...I got some 'splaining to do!

I love BIG BANG THEORY on CBS.  The characters remind me so closely of so many good scientist friends I have had over the years and as a self professed “grown Up Nerd” the passions that they enjoy, and the uncomfortable situations they get into seem all too familiar. In truth I can remember being even more awkward than the gang are in dealing with what society likes to call “normal” people.

NOTE: In a world where accountants geek out over “Game Of Throne”, Tolkien movie gross millions of movie bucks and I have seen NEUROMANCER for sale in the grocery checkout line I put to you that the term NERD needs to be revisited.

Something that one of the “just passing through” characters, Lucy, said kind of explains why I am sitting in STARBUCK’s just now.  Lucy had such crippling social anxiety that she decided to take action against it herself.  To do that she consciously set herself in situations that make her uncomfortable.  The best way to face the dragon is face to face, not with your back to it.

Losing Jeff as we did has really set me to thinking about what is and is not important to me.  Above all things is that I need to enjoy the life I have been given and the way Jeff passed has given me pause.  He was younger than me…and he is gone.  I was privy to everything that he wanted to do, at least what he shared with ANYONE, and I know how much of his song was left unsung when the music stopped.

Along with Jeff’s passing something else that I have noticed in the people I have known, both near (like my Father) and far (like my invisible friends on FACEBOOK).  When we were young we were excited about everything, just the taste of a new drink or the smell of strange place could set every neuron to quivering. When we were also something that is becoming more and more rare in the world, we were open.  We were open to new thing and new people and new adventures.

When your heart is open you can invite all manner of things in, some might be bad it’s true but most of them are good.  Like the Dali Llama I CHOOSE to believe that the world is not so much good (or Bad) but rather it is neutral.  How it affects us is based on how we choose to interact with it, what we choose to let in. The trouble is that as we age we change, for whatever reasons we close like a rose at sunset. Maybe it is armor from all the bad things that happen to/around us.  The why of it is not as important as the fact that it happens.

When I was a child my parents did a lot of entertaining a lot and they had a lot of rowdy, funny people as friends to be entertained.  I remember specifically them throwing a costume party and being chased under the hors d’eurves by a masked Doctor with a giant hypodermic squirt gun (he turned out ot be our family doctor who felt so bad for scaring me he gave me the squirt gun which I used for a lot of summers after). As my folks aged though I watched them change, they closed off.  They didn’t go out to dinner with friends as much, or even leave the house.  In the end my Dad wound up gaining a horrendous amount of weight until he looked like a latter day Jabba the Hutt, perched on the end of the couch in his terry cloth sport shirt and khaki shorts, smoking his Phillip Morris and drinking his coffee. The formerly vivacious couple who laughed so heartily and deeply when I was a child pulled the blankets over their heads and all I could see of them was bathed in the glow of their TV sets.

I have seen this behavior to some extent in so many of my friends over the years, pals who once bounced around a picnics at the lake or swung out over rivers on ropes slow down, close off, go internal.  They go onto the social networks and tell themselves that they are still participating in life not realizing that calling internet communities “social” networks is like assuming you know what the Taj Mahal looks like because you have seen pictures of it.

That is not to say that things like TWITTER and FACEBOOK aren’t fun or are invalid, far from it they have expanded our abilities to keep in touch exponentially, but some of our monkey brains seem to have lost the simple fact that it is a metaphor.  It seems to forget that FACEBOOK was visualized as a “virtual commons” and that your “FACEBOOK Page” was originally called your “wall”.

Anyone who has ever gone to college knows that “the Wall” in the commons is where you leave note for your pals on things that are going on and where to meet up after class and such.  The “Wall” was a simple delivery method and the truth is that if you found someone standing in front of the wall as longs as some people spend time staring at their FACEBOOK “wall” you would think them some sort of stalker, or at least in need of some sort of mental aid.

Another thing about a common is that when you are standing in front of “The Wall” you might actually experience something that, as we age, we experience less and less.  You might actually experience some physical contact and direct interaction. It could be the brush of a shoulder or a simple exchange of smiles but no matter what form it takes it is a simple reminder that we are not alone, that there is something beyond ourselves.

