself up, and joined in.

As I said on Facebook, Megadeth would be happy to know that I've found a 100th way to die....

And yet, it was worth it, not so much for the exercise - which was amazing, and which wore me out enough that I went to bed at 9:30pm - but for the sake of the New.  Suddenly, even though I'd changed absolutely nothing else in my routine, my life felt more interesting, and that's what ultimately counts: how you feel about your life.

I've talked about the Power of Now, but sometimes the solution to existential angst is simply to try something new, even if it's something small.  Spin classes, of course, are somewhat dramatic if you're not into exercise that much, but I realized that I am thoroughly missing new stimuli.  Time to embrace the Power of New.

A slide from the creepy DHARMA Initiative brainwashing film from LOST quotes the Buddha:

"Plant a good seed and you will joyfully gather fruit". 

As Samhain ends, according to the Pagan calendar, those in the Northern Hemisphere lie directly opposite of Ostara, the spring holiday when we plant next year's harvest, when we sow new seeds, and start the cycle over again.

Naturally, we don't have to wait to re-create ourselves. Everyone has a stuckness monster living in their shadow.

And for people like me who, more than most, have to do regular inner work to prevent the monster from manifesting in yet another life crisis, sometimes all it takes is to do one new thing - plant one good seed no matter how small - to cure the hapless creature, shine a light for him to see, and set him free.

What this Blog Is Really About

   Recent events in my personal life that peripherally involve my writings have inspired this entry.

   I've had online journals before, all of which I let lapse.  As I had finished my first book and approached the middle of my second manuscript back in late 2009, restarting a blog was definitely on my mind, but I procrastinated. 

  Then, this past January, my marriage ended in a very dramatic way, and suddenly I had a lot I wanted to share with people I knew, even people I didn't.

   Looking back over the archives, it's been a long journey.  I've covered far more mileage than most people in my situation would have.  I'm a very different person than when I started, a better one, if maybe more frenetic, at once more and less certain of himself and the new identity I am still crafting for myself. 

  And though I've hesitated at times, both off and online, I've ultimately had no qualms sharing it all with the entire wired world in this forum.

   But make no mistake: my openness about my doubts and weaknesses, moments of frustration, does not give you the right to treat me like a weakling.  In many ways, because I can open up, I'm stronger than the manliest alpha, because I've got the balls to walk with an open heart.

   So what is this blog?

Odd Place is My Web Presence. You'll notice the tabs I keep for my new talent work, my bio, my books, and my freelance work. This is the professional portion of my home page. Everything else is for fun.

Odd Place is My Story:  My life's far more interesting than it might seem at the outset. Off the top of my head, at least fifty or so good souls out there consider me a good soul, a close friend, and someone they care about.  My story thus matters to several people, and I don't mind sharing it. 

  (Hell, if I never wrote this blog, I never would have met Alice, and my BlackBerry would be tragically vacant)

Odd Place is My Therapist.  Yes, I've taken therapy in the past.  It's helped. 

  I hear rumours some of you consider it unmanly or gay to take psychological therapy, to openly talk about dreams, emotions, ideas, and the dreaded "f" word for most straight guys, "feelings".

  You know what, how's this for an "f" word? Fuck that! 

  Half the benefit of all therapy is simply knowing that another human being out there knows your insides, can clue in to what's happening to you. Writing here about major problems, frustrations, and anxieties helps me feel better.

  And if you guys think this misrepresents me to be more fucked up than I am, consider this: I have to be in a clear, calm, and content frame of mind to be able to write about anything, let alone a major personal problem. 

  By the time you read about something like my nervous breakdown or my frustrations with working and dating, or whatever, it means that the negativity is already out of my system.  It's gone, out of my mind, body, and spirit and onto the page, presented in such a way that it can benefit someone else experiencing something similar. 

  This is how I vent, and when you meet me in real life after I've posted something dramatic here, I'm more than okay.  I'm Tony the fucking Tiger.  I'm GREAAAT! 

Odd Place is My Canvas.  Finally, I'm an artist.  Always have been, always will be. There are days that I crave heading out to the bars with the boys or out to play baseball or hockey, and there are days where I'm content to lose myself in my own daydreams. Lately, the introvert days outnumber the extrovert ones.

  I've grown into a social animal, but in many ways, I am still the kid who'd vanish to a grassy hill in the spring, lay back, and spend his lunch hour staring at the clouds.  I've had many events happen in my life that could have potentially killed that kid, but he's still around, seeing sailboats where the rest of us see cumuli. 

  Some people were born to throw a football around; others to run a city; maintain the law, or advance science and technology.  I was born to be a writer and an artist.  Whether the medium's electronic or acrylic, paper page or plasticine, I will use it to express myself. 

