An End

I began Look Homeward, Martin ten years ago. Today, I say good-bye.

For me, "The End" means completion. With this final post, I complete Look Homeward, Martin. 

This blog began with a different me - a recent college graduate, still living at home, who had a vision for living without true knowledge of how to truly live it.

Now, I have reached a point, ten years later, where I live in the world of many of the choices I made then and across these ten years - choices to live a helping career in Library & Information Sciences; choices to live a creative life in writing and filmmaking; and choices to orient my life around travel and experience.

In reaching the completion of this blog, my posts became less frequent. I view this as something positive. I write less on here because I live more. 

Through Look Homeward, I worked through this process of performing my life's vision in naming experiences, obstacles, and goals. 

Thank you for reading along with me.

Revising the 50 List for A Post-Pandemic Life

I shared my "50 List" over five years ago.

In writing that list, I attempted to create a vision of an upcoming period of my life - a life where I felt solid and stable in my career. I tried to avoid a lot of specific goals and write vision statements.

That list reads differently in a post-pandemic world and to my post-pandemic self. My new therapist urged me to rewrite the list because I am not the same. 

Last year felt like living in a house that kept burning down - a horrifying feeling. It felt exhausting to continually recover everything and return to a new normal. At a certain point I had to let go of things I no longer had the energy to keep. For instance, I let go of hockey after my 20 years of fandom because intuitively it no longer fits in the life I want now.

The paramount question from last year: what do I still want in my life after the pandemic? This question motivates me to revise my "50 List" into something simpler - a list of vision statements that cohere into a new vision of how I will define goodness and stability in my life.

A Revised 50 List

• Write and direct a film every year.
• Travel once every year 
• Pay off student loan debt.
• Own a guitar that I can pass on to those I love.

Why do We Need to Fight?: Thoughts on Writing Stories of Peace

 As a writer, I focus on externalizing the internal. I frequently write short screenplays or poems that engage in genre tropes in science fiction and dark fantasy as a way of externalizing internal realities and feelings. 

It feels intuitive to represent a war within oneself as an actual war. 

Yet, I also think of the older poet ("Homer") in the movie Wings of Desire who says, "No one has so far succeeded in singing an epic of peace… what is it about peace that makes its story so hard to tell?”

This past year has led me down a path of interrogating the need for combat in my fiction. Why do I need to write about fights and violence? The answer feels easy: because my characters have an internal fight - an internal violence that disrupts their lives. 

Just like me. Just like so much of my life feels like a war inside. Many of us feel like we have a war inside. Stories with combat and external conflicts compel us into a catharsis from our internal conflicts.

Interrogating myself, I ask why isn't peace compelling? Why do I not write enough about kindness? "What is it about peace that makes its story so hard to tell?"

Using a self-interrogation, I think my attraction to films and stories involved in combat comes from this mental combat. Why am I still at war inside of myself and when will peace happen? What does peace feel like?

Last year led me down this path because I wanted to avoid anything dark. I couldn't bear brutality last year. I wanted peace and stability. I wanted kindness and hope. It felt so far away and it felt like everyone had to deal with lives without mental peace. We all lived in a mental space of seemingly unending brutality and combat

I do not have an answer to Homer's question. And I cannot stop loving or imagining stories without combat. But as a writer I want to imagine and write more stories of peace, connection, and kindness. 

"I" and "We" Spectrum - A Spring 2021 Update

I'm here. 

I wrote almost nothing for this blog last year. My energy and my sense of hope has been empty. 

It's hard to write a blog post on a blog that largely follows how I work on my goals in a year that crushed my goals. This past year - the events that arose from the decisions people made - crushed many of our goals. 

Throughout last year I had many privileges - a job and income, a loving wife, a new pup - that so many lacked. Yet, how people acted and how people continue to act left me with a profound sense of hopelessness. It's important to not simply blame a "year" for misfortune when too many with agency acted irresponsibly. 

This has been a difficult winter for me. My great uncle died of COVID, too many of my friends suffered from COVID, and my mom and my sister had a terrible bout of COVID. Unrelated to COVID and still difficult was the unexpected house repairs that exhausted our honeymoon fund. Most difficult was putting my dog, Rory, to sleep after nearly 14 years. Currently difficult is seeing my wife's (and, now, my) dog Odie suffer from lymphoma and deal with chemotherapy. 

But, Spring is here. My friends have received vaccine doses. My sister and my father received vaccine doses. 

Let us hope that good things will return this Spring. My larger hope after all we experienced is that we think of this experience in terms of we - that we think of our decisions in terms of others. 

A long time ago, philosophers recognized that "I" is important and that our society should empower that I. But this year should teach us that "I" and "we" are on a spectrum. Our "I" feelings and desires connect with consideration of others. Our responsibility to our own self connects with our responsibility to others. 

That is my larger hope. I hope we walk away with a value of everyone, with a sense that everyone matters and our self-interest only matters if it empowers others. 

Endings from a Writer

I always begin writing a narrative with the end in sight. 

