Happy Anniversary

One year. 365 days. Scratch that, 366 days. Apparently last year was a leap year, and maybe hat’s why it felt so long? Or it could have been that one year ago, I finished my last gig.

I haven’t worked in a year.

I mean, I’ve done things around the house. I’ve done yard work, and painted, and done some carpentry. Bit of roofing. I’ve done enough that I’ve messed up my back, and buggered my elbow, and hit myself on the head, and mildly electrocuted myself….

But I haven’t been paid in a year. According to our culture, I’m not a productive member of society. I’m a leech, a drain on the system, lazy, sucking the government teat. I should be pulling myself up by my bootstraps, working on a side hustle, or whatever the fuck it is people tell themselves so they can be shitty to people on unemployment.

One year.

Now, I won’t deny that there are people who choose to live off benefits. But I can’t fathom living like that. I can’t wait to get back to work, to live out of a suitcase, sleep in different beds and collect room keys and work 18 hours and fall asleep with echoes of the band and the crowd and the hum of the bus in my ears. I miss spending months working on one show. I miss the collaboration, the frustration, and the relief of opening night.

And don’t tell me I should have gone and done something else, or done something with my time. Apparently it’s hard to be motivated or focus when you’re mildly depressed because the last twenty-four years of your life feel like a bit of a waste.

Similar to the last year, I suppose.

Anyway. Happy anniversary, me. I’m having a drink.

Drugs

Yeah sure, I’ve done drugs. Been drinking longer than some of my friends have been alive, which says I either have a problem, or I’m old, or both. Other drugs… well, pot is legal on a state level across the entire west coast and then some, and now isn’t the time to get into other things.

But the best drug I’ve taken recently… was a picture.

Not working has been hard. My last day of employment was 21 February 2020. Three weeks shy of a year, and there’s approximately a hundred percent chance I won’t work before I make it an entire year. It’ll go past that. If I’m lucky, the summer. If I’m not, it might be another year before the type of events I work are back to hiring. And while I’ve never liked to define myself by my job, it’s a big part of me because it’s taken me to some amazing places and experiences, allowed me to make some incredible friends. And some crap ones too, and some of the experiences have been absolute shite, but on the whole I’m definitely ahead on the positive/negative experiences and friends count.

Anyway. I’ve been listless. Unable to focus. Wondering what’s the point of it all, when you really get down to it? (I still miss TP). I have some friends who have been good enough to let me stay with them in deepest darkest Somerset while everything is in lockdown, and having 14 acres to roam about despondently has been good for my physical health, more or less countering the effects of all the monster munch and haribo and gin.

Part of the 14 acres are three fishing lakes. I’ve learned more about fish than I ever cared to, and more interestingly learned about the things that eat fish, which apparently is anything that can get its teeth into them. And I’d never seen a wild Kingfisher until I came here, and saw a brilliant streak of blue across the grey water back in December.

I know what it sounds like now. I know when to look for it. And last week, the day after getting a new lens for my camera cos the old one wasn’t focusing properly and I enjoy spending money even if I’m not earning anything, I heard it. Catching the blue flash from the corner of my eye, I saw it land on a blooming bullrush and start scanning the water for fish.

For ten minutes I got to snap away, while he hunted, messing with framing and getting him in different poses (I’d like to thank the fish for moving about and catching his eye). But I’m old, and things ache, and keeping it up for that long was a bit uncomfortable (the lens, perverts). I decided to move around the lake a little, see if I could get into a position that was better on my back so I wouldn’t have to stoop forward and avoid the branches between us.

Wouldn’t you know it, the little bugger spotted something, and dove at exactly that moment.

I didn’t get the dive. I didn’t get him coming out of the water. They’re bloody fast. They can dive at <checks wikipedia> 25 mph. But I managed to just about get him as he flew up to another branch, holding down the shutter and getting as many pictures as I could in the hopes that one might come out.

He ate, then darted across the lake, away from me, so I could check what I got.

When I saw it, the framing was shit, the subject was all the way at the bottom right corner. But I could tell in this photo it was a kingfisher. Most of the others were just blue blurs against green blurs, but this one seemed clear. I zoomed in, and somehow, against the odds, it was in focus. There was a fish in its beak.

I was high for an hour afterwards. Seeing the lucky shot made me grin like I haven’t in a while. I wanted more, to get more pictures, to follow the little bugger around the lakes all day. And I wanted to share it. It felt like working on a show, and being excited to see the reaction of the audience. Of hopefully making someone else smile, and appreciate it, and all those things I haven’t been able to do for the past year.

I haven’t left the house without my camera since.

Stock take.

Oh yeah, I’ve got a website.

I forget bout it sometimes, even though the link is on my browser home screen and I spend way too much time on my laptop.

Every year at the beginning, I’m going to write more. Once a week, without fail, on the same day and around the same time, so I (and my four readers) can get into a routine.

