The Crack in the Floor Sunday, Aug 16 2009

The last couple of days were rough. It feels silly and stupid to write that in the past tense — the roughness only stopped about ten minutes ago when I left my bed and logged on. I didn’t expect that to make me feel better, but for some reason giving up on sleep and listening to some woe-is-us break-up music has soothed me.

Resentment and I have been slugging it out, toe-to-toe, and it’s been to the gym since the last time we squared off.

I know it’s no good, these thoughts of blame and anger directed at someone else. It’s chewing over rotten meat — all you’re left with is mold on your tongue. But it’s such a challenge to escape.

I try to keep an even keel. I remind myself of my own one-sidedness, recall my own persistant failure to love. I acknowledge that the way I feel now that we are no longer together must be very similar to they way my wife often felt while we were. I admit to all the time I was given to change and make better choices, choices that considered someone else’s feelings over my own. Now I don’t have that time anymore. Now it’s my feelings left in the dark.

It’s only fair.

But that doesn’t make it right.

And there’s the crack in the floor I fall into. Because whatever fed into it, the ripping apart of two people joined by vows is a betrayal. The fact that my daughter doesn’t live with me anymore, she visits; soap gets in her eyes during her bath and she cries for mommy — the simplest, most natural request of a child — and I have to tell her she’ll see mommy tomorrow, because mommy’s somewhere else.

You feel powerless and it’s natural to point fingers at someone else.

But that’s the lie. I feel powerless. But that’s only how I feel. And I’m learning to perceive through the illusion.

Anger is a threat response. Someone cuts you off on the freeway, you feel endangered, you yell in your car. Doesn’t make you any safer.

I’ve been wrestling with resentment and anger and bitterness. Somehow, tonight during the walk from my bedroom to the office, I stepped out of the ring. Somehow my soul recognized that everything that upsets me is a lie. And a lie only has power over you if you engage it. Fight or give in, you are subject to it either way. You win by not fighting.

So I didn’t come through as a husband. I’m a better man today then I was yesterday.

So I was betrayed. That’s a result of someone else’s choice to believe a lie. I don’t have to believe it too.

So my daughter got soap in her eyes. We rinsed it out. She went to sleep. In the morning she’ll wake up and see her mommy.

And that’s something to be grateful for.

“We are continually faced with a series of great opportunities brilliantly disguised as insoluble problems.”
- John W. Gardner

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On Poor Writing Thursday, Aug 6 2009

I’m sitting at a red light. To my right is a video store. In this day of the download, those old brick-and-mortars don’t look so hot. Oh, they try — but so do the trannies in fishnets back on Santa Monica boulevard.

Still no green. I look at a very large poster for a movie I’ve never heard of.

The design elements are:

* a whole lot of white space

* a title I don’t remember

* a tagline in a font too small to read from the street despite the poster’s window filling acreage

* a man

* a woman who is Beyoncé

* another woman

* the arrangement of man-woman-woman to imply a love triangle of menacing nature

So, an awful poster for what looks like an awful movie.

I grew up in this neighborhood. I know this is the longest red light in town, but still — get me out of here.

Then everything that is on my right resonates with everything that is off in my life:

What if I write a movie like that? What if I write a screenplay and I think its really good because its the best I can do but then I see the poster and its something like that because frankly the marketing guys just don’t have a lot to work with? And the movie is awful and uninteresting and even I want to change the channel because I caught it on TV — didn’t even bother to DVR it — because frankly the director and actors and even the art department didn’t have anything more to work with than the marketing guys?

What if I write a bad movie?

I relate this story over sushi to my friend, a business director in her position and a novelist in her soul. The sun is now disappearing outside.  “Well,” she says, handing the black check presenter back to our server with her credit card inside,  “At least you’d get paid.”

My friend is very clever, and she’s right: I should be so lucky.

Back in the car, and now I’m looking out at the morning sun in the rearview mirror.

You should be so lucky, to write a terrible movie. If your first draft is coherent at all, it would be a happy accident.

I think of a screenplay sitting in my closet at home: a copy of an early draft of The Last Samurai. Its radically different than the story that Edward Zwick actually filmed, and not nearly as satisfying. Captain Algren isn’t a drunken soldier of fortune haunted by memories of genocide — he’s the darling of West Point. Katsumoto is the enemy and he stays the enemy. Algren is married, and his wife dies — predictably. All in all, rather bland.

“I’m like that too,” my friend says between sips of water. “I want it to be perfect the first time.”

“I guess it’s like what Hemingway said about first drafts,” I reply.

We smile at each other. We’re both writers; we know the quote. No need to curse during dinner.

The light turns green, and I pass through the intersection and continue towards the onramp. Time to go home and write something awful.

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Constants Monday, Aug 3 2009

Caught Eminem’s video for Beautiful.

It’s him walking around in Detroit. These are not nice neighborhoods.  They are economically devastated. There’s even a stadium being torn down.

I’m watching Em. He’s got money. Being in this environment isn’t the trap for him that it is for almost everyone else.

Of course, this album is the one he made after disappearing for five years into addiction and depression. Money was a bigger trap than poverty was.

Something about the look on his face, it just hit me.

We will always feel the way we do.

There’s no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, no achievement that will erase this strange soul-ache.

There are moments. Connections. Foretastes of heaven. But satisfaction? No. This body isn’t capable.

This isn’t depressing. It’s freeing.  I felt happier when I realized that no matter what changes, I’ll never be happier. No more chasing the wind.

Most unhappiness in life is a result of false metrics — being unsatisfied with your perfectly good apples because they aren’t the color of someone else’s oranges.

Yeah, it’s a cliche, that whole destination vs. journey thing.

But maybe a cliche is just a truth everyone has heard but few have felt?

Link to the video.

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