The
burning question in my head lately has been why I dropped out of film years ago. Not in a regretful way. I do miss aspects of that lifestyle and industry, and I was certainly doing well, but more in the same way one misses a city or town you moved away from. To go back would be returning to a ghost town in which the good aspects dissipate as soon as you arrive to the bad aspects you'd forgotten about. You'd just be starting all over again rather than returning anywhere.
I've moved often enough to know the reality of that. This Friary here that Todd likes to refer to is my 34th apartment since my first in 1994, and that's not including the tent I lived in for seven months or the other places I've sauntered off to for extended periods of time. The question of why I quit is more of an articulation I've been working on for my own reference rather than to spout it in some banal conversation about using my degree and expanding my ever questionable potential.
In the past I've answered this by saying any of the following:
- I was seeing my future start to be consumed by coddling to coke-addled producers.
- The bigger money sets looked like the fun had been stripped away that I enjoyed on small sets.
- I saw my entire life being consumed by film; whether working, networking, or just relaxing it was always movies and nothing else.
- Everyone in the industry seems to find themselves in the category of "back stabber" or "the betrayed".
- I had a fall out with a close friend that ended all my interest in the industry.
All of these are vague half-truths that really aren't actual reasons at all, but seemed good enough to start some spin off conversation that drifted away from that topic.
Today I was wandering around Denver and I finally hit a reason that seemed very true. I didn't have anything to say anymore at the time that wasn't already being said. My second year at SVA I had an amazing writing class and became quite good friends with the teacher, Joan. Through that class, amongst a lot of other writing I really am proud of, I managed to push out the main thing that had really been aching my brain. It was a very tight friendship/romantic obsession that completely disintegrated literally within the last hours of high school. It gnawed on me for 6 years afterward before I was fully able to reconcile it. Much of that had to do with the script I wrote; producing it, bringing the actors through the mindsets of the characters, and finally shooting it twice over two years with two different sets of actors seemed to do the trick.
Once all of that was done, so was I, and I steadily retired into the world of coffee shops and travel excursions to recoup. A year and a half after my last set I set off walking across the US as a way to grant me time to work out where to go next after film since it seemed better than
languishing in coffee shops. I went through two girlfriends and a cat, traveled about 3,200 miles entirely on foot, and felt far more alive than I ever had before in my life.
As the West Coast approached, I saw the return to standard living as inevitable and mentally prepared myself for that. Debates raged in my head of whether or not I was escaping life or finally delving into it. Whether living on the road like I had been was a viable way to live or would I be dropping into avoidance if I tried to make that a permanent lifestyle. Over the interim in Denver I read
On the Road and
Into The Wild and didn't like the idea of becoming another Kerouac or McCandless. Kerouac just seemed like a completely self-absorbed asshole, irrespective of himself and everyone else, and McCandless seemed consumed by a disdain for his past and endlessly running from it. It was the latter I was most afraid of becoming since our lives seemed so much the same in many ways.
In the end I went back to Denver where I'd started nesting in my wintering phase of The Walk and tried to pick up where I'd left off with an idea to open a coffee shop of my own. At that point everyone told me I should turn that blog into a book, or get back into film with it in the form of a script. You'd think after an experience like that I'd have something to say, but it still all seemed very conventional. As a book I saw it optimally ending up as good bathroom reading after a full meal. I'd read other people's books on walking like Newman and Jenkins, as well as Krakauer, Kerouac, and Hunt who did have more impressive points than the simplicity of the journey. After all my touting of quitting film for self preservation the last thing I was going to do was exploit the one thing I was obnoxiously proud of to make myself feel "all growed up and careerful". It was an experience for me and the people who were reading along at the time only and I knew it... and that kinda sucked.
So that brings us back to what is the idea behind wondering why I skedaddled from a seemingly rising career in something I honestly did love doing? The honesty behind that question has been what interests me more than the actual answer itself. My fears have lied in what others have often accused me of which is a fear of success, fear of responsibility, and/or fear of commitment. These are good standard stereotypes to work from, like a handy tool for the soul.
A year ago I returned from a trip to Europe with a driving desire to make a commitment to settling in and finally set up my coffee shop and community center I've been plotting and planning internally since I was about five. This was when
Todd and I reconnected and he started going on and on about his yearning to travel. My apartment, as many of you know, then became known as
The Friary as he established it as a centralized nerve center to come and go from as he dragged up memories of my old Walk. Continually he'd berate me that I was fooling myself about
settling in and that busting just under the surface was my desire to step out again and wander about some more.
