Goodbye to a Decade of Pain

In Fresno, I was able to spend a lot of time catching up with my old friend and hearing the story of how he came to wind up on stage. It wasn't his first choice. He had tried to break into movies, like many foIk, and had found it impossible. "Real actors don't need cameras pointed at them," I told him. I told him that I admired his determination, but there is no way in the world I would ever want to try to break into the film industry. It just doesn't appeal to me at all. Of course this is quite ironic, given how much I wrote about movies over the last couple years (over 200,000 words, the last time I estimated). But to me it was never about trying to become part of the movie industry. It was something far deeper and more important in my life. If I could summarize, I would say this: in 2004 I left New York City and separated from my wife. For the next two years, I was pretty much depressed and broken, for reasons that I could not even understand at the time, but which have become clear to me in great detail. I wound up living much of that time in a friend's basement apartment, but also being completely cut off from her. It was very strange. During that time I grew to become extremely angry at the world, for my situation, and for what I saw as the absurdity that the entire world had become. In June 2006, I became so disgusted at the television, and all the things people were saying on the news channels, that I thought I couldn't watch tv or read the news anymore. At that moment, for some reason, I flipped the channel over to Turner Classic Movies and pretty much left it on there for the next two years straight without changing channels. My job let me work at home and I would leave the television on, playing a whole day of old movies one after another. In college I had taken a film class, during my last semester at Willamette, but I hadn't really taken it seriously as a study of contemporary art. Watching TCM not only gave me the film education i never had, but it also taught me what I saw as the real history of the 20th Century. It was like being immersed in a time machine. After a while I began to feel as if I were living in 1948. I began to understand how much America had changed, especially the rules about how men and women interact. It was a tremendous change in me, to see contemporary culture in that light. I could see how much destruction had been wrought by these changes. Before I started my viewing, I could hardly watch any old black and white movie from the 1930s. After two years I could easily watch three 1930s movies in a row. I learned about actors, actresses, directors, producers ,etc., I never knew about it. I came to see the library of classic Hollywood movies as an enormous treasure bequeathed to us. I even fell in love with Ginger Rogers (I blew a kiss to a picture of her in a storefront last night on my way to see a community theater production). It was great fortification. It changed me. It gave me a sense of honor I never had, and what it means to be a man. I realized how I had been so wrong in so many things in my life. It made me feel sorry for our culture today, and all the destroyed lives and discarded wisdom. It was nearly impossible for me to see new movies in theaters during that time. "It's like surfacing in a water and taking a giant gulp of sewage on the surface," I once said. Yet even then I knew that there was a reason why the Classical world was destroyed. "The Classical world had enormous structure," I said. "But it was also a prison." That's why there are so many movies where people wind up having to go to jail at the end, because the Classical rules dictated such.On the other hand, Postmodernity (contemporary movie) supposedly had no rules but it was a sewer. Just when I thought my life would go on forever like that, in June 2008, a whole raft of things about my life suddenly changed. First off, the company I was working for went bust, so I lost my job. Also my friend from whom I was renting the apartment moved out of the upstairs, and I had no desire to stay there any longer. Also a close friend, with whom I had been trying to write a screenplay and had been working with nearly every day for two years, was suddenly diagnosed with leukemia. Also my ex-wife, with whom I had been friends since our divorce, suddenly cut off all contact with me (I learned last week from Rick that she got remarried not long after that. I'm happy for her and am at peace with all that. I was happy to leave our marriage). In any case, I was suddenly in a new place in life. I decided that I would travel for a while. Without TCM, there were no more classic movies. Instead I decided to start to go see movies in theaters again. Like all things I do, it became an obsession, one that carried me over the next two years as I travelled around the country in my car, and over to Europe. It was tremendous fun while I was doing it, even as it was very lonely. I went to nearly every movie all by myself. Writing about them here on my blog helped me sustain myself, and feel as if I were connecting to other people while doing it. But it couldn't last. It took it's toll on me, to be exposed to so much of the culture of Postmodernity so deeply. It was like drinking poison and trying to synthesize it in my body. After a while, it caught up to me. All the time I was travelling I was also battling tremendous demons. I was chasing ghosts of monsters all over the country and the world. Many of the places I went to were because I was trying to track down the remnants of certain historical individuals, most of them long dead, whom I had come to see as the architects of the disaster that had overtaken our country and the world. At one point my quest saw me in a quiet graveyard in suburban Connecticut, throwing a symbolic folding shovel down on the grave of someone who died in 1972 and screaming at the air. I was battling huge monsters---world-size ones. Only my leukemia-stricken friend knew the whole story of what I was doing. I felt all alone, as if it were up to me to save the world, and restore something that had been lost. I thought that there was no one else in the world who could help me, because I alone knew the identities of the monsters. It was me against the world. Finally in 2010 I couldn't take it anymore and various reasons suffered an emotional collapse and withdraw. I couldn't go on battling these monsters by myself. I couldn't see movies anymore. Last fall I made one last stab at compiling the notes of the things I had learned, so I could the story of what I had learned to others. I was fairly successful at this. Then in November my grandfather passed away. Somehow it released a whole flood of emotions that had been pent up. The last ten months have been among the most emotionally chaotic in my life, trying to synthesize all the emotions I have experiences over the last few years, and trying to get past the struggle with the monsters I mentioned. But the good part is that now, ten years after the giant tragedy that changed all our lives, I have come to feel free of so much of the monsters that are still imprisoning the rest of the country. I see the tributes and memorials on Facebook and on television and I know how trapped so many people are. I had to go on and try to slay the largest dragons that mankind that ever produced, but somehow i feel free. But it can't stop here. As my Thor, my leukemia-stricken friend who has now fully recovered, told me. "You HAVE to write this up. You HAVE to find a way to express this through art. You have a duty..." He wasn't saying anything I didn't already know. He was just repeating my words and thoughts back to me. For much of this year, I have been struggling with how to find a way forward. I was at a loss. I didn't know what I was supposed to do. But somehow over the last two weeks, I have felt the dawning of a new day, a new way forward. This is what I'll be writing about here I guess. Two nights ago in my motel room I finished the first chapter of a manuscript I've known I had to write for a long time. Artistic expression is the only way forward for me. It's the only thing that keeps the pain at bay. It's the only thing that feels like healing. So here I go.