It’s not a resolution. I don’t do resolutions. I leave those to the US government, cos they’ve been doing such a bang up job of all of it recently.

But it’s always an attempt to kickstart myself into the motivation I had when I was younger, less grey, and, surprisingly, fatter. The one thing I managed to accomplish after almost a year of a pandemic, lockdown, unemployment, etc., is losing 10 kgs and actually keeping it mostly off.

Okay, that’s not true. I perfected a ribs recipe, learned how to make French cheesecakes, and plucked my first pheasant (skinned, actually, but it was my Christmas dinner to myself, and pretty rewarding. Also, not the one in the picture, he’s still kicking around somewhere). I made three types of stock, I landscaped the house in Vegas, painted the interior, and watched every single Tremors movie.

So 2020 wasn’t a complete bust.

I did hear back from the screenwriting competitions too. No placement in any of them. There’s still two entries, but the results aren’t announced until July, and not really expecting anything from them either. Got some decent feedback, so of course I’m setting them to one side and thinking again about a book series idea, one that’s been kicking around in the back of my head for a decade. Ad by thinking about, I mean I’m half a chapter in, and this time I think the beginning is going to stick. It’s got potential. It’s got the building blocks of what it needs.

And it’s got names of characters that make sense at this stage in the story. Once I’ve got the names down, well, it’s all just words after that.

Ultimatum

I was given an ultimatum by my father last night.

I spent the two weeks prior up in Oregon with them, where we did what we usually do: Drink Wine. Drink Whisky. Drink Whiskey (dad’s actually developed a bit of a taste for good Irish).

And we also talked about family. A lot.

There have been four death in my family so far this year. None of them have been to do with Covid, but happening in the time of Covid has made it harder to deal with, as we can’t travel for memorials or anything like that.

So we’ve talked about family. We’ve reminisced, we’ve gone through boxes of old family trinkets that Mum has impressively carted around between two continents, three time zones, and five houses, and all date back to WWI.

And we’ve talked about the future. About where we might all be in five years, or one year, or next month. We’ve talked about how cute and opinionated and independent Caolila is already at 23 months (and how adorable in her pink DM’s (courtesy of her cool uncle) she looks). We talked about how Alex doesn’t mean to but is good at finding trouble, and also hugs and love. And we talked about how Aiden spends hours and hours making little stop motion lego movies at ten years old.

Ever feel like an underachiever?

Well, to be honest, every time recently I read the news it seems that someone younger than me is taking a moral stand and fighting for their beliefs and the rights of others. They’re being vocal about the things they believe in, they’re being vocal in the fight for the rights of others, people who don’t look like them, or pray like them, or earn like them, or fuck like them, or even vote like them. And it gives me hope. Hope that the world, while it feels like chewing on packing peanuts right now, might work itself out eventually.

But I digress, as I so often do when I’m writing personal shit. Or maybe I do that too when I’m writing shit that might not one day be personal if I ever submit it… bugger. I digressed again.

So. Ultimatum. Last night. I was given an ultimatum. By my father.

If I haven’t submitted any writing by the end of the year, on 1st January they will submit my novel (which I wrote piecemeal and sent to them a chapter at a time), to as many places as they can find.

So that’s it. That’s my ultimatum. And it’s either the best or worst thing the could have done. Best, because it might push me into making a move myself. Worst, because if I don’t, and they follow through, my opinion of that writing is no publisher or agent would come within a thousand miles of me after reading it, and despite all the dragging of heels and waxing and waning of enthusiasm on my part, I do still actually want to be a writer.

I didn’t have the heart to tell dad when he was telling me that there’s a writing competition that closes end of this month that I’ve actually looked into seriously entering. That I’m trying to motivate myself without the ultimatum, without the guilt trips, without anything other than a feeling than maybe right now, the timing is right. Maybe right now, is what I’ve been unconsciously waiting for. Right now, light that left M5 a thousand years ago is getting to your house. Right now, god is killing moms and dogs because he has to. Right now, I got distracted with youtube videos again (bonus points if you can tell me where those references come from)

And speaking of distraction, as I so often do, my current distraction is writing. Writing distracting me from writing, crazy right? But my nephew is interested in stop motion, and making his own movies, so this week’s distraction is to write him a little movie to film. I sent him a questionnaire to fill out to help me maybe write something he wants to film, and as soon as I get it that’s my focus for the week. He’s ten, interested in it, and worth getting distracted for.

Also, I built him a stop motion green screen lego studio, and if he makes it big on youtube I asked him for ten percent. He offered twenty.

I sure as shit hope he’s better at stop motion than negotiating.

June??

How did that happen?

I mean obviously, the Earth kept spinning and moving round the Sun, but seriously, this year is the longest I’ve ever known and I can’t believe we’re in June already.

I was going to get the garden sorted out— front and back. I hate gardening for more than an hour at a time, so that makes it hard to accomplish much.

