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[peytons-depression-land]

Soldier Coffin Baggage Claim

A sailor’s coffin was unloaded from an airplane with a military procession. I was sitting in the terminal of a southern city’s regional airport this weekend - Memorial Day weekend - and saw it happen. Seeing this sight on this very weekend sounds almost too contrite or planned an occurrence to be believed, as potent with uniquely American meaning as an American flag outside a McDonalds at half-mast after a mass shooting, but it happened, and I was sitting right there. 

My first sign of the goings-on were the seven Navy sailors I saw out on the tarmac as I walked down my terminal. I spotted them through the large windows that often line the sides of US airport terminals; windows, I’ve often speculated, that seem designed to present the would-be flyer with a comforting glimpse at the ordered, regimented routine of air travel minutia. “There’s nothing to be afraid of, just look! Your flight will be as smooth and clockwork as the methodical procedure you see right now on the runway through these windows.” But back to the sailors. They stood out on the tarmac, close to the building, six in two rows of three, the leader in front. Five of the sailors were in the little Donald Duck type uniforms with the little hats and two seemingly higher ranked sailors, one man and one woman, in the all-white dress uniforms you see Tom Cruise and Val Kilmer wear in Top Gun. The group appeared to be doing some sort of drill, but I paid them little mind, as nothing else was going on around them. I figured maybe there’d been a procession earlier, and they were just the last remnants, finishing things up. When you grow up in the South, around military instillations, you become numbly accustomed to the pageantry and uniforms of the national occupation. It becomes background noise. So, I went about killing time before my flight.

After a little while of sitting, reading my book, facing the runway window, I noticed that more was happening outside. Six of the seven sailors stood in a block next to a black hearse that had pulled up. In front of the hearse was a black SUV, people sitting inside behind the tinted windows. A police car with flashing lights sat at the front of the convoy. Airport ground crew, in their ear protection and high-vis vests, had removed their hats and stood solemnly. What other time have you seen airport employees come to a complete stop? Or any American employee for that matter? Labor only stops to honor the empire. A thumb headed cop stood off to the side. Drivers exited the SUV and hearse. From the back of the SUV emerged the white suited Navy woman along with a thin, frail civilian woman. The dead’s mother? Sister? Wife? They all waited for the arrived plane to taxi to the gate.

As I was noticing all this, a crowd inside had gathered around the window. They were the other travelers and people on my flight – on this plane about to dock and unload the coffin. The odd thing was how intensely everyone was reacting to the situation. Sure, I couldn’t blame them for watching, I was too (and even taking these notes), but they seemed so solemn and emotional. Many of them are even recording the proceedings with their phones. Why? Did they plan on watching it all back later? Showing others? They were as unrelated to the event as I was, so why were they so invested as to want to film it? Did they just feel it’s what they were supposed to do? Has a lifetime inside the imperial core conditioned them to the point that they can, at will, stir up emotion within themselves at the hint of supposed “military honor”? I’m being judgmental, but I hardly doubt they do this when they happen upon a normal funeral possession driving down the street or exiting a church.

The little conveyor belt car pulled into place on the tarmac, ready for the plane. The six sailors -five Donald Duck and one Top Gun - took their places, three on either side of the conveyors end, ready to grab the impending wood box. The plane taxied into the gate. A hatch near the plane’s front was opened. The lone woman relative seemed ready to cry. I don’t want to sound too harsh, cynical, or heartless in regard to her dark hour.  I most likely would never have the gall to say anything to her face, which I suppose makes me a coward in my convictions. But, then again, I struggled, and struggle still, to feel bad. How can I feel bad when I know what the service of the person in the box truly represents? How can I feel bad when I hate everything the US military stands for and does? Then again, maybe she felt the same way, maybe she didn’t want them to join, and yet, they’re gone all the same – someone she cared about. It’s conflicting, balancing your ethical stances and anger against the cogs of imperialism vs the necessary empathy for individuals and the material conditions that lead them to where they end up.