I was first made aware of the potential for this long before the Internet even existed.  Clifford Simak wrote a poignant story about it in the 1940s called THE HUDDLINGPLACE.  I first read it in THE SCIENCE FICTION HALL OF FAME and it has haunted me ever since.

Since Jeff retired I saw him start to fall deeper and deeper into his solitude, deeper and deeper into himself.  When we spoke about him finding work he often said he knew he needed to do that because he did not need the money so much as he needed the contact with other people.  He knew that he was by his very nature a shy person and that if he did not have the force majeure of going to a job every day that he would not do it.  Racing was a big part of his life, even after I bowed out, but even that had begun to bore him.  Slowly he had begun to pull the covers over his head just as I had seen my parents had before him.  One of our last phone conversation I had not heard from him and I asked him why.

“I haven’t been doing anything so I didn’t think I had anything to talk about.” Came the calm reply.

The things that attract our attention most in others, that annoy us most, are usually a function of the failings we find in ourselves.  That observation isn’t an aphorism, it is a simple fact.  When I got back from Austin I started a BLOG that I called “the Bucky Project” and I did it because I didn’t really care for who I had become over the years and I wanted to peel away the husk that was surrounding me (“Yanking my covers” as my old girl friend Valerie used to say) in hopes of finding that goofy kid I once was.  Even though I didn’t keep that BLOG up (I love blogging but I go through phases where I think it is fatuous and narcissistic, which it is but what are you gonna do?) I have kept up that search. The events of the last few weeks have only thrown aspects of it into sharp relief.

I love my digital art, the act of doing it brings me pleasure.  To do it the best environment is a dark room with an icy blue glow from all my monitors.  When I have worked in offices with other humans they often call it my “cave”, but it is where I am most productive. I have come to realize though that it also something else, it is me pulling the covers over my head.  Like my Parents did.  Like Jeff did. I see people’s lives like a timeline and, through my experience, I have learned what happens when you embrace the covers and pull them over your head.  The next stop on the timeline is eternity.  Even with my bad heart I am not ready for that.

So here I am, pounding away on my MacBook and sipping my Americano.  True I had to put in my earbuds and turn on my music to finish this piece because a gaggle of soccer Moms took up residence at the table next to me.

What is the plural of Soccer Moms?  Gaggle? Herd? Chat? Burble?

But I am out in the world and starting my day with caffine and a simple reminder that the world is out there and I am a part of it.  Maybe it makes me uncomfortable; maybe it is not as ideal as my cave but no matter what it is better.

I can’t ‘splain why but it just is.

Once more with feeling

OK...so THAT happened.

What Happened?  Well the worst month in recent memory, possibly ever for me.  I heard a joke once that if you played a country song backwards you got out of prison, your wife came back to you and your dog came back to life.  Since last month sort of played out like a bad country song I find myself wishing that I could put the turntable in reverse and spin myself back to what, in the myopic eyes of hindsight seemed like a better time.  I say "seems" because as I have aged I have found the facility to "step out" of my life and look back in.  It's sort of like being able to get out of the car at "It's A Small world", perch on some cheesy fiberglass replica of a taco stand and look back into the cars full of gaping tourists and see how GOOFY we/they really look.

But I digress...a lot.  Get used to it.

So let's go to "The Big Board" shall we and count down the things that happened in the lovery month of April and I will share some thoughts.

1.) SPARKY: Sparky was the source of unquestioning joy and love.  Even when things were not good in the family he loved us all with all of his heart and love like that will, in fact, keep it together.  On top of that Sparky had no bones about expressing how much joy he felt at the simple task of living, and he was generous with sharing those feelings.

Sparky Died last month in a manner more horrible than I care to think about. Still, in our last visit with him I still got the feeling that he loved us all and was perhaps worried about why we all seemed so sad. The last picture I took of him he was smiling his doggie smile and looking at Nicholas, his boy.

2.) JEFF: I can't really write still about this but the day after we had to let Sparky go Jeff, my former brother-in-law and adopted brother in life as well as the best friend I ever had, was found dead in his apartment.  We still don't know what he died of and our lives are sort on hold until that happens.

