Back in 2019 I started attending a FILM 1 class at LBCC after work. The goal was to give myself the language and the knowledge to analytically interpret the films I watched. This was a period of my life where I started to attend theatre screenings in earnest because I realized I loved watching movies just a tad more than your average person. I tell people my cinematic awakening came when I watched There Will Be Blood for the second time. The first was in the theatre when I was 17 and I wasn’t *quite* there on my sociological or philosophical journey to grapple with the ideas beneath the surface of the film. The second time I saw it though was sometime after I started college and had been exposed to ideas, thinkers, and some critical analysis of literature. So when my brain tackled it this time I saw the nearly unending wealth of symbolism within the frame, the ideas that were presented as the two opposing forces of capitalism and religion as measured by the effect on the family. I thought if one movie could have such fecundity, surely others would as well.
After that I began chasing that high across the cinematic landscape, becoming familiar with directors and their oeuvre. Still the deeper layer of understanding was missing, as evidenced by the fact that every time I read a good analysis on the AV Club or the Criterion website my mind would be blown by the evidence and conclusions these writers were drawing. I had to tap into this second sight of sorts, open my third eye to the pieces of film as a text. After I took Film 1 everything opened up to me, I understood why I loved music in film and how it worked in concert with the action on the screen, I learned to notice things like camera movement, pacing, cuts, mise-en-scène, colors, framing. By seeing all the different pieces I was able to form interpretations and analysis that were beyond my previous capability. The side effect was that even films that I didn’t have any interest in or that I considered bad or boring now became an endless stream of subtext and symbolism that I could also analyze. This sort of retrospective analysis is the sorts that reclaim certain movies from the box office graveyard or the genre film wasteland.
Of course this was all for personal enrichment as I never thought I would be in the business of making a movie, but I thought maybe I could write one. The next class I took was a screenwriting class, it was eye-opening. Especially in the way that I realized this class was geared towards writing a very specific type of movie: A Hollywood Blockbuster. I guess the goal of this school is to get you employed which is great, but the classes were definitely centered around the kind of cookie cutter process that can threaten to rob the art from the artifice of movies. Still being able to write even the most basic script to create stakes and deliver an emotional response is better than writing my indie, arthouse script with 0 thought to dramatic tension. I came out of that class with a 20 page script that although I thought was pretty good, remains unfilmable (for now) because of the set pieces and locations I had written into it.
So I figured my journey was over at this point because the rest of the classes in the film program, the ones that required hands-on training were 6 hours of lecture and lab and, as I tend to forget, I have a full blown software engineering career that I still have to maintain and I couldn’t disappear for a whole day every week to take more classes. At this point I took a quick dip into Philosophy courses, but always keeping eye on the film classes. This Spring I saw an opportunity, the class was being offered on Saturdays! So I devoted my Saturday for 13 weeks straight to learning filmmaking from scratch because I didn’t even know how to turn on the camera. This was the workshop version of all the analysis classes I had taken. Lighting, framing, coverage, color temperature, scene direction, I had to learn these basic concepts and apply them every week and by the end I would end up with a 5 minute short.
The film I eventually made is 10 minutes and 45 seconds. This was because the script I wrote about a “humble” mushroom salesman who tries to breathe life into crappy spores had an ambitious montage sequence that was basically a love letter to a specific Allman Brothers Band album. The version I aired for class was 6 minutes long with a huge chunk of the montage cut out and I absolutely could not stand it so the version I’ll share with the world is my longer cut. The challenge presented by our professor was to write a script with 0 dialogue so the success of this little film of mine rests on whether the viewer can piece together the interior thoughts of the character without any explicit exposition. I broke the script up into individual shots of which I ended up with 50, not counting the coverage we would eventually have to take. I realized that the props I had written into it (mushrooms, trays, spores, caviar, flyers, etc) would take some effort to procure so on day 1 I wanted to film the easier scenes. This kind of backfired because we spent 80% of the time arranging the lighting so that it would look natural but well lit in the room. It was very slow at first, but by the second and third day we were figuring out what worked and what didn’t work and the shots we had to retake vastly dwindled in number. There were some shots we took that were….let’s say experimental and although I wasn’t happy with them we spent too much time setting them up so they had to stay in the film, you’ll probably know which ones I’m talking about.
My perfectionist streak was wearing thin with the deadline looming so the iron grasp I had on prop design went from being true to life to being “good enough to get the point across” and me and my friend Sergio went around to a couple Cambodian grocery stores in Long Beach looking for interesting mushrooms before going to the mushroom mecca that is H Mart. I took my iPhone into the store and guerrilla filmed the scenes there. For the scene at the liquor store, Hops and Vine in Long Beach was nice enough to let us film at 8 am when they opened and we didn’t take the boom mic because I was self conscious about filming in a public place with it. I deeply regretted it because the sound we recorded on camera was basically unusable and I had to flex some sound design muscles to make it sound okay. We also filmed the drug exchange at Ground Hideout which was kind enough to let us shoot the scene in their outdoor sidewalk as long as we didn’t interrupt customers. Then my friend Will who was in that scene as the USC student suggested a little field off the LA River bike path that we could use as a cow farm so we drove there and I mixed up some chocolate pudding and dirt at Sergio’s suggestion and we had our cow poop. The editing process took another week and a half and although there are some things I would have liked to reshoot it wasn’t in the cards with my time running out.
So to undo any pretentiousness that may have seeped into the rest of this post, I know this film is not an example of any of the aforementioned masterpieces and to boot there were other class members who seemed to take this course as just another class on their way to a degree of some sort. But once you’re over 30, any accomplishment is worth celebrating and I feel like for someone who graduated college with an engineering degree, exploring this wholly unrelated field and being able to produce something that is at least intelligible was a great accomplishment. Most importantly it was fun shooting with my roommate and friend Daniel who is in every single scene and contributed the one word of dialogue in the movie. This marks the first step in what I hope is a series of self-financed, short films involving me and my friends that will get better and better as I practice the craft a bit more.
Raise your hand if you’ve seen Dune 2. Keep your hand up if you’ve read the New Testament. Keep your hand up if you’ve been obsessed with the writings of Leo Tolstoy. If your hand is still up, then you might be Mahatma Gandhi or Martin Luther King Jr. If they were still alive today. Tolstoy took a stance of radical love later in his life that influenced all forms of non violent protest that we are familiar with now. Where did this stance come from? The source of eternal life, the Son of Man, Jesus Christ. Yet he approached the life and teachings of Jesus in an experimental way, by removing the miracles, the divinity and the mysticism from the gospels.
I read A Confession in which Tolstoy admits his total lack of the will to keep living, and the book is framed as a way to make a logical argument against his own suicide because if he can find no reason to live then why should he. The thrust of the novella is beautifully summed up in the parable he details:
There is an old Eastern fable about a traveler who is taken unawares on the steppes by a ferocious wild animal. In order to escape the beast the traveler hides in an empty well, but at the bottom of the well he sees a dragon with its jaws open, ready to devour him. The poor fellow does not dare to climb out because he is afraid of being eaten by the rapacious beast, neither does he dare drop to the bottom of the well for fear of being eaten by the dragon. So he seizes hold of a branch of a bush that is growing in the crevices of the well and clings on to it. His arms grow weak and he knows that he will soon have to resign himself to the death that awaits him on either side. Yet he still clings on, and while he is holding on to the branch he looks around and sees that two mice, one black and one white, are steadily working their way round the bush he is hanging from, gnawing away at it. Sooner or later they will eat through it and the branch will snap, and he will fall into the jaws of the dragon. The traveler sees this and knows that he will inevitably perish. But while he is still hanging there he sees some drops of honey on the leaves of the bush, stretches out his tongue and licks them. In the same way I am clinging to the tree of life, knowing full well that the dragon of death inevitably awaits me, ready to tear me to pieces, and I cannot understand how I have fallen into this torment. And I try licking the honey that once consoled me, but it no longer gives me pleasure. The white mouse and the black mouse – day and night – are gnawing at the branch from which I am hanging. I can see the dragon clearly and the honey no longer tastes sweet. I can see only one thing; the inescapable dragon and the mice, and I cannot tear my eyes away from them.
Leo Tolstoy – A Confession
Facing the inevitability of his own death, the decreasing pleasure he gets from living every day life, and the inability to forget about the futility in which he now exists he comes to the conclusion that not serving any further purpose he may as well die but admits that he is too cowardly to do it. He tries to find a way to overcome the suffering when he remembers that he gets a glimmer of existential joy whenever he considers how he felt when he had faith in God. It was a matter of course, perhaps even the trend for intellectuals in Tolstoy’s time to be atheist, or to at least accept that religion was not a rational endeavor. Yet he makes the claim that he was at his most happiest when he believed and that this faith in itself could be the key to finding his will to live. He tries to return to the Russian orthodox church in earnest only to find himself disheartened and confused by the dogmatic and empty ritualistic acts that plague the sermons. Tolstoy decides that he must cut away the cruft that has accrued over the centuries since the crucifixion and get back to the very soul of Christianity which are the teachings of Jesus Christ. This is where the novella ends, with a promise that after years of research he will come back with his findings. He delivers this in a following book, The Gospel In Brief, which is itself a smaller piece of a larger work in which he reinterprets the four gospels of the New Testament, stripped of all superstition. Admittedly I did not see his existential crisis ending with a renewal in religious faith. I understand where Tolstoy is coming from though because his conceptualized idea of faith is akin to the Christian idea of the spirit. Then as Jesus teaches his disciples, eternal life can only be found through the spirit not through the flesh. In the parlance of the fable, all the honey in the world will not save you from being eaten by the dragon because the mistake is serving the flesh to save the flesh, in essence making yourself more delicious for the dragon to enjoy. One should serve the spirit to save the spirit which would allow Tolstoy to lift himself right out of that well and enter in the kingdom of Heaven, eternal life or as I like to think, existential purpose and fulfillment.