I was going to lay a concrete path. I got all but the last part done, which should only take an hour at most to do, but I can’t seem to convince myself to do it.

I was going to spend time learning a language or brushing up on German or French. I laughed when I found my old language CDs I got when working for Holland America, because I’d forgotten at the time I was going to learn Dutch (for the Engineers) and Italian (for the Officers).

I was going to lose weight. And I have been, slowly. under 100kgs yesterday for the first time in a year. But I could have been more disciplined if I didn’t keep learning how to cook macarons and bakewell tart and so on.

I was going to paint the house. And here, I’d say, is the major success of this unwanted unemployment. Except even there, I’ve got about fifteen minutes of work left, I need to edge one wall in my room, but it’s been sitting like that for… shit, three weeks.

Writing. I’ve been chipping away. 3 pages a day. On some days. Enough that I’m half-way through an episode of a new TV series. But 28 pages isn’t all that much in the grand scheme of things, especially when I get most of my writing done before noon these days.

In fact, I get most of everything done before noon. Shopping? Check. When I do it, which isn’t often, and is much quicker than it used to be. Laundry, check, cos then it goes on the drying rack in the yard. Swimming, check, although that’s only a recent development as the pool is now warm enough before the sun hits it in the morning.

So the rest of the day is spent streaming movies, streaming music, and finding excuses not to open a bottle of wine or pour myself a gin. I need a deadline, something to point towards, to know when this will all finish, so I can motivate myself better. But now it’s fucking June, and things are opening up, and cases aren’t going down, and a lot of the opening plans seem like wishful thinking right now. I spend the afternoons trying not to think about things, about what comes next, trying to distract myself.

And that’s what this blog was. A distraction for myself from everything that’s going on in this country right now. So many thoughts, but they’ve been said by people more positioned to speak on the issues, and more eloquent than I. But maybe I should start politicking on here again. It sure as shit would give me stuff to write about. We shall see.

Survivor Guilt

I haven’t been through a horrible life threatening situation, so why do I have survivor’s guilt?

Altho I guess it depends on what you qualify as a life-threatening situation. You could argue that the race was life-threatening, considering what we went thru during some of the crossings. But in this case it’s more that life seems to be a life threatening situation.

Mostly, why am I still alive when others have died?

I get it. That’s the way life is, it’s fucking random, and we have little control over it.

But, still, why me?

I’ve lost a couple of friends in the last few years who seem to have more purpose than I do. Friends with families, kids, people who are relying on them for support. My friend Rusty had a six year old daughter when he went. Ross had just got married. Laura had five children and was only a year older than me.

Fucking cancer.

But then, is that the purpose to life? To have a family, to have people who rely on you for support? Or just to be? To consume stuff? Because if that’s my purpose, I’m consuming wine by the bucketload in this lockdown. And whisky.

I have no answers really. I don’t know if I’m looking for any, to be honest. I don’t know if I want to know the answer. But I’ll keep maybe looking for it, and if I find it at the bottom of a bottle I’ll let you know…

Motivation pt.... lost count.

Hey, it’s in the webpage title, I’m no good at naming things. If I ever had kids, and it came to naming them, I’d probably panic and name them something asinine, like wall, or table, or lamp. Or asinine.

But anyway. I feel like today, something changed. There’s an itching in my soul I haven’t felt in a while. Or maybe it was last night. I was convinced last night that I should be typing, hammering out new ideas, or working on the old ideas that are still lurking on my hard drive, and I almost did.

Story of my life. Story of everyone’s life, really. “I nearly did.” Maybe I’ll write about that one day.

Thing is, today I feel the same. Not immediately of course, first there’s the hour after waking where I’m questioning why the fuck I woke up at 0557 AGAIN. Seriously, waking up and looking at a clock to see that time is getting to be the only good habit I have during this period of.... what’s an existential crisis, but for the world?

I digress.

Did you ever have an itching in your soul? Like, you’re a bit twitchy, restless, and you’re not sure what to do to soothe it, and your brain is like a racquet ball bouncing round the court that keeps getting put in motion by a blind octopus. The problem with the twitchiness is focussing it, like getting a blind octopus down a fish trap. And nurturing it to the point where you come up with something, so the opposite of feeding the blind octopus to a bunch of hungry Las Vegans who have been deprived of sushi for two months. I got to work on my similes.

But it’s good to think about similes, regardless of how painfully forced they are. Maybe this is it. Maybe for the rest of my unemployment I’ll be focussed, and do some writing, and achieve something other than painting the house or cleaning the yard or fixing the roof or cleaning the garage or drinking 22 bottles of wine or putting in a concrete path. Maybe I’ll write something.

Maybe I’ll write this. Every week. Without fail. Maybe on Wednesdays. Maybe I just finally found a title.

Tears

It’s tough logging on and seeing the last thing you wrote, when that’s a eulogy that comes nowhere near grasping the impact on your life the deceased has.

