In 24 hours I'll be on a plane headed to Singapore. 18 hour flight, a day in Singapore, and then at night another long ass flight to Australia. My last post for awhile. Everything's going great; excited for the trip, good response to my latest treatments. I may even get a chance to see Mary, the Irish girl I went out with for five years. She's relocated to Australia happily and man I hope to get to see her. The only thing I'm worried about is I wasn't able to find someone to feed the stray cat who lives in my backyard and has sort of become my cat. She's very self sufficient, but she's gone from being scared of me to such an extent I thought she was feral, to putting her paws on me whenever I go outside and begging for pets and cuddling next to me. I hope she's ok and remembers me when I get back. Be well, Caids. I give you permission to eat our squirrel friends if need be. Fucking circle of life, you know?

(I tried to change her unfortunate name given to her as a joke but it's all she responds to)
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I amost forgot: this is for the Decemberists fans.

On March 20th, the day after my birthday, the Decemberists DVD, A Practical Handbook is finally released after working on it for two and a half years.



I think my favorite thing about the entire process is that I got to make something with Carson Ellis doing the artwork for it. That gives me a really pleasant feeling in my belly.

It all started unintentionally. I started as just a fan of the band, turned onto them by a girl when she came to visit me for a few days and she kept listening to 'Red Right Ankle'. I was working at the time at Dreamworks Animation of all places. It was post film school the first job that randomly came up after working in a video store for a year. I even worked in that video store for a little after I quit Dreamworks, such is the life of a film school graduate. That job was everything horrible they tell you about the corporate environment with the added pressure of self important people strangling each other to make family fun entertainment. It was a lot like The Office, even including ill informed office romance and bad pranks and the same existential dread and comedy. I spent, in fact, the first day after I quit watching the entire British series on DVD wincing.

During that time I'd caught the Decemberists on tour, at the Great American Music Hall and this is exactly what happened. I went alone, was sitting next to a redhead and during one of their songs I started singing along. She kinda giggled at me. I told her I'm sorry I love this band. She said so do I. And that's when I met Carson. Afterwards I met the rest of the band and they heard I'd done some live shooting and asked if I could come back for night two and film. I did. Unfortunately I can't ever show that amazing footage because in a guitar / accordion solo duel Jenny and Funk covered a lot of famous expensive songs.

A little while later I was doing nothing, going nowhere, figuring out what to do with my life and they asked me to come up and film them recording Picaresque. I dropped everything and drove from San Francisco to Portland. As seen in the documentary it was a good deal of insane fun. Friends and family dropped by continually, becoming part of the album. It was one of the best summers I'd ever had and suddenly I felt I had a new vocation. There are people who like shooting sports, nature, etc. I just really dig shooting bands. Here we are years later and they remain the one band who I love working for more than all others and people I'd truly call friends. The videos I've made for them are the least selfish things I've ever made. I want them to be for and of them. They're just great people I'd do anything for.

Things have changed for us now; I get a lot more chances to work but don't have that personal connection I do with these other bands that I did back in those days when we were working so small. It's neither better nor worse, just very different. Things have changed for them, too, for certain. But they remain the same great people. That's incredibly rare and is a testament to their character. We'll never probably have an atmosphere and time in our lives like that again, but we have the memory of it and I'm excited we get to share it, too.

So anyway I promised to share something to the Decemberists fans, the treatment for 16 military wives written in one hour five days before we shot while I was recuperating having just come out of hospital. You'll see some things that are different, but this is how naive I was back in the day: I even wrote it in script format. Due to my headache problems I had to direct the video on a cocktail of medications one of which was experimental. I'm sure people have been on drugs before while directing, but not these ones. I don't think I was ever proud enough of this video, because I see so many problems in it, but looking back this is where it all started and I was a right lucky bastard to be a part of it.

Here it is.

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Hope to write you all from the road...

Just heartbreak. No hobos. No shotguns. Some crust. And going to the southern hemisphere. Two posts today. This one is the maudlin philosophizing emo one, so skip it if you want to see a hobo with a shotgun and read why I think 300 is racist garbage.

So I can still get passionate about stuff like silly movies about naked dudes with spears and my professional life which I take as a good sign as my personal life has been an absolute disaster. It's been hard to get worked up about anything. I've never been so heartbroken before. It's amazing how it's a physical pain. You can't sleep or eat or think about much else. The thing that sucks is it's so clear right now but at the time you apparently have to hit rock fucking bottom to see you need to get out of something. It's odd how potent a mixture you can have of love and damage. I've definitely witnessed it before, but never been through it myself. Admittedly with me it got so bad friends were worried about me. I'm glad to say to all of them reading that I am probably hiding because I feel like a jerk to you all, and I can honestly say I'm ok now. I even have my fucked up sense of humor back.


this should be in one of those time life mysteries books as it was taken pre-breakup

I think the sad thing is that most people go through an experience like this and become bitter and jaded and decide never to open up to anyone again. Most of the people I know seem to be able to trace their sense of guardedness to experiences like this. I don't think that's right. You should give completely to the people you care about it and if they take and use it, it may hurt, but it cannnot be wrong on your part. I don't understand why people are scared of that. I think letting damage become permanent is how people get to the point where they assume kindness is always insincere. That's really sad. Then everyone is just mean to each other and not themselves.



The strangest thing I'm finding is how a breakup redefines your sense of time. A past has become absolute, inaccessible. The future has doors that are closed forever, possibilites that have ended. And the present becomes something you have to kill time over to get by. That's the worst part. I think they should really crack this hibernation thing. Fucking bears do it, come on. And when you have a particular bad breakup, they inject you with bear hormones and you knock out in a cave for six months and when you come back, sorted.

Why have I been trying to find someone to blame, or how come so many relationships devolve into that? No one is perfect in a relationship. After all this I only believe more strongly that the most important thing there is in relationships is an ability for two people to forgive one another and be ok with each other's faults because everyone has shitloads of them. As Chris Rock puts it:

"'Cause if you can't share what you're like, you'll have problems.
When you love somebody, you got to love everything about them.
You got to love the crust of a motherfucker.

You can't just love the white part of the bread.

You gotta love the crust, the crumbs,
the tiny crumbs at the bottom of the toaster.

That's what the real motherfucker is."

If you don't have that you don't have love. You have a form of madness that's based upon need. People in the throes of what they call intense love when their brains are mapped have cortical activity most closely resembling cocaine addicts I read once. Maybe that's it.


actual image of brain activity of someone in love, or high on cocaine

But I think as unromantic as it sounds, if you can find someone who is okay with your farts, the fact you get boogers hanging, the weird things you say in your sleep, what you look like at 3am eating garbage from the fridge with fucked up hair - and then not just the trivial stuff - whatever weird ass health problem you have, your mood swings, your bad habits, the things about you that aren't kind or good (because we all have that shadow self), overlooking stupid and completely idiotic political beliefs you have, tolerance for the odd passions you have... If you can find someone who can deal with all that you have found ideal love. With the wisdom of Chris Rock, bear juice and time I can now move on from what was close to it.
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For lots of reasons then, I'm leaving the US in a few days here. I am going to Singapore, then Perth, before going to Brisbane to go scuba dive the Great Barrier Reef. On the way back I'm going to spend some time in Tokyo and Kyoto though. I'm lost right now, which I think you can fix some times by getting even more lost. And broke, too. And I'm glad that I won't have a phone that works. I'm going to want to blog this trip though, so I'll try and get my act together. Please share experiences of these places if you have them.