Now that I’ve put that out there I want to state that I myself am not religious, and I don’t believe in any literal sense the scripture writ in the gospels. Jesus never sat down and wrote his thoughts into words, the gospels were written around 60 years after his death. Not only that but the canonical gospels are only a subset of the many that were written which the budding Christian church decided were the most suited to be canon. Even the canonical gospels don’t always line up with each other either. So we must tackle these religious sources for what they are, unverifiable accounts of the life and teachings of a man which may be more literary creation than historical figure. This is of course supreme blasphemy according to the church. The funny thing about heresy is that it only matters to you if you abide by the institution that declares it such. The greatest Christian institution: the Roman Catholic church is a military hierarchical framework originating via the Nicene Creed. It was created as such to protect Christianity as a religion and to standardize the creation of theology, the greatest misstep I think in the history of Christianity as a philosophy. Because in doing this, they wiped out the most anarchic of Jesus lessons: the rejection of dogma in favor of belief. His words are simple, yet the institutions that sprang up in his wake continually complicate them in favor of maintaining the idea of religious divinity and disseminating this power into a purported chain of command that starts with the pope. Yet Jesus was a teacher of the poor, disavowed the rich and powerful and held that men are more important than all religious ceremonies. The catholic church then, and any offshoot from its inception, is itself a heretical organization.
Therefore I can get to the real business of Jesus, which is interpreting his philosophy in a way that applies to humanity not divinity. As I read The Gospel In Brief I could not help but make continuous connections to other great teachers of life. So much so that I thought Lao Tzu and The Buddha must have been pen pals with Jesus while he was in the forest coming up with his ideas. I kid, but Eastern influences must have been present in the time of historical Jesus, there’s very little evidence to suggest there was any direct contact but the similarities in some of the lessons is striking. Firstly there is Jesus’ role as an ascetic. The Jewish fasted before the time of Jesus but the biggest difference is they fasted to commemorate events or to perform a sacrifice as dictated in the Old Testament. Jesus not only willingly gave up food, but went so far as to say food is not necessary:
He who fulfills the will of the father shall always be satisfied and knows neither hunger nor thirst
He upends the paradigm choosing instead to not look at fasting as a sacrificial act but as a display of the will of the spirit, a supreme act of self control. The Buddha also recommended his followers to fast as a way to detach from the need of food and sustenance which would arouse suffering. He practiced extreme fasting for a time before giving it up in favor of the middle way yet he did so with the realization that one does not need as much material food as they think and that one’s power over the mind is one of the greatest tools against suffering. So on one hand we have the food of the spirit (service to the Father, the origin of life) surpassing the need for food of the flesh. On the other hand we have the removal of the attachment to food by our willpower. The two concepts seem inevitably entangled to me. Moreover Jesus taught generally that needs of the flesh chain us to dying by the flesh. His concept of eternal life, as being removed from any sort of fleshly desires could be read as another version of the eightfold path of buddhism which aims to remove all attachments to any concept or materialism that stop us from achieving enlightenment and exiting the cycle of death and rebirth, aka eternal life.
Next we have Jesus’ radically nonviolent stance. As he famously states:
If anyone strikes out your tooth on one side, turn him to the other side. If you are made to do one piece of work, do two. If men wish to take your property, give it to them. If they do not return your money, do not ask for it.
Jesus reinforces his belief that resisting evil is itself a mechanism of evil, hence the only means to do away with evil is to not only to willingly suffer, but to give more than the actor against you would take. This form of “generous” victimhood is a means to highlight that the things that victimize us do so at our own volition. Here we have a smattering of the stoic concept of “Amor Fati”, love thy fate. Jesus encourages his followers to love their fate by multiplying its effects. The buddhist concept of right thought, right conduct, and right effort all apply to this situation, because Buddha also taught the ancient concept of Ahimsa, nonviolence towards all living things. Jesus’ method of multiplying those violent or evil acts against us can be seen as the inversion of the buddhist belief that life is suffering. If you throw yourself on the sword instead of resisting against the sword then no action can be taken against your will and therefore you cannot suffer by the spirit. This also has moral implications because by increasing the acts performed in your detriment, you are increasing the evil done in the short term however there can be no moral victory against a non-violent resistor and in our modern times in particular, in which all actions are surveilled and criticized, the moral victory is the everlasting one.
Lastly Jesus preaches that the kingdom of heaven, contrary to popular culture, is timeless, cannot be seen, and is not physically present anywhere. He says that it exists on earth and can be entered at any time provided you access the origin of all life, the spirit.
Understand that, if man is conceived from heaven, then in him there must be that which is of heaven
Rather the kingdom of heaven is part of us because we are created from it. We lose touch with it and Jesus’ lessons act as the shepherd that reconnects us to our divine origins. This concept is striking in its similarity to the words of Lao Tzu in the Tao Te Ching. The tao, for the uninitiated is the eternal and limitless substance from which life springs, and life returns:
The Tao is infinite, eternal. Why is it eternal? It was never born; thus it can never die. Why is it infinite? It has no desires for itself; thus it is present for all beings.
Lao Tzu – Tao Te Ching
The tao represents the unlimited potential from which humanity is made. In the Tao Te Ching Lao Tzu describes how being more like the tao improves our lives because the closer we are to the origin of life then the closer we become to realizing the perfect life, or perhaps as Jesus would say, the everlasting life. Jesus refers to “the father” as this origin of the spirit. The father is one with the kingdom of heaven and traditionally he has been identified as the Abrahamic God that created the earth, and gave Noah his purpose etc. But what if it wasn’t the same God? What if Jesus never meant that the father was an actual person or deity but a force, origin, or an immutable aspect of human nature like the tao? He certainly alludes to the fact that his father cannot be known, nor can the origins of his own birth be verified because the light that illuminates knowledge cannot itself be illuminated. Similarly Lao Tzu describes the tao:
The tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao The name that can be named is not the eternal Name.
The unnamable is the eternally real. Naming is the origin of all particular things.
Free from desire, you realize the mystery. Caught in desire, you see only the manifestations.
Yet mystery and manifestations arise from the same source. This source is called darkness.
Darkness within darkness. The gateway to all understanding.
Lao Tzu – Tao Te Ching
Here he states that although we can try to describe the tao, give it a shape and a name, we are incapable of ever actually understanding it or knowing it. By naming it we create a lesser version of it in our minds, similar to Plato’s theory of forms, we can only reach approximate knowledge via an imperfect understanding of the infinite tao from which all life springs. Jesus seems to think similarly of his Father:
You have understood that understanding proceeds from the Father into the world and returns from the world to the Father.
Lao Tzu and Jesus reasoned that trying to define something intrinsically unimaginable robs it of its power and purpose. Rather they all preached that keeping this unfathomable barrier in mind while accepting that it is a part of us is instrumental to being at peace with ourselves. The Buddha and Jesus also both believed that maintaining strict beliefs and expectations were fundamentally damaging to our internal lives. Siddhartha famously encountered the four sights which (eventually) awakened him to the four noble truths of suffering. Jesus understood similarly in his meditation out in the wilderness. He states in the gospels that that the temple of God lives in the hearts of men who love each other, taking care to illustrate that no physical sacrifice, place of worship, or ritual can bring you closer to eternal life and speaking harshly to the orthodox who upheld these values for their own sake due to their attachment to scripture. According to the buddhists, once you remove all attachments you will achieve the state of enlightenment which will allow you to exit the cycle of rebirth. Enlightenment, eternal life, entering the kingdom of heaven, returning to the Tao: these all sound like the same concept to me.
So it seems there must have been some dialogue between east and west at the inception of Christianity. But whether these are all teachers that borrowed from each other or whether they all possessed the clarity of mind to arrive to similar conclusions doesn’t matter. Religions have sprung up in the place of teaching to try and control the power that comes with sanctity. Yet holding the words of our teachers as unimpeachably sacred is damaging to the whole endeavor of human progress. Jesus knew this which is why he taught that belief supersedes actions. Correct belief gets at an objective center of morality, but correct actions leaves room for the false teachers to bear ill fruit in the realm of subjectivity. This is the true power of Jesus’ words, because even if you do not believe in the christian church or have ever heard of Jesus, are part of a Satanic cult, or are born on a different planet if you do as he commanded and always, and to the end, love each other then you are a disciple of Christ without ever realizing it. It is this concept which propelled Tolstoy from suicidal ideation to passionate living. The connection to these truths which have been realized over and over throughout history saved him in spite of the obfuscation caused by the religious theology that paradoxically try to protect them.
I went on a trip to Austin after telling my friends for years that I wanted to go. The straw that broke the camel’s back for me was seeing all of them take their epic summer vacations to Europe. I know it sounds tone deaf considering I just went on an epic trip to Japan earlier this year. But I also feel that being in a privileged and unique position to have the agency to take these trips puts me in moral bind. If I do not exercise these powers that I have, am I worthy of having them? If I don’t take advantage, am I wasting the opportunities presented to me? and most importantly will I regret it later in life when I think, “oh how I could have traveled in those days and chose instead to be humble about it and wait for my turn again”. There’s this capitalist instinct to squeeze as much productivity as possible into your days. Yet everyone’s concept of productivity really rests on the goals they have defined for themselves. And for someone such as I, whose only real goal is to live life authentically…how is one productive at living?
