A day away from set; a loose leaf list, Ludovico Einaudi ticking the ivories over the headphones, a call to grandma in Irvine for her birthday, she can’t believe how clear an international call sounds nowadays, a strong Thai coffee, notes, a scene list in excel cells promising order to the whale we have to swallow, and a watch still set on my California heart.
Thai filmmakers hold a prayer ceremony prior to principal photography in order to bless the production.
I love this idea. The kicker crosses himself before the field goal. The left forward drops to his knees to look toward the heavens after scoring a goal. What does it mean to you to take a moment to find your center before embarking on a major project?Sent from my iPhone
The most surprising part of my 2018 was that I would spend it completely sober. I didn’t intend to do this, but I’m so glad I did.
This comes from a man who loves his beer and adores his bourbon.
In recent years I’ve often wondered if I drank too much (I do) and if I’ve ever been on the verge of turning it into a problem (grey area, so maybe yes). I’ve gone over this numerous times with a therapist and the line isn’t a bright one to draw. I have never been a blackout drinker but I’m also someone who doesn’t like having just one, and rarely appreciates only two, three can be nice but that one often leads me to four or five which dumps me into a hangover. This happened once or twice a week, not to mention the once or twice a month where I drank more. This level of drinking might not be terribly excessive but it’s more than enough to be considerably intrusive (not only on my plans and potential but on my emotions, diet, finances, health). So just “what to do” about drinking has been up for debate.
I do a yearly “sober January” — perhaps you’re familiar?— which usually consists of no drinking for the month aside from 1 or 2 “hall passes” if there is say, a birthday party or a Super Bowl, I made an exception.
I did my time this last January, sans hall passes, and for no reason at all I decided to roll it over at least til my birthday in February. But when my birthday came I spent it being quite physically active and I decided I’d wait until my 90 day mark.
90 days came on a trip to Joshua Tree with my best friend. I bought my favorite IPA which I intended to open over a star-lit campfire. One of my very favorite things to do.
But... by the 90 day mark I was also feeling benefits that don’t come in a mere 30 days. At three months I started seeing weight loss. I also happened to finish a new play. I’d developed a daily meditation practice for the first time ever. And I was SAVING MONEY. I did stuff I usually “couldn’t afford” like, ya know, the dentist, yoga classes, eating out (and finding the bill about half what it used to be).
I left the IPA in the cooler, and then put it in my fridge where it still lives nine months later.
Instead I decided I’d wait until opening night of the play I was doing to toast. Get through the rehearsal process, then enjoy! But by then I decided to wait until closing. Get through the run, then enjoy! By closing I was a week away from 6 months. I found I was already enjoying.
At 6 months and only then did I think about a long term plan. I decided I need to get through a few events that I normally associate with drinking and reestablish a relationship with these events without being sauced:
International Flights where they practically throw alcohol at you.
Being abroad and trying what “the locals drink.”
Family reunions.
Thanksgiving.
Holiday Parties.
Christmas.
New Years.
And another thing happened along the way. I had the fucking BUSIEST YEAR I’VE EVER HAD. I’m sure that the flowering of a good professional year coinciding with a year of not drinking is pure coincidence, but I can also be sure of this: At the rate I was going I wouldn’t have been able to handle a couple mild hangovers per week and one or two big hangovers a month and stay on top of shit without certain burnout.
Actually through the year I really started to wonder how the fuck I did it in other years. Here’s one possible answer: often times I didn’t do it, or I wasn’t doing it, or if I did, it came at serious cost.
Not everything was great. I gained some weight back— in absence of the numbing alcohol I found eating crap was fun. I still slept in too much (a thing I always blamed on drinking). I was still susceptible to irritability and anxiety and depression. But the kinda cool thing was that if I was eating crap or sleeping in or pissed off or anxious or sad I could definitively rule out at least one cause— alcohol— as the reason.
And some things were surprisingly cool. Dodger Stadium. Ordering a coffee. “Coffee??” they say, puzzled as hell and looking to see if they even have a coffee pot. “Please.” And then Yasiel Puig slams a triple while you are wired. Sports on caffeine is as much fun as on booze.
Driving home. Whenever. No worries.
Feeling tired. Naturally.
It was a good year to meet myself without the tasty poison. I haven’t decided if I’ll crack an IPA in 2019. I can see myself being quite happy as a non-drinker. I couldn’t see that before. But I’m in zero hurry to revisit hangovers, and blind excuses to numb myself with an addictive liquid. We’ll see. I made it a year without planning to. Something about that worked. So I’m not going to overthink this point.
So. If you’ve ever considered trying something like this, as someone who loves an amber and a rye probably as much as you if not more, I urge you to do it. You don’t have to necessarily identify as an alcoholic to consider that cutting out drinking may bring some unforeseen benefit to your life. A grey area drinker stands to gain, too. At the very least run the experiment. If it’s too hard, that might signal something important. And if it comes easy, the only thing you really have to lose is some weight (maybe) and hangovers (definitely). And my guess is you’ll probably gain valuable perspective along the way.