The flag draped wooden box began lowering down the conveyor belt, much slower than I’d ever seen suitcases and packages unloaded. I’d never know they belt and strap the American flag onto the coffin for the entire duration of the trip. Subsumed by the flag, even in death. There’s a profound strangeness in watching a coffin, a supremely reverent object in our culture, unloaded from the same place and in the same way as travel luggage. A cargo hold of souvenir and dirty underwear and bikini stuffed suitcases and also a dead body – supposedly the most important kind of dead body, a solider. Do more important soldiers get their own planes, or are they always just lumped in the hold of some commercial airline jaunt? The box finally reached the end of the conveyor. The relative was watching over, crying. Top Gun lady applied a professional level of sympathy, a hand on the woman’s shoulder. “There there.” The six sailors awkwardly waddled the box from the conveyor into the hearse, my former Donald Duck description feeling darkly ironic. The sailors saluted the coffin as the hearse driver closed the big back door. The crying relative and Top Gun lady got back into the SUV and their driver got back behind the wheel. The cop car drove off, the hearse and SUV following. The six sailors stood at attention as the convoy pulled out and the ground crew around them prepared to unload the normal luggage. Before the sailors broke from salute, suitcases and duffle bags started being chucked down the same conveyor belt that minutes before had a dead body on it.

The sailor procession disbanded and made their way off the tarmac. The remaining cop outside fist bumped an orange vested runway worker as he waddled back to the building. Inside, all the other passengers drifted away from the window. One or two of them sniffled. Again, I can’t help but wonder if they were actually crying, or if it’s some sort of act, some sort of inner patriotic voice telling them they should be feeling emotional. Suitcases kept tumbling down the conveyor car as the plane was unloaded. The eagle had landed, now back to work as usual; the work whoever it was in the box had died for.

Five minutes later and you’d have never know it even happened. Back to just being a normal airport.

[peytons-depression-land]

With BlackBerry, Matt Johnson continues to show no other director has a better understanding of our modern, media-molded minds

For those unfamiliar, Matt Johnson is a 37-year-old Canadian indie filmmaker, whose new film BlackBerry, which he co-wrote, directed, and co-stars in, was released this past week. BlackBerry charts the rise and fall of the Canadian creators and company behind the once ubiquitous “BlackBerry” smart phone, a device that’s now a relic to the pre-iphone aughts. The film chronicles the triumphs and tribulations of the phone’s creators, underdog nerds Mike Lazaridis and Dough Fregin, and cutthroat businessman and Blackberry co-CEO Jim Balsillie, who both launched the phone to its successes and helped destroy all they created. Johnson’s previous features are The Dirties, a found footage dark comedy/drama about the lives of two film obsessed high schoolers leading up to a school shooting, and Operation Avalanche, a period thriller about low level CIA agents faking the moon landing – a film in which said agents con their way into NASA, which Johnson and his crew actually did in real life when making the low budget indie film. However, Johnson’s most iconic work, and most beloved by many, is his mockumentary comedy series, which started as a web series and was later adapted to TV, Nirvanna the Band the Show. The series details the misadventures and schemes of a fictionalized version of Johnson and his friend, musician Jay McCarrol, as they try to get their band – Nirvanna the Band – a show at the Toronto restaurant and music venue “The Rivoli.” You might know this series from the now famous "Update Day" clip in which the duo sing along to the Wii shop music. In 2021, Johnson and McCarrol even made a three-episode animated children’s spin off of Nirvanna the Band, titled Matt and Bird Break Loose. A unifying aspect of much of Johnson's work is his narrative documentary style of filmmaking, often employing real people in Sacha Baron Cohen-style moments.

Something about me: I'm kind of a Matt Johnson obsessive. Any time I meet someone from Canada under the age of 40, I ask them if they've heard of Matt Johnson or Nirvanna the Band the Show. I have multiple back-up hard drives with the complete web series and TV seasons of Nirvanna the Band because it's impossible to get/find now in the US. Anytime I'm in a large media store that sells 2nd hand movies (like Amoeba Records), I religiously spend time searching to see if, by some small chance, they have one of the physical copies of The Dirties (the ones with the variant covers that look like Criterion Collection covers) - it's kinda my physical media holy grail. My DVD of Operation Avalanche is one of my most prized possessions. Hell, I’ve even tried my hand at replicating Johnson’s style numerous times, a short film I made while at film school abroad in France being the main example. So, suffice to say: I was very excited for Blackberry.