And words like deceased and eulogy come nowhere close to describing the pain or joy or humbleness you feel when trying to describe how important someone was to you.

I know I’m not the first person to try to talk about it, and to feel the flush of moisture and heat to the eyes, to blink the tears away, and to find a crutch to focus on, but one of the beauties and one of the pains of life is that no matter how many people have been through what you’re going through, it’s always personal. Life is personal.

So while I sat down at my laptop tonight to write about the virus and the situations it’s putting us in, I find myself in the strange position of being brought to tears at my own words, at finding that no amount of pleasurable wine buzz can numb the knowledge that I’ll be going onwards without a grandfather. All the things going on in the world right now, the quarantines, and the conspiracies, and the stupid distracting videos and photos (I posted one tonight) can distract me all I let them until I think about however this pandemic has changed life, mine is changed in a way I always expected and still can’t cope with.

Incidentally, my grandfather didn’t die of the coronavirus. Given how stubborn he was, the only thing that would have bested him was himself, and it was his own body packing it in that finally gave him the rest he deserved. Not even a pandemic was going to tell him he was done.

1924-2020

I could tell from her voice that something was wrong.

Moments later I knew it was the phone call I’d been expecting for eighteen years.

“Grandad’s gone.”

Just because you’ve been expecting something for eighteen years, doesn’t mean you’re ready for it.

I tried to write a summary of his life. I tried to write about how I feel. But none of it is enough. How do you break down 96 years? Service to his country, his town, his family? I know he wouldn’t want us to cry, but I can’t help it. I know he’s at peace, and I’ll gladly bear this pain to know that he doesn’t have any pain any more.

Most people who know both of us would say I get my stubborn and my argumentative streak from him (but his arguments were always more refined than mine). The biggest lesson I choose to take from him, apart from never giving up, is the delight that was always evident on his face when a family member would walk in the house, despite our being spread around the world.

I was lucky to have forty years with him, and it was nowhere near enough. I miss you so much already.

“‘ere I sit, broken’earted,”

Happy Birthday Grandad.

Turned off

I took a week off watching news. No articles, no video, nothing.

It didn’t help.

There was a trickle of information. It didn’t help that the Nevada caucus was coming up and a lot of my friends seem to be politically active and went out to caucus for various candidates. Good for you guys!

But I don’t feel any better. There’s still this sense of hopelessness that comes every time I read an article about current affairs. I still don’t know what the point of it all is, because it feels like the status will stay quo and we’re all going to get fucked over by the politicians who care more about elections than legislations.

I don’t want to be an informed voter any more. I mean, what’s the point when we almost can’t trust the information we’re being given any more? We don’t need Russian bots spreading it about when we’ve all got that uncle who refuses to listen to facts, that grandparent who doesn’t understand that the empire doesn’t exist any more, that sibling who is a one issue voter despite hating everything else a candidate stands for.

I’m going to be an uninformed voter from now on. At this point, I don’t care who wins the Democratic primary.

Because while there’s a bunch of smoke and mirrors out there about what they’ve all said or stand for or will do if they win the job guaranteed to turn your hair greyer than a British springtime, I know what I believe.

I believe that everyone should have equal rights.
I believe that a country should protect its citizens from all enemies, foreign and domestic.
I believe that the citizens of a country should come before corporations.
I believe that the scientific method is the better way of doing things.
I believe that taxes should be progressive.
I believe that if you have to lie about the other side to get your own elected, and you can’t talk about your own policies without lying, then maybe you’ve got shitty policies.

There’s more, but you get my (leftward) drift.

Now, in my lifetime, all the above means I vote Democrat. And in the last ten years it’s become increasingly unlikely that I’ll have the option to vote for anyone else, because for Republicans to shift to agree with ANY of the things I believe will get them eviscerated and thrown out of the party.

So there’s no point in being informed. There’s no point in reading about all the bullshit, because, quite frankly, it’s getting me down. Knowing that I could steal a pair of shoes and get five years in prison, while some muckety-muck can steal billions and get probation is depressing. Knowing that I have to declare every cent of income and pay my fair share, while a corporation can contribute to a campaign to influence a senator to write in a tax loophole so they can squirrel money away, is frustrating.

And knowing you can be on camera confessing to committing crimes, but if you kiss enough arse your buddy will grant you a pardon and possibly a medal, well, it makes me want to go out and commit crimes.

Departure

My hard drive is littered with the corpses of documents started and never finished. Of ideas, half-formed and then forgotten about, or deliberately discarded, or accidentally saved in the wrong folder and buried.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. I just counted, and I have 2 finished scripts I should be editing, and five that have been started (3-50 pages) and should be finishing, and three book ideas, and a couple of shorts/sketches floating around. That’s more than enough to keep me going.

