Tag: therapy

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30Hz Bl-g Life @ 30Hz

The Slide Into Meh

I doubt that you’ve read this bl-g from the beginning. So to recap. I began writing about music and life and everything else because my therapist recommended that I journal. I started journaling but just didn’t keep up. The bl-g went up because by posting these entries, there were good people out there to hold me accountable. Well, you might be good people (wholly debatable) but you haven’t held me accountable. So it goes. The bl-g morphed into something more about music than therapy as I grew “healthier.”

Pi, the man with the drill

The problem with mental health is that it’s not entirely unlike physical health. Mental health waxes and wanes with much less predictability. My daughter comes home with hellfire disease from preschool, physical illness is just around the corner. Guaranteed. Mental illness is tricky and always in flux. Some days are better than others, some weeks are better than others. Only now I’m more aware of these little slides up to the edge of a “funk.” We’ll call it “funk” in lieu of “depression” because I have been clinically depressed and I no longer throw that word around lightly.

Lately I find myself looking over into that pit. And I’m becoming tired, tired of preventing myself from falling in.

It was two years ago when I first slipped into depression proper. I remember coming home after watching Black Swan, a shell of myself. Movies seemed to have affected me more deeply in recent months. Inception had caused a panic attack. Black Swan forced me to recognize that what I was feeling was not normal. I’m not prepared to draw connections between the content of this movie and my own revelation, but I’m sure there’s plenty of material. Sappy movies induced real emotional pain. I experienced similar results from dark, depressing lyrics. Instead of observing from the outside looking in, I was on the inside looking out. In the thick of it.

These feelings are flowing again. But I’m able to confront them because I’m aware of the possibility of what lies below. For me, it was six months of pervasive emptiness. It’s extraordinarily hard to put into words. I no longer found joy in the things that I loved. I could get out of bed and I could take care of my daughter, go through the motions. I didn’t care to watch movies and music had lost its joy. These activities just seemed so frivolous. After getting my daughter to bed I just wanted to go back to sleep. I had no energy to write or enjoy my wife’s company. Or anyone’s company, really.

This rumble has no point. I have no great revelation to impart. I’m merely journaling because it’s what I need to do. And I’m not doing enough of it. I’m turning to consuming myself in writing and work and movies and music and video games and Twitter because I see these activities as guardians of the fortress, but they’re terrible guardians. They’re probably drunk and take just about any bribe you offer them. I’m taking a weekend with a friend at the end of this month to get away for a bit. A nice Sears mail order home (heck yes) on the Chesapeake. I’m taking my typewriter and my computer and a lot of beverages. Lots and lots of beverage. I see two possible outcomes. I’m looking forward to both.

THIS:

The Shining, Jack Nicholson happy

OR THIS:

The Shining, Jack Nicholson CRAZY

BUT EITHER ONE IS BETTER THAN THIS:

Jack Nicholson, The Shining

 

 

Categories
30Hz Bl-g On Writing

Welp. Apparently I’m not a writer – a 30Hz rant.

A writer is told by pretty much everybody  that a writer is only a writer if that writer writes. And if you read those so-called “craft” books, a writer can only be a writer if that writer writes at least two hours per day. More is encouraged. Less is, well, fine, if you want to [audibly scoff] write fan fiction. Pick up any copy of Poets & Writers or Writer’s Digest and you’ll find advice like this. It might be cloaked in encouraging exclamation points but, in the end, every piece of writerly encouragement boils down to this: Just sit down and write. 

When Harry Met Sally - Sally's nagging look
The voice of the nagging compendium of writer’s advice looks at me like this when I’m not writing. She looks innocent, but she’s got angry opinions.

So, thusly, I am not a writer.

I cannot sit down to write 2 hours most days. I cannot, with certainly, count on anything beyond 30 minutes each day. And even then those 30 minutes are the foggy, dreary-eyed minutes after midnight when birthing words seems as impossible as birthing a baby through my eye’s lacrimal ducts. Some days I don’t even have time to register the guilt that comes along with being a writer that doesn’t write.

Tear duct diagram
Imagine the pain.

At this point in my life I’ve typed many many volumes and hopefully have many meaningful volumes left. I’ve had some minor screenwriting success. I’ve written hundreds of movie and music reviews for various publications and been offered invaluable opportunities as a result. I’ve interviewed Tom Hanks and John Travolta. I was close enough to Paul Newman that I could smell his cologne. I’ve been through an MFA program. I’ve been published in literary magazines and tech magazines both online and off.

 

But apparently I’m not a writer. I’m just a guy typing a lot of disparate words.

I’ve spent 16 years of my life typing these words. Not all in fiction, though. Fiction has only been a more recent development. And it’s only been within the last couple of years that I could admit to anyone that I was a writer, even if I don’t wholeheartedly believe it — what with that burdensome guilt resulting from not writing all the time.

Sam Raimi beat me to it.

My “career” began with movie reviews and entertainment journalism before moving into screenplays and copywriting. Back then, I might have been more of a “writer” though. I hauled my 47 lb. Dell laptop/boat anchor to Caribou Coffee and sat for hours on end, just working and writing and drinking massive amounts of coffee. That right there was the sweet life. Unlimited time, unlimited potential… but only limited talent. It takes years to learn how to write and write well. And though my fledgling confidence soared, I was only a student with big dreams of writing a low-budget indie horror movie that spanned genres, gained some notoriety at film festivals before being picked up by a major studio and given a limited release… and ultimately selling big as a DVD.

