Out of Focus

Procrastinators Unite ... Tomorrow! (He said last Thursday)

[Special note: By "this morning" in the next paragraph, I obviously mean, "last week," i.e., when I began writing this post; as opposed to when I continued rewriting and editing it; as opposed to when I finally clicked "Publish"! Onward …]

Walking home this morning (now known as "a week ago, 10/12/22"), after dropping off my kids at school, I felt my phone vibrate: It was an alert announcing the list 2022 MacArthur Fellows, colloquially and informally known as "genius grant" recipients. That notification provided the catalyst for me to finish this post. [Ed note: Which …. didn't exactly happen, eh? OK … enough with the interruptions.]

So at this point, "catalyst" might overstate things. More importantly, I don't mean to imply that any of what follows breaks new ground, nor do I foresee myself receiving a surprise call with news of my own MacArthur Fellowship. Rather, it made me think of a (not-so-clever) joke I had included in the first draft of my birthday post, before I removed it in order to include it within its first spin-off essay. But it didn't survive that either.

Even now, as I begin a third post containing content that I initially wrote for the first, who knows where I'll end up?

Right. It should be me, and yet, I often find myself to be my own unreliable narrator.

Last week, I had committed not just to myself but also to two different "accountability groups" that I would post something! Post something again, that is. At least once, so as to have three entries in a row over three weeks. Baby steps, right? "Don't try to post every day," at least not until I can post every week, right? Completing those small steps (maybe call them S.M.A.R.T. goals) rather than over-planning ALL THE THINGS (which tends to end in disappointment) could transform my momentum from its relative state of inertia to one of progress.

But …. oh no. Best laid plans and all that … again … meaning that maybe I need to accept that such repetitive reality fulfills the the fabled definition of "insanity"! Though I nearly crossed the finish line last Thursday, I ran out of time, had to go pick-up my kids from school, and for any number of reasons excuses, didn't return to this post until today (which, yes, is actually "today", Tuesday 10/18, so help me!).

The fact that none of the above directly qualifies as a lede—nor arguably a nut graf—encapsulates what ultimately became the point of this post, simultaneously pushing its original topic—also originally part of that now nearly three-week-old "birthday post"—to "next time."

Sitting at my keyboard last Thursday, browsing the latest group of 25 "geniuses," I began what is no longer this post discussing the creative project I mentioned in my previous entry that involved searching through issues of the UCLA Daily Bruin from the early 1990s. Originally, I explained that "Why?" with this answer: "My perfect predilection for procrastination," which unsurprisingly resulted in the appearance of my not-so-superpower, who proceeded to ignore all attempts to stick the original point!

My alliteration offers just enough of a wink towards self-deprecating humor that acts as my porous shield from shame; too often, many of us prefer to make a joke at our own expense before someone else can do so for us. I certainly have perfected this practice over the last several decades: planning so much, doing far less, proclaiming, "I'll do that next," or, "Maybe tomorrow."

If only MacArthur awarded a Genius Grant for procrastination I'm confident the MacArthur Foundation would have offered me a one-time exception to become the sole two-time Fellow.

There it is! See? Not so funny. But damn, I was determined to squeeze it in! And when I become determined to do something, I have a really hard time letting it go … even if I never get to it.

I should restate that: Especially if I never get to it.

Self-deprecation—or maybe a better word is denigration?—is so powerful, especially when it delays making the "joke" irrelevant. For a long time, I reveled in other humor celebrating such inactivity. For instance, my ability to recite a quote from a movie may not seem surprising. So what's the big deal if I revel in what has been an all-time fave ever since I first saw Tremors upon its 1990 release: "We plan ahead, that way, we don't do anything right now."

Except, I actually have a very poor memory when it comes to lines from movies, even ones I love. Some people will look will stare at me with shock when I don't realize that the line they just referenced is from Ghostbusters or GoodFellas or The Breakfast Club or Ferris Bueller's Day Off or … well, you get the idea. I won't remember some not obscure but less-than the best known line from an all-time favorite like The Apartment, but you give me something that resonates so deeply from a 30-year-old super-fun B-movie I haven't watched in at least two decades, and you bet that sticks! Probably, in fact, because I never realized how much it connected with me until far more recently.

(FWIW: This line of thinking will eventually sync up nicely with the post I began writing and now intend to finish … soon?)

It was just over a year ago that I gave a spot in this home of infrequent, semi-deliberate thoughts to all the "unfinished" ones. Oh yeah, I still hold on to many of them, even as I recognize that it makes more sense to leave them behind. But what of the Goldilocks idea? The single weak spot in the Great Wall of Aaron that holds back my ability to keep flowing; keep growing; keep accelerating. Periodically, I think I have my fingers on it. I think I found the Jenga piece that will topple the structure and help me lose the game I've played against myself for so long.

About five years ago, I took one such symbolic action: Beginning by destroying; cleansing through fire; you know: The usual exorcism rituals. That t-shirt at the top, that also provides the headline for this post? I had one of those. I loved it. I wore it. Sometimes, even in public.

Naturally, I had to destroy it!

So one day, I had a bright idea: "I'll burn it!"

Set it on fire. Send it to the ash-heap of my history. Prove to myself that I no longer thought calling attention to a frequent personal dilemma in this way was funny, particularly when my own actions had so regularly proven otherwise.

So, a few weeks later (natch!), I finally did it. I went out on our terrace so as to avoid potentially burning down our apartment. And that may have been a good idea if the surrounding buildings didn't make our small outdoor space a near-perfect venue for testing aircraft wind-resistance. No matter: I was just burning a t-shirt. What could go wrong?

Thankfully, nothing did, but that turned out to be more luck than it should have been as some of the cotton embers flew away … contributing to some particularly bad camera work!

Don't worry: I make no grand proclamations now that my tenure as a Procrastination Genius (unofficial or not) have concluded. But maybe—just maybe—finishing this post and sending it into the universe will give me just enough of a nudge to put-off putting more things off, if only for a little while!

Time Compresses: Everything new is old again ....

Recently, I ran across this passage while reading the UCLA Daily Bruin:

We are in trouble. Serious trouble.

Our nation, built on the foundation of justice, liberty and freedom for all, is now being threatened by a new enemy. An enemy that instills fear into the hearts of women; an enemy that yearns to take the power out of the hands of the people; an enemy that feeds on the unfortunate, preys on the oppressed and relishes on the helpless.

There might not be any cure for this monster. Why, you may ask? Simple, because we created it. The enemy is not a human — it's the Supreme Court.

— "Guest Columnist" and senior communications major David Gibson
Summer Bruin "Viewpoint" section

If you find yourself on the left side of the political divide, nothing about the above seems so surprising, especially coming from an undergraduate at a University of California school. However, it lacks one crucial contextual detail that might only be obvious to current or recent members of the UCLA community who know that the Bruin no longer calls its "Opinion" section "Viewpoint," nor its summer-term weekly issues the "Summer Bruin."

One must travel 30+ years into the past and search the Daily Bruin print archives to look at the .pdf of the reel of microfilm images that make up the summer 1991 volume of the print-only Summer Bruin, and then find the August 22, 1991 issue. No direct link to this (or any other contemporaneous) issue exists of "the paper," which was solely a physical item—actual newsprint. Nor can you find a link to this individual column. The above linked archive site hasn't always worked for me, but you can access the correct pdf here and scroll to p. 184 to find it under the headline "The Supreme Court's potential Prince of Darkness." (Or, just scroll down a bit. You're welcome.)

That headline offers another clue that Gibson's subject wasn't the current debate over the legitimacy (or lack) of the Supreme Court, the overturning of Rowe, nor anything relating to the-president-who-shall-not-be-named. (Though, "Prince of Darkness" confuses that last bit.) Rather, then-student Gibson was writing about the nomination of yup-still-in-his-job-and-bringing-darkness-to-the-bench-30-years-later Clarence Thomas!

Why was I scouring virtually unsearchable, three-plus-decades-old issues of a college newspaper, you ask? It's for another of my long list of will-I-ever-actually-do-this-interesting-idea projects. This one required that I revisit everything—though primarily the movie reviews—I wrote for the Daily Bruin.

Yes, trawling through more than two years worth of enormous, often slow-to-render .pdf files so I could read 20-year-old Me's opining was, and continues to be, an arguably masochistic and often tedious exercise. And yet, browsing the stories, opinions, and topics that dominated both the local and global conversation in from late 1990 through early 1993 proved revelatory and provided a staggering "Uh-huh Moment."

I can imagine a college student in 2020—or at multiple other moments over the past decade ... or more—writing those same paragraphs because our conversations haven't changed. Sure, progress has been made in some areas, and the scope of certain issues have broadened to become more inclusive, but as I revisited the early 1990s in Los Angeles, nearly every subject that dominated the political, social, and cultural conversations then continue today. The times, they may still be a a'changing, but our debates don't. They simply provide additional evidence for Martin Luther King Jr.'s (or was it Theodore Parker's creation?), famous quote, "The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice," which President Obama regularly adapted for his 2009 election night speech: "It's the answer that led those who have been told for so long by so many to be cynical, and fearful, and doubtful of what we can achieve to put their hands on the arc of history and bend it once more toward the hope of a better day." Even when minimal progress is occasionally made, the conversations remain largely the same.