The missing, forgotten, ignored documents are by and large the beginnings of blogs that I’ve started when I’m not near internet service, which happens more than I expect. Between flying, shipyards with their spotty signal, cruise ships with their even spottier signal, and arenas with their locked signals, I probably spend a good three months a year right now out of range.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but for some reason the desire to blog always comes when I can’t actually post it. And generally, if I don’t write and post, it ends up never getting finished. I started one about linking pangolins to the current coronavirus fears in the hopes it’ll get people to stop eating the poor things, but internet was down so I never finished it. I was going to write a series about domiciles to follow with the last blog I actually posted, but again, lost signal so didn’t finish and lost the thread. And there’s a good chance this won’t get posted cos any minute I’m going to get called to a lifeboat drill and then we’ll sail away, and who knows how strong the signal will be for the next four days. Apparently there might be a storm.

Anyway, My pledge is to (surprise surprise) post more often again, regardless of work (which I’m going to find new and creative ways to talk about that do not void the NDRs I generally have to sign), and regardless of politics (which is all kinds of fucked up no matter which way you look at it). You lucky people, you.

Person. Lucky person, I know at this point there’s maybe only one bugger reading this.

Domicile

I visited my grandmother’s grave yesterday.

It’s a small square of marble in a graveyard that usually seems a month away from being reclaimed by nature, but it’s been recently mowed. It’s in the shadow of a church that was built in the 1200’s.

Every time I go home, home being Salisbury in this instance, it’s… different. It’s still home. It will always be home. But it’s been 24 years since I moved away, and I’m ever more conscious of how both it, and I, have changed.

Salisbury’s become a celebrity. I mean, to me it’s always been famous— for the Cathedral, for the Magna Carta, it’s proximity to Stonehenge and the White Horses of Wiltshire and Salisbury Plain.

Last year it became known, or rather notorious, not for its 13th Century gothic Poultry cross, but for an amateurish assassination attempt. It’s made it handy for reference, people who keep up with current events have at least heard of it, and don’t just assume it’s “Where the steak comes from (that’s a Dr. Salisbury, you bastards).”

I digress. This post isn’t about fad diets, or Russians, or historical sights. It’s about mortality. Because every time I come home, I wonder how many more times it’ll be home.

I come to the UK to see family, to see friends, and to recharge, to remind myself that public transport is great and history can go back longer than a hundred years and proper fish is cod and grey is a common colour for the sky. To remind myself when to drop my t’s and h’s. To remind myself that not everything has to be box stores, warehouses that disappear in the distance and that taxes are useful for things.

That religion and science do not have to be mutually exclusive. That not everything has to be one side or the other, my way or your way, black and white. But every time I come home, I feel it slipping a bit more. There’s less a sense of belonging any more. I wander round Salisbury, smug in the conviction I appreciate it more than the people who live there simply because I don’t live there any more.

But what ties you to a place? What makes it home? Arguably, Eugene Oregon should be home, because my parents, brother and sister and their respective families live there. I feel no affinity for the place. Vegas? If I could take the friends and leave the place, I would.

It’s the people. People make the place. And apart from one or two friends there, I have my grandparents. What happens when they’re gone?

It’s a question I’ve been asking for probably a decade now. Grandad had a stroke almost 20 years ago, a severe one, and I’m not sure he was supposed to make it this long. And since then, between having one leg (the other was left in Italy in 1944), kidney problems, the incredibly rare form of cancer that no one at the hospital had ever seen (and some hadn’t even heard of it) he’s battled through way more than a lot of people.

The thing is, no one lives forever. It’s a given. Death and taxes. Although it’s proving pretty hard for me to pay taxes in the UK no matter how much I actually want to.

So right now I wonder if this is the last time he’ll be here. As I have every time for the last decade. I dread the phone call, I’m not going to be okay that day. But it’ll come one day (unless I bugger off the mortal coil first), that’s a given. And on that day, what will Salisbury become to me?

Will it just be another place I once lived, a place I visit on occasion with nostalgia, a place with two or three marble squares in a small graveyard that is a convenient place for tradesmen to duck out off the street and enjoy a smoke and a bacon sarnie?

Distractions and things.

There’s a trick I use when I’m writing. I’m sure I read about it somewhere and adopted it, but it’s worked pretty well for me so far. If I’m on a roll, and I’ve got a fair bit of writing done, and a good feeling about where I’m going (hey, all those things happen sometimes), I’ll stop mid sentence.

Don’t get to the end of a scene, chapter, or paragraph. If I stop mid flow, I find it easier to get going again.

However, I opened up a document a few days ago to do some work on it, and this is what I find waiting for me:

THOMAS (V.O.)

That warm feeling flushing through me. Maybe that’s love?

He starts to type.

As he types, his Mum comes in, then everything speeds up.

THOMAS (V.O.)

…..

AND I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT THE V.O. WAS GOING TO BE.