I keep going back to this oft suggested 2-hour rule for writers. Quite honestly, it is a source of despair and envy and frustration. If I compiled a list of all the things I need to do each day I’m pretty sure I’d need a 48-hour day. Being a part-time stay-at-home father of two girls (one is 3 and the other is 6 months) more than half my day is already spoken for. I wake at 7:15am. I generally don’t get to sniff freedom until 8:00pm in the evening. By that time, I have two-hours of clear-minded time available for productivity. But that time is split fourteen different ways. Picking up the house (half-assedly), dishes, fleeting moments of face-time with the wife, working out, taking care of leftover tasks for my day job… yada yada yada… it’s 11:00pm and I didn’t even yada yada the best part. I haven’t even opened my laptop. Maybe I “wasted” twenty minutes during that time to relax — gawd forbid — play a video game or watch a sitcom on the DVR.

[tube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O6kRqnfsBEc[/tube]

Meanwhile this nagging voice in the back of my head keeps whispering:…writers make time to write…

I have a response to this voice of collective holier-than-thou literary smugness.

“I can’t make time, cocksuckers. I can’t fabricate more time or patience out of thin air. I have to do the best with the 24 hours given to me each day.” And while I’m not always the most skinflint of time conservationists, I try. And often I fail. And those days are riddled with guilt. Sometimes I give up too easily. But when I give up on a day it’s often because I hear that voice, nagging, ever-present in the back of my mind….writers make time to write… …a writer writes… That voice does not often inspire me. It has been repeated and reinterpreted to the point of meaninglessness. I feel like a child that’s been spanked too much. I feel so much guilt from thinking these things while I struggle to find time to write that the guilt means nothing. It doesn’t inspire me. It often just leads to anxiety and sometimes, as it has in the past, depression. And ultimately more non-writing.

We Must Cultivate Our Garden

It is true beyond a reasonable doubt that writers must write. But like the end of Voltaire’s Candide, a writer (or really any slave to the creative drive), must also first tend to his garden, guilt-free, in order to create without baggage. When I am immune to the guilt, I am a writer. I scribble notes in my journals and on napkins and receipts in my wallet. My mind is always working and plotting ideas and fixes for broken stories. I’ll put all of those notes aside to tackle whenever it is I’ll next have 30 minutes or 2 hours of rare undivided, uninterrupted, unshackled writing time. But rest assured when I have the time, I’ll be a goddamn writer whether that voice approves of me or not.

In conclusion:

Henry David Throeau - Sit Down To Write

 

 

Categories
About Me

About Me

The Millennium Falcon tortilla
The Millennium Falcon tortilla

I’m a writer that consumes music, movies and media of all varieties. I have OCD in my blood, and therefore I collect. Much to the dismay of my wife (and eventually my daughters, I assume) I often seek shelter among this stuff, these collections, these Threadless t-shirts, books, movies, video games and music. The natural progression was to write about these things.

When I contracted some of that uniquely first-world depression that’s been going around, I sought help in *gasp* therapy, a practice I’d long regarded as frivolous self-obsession; however, when I found myself unable to function, unable to enjoy anything about life, I could think of nowhere else to go. From these ongoing therapy sessions, I took away an important concept: I hadn’t been present in my own life for some time now. As I clawed myself up out of this pit, I found solace in a new collection. And true to my repressed inner hipster, I went retro and cutting edge and kitschy and blended them all up into a new obsession while maintaining all the old. There are only, after all, 24-hours in the day.

I returned to the turntable and the vinyl record. I returned for childhood nostalgia, for the albums I hadn’t heard in twenty years. I returned for the soundtracks of the 80’s, and the cover art and, most importantly, to be present in the moment and aware that life is going on all around me because someone has got to flip the damn record.  I returned because new artists are once again embracing the medium. I returned because visiting the record store and sifting through new records became something I could do with my oldest daughter. Even though she doesn’t yet understand the thrill of the hunt, sifting through stacks and stacks of tattered sleeves fishing for a curiosity (like the oft-forgotten 1984 soundtrack for Fritz Lang’s Metropolis headlined by Freddy Mercury, Bonny Tyler, Adam Ant and Loverboy), she’s begun to love music of all kinds. I’m proud to be the parent of my very own vinyl-loving toddler, a hipster toddler. When she wants to listen to “tunes” she walks over to the turntable – not the CD player or the iPod dock – and presses the power button on the receiver. I couldn’t be prouder.

Thanks to the Internet, I fumbled my way through setting up my dad’s turntable (which he graciously donated to the cause), replacing parts, and learning how to properly care for records. Now I seek out local record shops, plan trips around Pittsburgh and search for new (and old) records with nothing specific in mind. Hopefully these endeavors lead to some interesting stories. If not, I’ll just make them all up and sprinkle in plenty of my own unsubstantiated hyperbole about music, writing, movies, video games, hockey, antique maps, baseball and why wanting to be a fiction writer is just a godawful idea, you know, just to waste some extra binary code out there on the interwebs. …as if I’m not already wasting enough.

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