Hesher

Watched this tonight. Dug. Very.

Looking For Synchronicities and 11:11

Today I looked at the clock at 11:11am, 11:11pm, and went to bed at 1:11am.

I didn’t really try, it just happened. Of course the subconscious picks up more than what our eyes directly focus on. So if a person decides “I’ma see red all kinds today,” your eyes will most likely dart towards every red object in every room you’re in.

Devil’s advocate is kinda lame though. It keeps everything stiff. I did have a couple of synchronistic experiences today. Julia texted me that a certain song was stuck in her head right as I was showing a video to somebody with the same song in it. And then Dustin told me at practice tonight that he wanted to have a “Kubric-con” movie marathon while days ago I was considering buying Stanley Kubric’s entire movie collection from Amazon soon.

Eyes wide open, doods!

My Life In The Last 4 Months – Where’dit Go?

I checked my site stats a few days ago. I’m not the most popular guy on the internet, but I definitely feel exponentially popular since my RV trip.

Out of the 2,500 people that came to this site last month, 73 people liked me enough to come back.

So that’s pretty cool.

In October I moved in with Jake, drummer of the oldest version of The Coma Recovery. I currently live at his house with his dog, Monty.

That’s not actually a real picture of Monty. If you can picture this dog without his savvy haircut and shampoo’d fur, then you’ll have Monty.

The greatest experience living with Jake to date was a bright, sunny day in mid-October.  Unbeknownst to Jake, Monty had a day to explore town and had eaten and digested a used condom. Whilst a section of it hung from Monty’s ass, Jake (thinking it was just a clump of spider web) made the dire mistake of using his bare fingers to pull the stretchy, poopy magnum all the way out of Monty’s bum.

Unfortunately I pulled up to the driveway only after Jake had scrubbed his hands for the 5th time over. The story coming from Jake’s mouth combined with his tone of disgust gave me a laugh session that probably added 5 years to my life.

Julia and I have made a point to drink chocolate at Kakawa a lot.

Our drummer Casey from Flood The Sun got married. I may have forgotten to mention that Joel (guitar) got engaged and moved to LA with his lady, Ashley.

My bro Josh had a baby named…

Natalie.

Painted this for Julia.

And all the while I was working at Sunshine Theater…. venue-cleaner by day, bar-back by night.

I quit at the beginning of January. There was only so much dried vomit and hip-hop/metal demographic I could take. Then I was called to be an extra on a movie called Ten Year.

I wore the same thing almost everyday for 3 weeks to work 12-hour days as a background actor. That means I’m going to be one of the cheeseballs in the background pantomiming like a drunk while Channing Tatum gives a star-studded performance.

While the movie was shooting, I caught a deathly flu-like sickness from drinking out of water-filled beer bottles. Never drink the prop-water.

The good news is I’ve made some friends who might want me to be an extra while “Iron Man” Downy Jr. himself flies through the mountainous skies of New Mexico.

Coma is still going strong with a fresh rejection notice just in from South By Southwest.

Both Tommy and Will were sorely disappointed with the news (click to enlarge).

Today I drove to my parent’s house through snow and ice because my neighbor stopped paying his internet bill. When his internet goes down, that means nobody else on the street is getting internet.

As we speak.

Dreams And Music Videos

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!

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.

Snow Hike

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.

Rock, Film, Rock

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.

Battle Royale + 500 Days of Summer

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.

Zeitgeist The Movie. Then what…

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.

The Graduate

I took my sister back to the airport and said goodbye. I hit yoga. Then I watched The Graduate for free on On-Demand.

What a good movie… a good, good movie.