The Map of Your Life

The past few weeks have been a whirlwind. The highlight was a 7000 mile (round trip) excursion to the Redwood Forest in California to witness the wedding of Bill Homan and Gwendolyn. As Bill has been one of my closest friends for more than 15 years, there was no way we were going to miss it. Plus, we had the opportunity to test drive a Prius, got 400 miles to the tank, saw trees that predated Charlemagne, had rocks thrown at me by the Pacific Ocean (I'm not kidding! The fucking ocean threw rocks at me!), drove through a tree (it had a tunnel cut through it) and got to witness the "Bay to Breakers" parade in San Francisco. Now, granted, half a million drunk people in and out of various costumes looked less like a parade and more like an evacuation, but it was still pretty amazing to see.

You can check out pictures of this adventure over at Amy's blog.

And this past weekend, we celebrated Memorial Day like consummate Americans: we drank heavily, consumed our collective weight in meat and fired off countless rounds of ammo (courtesy of the great Don Bumgarner's most recent additions to his arsenal, including a 12-gauge shotgun nicknamed "Thumper", two sweet little 9mm pistols and a friggin' AR-15 – not to mention Amy's .22 Henry Golden Boy rifle, which is literally the only gun I can hit anything with). We had a few people up who had never been to the house before, including our dear friendsTara and David and Splatter Movie's Aaron Bernard and Nikki McCrea. Also in attendance were the Haushalters; Sirens of Cinema's own Rhonda Baughman and her beau, Kyle; and the always-impressive make-up team of Eric and Lorena. Everyone showed up with embarrassing amounts of food and completely freaked out our trio of misfit dogs, who hadn't seen another soul save Amy and I since the beginning of the year. So they expressed their excitement by being insane. At one point, I had to lock them in our bed room with soup bones and a bowl of beer.

(Aside 1: I'm not a beer drinker. The only thing I actually like is Guinness on draft and only because of my Irish DNA. My drink of choice, aside from hard liquor, is the fruity girl malts like Mike's Hard Lemonade or Smirnoff Ice. But we live mere minutes from West Virginia, in a county known as the "Seventh Most Inbred North of the Appalachians" (true!). So buying my beloved girly malts always elicits disdainful stares from the toothy proprietors. They with their John Deere baseball caps and Pittsburgh sports team jerseys. Still, with Mike's Hard Lemonade in hand, I needed a beer selection and wasn't sure what to get. "Need anything else?" asked the banjo playing mouth breather behind the counter. "Yeah," I said. "I need a beer recommendation."

"Okay, what do you want?"

"I don't know," I said. "What do fags drink?"

I walked out with my Mike's and a case of Yuengling. The counter guy even carried it out to the car for me. Apologies to any Yuengling drinkers out there who are offended by the above. Your beer is delicious.)

(Aside 2: Don Bumgarner is another one of my close and very respected colleagues. But he possesses a political philosophy that can be best summed up as "bizarre". He's not a liberal by any stretch, but he's not a pure conservative, either. If this were the Revolution, he'd probably be a Minuteman. And a Whig. But he's patriotic to a fault and when we called him from San Francisco to inform him where we were and what we were driving, his later voice mail asked: "Were you also wiping your ass with the Bible and spitting on soldiers?"

To which, I replied, "I wanted to, but I was too busy sodomizing members of Greenpeace.")

Now, though a great amount of fun was had and it was thoroughly one of the best days I've had in a long time (watching city folk around our horses was particularly entertaining – "Don't they have really big teeth with which to eat you better?" Rhonda asked), I was still plagued by stuff weighing me down for the past several weeks now.

I go through cycles of not-quite-depression. It's more a mixture of self-doubt, insecurity and paranoia. Beside my constant Fear of the Big White X that keeps me from enjoying good fortune of any kind, this malaise of self-worth tends to lurk just under my consciousness for long periods of time. It's usually accompanied by my old friends Insomnia and Tension Headache, which, now that I'm old, also brings on Upper and Lower Back Pain and Restless Leg Syndrome. The only thing missing for me is Dutch Elm Disease and gout.

