overheard from my office earlier today.

"Hey, you wanna go get sushi?"
"Dude. I eat, like, cheese sticks."

feeling nostalgic.

Do you remember going to see THE OMEN remake the night it came out, driving around the parking lot, hearing someone blasting Iron Maiden's "Number of the beast" and laughing, out loud and at length, because we both loved that song and it was June 6, 2006, and I was done undergrad and we still had plans to maybe take over the world together if we didn't end up resenting each other first. but that's all changed now and you've got a kid and I'm still in school and we talked on the phone the other day and you said you're still feeling anxious but the depression is getting worse, and all i can think is, I told you so. I told you to deal with these things and I tried to help you. but more than anything, you taught me that I can't help anyone and no one wants to be saved by anyone other than themselves. That's our legacy, just the lessons I learned and faded memories for an us that doesn't exist anymore, maybe never did in the first place.

real talk

I miss my brother a lot. also i am drunk

your mouth my mouth our mouth

Tonight I sat in a chair and listened listened listened while people talked talked talked for three hours and there was nothing else for it so i listened while they talked some more. I imagined their words streaming out of their mouths in a stream and the words converged, merged, fed like rivers into the ocean and i was struck dumbfounded. Therapy is not a science so that means its an art, but there is no way to portray it in a visual sense so it'll never hang in a gallery. Perhaps one day when I'm famous (joke) I'll get a group of patients together and have an installation at a museum where we'll hold therapy in a public place and not a white-walled office (our frame, or canvas, or whatever) and people can sip martinis and smoke cloves and pay us lots and lots of money, but for now, it's confined to clinics. I listened and listened and listened and wished with all my heart that i could somehow see the soundwaves coming from their mouths, or that humans could hear in color, or something, ANYTHING to let me know that what i am creating will last.

Now I'm in my room smoking in the dark and watching the smoke congregate in the corners of my high ceilings and the smoke is pouring out of my mouth and it's no different than their words except it hangs around a little while longer. does this make sense to anyone but me.

grossly underqualified

One of the hardest aspects of counseling is that you can't just blurt out the first thing that comes to mind when a person tells you something. Last night in group, a consumer shared a traumatic experience from his/her childhood. I, being a clinician, asked the consumer if the consumer had ever been in intensive therapy, to properly process the emotions and issues attached to this trauma. Consumer states that consumer has been in therapy, once, and the therapist said, "Oh, you'll get over all this stuff in time" and just generally treated the situations (which is to say, the devastating events that effect the consumer's life in every way imaginable) as a stage, something that someone gets through. Well, yes, OK, that's true; most of the trauma from a person's life can be dealt with. But it can take years for a person to get there, and that one time in a therapist's office was enough for this particular consumer to make the decision to never go back.

A peer from the group responded to what I said, and stated, "Fuck the therapy, fuck the counseling, fuck 12 Stepping. You can do that for years, and what'll you get out of it? Nothing. You need to learn to forgive, and only church is going to give you that".

Now, my initial reaction was to tell the consumers that this is bullshit, and that any clergy member who was presented with the types of issues that this person is going through would direct the person to a therapist, because any clergy member knows that some things need to be handled in a clinical setting. My initial reaction was also to tell this person that religions are all phony and were created from hatred and continue to perpetuate generation after generation of hatred, all in the name of love. And also to tell them that god is a lie and that nothing they're really going through is happening anyway. And that I think drugs are OK in the context of controlled intake and that legalizing all narcotics, every single one, would solve a lot of this country's financial, social, racial, and legal problems.

But I can't say that. I can't say that because we're not friends and we are not having a conversation, and I think that's what most people don't realize about therapy. It's a relationship unlike any you'll experience elsewhere in life. Even if I were to share all of my problems with a priest, I wouldn't trust him to not tell anyone else the second we get out of the confessional booth. A therapist, on the other hand, has actual, physical accrediting and legal bodies to answer to, and that should be enough to ensure confidentiality and trust. But this consumer had a shitty experience with a shitty therapist, and that colored every experience and opinion of therapy that the consumer will hold, and then someone else goes and tells them that counseling won't work and only church will save you and the idea is reinforced in the person's mind.