My answer is to act on those flourishes of inspiration. When the muse speaks to me, I listen. And here it told me (not literally of course) that I needed to get away for a bit. I felt that inexorable rejection of the mundane which visits me from time to time. I don’t want to end up like Ivan Ilyich and reject these in favor of a predictable existence so I checked and the universe laid bare a gift to me: Fantastic Fest. The Alamo Drafthouse’s film festival held at their base camp in Austin, Texas. I knew about this festival before but I had previously decided not to go thinking I couldn’t make the days work with the already lavish time I had taken. Now it would serve well as the grounds for a revenge trip, a revenge on myself really, the me that had dared to decide I wasn’t going to act on it before.
The plan was simple, I wasn’t going to take the 7 days off required to attend the entirety of the festival. I was going to opt for the cheapest badge possible, the second-half badge, partially as a trial run to see if the full experience would be worth it and also so I could offset some of the negative optics around my trip by working remotely a couple days. I flew in Friday night after work and would cram as much tourism as I could into that first weekend including some bike rides, work Monday to Wednesday, attend all five rounds of movies on Thursday, Fly to Dallas Friday morning and hang out with my cousins there, then fly back Sunday night. Only two days total of official vacation time if I could make it work.
I found out that Lance Armstrong is based out of Austin and it just so happened that the bike shop I placed a rental with was his bike shop. I discussed with Daniel, as a barometer of the cycling community, if it was cool to like Lance Armstrong again. He said that it’s kind of undisputed that everyone on the Tour De France (TDF) would cheat during his tenure there, and that’s a big reason why he felt he could confess the truth but that he still acted like a total douche about it and that’s why public opinion is against him. So okay relatively speaking he wasn’t any worse in deeds than his peers, but if we’re dealing with absolutes maybe him and the rest of them deserve the hate evenly spread amongst them. But all’s fair in love and war and morality tends to go out the window in intense competitions like the TDF, especially if winning is determined by the amount of cheating you do or don’t do. So this is all to say that although I don’t worship at the altar of Armstrong, being in his home base bike shop was still pretty cool.
The morning before picking up the bike I walked to the state capitol of Texas which I think was the biggest checkbox on my list of tourist activities plus I thought it would make for a great “I’m here” photo for my IG stories.
Which yeah it totally did
I didn’t go in as it was too early for visiting hours but I walked along its grounds and just tried to absorb the Texas-ness of it all. There was a statue of the ten commandments across the street which I thought “yeah, checks out” and then I was surprised to find a statue dedicated to the confederate dead….which okay I see what they are trying to do but the dedication said the reason for the secession was a matter of “states’ rights” but I think it is intentionally obfuscating the real issue at the core of the civil war: slavery. This was the same kind of Lost Cause gaslighting I saw on my trip to Virginia and Georgia last year so I guess I should have anticipated it, but that’s when I finally felt like I was in Texas.
I picked up the bike from Mellow Johnnys, only to realize that it was way more hot and humid than I had anticipated. I’ve ridden in hot conditions before but it has been a while and I was afraid my body was not acclimated. Still I shook it off and thought that it wouldn’t be any worse than the Tour De Palm Springs century I did a year and a half ago. I set off probably at the worst time, 11 am, as the heat was beginning to climb but the first part of the ride was through the shaded canopy along the Colorado River, then through some beautiful forested areas on the Austin-to-Manor Bike trail. It was going so well that I even stopped for a decadent coffee at a mochi donut shop also conveniently located next to a bike shop. Okay you probably feel me setting it up but once I hit the open plains and the blacktop coming back from Lake Long I was WRECKED. I explained it better in my Strava recap but I definitely was suffering from heat exhaustion by the end of that ride and I had to lay down and focus on not passing out for about 20 minutes once I got back. This kind of shifted my plans a bit because I decided bike rides were no longer in the picture.
The following day I decided to go to the Texas State history museum insetad. They have a cool immersive 4d theater experience were they play admittedly propagandic films about how great Texas is. No one loves Texas more than Texas I think and one of the films was about its identity as the Lone Star state who fights more its beliefs and doesn’t have problems standing in defiance of anyone who says otherwise. To wit outside the theatre there was a display from Gonzales, Texas the site of the very first battle in the Texas revolution. The narrative the museum tells is that being fed up with Texas’ poor representation in the Mexican government and mishandling of their economy forced them to rebel, and when Mexico showed up to Gonzales to take back the cannons they had given the outpost there, the Texans said enough was enough and erected a banner with the words “Come And Take It”. Mexico tried to do just that but was sent packing in what was the first volley towards Texas independence. Myths like these and the tale of the Alamo bolster this Lone Star identity. I admit as a story it is inspiring, and I can see why Texans love to embody this image of a scrappy, rebellious, and confident underdog. It hits the same notes that the American revolution did, and they would claim that Texas independence was also a struggle to break free from a tyrant. The reality though is a little suspect because at the time of Texas’ independence there was just as many Mexican residents as foreigners, perhaps it is for this reason that Texas would have preferred to be its own nation not really Mexican and not really American. Yet by eventually joining the United States it created a rift between it’s identity as an American white state and its true Mexican roots. To further confuse things it almost immediately seceded from the union in order to preserve its vast and powerful cotton trade economy. It’s still the Lone Star indeed but on the wrong side of history this time?
Okay these guys maybe are a little too white
When you think of Texas what comes to mind though? Longhorn cattle, cowboys, horses, rodeos? Not slavery, cotton, sweet tea, the confederacy? That is because there was an intentional rebranding campaign during the Texas Centennial Exhibition. Texas was(is) a southern state yet after the massive publicity of the centennial celebration we not think of it as a Western state. clever isn’t it? Granted the division between South, West, and Southwest is blurry and imaginary but our relative perception is all that matters. The humidity, heat and general swampiness of Austin told the real tale of the South at least geographically speaking. Having said all that I still bought a Gonzales pin because there is something universally badass about telling an overbearing source of authority to dare and come take their approval back.
Fantastic Fest itself was an amazing experience. It was like being at a film camp, seeing the same people everyday and sharing your thoughts on the films with them and the actors, directors, or crew that were there for the premiere. Then it ended in an extravagant party that reminded me of the crazy company holiday parties Verizon used to throw. I think 2024 will include me buying a full badge but for now I’ve written about all the 2023 FF movies I did see on my letterboxd.
After the festivities I got to treat myself even further and take a short flight to Dallas to spend a whirlwind two extra days with my cousin there. I’ve been meaning to visit her for a long time and I couldn’t pass up the opportunity now that I was within striking distance. I went to the Texas State Fair, the biggest of all the state fairs, while there and wow…you know how all throughout the world the United States is known for uniquely death defyingly fatty foods, well the Texas State Fair is the breeding ground for them. It’s the wellspring of the American diet including foods such as deep fried fritos and chili, deep fried pumpkin pie, deep fried shots of Fireball whisky, deep fried texas oatmeal pie and much…much more. Of course what is America without our rich tapestry of immigrant backgrounds? They are not be left out either as I had deep fried Vietnamese coffee, deep fried cacio e pepe, deep fried birria bombs, deep fried bao buns and still much more. It was a culinary experience unique to Texas and perhaps all the state fairs in the US have a little bit of this and a little bit of that but there in Dallas everything was bigger and abundant.
Big Tex, presiding god of Texas and its deep fryers.
Lastly and perhaps most overwhelming I visited the scene of John F. Kennedy’s death. There is a museum built on the floor where Lee Harvey Oswald fired three bullets at the president’s cavalcade. I’m not a big presidential buff, or even a fan of deifying presidents the way certain people do (looking at Reagan and Obama) but walking through JFK’s museum was absolutely gripping. I think there were several reasons for my fascination: 1) Just the general spectacle of death as entertainment which we are so accustomed to seeking out. It’s probably the whole reason the museum can be operated, droves of tourists coming to literally walk on the ground where a president was fatally shot. This tangible connection to the past is its own force too I think which is the reason we like to visit ruins and ancient structures etc. 2) The Zapruder film is an amazing public document. This was one of the first video recordings ever used in a criminal investigation shot on one of the first EVER home video cameras. The film runs at about 18 frames per second and each frame becomes a tick in the clock of the assassination. The detailing of events then unfold as each frame of the film snaps by. Is these 486 frames of films that have caused an explosion of conspiracy theories and deep dives into trajectories of the bullets etc. 3) The exhibits at the museum are laid out in such a way that it places you in the roles of an investigator. After covering JFK’s brief presidency you are inundated in facts about the murder each mapped to a frame of the zapruder film. Then you are exposed to various theories and although officially Oswald was found to be the only guilty assailant, the real nail in the coffin of any resolution is that he ALSO gets assassinated right after. So are you left trying to piece together what “really” happened yourself a technique which I admit left me wondering about the whole affair for weeks after.
My final act in Texas was to visit one of the South’s unique twists on open road culture. I joined the cult of Buc-ees which on paper is a gas station with a giant general goods store attached to it. In practice though it’s so much more, it’s like you’re walking into the temple of some ancient Greek god and their followers have set up a festival of goods and foods that you can only find in the shadow of the titular Beaver. You can buy idols and merchandise in his image to take to his followers back home for good fortune. You can indulge in the pristine bathrooms that upend the stigma of roadside lavatory usage and hygiene. This is all to say that I will be back to Texas if only as a pilgrimage to worship at the foot of Buc-ees once more.