In my defence, it’s my fault for not thinking about this script for six months. That’s not a great defence, is it…

But instead of struggle with it, get pissy like I would have probably a couple years ago, I just deleted up to a point I knew I could continue writing from, then kept going. Now, I could probably stop this sort of problem if I wrote an outline or treatment before setting out to do the script. Or, you know, work on something until it’s completely finished. But that’s just not the way I write. It would be great if it was, but it’s not.

Sometimes, it’s a struggle. Sometimes, I just look at a blank screen, or a semi-filled one, and just wonder what’s the point? Why am I sitting down and doing something I don’t like? But the problem is, I’m lying to myself. I DO like to write. Pretty sure I’ve mentioned it once or twice, but I find it cathartic. I’m just easily distractable.

Which can be a good thing. For instance, I was at the Barcelona airport today, with a six hour wait for a flight. If you’ve been there, there’s not a whole lot to do there. And I had a document open, that I just wasn’t focussing on. I’d maybe write a sentence or two, then start seeing what was in the news, or looking up stocks, arranging appointments (read that last sentence and I sound like a fully functioning adult). But something in one of the articles caught my eye, set things in motion, and half an hour later I’d written a short story. It might turn into something more, who knows, but for now it was the distraction that 1. Gave me a completely different idea from what I was working on, and 2. Made me feel more like going back to what I had been working on, and chipping away at that.

So yeah, turns out distracting myself is part of my process. If anyone needs me, I’ll be distracting myself. Not a euphemism.

Unfit

Such a wonderfully fitting word for me right now.

I turn 40 in January. I’m mildly shitting it, and it doesn’t help that I’m working with some disgustingly fit people. Some have muscles I didn’t know existed. Some are unfit to do their own laundry. So in the interests of being fitter, and pretending I’m not so old, my goal is to be able to take a photo doing a handstand on the beach, because that’s what these kids are doing these days all over the world.

I have some apps. That is also how the kids are doing things these days from what I understand. I’ve got a plank app, and a six pack app, and a push ups app, but they’ve been on my phone for three months and they aren’t working so far….

Okay, so I’m only using one. The thing is, I’m unfit. I don’t need an app that gives me a six pack, I need an app that gradually gets me fit enough to not hate opening the app and all its demands.

I am actually using the push up app. However, talking about being unfit, I couldn’t even manage the first day. The day that eases you into it. The day you do 2,2,3,2,3 push ups. I did the first two, and then heard a lovely gristly clicking noise and felt a weird twinge.

I finished the day. Sort of. And I’ve finished the next four days. Sort of. Apparently I’m unfit enough that I can only do more than two push ups if I do them girly style.

Basically I have to get fit to get fit.

The counter on the push up app is also helpfully telling me I only have 2551 push up left of the training regimen until I can do 100 a day. so I really have 5050 to go, as at this rate I’m going to have to do them all girly style before I try on my toes.

So… handstands on the beach at 45?

Psychic

In January I’ll have been doing automation for eighteen years. Not bad, considering when I was asked to go to a new cruise ship and learn automation, I didn’t know what it was.

I’ve done it on cruise ships, and for resident shows, and tours, and big events, and one offs. I could probably even claim I’ve worked on movies and TV, although it wasn’t specifically for that but more as an aside for a show I was already working on. I’ve been the boss, and the peon, and everything in between. I’ve worked with solid, reliable systems, and dodgy, skin of your teeth systems. And crews.

I’ve explained so many times that no, automation is not the same as the lighting or the sound. On several occasions, to the same people. That’s fine. I like what I do, and I’m mostly proud of what I’ve done, even if I wouldn’t always want anyone to see the actual shows themselves.

I got fired in August. First time for everything, I guess. But it sucks getting to 39, 17+ years under my belt, and getting let go. But the weird thing about it was, I knew it was coming.

I had a feeling about a week before it happened. Watched a guy go complain about me to management. But more than that, when I took the job I joked with people that I’d meet up with them when the tour swung through town, unless I got fired before then. I’ve never joked about that before, on any gig. But this one, for some reason from the moment I took it I was joking about it. I even asked when the show would need me in Europe, as I was planning a birthday trip. And added, assuming you guys would still want me by that point.

So yeah, I’m psychic. I knew it. But I would like to know, if I knew I was going to get canned, and I’d joked about it for six weeks before it happened after a month of work, why it still rankles? A friend said, on hearing of it, “Conrgatulations, you’re now a proper roadie.” So it’s not like it doesn’t happen. A bunch. And I was smiling on the way out the arena, for the first time in two weeks. It was definitely best for me. But still.

And this is totally different from the time I was put on a corporate black list for a cruise line. I wasn’t fired that time, and in fact they extended my contract by two weeks while they tried to find a replacement. I just wasn’t offered another contract (for a while, at least; got an email two years later asking if I was still interested in working for them. I politely (and arrogantly) declined).

Anyway, I’m writing this at work, a different job, so the biggest impact getting fired has had on me is my fragile ego.