The incident left kind of a bad taste in my mouth, but I couldn't relate that to the group. I just had to internalize it and process it myself, and I realized that I was doing a lot of inserting my own opinion into the mix, my personal opinions on religion and therapy, and that's not allowed. I don't give advice, I don't state my opinion, except when asked to, and I am not your friend. And I'm way too self-aware to know that every person's subjective experience determines how they interpret the world, and so for me therapy works and church doesn't and for other people the exact opposite is true and we're both OK. But it's hard not to say what I'm thinking, and even harder not to say what I'm feeling. And that's the reality of this work. Maybe the consumer could talk to a priest about what happened and that'd make it all better. I don't know.

Here's what I do know:

1. The consumer saw a shitty therapist who gave pat answers to a serious incident that had long-lasting repercussions in my consumer's life. The consumer saw this shitty therapist because the consumer has shitty health insurance provided by the state that only allows people to see shitty therapists in shitty, over-crowded, over-worked offices in the shittiest parts of the city. Clinicians get their licenses and flee from these shitty offices to open private practices in nicer parts of the city, and they accept only private insurances and they counsel housewives about boredom and stress and prescribe tons of medications and MAKE A KILLING. Here's the promise that I made myself while driving home last night, thinking about all of this: when I get my MSW and my license and I set up my private practice, I will continue to take low income consumers and provide them with quality counseling on a sliding scale basis, and I will market my practice to people who believe in the therapeutic process as much as I do, and if i don't make ends meet, oh well, at least I tried. There is no reason for every single person who wants therapy to not be provided with the highest quality experience possible, regardless of income (which naturally goes hand in hand with race). The most highly-trained, best-equipped counselors should not head for the suburbs, they should continue to help the people who truly need it and want it.

2. The counseling relationship ultimately leads to a power differential. I am not allowed to speak my mind or state my opinion. I am also the focal point of the group, the person that consumers turn to when conversation sputters out and the big, scary Silence sets in. I'm expected to always have an answer, or advice, and the truth is, I don't have any answers, and like I said before, I don't give advice. Perhaps evolutionary therapy has a place for totally honest communication between therapist and consumer? Perhaps there is a place for opinion from the therapist, and also the recognition that the therapist is just a person, not some authority figure granted with powers that you don't have.

3. I am a lucky person to be doing the job I'm doing, getting the experience that I am, and I'm also grossly under-qualified. Shhh!

camera

(Last week I made a promise to myself to start working on my screenplays every weekday. That lasted three days. Now I'm expanding my definition of workweek writing to include this blog, because I think it is important to write each day and to begin to think of writing as a "job" of sorts, even if I'm not getting paid for it yet. the effort to write each day is what's important and i don't think it matters so much whether the writing is on here or towards my screenplay or some other project entirely. So this is all part of an effort to just write as much as I possibly can, like I used to.)

This weekend I stood on a short stone pier at the beach where I spent most of my summers growing up. I didn't go too far out at first, because I am a neurotic person. The thought of stepping too far out on the pier scared me, brought about thoughts of mortality and anxiety and the things that I usually think about, but which seem intensified when facing raging oceans and breaking waves and unforgiving rocks. There was a small tower at the end of the pier, sending out a loud, beeping signal every couple of minutes. I stared at the tower and thought about walking up to it but decided against it. Because I'm neurotic. You know this.

