Farewell Colorado (For Now)

Farewell Colorado (For Now) | Apollo Fields Heads Eastward | NYC Wedding Photographers

Both of our going away parties began on picnic blankets in parks, surrounded by fresh fruit, local beer, and our closest friends. There were games and laughs, children, and sunshine. But as the days wore on, Heather and I grew closer to the reality of leaving with each farewell embrace. Lucky for me, this time around, I managed to avoid the emotional minefield of “this is the last time I will [insert memorable experience ‘x’] in [insert city ‘y’],” recognizing it as a self-imposed trap set on disturbing the logic of ambition and transition. Despite my valiant effort, both parties ended with me in tears.

I’m a long way from being ashamed of crying in public and even further from trying to hide it. I mean, what’s wrong with coming toe-to-toe with your emotions and ceding to their validity when they creep up behind your eyes? I actually find a problem in trying to suppress them. Because if we try to hide our feelings from our closest friends, then who can we be vulnerable with? In times of happiness and sadness alike, it is in our best interest to try to understand why we feel the way we feel.

In Colorado, my tears finally came when I hugged my friend, Brandon. Although only a friendship of a couple of years, the density and depth of our interactions has stretched our connection over what seems like many more. There is a candor in our exchanges that reflects contemplation and curiosity, the bedrock of understanding. If there’s anything I’ve learned from him, it’s that homemade bread will always be better than store bought. Making goods by hand is more than artistry, it is a source of value beyond our taste buds and aesthetic eyes. Thank you for teaching me this and for your friendship, Brandon.

To all of the others who came to see us off, I’ll never forget those last couple of weeks in Colorado. The Great American Beer Festival, Lake Street Dive at Red Rocks, the Rockies game, and finding a home for all of our beloved furniture. Carya and Thomas, Andy and Elaina, and Shane and Lexi, you all showed up when we needed you most and we barely had to ask. Large events like moving or weddings always bring people together and we aren’t just lucky or #blessed, we are #inyourdebt. Not like the bad kind of debt like student loans but the good kind of debt like owing your neighbor a cup of sugar or carton of eggs. The kind of debt that includes open door policies, late night pickups, and sending you home with a Tupperware of leftovers despite a bevy of polite refusals. I hope to be in debt to you all for a long time to come.

Finally, thank you to Frances & Bryce for sending us on the road with delicious food in our bellies. Whenever I think of Denver I will think of the mountains we climbed and the friends we climbed them with. Here’s to the friendships in our lives that make the Rockies look like molehills.

Turning 30 - "Am I Where I Expected Myself to Be?"

            30 is one of those milestone ages that makes us question every decision we’ve made in our lives.  Trapped inside our own heads we look at our regrets under a microscope, taking stock of the growth and decay of our insecurities.  30 forces us to be honest with ourselves because between all the excuses we’ve made over the years, the time has kept on ticking.  We finally ask ourselves: Am I where I expected myself to be at 30?

            I think most of us would say, “hell no! I expected to have a stable job, a significant other, and maybe even a house that would soon become a home.”  Turning 30 feels like a slap in the face to our youth and the mistakes we’ve made but in reality it’s a valuable signpost for the measure of our progress.  We need reality checks like 30 because otherwise we could go on making excuses while nobody listens.

            I personally stopped making excuses early, probably around 19 when I was academically suspended from my first university, SUNY Cortland.  Ironically enough, I still consider this mistake one of the best things that happened to me because it gave me a reality check that I very much needed.  For the next couple years, I proceeded to take time off from school, eventually enrolling back in a community college while taking on various jobs to identify my strengths and weaknesses.  I would later get accepted into an Ivy League institution only to turn them down and finish my undergraduate studies at the top of my class at CUNY Hunter in New York City.  The whole arc of those 11 years began with a reality check and now I’m taking stock of my choices.

            The only promise I made to myself by 30 was to become an internationally known poet.  Well, in November 2017, with the help of my fiancé, Heather, that became a reality when we published The Immeasurable Cookbook and sent copies to readers in Austria, Paraguay, and Portugal.  It was a high bar to set but I cleared it because I chose a good partner in Heather and always used writing as a platform to express my thoughts and channel my creativity. 

            Despite this achievement, the thing I’m most proud of at the age of 30 is my peace of mind.  Through my study of philosophy and my ten years of experience in hospitality I have recognized that mental health is our crown achievement given the complexity and perplexity of the human mind.  I’ve made most of my decisions from a rational disposition, but I’ve always consulted my conscience as a valuable litmus test for my happiness.  I believe that without our conscience, rationality can lead to cold, steely, logical conclusions; yet without our rationality, our emotions can steer us towards the volatile polarities in life.  My peace of mind comes from a drive to strike a balance, harkening to the doctrine of the mean from Aristotle and remembering that a happy life depends on a steady ship in rough waters.

