memorial day trip

driving down the winding road alongside the Smith River on the 199, tiny towns subject to change and decay, unlike the rising landscape

maybe aging means existing alongside your former selves, not transcending them. the complication is in keeping the timelines in order, the thread of the narrative bloats with each year, bleeding into the watery present.

there's the theater in eureka where I was a projectionist 20 plus yrs ago, moving heavy film canisters to the projectionist table, threading films into projectors, watching the ends of movies over and over, checking focus and frame out the small window that overlooked each auditorium, aching as I looked forward to life in LA, toward becoming a filmmaker. all that aspiration and ambition pulsing with the knowledge that it was going to happen. no matter what.

there's the theater in Arcata where I watched rivers of double features starting 25 years ago, where I worked for a time, where M did too, where one early morning she and I sat out front on the raised corner of the loggia and she looked at me and said we both know last night didn't mean anything and a possible door closed before re-opening a short time later, arguably beyond my agency or hers.

In Ferndale (where I was an extra in a film 23 yrs ago and where another film was shot 16 yrs ago produced by the company I worked in the mailroom at in LA) here's a house where we stay with old friends - some not seen in decades - all of us older, greyer. All fundamentally the same and unmistakably altered.

and there's the trees, standing for ages before my great-grandparents were conceived laughing at my insights (oooh 20 years, come back and see us in 500 bud), standing through fog and wet, through sun and ache. still t/here.

my filmic trajectory has not lined up with what that projectionist anticipated but that is not a unique story I suppose. still my next film project stirs, slowly gathering form and heft.

and this is a thing borne of many unconnected things, of where I find myself, of reading some D Lynch interviews, of recalling M Haneke directed The Last Continent at 47, of rewatching Man on Wire, of my 45th birthday just days away, of the trip to past corridors where my old iterations stand on every corner : I have always found myself waiting for things - mentors, money, approval - needing those things to grant me the power to move forward. This new film is the embodiment of that, which is to say a character wrestles with all these competing strands of history and desire of time and oblivion - and by the simple act of continuing to step forward, she transcends it. And so for me the act of making this next film is the renunciation of that need, that reliance on approval. I'm tired of wanting to be liked, this grade-school ache to fit in that I've toted around for decades like a fat cement albatross. Time to cut that loose and to finally get busy.

And 100 years from now when this next movie and the next and the next have been born and lived and been long forgotten this tree in the fog will still stand, not really giving a crap about anyone's aches or iterations.