Dangerous heart strings were these in which he'd tug. He was right to see that I did still have much more travel in me, but the need to do something with it rather than simply drift was the hesitation that continually frustrated his efforts. In addition to this I was finally digging in to Denver. I was finding the home I'd been after since the loss of film and my New York life I'd left behind almost a decade ago. My time of retirement was ending and I was finding the need to really do something again rather than simply putter away in coffee shops and float from city to city.
As Todd came and went last summer, and we had all of our geek out late night philosophizing over travel, a notion really did start coming together; not just with he and I, but with just about all of my friends and family. If you look over his
posts from last summer you see him go on about this idea of synchronicity that we were mulling over. At first the idea was stuck on the coincidences that happened in travel. He had examples, I had examples, my grandfather used to talk about it all the time, and its often a universal nod of agreement among other rovers when it comes up in conversation as one of those weird things that seem to happen.
Toward the end of last year, though, it seemed as if everything was starting to tie together, and all of it was pointing blatantly toward exploring this idea more fully. I had been under heavy credit card debt the entire year and had decided not to make any 100% decisions until it was paid off. My roommate finally came through with three months back rent the day before New Years Eve which wiped that debt out. On my way home from dropping that off in the bank I finished the book I was reading on the bus so I popped into a book store on a whim. What I found was a book that, within the first few pages, solidified everything for me to being gung ho on jumping into a pack with a mission.
The book was
Many Mansions, by Gina Cerminara, and it gave very good theories on a lot of this synchronicity stuff we'd been talking about, among a host of possible explanations to things I've long sought further reasoning for. These went from my Christian Science upbringing, that I'd fallen out of, and healings I'd experienced, to my spirit channeling great-grandmother whose "spirit regular" reappeared some 80 years later to my mother through a completely different medium (
long story). The evidence for these theories are primarily based off Edgar Cayce's readings in the early part of the 20th century and the first chapters are aimed at giving credible reasons as to why we should listen to him at all. Take me for a cultist or a half-wit all you like, but from my experiences the book's theories held a lot of resonance with me.
These were the actual things I was interested in exploring, and setting off in a backpack to clear my head of outside concerns like rent and bills seemed like the perfect solution. The onset of this economic free fall actually encouraged me more that this was the perfect time to do this. Other things in my family were all coming together toward this venture, and suddenly last month friends I haven't heard from in fifteen to twenty years started showing up making a dotted line along the East Coast where Todd and I have been thinking of heading first.
From my end of it, the feeling of heading to the east is one of recollecting all the close old friends and reopen those lines of communication, before heading west again to begin the actual exploration. My parents in the northeast both seem like that rest-and-reflect turning point before heading west to Michigan and Todd's family, then finally to Washington where my sister is. Oddly, Todd, who has never met my sister, agrees with me that she seems like a significant part of this trip as well, but we don't really have any idea as to how.
The strange part of this whole endeavor is that once this angle of the trip appeared around New Years the idea that I was leaving Denver stopped feeling like I was leaving it. My resistance to Todd continually getting at me to give in and travel stemmed from the idea that I didn't want to give up this home I'd finally made again after years of feeling adrift. I've found a really close friend in my co-worker, Angela, among others who I've known over the years of coming and going since 2000, but mostly stopped seeing this stop as a stepping stone to somewhere else. Somehow, chucking my stuff in storage this time and saddling off once more for a completely undetermined amount of time feels only like a temporary excursion to look into something pressing, even though talk has gone from months into the years category.
We shall see, but I think this post has gone on long enough. So there you go, that's my introduction of myself.
Last night it took me two and a half hours to get to sleep as all of this desertion fully set in on me. I've longed, for a decade, for a family and home and am quite terrified that with my rolling stone momentum I've gained over those years I am now incapable of stopping when I find it. This is a very old fear, but the level of kinship I found this past year, with Ang for the most part, but other good friends I see less often, has intensified every aspect of this departure.
is my family now after this past year. I have another friend Loreli with Izzy, her 5 year old daughter, who I've known since she was 15 months and figure myself as having some uncley role in her life. They, with her boyfriend, Brandon, give me the feeling of being that old grampa when they come over, which I really actually love. I'm convinced I'll be an amazing old man and can't wait for it. They often remind of an old family friend, Ersie, who made cookies with my sister and I when we were young. Its hard to remember that I rarely saw her, because she so prominently coats my childhood memories, but I like to wonder if that's how Izzy will think of me when she gets old. I think the same when I visit my friend Gus and his 6 year old, Aenea, who I intend to spend some time with on this eastward venture.
by stripping everything peripheral away, like paying rent and going to a regular daily job. With this economy I also have no qualms about stepping aside so someone who needs a job can have one while I go flit about with this.