            By 30 I have lived all around the United States, experienced love and heartbreak, success and failure, and the boring stuff in between.  I’m getting married in October 2018 to a partner who helps me stay focused on long term goals while I keep the ship steady.  With our eyes on the horizon we’re charting a course ready for a storm, yet carrying the reflection of the sunset in our eyes.  A reality check doesn’t have to be a bad thing as long as you realize you have to adjust your sails. 

Colorado Adventures That Make My Heart Smile

4.5.18 - Vital Root on Tennyson ~ 12 PM MT

We’re sitting at Vital Root after enjoying a well-crafted, fresh, lunch filled with flavor and crunch.  There’s a woman breast-feeding out in the open and it’s kind of hard for me to focus, but here we go.  Heather thinks that breast-feeding in public should be less stigmatized and a more common practice, and it does make sense in the same way that we should be more in tune with where our food comes from.  As we distance ourselves or create social stigmas around human practices that have gotten us to where we are as a society, we are very literally losing some of the community associated with our humanity.

The last three days have felt like a vacation in Colorado: on Monday Heather and I lounged in the Mt. Princeton Hot Springs outside of Buena Vista; on Tuesday Heather rode Limbo and I climbed at Earth Treks in Golden; and on Wednesday David Miller and I carved down the slopes at Keystone and smiled and laughed in our descent.  Each day contained moments of levity that are within a couple hours of our home in Arvada, providing us places of refuge and relaxation to panoramic summits and high speed descents with meandering roads and adventures in between. 

The common thread running through all of them was a sense of gratitude that continuously left our lips.  Heather and I were borderline tripping balls as we gazed to the sky in a creek side hot springs pool, thinking upon where we are both literally and psychologically.  The strong sunrays, the quickly drifting clouds and the smell of the fresh green pines combined with the sound of the constant trickle of the cold creek over the warm rocks lured our minds towards serenity.  The next day, clinking our glasses together at Kline’s Beer Hall after each of our endorphin sessions on horseback and climbing wall, respectively, made the pints go down that much easier.  On the chair lifts and on the slopes, Miller and I smiled and laughed, asked and answered, and thought, felt and shared stories.  When we plopped down into lounge chairs beneath the blinding high-noon sun we were billionaires, basking between snowcapped mountaintops gazing upon the best that the world has to offer.  There is luxury and then there is gratitude and appreciation – without the latter, the former is empty and broken, but without the former, the heart can still smile.

It’s weird to think about a person meaning more to you than your longest friends, but David Miller has achieved such status.  There is significance in the way he approaches conversations, welcoming the mundane and the magnanimous with an equal hand as if each holds equal importance.  In a paradoxical way there is wisdom in understanding the whole spectrum and listening to each wavelength as you try to hone in on someone’s frequency.  We all walk around with our own thoughts, suffering through our troughs and celebrating our crests, and it’s easy to forget that everyone around us has their own path but when you talk to Miller you feel like he’s listening in an attempt to sync up.  Being completely in concert with another’s wavelength is more than likely impossible, but that’s how I felt on the mountain with Miller – and that’s what happens when you listen to a song that resonates with you; or when you somehow spend an hour or two in front of a piece in a museum. What I’m trying to say is when you find someone who tries to sync up with your wavelength, don’t let them go, because they don’t come around that often, and human connection is invaluable. 

Wedding Photographers in NYC

3.2.18 - 5004 Cody Street ~ 1:05 AM MT

            Heather told me tonight that she really appreciated my partnership today.  She told me that she could count on me to tidy up the house, to research SEO stuff for Apollo Fields, and that trusting someone else to handle things isn’t easy for her.  Since the beginning of our relationship we’ve always trusted each other because we haven’t given each other a reason not to.  It’s wonderful that that reality is also seeping into the business partnership that we’re creating.

            I know that few people are lucky enough to find a significant other whom they can communicate with, work with, and even enjoy being with for a long period of time.  Often times it’s hard enough to even get along with yourself for awhile.  Yet here we are as a couple in pursuit of a creative endeavor that incorporates and celebrates the things that we are both best at individually.  There are even fewer people who can be part of something like that.

            As I explained it to several people at Oasis tonight, Heather and I’s partnership and eventual marriage was borne out of the recognition of a pattern of mutually beneficial decisions and actions.  To us, concepts like eternal love are irrational fantasies seated in the rationality of the human mind; pursuing them is akin to letting your conscience be commanded by a belief in heaven and hell—it allows imaginary ideas to take precedence over the human faculty of rationality.    

