just one person in a sea

...of many little people who are not aware of me.

file this under "must see"...

Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York

i could write many things about this film but suffice to say,
this is a complicated story with an ultimately simple truthful tale to tell. and i felt as much as watched this. and if it moved me, it was not so much for the story itself, but the relief that someone could be so honest as to how lost we can feel...

there are so many ways to interpret what's going on in this play. but one is certainly that
morbid fear, depression and narcissistic inadequacy all have the power to swamp the self with a narrative so that the person no longer experiences life as it is, but life filtered through that narrative. and that inner story of loss or fear or loneliness or failure spills out and influences the real life being lived on the outside. and so the narrative keeps being affirmed. and before you know it, real life's over and was never truly lived at all as it could have been. and at the centre of that story is that one cannot see beyond one's own experience, so that everyone else is just an extra, or perhaps, simultaneously, that we ourselves feel like an extra in our own life and have no idea how to direct ourselves beyond disappointment...

for as complex and richly layered as this film is, Charlie Kaufman has made an incredibly emotionally honest film... and for a film about the unavoidable nature of death we all face, and for as desperately sad a story as this is, it didn't leave me feeling depressed, but somehow quietly hopeful, that maybe one day one might meet someone who'll have the courage to say, 'what are we doing?' and hold on for the time we've got left rather than leave...

or maybe that person will have to be me. for, "no one is an extra" in their own life story...

LB

the smallness of us

got to witness the grand canyon yesterday, or perhaps be witnessed to. kind of puts the smallness of one's existence and what supposedly matters into perspective. we are not even a brush stroke in the scale of time it took for these colours to lay themselves down.

hard to have an ego when faced with eons...

it's the kind of place where wonder meets nihilism.

LB

if it can be broken, then it can be fixed...

thanks to Brook (welcome) for bringing something i wrote way back in May to my attention. sometimes it's good to see how far one has come on the journey. other times, like now, one sees wounds still raw and still needing mended...

colour me struck that it's the kind of stuff that doesn't get healed in a day and it's safe to say i'm still trying to work my way on through all these months on... i'm fairly certain that compassion for the other and for the self aren't mutually exclusive but i've made a brutal habit of rejecting the latter in order to achieve the former. and silencing that which needs to be voiced if it is ever to be healed continues to hold centre stage. if i have been increasingly quiet on these pages it is only an extension of my silence elsewhere. a lesson known is not the same as a lesson lived. silence caused suffering and silence has caused only more.

so as i make faltering attempt to live in conversation that is not possible without risk, that needs trust & a holding steady where trust has been unheld, so it remains now, as i wrote then:

i'm terrified of being vulnerable, and i have no idea how to do this...

may we all find our way through. and the courage to keep on keeping on. life's too short and the one's we love and desire to trade the uncool with (however painful that can be), like time, and ourselves, are a precious thing.

just a teenage dirtbag, baby...
LB

cast in a pod

Podcast of the Vanderbilt conversational gig available here.

just out of a week long therapeutic retreat. will post more as things find their place. for now, i have much to contemplate and much to work on to put flesh on my vision for my future. and when not doing that am making honest attempts at being as uncool as i can with sheltering folks significant to my heart.

all is well here in Tucson, hope it is well, wherever you are.

be uncool. and if you're Stateside, go vote for change, while you're at it. i feel privileged to be here for this slice of American history-in-the-happening.


LB