Fucked, Stockholm, 2019

This is a complex tale.  I’ll tell it over a couple entries. Here’s part 2.  Part 1 can be found here.

The issue with not loving oneself leads to other unexpected consequences along the way.  My escape from this feeling of utter freak-dom had always been a creative outlet and I was lucky enough to have found a few of those in my life–one that I miraculously got paid for and another that I paid to partake in.  Both brought me their own kind of joy, but in both instances something was holding back.   Today we’ll discuss the one I was paid to do.

By trade, I’m a Creative Director for a small commercial visual effect boutique in Santa Monica.  If you’ve ever read this hodge-lodge collection of musings I call a blog, you’re surely aware that while there are aspects of my job that are indeed artistic and creative, I consider myself first and foremost a craftsman.  I am presented a series of visual puzzles by a client that have a certain framework they operate within and which require solutions.  Ergo I am a craftsman specializing in visual problem solving.  

Which all sounds a hell of a lot more interesting than it is at times–something which the more regular reader would quickly point-out.  The issue with working in commercials is that you’re working in commercials with commercial people and some of those people act as though we like Doctors without Boarders for fucking Apple or Ikea or Ford or whatever brand we’re currently working with when in truth we make the bits of film that folks intentionally skip when they can–the 30 seconds of visuals accompanied by irritation and moaning that comes from the viewer right when the plot was starting to get good.  I help to make the pebble in your shoe look nicer and maybe bigger (or smaller) and shinier and more expensive looking than it ever could have when it was shot by whatever director who’s interpretation of someone else’s idea somehow warrants up to 30k USD a day to shoot.  

As I write it all down, I feel my loathing leaking out the sides of the browser I’m typing this into and oozing down onto my now sticky keyboard.  The thing is, I knew all of this when I started my career–that magical moment when it went from being a job where I was just helping with shit to being a career where I was actually doing the shit.  And I didn’t care.  Not for a really long time.  The secret was that I was learning.  

Every job I would find some minuscule piece of knowledge, some plug-in or process or workflow that I would sink my should into for the duration of the job and make the job, at least in part, all about that minute penumbra of the experience.  In doing so, I accomplished two goals.  First, the job, however boring or lame, became new and exciting.  I was learning, I was progressing, and I was fighting my way forward.  Even in the face of an adversely difficult assignment I would brute force my way through, learning as I went.  Failing miserably at times but always pushing forward and though to the goal-line.  The spot would always go on air and while I might not always be happy with the result I always saw to it that the client was.  

Second was that without knowing it, all of these interesting little facets of jobs I was creating solutions for began to coalesce into larger conglomerate chunks of knowledge.  2+2 may have equaled 4 early on but I began to understand the pieces in a different way, assembling a non-linear map of inter-connectedness between these chunks so that 2+2 was now equaling 64 or 128.  Solutions and ideas began to form where there weren’t obvious ideas or solutions previously.  I was amassing a volume of relational knowledge and I was doing it on autopilot.  This wasn’t a conscious process or anything I was intentionally working towards.  One day I just realized it was there.  

…which of course all sounds great, right?  Shit-ball clients and I don’t care (although it turns out I actually did).  Happiness found in small corners of consumerist hell (although I realize now I wasn’t always happy).  I acquired a zen-like 10,000 hours like a Hindu cow (although I was anything but zen at times and I only really ate like a cow).

But those 10,000 hours of inter-relational problem-solving prowess hid a new issue problem that was slowly creeping into focus.  The difficulty of the work I was performing wasn’t increasing with the exponential increase in capability I was creating for myself.  Those little small pieces of a job that I would latch onto and find a solution for became fewer and fewer which meant fewer and fewer opportunities to learn or to experiment or to grow my knowledge.  At the time I viewed this the way that our industry had developed.  When I first started out the industry was in it’s infancy and we made up solutions as we went along–there was no “right” or “wrong” way to solve the problems we incurred.  But as the industry aged so did the process.  People became specialists, tasks were subdivided-up amongst those specialists and the bar for taking part in certain jobs became how many of those specialists you have on the bench–at least that’s how I viewed it.  Being that I worked for a smaller shop and didn’t have many of those specialist on the bench the work I was getting had  fewer and fewer challenges for me and I found myself settling into complacency.

