Out of Focus

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.

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!

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:

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! 🤞

New Year, New Decade, New(ish) Focus: Beating Spider-Man to the Reboot Championship

courtesy Nina Matthews Photography

I’ve lost count, but math doesn’t lie.

Over the past four weeks, I’ve drafted this post at least a dozen times. It doesn’t feel like four weeks, but I began on New Year’s Day. It doesn’t feel like my fingers have crawled over this keyboard for 20 hours (or more), and I’m scared that it won’t read as if they have either.

Four weeks and more than 20 hours? That seems like a lot, right? I wish I could claim that I was meticulously crafting each sentence, utilizing my thesaurus to choose perfect words—mesmerizing you, kind reader, with my prose.

That would be an inaccurate claim.

These days, I care how people respond to what I write. During my younger years, I spent an inordinate amount of time not caring; just typing, barely editing beyond a spellcheck to get my rant into the world. (Of course, I always cared, but telling myself I didn’t was a wonderful cover for my insecurities.)

Now, I seem to have swung to the opposite pole. When I sit with an idea and find my flow, I try returning to that non-caring place. Whether I accomplish this goal or not—and regardless of where I started—part of my brain inevitably directs my fingers to stray ever so slightly, but enough to explore in detail something that for now should remain a simple signpost along the path to my ultimate destination.

Without fail, that tangent transforms from a single sentence into 10 paragraphs that require literary breadcrumbs to return to my unintentional fork in the road. Besides, this new thread can be its own thing. Meanwhile, if I've lost my own thread, where have I left you?

To those who know me beyond words on a screen, I realize your likely response to the above is, “Duh!” And yet, my difficulty curbing this practice continues to surprise me, which it shouldn't since my wife’s phone still describes me as “Superhero Tangent Man," 10 years after we met. (Avoiding tangents #1: A story related to our first date.)

WriMoBloPo 2019 Day 4 Day 1: So Many Drafts, So Few Posts

NaNoWriMo began four days ago.

I am not writing a novel, but last week, I planned to utilize NaNoWriMo as motivation to create my own, let's call it, NoBloWriMo. Or AarBloWriMo? Hmmm ... maybe WriMoBloPo? Maybe I need to keep working on this. I digress.

I'm not writing a novel. I'm writing a screenplay. For a film. Or two, because there's also this TV series. Or three? Because one of the scripts--originally a short film--might work better as a play.

Or one. I should stick to one. Because right now, I have none.

Or blog posts. Once easy, they have become impossible, even as every single day, something smacks me in the face, and that voice inside says, "Let's write about this!" They used to be easy, and not because I ever expected to turn them into anything other than random musings. Now, they've become impossible even

I never intended for this space to be an online journal. From that first post more than 15 years ago (Oy!), I simply wanted a place to express the random musings occupying too much space in my over-opinionated, infinitely-interested brain.

Somewhere along the way, as various work and life events (and Twitter; I actually do, in fact, blame those early days of Twitter!) got in the way, translating those thoughts into (coherent?) words on the screen with any regularity became too big of a challenge. Plus, I found a new, more private and introspective outlet.

My blog was not an online journal, and any possible need for it to become one evaporated when (after years of failed attempts) I not only started but also managed to maintain my offline journal. Credit due to Julia Cameron's The Artists Way, for her concept of "Morning Pages" led to my daily journaling practice of the last 10-plus years. The only habit I have sustained with greater perfection is avoiding even a single drag on a cigarette since the day I quit smoking nearly 25 years ago on Jan. 1, 1995.

(Second tangent: SHIT! Anyone out there nearing 50: Is it just me? Or does absolutely everything you encounter or contemplate first and foremost remind you of how old you are? Consider that rhetorical ...)

The first rule of "Morning Pages": Don't worry about doing them wrong! As Cameron writes, "There is no wrong way to do Morning Pages–they are not high art. They are not even 'writing.'" Still, I have never eliminated from my consciousness the idea that I must be doing them wrong. From discussions with several others, I'm not alone.