Considering the manner of three-of-the-four most recent justice's ascension to the Supreme Court, Thomas's nomination offers a solid starting point, though it is far from the only example. It's worth offering some context around Thomas's nomination, especially for those people who learned about 9/11 in a similar way as I understood Vietnam, the Kennedy assassination, and Pearl Harbor.

The 2022 (Belated) Birthday Post—The Day After ...

"i feel nostalgia for things i'd never known."

— I Keep a Diary    

It couldn't have been more than a few years ago, during the early-to-mid-Aughts-heyday of the independent blogger, I brought this little site to life. I did so out of boredom during my time occupying an undeniably cushy but wholly uninteresting job.

I have the urge to call it my "day job," but that would imply I had some other major activity occupying my time. I suppose I did once I began posting because I spent an inordinant amount of time dashing off opinionated missives while also reading and watching movies, TV, books, magazines, and, of course, other sites that could feed my snark, critiques, occasionally thoughtful commentary, but frequently other random nonsense.

However, before I faced the vital (2004) conundrum of Typepad vs. Blogger, I spent the majority of most work-days reading other blogs. For quite a while, I wondered if I should start my own, but on something just sub- of a conscious level, I was terrified that that a) My site wouldn't be as good as theirs and b) nobody would actually visit and read.

At that time, my lengthy blogroll included I Keep a Diary,, Brian Battjer's personal site in which he used photos to guide the stories he shared from his life. Of course, in 2004, the world couldn't imagine Instagram or even an iPhone. As of today, though he has updated his site on a schedule not so different as I have mine, his landing page—featuring the above epigram—remains unchanged from what seems like just yesterday, the day that I wrote "Pilot Post: Day Zero" seemingly just yesterday.

OK, sure. Somewhere in America, the anxious teens waiting to learn whether their complete stops, left turns, and lane changes scored high enough to secure that magic card of freedom bestowed by DMVs everywhere had likely just been conceived when that first post went live, but when "just yesterday" actually means the day I have to start answering "51" instead of "50," 16 years can also feel like "just yesterday."

Cliches exist because they're true, and so while time may not literally fly, the older I get, the faster it moves. Sometimes time moves so fast, and I seem to proportionally produce slower. Take this "Birthday post," for example, which I absolutely intended to publish on my birthday, i.e., yesterday.

And yet, here I am on Sept. 22, still writing, editing, finishing … thinking up "clever" ways to address my tardiness.

That epigram from Brian's landing page grabbed me when I first read it 17+ years ago, and frankly, it's never left. I think about it frequently, even if the triggers that bring it to mine have changed over the years. Now, though my own nostalgia may be rooted in events and actions I have known, too often, those moments have become so distant that they seem like someone else's life; or, even with specific clear memories, I feel like I missed out.

Before I began typing the majority of these words yesterday, I started reading Joyce Carol Oates's novel Blonde, and I ran across this line just a few pages in:

For what is time but others’ expectations of us? That game we can refuse to play.

After reassembling some of the pieces of my brain, I thought, "What marvelous synchronicity?"

Oh, you 365 days of yore, wherefore hath thou gone?

Memorializing My Media

This is "memorializing"?

It was just two years ago that I learned a completely new-to-me use of the word “memorialize” when I heard James Comey (followed by news anchors, pundits, and especially legal analysts )describe having “memorialized” all his conversations with then-president, Donald Trump.

As I say in my sidebar, “Context is everything,” and at least to me, the use of any form of “memorial” generally refers to commemorating someone or something lost and revered. We celebrate the lives of presidents and civil leaders; honor those who fought and died in war; and remember tragedies that we want to ensure nobody forgets.

But “memorialize” a conversation? Definitionally, I suppose it works: The second listed definition for “memorialize” according to oed.com (accessible for free via most public library websites with your library card, FYI) reads, "To preserve the memory of; to be or supply a memorial of; to commemorate."

The idea “to preserve the memory of” particularly interests me. As Comey, et al.’s usage seems common in legal practice, I suppose attending law school would have forced my surprise a couple decades ago rather than in 2019.

But even outside any legal context, I love the idea of “memorializing” in this manner, and in my case, I suppose I enjoy memorializing, well ... everything.

You see, I’m a packrat. Obviously I don’t refer to the actual rodent; but rather “a person who collects or hoards especially unneeded items.”

In my case, any metaphorical resemblance to the genus Neotoma is a genetic anomaly that I can definitely trace back at least two generations on my paternal side.

For at least the last half-century of his life, my dad memorialized nearly every life event—large or small—in his pocket “Day-at-a-Glance” calendar. He kept copious notes concerning anything he considered important or interesting, categories that often included items others would have found esoteric or anodyne.

He also kept everything. Though I was always cognizant of this fact, until he passed away, and I spent several hours perusing his files, I never actually knew to what extent.

I found old correspondence not just from family and friends, but to them as well, for he composed everything on his beloved typewriter using carbon paper so he could retain an instant duplicate. He not only had my old report cards and similar personal memorabilia; he had his own elementary, middle, and high school report cards. Externally, unless you lived with him at some point—wall-to-wall bookshelves, not withstanding—you may never notice his hoarding tendencies because he was extremely organized; anal, even, meticulously filing and labeling everything.

To be fair to my father (and, I suppose by extension, to myself as well), I can state with certainty that he inherited these qualities from his mother, my grandmother. Fifty years of photo albums—well-organized and (mostly) thematically and/or temporally consistent—squeezed in to the den’s built-in shelves of my grandparents’ apartment provide just one of many examples.

Before moving out of the apartment, she asked if anyone in our family wanted to take these albums. She thought, for example, that I might want the one she had made for my parents’ 1965 wedding.

Sure. Perfectly normal. As is keeping event-specific printed items, such as a cocktail napkin or matchbook. (1965, remember?) But what about ...

A cookie‽

For when I first looked through my parents’ wedding album, included on one page with the aforementioned cocktail napkin and matchbook, I discovered what by that point was an approximately 40-year-old cookie from the reception. It sat in a crushed paper serving bowl, clinging to the sticky album page, under the cellophane cover sheet.

The MMXXI Birthday Post: Upon turning L

Why have Roman numerals endured, maintaining a hallowed (if not necessarily useful) place in Western culture?

Better: How many people read that sentence and either ignore it or answer, “No idea,” and don’t think twice about it; versus my predilection to flashback to a MCMXC’s Arsenio Hall-bit that infiltrated pop culture enough to inspire a C+C Music Factory hit single.

Like most of my curiosities, this question did not spontaneously emerge from a vacuum. Less commonly, I managed to stop my rabbit-hole deep-dive before my feet left the ground, though only after falling down the neighboring pit searching for why “L” equals “50.”

I won’t follow that tangent; suffice it to say, none of the numerals that seem to have developed intuitively due to Latin words like “centum” or “mille.”

Naturally, this curiosity resulted from the new ME year celebrated today by my personal Gregorian calendar: As of II:LVI am Pacific Daylight Time, I passed from XLIX to L.

How is this guy L years old‽
AND he hasn't stopped yawning‽

But back to the initial question, because the endurance of Roman numerals for over MM years, long beyond performing any practical, non-decorative function fascinates me. As I approached L, and as people have offered both well-wishes and congratulations, I began considering my own presence, perseverance, and fortitude (whatever they may be), and the representative nature of this blog’s staying power as opposed to simply fading away along with its activity level and relevancy.

I’ve always enjoyed Roman numerals. They’re little more than pretty to look at, but I suppose they provide a weightiness; a kind of numerical bolding, even? I remember II decades ago thinking one of the more monumental changeovers at the turn of the millennium and century was watching MCMXCIX in favor for the larger but more compact MM.

Super Bowls; copyright dates for films, TV, and books; clock faces; building cornerstones and historical plaques: What else regularly utilizes Roman numerals? And still, I’m pretty sure I learned the III most basic—I, V, X—along with, if not before, our standard (Arabic) number system.

For nearly a decade, these birthday posts were the only consistent element of this space, and I used them primarily to note the many interesting people who share(d) my birthday. That annual tradition became irregular and infrequent during the MMX's, even more so since I have II or III birthday posts that I drafted but never published.

My adherence to the birthday post has been its own thing-to-make-me-say-hmmmm. As I noted previously, I have not always enjoyed celebrating my birthday; sometimes, I don’t even want to acknowledge it. I get too self-conscious. I question the motivations of people who disappear from my life before reaching out on that single day with a brief kind (and generic?) word. I contemplate my relationships with those who forget (or don’t care enough to remember?) that it’s my birthday.

So why have I always called greater attention to it in this space? Once again, the contradictory nature of my every feeling reigns supreme. In other words:

I don’t want to be the center of attention; how dare you ignore me!

I would be remiss if I didn’t wish a happy Lth to my birthDATE buddies—Luke Wilson and Alfonso Ribeiro—but otherwise, this year I choose to focus on the some of the various media that entered and/or achieved some cultural significance on-or-around Sept. XXI, MCMLXXI.

For instance, we recently got a new car which came with a IV-month trial subscription to SiriusXM, and on our first long weekend drive, I discovered that the “LXXs on VII” channel reruns American Top XL with Casey Kasem, generally picking that Saturday’s or Sunday’s date from a corresponding year between MCMLXX-MCMLXXIX.