Luck

History is pretty great. Apart from having the benefit of hindsight and being able to look back and judge all those poor dumb bastards for treating things with leeches, or painting their faces and making water pipes out of lead, it’s pretty amazing to hear about some of the things people have gotten up to— you wouldn’t think to make half of it up.

But do you know how lucky we are to not be living in history? I mean, yeah, of course everything we’ve done is technically history already, but in reading about some of the things people have gotten up to, well, holy shit there was a lot of shit.

Not even counting all the wars that seem to have filled most of our time and taken most of our money since we came up with both of them, there’s all the medical stuff. The Black Death, Spanish Flu, appendixes and childbirth and lead poisoning… I’m pretty glad that they’re not much of a concern these days. But that’s not what this blog is about.

How many of you wouldn’t have had a job a hundred years ago? Fifty? Ten?

I know I woudn’t, even fifty years ago. Automation wasn’t exactly a thing, theatrically speaking. So how cool is it I get to work on something I love that I’d have never been able to do fifty years ago? In all the thousands of years of humanity, I’m lucky enough to be alive NOW, and do the stuff I enjoy. But it’s the same almost across the board, except for farmers, merchants, and ladies of negotiable virtue.

And even they have it better, I’d argue. Farmers get all the machinery to use, merchants can sell things to people halfway round the world with a click of a few buttons, and again, medicine has been good for sex workers.

I digress. I get to be an automation operator/programmer, a career that wasn’t a thing such a short time ago. I want to get into writing movies and TV— again, a career that wasn’t a thing a short time ago. And can anyone tell me what the hell influencers would be doing if they weren’t influencing? How lucky are those bastards?

copy and paste

A couple of year ago, I was writing ten thousand words a month (a couple, in the same sense that “I’ve only had a couple of drinks” or “I’ve only been across the Atlantic a couple of times).

Back then I was on a roll. I was also on someone else’s payroll. I would write at work, in my down time, and I had a lot of down time as my job basically consisted of putting out metaphorical fires.

At some point that stopped. Maybe it was the feedback— I sent it to a family member’s family member, and they didn’t really give me anything I felt was constructive to what I was doing. Maybe it was the job— I got a promotion, and work actually became something I had less time to sit around and write during. But mostly, I think it was that, most of the way done with book 2, I realised book 1 needed so much work, so much editing, I lost interest in writing novels in general.

Because I don’t like editing. There’s something anathema to me about spending all that time writing, then doing it all again. And again. And deleting, and changing.

I never learned to do it. Taking English classes in England, I learned how to read the shit out of a book. Eng Lit was 2 years reading approximately six books. I think it was six. Of Mice and Men, a Game of Soldiers, one of the Austen Novels (they’re pretty interchangeable to me), a play set in WWI, and I forget the last two. In comparison, AP English in the US we read about 20 books.

In England, we learned to write a two or three page essay as quickly as possible. It was geared up to getting the first draft as good as we could, cos that’s what we’d be doing for GCSE’s. Answer a question about a book you have a pretty good grasp on, and move on to the next one.

And unfortunately, that’s where my writing interests lie. Write it as well as you can the first time around, then move on. That’s why I’m sitting (funnily enough, at work) here writing this blog entry instead of editing.

I’m biased, but I think it’s a good script. It’s loosely based on an idea I had when I was back in University, and I never wrote the full script until last year. After writing it, I (took a year off from it, then) printed it out, red lined it, and re-typed it. And that’s where I would love to be able to stop. Because this blog is new, and I don’t have to edit it, and that script is something I already wrote.

Unfortunately, I don’t get to do that. I don’t get to ‘once and done’ with scripts any more than I do with novels, unless they remain intellectual exercises or a cheap form of therapy. I get to beat my head against the screen, curse the names of the characters, the movie industry, and the twat who decided to write the script. And then I get to blog a bit for a break, because it’s new and I don’t have to edit it, and then I get to go back to tweaking, refining, deleting, and hating the characters I care about.

I’m on page 81 of 103 of what was 112 pages, in case you’re counting.

Humbling

I couldn’t do it.

I only have a tenuous link to D-Day, in the same way that everyone from the UK does; I grew up knowing about it, knowing the areas near where I grew up that ware part of the buildup of troops, knowing the story about Churchill and Eisenhower getting together for a war council at a local pub.

But as far as I know no one in my family was involved in it. My grandfather was either in Canada, finishing up his alpine warfare training, or in Sicily or Italy, having already started up into the ‘soft underbelly,’ and about two months away from losing a leg. There’s no family stories of bravery, or near misses, or of loss from that day, so I’ve never really made a concerted effort to go to Normandy and see the beaches.

That’s not really why I was even here this time around. A couple of free days, I thought why not go look at the Bayeux tapestry, see one of the primary contemporary sources for something I’ve been learning about for a while now. Call it research, pretend you’re not there for the cidre and the galettes.

