Mortuaries and Film Sets

So the last couple of weeks have been wild and exciting.

Here it goes.

I finally landed a job interview at a place that agreed to pay decently for design/video work.  I went through a couple interview sessions, graduating along until I was neck ‘n neck with one other person for the spot. Long story short, I didn’t get the job. But that’s okay, because the interview process made me realize that my true life-dreams can happen apart from working there; a mortuary.

“Graphic design and video work at a mortuary? Where death, sorrow, and sad families reside twenty-four seven?!,” you ask.

Yes. The job requirements involved the following:

• Designing memorial cards with photos of the deceased
• Help design marketing materials for billboards
• Video tape/edit memorial services

I didn’t know there was a market for such things, specifically creating DVDs of funerals.

Sidenote: I feel unusually careful about using usual dry/dark remarks about this situation, because the people who interviewed me seemed like rad down-to-earth people, and I risk this blog being discovered. How? They asked me for the URLs of sites I created.

I’d like to keep it real, however. Allow me to proceed with as much tact as possible.

A sad, yet rather pleasant, truth is, I’ve never been to a funeral service. I have a good-size extended family, and in all my 27 years, I’ve only had one family death; my Mom’s dad, when I was 8. My life has been relatively free of tragedy. It’s quite a thing to be grateful for. The strange irony is this: In the past I’ve been surrounded by dead bodies in the school cadaver lab, handling entrails and dismembered limbs, even a severed head cut straight down the middle like a cantaloupe, all for the sake of art.

It’s not that I don’t have death experience, just a lack of funeral experience. So, the job requirements were going to be quite a new adventure for me. I would have had to get used to consulting families about which super-hero should be photoshopped onto their deceased child’s memorial program. While I was up for it, because hey-it-was-a-job, the interviewers must have smelled something on me that revealed I was a little bit more interested in an autonomous approach to creative endeavors.

They used an interview technique to dig out my true values. So it was like psycho-therapy. At least that’s how I imagine successful psychotherapy to be; a system of questions that require you to look at the answers you already have for yourself. They pulled out what I really want to be doing in five years, and absolutely none of it had to do with working a 9-to-5 job in the funeral industry.

The day I got the email that said they gave the job to the other guy, I was as accepting as a Hindu monk. I contemplated the 5-year question, and started to obsessively write down some goals for myself. Immediately I began to see action-packed results and take steps toward the new groove. This was in complete opposition to the familiar, “I need job now, so I go git one.” Instead, it was “I am going to get a job THERE.”

As of now, I don’t have a steady job. Still work at the concert venue sometimes. But… more recently, as Albuquerque is gradually becoming a little Hollywood, I got to work on set for a day as an extra for a T.V. show. Coincidentally, I was also invited to a party with the cast/crew of the same show. Despite the new-guy awkwardness that happens in these situations, the whole experience and unfolding of events was an eye opener. And it all has to do with this little quote I discovered:

Fifty percent of the battle ends when you make up your mind.

Jamming with the Alien Baby

Tonight I jammed with Joel and his new/temporary side project, Holy Shit! Alien Baby.

It consists of musicians who practice, and who don’t, who decide to rehearse, or who decide to just plain ol’ hop onstage on impulse during shows.

Joel told me about it, as they are playing during Flood The Sun’s last two shows before he moves to Los Angeles with his lady, Ashley.

I came up with the brilliant idea to bring my saxophone to practice and play through this harmonizer called a voice box to see if I’d be down to play a show with them, reverting to my unfledged high-school roots as a jazz saxophonist.

Joel is rather more fledged than I, and it was the first time I got to see him put the sexy vibes through my not-so-sexy student alto horn. We missed each other by one year from being in the same jazz band class. Too bad, so sad.

They play two shows. I didn’t know there was one so soon, so I’m bailing on tomorrow night. Maybe I’ll play the next show, just maybe… that is, if my 10-years-out-of-practice mouth, and ego, can handle it.

There’s a load of vomit, and we’re all out of shovels.

My mom once told me that my Grandpa was trying to become a boxer until the traumatic day he punched an opponent in the stomach, causing him to vomit spaghetti all over the place.

The story was told to me when I was probably 8 years old, but it came back to my memory with such vivid splendor tonight as I was told to clean up a full stomachs-worth of spaghetti on the balcony at Sunshine Theater.

The smell of stomach acid, although consistent in aroma from person to person, is a smell that I’ll never get used to. This wasn’t a simple pile to be sopped up by a mop and bucket, but a series of massive splashes that started on a table top, slapped to the floor, and lubricated the foot steps that had trafficked through it, leaving a slippery 10-foot radius of fun and fragrance.

Tonight would have been the first night working at Sunshine that I didn’t have to deal with bodily ejections, and I almost got away with it.

Sidenote: Killswitch Engage played. I care about that kind of music as much as I care about seeing McDonald’s on roadtrips… but the drums sounded super good.