Tonight the moon is nearly burning my skin as its full moon-beams shine through my bedroom window.
My dreams have been wild lately. Not completely insane, just super real. I’m settling unresolved issues with people who I haven’t talked to for years. I’m facing imprisonment and capital punishment in foreign countries. I’m experiencing nuclear attacks. I’m living entire lifetimes in minutes.
I guess it works out, because I’m working on a music video for Will’s project, Riley Guy, and need a semi-schizo, moon-inspired neurosis to make this happen and finish already.
I’m running through thousands of photos. It’s not the most fun.
In other news, my production assistant job fell through. The movie isn’t going to be made. Somebody who had money chickened-out on the deal I guess.
“How can I help you finish your own movies,” you ask? Simply go buy stuff!
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.
I like when people call me on the phone while I’m job hunting, and present something to do that is much more fun than filling out applications. So today I impulsively went to the mountains with Kevin and Dina, on a hike that I’ve never gone on before, with views much cooler than I expected close-by hiking areas to have. Our plans were foiled to go as far as we wanted, but I realized that often I forget how rad the scenery in Albuquerque can be.
Later, we watched The 4th Kind at the dollar theatre, and then a Rock Climbing DVD called The Sharp End. One of those was worth no more than the dollar I had spent, while the other was well worth the $30 that Kevin had spent, plus another $30 that I might have to spend myself.
Tommy and I met up to rock some bass and keys ideas I’ve had rolling around in my skull, including the same tune I was messing with two days ago.
Later, a location scout for the T.V. show In Plain Sight stopped by my (parent’s) house and arranged taking pictures of the house as a possible set location. My parents approved, then let her take panoramic shots of the inside and outside. Eventually I asked her how to get a job on her show. She didn’t say that it’s an easy task, but she was friendly and didn’t seem to judge me for my underlying fragrance of desperation.
Shortly after, I went to go play drums at Brian’s house, watch Battle Royale again, and eat all of his Sweet-tarts that have been in the same place since Halloween.
I had a 2-movies-in-a-row night. Dustin was going to call me about some bash that was supposed to be happening at his house, but he waited till 12 a.m., then sent me a text saying,
“what r u you doing?”
“Watching a movie. You?”
“just got home”
(long silence)
And that was the end of the conversation.
I watched 500 Days of Summer and Battle Royale. The two opposing genres back to back can confuse the adrenals.
500 Days of Summer is a clever indie romance movie about a boy who never quite gets the girl, a catchy indie soundtrack plays in the background.
Battle Royale is a Japanese movie about a class of 7th graders who are sent to an island to kill each other off, the last one alive wins.
Battle Royale was made in 2000. I could see how much Quentin Tarantino borrowed from it; even one of the characters was cast in Kill Bill (you know, the girl with the spiky ball ‘n chain?). Sure enough, it’s said to be one of his favorite movies of all time.
If you want to see a bunch of adolescents forced to confess their crushes to one another in the face of death and acts of twisted human nature, check out Battle Royale.
If you want to see a guy get taken for the ultimate emotional roller-coaster ride in a nice-guys-finish-last kind of way (amongst heavy Smiths references), check out 500 Days of Summer.
I decided to re-watch Zeitgeist The Movie last night, mainly because it is the new remastered version, and has a little bit extra added to it.
Zeitgeist is not for the feeble, or even strong set-in-stone minded people. It challenges the biggest things relating to the conditioned mind of humanity, and most likely, even you have some of it.
It confronts what many Americans think we know about religion and government. So if you feel offended or irritated by those kinds of things, you probably won’t want to watch it.
I came around to watching Zeitgeist years ago because a friend of mine posted a link to it on myspace. I had a long phase of reading about religion and “the worlds biggest secrets”, and this came at an interesting time.
Whether or not you buy into this stuff, there is a clear sign of insanity in the way things are run in this world.
I feel like I’ve always known it, and have been fascinated by it in a way. Unfortunately, sometimes I’m so repulsed by human behavior that it causes problems of their own and doesn’t really help anything. My theory is that the ego’s problems can’t be solved by the ego. There has to be a new way of thinking, or even no thinking at all; that is, settling down the compulsive conversations we carry in our heads.
If the planet were small enough to study under a microscope, humans would look like little cells. We move about, build things, are drawn to other humans, repelled by others, and we reproduce. Our actions may even be recognized similar as the behavior of cancer cells, because, like cancer, humans are not working in harmony with life around it.
Ego appears to be the problem, because we’re so invested in it’s beliefs and self-image. We could still have egos and function fine, but without keeping the ego in check, or even recognizing its behavior, we are owned by its fears and limitations. A false sense of identity is steering the human vehicle. We are not free, but at the mercy of our ego-based neural wiring to make decisions. That includes all of the conditioning of our past, and preoccupations about our future. If you don’t think you’re a prisoner of your conditioning, try to notice when you get angry or defensive about something you believe, and see if it makes any sense to you.
Then there’s affirmations, the attempt at re-conditioning the mind to something of a more positive nature. “I love myself,” or “Everyday, in every way, I’m getting better and better.” Those hypnotic phrases might help you become productive for a while. The problem is, there’s nothing integrative about affirmations. You can pump your mind with positive reinforcement all day long, but you still have the polar opposite lingering around somewhere in the shadows. And when it rears it’s ugly head, you’re like the Patrick Swayze character on Donnie Darko; a self-help guru catatonically rocking back and forth, crying in his bedroom.