In the past three years Heather and I have taken countless trips, published a cookbook, moved across the country, adopted a Doberman from a sandwich shop, had our Jack Russell become paraplegic, acquired a horse, and fought and laughed in between.  Many things have stood in our way but none of them have stopped us.  Our relationship withstands the things that come our way because we know we control our actions and that we will be there for our partner when they get in their own way. 

            To say that, “we don’t fight” is a misnomer and an oversimplification—we hold different opinions all the time, but it’s a matter of choosing when and where to dig our feet into the mud.  It takes emotional will power to cede your pride in the name of the greater good of the relationship, but learning to govern your feelings in order to foster an atmosphere of trust, support, and honesty will always be worth it.  There are times when I or Heather knows that the arena we have chosen to fight in is a waste of time or that we were not meant to share this same battlefield and we’ve learned that that’s OK.  Our altercations are a matter of recognizing what works and what doesn’t, or what’s harmful and what’s helpful.  It’s less of a fight and more of a concerted effort at honest communication aimed at understanding.

            Through all of the fun and tears we strive to create love and act out of rationality and reason.  It’s less exciting than the love stories we’ve been told and sounds less sexy than the hyperbole of unoriginal wedding vows, but it’s the closest thing to being human that I can imagine.  If Heather and I love each other enough we will bring another human into a world where creativity, rationality, and reason are the concepts dangling above the crib, slowly spinning on a hand-stitched mobile as stubby, wrinkly fingers reach for the sky. Instead of pursuing imaginary fantasies we are writing our story one thoughtful camera click and pen stroke at a time.

Nihilism: The Teenager's Escape from Reality

3.27.18  - 5004 Cody Street ~ 9:10 AM MT

            I’m starting to write at 9 today, which is a step in the right direction.  Once I spend a few minutes or hours sucking at the teat of mindless information it’s difficult for my mind to focus and get back on track.  When I first wake up my mind may be groggy but it’s the most clear that it will be all day. 

            Yesterday I helped a friend, let’s call him Mark, paint a room and we talked about everything from nostalgic video games (Link’s Awakening for Gameboy) to what animal we’d want to be reincarnated as (some type of bird).  He talked about that he doesn’t have much time to do anything and the time that he does have he enjoys being by himself and gaming, proclaiming that he has “no responsibilities to anyone but himself.”  At the time it seemed very appealing, carrying an air of total freedom, but I can’t help but think that it’s ironically one of the reasons he’s depressed.  He often uses it as a rationalization for sleeping in until noon and he never applies himself.

            I remember when I used to sleep in that late and I’d feel crummy.  It was tough to feel good about myself when I wasn’t leaving the stamp of my uniqueness on anything on any given day.  Floating through life is fine and all, but at some point I thought, “this is how you wake up middle aged never really doing anything.”  Pleasure and leisure can only get you so far but fulfillment lies in a putting in a concerted effort at something that you don’t mind doing over and over again, improving upon it every time.  When you sleep through the morning and coast through the afternoon, the only thing you get in exchange is whatever you’re dreaming about. 

            Heather helps me by pulling my productivity towards her end of the spectrum because that’s her default.  It’s also why we’re good together: because we bring each other towards a happy equilibrium.  Too much of anything is detrimental, just take either Mark or Heather by themselves—unhappy and caught in a cyclical pattern of what they know and what they feel comfortable doing.  I could definitely use some work getting pulled to the side of productivity but I tend to think I hover more around the center than either of them. 

            Mark also lets his cynicism paralyze his action in the form of anti-capitalistic nihilism.  He’s not wrong—it’s just too much for a human mind to carry with it, especially if you’re going to exist within the capitalistic structure and enjoy some of the luxuries it provides.  Perhaps I’m too cut and dry or I’ve bought into the system as well, but when you hold beliefs as strong as him I think that you have to either separate entirely, removing yourself from participation in the system as much as possible; or you come to grips with the futility of overthrowing it, accept the benefits it awards you, and you try to combat it in the most productive way that you can as an unique individual.  I don’t think he believes in some widespread Marxist revolution to overthrow the owners of the means of production (I used to) but I don’t see any value in nihilism.  It’s like a teenagers way out of the existential crisis of capitalism.

            My argument against nihilism is also the same one why I don’t harbor negative feelings towards people most of the time—because they don’t provide anything useful to me.  When you do things in life that have no positive purpose you are essentially keeping your needle close to neutral, perhaps even tilting towards the negative side of things, and I believe life is more than that.  You don’t have to achieve greatness, you don’t have to get a PHD or discover something new; all you have to do is try to leave the unique imprint of yourself somewhere everyday (with exception to intentionally hurting others), and try to err on the side of positivity. 