My grandma passed away as I was watching Meg 2. It feels as ridiculous to say as it does to type. How could two disparate events be connected in time so permanently? My memories of my grandmother are now forever linked to memories of Jason Statham murdering prehistoric ocean monsters. My grandmother a real, living person of flesh and blood and a movie so haphazardly thrown together it barely even qualifies as having plot.
I stepped into the theatre knowing she was sick. We had known for a long time in fact. Over the last year as I saw her at gatherings or just random occasions she got thinner and thinner. At some point she began using a walker to get around being unable to keep balance on her own. It’s strange seeing a relative slowly lose their vitality, each time you see them you are made aware of the impending doom awaiting them, and each time you slowly come to terms with what’s heading their way. That’s just me of course, my mother probably sees it much differently having put a lot of effort and energy into worrying about her mother the last year of her life. She took the time to take her out to lunch or dinner here and there and when they were feeling extra rebellious they would go to the casino which my grandma really loved. She didn’t live with my mom though, she lived with my aunt not but 20 minutes away having permanently moved to Palmdale from El Salvador so she could live closer to (most) of her children and grandchildren and get better medical attention (which is honestly debatable but that’s a whole other blog post).
I would not say I was very close to her though. For the last decade or so she remained mostly a fixture at parties and birthdays. She was eternally sitting on the couch or using the restroom or sipping coffee or soup. But she would watch and observe, giving curt nods or responses when someone approached her. She was not what you would imagine a typical grandmother is like. She was not doting or fussy, and not chatty or opinionated. She was stoic and taciturn and forever serious. The interactions I would have with her would play like a series of questions and answers, a matter of facts and niceties and not much else. She wasn’t cold or belittling though, just reserved. Honestly this is where I felt the most kinship with her since I am the same way in social situations and we made excellent couch buddies just sitting there in silence and watching the goings on of those around us. My sister made a great point to me that the odd moment where someone could make her break out into laughter or a smile really left an impression on you, and that’s probably what I’ll miss the most.
I don’t take issue with her for being that way either, she’s a survivor of the Salvadoran civil war, and my mom has plenty of stories of having to run through the jungle to hide from helicopter fire or being shut in their house together to avoid soldiers on both sides of the conflict from taking issue. I cannot imagine the horror of living through a war, literally it’s not possible…I’m a peacetime schlub, and I hope I am never able to. Yet the repercussions of that conflict reverberate through my entire family, psychologically and physically and I don’t think anyone can handle that much distress and come out okay on the other side but yet here they all were establishing a foothold in a hostile country, putting the next generation through school, and finally culminating in allowing me to sit in a coffee shop and write alternatively dumb and cerebral blog posts without having to worry about my basic needs or threats to life and limb (other than self sabotage of course). For that I am, and must be, eternally grateful to my grandparents, parents, aunts and uncles, and the vague wider cast of close family friends that built their house of cards life in the US back in the 80s.
With the death of my grandmother I am left bereft of grandparents. That whole generation save a couple of great aunts and uncles has departed this realm and with them goes a whole way of life to which my connection is severed. My trip to El Salvador last year really opened my eyes to a lot of the stories and relationships that have followed me and my family my whole life but writing about it became overwhelming, so I’ll come back to that some day. But case in point is that with every year I grow more and more distant to those roots and me and some of my cousins seem to be the only ones interested in preserving at least some of the pieces of those twisted, withered roots. I guess the lingering question is why does it matter? Placing my existence in context has revealed itself to be more or less my raison d’etre and there is so. much. context. Technically, every preceding event that has ever occurred has lead to this, to me. Undoubtedly some things are more important than others though and that’s the Jairo based ontological excavation that I have undertaken.
So my grandmother’s death is both symbolic and personal. That’s redundant though as nearly everything that occurs is symbolic, especially to a literary eye. I wonder if she ever struggled with these questions of existence, of purpose, of living. Did she suffer from ennui, depression, or just malcontent? I’m not sure. I never asked her and she never talked about it to me and I’m dubious ever even mentioned it at all. I don’t want to say that if I had more time or if I had known I would have tried to ask her about all of this, or about herself. Even if I had known she was leaving the earth in a day I don’t think I would have sat down to talk to her like this. To me it would feel disingenuous and disrespectful, a person should be allowed to take their secrets and their being to the grave if they wish. If she never felt the need to discuss it then who would I, or anyone, be to ask her about it. She lives on as she wants to be remembered and that memory is something I won’t begrudge.
Grandma didn’t die in Palmdale though, she went back to the motherland, El Salvador to pass away. I don’t know whether she did this on purpose, all I know is the timeline of events is suspect. My aunt says she wanted to fly back and visit and a week later she went from being just generally sick to taking a turn for the worse. The doctors there gave her a prognosis of death and that’s where the chaos began. My mom of course had to fly out there as fast as she could accompanied by most of my aunts and uncles eventually. My grandmother lasted five days in a state of fasting, eating very little to nothing, at first suffering painfully from her ailments but soon after being administered a sedative out of mercy. My last conversation with her was a brief video chat on whats app in which she was cognizant of me and nodded as I told her I loved her and I wish she got better, taciturn until the end. Eventually she passed away surrounded by her children and some extended family that lived in El Salvador. My mom watched as she gave her last breath. I don’t know if this is the perfect death or the worst but that’s how it happened.
Was it right as Statham launched an exploding harpoon into the head of a Megalodon? Or when he picked up a helicopter blade and impaled an Alpha Megalodon? I’ll never know and that’s a mystery I don’t care to solve. I like to think that it was her choice to go back home and pass away, that it was totally in her control which is a very rare opportunity afforded to anyone in this life. She was buried the very next day as is tradition in El Salvador in a service attended by friends, family, and loved ones.
(Originally wrote the below for my caption on IG but it had the GALL to tell me it was too many words so I added even more words and photos and turned it into a blog post. Excuse some repeats if you’ve read both) I’m two days in from my trip to Japan and I’m still thinking about the Japanese free jazz concert I went to where Masayo Koketsu recited the bodhisattva Amoghapāśa’s mantra of light to attain revelation over sultry piano and percussion before launching into saxophone improvisation. Is this the Japanese equivalent of a Christian rock band? I’m not sure, but I think it was divine intervention since one day previous I was admiring the statue of Kokuuzo Bosasu in Todai-Ji (IG photo 1 and 2). His name means “boundless space treasury” which reflects that his wisdom is so great that it must be infinite and is prayed to in part for excellence on tests and education. They say if you recite his mantra 10000 times you will gain understanding of all the teachings in the buddhist canon. He sits to the left of a giant statue of the Buddha Vairocana, The Great Illuminator, a cosmic and primordial buddha that is sometimes interpreted as the spiritual blueprint of which all buddhas are made and return to (reminds me of the Tao). I took a photo of this vast edifice but the scale just doesn’t do it justice, just go see it for yourself! I donated 2000 yen to write my name on a roof tile that will get added to the temple as part of a restoration process. I left a piece of myself behind and this tactile exchange of self represents the metaphysical exchange where I took a little from Japan and gave a little of myself and to me that’s what traveling for is all about.
But I saw LOTS of Buddhas, Bodhisattvas, Heavenly Kings, and Divine Generals as I obsessively sought out temples to visit while I traveled Japan. None impressed me more than the Great Buddha of Kamakura (IG photo 3) which I accidentally stumbled into on my pilgrimage to find the resting place of legendary film director Akira Kurosawa whose grave is a modest tribute to such a legendary force in both eastern and western film.
I felt almost like I was trespassing on sacred ground, I wasn’t though since it is a publicly accessible site behind a buddhist temple…not trying to incur any spiritual wrath here. I paid my respects and left. On my way to the site I saw directions to a “buddha” statue so me and my friend Evan who had joined me that day took upon ourselves to explore.
After walking for about 20 minutes we came upon Kōtoku-in, over which which the magnificent Great Buddha presided. It sits completely outdoors like a meditative giant, 5 feet shorter than the Vairocana buddha I saw at Todai-Ji but the picturesque backdrop really makes it feel more epic in scale. The Great Buddha of Kamakura is a representation of Amitābha, who after many achievements over countless lives attained buddha hood and decided to create a separate realm which remained pure and free of the corruptive forces that exist in our realms. If you call upon him at your death you can be reborn into his pure land where you will live in peace and be able to attain enlightenment much easier. It seems to me like a precursor to our Western concept of Heaven, but then again those ideas are littered throughout the whole of human history.
But if we’re talking about Buddhist temples, Kiyomizu-dera (IG photo 4) is one of the most impressive sights in Kyoto. One night we were at a rooftop bar having highballs and I noticed this radiant beam of light penetrating the darkness out of the mountains and the next night I was out there with my friends seeking it out. It houses a statue of the Buddhist deities Daikokuten and Kannon, who bring wealth and save humans from difficulties respectively. Daikokuten is what’s known as a syncretic deity. His roots are in the buddhist representation of the hindu god Shiva, which has been mixed with the Japanese shinto god Ōkuninushi creating a whole new entity that is worshipped throughout temples to this day.
The aspect of Daikokuten at Kiyomizu-dera.