I was able to do most assignments almost in flow.  I would put on Daft Punk’s “Alive in 2007” and literally bang-out shot after shot after shot.  Brute force slowly became my knew reason for working–the sheer volume of what I could accomplish compared to another people became a source of amazing pride and drive.  That strategy carried me a few more years, but I noticed I was getting depressed more often and angry more often and more intensely than I had ever been before.  Looking back now, this is where I started to lose my way with my career.  

I know now that it wasn’t a lack of learning opportunities with my profession.  Of course there were and of course there still are.  What had happened was that at some moment (and fucked if I know when it was), I tried to do something out of the scope of my 10,000 hours of knowledge.  I struggled or failed or maybe even crashed and burned and then made the fateful decision that the next level up from where I was operating was too high for me to reach–that the work would be to great and that the failures required would cause my poor ego to suffer too much.  Like my boobs I had decided that this was it for me and that I couldn’t go any further because this was as far as I was meant to go.  I let resistance win.  

It didn’t take long for my “Brute Force” perspective on work to completely fail–You can’t gauge your own personal growth by measuring it against other people and when this ideology that had been shoring-up the holes of my emotional dike which in turn held back the fury of 25+ years of angst, anger and disillusionment with my career, you just know the impending devastation will be utter and complete.  When the dam burst in 2018 it flooded my life.  

I was fucked.

Shot on a LeicaM7, Kodak Tri-X pushed +2 at the Icon. 

A Confrontation, Los Angeles, 2019

This is a complex tale.  I’ll tell it over a couple entries. Here’s part 1. 

In 2018, I suffered a breakdown.  At the time, I don’t think I knew that it was a breakdown, but a couple years on down the road and I think I can call it what it was.  

A breakdown.  A crisis of meaning and of self. I doubted everything that I was doing.  Everything I was creating.  I doubted my ability to be a good father, a good husband, a good employee and ultimately a good human.  I was a 43 year old man in full-on DEFCON 4 meltdown.  A stereotypical, middle-aged Chernobyl.

When I looked in the mirror, I just hated my reflection, but that was nothing new.

I have always been big and I just thought it was my lot in life to be fluffy around the edge.  When I was a kid, I learned quick that I wasn’t regular–we would always go to the “husky” section to buy me jeans.  My mom said it was because I was bigger than the other kids and mom’s are good like that.  I think the moment that spiraled my self-image spinning out of control, was when I was 13 or maybe 14  (puberty was in full effect) and I went for a check-up.  It was a new doctor–a rather attractive younger lady doctor at that–and after some listening to heart-beats and looking inside ears, she asked me to take off my shirt.  I grasped the wide bottom of my t-shirt and considered my next move.  When you’re 13 and in the hormonal tsunami that is puberty, getting partially naked in front a woman in a low cut blouse can be marginally problematic to down right fucking embarrassing so I peeled that thing off as slow as possible while staring intensely at the faux white marble floor.

Once the shirt was off, she touched me here and there, which while a little stirring presented no significant difficulties.  Next she listened here and there, which was easier to contend with than the the light grazing I had just aced and then grabbed my right breast.  Yes breast and yes grabbed.  During puberty, the gods a blessed me with man boobs.  They weren’t huge breasts or anything but they stuck out a bit and made me feel a bit awkward when I tried on tighter clothes.  I hadn’t mentioned my boobs to anyone else and no one had thought to mention them to me, so I just thought that it wasn’t really a thing, even if they made me a bit uncomfortable and look a bit odd in a tank top.  Fucking tank tops.

Anyway, she grabs my right breast, squeezes it, cups it–almost like she’s fucking weighing it–and says something like, 

“Don’t worry, this will most likely go away one day.”