The Existential Tug-of-War

3.21.18 - Various Locations ~ 1:41 PM -9:10 PM MT

            I just got out of TIPS training and despite the fact that the trainer was nice, I still think that the whole thing is a racket.  That being said, it was nice to clarify the accepted Colorado truths of hospitality: that you CAN serve someone without an ID and that the police CAN lie to you to entrap you.  The process was pretty painless on the whole.

            I followed it up with fries and a beer at Fate Brewing (highly recommend!) and proceeded to run five miles and climb for an hour at Earth Treks—my stomach felt somewhere between a washing machine and a college party—nonetheless, I powered through and managed to enjoy my calorie-burning.    

            I came home to eat the leftover Blue Pan Detroit-style-pizza (I say goddamn!) and watched a leaked video of Buffalo Bills wide receiver Zay Jones who was naked, trying to jump out of a 30th floor window.  

            Here comes the cliché, “athletes and celebrities are people too” that everyone says in unison when things like his happen. It’s sad that things have to come to this for us to remember the humanity of eachother.  I think the core takeaway of what happened with Zay is that mental health is not to be taken lightly, and that we have to be careful choosing the lens in which we see the world.  Who knows the way Zay has been looking through the glass but it’s clear that he’s hit a critical breaking point.  This is just a reminder that our mental health should always come first because the human mind is too powerful to be taken lightly.

            We don’t even know the extent of the capability of our brains yet we press forward with technology as if we can handle the perilous unknown that we are creating.  There will always be nostalgia for a simpler time but the time we find ourselves in is scarily precarious.  Our psyches are bombarded with information, temptation, and subversion almost every second of every day and we’re supposed to stay sane, confident, and working towards a worthy goal in life.  Not to mention that the information we’re being fed is intelligently crafted to manipulate or affect our very sensitive psyches.  Thus, it’s not a mystery when public figures meltdowns like this—the pressure for the average 21st century individual is enough—without the eyes of the world judging you 24/7.

            For most of us in the western world we lead relatively simple lives even though we long for more. Part of it is our culture of rampant consumerism and entertainment, but the other is that the human mind seems to long for acceptance, notoriety, and accolade.  We go to school, we find a job, and we hopefully find a partner and start a family and in between all of it time passes us by.  We wind up climbing into our death beds wondering where the time went watching the reel of our regrets on repeat.  I think that the human mind is confused, caught somewhere between the comfort of the simple and the ambition for innovation, getting yanked back and forth day-in-and-day-out in some sort of existential tug-of-war. 

                                              At least that’s how I feel sometimes.

            That’s why I focus on happiness in the now, assuring that Heather and I hash out our inner workings to the best of our abilities.  Our minds can be scary places and talking to others makes our own feel less alone.  Sharing intimate stories and thoughts reveals to the world that we are alike even though our insecurities tell us that we aren't.  Sometimes we need to silence the thoughts in our heads to let the words come from our lips to make us remember that we all suffer and that misery loves company. 

            Pain is inevitable in life, but the way we process and react to it, whether we share it or lock it up can make all the difference.  The lens in which we choose to view the world determines the reality before our eyes; let it be tinted with the courage to share the pain that stirs inside you: first for the benefit of yourself; and second for the benefit of mankind. 

Diversifying Your Set of Skills

2.23.18
            I don’t know if the fort will ever come down at this point, it’s getting cozier by the day. Aside from that, I’ve been running around the past couple days, attending interviews, sending out resumes and trying to stay disciplined to a minimum amount of words per day.
My newly found ambition all stemmed from a conversation I had with Heather the first day I
decided to start this glorified journal.

            For the past few months, I have been chasing full-time jobs like a drug addict chasing a high and each time I have gotten excited, thinking, “I’m going to get this one,” the job is pulled a little further, just out of reach. Heather has helped me see that this focus on one full-time job is too singular and because of that, the other things I devote my time to, i.e. writing, local politics, seem even more laborious. Rather than focusing on getting part-time work in all three fields I care about, I’ve been putting all my eggs in one basket, dividing my mind into a competition of my interests rather than developing each of them individually.