I thought about the poems that I'd read on the beach and considered why it is that I am so afraid. Fear seems to run my life, not to mention in my family; fear of people and places and the unknown and death and everything else. There were quiet Asian families fishing off the side of the pier, and I thought about when I was younger, standing in this exact spot late at night with my father, and we were fishing then, too. I caught an eel, but in my 5 or 6 year old world, eels didn't exist. I'd never heard of them. So my initial reaction was to shout, "It's a sea monster!" My dad evaluated the creature and informed me that it wasn't a sea monster, just an eel. I felt silly asking what an eel is, and I'm sure he felt sillier when he just mumbled a response. "Oh, it's a fish, or...something?"

The ocean holds untold stories, presents the vacationer with new worlds that exist just below the surface. I got over my fear of the ocean early on and have loved the water ever since. But I'm always aware that the ocean is a mystery, and not really meant to house human beings. It is this awareness that colors my every experience. I am aware that it is not just the ocean that isn't meant to be home to humans, but this planet as a whole. We are aliens, or perhaps just vacationers enjoying a place that isn't ours, can't be ours. This planet belongs to the universe, and the universe belongs to no one, least of all us. The universe doesn't even belong to itself, because the very idea of "belonging" is a man-made construct. Property and ownership doesn't exist in nature. We divide up land and we also divide up stimuli received in our brain and label it to make sense of it. And you can take this line of thought further and further until you realize that our every perception is the result of some degree of measurement and interpretation. We are not really existing, just perceiving, and when the brain dies, show's over, folks, drive safe.

I stood at the end of that pier and I smoked a cigarette and I got my camera and just filmed things naturally occurring; a couple of boats drifting through the frame, waves breaking, the tower sounding its signal every minute or so. I went all the way to the end of the pier, fear be damned, and it was wet and slippery but I didn't fall in. I walked back from the pier and found my friend and my love but I was distant the rest of the weekend, as I tend to be, just stuck in my own head and not even sure of what's going on. I remembered when I first got my camera, I googled directions on how to clean the lens because I wasn't sure. A photographer had an online guide to cleaning lenses and stated that oftentimes amateur photographers will not shoot near water or sand or any other potentially camera-harming environments due to not wanting to damage their equipment. The author of the page stated that this results in a lot of great shots never being taken. The author encouraged the amateur photographer to seek out these locales and to take pictures, and if your equipment gets wet, fuck it, buy another. You'll always have the photos that you took, and they could live on beyond the camera, beyond the photographer, beyond the entire history of the universe. I imagine emailing myself a copy of the footage that I shot and that email leaving beamed to a satellite high above the earth, and then being shot back to earth, and there's a digital footprint left there. The digitized information exists between the earth and the satellite and it could exist forever, waiting to be picked up by a receiver anywhere in any point in time. This is comforting to me. And it occurs to me that this is what filmmaking can provide. It can encourage me to step out to the end of the pier, you're not going to fall in if you're careful and surefooted. The camera goes to places that I wouldn't otherwise consider going, but then when I do, it's not as bad as I thought it may be. And you receive beautiful images and they're captured forever and this is what it's all about.

Flirtations with Racism

1. Today I was giving this dude I work with (similar to me; white, glasses, facial hair, likes punk rock and metal) a ride and when we got into my car i was shocked to see that the music playing was Public Enemy's It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold us back. I had an instant moment where i freaked out and was like, did I do too much self-disclosure to a co-worker. does he think that i am secretly a black militant, or perhaps a Muslim? I hesitated to turn the music off instantly, and that would be the source of my next freak out. It didn't matter what I was playing; like I said, he was similar to me, culturally and also in terms of pop cultural frames of reference, so that meant he was down with the PE(" now every single bitch wanna see me"). But then I worried that my initial urge to turn the music off revealed the truly racist person that I am. Sure, my brain said inside my head, you'll listen to hip-hop in my car when you're alone, but bring another white person into the mix and you switch to bland jangly indie pop. And then I worried that my initial impulse to switch the music stemmed from my unconsciously thinking that because he is white, he must hate rap, thus making me and him both racist. this is the way my mind works. In the end, I played the first five tracks and switched it. That seemed safe. So am i racist or what?

