Author: Matt

Author, Registered Psychotherapist. Former circus animal.
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It Doesn’t Need To Be This Way

I was having brunch in the Market with my friend, Lady B, whom I’ve known for over 10 years. We were talking about “life changes” (we both being close to 40). We got onto the topic of how her and I sometimes are conditioned to expect the worst.

“With the house, didn’t you feel that, somehow, everything would inevitably go wrong and you wouldn’t get it after all?” she asked.

“Yes!”

It was as if she had read my mind. We were eating palacsinta at a small Hungarian bistro.

We talked about this, because she’d felt the exact same way when she and her partner bought their house. She speculated, correctly in my estimation, that this mode of thinking – let’s call it auto-tragic thinking – was the result of her and I coming from divorced families (the divorces or circumstances surrounding them being particularly destructive). The end-result, if not in all cases then certainly in ours, was that we were conditioned to expect gift horses to have mouth cancer and every silver lining to have a cloud moving in its way. Happiness was a pulled rug away from tragedy.

I thought about moments in my life – moments that everyone experiences – like applying for a job, asking someone out for a date. Moments where, realistically, we hope/aim for the best. The difference between the average person and people like myself and Lady B is that, in the event we don’t get the job we hope for, in the event that special someone isn’t interested in us, we tend to see it as a fateful inevitability; a symptom of a curse. Of course, we say to ourselves. Why should this be any different than any other time?

The subject clearly struck a chord for both of us.

“You expect it to be like in Carrie.” she said in a follow-up email, discussing how we became conditioned to expect the worst. “You’re at the prom, thinking that everything’s turning around in your life and then suddenly you’re covered in pig blood.”

The best male equivalent I could think of was Laurence Harvey’s character in (the original) The Manchurian Candidate; a tragic puppet whose fleeting tastes of freedom coincide with horrific end results.

So, no, neither Lady B nor I are cursed. Our houses have not fallen down or been taken away from us by a nightmarish bureaucracy. If anything we are only beginning to sense just how much re-wiring is necessary for us to see things clearly, without the faulty psychological infrastructure that led to us to believe that, indeed, the odds were stacked against us.

The mind is a frightening thing. This is why I read books and watch films which challenge my preconceptions. This is why I am lucky to have friends such as Lady B.

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For *’s Sake

It’s been one of those battle-cries of mine the last while. Everything in the world, culturally-speaking (and I don’t necessarily mean high culture) seems to be evaporating into mindless bullshit.

The AV Club – a site I admittedly have a love/hate relationship with already – just posted an interview with actor Paul Giamatti. In the opening summary, the interviewer describes the plot of his latest film, which reads like a counterscript of 1999’s Being John Malkovich and yet there is no mention of this parallel anywhere in the article, something even Entertainment Tonight would do. The interviewer talks about this upcoming film with Giamatti as if it and his role – the John Malkovich role, if it were Being John Malkovich – were just soulless objects to be discussed out of necessity. In other words, it’s just like any other media-junket interview, like something you would read in InStyle or Chatelaine. Not that those examples are b-a-d, but when you pride yourself as better, especially savvy, tongue-in-cheek better, you shouldn’t even be in the same postal code as InStyle or Chatelaine if you want to retain your reputation.

The Motley Fool – again, a site previously known for being savvy, even though they deal with the stock market – now reads like Ain’t It Cool News, complete with arguments which, under rational analysis, seem completely idiotic and antithetical to what one would assume is their mission statement (ie. being different than the rest of those brain-dead-and-short-sighted Money sites).

Oh, and CNN. Not that they’ve ever been more relevant than a Reuters news ticker, but they’ve gone from mediocre to stupid by allowing one of their show hosts, Lou Dobbs, to continuously question the origin of Barack Obama’s citizenship, a paranoid suspicion virulent in the libertarian/right-wing fringe of the U.S. that has been repeatedly disproved (read: he doesn’t want Johnny Foreigner running and ruining the most-possibly-greatest-country-ever-in-the-world).