             Diversifying your career path is a skill that comes easy to Heather as she has been doing it since she was a teenager. For her, it made a lot of sense to develop photography alongside her equestrian training because she couldn’t see herself risking her body day-in- and-day-out for an entire career. Thus, she came across photography, which is now the main source of income—but she kindly reminds me that it wasn’t always this way

             At the beginning of Heather’s photography career, she was willing to work for free or for peanuts and accepted jobs that others in the industry did not want to take. It was difficult because she still needed to make a living wage, but she was willing to do what she had to do to in order to gain experience. Jim Carrey has a quote something along the lines of, “you can fail at something you don’t like, so why not try and fail at something you do like?” It would’ve been easier for Heather to stay as an equestrian, but she thought about her life 20 years from then and had deduced that while it may’ve been easier in the short term, it would’ve been crippling in the long run to rely on one source of income.  Ironically, failure for Heather meant limiting herself to one full-time position.

              Now as I chase several jobs in each of my respective fields I feel more whole, engaging in conversations that cover an array of my interests rather than constraining myself to one. As I commit further to the development of my writing, political, and hospitality careers I also envision it all under one unifying umbrella in the future that Heather had the foresight to see at a much younger age. Framing my future in the context of an attaining elusive single goal has been a paralyzing approach of mine for years, but thanks to Heather, I may just be breaking free. Instead of looking at what I need, I’ve begun to look at how I can develop my interests in the diversification of my time, personality, and ideally, the stability of my financial future.

Time is Empty

2.23.18 - 5004 Cody ~ 7:25 PM MT

            Sitting down to write twice in one day, wow!  Maybe Pressfield is making an impression on me.  As I joke, it’s kind of true.  His distinction of a professional and an amateur is incisively honest and accurate.  As an amateur writer, I dedicate small portions of my day (sometimes no time of the day!) to doing something I say I want to do for a living.  Pressfield also defends us writers as he says the most difficult thing to do is to just sit down and write.

            He explains that the amateur: takes things personally; expects epochs the size of Homer’s Odyssey to drop into their mind and ooze out of your fingertips in some perfect, opportune arrival of immense inspiration; and clings too much to the judgment of his/her work.  The professional for Pressfield: learns to separate themselves from their work, creating a thick skin, seating their criticisms in a space separate from their ego; has a regimen where they sit down everyday, rain or shine, inspiration or no inspiration and writes.  This is so that when a moment of real inspiration hits, the writer has been at it, honing their technique, to now where they can lay it down as it comes.  The amateur waits on inspiration to strike, the professional writes through it.

            It is very hard for me to keep at it, given my history of complacency and litany of instantaneous gratification and distraction that lay around every corner.  It is nearly impossible for me to stay focused when I have a phone that flickers every two seconds and a computer that grants me access to any piece of entertainment I can think of (all for free to boot).  Living in the 21st century enables most of us in the western world to live at a level of luxury never before seen my humans—we can essentially get anything delivered to our doorstep with the click of a button.  We live like kings!

            Yet we feel like serfs.  We feel like nothing is truly satisfying and we bury our discomfort deeper into the meaningless abyss of consumption.  We turn our attention to products and entertainment rather than inwards because the passive approach is easier.  In a country that is run by convenience there is nothing convenient about engaging with the unhappiness that lurks in your mind while you wait in the drive-thru line at McDonalds or skip the intro to continue your binge session on Netflix.  When the inconvenience of the complexity of our minds comes to the forefront we find a way to conveniently drown it out.  There is no time for self-reflection in a time of instantaneous satisfaction.  We feel like serfs even though we have the world at our fingertips.

              Even now I have an itch to go out, an itch to watch porn, an itch to throw a movie on and cook popcorn.  Pressfield would call these urges ‘resistance,’ and I suppose that it is.  The progress of technology has subverted our attention spans, decreasing the value of a moment down to a swipe of the screen.  Time itself changes meaning over time; when I was a kid the phrase was “time is money,” and perhaps that’s still true, but I would now say, “time is empty.” 

             Time has been reduced to the passing of it—I still don’t get how people can be bored.   When I say that time is empty I mean that we’d rather fill it up with the consumption of meaningless information than sit and watch the seconds pass like we’re back in grade school watching the clock, waiting for the bell to ring.  **UPDATE** just got back from watching meaningless videos for like an hour. Time travel is possible everyone, and I’m not talking getting black out drunk, I’m talking turning your mind off to passively spend time.

"We Are What We Repeatedly Do"

2.25.18 - Brittany’s House off Independence ~ 9:46 AM MT

            Coming back from an Internet black hole, 30 minutes later, I’m finally putting some work in.  Its really hard for me to focus when there is so much content to consume, making it really easy to divert my attention to passive activities.  I’m grateful to have Brittany and Mike’s house to take refuge, although I wish their fireplace worked. 