Kannon is also an important deity in Japanese buddhism and I saw representations of him the most. Usually with many arms and a different tool in each hand. He is a deity of compassion and the aspect at Kiyomizu-dera specifically is prayed to for prevention of suffering. Below him sits the Otowa Waterfall. Here they have ladles where you can wash your hands and drink pristine mountain water in an effort to make your wishes come true. I took a deep drink of the water here and continued to navigate the impressive temple.
The view of the temple from below the buddha, at the waterfalls.
Buddhism is not the only way to gain favor in Japan though since it is an import from India via China and Korea. There are also Shinto shrines devoted to native Japanese gods and spirits. Again in Kyoto I climbed Mt Inari by way of the Fushimi Inari Taisha shrine devoted to Inari Okami, the god of (IG photo 5), at first with a staggering amount of tourists but then as I climbed further up the mountain they were less and less and I got to enjoy the assortment of Fox spirit statues and local desserts made by the residents in a more relaxed environment. Here I bought what a monk described as sacred sake only found on that mountain. Throughout the hike there are almost 10000 Torii gates, which traditionally represent the gateway from the mundane to the sacred. So you can say that as I passed under each one, the intensity and potency of the sake was only enhanced. Alas it would never make it back to the States, as me and my friends who did not participate in my thousandfold blessings shared it in a Ryokan not two days later. Yet in sharing the sake I think we all have charged our spiritual meters to max, at least that’s what I’d like to think.
Later in Osaka I visited Sumiyoshi Taisha which enshrines the gods of the sea and sailing. There is a spot behind the main shrines where it is said that the empress Jingu encountered the spirits first and decided to build the shrine. On that spot is an altar of small pebbles most of which are unmarked but some of them have one of these: “five” 五, “large” 大, or “power” 力. If you find all three you receive the five blessings of the spirits: health, wisdom, wealth, happiness, and longevity (IG photo 6). I almost left without collecting the pebbles, but damnit must one not do everything in their power to live a good life? I still have the pebbles in the decorative pouch in my room, choosing to keep them instead of leaving them tied up at the altar as is customary.
Of course no survey of Japanese iconography is complete without the macdaddy of them all GODZILLA and although he had no offering box I still venerated at his altar (IG photo 7). Godzilla traditionally represents the nuclear devastation the US wrought on WWII but I think it has turned into a symbol reminding us of the futility of our everyday lives compared to the titanic march of nature and time. At least that’s my reading of the latest movie Shin Godzilla, but with over 38 films in the canon it’s hard to pin him down to just one reading. There is no doubt that he is a cultural force in Tokyo though, as his grim face towers over one of the main avenues in the Shinjuku district. The first time I saw him there we were visiting an old expat high school friend. I asked him if we could visit the giant head and he said he wasn’t sure and he had never heard of people doing that so we left without trying. I found at that you could in fact go up there but we left Tokyo soon after. On our itinerary, however, we had one last night there before we traveled back to the states just for these kinds of last minute missions. I made it my goal to go up to that hotel and witness the statue for myself. Of course my tenacity was rewarded with the sight before you. A full scale representation of Godzilla from from Godzilla vs Mothra (1992) and also at the height which he would be in real life. Perhaps this was the shrine I treasured the most of the whole trip.
Godzilla from street level
To wrap this up, this a photo sharing service or something right, I have so many photos of the beautiful cherry blossoms that were in full bloom for our whole trip but I like this one (IG photo 8 ) from the zen Buddhist temple, Tenryu-ji, in Arashiyama which was the city where I saw people dressed the most in traditional clothing. The temple had an exquisitely maintained garden which I’m told has been preserved almost in its original state for centuries. The temple also houses this intimidating depiction of Bodhidharma who is known as the buddhist monk to begin teaching zen buddhism to the Shaolin Monks at the Shaolin Temple in China, creating a direct connection to the origins of Shaolin Kung-Fu. Since Zen Buddhism came to Japan via China, he is also revered at this temple. Another interesting legend states that he once sat and stared at a wall for 9 years in seated meditation. One version of the story states that after all that time his legs atrophied and became useless, hence Daruma dolls which are modeled after him have no legs.
Shrine to Bodhidharma at Tenryu-ji.
Obviously the totality of Japan’s religious and spiritual identity cannot be summed up in one trip, nor perhaps even in a lifetime of trips, and drawing any conclusions about it is like visiting a couple different states here in the US and forming a national opinion based on them. Yet there are similarities and patterns I can see. Compassion, enlightenment, meditation (mindfulness), respect and honor are all highly valued at the various shrines and and temples I visited whether couched in the forms of deities, spirits, emperors or buddhas.
I’ve talked about suffering before but lately I’ve been reading up on Siddhartha Gautama’s teachings. That’s the Buddha, not to be confused with a buddha. His lessons can probably be summarized as suffering exists, and suffering can be overcome. Today I wont be waxing on about him though, that will come in a few weeks, I’m here to talk about physical suffering. More specifically suffering for 14 hours on a bicycle.
Maybe it’s not fair to say I was suffering for 14 hours because I certainly started off feeling elated, undercut with just a touch of dread maybe. Certainly, even in the midst of the worst pain I felt spurts of joy as well. Delirious, pure joy such as the one described by the buddha as the second jhāna of Right Concentration:
Furthermore, with the stilling of directed thoughts & evaluations, he enters and remains in the second jhana: rapture and pleasure born of composure, unification of awareness free from directed thought and evaluation — internal assurance. He permeates and pervades, suffuses and fills this very body with the rapture and pleasure born of composure. There is nothing of his entire body unpervaded by rapture and pleasure born of composure.
On these long rides it’s hard not to consider them a form of meditation, yet I’ve never really experienced the banishing of thought on my bike until this day.
Jairo Lopez is a man, men are mortal, Jairo is mortal. When I write that name I am referring to myself but it’s not me, it’s the version of me that slots into your mind when you hear that name. If you’ve never heard it before then an impression is already beginning to form. That impression can become complex and informed by real experiences but it will always be just an elaborately built network of associations you make of me. There are perhaps hundreds of Jairos living in the minds of all my friends and family each of them a little different, imperfect copies of me that come into conflict with each other as perspectives change. These shadow clones are not mortal, they are eternal in the way that ideas can exist forever. I carry in me the ideas of all the friends and family I’ve lost over the years, holding them arrested and transfixed in time as I knew them. They perform in scenes of my memories, ambiguous actors in dubious plays with the same start and the same finish but always different in between. I may pass on these productions to others who may not know the original versions, a hasty rendition of a badly transcribed opera. They may retell it to others still, each time it jumps from person to person the actors in the plays become less true to their creators until only ripples of emotions and colors are left. The imaginary people and memories are distilled to the very essence of sensory perception, crushed into the miasma from which our very thoughts spring and in which the selfhood sits.
In this way we are not mortal, we cannot truly die. As our physical bodies return to the Earth so do our spirits live on in the collective human conscious via those we have touched. If we all exist as a conjunction of mind, body and spirit then upon our death each of these realms are released, disentangled from being. The body persists through the soil, the spirit lives in the hearts of others, but what becomes then of the mind? It ceases to exist…it’s the true death and no one can experience it but me for my mind is uniquely and unequivocally mine. Or rather, my mind is me, it gives me the ability to be a self in opposition to the other and it is unknowable to you.
My body seems to want to keep reminding me of that impending death. This time it was a gall stone, one I was carrying unknowingly but which demanded its presence known to me via an incredible pain in my upper right abdomen. In a flashback to the events from my birthday three months previous, once again I was stuck in a public bathroom writhing in pain. This time there was an overwhelming sense of pain, which triggered the symptoms from before: nausea, lightheadedness, difficulty of breath. Public bathrooms are such wonderful things, truly you never know what you could be walking into at one. I don’t know why I felt more comfortable suffering in the silence of a stall while my friends waited outside, presumably starting to wonder if something had gone wrong as the minutes ticked by. Indeed they walked in at some point to ask if I was okay. But how do I explain the iceberg of feeling and symptoms I had experienced in the span of the last hour or so? The deluge emotions and thoughts passing by my brain as I bargained with primordial forces to absolve of me of the little demon pushing his way through my insides. How could I explain the reconfiguring of my limbs and stomach to ease pain if even slightly, standing up and sitting down again when I thought I would lose consciousness and fall to the floor? So I told them I had a stomach ache but was okay.
I couldn’t monologue at them all that I felt as I was still going through it. Even in the present I was projecting myself in the future talking about the very events I was going through. This is a technique (or coping mechanism?) I picked up from some of the long distance cycling I do. Disassociate from the present you and think about how future you will look back on the events you are going through. Perhaps this comes from a strong desire for the present to be the past, if only time could pass faster through a sheer act of will. Most notably when I projected my thoughts forward some version of me, now relaxed and past the event, was discussing perhaps with you dear reader about what happened that night in the bathroom stall, ipso facto I wasn’t dead. I didn’t believe I would die and yet are we all not one terrible accident away from death? But there’s a difference between being killed and dying.
Eventually the intensity of the pain passed through like a storm. As it faded I thought about how objectively I should have dashed to the emergency room because I knew this was not a normal pain regardless of the rationalizing thoughts I began to have. Again my mind tries to play tricks on me, after the pain is gone already it begins to erase the internal promises I had made to myself and to soften the freshly minted memories into a nostalgic film instead of a blueprint of my doom. I resolved to at the very least see my doctor the next day. Which in our current healthcare system is a bigger undertaking than I knew. I couldn’t see my doctor but I saw a doctor and phenomenologically speaking that’s the same so screw it. I felt fine but the next day I was told to go to the ER because I had signs of liver damage. My own liver betrayed me, so this is how it would be I thought, there is no mind over matter, only mind in spite of matter.