With BlackBerry Johnson is making significant stylistic and scale leaps from his previous works, “making it to the big leagues” as someone more confident than me with sports metaphors might say. It’s a bigger movie than he’s made before, getting a limited national release here in the US, by a major indie distributor (IFC), starring two sizeable, well-known actors (It’s Always Sunny in Philidelphia’s Glenn Howerton and comedy mainstay Jay Baruchel). All this far from the rag-tag, small scale, underground nature of his previous works, where the cast was the filmmakers and the biggest names involved were Vice (and its since defunct TV network) and Kevin Smith whose company distributed The Dirties. Stylistically, BlackBerry makes the jump from Johnson’s previous found footage/mockumentary movie (both terms sounding far more derisive to the idiosyncratic style of Johnson’s films than I’d like) to a fully “traditional” narrative feature. With both The Dirties and Operation Avalanche, as well as NTBTS, the characters are involved in the actual act of filmmaking, for one reason or another, and aware of the camera filming them, the cameramen being acknowledged entities. The footage you’re watching is filmed, edited, and staring the characters on screen. But, with BlackBerry, besides a fun visual gag from Glenn Howerton at the beginning of the film, the cameras exist as they would in any normal movie – invisible watchers of the events.

What makes BlackBerry and Johnson’s filmmaking so great though is that he doesn’t just abandon all semblance of his style and aesthetic, becoming some bland gun for hire, like so many indie directors plucked from festival success to helm the next cinematic toy line for Marvel. Instead, he finds ways to work his style into this more traditional film in compelling ways. While the camera is no longer literally in the story, it still hovers around the characters, with longtime Johnson DP Jared Raab often shooting through the obstruction of windows, from far away, and with the back of heads in the foreground. The camera zooms and focuses in and out of different characters and things in the moment, cinema verité style, Johnson describing in a Q&A for the film having been influenced by documentaries like Pennebaker and Hegedus’ The War Room. The looming, documentary-like camera works perfectly for this constantly manic story of slap dash, neurotic tech wizzes and on edge CEO sociopaths, the camera matching the characters nature. For this story of greed, corporate malignancy, and the loss of ideals, the camera’s living style also feels like what you’re watching is covert, hacked CCTV footage. It makes the viewer feel like they’re seeing what actually happened: secret footage from inside the office, fly on the wall stuff, intimate to these people and these conflicts.

True to the overarching motif in Johnson’s work of media’s permanent place in our cultural language and experience, Blackberry is filled visual references to other movies: from a non-diegetic montage of famous sci-fi technology over the opening credits, to scenes of the lovable band of “Research in Motion” nerds enjoying movie nights of Raiders of the Lost Ark and They Live, to movie posters lining the walls of the RIM offices and featured on Doug’s t-shirts. Johnson perfectly described how necessary referencing other media was to his film when he explained “Pop culture that we think of as just nerdy ephemera, I believe sincerely, winds up dictating what technologists create that will become the future.” Well timed needle drops help ground the work in its specific world of a nerds 1996, 2003, and 2007, and frequent Johnson collaborator (and aforementioned co-star of Nirvanna the Band) Jay McCarrol brings a pumping synth score, not too dissimilar to Trent Reznor’s work in The Social Network, but with a uniquely quirkier, lo-fi essence that fits perfectly with the indie feel of both the film itself and its subject matter.