So when I started looking at what command the cultural conversations at the moment I began my true domination of my parents’ lives, I wondered what held the top spot on the Billboard Hot C was when I was born.

Facing 50: Deconstructing and re-editing my three-act structure

I was born in San Francisco 50 years ago tomorrow, and for the last several months when anyone has asked me that most terrible of conversation starters—“How are you?”—I have replied with some variable of the following:

“Hopefully, reaching the end of this 25-year midlife crisis.”

As my few most-recent attempts to resurrect this digital space demonstrate, much of my contemporary focus involves self-reflection. Because my constant curiosity seems to prefer the ever deepening meta-analysis best represented by Russian Nesting Dolls, I have also spent an inordinate amount of time considering the blurry purgatory separating healthy self-examination and narcissistic navel-gazing.

I wish my identifying a “mid-life crisis” was new, but no matter how little I have visited this space over the past decade, it appears that I left evidence of playtime in a similar mental sandbox just nine years ago:

Recently, more than usual, I have felt further away from myself, the things I enjoy, and the Aaron I know I am and have always been. A mid-life crisis. A journey of self-discovery. A bunch of blathering nonsense. Any and all of these. I’m hoping as I focus more on my writing – whether here, elsewhere or a combination of the two – that the answers will become more apparent to me.

“Hoping.” An ongoing story of inaction overshadowed by the busy-ness of any given moment; a trait that ever-present in my fear-center, but not one that resembles the “Aaron” I have always believed myself to be and often proven true to others as well. And yet, as nine years flew by, I too often neglected my aspirational child, allowing that that passive story to take roots and experience compound growth.

I wrote that 2012 birthday post and its excerpted passage less than six weeks after getting married; barely over 18 months before becoming a first-time parent; just four years shy of the three-month window during which I joyfully welcomed a second child before painfully saying goodbye to my dad.

And now, nine years later, on the eve of the conclusion of my first half-century, I ponder how much has changed, all that hasn’t, and where I am in life—personally, professionally, financially, socially, emotionally—as I turn older than either of my grandmothers were when I was born, and frequently, I feel more lost and confused than ever.

Of course, nine years ago, I looked ahead at a path that I have yet to follow in anything more than brief, occasional, irregular spurts.

More recently, I wondered how to edit or rewrite my story if I treat “midlife” literally; if I consider my truth-masked-as-humor answer to “How are you?” as descriptive, precisely where would I insert it within my three-act structure?

The “middle-of-my-life”? 25 years? The entire middle? Or just part of it? Have I reached the end of that second act mesa, preparing to begin the long descent, without brakes, traveling faster with each fleeting second.

OR, I could pursue a more optimistic storyline: Screenwriting gurus charlatans have different names for that central moment in the story where simple turns challenging or difficulties result in breakthroughs. “The Midpoint” is one common name for that crucial pivot point, placed in the middle of that second act, which actually contains the bulk of any story—half of it if not more, rather than just a proportional third.

That makes more sense for life too, right? During our first acts—infancy, childhood, adolescent, young adulthood—we develop and grow, hopefully determining the direction we want each of our stories to go. Then comes the long and most interesting (one hopes) second act, during which we establish ourselves in that story and the larger world, face challenges on the way to proficiency and expertise, develop relationships with others, and as time passes, hopefully determine the transition that leads to a satisfying conclusion in Act three.

For many of us, that might mean that Act 1 ends upon finishing school and beginning a career; Act 2 comprises successes and failures in that career as well as with our social and/or familial relationships, all represented with some major identifiable turning point somewhere in the middle; all leading into Act 3, with, if we’re lucky, some sort of relaxed and/or retired existence until the story ends.

At least, that’s a pretty clean, straightforward, and arguably sanguine possibility.

I guess it’s the one I’d like to model, even though my nature fights against it, because as I turn 50, very little resembles the path I foresaw or the story I believed I was writing when I was 25. I’d much prefer my 25-year midlife crisis conclude at a “midpoint” rather than a third-act transition, and the only feeling of certainty as I move through this moment in time, is that it will be one or the other.

In just over a month, I will mark another “birthday” of sorts: 25 years as a resident of New York City. I have and will always consider myself a San Franciscan, and yet, I will have lived in New York over half my life, and obviously longer than in either San Francisco (17 years) or Los Angeles (8 years). I believe I always saw my cross-country move as the start of my second act, and I know I anticipated a promising future. Still, I probably too often selected the less optimal next page in my “Choose Your Own Adventure” story.

Naturally, whether I push against or forcefully through the thin scrim between useful self-examination and counter-productive self-absorption, I inevitably start thinking about one of my all-time favorite films, Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York. I haven’t actually watched it in many years, and as this collection of words has coalesced, I have realized it’s about time I revisit it. It feels extra-relevant as I face 50.

Thinking about Synecdoche, New York prompted me to wonder what—aside from love and awe—I thought and felt about it after walking out of the screening room following my staggering first viewing 13 years ago. Luckily (and somewhat surprisingly), I actually wrote about it.

Rereading my open letter to Charlie Kaufman offered its own unanticipated and powerful experience beyond any I could have intended when I quickly (I’d bet) put those thoughts into words and onto this blog. I called it “A Reaction, Not Yet a Review,” and now reflecting upon my past reflection could also count as too self-indulgent—certainly the commenter who suggested that I, “”Get over yourself, and most importantly, get a hold of yourself,” because, “It’s only a movie,” thought so back then.

Considering how often my film-related experiences have induced both “Uh-huh” and “A-HA” moments, scrutinizing how the film spoke to me, the reaction it stimulated, and the self-realizations it proffered at that moment in time—roughly halfway between my move to New York and the present, I must note—seems appropriate, especially since my experience of and reaction to the Kaufman’s film—along with my serendipitous attendance at two other theatrical productions that weekend—feels like a more profound episode in my story than I ever realized.

I guess the barrier between self-reflection and self-indulgence reveals itself only after discovering the results of the process: Positive change thanks to lessons learned seems a better path than continuing (and likely never-ending) curiosity that does little else than uncover the next nesting doll.

I know that I have and continue to somewhat indiscriminately amble down both paths; I always liked rereading those “Choose Your Own Adventure” books and selecting different options. I love experiencing/watching/reading/studying different takes on the same story.

But as I face 50, I fear that my incessant curiosity and insatiable thirst for the new and the next are now luxuries because whether one considers 50 the new 40 (or even 30) or simply the age at which one officially becomes part of the AARP demographic, the likelihood is that most of my story is behind me, and if I have yet to find it satisfying enough, I really need to get to work.

Digitally Dusting-off a Decade of Unfinished Thoughts

Ideas, I’ve had a few....

A few million?

I often listen to a podcast and hear a comment or story that triggers a response, one which I’d love to discuss and/or debate with the speaker, but doing so directly is not possible. Wouldn’t my little corner of the Internet be the perfect space?

I export a link to the clip to Things, my overburdened task management app. My idealized scenario (GTD influenced) plays out as so: Later that evening, I go through my Things Inbox, find the link with the clip, and process it into a task to complete, namely, “Write post re: XXXX.” Then within the next couple days, during my allocated blog-writing period, I write a quick draft that the following day I clean-up and publish.

What a sleek., streamlined procedure. Dare I call it beautiful? So smooth. So productive. Makes perfect sense.

Ideals are such silly things. I may not remember that much from my undergraduate literary theory class, but I never forgot our ongoing discussions around the “Platonic Ideal.” In fact, as our society continues falling deeper into polarized idealogical-driven beliefs and actions—as opposed to reality-based ones—I think about my own perfectionist and idealist tendencies, especially how their primary true commonality is unachievable impossibility. Something close to my “Ideal,” sure. But “perfection”? Never.

Back to that podcast clip: Achieving that idealized process consistently actually isn’t that hard. The steps—aside from the actual writing, I suppose—are not so cumbersome. And yet, almost inevitably, when I send that link from my Overcast app to Things, I may as well have tossed it into a black hole, but a special one that taunts me by allowing me some ability to see inside and consider the idea, even as the gravitational force remains too strong for me to fully retrieve and act upon it..

Or,...

The ideas that I force myself to sit, focus, and expel onto my digital page only to ... run out of time. I don’t finish even a quick draft. Duties of the day and other events interrupt my flow, and returning to it later or the next day feels Herculean.

Maybe I actually finished a draft, the rushing river has arrived at its serene terminus—let’s say, a lake?—and it’s all there, just not clean or coherent enough. Too often, once I leave the keyboard, diving back into that freezing, glacier-fed water to complete something I consider readable—or at the very least, not embarrassing—becomes too high a hurdle.

If I can’t scale The Wall from Game of Thrones all at once, I too often don’t return to the headspace of wanting to climb it all. Of course this contradicts my inherent consciousness of never doing performing well—much less extraordinarily—without ongoing work, adjustment, and improvement. I want to see myself ascending The Wall in the manner of those insane climbers who attach a tent halfway up an enormous rock face so they can calmly (while suspended hundreds of feet high) take the necessary rest break before finishing the next day.

I doubt I need to explain why finishing any larger projects—i.e., screenplays and such—has proved even harder, especially once I have a “complete” draft that requires a lengthy rewriting/editing undertaking.

When I began this post, before its introduction morphed into yesterday’s, and the preceding paragraphs also transformed into their current state, I planned for this space to briefly comment on the contents of all those “Unfinished OOF Drafts”. Some of these files contain lengthy pieces that I never realized I had left unfinished.