The hospital kept me for 4 days. I had to watch my tightly scheduled and varied days fall part into one haze of cable TV and liquid meals. Each time I had to cancel a meet up I felt a pang of loss for a moment I would never be able to live. It’s a small price to pay to make sure I could stay alive but that’s 4 days diverted like a railroad from good times city to bad times central. I’m not the first to make this comparison but it felt like a prison, sure I was free to leave at any point, but I didn’t want to keel over after my first slice of pizza back home. So I sat there as my world shrank down from the greater metropolitan area of Los Angeles into a single room in Harbor City. As my agency dwindled, my problems and obsessions also narrowed in scope. If you have not realized how used to living life in the abstract we are then stay at a hospital for a couple days. I read this example in Irrational Man by Barrett: when you think of 2+2 do you stop and take the time to prove the 2,913 subtheorems that allow us to come to the answer 4? No, someone else has done that for us so we are free to go trotting about telling people 2+2=4 like medieval math gods. Being in the hospital was like removing these abstractions from my everyday life. The best parts of the days where the meals, and I would make sure to keep the phone next to my bed so I could order exactly what I wanted from the cafeteria. And OH! that bloody phone, a cruel joke played upon me by Fortuna. Unbeknownst to me the phone I had did not ring, so for the first two days I was not able to make a choice, all they gave me was the most milquetoast meal available. Being robbed of these choices was of course where the feeling of imprisonment came from. My days involved meticulously planning when I would stand up from bed and use the restroom so I didn’t have to drag my IV and medical pole behind me. I would strategically read my book at regular intervals so I didn’t get bored of the TV or the book too quickly. At night when sleep would come I welcomed it as I knew it was the single fastest way to pass the time. Just weeks ago I was exploring the cradle of my family in El Salvador, poring over ancient Mayan ruins, and zip lining across volcanic jungles and now I was here warring with a telephone and planning when to stand up and pace my room. Outside this prison I never have to stop and think about these things, in fact each moment I can spend reading my book or catching a tv show is a breath of fresh air in a fast paced life. That is the power of abstraction.
My doctors informed I developed an infection in my blood probably caused by the passing of the gallstone. In an existential jape I was symptomless, apparently they caught it early enough that I suffered no ill effects. Are you still sick if you don’t feel sick? Even with the knowledge that I had the infection I didn’t feel any better about being in the hospital. Perhaps if I had just a tiny fever, enough to whet that drive for self pity I could have withstood the experience a lot more easily. I started a round of antibiotics which I ended up having to take home in the form of a long term intravenous line in my arm, with a snaking plastic thread laid deep in my veins. I had an access panel, like a Cronenbergian version of the tin man needing direct access to his inner fluids. You know what they say, you can take the man out of the hospital but you can’t take the hospital out of the man. It was all very inconveniencing but the sobering thought I kept having was that 100 years ago I’d be laid out on my back literally dying of a fever from an infection I could have never prevented caused by simple stone from a near obsolete organ blocking my bile ducts. Again the abstraction of modern life rears its ugly head, without antibiotics I would be withering away without a hope or a prayer in sight of getting better. It would be a violent, disgusting end no doubt as the bacteria in my blood slowly started to destroy all my organs one by one. Yet in our blessedly modern society, I was complaining that I never had a symptom at all. I thought about how many times I would be dead by 1800s society standards. That one time I had cellulitis in my leg, that second time it happened a year later, that one time after the car accident, this new gallstone incident. Four times over I’d be dead, perhaps we should all keep an internal count lest we believe that thought terminating cliche: YOLO.
During my reading in the hospital I came across a passage from The Death Of Ivan Ilyich. The passage clearly resonated with me in the way that only a perfectly aligned moment in time can, so I ordered it and read it within the week. Ivan lives the perfect, complete life at least by the standards he has been taught. One day he bumps into the side of a table while decorating a room. An innocuous bump that somehow ends up gradually killing him. Needless to say my reading of this involved Ivan passing a particularly troublesome gallstone. He experiences physical pain at first but over time he starts to be tormented by his mental anguish until they become entangled and inseparable, the death of his body becomes the death of him. The pain in his side represents his inevitable death but it also serves as a beacon of illumination that cuts through the falsities of his life. He tries to go about business as usual, performing all the rituals that brought him joy and comfort before but the constant nagging pain does not let him slip back into complacency and he realizes that these things never actually brought him happiness at all they were only useful in allowing him to never confront his death and so to never confront his life.
As he begins to accept that he will die, the complete bullshit of every day existence angers him and he sees the masks all his friends and family wear. He feels as if he’s sitting next to this unknowable, eternal void that everyone around him refuses to see and which compared against the pettiness of their rituals do not matter. Playing Bridge with his friends was his favorite activity and as he realized he will die he stops caring for it. This is contrasted with the the fact that at his funeral his closest friend decides he wants to go catch a game of Bridge since the service ended early enough. Your friend’s death is not your own. What does it take to shake everyone out of the abstraction of ritualistic life? Coming close to your own death changes you, and although we know of it, when we meet it perhaps then is when we actually begin our lives. When you stare into that eternal, unthinkable void what will stare back? Ivan wondered if he had lived a good life, and he cannot admit that he did not because if he did it would require him to die a death of the spirit and reorient his entire existence.
Which at last brings me to Puss In Boots: The Last Wish (spoilers ahead I guess?). How could I know that when I dragged my little brothers to the theatre on Christmas morning I would be treated to such a deceptively Tolstoyan film about a cartoon cat. Puss In Boots is on his last life, a respectable 9 compared to my measly 5, when he meets death. He’s died in the same way that I have died, deaths that have been abstracted away not by modern medicine in his case but by fairy tale logic. At last he comes face to face with true death, literally in the form of a wolf. Unlike Ivan Ilyich he recedes into a false life where he is in a purgatory of rituals and adopts a mask in the form of a beard. This mundane existence is a death-in-life which compared to his previous lives is a shadow of his existence. Yet before he met death, he lived a life-in-death, never stopping to have real purpose or meaning because without knowing he would or could die he lived only in service to his legend, the idea of a Puss In Boots not his authentic self. He finally shakes himself out of his depression and latches on to the notion that he can regain his former existence by getting more “lives”. We know that he can’t ever do that though because after knowing death, he is irrevocably changed as becomes apparent in how he interacts with the characters going forward. He meets his former self at first metaphorically in the echos how he affected his former partner Kitty Softpaws and then later on more literally as all his previous incarnations are present to convince him to abandon his newfound morals. The change in him is clear as he does not recognize his present self in his former actions and he realizes he can never un-know this. The only thing he can do is stop fearing death and dedicate himself to a purposeful meaningful existence. Like Ivan Ilyich, he dies a spiritual last death so that he can begin life anew. Of course I see myself in the cat, trying to ease the burden of existence by continuing to perform in the theatre of Jairo’s life. While I don’t exactly feel like I have lived rudderlessly it’s a reminder that there’s nothing wrong with taking stock of life, taking a quick peek at the void to measure up against what you’ve been doing lately. The truth will always come out in that moment when you ask yourself, have I lived a good life?
Boldly walking out the door in Lancaster. Apparently, an incredible tempting of fate.
I was born today 32 years ago. But before I go into the thoughts, mood and growth of the previous year I want to tell you how my day went. I always take my birthday off, there’s no force on planet earth that will convince me that I should ignore this day. If you know me then you know I hardly lack reasons or excuses to celebrate and yet in practice today is the most socially acceptable day in which I can wax poetic about myself and indulge in the obsessions that have driven me this year and all years. So like every year I was poised to have a self serving adventure through my laundry list of peculiarities. I watched Halloween Ends on Friday, did cheese tasting on Saturday, had the family party on Sunday and today (Monday) would be for my own brand of entertainment. I was all set to watch Tar, a film about the worlds greatest conductor and composer (a fictional one or else this movie would be called Williams). As you know I love music compositions, classical, film, or even video game related. So this movie was a great film to kick off the events of today.
I was sitting at the Alamo, which is one my favorite theatres to visit in the heart of DTLA because of their reverence for the act of watching a film in addition to the film itself. But of course I also go for the ever rotating selections of food, spirits and beers. Yet today I was sandwiched between two film goers enjoying a pizza and fries respectively. But to my nose it smelled like the olfactory dimension of a junk yard full of rotting corpses (to keep these metaphors topical). I knew something was wrong as my stomach began to churn and a cold clamminess swept over my body. The munching sounds my neighbors were making were calling into question my own reliance on my ears as sources of pleasure, and the damned smell haunted me every minute that the film played, needless to say I could not pay attention. Finally as the waves of nausea seized me I scurried to the restroom and sat upon the throne of shame.
I couldn’t help but connect the dots to the novel I had just finished reading, amusingly entitled Nausea. In it the protagonist feels a feeling he can only describe as nausea as he dissociates with the essence of things around him, entering into a realm where the universe is contingent, threatening to change at any second. I found it hard to philosophize over the feeling that seized me (at the time) but I can definitely say that in the blink of an eye my being was fractured into the various parts that make up my sense of identity. My body asserted itself as the dominating force of my existence, and my mind was left to try and rationalize what was happening. And it did, very quickly I knew I had some sort of food poisoning, and I mentally flipped through the decadent courses of birthday feasting I had done over the past two days and couldn’t pinpoint the culprit. Of course that was merely an exercise in passing the time as my body seized all my senses, forcing me to retreat inwards as I lay doubled over in pain in the physical realm. Its hard to believe in the mantra of the athlete, mind over body, at a moment like this for there was nothing I could do to cease the black dread that coursed through my innermost chambers.