            The thought that’s been bumping around my head is to unify all that I’ve been thinking about since studying philosophy in a non-fiction work about living a meaningful life in the 21st century.  My immediate response to my own thought is: who are you to say how to live a meaningful life?  To which I respond, I studied philosophy, Aristotle intensively, and have meaningful interactions day-in-and-day-out.  If you are what you consistently do, then what does that make the average American?  A consumer: products, food, entertainment--that is what our culture is known for. 

            I used to think about dismantling the ideology of businesses, how ethics should be enforced onto ad agencies and mega-corporations because it’s not “right” to manipulate the psyches of the masses to make a quick buck.  A realization on that idea is that the inertia behind the consumerist exploitation of the American population is so great and monolithic that it’d be like an ant standing in front of a tank rather than a person in Tiannamen square.  A disruption of the system through bureaucratic means not only sounds like an unconquerable uphill battle, but an exercise in futility.

            Instead, focusing on the tenet of Aristotle, you are what you constantly do, in order to have a meaningful life you need to make meaningful decisions.  You need to exercise discipline in your consummatory choices, recognizing the need for pain, for silence, for the higher cost of quality products to live a more meaningful life.  Unless you’re willing to live a meaningless, surface-level life, in which case that’s fine for you to Snapchat your days away, Facebooking until the screen on your phone burns your retinas.

            Aristotle’s tenet, then, is a phrase meaning that life is a pattern of decision-making.  It doesn’t need to be framed in good or bad decisions, but rather healthy or unhealthy ones.  We do not need to invoke a 21st century code of morality to live better lives, all we need is some science.      

Unplugged Times

            When I opened up my eyes in the fort (yes, it’s still up) this morning, the sun scorched my retinas like a prolonged flash from a disposable camera.  It made me think of how far I’ve come from my hatred for the stream of sunlight that would find its way through the drawn curtains of my teenage years.  In those days, the only things that were worthwhile before noon were McDonalds’s breakfast and The Price is Right with Bob Barker (remember to spay and neuter your pets).

             After some reading in bed I took a stroll through the melting snow with Rumor, our Doberman pinscher who we rescued from a sandwich shop.  It always amuses me how other dog walkers switch to the other side of the road to pass because of her breed’s reputation—little do they know that Rumor is scared of cardboard boxes, paper towels, washing machines and anything that’s loud; not to mention that she lets our paraplegic Jack Russell, Riddle, maintain the alpha role in our house (I must admit that I do enjoy this misplaced, stereotype-induced appearance of intimidation because my tendency to smile at strangers doesn’t exactly strike fear into people’s hearts).  Taking walks like these, unplugged from the constant chatter of the Internet allows me to hone in on the trickle of the stream of mountain runoff, the honks of the distant geese, and the massive puddles that turn every sidewalk’s corner into mini ballets of pedestrian pirouettes. 

            Yet it’s still a struggle for me to leave the comfort of my couch, where I could be scrolling through the sea of infinite information and entertainment that lives in my phone, waiting, beckoning me to fall into yet another black hole of YouTube where after starting with one silly video I suddenly find myself, hours later, watching a clip of a cat putting on a bunny hat, leaving me wondering, “how the fuck did I get here?”  It’s nuts how easy it is to be captured by these cheap, goldfish-attention-span videos that sate our lazy, passive curiosities, but that’s a real 21st century, first-world problem—anything I want, including all day McDonalds breakfast and all of the old episodes of The Price is Right are just a couple of convenient clicks away.

            It’s unplugged times like walking through the snow with my dopey, intimidating Dobie that make me grateful for remembering the sound of a dialup modem coming through the receiver of our rotary phone as I try to hang up immediately, hoping not to inconvenience one of my older brothers by kicking them off one of their “super important” sessions on AIM in the basement.  Perhaps it’s just my version of “back in my day,” but I can’t help but think that this evolution of technology invading our psyches is a bit more intrusive and worrisome than watching Elvis thrust his hips on a television set or the 60’s movement being reduced to a brand of countercultural consumerism.  Perhaps we all want to be strong and intimidating but beneath it all we’re all just scared of paper towels and cardboard boxes like Rumor—either way, I’m just happy and grateful I can still muster the strength to shirk the comforts of convenience and enjoy the trickle of a creek once in awhile. 

Apollo Fields Wedding Photographers

3.12.18 - Bean Fosters – Golden, CO ~ 11:06 AM MT

It’s weird how a letter on a typewriter feels more real than a note typed into a word processor.  Something about the tangible ink slapped onto the page one neat character at a time that delivers finality to your words.  Typing on a typewriter forces you to arrange your thoughts in real time, creating a sense of emergency that nudges your mind to move forward rather than laterally. 