For example, start near the bottom, traveling back to Oct. 2012 with “Panic Attack DETROIT,” which focuses on a performance of a Playwrights Horizons production called Detroit. The file contains over 1500 words, and it appears relatively coherent even while remaining obviously unfinished. The piece focuses less on the play than the mammoth panic attack I experienced beginning about 20 minutes into the first act, explaining why this unpublished (and unedited) post begins like this:

When I think back to The Sopranos, rarely do I think first of the inaugural season’s prime conceit: A physically imposing and strong mob boss begins having panic attacks and decides to go see a psychiatrist.

I continued for over 550 more words before even mentioning the play. Then I explored why the non-panic attack-related experience of the play that I recalled was so different from the contemporaneous reviews I read.

I never reached a specific conclusion, and though those 1500 words remain “obviously unfinished,” they were pretty close to complete. And yet, I didn’t return to it, nor nine years later could I tell you precisely why, but before I knew it, the show had closed, and I can remember silly me felt publishing no longer made any senes.

Glancing at almost every title in that list offers similar memories. I saw Red Dog Howls at New York Theatre Workshop just two weeks after going to Detroit. I didn’t have another anxiety-induced episode, but I remember not liking the play, which irritated me due to its inability to better fulfill it otherwise worthy and promising premise.

To my eyes, its greatest misstep resulted from its overt and counterproductive manipulation, which led me to write this (again, unedited, mind you) paragraph:

People often complain about how manipulative plays and films are, but what we really complain about is how easy it is to identify specifically when and how the responsible artists are manipulating us. The art of storytelling in all its forms is grounded in manipulation. If the book, play or film does not grab hold and manipulate the audience’s emotions in some way, it can’t help but to have failed. But when there is no mystery to that manipulation, when you can see the puppet’s strings, few things are more tiresome.

“Space for SPACIOUS” focused on my love for the late, why-didn’t-I-think-of-starting-that-business co-working space company that turned restaurants into coworking spaces during their non-operating hours. Spacious would outfit the location with power strips as well as fast, stable WiFi. They would offer free water, coffee, and tea, and since the locations were mostly nice restaurants just serving dinner, the bathrooms were generally clean and comfortable, plus you could walk away from your stuff without fear of having it stolen, regardless of getting punched in the face.

I utilized Spacious regularly for well over a year, and in those earlier days, they also seemed to want to create a community among its members, most of whom seemed to be ambitious young startup entrepreneurs. Ironically, that too changed as the company grew, obviously becoming less integral to their plans. For instance, their Member-oriented Slack workspace suddenly disappeared.

But like too many startups that find quick success, they also grew, maybe too quickly, at least in terms of how they also transformed (and arguably abandoned) their initial business model by focusing less on the restaurant spaces and more on leasing vacant locations they could turn into dedicated coworking spaces able to remain open later in the day. The whole thing revived sad memories of the late, oh-so-great-for-its-time, pre-Netflix Kozmo.com.

At the end of Aug. 2019, shortly before becoming notorious for something other than its lovely, large, amenity-flooded coworking spaces, WeWork acquired Spacious. I had planned to write about Spacious for nearly the entire time I utilized it. I kept thinking that I might create a guide to all their spaces, rating each location and describing any special features not necessarily at every location. (For example, some spaces offered seltzer water too!)

However, I only began that still-living-in-my-“Unfinished”-folder draft about a month after WeWork’s acquisition. Maybe more importantly, it was just three months before WeWork’s Dec. 2019 announcement of Spacious’s shutdown, which made irrelevant my hosanna-filled, yet still critical, thoughts and plans.

If there’s one thing I don’t want to be, it’s irrelevant. (Note: Good memoir title!)

Don’t worry: I do not intend to address each of that folder’s files, nor all the other ideas revealed by a Things deep-dive. I may return to some of them and both contextualize and/or “finish” them, posting them here. Eventually. Or maybe not. But ... no promises, duh.

This post, too, came dangerously close to sitting in the digital dimension of my hard drive. I began moving my fingers across my keyboard on Monday. I thought I might be done, but of course, I ran out of time to proofread, edit, post, blah-blah-blah. Determined to shift out of my inertia and accelerate towards more active and directed momentum, I planned to return to this screen and proofread/edit/post/blah-blah-blah Tuesday morning, leaving myself the afternoon to work on (and maybe finish) a much more recent occupant of this folder: “OOF-Draft_COMMUNITY CORONA-INTRO,” the first of a short series that certainly remains “relevant,” but in far different ways than when I first put words-on-screen.

Somehow, returning to this post Tuesday felt—for lack of a more complex or detailed description—scary. So, naturally, I put it off, symbolically dangling several carrots and sticks in front of me. So tantalizing were those carrots and so terrifying the sticks, I succumbed to the easiest and most comforting action possible.

I took a nap.

Naps don’t alter inertia. So I woke-up, returned to the computer after 9 pm, and suffered the consequences of not going to bed as early as I had hoped. Still, it came with the satisfaction of knowing that I would push these words into the universe and move this file out of that dreaded folder, while gearing up to dive back in. And then, that connected but different collection of words commandeered my fingers yesterday.

A fine line separates momentum from inertia, and I have spent years hopping across or often straddling it, struggling against the “Resistance” that too often wins our Tug-of-War.

Now if I can just stay on the better side long enough that my momentum accelerates, creating a habit that hurts more to skip; that wins the battle of instant gratification instead of capitulating to fear and insecurity.

Yeah ... that would be something!

Planning on rebooting and now maybe Doing ... Again

TREMORS: "We plan ahead, that way, we don't do anything right now."

I am a “Planner.”

A “Doer?” Sure. For years, decades even, I was a “Doer.” And even when I fell short of “Doing,” I drew from a war chest of great excuses, thereby allowing myself to retain that “Doer” mantle.

And yet, just over a month before I complete my 50th trip around the sun (WTF‽), the documentary of my life muddles that description. All the excuses fall flat as I recognize fewer tomorrows ahead. Suddenly—or maybe not so?— I find myself experiencing a challenging internal reconciliation, one made more difficult due to my ongoing need for a clearer external harmony as well.

I realize that’s vague; enigmatic even, and not necessarily in a fun way. And yet, it provides a decent enough representation of my current thought process, so ... I’m gonna go with it.

Two of my three brothers got married in California this summer, and so in June as well as earlier this month, I traveled west to attend. I went alone due to both COVID and cost.

As I have likely mentioned here before, I grew-up an only child, but I have three (much) younger brothers from my fathers second marriage, which occurred when I was 13. I never lived in the same city as the three of them, much less the same household.

These trips, coming on the heels of the beginning of our return to normalcy mixed with our lunge back into “Woah woah woah, have you met my not-so-distant cousin Delta,” all naturally coinciding with a monumental and unbelievable approaching birthday has been, to quote Marty McFly, “Heavy!”

I often write, “I find myself,” a fascinating phrase that at its core removes all personal agency, doesn’t it? As if I’m just floating along through life, and ... “Oh! Look where I landed!” My consciousness contains an eternal battle between Yin/Yang-like polar opposites, a Battle Royale between the intellectual and emotional , with the latter often saying to the former, “Fuck you! I know you know what I’m doing, and I could not care less. You dominated way too long. My turn!”

And so now, here I am. I started this post three days ago. I’ll return to what took so long, but as I go through it for the last time before clicking “Publish,” this three-times-as-long-as-it-could-have-been process distills the larger them of what follows perfectly. At least ... it does for me. If you’re not in my head, you might need to keep going. (If you are in my head, the rent is long overdue!)

I have struggled for weeks—months even (years arguably)—around what to do with this online space. My desire to write too often remains a hovering threat rather than any activation of that infinitive into, “I write.” That much should be evident simply by scanning the last decade-and-a-half of posts.

I plan so many things: Commentary, if not necessarily criticism, of film, TV, theater, podcasts, and all media; political-oriented responses to all those things that seem obvious to me, but I don’t hear others discuss; personal exploration, i.e., the “diary” that I never intended this site to become but more often than not through my 40s it has represented.

For the past two years, I have planned a total reboot of this site, one to better categorize my work, making it easier to navigate, prettier to look at, living in a corner of the Interwebs that shouldn’t be relegated to (primarily) The Wayback Machine. I even created a “chip-away” project to do so, in which I would spend a limited, bit-size amount of time each day so the task didn’t feel so enormous. I told myself, “This year, for sure.” As we shot past the halfway mark of 2021, I continued telling myself that.

COVID-19 has provided everyone with magnificent and legitimate excuses for how the past 17 months have not proceeded according to plans, but the compassion I have tried to offer myself around this extremely challenging period feels much less earned. Sure, I have two young children, and we live in too-expensive Brooklyn, but my wife remains the sole breadwinner as she has been for the majority of our 11-plus year relationship.

Once upon I time, I executed constantly. Maybe I wouldn’t complete everything to my desired result (read: idealized perfection), but I would complete them, even if that meant a nonstop, frantic rush at the last minute. At least, the things I cared about and wanted to finish, those would reach some sort of conclusion, and I could move on to the next.

Or ... that’s what I always told myself.

I could write tens-of-thousands of words examining this behavior.

I won’t now; I might later.