Was this what 32 promised to be? It was as if my body pulled in the leash I was on, reminding me that I am a prisoner in this fleshy vessel and lest I forget, it is a slave to time and the condition of aging. Somewhere in between the mind and the body lay my spirit, quietly crying out in the desperation of knowing the problem but being able to do nothing except let it run its course. Though the rational, scientific reason for my ailment was food poisoning, spiritually I felt that I was paying the price for the Dionysian way I chose to celebrate the weekend. Both reasons are true simultaneously in the way that that your favorite movie can be the best thing ever and also complete trash.
I eventually employed the oldest trick in the book, the one I use to bicycle up GMR or up to Mt Wilson, I tried to ignore the pain. That’s a two way street though because if you’re not looking at the monster, you don’t know what it will do next. As I lay there trying my hardest to cross into the astral plane I felt the final lurches, the sudden cotton mouth, the radiating goosebumps where I knew my end lay. I got on the floor, hugged the toilet and waited. If it only it were that all my problems could be solved by simply expelling them with extreme prejudice from inside of me. The social anxiety that comes from being in a room full of strangers? Hurl it into a trashcan on a way into a party. The fear of death? Leave in the restroom of the nearest funeral parlor. The despair that your favorite breakfast burrito place has irrevocably changed its burrito? Loosely wrap it up in yellow parchment paper and toss it into a gutter.
A cold sweat gripped me and where before I wasn’t able to even stand without feeling the gravitational pull of the earth drag me down, I was made whole again as the inner dimensions of my self corrected course. I couldn’t go back into the movie after this episode, the whole world had changed. As I walked the streets of Los Angeles I realized that my favorite indulgence, that which I would have reveled in today: the delicious phenomenology of eating a pastry, of sipping a cocktail, of drinking a coffee had been robbed from me as my stomach made painfully aware as I tried to drink water on my way out of the theatre. In this state of un-jaironicity I was forced to accept that mind over matter is not true, but perhaps this was an omen to follow other pursuits.
The streets of downtown reminded me that the city is not a luxurious place. The luxury sits atop it, floating over the apartments of the middle class and the poor. Like a well made cappuccino: the rich, white foam floats above the coffee, and the grounds which have had their very essence removed in service of the drink have been unceremoniously tossed aside. If you are so unlucky as to find some inside the cup, at the bottom of the drink, who among us is hearty enough to enjoy them as the basic building blocks of your coffee. More than likely you spit them out and leave them on the sidewalk with the grime, and the dirt of those who the city is built upon.
Which brings me at last to my recap of 31, it’s the year I rediscovered my voice which lay dormant, and nestled in a web of films, books, and music hoping that the sheer volume and variety of them would impart some knowledge of my self to the universe. The more I read the less likely I knew this would be and even though these words exist in an imperfect format, one perhaps even more vulnerable to the ravages of time than good old paper, let no one say that I did not try to at least write some of my thoughts down to be handed down through the generations to those who wish to know an insane amount of useless trivia. I have found a titillating fountain of writing in the works of great western and eastern philosophers and those who wish to know what truly shapes the world and our times should start there. Learn about the introduction of the rational into the collective human consciousness, it’s never ending battle with faith, and at last its rejection in favor if the irrational at least when it comes to the question of “Who Am I?”. There’s nothing rational about being a person, we each exist as a separate and distinct entity, our mere act of living corrupting any overarching hypothesis for the explanation of mankind. Here I am sipping on a cocktail in defiance of my earlier bodily episode, knowing full well that I might re-trigger the stomach pains, but I (the philosophical I)exists first and I make the rules when it comes to how I shall suffer.
Okay but it’s called the Armageddon and it’s awesome.
Eddie Munson reminded me of what pure love of metal is, perhaps it’s not a lifestyle as I always believed, perhaps it’s a philosophy or perhaps it’s a religion. The individual’s battle against the tyrannies of the universe, the proclivity to unearth the skeletons under the bed, the altar of worship: the stack of amps, the darkly lit stage, the ritual sacrifice of sweat and energy. There’s much to be written about and my brain can only remain focused for so long before chasing the next croissant on my bicycle down a badly paved road on a hot day. Yet the smattering of traveling I’ve done this year made me aware that the wealth of context, history, and information out there will outlast and outlive any one person’s attempt at stitching together the whole of human existence. So in light of the impossible my goal is to do the improbable and stitch together the whole of mine own existence every hour of every day for as long as I can. Maybe 32 is an age where I am increasingly in service to my body but perhaps I can sharpen the mind, and the resiliency of the spirit as well.
I had a dream a couple weeks ago that I can’t remember save for one detail. The titular theme from Fellini’s movie Il Bidone played at some point over whatever crisis I was facing in my dream. I have vague memory of rolling my eyes at the circumstance I found myself in. I felt something like a quiet exasperation, as if I was being made the punchline of the film playing out in my mind. Il Bidone is about this group of conmen and hucksters who very often cross the line from morally ambiguous to downright cruel. They pose as church members and city officials to scam people, usually farmers, out of their life savings and never look back. Yet, realizing that these are not lifelong careers some of the younger protagonists exit the life one by one as they set their sights on more stable enterprises. Except Augusto who cannot stop playing the role of swindler because he is addicted to the life, or perhaps more accurately, he’s not playing at it because he was born a con artist and will die one. Eventually Augusto in his immense audacity tries to con the very conmen he’s with out of the money they just stole by pretending to have a burgeoning conscience. The audience knows that he needs a lot of money to give to his estranged daughter so she can go to college, yet it remains ambiguous whether this was his hail Mary effort to get it for her, or whether he just would have kept it. The audience is left questioning his motives as he is left to die on the side of cliff, left there by his colleagues in thievery.
So why would these themes invade my dreaming mind. We’ve all heard of impostor syndrome, the feeling that you don’t belong and that you will be discovered for the phony that you are at same time as you are receiving what you feel to be unjust praise. It’s the other side of the coin to assuming roles in our daily lives, the acute awareness that we are not who we are pretending to be. To me this is a sign of a disconnection between the standards we hold ourselves to and the standards of others. As humans we shift in and out of various states constantly experiencing ourselves as the object of others’ gaze as Sartre would put it. This wrestling with the perception of you by others can lead to a tunnel vision: trying to be the perfect waiter to your customers, the perfect son to you parents, the perfect athlete to your coach. Yet since we are not objects but multidimensional beings setting our measure of success to perfection has already assured we fail, at least in our own eyes. So the feelings of inadequacy are our own creation, and I would banish them by simply admitting: Yeah I could be better but you know what, I’m already pretty damn good.
Yet if we take impostor syndrome one step further, are we con artists? That’s the real fear, that we are inadvertently tricking everyone into metaphorically giving us their life savings by placing their trust in us. If we decide that yes we are impostors and that we’re not gonna stop then we have crossed an ethical boundary which we can’t come back from. This border area between the ethical and unethical is where we wrestle internally with ourselves. Most of us would try to lower expectations, deflect praise, and admit failure readily in an effort to further distance ourselves from that borderline. Yet am I Augusto? Am I in for a penny, in for a pound? Self-advocacy can feel as if I’m walking around dressed up as a priest telling the people around me about how awesome the church is and how just with a little bit of money we can make the much needed repairs to the house of God. Then I take their money, ditch the priest robes in a garbage can and use it to buy Slayer records. Maybe the invisible line is between humility and pride. Being humble gives us the chance to accept praise while hedging expectations, being proud can be seen as boastful, unjust and sinful. Yet in the modern society we live in, being loud is often the path to recognition. Maybe that’s why the Il Bidone theme is so fun, because sometimes you gotta play into the con but not so much that we are left for dead on the side of the road.
I recently rewatched JAWS for no other reason than it’s a great movie to watch in the summer if you’re not planning on going swimming in the ocean. Imagine my surprise when I proceeded to watch Jordan Peele’s NOPE and noticed the former’s DNA all over it. The first part of JAWS is the slow realization of the threat. Shark attacks keep happening and the only person who seems to care is Chief Brody. The mayor cares, but only insofar as it doesn’t affect the tourism money that pours into the island every summer. The central conflict in the first two acts is thus setup as a battle between the dismissal of the shark as a threat which represents a primal force and Brody’s attempts to convince the town officials that the shark needs to be reckoned with. As the officials continuously downplay the shark and hamper Brody’s ability to neutralize it the body count keeps growing, as well as the boldness of the attacks. Spielberg aims to show us that we continuously take for granted our roles as alpha predators in the food chain, when humanity grows complacent nature comes to knock at our door.
In NOPE (spoilers), the film follows a similar pattern with the key difference that the monster is summoned not due to complacency and greed but to humanity’s need for spectacle. Ricky Park cannot help but be enchanted by the danger of the monster, his past is inextricably linked with close encounters of the dangerous kind. As a child he watched a chimpanzee brutally beat his co stars within an inch of their lives then seemingly faced the monkey himself only to come out unscathed. He at once grows a false confidence and a need to recreate that traumatic event over and over in his life. It ends in tragedy of course as a central theme of the film is that you can’t tame nature. Once he entices the beast, and makes eye contact its predator nature fully unfurls.