Once you organize the first few words of a sentence and you like them enough you put them down and you figure the rest out as you go.  Before you know it your fingers are splashing all over the keyboard and little tiny metallic pangs are echoing throughout the room until a delicate chime rings to delay the creative symphony for a few seconds. 

There is definitely something more present about typing on a typewriter.  On a computer with WiFi your mind is being torn to the sides, “come hang out in the periphery of the Internet where you won’t have to work so hard,” it calls to us.  But being lucid enough to arrange your thoughts with a focus where you can’t believe your fingers are actually moving with purposeful conviction feels like a submission to the magical creative element that eludes the amateur artist.  It’s funny that returning to a more primitive, real technology can trigger the magic that lives inside of us.

As I type this in Word Processor, I am constantly fumbling my thoughts, going back into my sentences and reworking them, never allowing my mind to uninhibitedly flow forward.  Real time editing grants me the godlike power to alter the creative process and assure that I don’t make any silly or clunky mistakes.  The problem with that is that it interferes with the free flowing creativity that is necessary to any worthy piece of work.  It would seem unnatural to see a painter go back over their work and erase a stroke of the brush.  When a painter dips their brush into a palate and splash it onto a canvas they mean it; when I write on a typewriter, plucking at the keys, I mean it. 

A real element is lost in the creative process when it lives in the electrons of a screen, separating our hands from our creation.  It is a similar transition in social media where we immerse ourselves in a world of appearances, a world that feels real, but isn’t.  It gives us this sense of partial familiarity because the importance of the real is lost in the robotic 1’s and 0’s of binary code. 

There’s nothing wrong with waiting for creativity to circle back around, sitting in discomfort as it orbits your mental grasp, just like there’s nothing wrong with admitting to something painful that’s happened in your life on social media.  But the electronic cursor that prods your mind, blinking in your face like a cruel mockery of your stagnant creativity is akin to the way that the world of positive appearances mocks your negative experiences.  A refusal to accept the real thrusts your existence into a world of appearances that seeks only to satisfy surface level gratification, ignoring the deeper concepts of our lives that wind up plaguing our minds into a cycle of consumptive passivity.

Allow pain to enter your mind and let seeds of creativity take on some water before you abandon their growth.  Simpler times seem nostalgic because our minds were more engaged, more responsible when we didn’t have crutches to carry us along in our lives.  It’s hard to argue for the welcoming of pain into one’s life, so think of it as an invitation to the real; a return to experience rather than appearance, because experience is where we derive meaning from and in the end we all want to lead meaningful lives.  Don’t let the electrons mock you into a passive life.  Move forward, not laterally. 

Happiness: A Focused Effort on Self-Improvement

It took me awhile to get in front of a keyboard today.  I'm still putting up the same obstacles between me and my writing.  A blank page forces me to come face-to-face with my potential and I sit and stare, like I'm waiting for a divine strike of inspiration. The thought of perfection paralyzes my hands and mind. The reality is that I just have to endure the pain if I want to be a professional writer.

I watched an interview with David Foster Wallace in an attempt to lure inspiration from the depths of my consciousness.  It still saddens me that a man with so much intellect and insight into the human condition took his life.  It saddens me to think about what else he could've contributed to the progress of humanity.

In the interview they spoke about the allure of drugs and entertainment and how they both provided a certain escape.  DFW linked these concepts to the ideology of self-gratification that pervades U.S. culture, where this hedonistic pleasure-center is constantly fed.  He touched on class as part of the problem as it is the privileged graduates holding Masters and Bachelors degrees that have the ability and affinity to engage in higher culture, while the uneducated are trapped in a cyclical poverty.  Let's face it - the endurance and focus necessary to read stuff like Infinite Jest is going to lose 9 times out of 10, even in educated circles.  The trick seems to be to expedite the transmission of self-developmental content in an engaging, inexpensive, and for lack of a better word, subversive manner.

A fulfilling life requires effort, discipline and thoughtful action, which are all products of self-development.  The problem is that mainstream media undermines all of these.  The passive satisfaction of our thoughts and desires renders the active life a laborious endeavor, devaluing the fulfilling process of work in favor of comfortable stupefaction.  Work has been an adversary to humans for millennia, but its stigma has grown exponentially since the dawn of the industrial age.

What would the argument for a life of fulfillment rather than comfort look like?  The Aristotelean aim was towards a happiness made possible by virtues like temperance, courage, friendship, honesty, etc.  The world we live in now subverts these virtues in the name of capitalistic enterprise; which means that our current system of values stands in opposition to our actualization of happiness and fulfillment.  We are given instruments enabling passive unhappiness and we are told that we are lazy, ungrateful leeches on the society.  MAYBE if we were given empowering tools rather than those determined by economic and capitalistic ends, we would be a more effective generation!  