Do you trust that I will? I mean ... I don’t. I am neither confident, committed, nor sure that I want to; nor certain that I should. What an awful word, “should,” one that I hesitate to use because of its roughly life-long destructive impact on me.

But I want to be back here. I want to return to the original 100,000-foot intent of this site, namely, offering myself an opportunity to get out of my head, by flinging words onto the page; by taking my never-ending ideas and opinions and throwing them into the world, for others to read (or not); maybe even respond (or not). Showing-up in public was always the goal, even when just an unconscious one; creating a confident presence in both the real and virtual worlds and arguing that I have something valuable to say, and hopefully, useful or at worst interesting to someone else.

Sitting down, facing the screen—whether blank or already full of words—becomes harder for me each day. “Why?” has become a persistent question; arguably, too persistent. I am too curious. I care too much about that “Why?” I love and appreciate curiosity, and I feel too many people aren’t curious enough, certainly about the world around them, but maybe even mores about themselves.

And yet, I now connect to the old proverb more than ever. Frankly, as a dog-lover/cat-hater, I never minded Curiosity’s homicidal tendency. Of course, such glibness creates a beautiful barrier against fully considering the metaphor. You see, now I simultaneously recognize how the search to answer “Why?” regularly blocks me from finishing just about anything, if not actually everything. I suppose I’m learning how to become more selective in my curiosity around all those “Why?”s, so that fewer of them will hijack my attention and drive me down tangential pathways, further from any specific, determinate goals.

See, even that intro became a winding path to this post’s original intent: Examining what I’ve left unfinished, and in many cases, not even started, particularly related to this 17-year-old blog that contains fewer than 900 entires. But during this process occupying several hours over the past three days, something else came out.

I think it’s valuable, at least to me. So I’m going to leave it here, and that should make it far easier for me to return tomorrow.

Right‽‽‽

The (still-not-quite) daily check-in: A journey in search of self-compassion

Self-Compassion:
Graphic by Hugo Hinojosa for The Prospector (theprospectordaily.com)

Yesterday was Monday right? I could swear yesterday was Monday.

On Monday, I mentioned launching a “daily check-in” in this space, and yet, I realized that I set no goals; I only offered examples of what I intended to write using two previous, originally more private, let’s call them “accountability reports.”

Was I already giving myself an out?

Since yesterday was not in fact Monday, I recognize that my every day streak stopped at one. Or is it even a streak without at least a single consecutive pair? So, it stopped at zero. It didn’t start. Or it began, but it was aborted. So many different ways to say the same thing.

These days, I exert a great deal of energy and focus attempting to show myself some grace; some compassion.

To clarify, “these days” actually means “since yesterday.” And to clarify further, I mean Thursday-yesterday, and not the Monday-yesterday I mentioned at the start.

Yesterday, during a conversation with my therapist, I expressed—not for the first time—my misanthropic frustration that results from a repetitive pattern: I reach an “A-HA!” or even “Uh-huh” moment (see last post), and yet the semi-conscious action hamster in my skull reacts non-constructively. It looks over at the Headquarters control center, yawns, and then closes its eyes to continue; or, if it’s spent too much time chatting with Anger, it sticks out its tongue, goes on strike, and pickets without moving its wheel.

Of course, I only speak to my own experience, but the most challenging part of any mental and emotional self-care or -improvement—and therefore, the entire psychodynamic therapeutic process—is bridging the gaps between intellectual comprehension and emotional acceptance enabling myself to diminish my blocks and fears, which of course are often—if not always—the same thing.

Even as I recognized its validity, my therapist’s response was not particularly satisfying: Compassion.

Compassion towards myself is the only escape route. Compassion not only for “Present Aaron” and my current realities and challenges, but also for the little boy, adolescent, and young, less-young, and not-so-young men that star in the various chapters of my life.

Definitely far more of an “Uh huh” than the alternative, but still seemingly impossible; how can I show myself compassion when I keep messing-up everything.

Of course, there’s the rub, right? Am I flubbing life? No. (It was rhetorical, but also, still no. Not completely.) But my belief system, and the unholy polyamorous marriage of Fear, Disgust, and Sadness refuse to provide an opening to consciously frame reality otherwise.

I can’t express how much I love Inside Out, and how valuable a movie it can be. But where does compassion fit-in? I suppose it’s an element of Joy, but in this regard, especially as a counterpoint to Disgust, that doesn’t seem strong enough. Of course, that’s the point of the film: Joy is all we have to fight Fear, Disgust, and Anger, and if we can teach her to acknowledge and embrace Sadness rather than fix or ignore her, I suppose that in itself is fulfills the necessities of “compassion.”

Creating my own context, within which I wonder why my life’s journey to date has diverged so much from the path I planned, and answering that question with, “You kept fucking up!” Not only does me no good, but also enhances the damage. Instead, I can’t forget nor dismiss my history, but I must learn from it rather than dwell in it.

AND to some degree, I don’t want to look forward too much either, right? That may be an even larger challenge to me, because I’m a planner. I make and have lots of plans. And they’re good ones too. I can show you one day ... as soon as I start them.

I can’t ignore what’s ahead or live life completely unplanned—especially as a nearly 50-year-old man with two kids under eight—but I also recognize how the constant looking ahead enables my procrastination. It’s also an escape from the present, which in itself seems completely insane since the present is the only period any of us can actually experience. (At least, for now ... in today’s present.)

During my UCLA days, I wrote a one-act play that focused on this debate-as-old-as-my-time: past vs present vs future. I’ve always considered living primarily in one’s now as the optimum way to be, but the past and future are so much more comfortable, no? And they take so much less work.

Writing about not writing: Creating a conclusion to a never-ending Series

I have focus issues.

I suppose the title of this blog indicates as much, but when I first used it (literally 30 years ago for my UCLA Daily Bruin column), I did not yet possess that awareness. I considered “Out of Focus” a simple, slightly self-deprecating title that would simultaneously contextualize my column as one focusing primarily on film and television.

But now? Twenty-nine years after my last column in the Bruin? Over 17 years after this site’s “Pilot Post”? What is this blog?

I recently finished cataloging the previous nearly 900 posts to discover that intentionally or not, the totality of the content within this space lives up to its name: It lacks focus; it lacks a consistent identity; it refuses to present a [shudder] “brand.” And yet, holistically it offers an accurate representation of the hamster wheel inside my skull.

I only received my ADD diagnosis about two years ago, which now—after-the-fact—is utterly shocking to me. (And, if you know me in the real world, likely surprises you as well.)

Once, when I launched this blog, I mostly commented on other things: entertainment news, other blogs, general movieTV mishegas; I didn’t write a ton of “criticism,” though the recipe for most of those supremely critical posts included a featured a bushel of snark, a hefty pour of often-myopic opinion, a pinch of arrogance, and a dollop of contemporaneous zeitgeist.

Over the years, especially as I stopped posting multiple times a day primarily with reactionary “takes”—mostly hot, many not—I lost touch with what I had already published here. Between 2006-2009, I regularly found myself longing to share my thoughts with the webiverse, but again, not with any focus. When Twitter arrived, it (for a time) became a sufficient substitute.

Over the years, whenever the urge became so heavy and loud that I either did resume drafting ideas that may or may not have seen the light of public availability, I created plenty of insane and unnecessary hurdles, mostly in the form of explanations that, I suppose, I needed to provide exposition. The unhelpful Aaron-voice demanded that I must—an evil word, second only (maybe) to should—explain myself (and my absence, natch) before I launched into anything new.

Writers write, but I can’t start writing until I explain why I have not been writing.

I shouldn’t talk about politics unless I offer a reason for anyone to give a shit about my political ideas or analysis.

Though regularly triggered by my obsessive listening to dozens of podcasts, I must not devote time to using my reactions to offer well-considered takes, at least not without first describing my obsession with the medium and how frequently I want to turn my asynchronous conversations with several of my favorite shows/hosts into actual dialogues.

You get the idea.

I never intended for this site to act as a diary or confessional, and yet, so much of the handful of posts from the past five-to-10 years have been focused on personal reflection rather than external commentary. That statement covers all the unposted and incomplete essays currently occupying space on my hard drive, in the cloud, and really at this point, who the hell knows where else.

See, I’m doing it again. I didn’t even mean to, but this is what happens when I let my fingers do the walking all over my keyboard.

I keep embarking on new quests for accountability. Currently, I participate in multiple (specifically, three) accountability groups. One of them is technically on hiatus, but some of us still post to our group forum, and by some of us, I mean mostly me.

Though there is no current active commitment to check-in, I decided that I wanted to keep doing it. And then, I wrote one nearly two weeks ago that as I typed developed into something much more than a simply check-in.

Because that space focuses on accountability, I push myself to communicate as openly, honestly, and transparently as possible, qualities not exactly native to my San Francisco secular Jewish upbringing nor my stereotypical, 1970s latch-key child-of-divorce youth. So as my fingers crawled around the keyboard, and I wrote several hundred words, I asked myself why I so easily could share these thoughts with only 10-12 sort-of-strangers? What am I hiding from? And what can I just maybe set free?

If I’m going to write, dammit ... if I’m going to call myself a writer ... well, I will just throw this shit into the world! Stop controlling and explaining so much, and instead, just create!

So nearly two weeks ago, I began this post.

I finished a draft.

And then?

