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…