In both films there is an undercurrent of unappreciation for nature and its untamable forces. So what does this long winded preamble have to do with my bike ride? I too have taken for granted the sheer size and viciousness of the course I signed up for. I looked back at my Strava post for 2021 Tour De Big Bear and I called it one of the hardest rides I’ve ever done if not the hardest. In the subsequent year I’ve done harder rides, and perhaps this gave me a false sense that I could tackle the 100 mile course this year. Don’t get me wrong I set my sights on it almost immediately, and set up what I thought was a decent training plan to get me there. Yet at over 8000 feet of climbing over 100 miles, at an altitude of 6000 – 8000 feet it is a formidable monster.
I knew in the weeks leading up to the ride that I wasn’t ready, my speed and performance on some of the most recent rides I did was just not enough to meet the 10 hour cutoff time at TDBB. Perhaps for this reason I started to tell my friends who were also going that I was not going to make it, and to please not wait for me or anything like that. I was sowing the seeds doubt early on. This was, correctly, assumed to be pessimism on my part. Yet I knew in my heart it was the truth. I had taken for granted the rigor and discipline training for this ride required. I found it very hard to stick to my interval workouts, especially after the disappointing results of my second FTP test. It was demoralizing to be doing these interval rides that were not enjoyable for me and seeing no payoff. So my training after became limp and half hearted. Throw in a couple vacations, small injuries, hot summer days and the writing was on the wall.
Philosophically speaking, setting the expectation that I was not going to finish was an effort to reduce the vulnerability I faced by failing. For me optimistically tackling a challenge and not succeeding is magnitudes of order more emotionally damaging than meeting my goal of failing. Yet the question remains whether I sabotaged myself by resetting my desired outcome lower. The flip side to that is that surpassing one’s goals also is a reward in its own right. A sliver of me held on to the hope that I would somehow disprove myself and complete the course, even if took me all 10 hours to do it.
I started off on the wrong foot already by giving my legs perhaps too much of a workout the day before the ride in what was supposed to be a low effort warmup spin around the lake I was trying to play catchup with my powerhouse cycling friends. I went to sleep with very tired legs and I doubt I had fully recovered in the 5 hours it took for me to wake up and get ready for the big ride. However I still started off feeling great, there’s always adrenaline coursing through you when these big events happen, plus being able to start with my friends sets a good mood. I think my ride to first aid station was pretty good, I wasn’t breaking any records or anything but I was on pace to finish if I kept it up. My friends of course dropped me within the first 5 miles but it was as expected. I saw them once more as they were ascending the second climb of the day from the first aid station and I was descending towards it, a pattern which would repeat itself 5 hours later. I made the same mistake as last year and had to pee so badly at the bottom of that hill that I waited in line with the rest of the cyclists who were trying to use the portable toilet, time wasted. On my way back up the hill and through the north side of the lake I was starting to feel the familiar signs of exhaustion: cramping legs, sore back, sore saddle. Yet these hit me a lot earlier than I am used to, no doubt the altitude was having its effect on me, my heart rate is of course elevated as there’s less oxygen to go around up there. After a couple salt tablets the feeling of cramps subsided and I stopped in for three pieces of bacon at the second rest stop because I couldn’t just ignore such a delicious treat.
Half the reason I kept going tbh
On my way to the third rest stop I knew that my faculties were significantly diminished, it was a relatively flat part of the course yet I was finding myself struggling to pedal and to stay abreast of pains accumulating in my body. At the third rest stop I indulged in TDBB’s famous rib stop and had a chat with Mike Manson who like me, valued just finishing a course over finishing it as fast as possible. I left asap as I didn’t want to spend too much time at the rest stops, still holding out hope that I might finish. Following this was the first big climb of the day, a 7 mile spin up to the top of Onyx peak. My goal here was to surpass last year’s effort since this was the last part of the 70 mile course. The good news is I did PR that climb but not by much, though on the whole I felt much better than last year where I remember struggling to make it even a mile, maybe it’s all a mental game in the end. Once I crested Onyx I stopped at aid station 4 where they advised me that if I took on the rest of the course at that time I might not make it. I definitely considered turning back and completing the 70 mile course instead. It didn’t help that I had to take an unscheduled break to deal with some uncomfortable stomach issues which I blamed on the incredible amounts of fiber Daniel had made us eat the night previous.
As I was deciding what to do I saw Mike again, who told me immediately that he was going to continue the course. I rallied with him and decided the course officials would have to come get me if worse came to worse. We began the descent to Jenks lake which was almost 9 miles. Partially through this descent is where I would spot my friends for the last time. Daniel in particular looked like he was suffering up the climb, a stark contrast to cool and consistent climbing he was doing earlier in the morning. The descent was electrifying as we reached speeds of 35 miles per hour down the mountainside. Yet my elation slowly blossomed into a dread as the road just kept going down and down. I realized painfully that the bill would come due as I had to make my way back up this mountain if I was to complete the course, which would be the hardest part of the whole thing. Here is where I think my spirit finally broke, I made eye contact with the beast and the monster revealed itself to me. I slowly began to accept and rationalize my demise. At the bottom of the descent there was yet more climbing to do around Jenks lake before I even got back to ascending up to Onyx peak. At the Jenks lake aid station me and Mike assumed we were the last people on the course, actually there were 3 cyclists behind us at that time to my estimation, but still not exactly on the right side of that bell curve.
I let Mike drop me here as I was suffering pretty badly. My need to stop kept growing more and more frequent as I was having trouble putting in a consistent effort up the side of the lake. Eventually I was passed by another rider and then a second who informed that I was not the last person on the course there was one yet behind me. I struggled my way all the way back to the bottom of that 8 mile climb and I took a rest on the side of the road. It was the last real challenge ahead of me before the finish line. It was here that the last rider on the course caught up to me. It was a sight you hate to see, a cyclist walking next to his bicycle defeated by the course. We exchanged “are you okay?”s and he told me his legs were destroyed as this was only his 4th month of cycling ever. I congratulated him on his ridiculous gumption as he slowly passed me on the side of the road where I sat eating my banana. There it was, at long last I was the last person on the 100 mile course.
By this point three SAG(support and gear) vehicles had approached me asking if I needed a lift out of here as they warned me that the remaining two aid stations head of me would be closing soon and might not be there by they time I rolled by. I turned them down saying I still had plenty of supplies and they moved on but not without recording my bib number in order to keep track of me. I watched as the cyclist walking his bicycle up the hill got into a SAG and took a ride back to the finish line. As I made my way back up the side of Onyx I was struggling, and was pretty sure I’d miss the remaining aid stations. My mind was made up to finish past the course cutoff at this point. The SAGs had other ideas though.
Two of them pulled up beside me and I was going so slow at this point that they were able to get off their cars and walk beside me as they tried to convince me to take a ride back since everything ahead of me was closing down and I would be unsupported with food or water in the heat and they further confirmed what I suspected, that I was in dead last. I told them no but eventually my exhaustion and their promises of being without water reminded me of my terrible experience trying to climb crystal lake three weeks previous. I eventually told them that I would go only if I could get dropped off at the top of onyx, skipping only about 6 miles of climbing and 1800 feet of elevation, they agreed and I took the ride.
Driving up the side of onyx in an air conditioned cabin I felt like an absolute fucking scab. I had broken the sacred pact between the cyclist and the road: That it didn’t matter how long it took as long as you finished. Passing all the cyclists still struggling their way up the mountain felt like I had betrayed them especially as they each also refused to take the ride. Eventually I passed Mike who was making much better time than I was. I was reminded of the shark cage fugue from JAWS, traveling in my own cage of sorts up the beast that I could not conquer, and like Matt Hooper I too was out of spit.
I was joined by two Japanese women who were also taking the ride to the top of onyx as they had underestimated the difficulty of the route, they were only skipping about three miles however. Once we got off at the peak they happily hurried back down the descent to the other side where the finish line awaited. I paused for a couple minutes just trying to wrestle with my perceived failure. True I skipped most of the hardest part of the course, yet the entire thing was a challenge to me. I had done much more than last year and in my mind I could have finished the 100 miles given enough time and water. Of course that’s true of any ride even if you crawl along at 4mph and stop a lot eventually you’ll be done. I decided to shake off the emotions for now deciding that taking the ride was smart from a well being point of view as I didn’t want to bonk and get stuck on the mountain without an exit strategy.
I proceeded to descend down the side of Onyx that I climbed 4 hours earlier, the usual elation of barreling down a mountain hampered by the feeling that I hadn’t “earned” it. There was about 16 miles of course left which is the second Strava route posted above. Half of it was easy and the second half involved about 700 feet of climbing back to the finish which was not the quick and painless effort I was hoping for yet much better than an 8 mile struggle of a mountain. As I was nearing the finish line Mike caught up to me. I thought he had blown me out of the water making it so far after I had taken the SAG ride, yet he informed that he too got taken by the SAG to the top of Onyx. I guess they were sweeping the course of stragglers. I felt better about my effort and Daniel and Will were waiting for us around the corner to the finish line to cheer us on which I greatly appreciated since they had been done almost 4 hours previous. At 9 hours and 30 minutes I finished a total of about 93 miles and 6300 feet of climbing which was still a climbing PR for me. I took it as a victory and yet I couldn’t help but wonder how much more I could have done in the extra 30 minutes before the cutoff. Will I be doomed to repeat my mistakes next year? Or will I saddle up like the holy trinity of Hooper, Brody, and Quint and blow Big Bear out of the water with extreme prejudice? Or Will I even attempt it again? It remains to be seen.