2. I'm in the car with a black consumer at work, and i am just randomly flipping through radio stations. I land on a lil wayne track that i like but don't know the words to, so i can't like rap along or anything, so my participation seems perhaps like a stupid white liberal nod to solidarity (again, not saying there is any reason to interpret these events as I have; this is my purely subjective experience, and probably no one thinks I'm racist, and probably I'm not (though actually writing this sentence made me think that, yes, i am racist), so feel free to read this shit for entertainment purposes. I am just a neurotic, self-doubting, everything-else-doubting bro, yknow) and then I go to change the station, hesitate, and then fuck! actually do change it, and then I of course instantly worry that my changing the station revealed my true racist self, earlier when you were both singing along to the song, he was loving you, and then you changed the fucking station. Might as well join the KKK, you fucking RACIST. That's what i heard in my mind. And this is what I am stressing out about, all the time; nothing. And my work has taught me that ultimately most people spend a vast amount of their time freaking out about nothing, and I'm no different, so stop fucking freaking out about nonsense. But once I acknowledge that I'm freaking out about, and then I start to worry that I freak out over nothing, and then before I know it I am freaking out about how I am freaking out about nothing (and even this simple acknowledgment of my freaking out is proof that I know its senseless, but i'm still doing it in the moment). And this is what I love about humans, ultimately: our ability to contradict ourselves. Not every species of animal can do that. our ability to hold two positions in direct opposition to each other, and to argue them both, is an extension of our basic ability to feel conflicting emotions about ourselves, and the world around us. You might not know it but this is a pretty FUCKING AWESOME aspect of humanity and I urge you to start doubting everything, including my telling you how FUCKING AWESOME skepticism is. I am determined to just dive into the gray areas and doubt everything and then start to believe it all and believe none of it all in reaction to the believing and it's beautiful. So what i hope to catalogue here in a series of vignettes about my anxieties about my own racist tendencies. I'll start by stating that I do not believe I am a racist, at all, because I understand race in terms of biological and cultural roots and think that we the only differences that exist between us are purely man-made constructs, and a basic misunderstanding of evolution and biology in general. But maybe I'll feel differently about all this by the time I'm done. (I will never be done)

DR. REPP (v.o.): All culture and art and godheads and societies are attempts to make something permanent out of life, which is just an accident and an illusion, anyway. We strive, and we worry about it, and we want something, oh lord, something, please, solid in our lives. And then we die and all of time exists in a split second and we never even accept or learn to enjoy how short everything is. How this all could’ve just as easily not happened. We take existence for granted and talk of destiny and fate but the truth? This all could’ve just as easily not happened. And it probably didn’t anyway.

to be mailed with the hair from my mustache that sticks up

Orlando looked nine feet tall from my place behind the desk. I had been working the job for almost a year but I wasn’t really ready for this. My supervisor is in the room with us, trying to talk to him. His words are tangential, disjointed. In the business we would say that he is “responding to internal stimuli”. He tells us that there is a man in the streets who wants to murder him and he’ll have to do something about it. My supervisor asks why and Orlando tells him it’s because of a girl. “Have you been with this girl?” my supervisor asks. “I smashed it once,” he responds, and my supervisor (brunette, young, from the suburbs) just nods her head and I try to stifle a laugh. A psychiatrist comes into the room and that’s when Orlando leaves. Earlier, when it was just he and I, he stared at me and told me about Iraq. “When I close my eyes all I see are the letters K-I-L-L”. The cops pick him up a few days later and he’s in the hospital.

evolutionary therapy: I

"Animals in order to survive have had to be protected by fear-responses, in relation not only to other animals but to nature itself. They had to see the real relationship of their limited powers to the dangerous world in which they were immersed. Reality and fear go together naturally. As the human infant is in an even more exposed and helpless situation, it is foolish to think the fear response would have disappeared in such a weak and highly sensitive species. It is more reasonable to think that it was instead heightened, as some of the early Darwinians thought: early men who were most afraid were those who were most realistic about their situation in nature, and they passed on to their offspring a realism that had a high survival value."
--Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

Yes, they did indeed pass on to their offspring a realism (that is, the fear response, which I'm gonna call the death urge because this is supposed to be a horror movie blog, after all), and since the men who developed this sense of anxiety about the world would have lived longer than those without it, he would have produced more and more offspring. The death urge would have been naturally selected for and passed on to future generations via genetic information.