I suppose I took a “Creative U-Turn,” as coined by Julia Cameron in The Artist’s Way, which I happen to be working through right now. In fact, just this morning I read the section about “Creative U-Turns,” which prompted me to finish and post this collection of words now.

But the initial catalyst for this post was the two accountability group check-ins, one of which includes my description of what I like to call an “Uh-huh moment.” I have shared my idea of an “Uh-huh moment” idea—as opposed to “A-HA!” ones—with many people over the years, so I just assumed I had written about it here as well. However, after searching every single post, I discovered one simple mention without any true definition.

When I first drafted this post, I meant for it to mark the beginning of a new practice: I had decided to check-in here, in this space every day, just as I’d been doing in that smaller forum. And just like that, “every day” didn’t even make it to “tomorrow.”

But it’s a new week, right? And though “every day” will surely become an approximation more than a guarantee, my goal is regularity and consistency, and creating a place with enough active new content that I no longer feel like explaining my return every single day. (It makes sense to me, OK?)

Therefore, without further ado, more than 10 days late but at no cost whatsoever, I give you “A-HA!” vs. “Uh-huh” amid additional self-reflection!

We Live in a Country ...: Reflections on a Nation and Inauguration

Photo credits:
Top: Daniel Acker, Bloomberg/Getty Images
Bottom: Samuel Corum, Getty Images North America/Getty Images

It’s already been a week!

OR...

It’s only been a week‽

One week ago from the moment this post went live, only watching a clock would have let you know anything was different, and yet everything had changed with President Biden’s inauguration and the semi-peaceful transfer of power.

Through the windows of my Brooklyn living room, I saw blue skies. On my TV, I noticed the same in Washington D.C. Earlier, as I sat to write my morning pages, an unexpected heavy flurry swirled outside; after, when I closed myself in the kids’ bedroom to meditate, the snow had stopped, but outside appeared cold and gloomy, remaining overcast and gray.

Though I did not record changes in weather in order to compare them to the timeline of He-Who-Shall-No-Longer-Be-Named’s departure from the White House for his final flight on Air Force One, it seemed to me that the further he traveled physically from our government’s seat of power, Mother Nature began to relax. By the time he landed in Florida and deplaned, that blue sky had peaked through, and Kamala Harris was minutes from taking the oath that allowed her to drop “-elect” from her new job title. And by the time our Mini-Wannabe-Mussolini and Melania parted ways to go to their separate bedrooms inside Mar-a-Lago, only the winter coats and accessories (most notably some giant mittens!) revealed the season. The temperature in D.C. at noon reached 42 degrees, right around the average high temperature for the date.

As high noon approached, President Uncle Joe took the oath-of-office at 11:47 am, standing on the same platform that just two weeks earlier hundreds of abhorrent, anti-constitutional, anti-patriotic, apparently ProFa (read: Pro Fascist) insurrectionists had defiled just two weeks earlier. Meanwhile, from my personal view in Brooklyn and the televised one from D.C., though clouds remained, the day now appeared bright and sunny, and I appreciated the fortuitous synchronicity of between our leadership and the weather.

I wondered: Going forward, maybe we could just skip “45” in the presidential count. I mean, there actually have only been 44 people to hold the office; Grover Cleveland’s non-consecutive terms make him both 22 and 24. So why not treat Mr. 45 like so many buildings consider their 13th floors: Technically, within the unforgiving universe of numbers, it exists, but too many people feel better not seeing “13” on the elevator display or buttons, we accept its absence and pretend the 14th floor isn’t ... well, you know.

Listening to Biden’s speech, as the morning became the afternoon, as I’ve heard so many others express, I suddenly felt a little bit more relaxed. Certainly, I’m conscious that a new president doesn’t automatically fix anything, much less everything, but in this case, at least my daily expectations had flipped upside down: The glass for our country and our world was now 50% full rather than 90+% empty.

I watched the entire ceremony with a sense of cleansing:

• Thrilled by the musical performances of all three superstars, especially once Lady Gaga was finished, and the immensity of the moment seemed to make her think, “Did I just really do that? Did this happen?” (Though to both Gaga and JLo: You couldn’t wear a mask until you reached the microphone? Like everyone else?).
• Moved by the very sight of our new, smiling, non-housefly-attracting VP, whose ascension to the second highest office in the land may be the closest to fruition the “American Dream” ideal of the American Dream has ever reached, marking so many notable historical facts: First female VP; first female person-of-color VP; first PresidentVP of Asian descent; only the fourth first-generation American President/Vice President ... and I’m sure there are more.
• Comforted by the new President’s inaugural speech, filled with aspirational hope but also recognition of reality, I also appreciated the mature, communal concept that “We must end this uncivil war,” which stood in such stark contrast to the authoritarian, gaslighting, abusive-father-yelling-at-his-kids declaration of “This American carnage stops right here and stops right now.”
• Awestruck by the beauty, depth, hope and ambition of Amanda Gorman presenting her poem “The Hill We Climb”; a magnificent piece of writing that stands alongside Emma Lazarus’s “The New Colossus” as a distillation of what our country should strive for. Maybe they should cast Gorman’s poem in bronze, creating a plaque for the Capitol Rotunda, since I can’t imagine a more perfect response to the Confederates who stormed the building on Jan. 6. When she finished, I thought, “Biden just gave the best speech of his life, and thank god he didn’t have to follow her!”

But when the ceremony was over, and I began scrolling through various social media—not doomscrolling, but only barely hopescrolling—I quickly remembered that even with all the positive feelings an sights I experienced and also witnessed in others from afar, we live in a country that does not live up to its full name, and arguably, it never has; or if it did, that pinnacle of states fully united has not been reality since May 29, 1790. We consider Sept. 17, 1787 “Constitution Day,” but that date was simply when the delegates to the Constitutional Convention from the 13 original states agreed to and signed the document. Though even that statement requires an asterisk, for no Rhode Island representative signed, and the state did not officially ratify the Constitution until ... May 29, 1790.

Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” and MAGA Mentality

A week ago Sunday, I participated in an online book club. I had never actually engaged with this group before, though they had been around for a decade, and I first “joined” via Meetup.com over seven years ago. Each month, I wanted to read the selection, but I never would, and the monthly meetups involved a trip into Manhattan that repeatedly felt progressively more difficult as the dates approached.

The club hadn’t met since March, the pandemic obviously making an in-person meetup impossible. Having not “met” in nine months, and nervous about how well the conversation might flow via Zoom, the organizer decided to run a test using a short story rather than one of literature’s great novels. (When I first joined via Meetup, the group’s name was the Modern Library 100 Book Club.) He selected Shirley Jackson’s iconic and influential short story, “The Lottery.”

A quick read? No travel? Attendance while wearing my elephant slippers and sitting at my desk? The universe had removed all my excuses.

The organizer chose “The Lottery” weeks before a large contingent of insurrectionists who claim to value “law and order” decided that violently attacking the seat of our government provided the best way to “protect” democracy from an election result with which they disagreed. By the time roughly 20 of us gathered on Zoom, the uproar prompted over 70 years ago when Jackson’s 3700-odd words first appeared in the June 26, 1948 issue of The New Yorker seemed especially quaint.

And symbolically prescient.

(That New Yorker link includes the full text of the story as well as audio version by author A.M. Homes. I encourage anyone to go read it, certainly before continuing here.)

Like many (or even most?) people my age, I read “The Lottery” in high school, if not before. I never forgot its ending and always recognized its enormous influence on so many other works of literature, forms of storytelling, and general pop culture. Still, before rereading it on Jan. 9, I knew the story’s climax but recalled little of Jackson’s journey to that denouement

From the start, I was surprised at how completely Jackson foreshadows her twist conclusion. This passage comes from the story’s second paragraph:

Bobby Martin had already stuffed his pockets full of stones, and the other boys soon followed his example, selecting the smoothest and roundest stones; Bobby and Harry Jones and Dickie Delacroix—the villagers pronounced this name “Dellacroy”—eventually made a great pile of stones in one corner of the square and guarded it against the raids of the other boys.

Since the book club discussion, I’ve written literally thousands of words that ventured down multiple tangents about “The Lottery” and its perfect distillation of Trumpists, their ingrained MAGA mentality, and the jaw-dropping, shocking, horrific events at the Capitol on Jan. 6. Upon reflection, I’m surprised that I was shocked by the contemporary resonance of Jackson’s tale, a realization that continued to solidify and grow after our conversation.

Finding my focus proved difficult, though I now realize I was helped somewhat by the historian Heather Cox Richardson whose remarkable daily “Letters from an American” on Jan. 16 focused on the long history of right-wing authoritarianism in America and how easy it has been for some to tap into the collective feelings of resentment and stoke tribal action. Still, even with her much more descriptive and eloquent context in mind, there absolutely must be a glitch in the Matrix when—regardless of metaphor or symbolism—“The Lottery” is a work of fiction, while the Trump presidency is not.

He mesmerized millions of Americans who hoped for his regime to continue, and regardless of what percentage (large or small) were rabid enough to consciously answer his call-to-arms, the images I watched seemed more appropriate for Designated Survivor than CSPAN.

I always found “The First Follower Theory” clever and profound, but Jan. 6 was just the latest example of how terrifying it can also be. “The first follower is what transforms a lone nut into a leader,” Derek Sivers states during his short TED Talk. The first (and second, third, and fourth) followers make the crazy “safe”; they enable others with similar ideas and biases to speak out because they no longer feel alone.