…and that was it.  My boobs were from that moment on all consuming.  What’s worse?  They never fucking went away.  Until I was well into my 30’s I would never and I mean NEVER, take off my shirt in front of someone unless I absolutely had to and even when I started to try taking it off at the beach I felt overwhelming waves of shame wash over me that eventually–sometimes only after a few minutes I would find an excuse to put it back on, or wrap a towel around my shoulders.  As a teen, when groups of my friends would go to water parks I would leave my shirt on or just not go.  Friends going swimming?  Nope.  I’m sick or busy.  Shirts and skins playing soccer.  Walk off the field and serve detention.  Once I was having sex, the shirt was on or the lights were off at least in the beginning.  I just knew that if the person I was with saw me they would see how flawed I was.  How ugly I was.  I felt like a freak and that sensation was so intense and so scarring that it’s lasted into middle age.  In fact, it was so intense that I just wanted to destroy my body because it had betrayed me. 

So I used it as an excuse to eat whatever.  To drink and smoke and sit on my fat ass and let it get fatter and fatter, because what did it matter.  I would always be me.  I’d always have the tits and always be a freak.  I decided I wasn’t going to love myself, and I didn’t for 30 years. 

Shot on a LeicaM7, Kodak Tri-X pushed +2 at the Icon.

Looking Forward, Stockholm, 2019

For the month, I’ve been back in Stockholm.  From the moment I stepped off the plane I felt something shifting–this ever so slight adjustment to my perspective.  Moment by moment I could feel my self straightening, aligning and moving into some kind of balance.  

This is movement is slight, like a millimeter a day but after a couple weeks I wasn’t crooked.  My shoulders were straight, my legs were straight, my back and core were straight and I found myself in equilibrium.  

This doesn’t mean that I wasn’t irritated at times when I couldn’t get all three kids to agree on a single day’s plan or crazy happy when everyone had a good time when they thought they would be miserable.  The balance I’m talking about is a centering of my perspective at it’s neutral position.  A centering that isn’t overly stressed, overly concerned, overly worried or overly anything.  A center that is exactly in the center–exactly where it should be.

I lived through the same 14 months as the rest of the universe of course and just like everyone else I’ve been run down by it all.  In my mind, Covid has been this cat6 hurricane wind trying to blow us down to the point that we all look like the picture of the single solitary tree, sitting onto of a hill windblown to near horizontal–that picture that pops up in black an white on Instagram all the time in different incarnations–weathered and near beatdown but still standing.  Sure Covid has taken its toll on all of us but I don’t think that all it is.  

Death, suffering, economic injustice, racial inequality, lack of community, lack of purpose and lack of spiritual essence were always there, Covid simply nudged them into the daylight of everyday purview.  This beautiful life that we tell ourselves we live was caught in the lie it is, and the resulting emotion strain blew down our souls like the wind and that tree.  For fourteen months I’ve walked a crooked man’s crooked walk, everyday becoming more and more unbalanced.  

But now, here and now, I feel I’m standing straight again because I’m here.  From the air that I’m breathing to the lakes I’ve been swimming in, I feel myself pulled right.  It’s not that Sweden has magically solved its problems is some utopian society.  I’m pragmatic enough to not be so gullible.  Because Sweden is trying to be a society run by human beings who actually care about the outcome and not acting like it’s some tribal zero sum game they achieved a sense of equilibrium.  There’s a balance not because of some unachievable absolutism that the left and right in America are always hot in pursuit of, but because there is a compromise and ebb and flow and a desire to live a beautiful life.  And my god this place oozes with the stuff.

Ester doesn’t want to go back to the states.  I can’t say that I blame her.  I’m ready to come back home for good.  Why would anyone want to go back to that chaos when you could be surrounded by so much beauty.  It’s easy to look forward to the future when it actually feels bright.  Well, at least until it starts getting dark around here in November-ish.

Shot on a LeicaM7, Kodak Tri-X pushed +2 at the Icon.