Becker concludes thusly: "The result was the emergence of man as we know him: a hyperanxious animal who constantly invents reasons for anxiety even where there are none." I said something very similiar to a very pretty young girl while we sat on the floor on Valentine's Day, but in Becker's quote, I believe that I have found the crux of the idea that I have felt germinating inside me for the past couple of years. I have wanted to be a therapist, but it is becoming increasingly harder for me to reconcile the reality of how most of the people in the mental health field think. They are not scientifically inclined, and it has hurt the development of empirical data to back up most of the claims that the field makes about how it rehabilitates people. There is always a push to legitimize the social sciences, but mental health has been lagging, lagging due to generations of scholars perpetuating Freudian non-sense, hypnotherapy, Christian-based counseling, and the like.

But here, it seems, lies the roots of the idea that I am calling evolutionary therapy. This could become my life's work, I think, and it's based upon a simple premise. All mental disorders (calling them mental illnesses is a misnomer) are rooted in the fear of death, a very real, biological sense of mortality which is unique to humans. The death urge has helped humans to increase their numbers and ensure the ongoing survival of the species, but it has also rooted in us an innate, genetic anxiety. Therapy can help to alleviate this anxiety, but first it must take aim at the ways that humans have naturally selected for the death urge, and the ways that we can healthily deal with it. This involves educating people on biology and the evolutionary roots, of their fears, depressions, anxieties, and psychotic behaviors which have been misunderstood and allowed to take control over their lives. Humans need science and evolutionary theory in order to ensure the continuation of the species. I do not know if this is a new theory, but there has never been a scholarly article written which utilizes the term 'evolutionary therapy'. This may not be new, and it may not even be novel, but it is a beginning of my academic pursuits and, I hope, will offer an alternative to the soft, touchy-feeliness which therapy is often associated. Like the films that I will make because they are the types of movies that I want to see, I am going to develop a new model of social work practice, because I cannot exist and work with the existing one.

uh

I just found a file on my computer, a text file that I created on 3/2/2008. I do not recall creating this file. I don't remember writing anything. When I opened it, it was a Word Works document consisting of a single sentence, four words:

MARS IS EARTH'S NIGHTMARE

THE GHOST OF THE COMPUTER

I have reached a point in my purging where I know that it is entirely possible to adopt a perspective merely because it is interesting to do so. There is no way to quantify belief. One can say that he believes in god, and we have not yet developed a physical way of observing that one actually does believe in god, in a material way. We have neurological scanning technology that can visualize the chemical processes at work, but all they tell us is that the individual is experiencing the act of belief. I want my brain to be a clearinghouse for ideas, a sacred ground where all ideas and perspectives are considered equally. My eventual neurological scans will reveal religious beliefs, I suppose. It is quite rational to believe in god despite a lack of physical evidence to support the case. Belief is a conscious choice, a selection of an emotional process over a rational one, and it is arrived at via reason. I will explore all avenues of human thought and expression and life, adopting any belief system as I see fit, believing none, believing all.