There’s an intelligence that is completely unique to our mammal-hood; one where new ideas are formed, intuition is developed, and flow is experienced. And it’s been proven that it only arrives when the mind enters small windows of silence amongst the internal conversational mind-chatter.
In my own rare experience, it’s those times of clarity when a new perception arises, and nothing more is needed. People on the outside even react to your state. It’s almost like the exaggerated portrayal of a monk walking amongst the forest with birds and squirrels perching on his shoulder, displaying an auric sheen. If a person can hold this state long enough, included that past and future are no longer a concern, then new experiences unfold. There is a whole new respect and appreciation for life, nature, animals, even for the squarish assholes on T.V.
I once read something where a guy had an epiphany. He suddenly considered that if he experienced life through another human being, from birth to death, same physiology and life-events, he would BE that person. He would act, look, dress just like them, and completely 100% be them, inside and out. It was a sudden paradigm shift from judgment to compassion. It was Joe Rogan who wrote that on his blog.
What is the part of you that could possibly experience the life of another person? It’s essentially what is experiencing your own life now. The part of you that is aware of what you see, touch, feel, taste, etc. It is what every single human, animal, and plant have. It is awareness capable of observing. It’s the lingering “something” that’s under the mind-chatter, and what steers your cells into the proper places for your body to even exist.
Then there is the trick of becoming aware of awareness. This awareness can expand or we can confine it within our own little mind-based world. But if it expands enough, that’s when we get a sense of being plugged in to the whole, and we start living in harmony with our surroundings. It can only happen when the mind is immersed in the present moment. The same idea is in the beginning of Zeitgeist.
I’m not a big fan of getting entangled in worrying about petty things, or getting involved with human micro-dramas. A lot of people experience a strange pleasure in living dysfunctional lives. I can’t say co-dependency and power-struggles have had lasting positive results for me. Human insanity is starting to rear it’s ugly head at this point in time, I think to the point where humanity might be forced into a major shift in direction before we all destroy ourselves.
Weird times.
So the solution to human crazy-ness is always a foggy one. But I think we can have confidence enough in ourselves to remember an experience or state of mind that may have once harmonized on a much deeper level than any words can ever describe. If we’re lucky enough, we may find it again hidden in our present experience. Then, life may be so kind to bestow the next little piece of the puzzle.
I picked up my sister from the airport today. I haven’t seen her for a while. I was finally able to give her the DVD that I got her for Christmas, a movie called Chaos Theory with Ryan Reynolds. She has a thing for Ryan Reynolds because he’s “cute” and “funny”… This time, however, he plays quite an unremarkable square, and this movie was a little less funny than a usual Ryan Reynolds flick, having intense dramatic dilemmas, cry scenes, etc.
This movie does contain a theme that is held by some of my favorite movies of all time; the character experiences a revelation, epiphany, or paradigm shift, that throws his mundane reality out of wack, sometimes painful, but resulting in an awakening. Sort of like:
Fight Club
Vanilla Sky
American Beauty
Office Space
There’s something subconsciously appealing to becoming a person with nothing left to lose. I think it’s a collapse we’re all afraid to experience, whether or not we expect the resulting outcome of rebirth and liberation. Lust for comfort suffocates the soul. The world knows by now that there are a wide array of minds and personality types encapsulated in each human being, yet we are put through a mediocre school system that indirectly teaches that uniqueness is unacceptable, and that having a goal to live a banal domestic life amongst a 40-hours-per-week office job is 100% acceptable.
Of course there are apparent downsides to not following the professional corporate work approach. Money can be hard to come by. But what I’ve observed is that money has ways of flying out the door, no matter how much you’re making, and money has ways of coming, no matter what you’re doing.
“Life is what happens to you when you’re busy making plans.” -John Lennon
This is a video where a 14-year-old snagged an interview from John Lennon in his hotel room almost 40 years ago.
I followed the hype and went to see Avatar today, in the most expensive form possible; 3D in a digitally projected XD theater (whatever that means). Only $15.
‘Twas worth it, though. It changed my life for the better. After watching Avatar, I hanker for humanity less, and now want to live in a world that doesn’t really exist.
Sometimes you can almost feel it when the rest of the world has relaxed and climbed off their hamster wheel. It’s a good feeling, whether you do really feel it or imagine you feel it.
Everything used to close down every Sunday the same way it does on Christmas. Why only 1 Day off per year versus 52? It’s no wonder we’re slowly going more insane.
Today was probably the only time I’ve felt so good doing absolutely nothing, without the familiar self-induced guilt trips about using one day to do nothing. I think in the course of history, it’s pretty new to be afraid to rest. And for some reason we’re all contributing to the conditioning of one another to work ourselves mental. Not only is work something that we feel we have to do to be respected by others, but it becomes the source of our identity.
What’s the first thing people talk about with other?
“So, what do you do?”
The thing about work is, people have to tout how hard they work at this-or-that so they can buy this-or-that and get married to him-or-her. Taking a day to do nothing is unheard of and frightening to people. This isn’t about using one day to be lazy, which has it’s own toxic qualities about it, but it’s about becoming potential (versus kinetic) energy for a moment.
Heaven forbid we experience ourselves silently in our own houses.
Of course, everything-in-moderation. The human body is a product of nature, and nature is about balance. A wave has got to recede after forcing itself on shore. Trees have got to chillax a couple seasons to start pushing out greens again.
Today I read The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand, drank wine, watched Lord of the Rings, and didn’t open a single present. Delights.
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Please Listen to Ben’s wonderful Christmas song he created just for your Christmas, 2009.