Most movements—good or bad, large or small—work in the same manner as a pyramid scheme, so when the origin—let alone the originator or first leader—becomes lost or forgotten, it is the most ignorant followers who become the most dangerous by being the most complacent. In “The Lottery,” Jackson devotes much description to reinforcing that nobody knows how or why the lottery began; how it has (or hasn’t?) evolved; or even what underlying meanings and symbolism stem from this ritual and the various objects involved.

Jackson makes clear the lottery’s normalization right from the beginning as well, essentially describing it as no different than any other town event. How could it be when Mr. Summers—the man who conducts the lottery—also MCs “the square dances, the teen-age club, the Halloween program.” Mr. Summers is neither a political figure nor a member of law enforcement. He simply “had time and energy to devote to civic activities.”

Why would the townsfolk consider the lottery abnormal? Why would any of them exhibit much curiosity? The crowd expresses a nervous anxiety followed by a cathartic relief before celebrating their safety by killing the sacrifice.

Empathy is non-existent: Not for their neighbors; barely (if at all) for their families. Not once during the story does anyone—including the lottery’s eventual “winner,” Tessie Hutchinson—argue against or question the lottery’s existence. When one person mentions that another town has discussed abandoning the lottery, Old Man Warner—the oldest man in town, i.e., the town elder who has survived 77 lotteries—leads the dismissal and derision of the very possibility of doing so, blaming the crazy youth for whom nothing is ever good enough.

They do it because they’ve always done it.

They do it because they believe this annual sacrifice keeps the crops growing.

They do it because they believe not doing it would court destruction for their way of life.

Until the very end as stones fly towards her, even Tessie’s screams focus on how the selection process was unfair and rigged, not that the entire endeavor is wrong or barbaric. The rest of her family doesn’t even go that far: Her husband simply accepts it while their three younger children celebrate not pulling the black mark themselves. Whether her youngest son Davy understands what’s happening or not bears little relevance on the feeling elicited when reaching, “and someone gave little Davy Hutchinson a few pebbles.”

Meanwhile, Jackson ensures we can’t forget Tessie’s own complicity as she places an enormous hurdle in the way of the reader’s ability to empathize with her too: She’s more concerned about herself than her children. In my reading, it is not a stretch to assume she would toss any of them, onto the pyre to save herself, including little Davy.

Before the family draws their individual lots, but after her husband Bill Hutchinson and Mr. Summers discuss that a married woman selects with her husband’s family, Tessie argues that her daughter Eva and son-in-law Don should have to pick too, which would only lead to lower odds that Tessie would select the black dot. Apparently, if Tessie had to stone Eva, that would be more fair.

There is never a moment when anyone from Mr. Summers on down expresses sorrow nor sympathy to Tessie, either. Not only is the relief among the crowd palpable, they enthusiastically participate in an activity for which even moral relativism offers no real defense. The closest to any expression of distaste Jackson offers arrives with a brief, almost tossed-off comment as Mr. Summers tries to move things along:

“All right, folks,” Mr. Summers said. “Let’s finish quickly.”

How is it possible for a whole town to feel good and have fun committing murder? Belief and confirmation bias are powerful things. A mob mentality not so different from that in the story seemed to occur due to the precise moment in history the story arrived via The New Yorker, one when our current disease of American exceptionalism and entitlement grew exponentially in the wake of World War II.

And that disease is what ultimately led to Trump and what now must be termed “MAGA mentality,” which we should not describe as delusional but rather as an example of inexplicable blind faith. Never-Trumpers have regularly argued, “Country over party,” but that’s the wrong argument. Our political discourse often involves multiple views talking past each other and debating different subjects, and that’s true in this case as well. “RINO” accusations aside, the members of the Cult of Trump believe the only way to save their country is not through Republican or conservative ideology; to them, Republicans may not be as crazy as the “libtards” controlling the Democrats, but they’re just rats in “the swamp” too.

Thirty-six Days of HoliFilms continued: But Why‽

As I mentioned at the end of my New Year’s Day post, “I just need to keep showing up.” Though I have long hoped to make my writing my “work”—or a core element of it—at least in the near term, the work I want to write most likely offers little financial reward. Since my wife continues to bring home the bacon for our family, I’m often the one frying it up in a pan. Metaphorically.

Therefore, when I attempt to prioritize my day, especially when much or most of the time revolves around watching the kids or driving them somewhere, as well as all the non-traveling elements involved (i.e., spending an inordinate amount of time searching for parking), the “must” dos and “want to” dos partake in a Battle Royale, usually dominated by whatever tasks gravitate easiest to that horrible word “should.”

When I worry that a task will take more time than I have available, I find it challenging to start a task, especially creative ones, that the time-of-day and other scheduled activities will force me to stop. Instead., too often I put off the the time-consuming task, even if it’s something I enjoy and want to do; or, I keep going and run late for whatever’s next (often picking-up the kids) or allow something else to fall off the to do list.

But if I want to move beyond my current stasis (at worst) or inertia (at best), I must alter this pattern.

As I wrote in yesterday’s #36DaysOfHoliFilms intro, that personal project was part of adjusting my daily priorities. The lack of accountability to an external entity other than myself always creates my largest hurdle. When I participated in the 1999 Boston-NY AIDSRide and the 2009 Westchester Triathlon, I never would have made it to and through the events without their connection to fundraisers. With dozens of supporters donating thousands of dollars in my name, I could never have endured the shame of backing out.

Of course, undertaking both events within that framing was my method of forcing myself not to flake. I hate disappointing other people, but I’m an expert disappointing myself day-to-day. The only way I avoid doing so usually involves some kind of challenging, often time-consuming lifehack. So if there are just too many household or kids-related tasks, or if I feel like I’m not spending enough time seeking new sources of income, the guilt around writing becomes too great. How can I “indulge” myself in that way?

I know balance is possible, and yet I tend to focus on more self-destructive and -defeating thoughts, such as calling a concerted effort toward accomplishing positive goals with long-term benefits akin to an indulgence. Somehow, I am confident that I can achieve such balance if only I can train my brain to find it and—most importantly—stay consistent with my routines. I decided the best way to do that is to, “Pay myself first.”

I don’t remember from whom I first heard that phrase, nor is the idea underneath it new to me. If I resent most of the minutes of my day because of my anger at the limited time I have to focus on achieving my stated goals, performing the tasks I want, and taking noticeable strides forward, then not only do I remain miserable but—as screenwriter, podcaster, and co-creator/executive producer of Showtime’s Billions repeats regularly—I will become “toxic” to myself and everyone around me.

Actually, though I avoid using the word “should” as much as possible, I should have written “I became toxic....”

I provide this preamble as support for the following statement: When “tomorrow” becomes “today,” and another several hundred hopefully interesting and meaningful words appear here, something is going right, even if imperfectly!

I’m not not busy. Managing remote learning for two young children—even once I began regularly dropping them at daily pods—proved exhausting and played a major role in my chronic decision paralysis. Creating extended windows of time and any degree of flow felt unachievable. So throughout 2020, with few (if any) hours during each day solely to myself and no ability to escape to my regular cafes, cowering spaces, and other “work” locales, completing anything beyond the most menial tasks felt undoable, and fomenting the creative energy to write anything—especially while knowing that the chances were better than not that I would get interrupted and derailed—became impossible.

Though the pandemic affected everything, beginning in the Before Times and continuing unchanged through the remainder of 2020. I wanted to accomplish two things:

Thirty-six Days of HoliFilms (a/k/a #36DaysOfHoliFilms): A Primer

A couple years ago in late November, I decided to start a #MovieDiary with my Instagram feed. My (not original) idea was to capture the first onscreen image as well as the title card, combine them into a single mini-collage, and add a “brief” reaction in the comment.

I didn’t get very far.

This attempt during the Before Times, when visiting a movie theater didn’t carry potentially deadly risk. However, even then, I had realized that parenting little kids (two and four years old at the time) meant fewer visits to the theater and opportunities to binge media at home. So as December rolled around, I attempted to cure my frequent decision paralysis with a mostly pre-scheduled, monthlong festival of holiday movies—a/k/a HoliFilms™️—that I would track with my Instagram #MovieDiary.

The idea was simple: Watch one film related to the end-of-year holidays every day during December. With the exception of two annual mandatory viewings—It’s a Wonderful Life and The Apartment on Christmas and New Year’s Eves, respectively—my selection criteria remained straightforward: Holiday-related or -themed films, either new releases or new to me; or movies that I hadn’t seen in a long time.

In 2018, I made it two weeks before missing a day and adjusting my goal from one movie-per-day to 31 films by the end of the month. Ultimately, I missed that target too, but not as badly as I failed to keep-up with the Instagram posts. I watched 26 films but managed only eight posts. My posting fell behind quickly, and though I continued capturing screenshots in theaters and at home, I never caught-up, eventually choosing instead to move-on.

Determined to do better in 2019, I naturally complicated my criteria. Aside from the two aforementioned constants, I would not include any titles from my 2018 attempt, and if I chose a film not new-to-me, I had to have watched it last over 15 years before.