Here’s one such I gained:
— No drinking? How healthy!
— Actually, it’s neutral. I’m just back to normal.
Happy New Year.
Welcome to the most wonderful time of the year. Stockings are hung by the fireplace with care. Shopping mall parking lots are their own WWE cage matches. We book flights, and storms will reroute many of those flights. Calls into crisis centers typically spike around now as well. There’s a societal pressure to spend money on gifts regardless of whether you have extra money lying around. Ah, and misteltoe.
It’s also a time when we begin to hear the drum of “The War On Christmas” as often as Mariah Carey’s “All I Want For Christmas.” Many who believe there is a war on Christmas must feel a great sense of relief now that the Commander In Chief, stalwart defender of Christian values that he is, told an audience at the Values Voter Summit in Washington that we are “going to start saying Merry Christmas again.” Never mind that Obama said Merry Christmas every single year on broadcasts and events.
The truth is that it’s hard to imagine a real war on Christmas. For one thing, in America alone Christmas is a $465 Billion Industry. It’s not possible to overstate how much money this is.
But I’ll try.
China spends, next to America, the second most in the world on their Military Budget. That figure stands at $191 Billion.
For those doing the math that means that Christmas has more than twice the military budget of China. So: In an actual war between China and Christmas, Christmas is a two to one favorite to win.
Christmas can buy over 100 B2 Bombers fully loaded with Nuclear Missles. Christmas can kick some serious ass.
People are nuts for Christmas, it’s hard to really see a real war. Christmas seems to be doing just fine.
But let’s go ahead and talk about Christmas. What the hell is it?
Ostensibly, we are celebrating the birth of Jesus. Yet even ardent Christians recognize that the 25th of December is not the dude’s actual birthday. The Bible says there were shepherds in the field at Jesus’s birth. We know that shepherds were not in the fields in during the month of December. Also, Jesus’s birth was recorded in Bethlehem to register in the Roman census. But during the winter, due to the cold, the roads and records weren’t open.
We know that in AD 312 when Roman Emporer Constantine converted to Christianity the pagan celebrations of the winter solstice became mildly annoying and eventually intolerable. One could make the argument that in order to streamline conversions to Christianity they went ahead and just changed the meaning of the celebrations. I imagine it went something like this —
It would appear that nearly 2000 years before the modern “War On Christmas” there was first the “War On The Solistice Celebrations.”
And somehow this ruse stuck, which is how we got the pagan Christmas Trees, and somewhere along the line poets and copywriters gave us Santa Claus, Reindeer, Rudolph, and now the Elf On The Shelf.
Last week prior to setting sail for the Thanksgiving holiday I chose to revisit Homer’s Odyssey as my first mate for the journey along Interstate 5 North. The translation, by Emily Wilson, and narration, read with depth and clarity by Claire Danes, proved to be excellent companions. Not only is Wilson the first woman to translate Homer in English, her poetry is both understandable and elevated. The first 4 hours, or 100 pages, are all introduction, which, if you haven’t committed to Homer since high school or college are more than necessary and not only pleasant but revelatory.
As I steered my ship north toward the Bay Area, day turned to “rosy-fingered” sunset, into dusk and finally into dark black night, and I listened to a man, “a complicated man” as Wilson posits as no other translator has, try to make his way home. On the heaviest travel day of the year, I took comfort in this complicated man’s plight weeping on the cold shore of Calypso’s island wishing to see the smoke rise over Ithaca again. I was surrounded by a thousand other vessels traveling north, south, west, east, all fighting for inches of paved road to make their way home. As I drew further north and into the night, into the story, torrents of rain fell onto the Central Valley, easing the choke of smoke from the fires, it fell onto the hood of my car, which felt like Zeus knocking. Some ships ran aground, wrecked or else spun off their course, tossed by the angry “wine-dark ocean” to the side of the highway.
It then occurred to me that our oldest stories in the West were about 1. War (The Iliad) and 2. The aftermath of war (The Odyssey). And this second is about feeling lost, grief-stricken, guilty, homesick, PTSD, reckoning with the dead, families in despair, returning in disguise without trust for anyone, bringing the sword back into your very home.
I was traveling to see my sister and her husband as they hosted their first Thanksgiving in their new home. I was leaving Los Angeles, which was once my childhood home and now my home as an adult. My parents who live outside of Lake Tahoe left their home to travel east. I have no home, and I have many homes. And as such I find myself similarly tossed, at times. By fate, by choice, by chance, by luck. Wilson told me that the poem is in the *nostos* category, which means *home*, which is how we get the word *nostalgia*. I wonder if the need to search for *nostos* is as human as our need to tell stories.
After the weekend, I bought the paperback to read along with Claire Danes’s voice. Reading tonight in a home I once thought would only be temporary. And it perhaps still is temporary. Or maybe home has always been the same place, only the gods continue to shift the winds and the furniture.