  This is a place where I can create whatever the hell it is I want to create, in a medium where I am proficient to the government-tested tune of 134 WPM.  A place where I can manifest as quickly as I can think.  People talk about "playing God"; how many of them put the emphasis on the "playing"?  Not many.

  So that's it.  If you're curious about the events in question, they're still ongoing, and if I do decide to comment, it'll be after they've passed.  Until then, have a pleasant evening!

"Some Radical Notions..."

   Less than a week to 30 years old.  Something tells me the air's not gonna feel that much different when I wake up on Friday.  Intellectually, I know it doesn't matter.  Emotionally, I'm much better with 30 than two years ago.  Still, it's a milestone, and we like to celebrate milestones: new years, anniversaries, new decades, centuries, high school reunions (now in danger in this post-Facebook age).  So, yes, there is that subtle pressure to mark the passing in some way. 

   I suppose that anxiety, almost desperation, that I've felt in years past as similar milestones approached was to ensure I didn't just let the moment slip, to do what Henry David Thoreau wrote about (made famous in Dead Poets Society):

 "I went to the woods because I wanted to live deliberately. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life. To put to rout all that was not life; and not, when I had come to die, discover that I had not lived."

   The bright side about living for the Now is never having to worry not living.  The next five days don't necessarily have to be the last five days of 29.  They can just be the next five days.  That being said, I have a deadline to meet, and this is my warm-up for today's work.

****

 Dreams have been preoccupying my idle time lately.  I'm not only talking metaphorically, but of actual dreaming, REM sleep, id, ego, and superego type of dreaming.  Lucid dreaming, and so on.

   Dream incubation is a process whereby you try to trigger specific dreams in response to a specific question or problem.  We all do it without meaning to whenever we're facing a deep crisis in waking life.  How often has the solution, or at least an important puzzle piece on the way to the solution, presented itself while asleep?  It hasn't worked completely, but it has enhanced the potency of dreaming, such that I'm remembering more details now.  The subconscious is like any muscle in your body: give it attention after a period of neglect, and it will grow stronger.  While I'm not directly dreaming about the biggest challenge in my waking life - finishing up my novel in less than a week - it's helping me laterally: I'm finding writing easier now, more of a flow.  I did 3,000 words yesterday alone, and it didn't feel like work. 

   But I digress.  Dreams exist beyond practical, waking life applications.  As utilitarian as we are, sometimes we'd be better off just enjoying the experiences for what they are, not what uses we can put them towards. 

   To say that I liked the film Inception is an understatement.  It's the type of story I wish I'd written.  Damon Lindelhof feels the same way, having tweeted much the same when it first hit theatres.  I'll tell you, if Mr. Lindelhof, the guy who thought up LOST, one of my all time favourite TV shows, feels that way, you can imagine my sense of writer's envy at this concept.

    Late author Michael Talbot wrote about "a participatory reality", that life may in fact be holographic in nature. A true sheet of holographic film - not necessarily the kind you see on credit cards or cheap store bought products, but the ones in art displays that require lasers to illuminate them - has the whole image embedded into each part of the film.  Cut the film in several pieces, and each piece reflects the entire image, rather than a piece of it. This model of existence as a "holographic universe", as Talbot put it in the book of the same name, means that every part of reality necessarily contains all the other parts. This means that the traditional, common sensical experience of the 9 to 5 life for most of us is connected to the dreamworlds that we explore before the alarm clock goes off, and we "wake up".

  One of Inception's subplots involves a character who loses the distinction between the dream world and the real world.  Sadly, it leads to her death in real life, which of course, when you take a step back, is not real life at all, but a film creation.  We lose ourselves in movie theatres, and for that time before the suspension of disbelief kicks*, the film world becomes reality.  To paraphrase Leonardo di Caprio's character Dom in Inception, it's only when we've left the theatre that we've noticed something weird: namely, that it wasn't real.  But for the time you were engrossed in it, it was real, and that makes me wonder: what makes the movie reality less real than real life? 

   It's a classic Matrix style question, repeated so often over the past twenty years of speculative fiction and TV talk show spirituality that it's bordering on cliché.  Are the things that we create real? 

   The mediocre, analytical mind says, "Oh, of course not.  It's just a story. Quit your daydreaming, melonhead!"  Yes, we get that.  In our day-to-day reality, where we just accept what we're given and do our best to work with it, where we become uncomfortable with concepts that shake our view of the world, that's the obvious answer.  In waking life, yes, they're just inkblots on a piece of paper or chemical reactions on celluloid.