Why 15? I don’t remember, but an educated (and self-aware) supposition deduces that I wanted to watch Love, Actually in order to see if my late-40s self—older, more-sentimental—would hate it as much as I had upon its 2003 release. (Spoiler: I did.)

By Dec. 6, I had already missed a day, so the plan quickly returned to 31-for-31. And you know what? I came soooooo close, watching 30 holiday-theme films before the ball dropped in Times Square.

But again, though I have a whole collection of screenshots for nearly all 30 of those films, creating the posts—more specifically, writing my thoughts—felt impossible, and not a single film made it to Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, this blog, or anywhere else.

Leading up to the end of November 2020, I had watched fewer films and less television—new or old—than I had in since I was a teenager. As I had never made a conscious choice to reduce my media consumption, rather than offering any form of solace, my FOMO induced anxiety, and really, I have enough of that already.

Though my now four- and six-year-old children consume much of my time and attention—a reality magnified exponentially by the end of March—I can’t legitimately blame them for my lack of video media intake. Rather, the intensity of that previously described decision paralysis grew.

I regularly spent an hour (or more) browsing all my services for something I thought might match my mood and/or attention span. More often than I can count, I would settle on nothing; or I might find myself glued to no-new-news on MSNBC or CNN while doom scrolling Twitter/Facebook/Instagram/etc or imagining that I could achieve Inbox Zero for the day without simply deleting and unsubscribing from everything.

So what better way to solve my indecisiveness than to take the day-to-day choice out of my hands? With Thanksgiving approaching, I thought I’d start early. Why not? If I’ve never completed 31 films, much less one per day for 31 days, why not increase that total to 36, i.e., the number of days from Thanksgiving Thursday through New Year’s Eve? It’s just common (non)sense!

Plus, because I seek perfection in all things including procrastination, and my finally diagnosed ADD and never-confirmed OCD crave form and structure, I also naturally invested several hours creating a personal HoliFilms festival. During that process, I also chose to group films by some identifiable (even if minimal) common element, which in turn would help me determine a schedule to follow.

Then, on Dec. 1, I began this post. I planned to preview this project, thereby allowing me to avoid explaining all these details on Instagram. As I progressed through the month, I could return to this space to expand on any themes and/or discuss individual films.

A funny thing happened on the way to throwing the switch bringing to life these thoughts beyond the synapses in my grey matter; something unlike the dozens of unfinished (and usually abandoned) collections of words composed (especially throughout the 2010s) for this space: After allowing it to accumulate its own thin film of digital dust, I returned to finish it! More importantly, I also already have completed the other elements of this endeavor ... well, almost!

Currently (as this post’s publication), 33-of-39 entries live within my Instagram feed. Every movie I watched on and between Thanksgiving and Christmas Days have entries is there. And I will post my comments for the final six films I watched by the end of the week.

Yes, the period between Thanksgiving and New Year’s accounts for just 36 days, not 39; and yes, I named this undertaking “#36DaysOfHoliFilms”; and yes, I failed to make my viewing quota during two previous attempts. Yet, I managed to cap 2020 by landing on the other side of my target: I ultimately watched and included 39 films.

If you’ve made it this far and still wonder, “But why‽” I have a simple, introductory response: “Fair question.”

But that answer must wait—along with more details and entires related to #36DaysOfHoliFilms— for another day.

Maybe even ... tomorrow?

Happy New Year: Once Upon a Time ... Rebooting a Decade With Year 1

Photo by: Markus Winkler on Unsplash

I realize saying “good riddance” to 2020 became cliche around midsummer of that turd of year, but right now, as I sit aiming to accomplish my first SMART goal 2021, I can’t help but hope a decade from now I can see last year as the nadir from which my fifth decade will launch with a more positive trajectory.

Sure, all those Best of Te(e)ns conversations ended a year ago, as did the argument: Is 2020 the final year of the previous decade or the first of the next? It’s that damn digit in the tens column creating such confusion and chaos ... but I digress.

The majority of 2021 will mark my 50th year of mostly successful breathing, and when next September rolls around, so will the beginning of my aforementioned fifth decade. As I reflect on the past year—and the past seven, 10, 20, 25 years and more—I see so many stories, all of them starring me. And yet, I feel as if I’m watching other people’s lives.

Multiple lives? Multiple lifetimes? I’m not sure if I have landed on the distinction, but certainly, in my 20s, I never considered that any part of my experience no longer felt like mine. Yet, as I feel as if I’m accelerating towards that half-century milestone, I find it increasingly difficult to connect to my lifetimes to date; the ones I’ve lived since my birth.

Suddenly, I have the urge to rewatch Todd Haynes’s I’m Not There, a film I have not seen since its initial release, but one which I believe would resonate with me far more now. I imagine the current lens through which I experience the world would receive Haynes’s multiple actors/characters representing a single figure quite differently than I did over a decade ago.

Last year, I wanted to write more. Every year, I want to write more.

Last year, I intended to prioritize doing so, and yet, my first post in this space—the easiest place for me to write both for myself and the greater Interverse—came four weeks into the year. During the course of the year, I started, stopped, resumed, abandoned, and thought about at least a dozen other posts, but the only other one that made it this space for public consumption only arrived in October. IT might have arrived sooner had the life-as-we-knew-it not become a historical era now known as The Before Times, but then again, it’s not like I suddenly became prolific earlier in the year.

Photo by: Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

So this year, in 2021, I’m looking to change the narrative. My narrative. My narratives, I suppose. Maybe I can connect them all. Or maybe I can figure out how to make myself feel connected to all the stories, whether they feel like the progress off and/or overlap with each other ... or not.

Once upon a time, I awoke in San Francisco. I remember little, if anything, not implanted via visual or audio artifacts.

Once upon a time, I remember being a not-quite five-year-old who suddenly had two homes rather than one. It wasn’t my fault, of course. My mom explained it to me. My dad explained it to me. I took it well. Boy do I wish I could remember what little me must be covering up.

Once upon a time, I skipped a grade and seven years later felt so young and small during my Freshman year of high school.

Once upon a time, I moved into the dorms at UCLA one week after turning 17 and at least two or three years before I probably was ready to do so.

Once upon a time, 26 years ago today and after a few years of a two-pack-a-day habit in my early 20s, I quit smoking.

Once upon a time, I lived on my own in Los Angeles, working in the film industry, climbing that ladder, but clutching a safety harness that most likely kept getting in my way.

Once upon a time, I accomplished my goal and moved to New York without abandoning my career ambitions or trajectory.

Once upon a time, I made some immature choices, developed my unique form of overly busy and extremely lazy (now well-understood as my too-long undiagnosed ADD), and eventually thought that maybe I had once again determined how to get where I wanted to go.

Once upon a time, 10 years after some fortuitous timing propelled my move to New York, a perfect (metaphorical) storm left me out-of-work, alone and heartbroken due to the unexpected end of my four-year-relationship, and forced to leave not just my rent-stabilized-but-now-unaffordable Upper West Side apartment, but also the entire island of Manhattan; not just moving to Brooklyn, but into a five bedroom share with four other (previously unknown to me) guys in their mid-30s.

Once upon a time, I thought I had hopped back on track, but had I been smarter, I would have known that I had simply hopped onto the wrong train.

Once upon a time, I said “Fuck you 2009!” a year that ended with the (again, metaphorical) punch-in-the-face of a shocking, devastating job loss, followed just a few weeks later by a (literal) punch-in-the-face mugging in a Starbucks!

Once upon a time, at the beginning of 2010, I made one of my best decisions and went on a JDate with my now-wife because my new decade resolution preceded Shonda Rhimes’s best-selling book by nearly six years. Granted, that “yes” occurred around Jan. 7, and the habit didn’t keep.

Once upon a time, after a first long bout of unemployment, I took a job I didn’t really want but absolutely needed to get. It quickly became all-consuming, and I worked harder than I ever had before. But I progressively felt less connected to anything I cared about and enjoyed outside of work. Worse, I was at a loss as to how to get back to myself.

Once upon a time, I had a wonderful wedding, and witnessed the birth of my two amazing children. Suddenly I was a dad; two little kids look at me and see “Daddy.” I remain confused how that works or is even possible.

Once upon a time, months after becoming a dad for the second time, I lost my only dad. Four years later, it continues to feel like yesterday and forever ago simultaneously. More importantly, though, I continue my attempts to understand that reality, my feelings of sadness, guilt, shame, and loss.

Once upon a time, I looked ahead to turning 50, and thought about my two grandmothers, the same age, born just six months apart, both not yet 50 when their grandchild Aaron was born.

Once upon a time, I sat at my computer to write something, unsure what it would be, but hoping the process might help me make sense of these (and other) flashpoints; wishing to reconcile the knowledge that these stories are mine even though I barely recognize the characters, including the protagonist, i.e., me.

2010 started with a happy bang, and as the years progressed, I got lucky in my personal life, creating a new family featuring new milestones every other year. But aside from the three most important people in my world, collectively the last 10 years have been utter shiite, with the past four really stinking-up the joint, and 2020 beating the already decomposing carcass of the previous year’s horse saying, “Hold my beer.”

I’m not a big fan of my 40s, so, rinse and repeat, let’s try again. A new life; the start of another lifetime. Hopefully 10 years from now, I will find this entire ramble quite amusing.

Until then, I just need to keep showing up. Or, actually, start.

Happy New Year.

And, we’re off! 🤞