Thankfully we’re not entirely deprived of Johnson’s charismatic, comedic screen presence in BlackBerry. While not the Orson Wells-style leading man both in front of and behind the camera he was in his previous works, he still features in Blackberry as the third of our main 3 characters, Doug Fregin, co-engineer/creator of the famous phone, who acts in a way as the film’s audience surrogate. Despite Doug being a “goof” as Balsillie describes him, he’s the heart of the main three characters, the moral center to which we compare Balsillie’s shrewd cunning, lies, and manipulations, and Lazaridis’s tragic moral downfall from tech idealist to bottom-line businessman. Doug is undoubtedly a character in the typical “Johnsonian mold” - a movie quoting, John Carpenter t-shirt and sweatband wearing, ninja turtle loving hyperactive who uses Star Wars references in business meetings. In fact, the character seems molded in the film more on Johnson than the real man, given that, as Johnson explained, he’s a “true cipher… has never done a taped interview,” leaving Johnson with room for interpretation.

However, while Johnson delivers a more lighthearted, comedy performance, as a director he pulls some impressive dramatic performances from Howerton and Baruchel. It’s true that the movie is, at its core, a dark comedy, so there’s some great comedy in the lead performances, Howerton delivering that trademark snark and unhinged rage his Always Sunny character has become known for and Baruchel with his awkward nerdiness. I have no doubt Howerton’s scene in which he, in a rage, screams “I’m from Waterloooooo! Where the vampires hang out!” - in a moment that must be seen to be believed - will become a quoted classic before long. But the characters aren’t just farce Social Network parodies, they have depth and drama to them, a credit to Johnson’s directing and Howerton and Baruchel’s acting. You feel Balsillie’s underlying insecurity and attraction to power that drives him. You hurt seeing Lazaridis slowly turning into what he once stood against and the tragedy of him reaching his ethical “point of no return” when he agrees to the BlackBerry touchscreen phone being manufactured overseas, in order to meet budget and deadline. We also get some delightful supporting performances from the likes of Saul Rubinek, Rich Sommer, Cary Elwes, and Michael Ironside as an imposing, rotund, bolo tie wearing, hard ass COO.

BlackBerry is a tragic tale of ambition and passion succumbing to ego and greed, and in so it’s not only a movie about the tech sector, but also about the struggle of making art. Lazaridis struggles, and ultimately fails, to maintain integrity while creating a technology he loves and believes in against a world run by people like Balsillie who only seek profit and status, quality be damned as long as it sells. Anyone who makes art, especially films, is up against the same problem. There will always be Mike Lazaridis and Matt Johnson’s, there will always be Jim Balsillie’s and David Zaslav’s, and there will always be a struggle between the two: art and commerce. The tragedy comes when the creator, like Lazaridis, loses their principles, and begins creating not for the love of it, but out of obligation and out of profit. The triumphs come when the creator finds a way to take what they love, what they’re good at, and what is meaningful to them, - their vision - and deliver it to the masses with the heart intact, as Johnson has done throughout his career, now with BlackBerry more than ever. It’s up to the creator to stand fast and endure to create their meaningful works, as oftentimes the sharks will get along either way, as we see in the end credits with Balsillie, who avoided any jail time for his stock fraud committed while co-CEO of BlackBerry.

While I don’t think they're for everybody, Matt Johnson's works capture the modern media deluged culture that we all exist in better than any other modern artist or filmmaker. His movies are always about movies, whether they narratively are or not, just as our lives have become subsumed by media consumption, regurgitation, and reinterpretation. We now live in a world where almost every movie and TV show is at our fingertips 24/7 - a religion, the upgrade to dreaming, the codex we classify our existence on - and his film-making style and characters reflect that. The characters, especially the characters Johnson portray, speak in a lingua franca of movies quotes. His camera is alive and involved in the action, often literally, just as our cameras and screens are every day. His editing blends the real world with the movie world, blurring the lines. His movies are not documentaries, but they’re certainly not just fiction, something in between, a dreamlike blend for our media-soaked minds. I’ve never been one good at the rigid definitions of “modernism” and “post modernism” in art, but I have to believe Johnson is the cutting edge of whatever “post-post-post…Modern” stage we’re at currently. The Dirties is about media’s role in the lives of a youth more connected but also alienated than ever before. Operation Avalanche takes the uniquely western art form of film and uses it to represent how governments often use media to manufacture their own fictions to control the public narrative. Nirvanna the Band the Show shows how media influences our everyday lives, friendships, personalities, and dreams. And now BlackBerry serves as a cautionary tale for the fate an artist can fall to if they let their work become a product instead of a passion and art. As we drift further into the oblivion of inevitable ecological, political, social collapse, media becoming the God of our reality, Matt Johnson is our guru, beaming our media-soaked psyche back on to the screen, creating innovative, funny, compelling stories of life through the lens of a movie-fed world.