You hear the term "wingman" used in trivial ways these days.  Anyone who knows anything about aerial combat though knows that "wingman" is not a term to take lightly.  If you have a wingman he has your back and you, by extension, have his.  It was like that with Jeff and I. though I often thought he was a much better friend than me.

3.) WORK: For the last number of months I have been working at a job that seemed perfect for me.  It involved Cameras, video and all the VFX skills that I have been acquiring since I was a teenager. I was drawing a salary, earning good money and getting to travel.  I won't go into what brought about the parting of the ways between that company and I but suffice to say that in the parking lot of Dental practice in Pennsylvania it happened.

Now those who have known me in the past may roll their eyes and think "Bucky did it again" and if you feel the need to be judgmental feel free to do so.  In the past I might, in fact, have been inclined to agree with you.  In this case though I don't.  It was the right thing to do, no matter how difficult it made it for me.

4.)THE MAGAZINE: On the same day I parted ways with my former employers I called my friend Blake who I had been doing THE WHEEL with for the last 3 1/2 years to tell him what had happened.

Rather then the smiling pal I had worked with and known for all those years I got...someone else.  I was told the magazine had been late "too many times" and that "they were going to take it away from him".  That day I was without food, without sleep and without the meds that I have to take to stay alive, I could hardly respond beyond a visceral level.  My words were like the screams of a beast that had been stabbed too many times and could only respond with bellows of pain.

I was told that he had "hired someone else to do the magazine" that "it was done".  I had been fired without being told.  No phone call, no text, no e-mail, no nothing.

So let's glance over the basic level of disrespect and betrayal that I felt at that moment, we can even glance off how many times the magazine was late because there was no contributions to fill the pages or it was late because my "former partner" was at Indy with a pal or Cooperstown with his kids. If my former partner had not blocked me on his iPhone, immediately, I could have listened to him tell me "it was nothing personal, just business".

Well if it is business it is piss poor, amateurish business.  It is cut and run crap. It is not like the person who instigated it.  I might never know why it happened because; even though it still bothers me (obviously) I have not got time to dwell on it.  I need to move on.

So I arrived back from a ten day death march of a shoot with no employment, no clients and a goodly portion of my support system in tatters.  The one thing I did have was something a new friend had said to me the day everything came down.  She said:

"Martin, you will be ok, god obviously has other plans for you and is giving you a clean slate!'

Usually I would take something like that through a veil of cynicism, which would filter out all the good will that it contained.  This time though, not so much.  This time I actually surprised myself.  I won’t say that I didn’t have a couple of forbidden beers (anything over 2 beers a week is bad for me in my current health, I had considerably more than that) but that was just a temporary stop on the reconstruction train.

After I slept away a couple of days I started doing what I do so well, I started working my network.  I went back to clients who I had lost because of my former job(s) with my hat in my and served up some serious “mea culpa”.  I worked my rates and took calls.  I looked at my tools and my skillset and set to the task of re-inventing both my Studio and myself. What did it get me?  Two weeks out I have new contract from old clients and am making more than I was before and working on projects that make a difference.  Adversity can bring clarity if you address it properly and I can see clearly now the rains have gone.

The truth is I didn’t write all of this out to elicit pity or sympathy. I have done that in the past I know but I am working on the part of me that requires that, trying to push it to the back to clear the way foreword.  I write this out as a sort of Cenotaph for my grief. In the grand perspective the loss of the work is just a speed bump, I will find a new way.

The Loss of Jeff and Sparky though, those are scars on my soul.  Not shallow scars either, deep scars like a scimitar to you back or a limb that cuts deep and severs muscle fiber to the point where you have to learn to move differently when you move foreword. Each day I don’t see sparky, each day I cannot call Jeff and just yak is hard.  They are getting easier, but not by anything but a minute increment with each sunrise.

The thing is though that to do anything but try and make everyday as productive as I possible would show my friend/brother Jeff disrespect. To let another beautiful Sonoma day go by without feeling the sun on my face and smelling every smell I possible would show disrespect to my beloved Sparky.

Those are two things I will not do…