Basically, this malaise occurs when I look back at my career and notice that, if it were a hurtling meteor, it would simply burn up entering the atmosphere and not make the tiniest impression on the culture of the Earth. I feel very much like my ten years as a professional writer and semi-professional filmmaker has made no impact. Not that, in the giant scheme of things, any of our culture really amounts to a hill of beans, but still. I long for longevity.

Add to this my almost constant struggle with agnosticism and I feel quite lost in my own skin.

It's not something I intentionally dwell on, but it does scream at me during the long, dark nights. And there's no bit of self-cheerleading I can do to get rid of it.

So Sunday night, after our ATF party (alcohol, tobacco and firearms), after an evening of Tenebre, Slither and Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama, Amy and I collapsed into bed, pulled the dogs up to our chins and settled for a long evening's unconsciousness.

And my subconscious decided to deal with my insecurity very directly.

My dreams are usually very cinematic. I dream in cuts and bright Technicolor. There are usually guest-stars in my dreams. Generally, they're either action packed or one of two different scenarios: 1) I'm searching for something that I know is in the room somewhere and I can't locate it; 2) I'm trying desperately to get somewhere and either make wrong turns or am delayed by one thing after another. Usually, these last two are extremely frustrating, allowing me to wake up on edge and irritable for the rest of the day. The action-packed ones, I prefer.

This Sunday night dream, as I mentioned, was very direct. I don't know who I was talking to, but it was just the two of us in a hotel lobby. I was bitching to this other person about my feelings of inadequacy. "I've made no difference in the world," I say. "I haven't changed a thing or made a single lasting contribution."

And this other person, whose face I cannot for the life of me remember, so it was likely an amalgam of dream faces, replied, without irritation but also without affection: "You can't see the map of your life because you're at ground level. All you see is what's around you. You can only see what is laid out before and behind you from above, and you can't rise above your own life. Only other people can, and they can't always explain to you what they see."

The scene actually repeated, with a variation of that speech coming again, and again, a dispassionate tone, but very firm. And "the map of your life" was repeated distinctly.

Now, I know where a lot of it came from. You don't have to be Freud. I'd just seen Indy IV (and loved it, thank you) and the scene where Indy describes the Mayan pictographs carved into the ground, meant to be seen from the air, reminded me that I used to study that stuff in high school, fascinated with the idea that the Mayans were in tune to something greater than themselves. So the "map of your life" idea definitely came from there. The rest of it was just my subconscious getting frustrated with my constant phobia.

But I like that phrase, "The Map of Your Life". And since that dream, I've really relaxed – as much as I'm ever able to, that is. I'm not pre-occupied with the idea of leaving a mark on the world. Because I will never get to see "the map of my life". I won't know what impact I'm making—I may never know. And knowing that I may never know something is actually kind of liberating.

(Hey, everyone deals with their shit in different ways. It was either this literal-as-hell dream, or Don's AR-15 and a water tower. Which would you prefer?)

Of Bachelors and Bachelorettes and the parties they attend

Earlier this year, my good friend and colleague, Mike Haushalter, asked me to be his best man for his wedding. I accepted, of course, but with the stipulation that I not plan the bachelor party. Being married myself, and wanting to remain so, I didn't want to have to arrange for strippers or car pools to nudie bars. Mike assured me that there would be others to take care of this.

This past Friday, our house became the central location for the party, after being notified by the 'others' that funds were too low for strippers and bars were just generally depressing, particularly when the groom is not a heavy drinker. So in lieu of debauchery, we opted for barbecue, bad movies and firearms. Living as far out as we do, we often shoot on our land without fear of police or injuring neighbors. And since hunting season is coming up, the sound of gunfire wouldn't be unusual anyway.

I arrived home after work around 3:00 pm and started to clean the magnificent hovel into inhabitability. Mike and his friend John arrived a little after four and we hiked into the back 20 acres to start setting up targets. I am in possession of an enormous woodpile, so there was lots of lumber to shoot at.

I went back into the house to get a little table to serve as a gun stand when I see Mike and Johnny tearing towards me like their asses were on fire. They were slapping at their heads and flailing their arms. "Bees!" Johnny said as he zipped past me. "Fuck!" and "Motherfuckers!" was all he said beyond that for the next few minutes.