[peytons-depression-land]

This Post is Not About My Day Trip to Santa Barbara

I rode Amtrak’s California Surfliner from LA to Santa Barbara and back for a day trip a couple weeks ago. I had a good time, took notes, took pictures, and fully intended to write up a something about the experience. I tried to write the post the day after I took the trip. But, only about six paragraphs in, I impulsively typed the following:

“Is anyone actually reading this? Does anyone care? This is horrendously boring isn’t it. Why did I kid myself that anyone cares what I think or do or write. It’s all pointless bullshit. My existence is pointless. I should just stop even trying to write this boring fucking article and go out and buy some rope to hang myself with right now.”

That’s essentially been what my writing process has been like for the last year or so. Crippling self-doubt at every turn. Even the act of trying to recount something I enjoyed doing, in which I took steps to aid me in retelling – which I also enjoyed doing – feels like pissing in the wind. As I sit here alone in my bedroom, several weeks later, my head slightly sore from drinking on an empty stomach and forgetting to take my Cymbalta and Lithium today, I’m still wondering if it’s worth trying to write this. But I feel like I need to write something, anything. My energy to work on scripts has all but seemingly drained out of me. All I’m doing day in, and day out is a glorified customer service job with the veneer of an entertainment industry entry point. The last 10 months I’ve been about as creative as I would be in a coma.

I’ve tried putting the words down so many times, in so many ways. As I already mentioned, I have a whole other word document of a scrapped previous attempt. But something inside me is just fundamentally averse with trying to write this story. But why? The trip was great. I rode an Amtrak train for the first time: something I’d wanted to do for so long. Yeah, it’s lame, but as a fan of rail systems and as someone who believes we should have a better one in the US, scrappy little Amtrak is all we got, so I had a blast finally getting to take even a short trip on it. Upon boarding there were conductors at the door with the little hats they wear! I bought a reasonably priced but kinda shitty cookie and diet coke in the charming little snack car area. There was a LED sign in the passenger area that just constantly read “AMTRAK” for some reason, as if it feared that we Americans are so unfamiliar with the concept of traveling by train we’d forget we were on one if not continually reminded while en route. I even snuck into the mostly empty business class section with the nicer seats for half of the ride (well idk if I snuck in or not, it was unclear if I was supposed to be in it – but they never asked for my ticket so who knows).

The ever present Amtrak sign

Why was trying to recount all this such a chore; why did it feel like the most boring thing in the world to try and tell people about it? I enjoyed it, and isn’t that enough? Isn’t it enough that I found a certain beauty in the progression of the scenery outside the train? First passing through the industrial wasteland of greater LA, the storage facilities, trailer parks, and graffiti covered warehouses of The Valley. We then moved into patchy green hills marked with tan rocks that jutted out, tunnels going through the low mountains, peaks off in the distance still snow-capped from the recent freak snowfalls. The train even passed by an old, disused movie backlot, probably a relic from a time before streaming services and the internet. Why was my mind screaming at me to hate myself for trying to write? Why is it still?

Sitting in the business class we finally reached the portion of track that rides along the coastline. There are oil rigs off in the distance. The roads next to the tracks are dotted with hippie surfer vans and road trip retiree RVs. Only about 30 minutes behind schedule, which as I understand it is pretty good for Amtrak, we reach Santa Barbara.