But the tapestry, while it’s 70 metres long and the second longest tapestry in the world, only takes about a half hour to see. So I thought I’d go look at some D-Day stuff, because hey, it’s nearby, and I probably won’t come up here again.

I couldn’t do it.

I couldn’t ride across the channel in an oversized metal bathtub, the taste of salt water and the smell of vomit and fear, then struggle up a beach as bullets fly past (if you’re lucky) your head, lugging so much equipment. I couldn’t stay calm while friends die, some still in their teens, all too young.

Nothing but respect for those that did it, 75 years ago. It’s a humbling thing, to see the guns that were pointed at them, the obstacles they overcame and know they did it for you. For us. For the idea that Fascism is bad, that people shouldn’t be rounded up and put into camps because they’re different, that freedom is a possibility if we fight hard enough for it.

I’m lucky I don’t need to do it. I don’t need to run into the guns, through the water, up the sand, over the cliffs. Other people did that for me. But I need to remember what they died for, and make the most of the opportunities they preserved, and remember that people can be better than politicians that divide us to the point that storming the beaches seems necessary.

Home

Where is home any more?

There is a house in Las Vegas with most of my stuff in. Bed and sheets, clothes (including a growing number of Doc Martens), Lego, and more kitchen utensils than I need (but not more than I want). My car is parked there, and all the tools for work and play are there too. It has a pool.

There’s a house in Eugene, Oregon, with some more stuff. Most of this stuff is in a garage, because in Eugene they don’t have to park the cars inside to prevent them from turning into furnaces in the warmer months. That, and the house is already full of other stuff. There’s boxes of books I’ve read, and probably some more kitchen utensils. There’s an MGB chassis that I suspect is going to end up being mine.

There’s a house in Salisbury, UK, that doesn’t have enough stuff in for it to be called ‘stuff.’ There’s my salopette foulies. A jigsaw puzzle. An MGB model kit (1:24 scale, so much more manageable than the Oregon one). And apparently a chequebook from an account long-since cancelled.

There’s a house in London I stay in on occasion, and last time I stayed there I did laundry unsuccessfully, leaving three or four items of clothing stuck to the top of the dryer. Amateur mistake, you’d think I hadn’t been doing my own laundry for 24 years…

And then there’s the myriad hotel rooms I’ve stayed in over the last couple of years. I daresay at the rate I shed hair and the speed with which some rooms are expected to be turned over there’s still DNA evidence I was there. HAIR. I said HAIR.

You know what? They’re all home. Because, and I shudder to get mushy, home is where I take it, where I make it. Home is somewhere I’ve never been before, as long as I’m there with a friend. Home is all of the above places, because of the family and friends who are attached to said places. Maybe not the hotel rooms per se, but even them, depending on where they are and why I’m there, have friends attached to them. Attached as in “hey, I’m in London and several mates live there,” not attached as in “hey, morning, I see you’re still handcuffed to the radiator.” That’s a different type of friend.

Besides, you should never handcuff someone to the radiator. That’s how injuries happen.

Birthdays

I wasn’t sure whether to write this one or not without coming across as being a whiny little bitch. But then sod it, it’s my page and I can whine if I want to.

One of the things I miss about being on the road, is birthdays. Mostly other peoples, but sometimes mine. Because working on the road, you miss them. You’ll forget that it’s come around again, that you’re another year older, and the grey in your hair is more noticeable and possibly migrating to your face, and the wrinkles don’t disappear when you stop smiling any more.

I miss birthday drinks. Mostly other people’s, again, but sometimes mine. This year I went out to eat two days before my birthday because that was my day off that week. Had a great meal, and a couple glasses of wine, but it would have been better to sit around a teppanyaki with a bunch of mates, or grab beers with people after they finish work. And it’s a great time to catch up with people. As we all get older and slightly less social (through choice, obligation, or a bit of both) the times between seeing people, even when you live in the same town as them, get longer. It’s easier to stay home, and not put pants on.

Birthdays give a purpose to putting on pants, I guess.

Several years ago, I took my birthday off facebook. Mostly because I had a hundred notifications, and 90% of them were from people I almost never speak to. It felt fake; contrived, phone-in friendships.

But now I use facebook for keeping in touch with people. It’s how I get most of my news about their lives. And maybe it isn’t the worst thing to do, to be reminded on that one day a year that there are people around the world, who would actually come out for a pint if you were near them… or at least seriously consider putting on pants.

Maybe next year I’ll put it up there, assuming I’ll be in a hotel room somewhere and away from the people I love, care about, or want to mooch free drinks off. And maybe next year I’ll start actually wishing people a happy birthday on facebook.

Actually, next year is 40. I think I’m supposed to have a big destination party according to a deal I made with several members of the family. Only got 11 and a half months, should probably start planning…

(oh, and for those of you keeping score, I wrote every day this week, almost 3k words. Baby steps).