Setting up the targets, pounding stakes into the ground, etc., had disturbed an underground hive. The bees were shooting out of this massive hole beside our burning pit—a black cloud of angry, swarming insects. It resembled something Biblical. Then the swarm formed an arrow, cartoon style, and took off after us.

Both John and Mike were stung multiple times and John got it the worst. He was also worried because he'd been flailing in the front with a gun strapped to his hip. He feared that one of our neighbors driving by would call the cops. I reminded him that I'd only seen a cop on our mountain once, turning around in our driveway because he'd missed a turn.

The swarm vanished fairly quickly. I trekked up with a can of bug spray to see if anything could be done. The hive was too large and while the anger had vanished, the bees were still pretty active, zipping in and out of the hole. So I simply gathered up the lumber and moved it all a few yards to the right. Mike and John were amazed I was never stung once, but, then again, I wasn't doing anything to piss the bees off.

Safely removed from the plague, we set up our targets again and spread out the arsenal. We had hand guns, revolvers, shot guns, semi-auto rifles and plenty of ammo. Jeff Waltrowski arrived a few minutes after the Great Bee Assault to join us. And lemme tell you, folks—it's my opinion that anyone who is for gun restrictions has never fired a gun before. They're awesome! It'd been almost a year since I fired a gun of any sort (not since the Day of the Deer Execution, anyway) and I thought sure my skills would have rusted to nothing, but it turns out I'm a pretty good shot with a rifle and target pistol. The sad fact remains that, with my Baretta, I'd stand a better chance at hitting an assailant by throwing the gun than by firing, but I did better than I'd anticipated. We blew the old school human paper target to bits, disintegrated a Styrofoam wig head and shot the hell out of a little die-cast tank, not to mention an entire box of clay pigeons. And we did it all with dignity, manliness and proper diction and grooming. The Great Nerd Bachelor Party had begun.

Amy arrived home from work and tried to sneak in with "I'm not here! I'm not crashing!" but John convinced her to come out and shoot his new semi-auto. He came back in a little while later saying, "Mike, never piss off your wife! She's a really good shot." I already knew this, but I appreciate any fair warning these days.

Amy then made us brownies, went back out in search of orange juice (something I'd neglected for our alcohol arsenal), while Mike fired the grill and cooked us all some awesome angus burgers. We imbibed, forgot to toast him entirely, and put on Death Trance, and incoherent action film from the guys who made Versus. An hour in, I was feeling pretty good and impaired, no longer even caring that I couldn't figure out what the hell was going on with the movie. Then Mike said that there was someone banging on my door.

There was. A woman had a Durango blocking our driveway. It had a flat tire and she was completely lost. Wearing a denim mini-skirt and a tube top, this woman was in her late 40s and looked a little like the prostitute from My Name is Earl. I came back in and asked if anyone wanted to help me change a hooker's tire.

Mike was convinced I'd hired her as the stripper and, to be honest, that did seem like a logical explanation but, again, see above. I wasn't handling the "adult entertainment". Nope, she was just a woman with a flat tire. A woman with an enormous car, a broken jack and a spare that was frozen to her chassis due to lack of maintenance. It took all four of us, plus Amy, plus a series of tools, WD-40, two jacks, a few boards, a can of fix-a-flat and an air compressor, and 94 minutes to get this stupid broad back on her way. "This stuff happens to me all the time," she lamented. "I have the worst luck."

"And thanks for spreading it around to us," I thought as my buzz vanished entirely.

John ended up sawing through the cable holding her spare to the underside of her car. It had frayed and was not lowering the way it should. Of course, cutting the cable meant that the tire had only one place to go: straight down onto John's head. The party was a roaring success for him by this point. We all considered just going back into the house, getting the guns, shooting her, hiding the car and having done with it all. (Trust me: we all considered this. We had the firepower after all! Why not make this our own Very Bad Things?) But we were good Samaritans, a fact not lost on this woman. She was highly aware that banging on a door in the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night was a really risky move. She was lucky she got the Nerd Bachelor Party and not something much scarier further over the hill. But living that far out on your own without having AAA or knowing anything about your car or even how to change your own tire is just very stupid. Very.