Business class, on the coastline

I need to keep writing. I need to finish this so I can know I can move on. Should I go next door to the 7-11 and get an energy drink to try to keep me awake to finish this? It’s almost 1am. I don’t work tomorrow so I can stay up, but I don’t want to. But I need to just get this done now and move the hell on with my life. Like who is gonna read this bullshit melodrama about my embarrassing struggle to write a damn blog post and think it’s good. This is gonna be a piece that – if I’m ever lucky enough to reach any notoriety of any sort – people will find and use to make fun of me. They’ll point out how self-obsessed I am. How nothing all this is. How emblematic of a cultural emptiness a vain writing like this is. Acquaintances will find this and shit talk me behind my back. No one will respect me. I will be laughed at on podcasts.

God I could use a drink right now. But I can’t. I’ve already hit my 1500 calories for the day and I don’t want to go over my limit. I need to stick to my routine. But fuck do I want a drink. I’ve just been drinking more and more recently. I finally get the appeal. I didn’t really start drinking until after I turned 21. Not out of some sense of following the law, but I simply wasn’t interested in drinking for some reason. Call it a fear of losing control, having something I knew would affect my mind. But now I get it. It makes me feel better, even just a bit. Helps me feel less sad. I want my mind to be affected. It’s better than its default state. Drinking was part of the reason I took the train to Santa Barbara. Not driving means I could just walk around all day and drink, and then just ride home. Day drinking two hours up the coast from where I live.

Santa Barbara is a sleepy city. Google says its population is right around 88k, but you wouldn’t guess it on the day I was there. It felt like a place where no one lived, only visited on day trips and weekends. All of the buildings downtown where white with red clay tiles on the roofs. I’d later learn this is a kind of architectural standard imposed on the downtown area, so even the 7/11 looks like a building in an old Spanish village.

Fairly quiet by the train station

The thing about Santa Barbara is it’s not actually historic, at least what you see today isn’t – comparatively speaking. It was all built in the 20s, riding off a regional fad of recreating old Spanish architecture, like the grand courthouse built in 1929, which is meant to recreate a Spanish castle. It’s all fairy tale facade; the beautiful grand mural room in the courthouse painted by a guy who did the storyboards for Cecil B DeMille, famous movie director and co-founder of the place I’m indentured as a servant. But just because the town - the courthouse is a facsimile doesn’t mean it isn’t beautiful, because it is. The cavernous halls of the courthouse, which is still functioning (meaning that while you tourist around inside you occasionally pass serious looking conversations between lawyers and clients), is filled with stylish oddities like phone booths housed in ornate wooden doored alcoves, or fire extinguisher cubbies with stained glass doors. The garden courtyard of the place a seemingly popular spot for wedding photos, as exemplified by the lesbian couple in matching pristine white suits that stood yards away from me.

The courthouse entrance

Courthouse entrance hall

Still contains working payphones

Probably don't break the glass even in case of emergency

But the inaccuracies are there. I stumbled my way onto a free tour given by a docent of the building’s historical society. A knowledgeable and enthusiastic older man prone to curtness if asked any questions by those on the tour. He pointed out things like how the grand doors, that on a real Spanish castle are built large enough to allow riders on horseback to pass through, are built at the top of a flight of stairs and horses can’t climb stairs. Or how the building mixes designs of the three coalescing religions of Spain, blending catholic angels with Islamic tiling, and Jewish stars. The docent pronounces Muslim like “moslum.” Saying this feels eye-roll worthy, but I can’t help feel some sort of parallel with falsehoods of the city, the veneer masking the truth inside.  Typing that sentences makes me start to feel self-conscious again. Damn, I was starting to really get on a roll there for a minute.