  Then again, when we've lost ourselves in someone else's dream world, whether it's captured on film or on paper, how can we deny the reality of our experience?  Is it truly vicarious living in those moments, or does it become vicarious only after the experience is over?  Now being all we have, that tells me that what I'm doing, what all creative people are doing, is creating a real world, a true story.  There may be no such thing as "fiction".

   Because if even one human being can lose himself or herself in another's narrative, then the experience is real, meaning there is a world on the page and on film that is just as real as the days spent filling out TPS reports, serving people coffee, running corporations, or even wandering the streets, unemployed and destitute. Media is simply our point of access.

   This is the essence of my novel.  I set a personal deadline to finish it by my 30th birthday. I have five days, yes, but I also have right now.  And now is all we ever have that's real.

***

(* yes, that was an Inception term)

A Lone Wolf in a Bubble Universe

Every now and then, I find myself in a bubble universe.

Growing up, I was a lone wolf.  Never the most popular kid on the playground, always lost in my own daydreams at recess (and not always by choice), I spent a lot of time wandering around the trees and bike paths, reading, drawing, writing, and just thinking.  High school came around, and I started making friends, met a girl there who I eventually followed to university, where I would then meet some of my closest friends, more family than family in many cases.  For much of the past ten years, I was a social being, a denizen of a community and civilization, seldom a day passing by when I didn't see or talk to someone I knew.

As for that girl, I would live with her for most of my twenties, marry her, and ultimately split from her. My family of friends remained, although many of them have either moved away, or our day-to-day lives have tended to diverge.  These days, for the most part, I've become a lone wolf again, and I've returned to exploring the wild.

I'm ambivalent about my alone time.  Loneliness abounds, and yet so does freedom.  I sleep alone, and yet I sleep wherever I want.  Often, I miss having someone to come home to, and yet I come and go as I please.  It's all a contradiction made manifest, my life at present.  Sometimes, though, I question whether it's that I choose this lifestyle, or if I've just gotten used to it.

Then, the bubble appears.

The human experience of existence sometimes generates more solitary shamans than venerated priests, of which I am definitely more of the former.  At this moment, I'd rather live with what feels right than what makes rationalistic or intellectual sense; would rather express sentiment, not argument; do what I want, even if the group begs to differ.  When I feel this way, I know that I'm in the bubble.

Several signs also indicate that my universe has become a bubble.  For starters, my sarcasm has lost all effectiveness.  I make jokes, friendly jibes towards my friends, and they all fall flat, creating irritation and making me appear to be a first-class douche.  It's as if some invisible force field has appeared between me and the rapport I've built with my closest friends over the past decade and they no longer "get me". Trying more simply pisses them off, making me want to withdraw rather than risk creating additional faux-pas.

Then I go the other way: I stop censoring myself on blogs and status updates and just say what's on my mind without giving a shit what people think. I ignore the stronger Alpha personalities trying to get me to do things I don't feel like doing.  As grateful as I am for my family of friends, I begin to reject the group.

I know I'm in the bubble because currently, I'm very productive in my personal life - papers signed and delivered, bills paid, dust-bunnies cleaned, stories completed, weights lifted, ellipticals run.  Similarly, while accomplishing old tasks and fulfilling old habits, I'm also seeking out new experiences, the types of things that I can best do alone when the group isn't leading me.  I've held leadership positions in the past, but I've never had an overriding urge to be in charge, to tell people what they can and can't do.  But nor do I want to be told what to do by someone else, not right now, anyway. 

Finally....I'm in the bubble because, well, I just prefer being alone.  It's that simple.

And yet, not completely.

Living with a romantic partner for years gets you accustomed to having another soul around, someone who's not just a "buddy", and as much as you can adapt and actually prosper as a single, independent, and free person, there is always a residual part of you that aches for one person to be there to hold you tight, to be intimate with, and to keep you warm at night.  No amount of buddy time, whether it's spent watching a game or trying to pick up girls at a club or a bar, is going to help: when I'm in the bubble, such activities only serve to remind me of what I don't have.  No, when my universe becomes rather bubbly, I work best finding new love on my own terms.

Far from being a form of weakness, this desire and yearning for intimacy is a part of the human experience, one that I never want to lose for the temporary sake of not feeling sad. Because, ultimately, in life as in fable, even the lone wolves of the world find each other, on their own terms, when the time's right. 

The bubble universe will burst, a not-so-Big Bang that will start everything fresh, restore the connections, bring me back to civilization.  Eventually, I'll re-emerge, but not today. 

Today, I'm in the wild. 

See you next time.

Randoms - July 21 2010

Class Hatred:  I just finished Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club. Fucking amazing book. Much more to it than just fighting, and you know what, it’s explained why I’ve been feeling the pressure from my hometown lately. I’m feeling a Durden-esque class hatred on right now everywhere I look. And it’s true: to a certain degree, I’ve bought into what society and advertising says I should have, not what I actually want, and that I don't have. No wonder I'm so grouchy lately.