Once mankind has accepted that the thing we have chosen to call the soul is really nothing more than our personalities or our collected intelligences, then human thought and discourse can get truly interesting. If we are willing to stake a belief in a human soul, then, why are we not willing to take the same leap to inquire as to the nature of the machine’s soul? It's just as immaterial as the human soul and the odds are about the same of proving its existence. What does an appliance feel? Does a computer have dreams? (See Douglas Coupland’s Microserfs wherein the protagonist tries to create a subconscious for his computer by creating a random folder and interesting random text files of information. What else is the human subconscious but all the information we filter through our brains, all of the clutter that we don’t know what to do with? A computer’s subconscious is more relevant than any theory of a human subconscious, anyway, because we can at least point to an actual folder that is the machine’s subconscious.)

Further food for thought: computer software is dependent upon line after line of binary code, endless sequences of data which inform the technology’s function and usage. It can only do what it is programmed to do. Well. Sounds similar to human coding, DNA, genetics, right? What if human begins are nothing more than the genetic equivalent of a player piano, acting out some predestined, scripted existence? Perhaps our entire lives are already written out in a long strand of genetic coding? More to the point, if humans are willing to believe that we have a soul despite the absence of any tangible evidence to justify our having this belief, then we should be just as ready to believe that our computers have souls, too, and perhaps our houses are haunted by the ghosts of our discarded toys, washing machines, microwaves, and television sets. This will be a key to the initial work that I will produce over the next couple of years, where one realizes that belief in nothing is ultimately belief in everything, since saying that we are all wrong and all explanations for the existence of life are meaningless and lacking is also saying that all explanations are valid and you can freely pick and choose from any existing belief systems, and even create new ones. Nothing is everything and we’re all right because we’re all wrong.

When you open yourself up to the possibility of the ghost of the computer, then you open yourself up to the possibility that artificial intelligence is just as valid as human intelligence. Digital is just as valid as analog, a point that digital filmmaking, which will be the medium through which I express myself until I can afford others, must ultimately make due to the fact that it will be created through digital (that is, pixilated) processes. What we must point out is that digital information is nothing more than a tangible expression of the stuff of the universe; cells and colored light. What we perceive in a film is no less relevant than the stimuli that we perceive in our everyday lives. This is the path to truth, the only way the human line of thought can continue. This leads us to the acceptance that science and religion are really the same things, just ways of explaining the universe, and ultimately are all part of the all-encompassing continuum of human expression and feeling and evolved behaviors. Science is the rational side of life, the order-seeking side, the 1s and 0s binary code of life, while religion points to the supernatural, the part of the human mind that wants to tear structure and logic asunder. Once we see that science/religion, digital/analog are really the exact same thing, we free ourselves to the possibility of anything, literally everything being possible. The ghost of the computer becomes real. So too does the soul of the appliance.

I stood beneath a tree today with my brother and we talked about how small the tree used to be when we were younger. We looked at its branches and how long they stretched now, and stared at the roots in awe. They too reached out from the base of the tree, like a child becoming an adolescent becoming an adult, moving out into the world, finding out what how it processes and perceives the world. And then I thought about chopping the tree down, and how I could never do that, and how even if I were to take an axe to the thing, maybe the stump that was left in the ground as a reminder of the tree's brilliance would go on existing for thousands of years. The basic matter of the tree would remain in existence into infinity, and so maybe the tree itself would, too. And this lead to me considering the minute, sub-atomic ways in which we are only now learning that the human species receives and processes information, and that in turn forced me to consider that maybe, perhaps, in some way, after the human brain ceases functioning and we die, maybe we still continue taking in stimuli and processing it. It is an extremely biased, anti-intellectual stance to say that the human brain can detect and process every bit of information we receive from every dimension of reality. Maybe the remotest parts of our being, the very smallest pieces of genetic material we consist of, goes on into eternity. Maybe we all get to live forever in ways we never even came close to dreaming were possible and our every anxiety about death and destruction is wholly unfounded. Maybe (probably) we are all wrong about reality and the truth is something that we could never even hope to conceive of (yet). Regardless, it occurs to me that the only way to obtain this knowledge is through science. Religion is static, the most conservative, concrete way of thinking possible, and it is nearing irrelevance. To me, anyway.