The docent in the mural room

Several shops in Santa Monica seem to fit my interests quite well. I browsed a cluttered bazaar of antiques – my favorite type of antique store, one in which things are piled and hidden on packed shelves, not some overpriced boutique experience but a real treasure hunt. There was the Book Den, a nice little bookstore with a large amount of old paperback pulp and detective novels, something I really enjoy. I left with a 1978 copy of Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep (I had just finished reading The High Window) featuring an illustration of Robert Mitchum on the cover, the film adaptation staring him advertised bellow the title, as well as a more recent printing of Bukowski’s Factotum (I’ve never read anything by Bukowski but look forward to digging in). I stopped in a comic shop, in which I considered buying the complete SCUD book, but decided against it since I didn’t want to lug it around the rest of the afternoon. A 30-something man who I assume had some type of neuro-atypical condition paced around the store talking to himself about the comics he wanted to buy, excitedly holding a book up (I didn’t see what) and exclaiming “I heard James Gunn wants to adapt this!” to the uninterested cashiers who feigned interest out of niceness. After chugging down a happy hour sangria in a forgettable trendy, exposed ceiling bar, I tipsily browsed a record store that for some reason had glass cabinets at the back containing ridiculously breasted anime women figurines. The place had no Steely Dan or Warren Zevon records– disappointing. However, I did get a copy of the soundtrack to the film The Midnight Express, the film my mom says was the first ever R-rated movie she was allowed to see in the theater. I’ve never seen it but love its soundtrack as it contains seminal works from the electronic and disco music pioneer Giorgio Moroder. Carrying around the handle-less paper bag the record was put in was a bit inconvenient for the rest of the afternoon.

If there was a theme for the food I ate that day it was the ocean. For lunch I had a lobster roll that was good, but overpriced, as many restaurants in California are. The place I got it from was decked out in neon, looking like the juice bar the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers hung out at when not fighting evil mixed with an episode of Baywatch. The theming was fun but felt hollow in that “intentionally trying to be eccentric” way trendy places in LA often are.

The crab roll was good. The chips were underwhelming.

For dinner I wound up at Mexican place where I had octopus tacos which were great, unlike the extremely bland rice and a salad covered in some awful, cloyingly sweet dressing that tasted like bubblegum flavored medication that was served on the side. That’s ok, the chips and salsa were enough to compliment the great tacos. A couple tables over from me where the two mothers – I think they were friends, not lesbians – with 5 children, who I’d witnessed almost get the youngest child, no more than 5, killed by an oncoming car earlier. After going across the cross walk, the mothers had realized the youngest girl wasn’t crossing the street with them, so they yelled for her to catch, only to realize at the last second that the light had already changed and they had told her to run across the path of an oncoming car. The car was thankfully going pretty slow and was paying attention, so crisis was averted, and the two mothers appeared to pretty much immediately move on from the near child-death, or at least that’s how it looked to me from across the street. Now, across the patio, they ate dinner while the kids shouted at one another across the table, all with apparent amnesia to the near accident from 30 minutes prior. After dinner I walked across the street and had a small ice-cream cone and was able to pay in exact change thanks to my book purchase from earlier in the day. I had let myself eat whatever that day, take a break from the routine. I don’t normally indulge as much as you’re reading about.

One of the last places I saw in Santa Barbara was the pier. If you’ve ever been to the chaotic, crowded, vendor cart and tourist gimmick-filled Santa Monica pier in LA, the Santa Barbara pier is pretty much the exact opposite, or at least it did that day, to me. It has quiet, despite being decently busy. No one shouting or yelling, blocking paths so they could stop and take pictures. Only one cheesy gift shop and a couple local restaurants. Down at the end of the pier sat big palm trunks on their sides, a creative way to make benches for the patrons. The sunset was nice. I was still a little drunk from the sangria so maybe that’s why I liked the place so much. They even had some free telescopes you could use to look out across the water. A seagull landed beside me.

Seagull friend

I finished my ice-cream cone and waited for my train home to finally arrive. The two mothers and the kids waited, all five of them screaming in unison and running around, even getting precariously close to the tracks. God help these kids survive to adulthood. When the train pulled in, I made sure to sit in a different car from them. The alcohol from earlier was finally starting to wear off so I bought a $7 canned margarita from the snack car (still cheaper than most bars in LA). The buzz of the drink felt good. Riding the train is like taking a plane, only much less oppressive. There’s more room to move around, its less crowded, and no security theater causing a hassle. I finish my book and my drink.