In Cameron's universe, this practice demolishes the barriers otherwise blocking one's creativity; it is the key to helping creative artists recover from what blocks them.

I have dozens of journals, filled with whatever word strings my OCD brain has spit into them. My routine has evolved over the years, and rather than "three pages of longhand, stream of consciousness writing, done first thing in the morning," I tend to use a timer, set to 30 minutes, which usually generates four-plus pages in a standard Moleskine notebook. However, no organization or planning, simply dumping whatever comes out onto the page ... well, that's what I do.

I wish "first thing in the morning" was possible. Once upon a time, during that other life of mine B.K. (before kids, natch), it was. Now, there are breakfasts to make, OIT treatments to prepare, kids to dress and take to school/daycare, and of course, none of that considers escaping my own waking-up sleep-haze, or those minimum requirements to start my engine (water, eye drops, coffee, bathroom, etc.).

Rarely does any of it progress smoothly, but I usually still manage to start them before 8 am, which could be "first thing" if a couple little people weren't ensuring that the day starts no later than 6. (Let's not even bring-up how fucked this past Fall-back weekend was!)

I show-up. I write ... or scribble ... or form stings of letters that reasonably resemble English. And yet, they don't break down my barriers, so ... am I doing them wrong?

My intent this NaNoWriMo is mostly just about a different "WriMo": I want to write more and not just say I plan to write more. On one hand, most recently, I've worked on incorporating the lessons of Seth Godin's The Dip, "quitting" the unnecessary things that distract and steal time from my main goals and (therefore) needs. But for some reason, maybe due to its utterly private and risk-lacking nature, I feel some compulsion to not quit this blog but rather to reinvigorate it; or at least, to post to it.

If you found your way here, and to the end of these roughly 900 words signifying ... something: Hi. Thanks. Hopefully, at the end of NoBloWriMo ("November Blogging Writing Month") AarBloWriMo (Aaron's Blog Writing Month--problematic acronym!) WriMoBloPo ("Write More Blog Posts"? Not great, but will do for now), I'll realize precisely what I'm want to say here, and maybe more importantly, I'll stop spending time on the seemingly endless drafts I've started, sometimes finished, but never published for the world to see.

Promises, promises.

Writing Remains Hard: The All-in-One Sequel, Remake, and Reboot

Hello. Anyone there?

I’m back. Or, am I? Hard to know. I’d like to think so, even though I’m not sure what being back means; what I’m back to; what the results might be.

Hell, I started this post two weeks ago. I spent a lot of time away from it, thought I’d finished it, left it behind for a few more days. and here we are posting on some random Monday. (FWIW, 24 hours ago, that “Monday” read “Sunday.”)

I launched this incarnation of Out of Focus 15 years ago, but for over a decade, my little corner of the interwebs occasionally sputtered a bit, but mostly settled in to a state of inertia. I can’t say how many times I have attempted to return to this space. Many? No. Many many? Closer.

I often asked myself, Why bother? If I feel so compelled to write, should I not focus on other work? Producing words possessing the potential to earn income? Whether that means working on just one of my multiple unfinished screenplays, or pitching and writing freelance pieces like this or (just a couple weeks ago) this, would it not make more sense to spend my limited time, effort, and emotional energy on work that has at least the theoretical prospect of generating income? My greatest successes on the job front currently remain in the growing-ever-more-distant past, and writing begets writing! Right? (So writers tell me.)

I will never develop, achieve, nor drift along with that often-elusive flow if I just dip my fingers into the stream now and then.

But, let’s say I do choose to make a go of it and pursue more writing opportunities of any sort than I have so far. My clips? They’re old. This blog is so old, I missed its Bar Mitzvah. I don’t even know that it wants its learner’s permit.