Of course, once we finally got the spare on the car, it too immediately went flat. That's where the compressor and fix-a-flat came in. And the prayer that she'd at least get out of sight before she broke down again.

By the time we finally got rid of her, it was well after 10. John and Amy had to work the next morning; Jeff had an appointment. The party was over. I still don't know how Death Trance ended and we didn't even get to whatever disturbing porn Mike had with him. But, still, all in all, not a bad way to spend an evening.

The next day, the party continued, to an extent. I hooked up with Mike and our friend Matt Gilligan and set out to see Shoot 'em Up, which they'd already seen and loved. Amy and Carolyn, Mike's fiancée, headed over to the Smiling Moose for the bachelorette party. Post-movie plans involved a journey to a local strip club and I'd already decided to skip that—again: see above. Maybe I'm a failure as a man, but I have very little interest in strip clubs. Maybe it is because I'm married and have seen naked women in the past. Or maybe, as was pointed out by my brother-in-law earlier at my mother's birthday party (oh yeah: busy fucking weekend), I have no desire to throw money at a woman who doesn't give a shit about me. Or maybe I just don't want to spend my evening in a depressing cellar with a bunch of desperate, sleazy men watching women making ends meet with a last-resort career. Whatever. I wasn't going.

Shoot 'em Up was disappointing. I was able to deal with the suspension of disbelief when it came to the physics. The hero hit everything he aimed at and a whole bunch of shit he didn't. The villains all dressed identically and couldn't hit him if their guns were pressed against his chest. Laws of thermodynamics, friction, speed, sound and gravity were routinely broken or utterly disregarded. Also fine. No problems here. Video game logic; I dug it. But the movie routinely cheated it's own rules and premise and treated the audience thusly: "You're obviously very stupid for being here in the first place and we're going to treat you as such". There's a plot hole in the center of the film that's just unforgivable, involving a robot baby. It angered me. And, seriously Hollywood, you can't have a pro-gun movie with an anti-gun message. It doesn't work. It doesn't work as irony and it doesn't work as a message. It's asinine. Especially when the man implementing the anti-gun message actually murders someone—with a gun—at the end of his decree!

Of course, this further perplexed Mike and Matt. "You think about these things too much," one said. "It's just meant to be fun," said one or the other. Which also angered me. That's the reason shit continues to be made. I've had this fight with friends my entire life. Just because a movie is meant to be entertaining that doesn't give it the right to be insulting. Not everyone in the audience is an idiot. And no, I won't stop taking things like this seriously. It takes as much effort to do something right—especially on the script level—as it does to do something badly. I have no tolerance for lazy screenwriting.

After the movie, I had Mike drop me off at the Moose. I like that bar and the owner, so I figured I'd have a drink and go find something to do, not wanting to crash the girls' party. I ended up being invited to join. Amy, Carolyn, some work friends of Carolyn's, and our friend Tara (make-up whiz on Professor Jack and the Electric Club) were boozing it up in the bar's upstairs pool room, which they had virtually to themselves. Amy had bought light-up shotglasses with penises in the bottom. And straws with penises on them. And penis candy necklaces and bracelets. Basically, everything that stood as a symbol to oral sex… a practice most women abandon after the honeymoon. They slapped a pin on me that said "Dated the Groom" and we bitched about work and friends. It was a fun time.

And I was able to hang out and drink without feeling (overly) old, as I have lately. Though we were chased out around 1am by a rowdy group who strolled in already drunk. Actually, the group was okay but they were with a little asshole with a faux-hawk who thought it was hysterical that he could scream at the top of his lungs like Fay Wray. Rather than shove a pool cue down his throat, we opted to just split.

And thus ended the pre-wedding festivities. We have the rehearsal dinner this week (which is good because I don't want to make any eating mistakes on the big day) and then the ceremony and reception on Saturday. Not to mention my speech. Considering every other best man's speech I've ever heard deals with how the best man himself is actually more important than the couple, I'm looking forward to it all the more.