Oh my goodness, what a long time between posts. The last 6 months have been interminable and challenging on a variety of fronts. For much of them I was in a deep hole of darkness, seemingly stripped of purpose and aim, although even typing it out like that gives it a shape and form which it didn’t have. A nebulous mist of decay, darkness, and worst-case scenario-ing is the most rosy way I can put it. Creatively, nothing was happening. I could barely summon the stamina to sit through a movie much less think about making one. I said out loud, more than once, “I’ll never direct anything again”, not as a woe-is-me lament but as a declarative statement of fact. It’s only here on the other side of it (hopefully!) that I can see how deep this thing had claws in me.

Many factors were at play in installing me in the hole: pandemic, telecommuting, homeschooling, mask anxiety, social anxiety, racially-based horrific events, it being the 15 year anniversary of my brain tumor surgeries and proton beam radiation treatment, me needing to summon the will and money to shoot the second half of Sister/Brother, my birthday and so on and so forth. It was everything and nothing all at once.

Things that helped slowly bring me back to the land of the living (and note, none were instant curatives, only a looooong cumulative build): running, playing guitar, watching a particular film and realizing I could shoot outstanding long driving scenes non-sync and use wild tracks from one over another, 20th anniversary with MM, trips to the Tualatin Nature Preserve, camping in Florence OR, trips to Wildwood recreation area and Sauvie Island, watching The Bureau, and in no small part reading Greenwood by Michael Christie, which I picked up on a whim. But again, the doing of all these felt like trudging through tar. It’s only looking backward that I can assign healing properties to any of these.

I’ve been out of the hole for about a month and felt like the spark was relit, like walking across a desert at midnight under a starless sky and coming upon a tiny flashlight that can illuminate your steps until you can ascend and look at the valley below from a higher vantage. (sorry for the subpar metaphors, not sure what’s going on today lol). And once that happened I was able to be pulled back toward filmic work and thought: started a new spec feature screenplay, took photographs for a new webseries project, finished a short script, wrote season 2 of MICROAGGRESSIONS, cut a directing reel, and charted a course forward for Sister/Brother. Each of these small steps felt all the more triumphant b/c of the darkness that preceded it. Both the thing itself and the echo back from the canyon wall, a call and response in oblivion.

the fall 2020

Year in Review

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