The last continuous, albeit brief, period of my feeding this site was my 13 for ‘13: Thirteen posts during the summer of 2013. (Unintentional synchronicity.) I've produced more children (two) in the past 5 1/2 years than blog posts (one). Sure, the kids are a co-production, and their existence complicates my ability to find time to write, but of course, I can turn that around and say, "But Aaron, you can't find time to write; you must make time to write."

I’ll never earn anything from my writing if I have no recent writing to show. And even more important than the age of my work: Has it aged well?

Some? Maybe. I found a Seinfeld spec script that I wrote 25 years ago, and considering both its age and my then-age, I surprisingly didn’t hate it. In fact, I actually thought it was, dare I say ... good?

But the rest? I have great difficulty reading most of it. During my periods of greatest prolificacy, I edited far less. That was my “style.” (In many cases, such as mine, “style” is what bad writers use as an excuse for bad writing.)

So, I have to start somewhere. Might as well be here and get something for my ongoing $8.95 per month contribution to Endurance International Group’s revenue stream.

Actually, all this hemming and hawing about not writing seems silly considering that I have, in fact, written hundreds of thousands (probably even millions) of words over the past decade, but few were meant for public consumption. I have a number of posts meant for this space that died before publication. I never finished them, or they no longer felt timely, or while editing I decided they were crap. But even those attempts only represent a tiny minority of what I mean.

More than 10 years ago, I first attempted to work through “The Artists’s Way,” Julia Cameron’s 12-step program for those of us addicted to artistic procrastination and creative blockage. Over the past 3,356 days, I have written my version of “Morning pages” virtually every day. Some months, keeping up with this practice has proven too challenging. For example, five months encompassing the end of 2017 and early 2018 produced a dark age lacking any evidence of how vital this endeavor had become to my daily well-being. But that period aside, I estimate well-over 3,000 entries included within my 50-plus Moleskine notebooks.

As my 2 1/2-year-old son gets into everything, keeping him from scribbling in or ripping pages out of those notebooks has been challenging. So the other day, I pulled them off their easily accessible shelf, organized them by year, packed them into boxes, and took them to storage.

Should I have bothered? What do I do with them? Why have I kept them? I don’t know, but I can’t throw them away. At least not yet. Collectively, their existence sparks a lot of joy.

And I guess I feel the same way about this blog, which as I noted in my second post in Feb. 2004 took its name from my column for the The UCLA Daily Bruin. My time at the paper was both my first ongoing and consistent writing for public consumption as well as a major contributor to my never finishing my degree at UCLA. (That’s a long story for another time, however.)

My first published article elicited hate mail. The writer called my silly column “drivel,” and decried *The Daily Bruin* for giving such content a forum in its valuable pages. To be fair, the piece was, essentially, “drivel”: An unnecessary (and pretentious) attempt to announce my arrival as a critic and columnist to the UCLA community, presented in the guise of a dream featuring 1990’s most famous film critics welcoming me to their ranks and yelling “I’m right, you’re wrong!” at each other.

When my editor showed me the letter, I felt crushed. I hadn't even written my first review yet, and I've already received hate mail? The letter-writer was a stranger to me, and nobody else cared. If anything, everyone thought someone taking the time to write and mail (1990 here!) a letter about my column was a bit crazy. I still wrote reviews, participated in major press junkets, interviewed celebrities, attended the Spirit Awards and Oscars, and in 1992, the incoming Editor-in-Chief and Managing Editor drafted me as Editor of the A&E section. That single piece of hate mail had no lasting impact on my tenure there.

And yet, more than a quarter century later, not only do I vividly remember that crushing feeling, but here I am writing about it.

For me, that’s even more reason for my return to this secluded corner of the most public of spaces. So I’m back. For now. For today. Hopefully tomorrow? We’ll see. A few times each week, at least? That’s the minimal goal.

But no promises.

And I don’t really mind if nobody reads this. When I wrote that first column at UCLA, I wanted people to like it. I wanted people to like my writing. I wanted people to like me. But I wasn’t writing for me.

Now, I am.