I argue that narratives feel more potent because of a fulfilling end, an end that happens because what happens in a story drives to that end. The same way real life feels more vital because there will be an end, unfortunately, a story feels vibrant because it will end and lead to an ending. 

Narratives, unlike real life, need causality. Every decision or action a character takes leads to another action. Nothing just happens. The narrative needs action flow for cohesiveness. 

For my writing - mostly narrative short screenplays - after I understand what characters I'm writing about, I try to conceive of an end first. All characters, I argue, should drive a plot forward and act strategically. A good strategist creates a strategy based on outcome. "What is the endgame?" "What do I want everything to lead to?" "When this is over, what do I want everything to be like?" A character asks these questions or acts with this strategic mindset, even if not explicit. 

Therefore, I start by thinking of what do I want the reader or audience to experience in the end. When they finish what I've written and leave, what do I want them to feel? 

Then I think about what ending will leave them with that feeling. Then I work backwards - if this is the end, then how did we get here? I work backwards on a broad level - what happens in the story - and on a specific level - what just happened? 

All of this connects with how a character causes things to happen and drives toward this end. Their strategic mindset and their imaginary context move to this end. 

The Inconvenience - Uncertainty Principle

 Let me share a hypothesis I have on how individuals connect and access entertainment. 

I argue that most people make decisions on accessing entertainment on two factors: convenience of access and likely experiential outcome. People want to consume entertainment that they know will give them the outcome they expect to have (generally positively entertaining or uplifting, if not fulfilling) and that has the fewest barriers (financial, physical distance, age requirements) to access. 

Based on this argument, I created the "Inconvenience - Uncertainty Principle," a series of three statements on how individuals choose the entertainment they access:

1) People are willing to deal with the inconvenience of accessing a work of entertainment if the outcome they expect or want is certain. 

2) People are willing to experience a work of entertainment with an uncertain outcome if the work is not inconvenient to access. 

3) People are unwilling to experience a work of entertainment with an uncertain outcome AND that's inconvenient to access. 

What this means:

1) People who, say, live 30-40 miles outside of Atlanta are willing to pay a substantial cost, drive in less than ideal circumstances, pay for a babysitter and parking - basically, reconfigure their routine day or evening - in order to see Disney's Aladdin or Hamilton at the Fox Theatre because those shows have certain outcomes. I mean...it's Hamilton. It's Disney. Someone who buys that ticket knows the outcome and will buy a $100+ ticket to see it. 

2) If a movie with a low Rotten Tomatoes score is on Netflix, then someone subscribed to Netflix will feel more willing to watch it than when it was in theaters because it's something they can watch in their pajamas, without leaving the house, and at no additional cost in money.

3) If a movie with a low Rotten Tomatoes score and an uncertain outcome is at a movie theatre more than 20 minutes away, most people will choose to not see it. If someone lives in Buford, GA and casually (or even more than casually) likes baseball, they will not drive to see the Atlanta Braves if the Braves are having a subpar season. 

To clarify some things:

Inconvenience and uncertain outcomes fall on a spectrum, personal for everyone. I began considering this hypothesis with theatre in mind. The challenges of making and producing theatre is that so few people access quality or professional theatre in their life. Therefore the outcome for a non-theatre experienced person is inherently uncertain because of poor theatre experiences and a lack of knowledge of how theatrical performances work. 

Certainty in outcome increases based on trust and experience. Individuals who have accessed theatre from a specific organization before will trust the organization and have less uncertainty in outcome. "I don't know if this play is for me, but I loved everything I've seen here." As another example, there are film directors I love that I will still go because I trust they're doing something I want to see or something interesting, even if the reviews are mixed.

Uncertainty is personal for everyone. Someone might not like an actor and therefore if a movie has that actor, the outcome becomes uncertain. "I don't want to see that movie because I don't like Jeremy Renner." 

Inconvenience can also depend on circumstance or mood. If someone just wants to get out of the house, the movie theatre 20 minutes away feels less inconvenient compared with other options of entertainment access out of the house that may be more than 20 minutes away.

Relationships are Voluntary: A Brief Post

All relationships must be based on volunteerism.

I learned to live by this maxim which has left me hurt and left me powerful. Any relationship - that is, romantic or platonic - should continue by choice and never because of obligation.

I learned this lesson the hard way. I learned this lesson by hanging onto relationships that gave me needless anxiety for too long. I learned this lesson by believing I could negotiate romantic relationships. If someone said "I'm not interested in you" I believed I could negotiate it through reasoning or pleading.

I felt like a failure for failing at relationships. I felt I had to act as the best, most giving friend. I felt doomed to perpetual loneliness because my romantic relationships averaged 1-2 dates and, until my recent relationship with my wife, 3 months. 

After a toxic relationship, however, I made a moment of clarity: I would rather live alone the rest of my life than to live with a toxic person. 

That moment of clarity happened only as a 28 year old. It lived in me previously as a thought, but from that time I learned to embody it.

My moment of clarity: my life mattered whether someone was in it or not. I do not have time for unfulfilling relationships.