The malfunction many of us working stiffs feel is that simultaneous desire for the high standards of living and life experiences that wealth brings – the exotic vacations, the nice living spaces, the hot cars, the mansions with furniture that’s so fluffy I'm gonna die – and disdain for how much of a self-important dandy you really become when you get caught up in the brand names and the elite memberships and the Michelin stars. It’s the status symbolism of the wealth and not the money itself that becomes more important, and that’s where I’m conflicted, because well, I ain’t no dandy, and I could give a shit about status. 

Recommended troubleshoot: accept that it’s possible to have da moneys and not become a bourgeois clone. Get rich to do what you want, by doing what you want, and though you might live in nicer digs and visit cooler destinations than Cuba or Florida, you’ll still buy your boxer briefs at Zellers and sit in the 100 section at the Jays games like the rest of us.

Quick aside: the imagery of the IKEA catalogue replacing porn as the standard single guy’s bathroom read is also something compelling. We truly are a generation of men raised by women, according to Palahniuk, and we’ve been effeminized to such a degree that we adopt the same nesting instincts as women. And yet, maybe this is only true if you're living with a girl?  Shopping at IKEA used to have much more appeal to me when I was in a relationship than now. As a single dude, I’m finding it's not nearly as appealing as before, and I could give a crap about what kind of TV stand I have, not like before when my ex would lovingly point out the flaws in my colour co-ordination.

However, I do stop in every now and again for the $1 breakfast and lingonberry juice. That shit is scientifically proven to put hair on your ass.  I know, I've run tests.

Reality Check:  Returning to Chuck Palahniuk for a moment, I was surprised to learn that when he pitched Fight Club to W.W. Norton and Company in the 1990s, the major publisher only offered him a $6,000 advance. The offer was what other writers called a "piss off" bid from W.W. Norton, an insult in the modern publishing industry.  By comparison, Stephen King's advance for Carrie was $2,500, but that was back in 1973...I have no idea what the inflation would be, but it might be comparable.  Either way, it made me realize: I've been resting a ton of hope on selling my current MS, even though I may not get much for it at first.  I'll still have to work a job until the royalties kick in, and then only if the book sales exceed a certain amount, typically $100,000.  I may also have to write another one, and that could take another two years, depending on the concept.

What does Palahniuk's example tell me?  Barring a meteoric rise to fame and film adaptation thanks to the brilliant and compelling nature of my writing debut, the future's probably going to look much like my present life. That means I may as well start acting as if I've already made it.  Palahniuk said yes to the initial offer because he saw it as six months' worth of rent right there.  Not gonna lie, six grand would be a life saver at present, and if it leads to the fame and fortune that Palahniuk and King now enjoy, it'll be worth it in the long run.  Until then, I can act as if, and be happy. 

Hmm....what would your day look like if you already had what you think you needed to be happy?

Random Fandom: Katee Sackhoff. 

Oh, Katee Sackhoff, how I miss thee!  BSG didn't end as well as I'd liked, but you were always amazing on it.  I remember many a conversation with my buddies about who we'd want to hook up with on the show. Most of them chose Tricia Helfer' Six, others preferred Grace Park's Boomer.  But I have a thing for beautiful, strong, aggressive women, who aren't built like sticks, who have that hint of artistic crazy and that unpredictable temper, and that was always Starbuck.  Katee turned 30 this past April, and she's incredibly smokin'.  That means there's some hope for me yet, as my 30th is only months away.  Who says you always have to be 21 forever? I caught a few glimpses of her on the series ender of 24, but hopefully we'll see her come back to TV full time soon. 

Be Castle

***

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. 

"Light Up The Fire", by Rumi

One of my favourite poets....(yes, I have favourite poets...I'm an English major and a writer, hello?).

---
"Light Up The Fire".

I gaze into the heart, lowly it may be,
Thought the words be higher still.
For the heart is all the substance,
The speech an accident.
How many phrases will you speak,
Too many for me.
How much burning, burning will you feel,
Be friendly with the fire, enough for me.
Light up the fire of love inside,
And blaze the thoughts away.

By: Rumi

From The Love Poems of Rumi by Philip Dunn

A Beautiful Journal from Author Whitley Strieber

...



I've been reading Whitley Strieber's books ever since I was eleven years old, and when you read my writing, the influence of his non-fiction, moreso than his fiction, stands out in my work. Especially the non-fiction passages that read like the following link.

Here is his journal entry from today, about a recent experience he had. It's simply beautiful.

...

Avatars

...
(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.

...