The Midnight Express - sans Turkish prisons, and actually just at 6:50pm

I reach my stop, and it seems to be just in the nick of time. While I wait for the train to pull in, the conductor makes an announcement on the PA box near me. They’ll be waiting at my stop for an indefinite amount of time, as it seems there’s a car stuck on the tracks up ahead. With exasperation she mentions to the handful of us waiting by the door how occurrences like this happen every day. She says something along the lines of “it seems like automobiles are just always interfering with trains.” I sympathize with her frustration, and whether she knows it or not she’s just described America’s central problem when it comes to effective national rail transit. I exit the train. And with that I was home.

I… I did it. I wrote about my trip. Kinda. Good enough. Why was that so hard? Once things got going the only thing that was difficult was how tired I am. Maybe that’s the key. More tired less self-conscious. But it’s good I wrote it all out, I needed to. Just like I needed to take the trip. Because I love trains. I love going to cool places and learning about their history. I love eating good food and finding cool shops. I needed to go because I spend a lot of my time hating myself, hating life, hating the state of things both personal and at large, thinking about death, and I need to try to find ways to break out of my trench and remind myself of reasons to live. Ok, writing that part makes me start to worry again. Is that too saccharine of an ending? I guess it doesn’t matter, because as long as I couch what I write in ironic detachment and meta-analysis of the writing process, I can claim innocence. Them’s the rules. I feel like this might have all wrapped up too quickly, but, again, this isn’t a post about my trip to Santa Barbara. So, it doesn’t matter if I don’t have a good ending. It just matters that it ends.

Until next time.

[peytons-depression-land]

Welcome to the Embarrassment Zone: A screenwriter trying to write prose

I’ve always struggled with forcing myself to create and share prose and non-narrative writing over my preferred format of screenplays. It all comes down to a deep rooted fear of being accused of pretension and self-obsession.

See, with screenplay writing every word and every character is at risk of being superfluous. That shit has to be lean, mean, and tight as possible - every ounce of fat trimmed away, every darling not only killed but buried and forgotten. Sure, you can break the “rules” when you think it’s worth it and include extra detail or descriptive flourishes (god forbid you hold Blake Snyder and his Save the Cat method gospel) but if your screenplay read like a novel its probably never going to get read, unless it’s really really good from like the very first word (and even then they’ll probably just hire a screenwriter to re-write it and just give you “story by” credit). At least that’s what I’ve been taught/what my experience as a young entrant into the world of Hollywood/screenwriting profession has been thus far.

But with prose writing or non-journalistic nonfiction (ie journaling) there’s not really as many overall boundaries or rules. Like, sure, narrative conventions exist, but you have far more room and space on the page to use. You’re not writing a eye-catching piece of blue-print work that’s intended to set a whole artistic process of making a movie/TV show in motion, never intended to be itself read by general audiences. With prose your writing is the main attraction, and so you can add all the detail, all the flourish, all the eccentricities you want: and therein lies the issue for me. When I write prose I’m always paranoid that the literary devices, details, and narration I’m providing are overwritten, pretentious, and self-obsessed.

When I write out some metaphor or lengthy description of a character (or in this case my own) internal feelings, I just feel so conflicted over the necessity of it; are these words and ideas providing substance or am I just jerking myself off artistically? How much is too much? How much is too little? There’s no definite answer and the possibility of fucking up scares me. The possibility of creating art or writing that is embarrassing in its flaws or unearned pretension has always been one of my biggest fears. I don’t want to be the fool who doesn’t realize that their work they regard as good is actually laughable. The thought of lacking self awareness is to me about the most humiliating thing I can think of.

But I need to get over my petty fears of failure. These obsessions with not taking risks when writing are what make my creative process so glacial and bound by anxiety and procrastination. I gotta start writing more - both my screenplays and just experimentally, with things like this. So I’m starting this blog and I’m gonna start using it on as frequent of a basis as I can make myself. Maybe I’ll recount my day or random stuff I’ve thought about. Maybe I’ll try to write some short stories or something. Maybe I’ll just write a lot about how depressed I am. Regardless, I just want to get myself writing more, embarrassment be damned.

One thing is certain: there will be lots of typos. I always miss something. And I ain’t got the time to just sit around and proofread over and over. Plus probably no one is gonna be reading all this anyway, so who cares.