Now, one of the arguments I can imagine hearing is: well, Matt, in a 24-hour newsday (whether on TV or the Internet) when people expect constant information there inevitably has to be weaker material. To which I say: I understand, but I’d settle for less information over less hours (if need be), if it means the information will be consistent and better. After all, you are what you eat, and in this day and age we feed on media in an astonishingly unconscious and voracious manner.

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Man invented mathematics in order to demonstrate that memory alone is inherently faulty.

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Returning

Although this will go down as a formative, self-defining year, one of my great frustrations of 2009 is the inability to find the time and/or energy to collect, polish, publish all of the things, happenings, and concepts that come across my path – not even a healthy fraction. I’ve had more success capturing visuals but that’s due to being in the right place/time with a cellphone camera rather than wilfully executing a deliberate agenda.

Work is going like gangbusters, which I am thankful for, the novel is improving with every moment I spend revising it (helps that people actually want to read it), and most recently/surprisingly I have become a homeowner. Just two days ago I was offered a part-time teaching position from a respectable college for a respectable film/TV program.

And yet, at risk of portraying myself as spoilt (or tetched), it seems as if it’s not enough. I feel there is so much going on that I want to grab hold of: the recent (Twitter-inspired) trend of authors turning around and publicly accusing peers of personal attacks when in fact they are just doing their jobs (eg. book reviews), the aesthetics of stereoscopic imagery (that’s 3D for you junior rangers), and the way in which the world unravels and combines at the same moment in time like a Möbius strip, and what about the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo…?

It’s too much for me. Everything: life, art, work… I hit the mattress every night and practically pass out. I used to read… I read War & (f’ing) Peace in the time between laying down and actually sleeping. Luxury! says the current me. Mind you, he gets more sleep and perhaps has a better grasp on the whole “early to bed, early to rise” thing. Maybe I shouldn’t be visualizing the voice of “current me” as being spoken in the harsh brogue of a Scottish authoritarian.

Things felt as if they were falling apart in the spring, like when the aperture ring on my Zorki-4 came loose, right in the middle of shooting some nice “golden hour” shots on Dundas West (just south of Kensington Market) after a fallow 35mm winter. Little could I guess that within a few months I’d be living in a house just five minutes north of where I took these photos. Thankfully, most of them came out fine. Perhaps it was all an elaborate metaphor for being patient, for trying hard to see the forest rather than scrutinize the pines, the mouths of gift horses, etc.

This may all be true, if terribly clichéd. And who would give a horse as a gift in the first place?

This is not a lengthy letdown friends, as if to say that this blog has served its purpose and is to be cast onto the great cyber-somethingsomething where cyber-things are cast and probably set on fire. No, I will not be taking this blog on a walk into the woods, with Daddy and his shotgun. I’m just reaching a threshold where life is requiring more concentration and energy, leading me to ask (hello, rhetorical!) how imaginary magnitude can adapt to suit these changes without looking like an outmoded vehicle or an abandoned hobby (or both). Yes, as I said, rhetorical. But since when has rhetorical ever been a particularly devastating accusation?

Rhetoric is just a temporary building material, made up of the same stuff that kludges are moulded out of. Hope (if not faith), led by patience. That word again: patience. I think I met you somewhere, at a bar maybe, when I was younger and looking for your type. It is true that rhetoric cannot keep a tower standing, but it can inspire the building of towers.

Where am I going with this…right: things are odd, and unbalanced, and it all points to a giant (fictional) neon sign blinking just above my head, big-city halo-like, which says: TRANSITIONAL PERIOD OF ADJUSTMENT. Fair enough (if not sexy).

I suppose I am writing this to say that I’m here for you, but not in the way that I was, which is not to say that I am not still here. My focus is changing, not changing for change’s sake but fermenting into something more stable and powerful. I guess, if I may go back and answer an earlier question, the reason why I am not as prolific here as before is that – now that I am slipping into a new stream of life – my energy must be treated as a finite commodity. Perhaps this, for now, is “success”, and I’m just looking at it like a paleontologist holding a magnifying glass against a piece of the Arctic ice shelf, unsure of what is before him.

Tell you what: when I find out, I’ll let you know. The long and short of it is that I’m still here, but here may be changing to suit my needs. We’ll see. We.

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