This mostly sounds like entitled wishful thinking, but it's important for me to hash out these concepts.  Self-development is critical for lasting happiness and we live in a culture that undermines it around every corner.  Happiness and fulfillment require effort, discipline, and thoughtful action, which means that if want better lives, we need to make a concerted, focused effort on improving ourselves.

It is Human to Feel

2.23.18 - Bookbar ~ 3:21 PM

            Lately I’ve been having a conversation with myself about my own potential.  Perhaps its listening to Steven Pressfield’s book, The War of Art, perhaps its serendipitous timing given my current “occupational struggles.”  Why don’t I just say “I can’t get a fucking job,” rather than dress it up like some piece of watered down reality?  I guess using phrases like these is a way for our brains to navigate the pain we feel when we have to accept a harsh truth of our reality. 

            My  current reality is that I am afraid of my own potential.  I’m afraid of putting myself out there, of putting a price tag on my work.  By remaining judgment free of others, I have carved out a place for myself to be safe from judgment as well, because I guess I’d rather live in comfortable anonymity than recognized splendor—or worse—recognized failure.  I’ve rationalized to myself for years that the reason I haven’t committed to a certain work is that I have always found a reason not to do it, a caveat that renders the effort futile.  But I’m just coming to grips with the fact that if I want to be a successful writer I need to: 

a) write (duh) and;

b) Not be afraid to approach my own potential.

            Even as I sit at Bookbar on Tennyson, surrounded by the clinks and clanks of glassware, I question my happiness with getting the job at Oasis Brewery.  It's another job that doesn’t push my limits, it's an atmosphere where I'm already comfortable-- it's safe.  By my failure to dedicate myself to my work, my tendency to take what's safe, and my contentedness with what I have: I have paved myself a history of mediocrity.   Growing pains are part of the deal when you enter a new industry or part of your life and I have spent my entire adulthood avoiding difficulty.  The only time I really reached for something was bartending at Henry’s Restaurant in NYC and I achieved it and quickly became complacent.  Even there, I wasn’t really pushing myself to master a craft. 

            The only thing I’ve exercised a great deal of self-control and awareness is in understanding social interactions.  As a friendly face, I have honed the ability to make people feel comfortable and welcome to say that which makes them vulnerable.  I’ve done this with a combination of eye contact and knowledge that we’re all insecure and unsure of ourselves, and I’m just willing to be the first one to admit it in a group.  When someone is overly sure of themselves it strikes me as arrogant, and I’d rather be vulnerable than overconfident.  That’s why I’m excited to open Apollo Fields with Heather.  I know I have the ability to make all of our guests comfortable and I know Heather will execute the production side of things or die trying.  I am so lucky to have found a partner so rational and understanding. 

            Back to the conversation on my potential -- I have learned that my biggest asset in writing is my power of description.  That I can transport the reader to a place of my creation and I can have fun doing it.

           All around me BookBar is buzzing with the comfortable speed of a café on a Saturday afternoon.  The patrons around me pluck away at their computers, while people seated on leather couches laugh in the background.  Money is exchanged over the counter and “have-a-nice-days” are cheerily spoke through the barista's lips.  There’s a comfort to cafés that I wish could plop in my living room, where people talk and jest in casual business.  I didn’t think about it, but you rarely find tie-wearing businessmen conducting conversations in cafés, probably because they mean business and its too important to be said over a coffee table.  Keep an eye out for them - they tend to seem out of place. 

            But here I sit, happily plucking away, a letter at a time from my worried consciousness, conjuring up sentences from seemingly nowhere.  They say that energy is neither created nor destroyed but where does creative energy come from?  Logic says that if it isn’t created, then it must live dormant in each of us until we call it forth to our mouths or fingertips.  A reassuring thought except for the creative individual during writer’s block-- “I have it in me somewhere, it has to be here!” like they're looking for a pair of lost keys stuck between couch cushions.  What am I writing anyway?  Or more accurately, why?

            I like to investigate the human condition, getting at why we behave the way we do in social settings and how we can better understand one another.  I like (not always) to be honest with myself, engaging in these wacky conversations because running away from them makes me feel like shit.  It makes me feel like the way I used to when I would lie to avoid my harsh truths of reality.  The way of life that really came to a head in my first semester at SUNY Cortland where I avoided my problems altogether.  Everyday I woke in dread of the problems I’ve swept under the carpet the night before; and every night I went to sleep in a cannabis-induced shame.  It takes courage to have these conversations but the alternative is a tepid reality laced with indifference, envy, and personal stagnation. 

It is human to feel—to ignore this is to ignore human life itself.