Most people think there’s nothing magic about statistics, but I love to experience math that way. Your odds of meeting someone who wants to give you their car because they won’t need it for the next year are exactly zero if you sit at home. I spend, granted, too much time socializing but this means that my social network is large enough that when I need a toaster, the odds are pretty good that I’m connected to someone out there who just realized they have an extra toaster and would love to see it getting use. The odds, to an outsider, look like magic when I speak the words, “I need a toaster” and a new toaster appears on my counter.

Now it turns out that I’m actually a really shy person. (No, no one else believes that either.) But I learned a trick years ago that helped get me into the good kind of trouble by upping the odds that I’d be near it. I call it “jumping off cliffs”. After a couple of simple recent cliff jumps, small social risks, I suddenly found myself spending five days hugging dozens of women in slow motion as a nonverbal conversation about music.

First, the cliff. When I was in Jr. High School I learned a trick. If I tried to stand in front of a phone, imagine the call I was about to make to a cute girl, and then force my arm to pick up the phone and dial, nothing happened. Nothing happened for a long time and I felt miserable throughout every one of those terrifying minutes. I learned instead to walk away and take on a project or do something else until I’d completely forgotten about the girl and the phone. The moment that thought re-entered my head, the moment I realized I’d forgotten, I immediately threw myself off of a cliff. I grabbed the phone and before I was aware of what was happening, it was ringing and someone was about to answer. I was falling. No time to think about jumping, it had already happened and now I was going to have to respond! Sure, I blundered, said moronic things, pissed people off, and made them laugh. But if I had simply sat at the cliff’s edge absolutely nothing would have happened. And here’s the best part. This type of risk, and almost all social risks, are metaphorical cliffs. No one will die. What’s the worst that can happen compared to that?

A little more than a year ago I went out a cafe to meet an old friend, Margaret Heyn. I should probably have been working, but I don’t get to see her very often now that she lives in San Antonio so I skipped out. She had a friend along and after some chatter they tried to convince me to, again, skip out on even more work and go Tango dancing with them. As it turns out, tango dancing requires a fair bit of patience and has a steep learning curve, especially for leads. I had tried a few times years ago to learn this dance with Margaret and was frustrated. Worse, they weren’t asking me to come to a class. They were asking me to come to a full on dance space full of people moving smoothly and elegantly around a tiny room, step into this densely packed sea of movement with a woman in my arms, and somehow manage to stumble around without tripping her, running into anyone else, falling onto anyone, or generally being the single cause of a complete disaster. I can tell you from experience that, starting out, this is nearly impossible. In a notable night from my past I once lead a woman into having her foot stabbed by a high heel. I helped her limp off of the floor and swore never to dance again.

“We’ll give you a quick lesson in the parking lot”, Marg promised. The cliff loomed. Here was my chance to look like a complete idiot in front of someone I’d just met and potentially injure countless innocent dancers. Social death. I thought about it, made myself stop, and threw myself off. Sarah Stayer, Margaret’s friend that I met that night, won a free month of tango lessons that evening and handed them to me on the spot. We dated for the next year.

A year later I found myself in Chicago and wanting some kind of release. I leapt off of a few more cliffs. I sent messages to a series of people online who mentioned tango and Chicago in their facebook profiles. I drove an hour and a half into the city, to a place I’d never been, to try to dance with total strangers. I was still, essentially, a beginning tango dancer. There I had a fifteen minute conversation with Carolin Colon and Galina Obushinskaya after dancing with them. Each invitation to dance was another little cliff, the dance and conversation happening in free fall.

Months later I decided, against sound financial judgement, to splurge on a tango festival that happened to be in Chicago. I contacted Carolin out of the blue. I hadn’t spoken to her since our fifteen minute interaction months before. She, in turn, took a social risk and immediately offered to have me sleep on her couch.

It turned out that Carolin and her housemate had a cat, so propelled by my sneezes we split for a hotel room at the event, which lead to meeting more people who wanted a place to crash (when the dances ended at 5:00am) and suddenly I found myself in a nice hotel room in Chicago with Carolin, Galina, Viktoriya Pantaleeva and Margaret (who coincidentally happened to come to the same event!) laughing, drinking wine, swapping stories and having the time of our lives. New friends. New experiences.

So start your cliff jumping now. No one will die. And by upping the odds, you just may find yourself in a hot tub full of world renown tango dancers. (Er, that happened later.)

As always, click photos to visit photographer’s site

A woman approached me during one of the daily workshops at this last week’s Chicago Tango Week. “I just have to tell you… I was so moved last night… it was just so beautiful… watching you and your wife dance…” I looked at her puzzled. “Your girlfriend..?” My head tilted to the side. “Your..? Wow… it was so beautiful.”

I still have no idea who she might have meant, because that is how incredible a tango connection can be. There are so many wonderful people and moving dances every night at a Tango festival. The daily stream of workshops were followed by dances stretching until 5:00 AM and as we immersed together in this world we grew ever more attuned to the music, the dance, and each other.

The peak experiences have many flavors. During one very quick style of Tango, called the Milonga, Galina Obushinskaya and I risked the breakneck pace and found a sudden exhilarating connection that took us shooting across the room. Later I had a slow, very simple, very connected dance that melted through each movement. At one point I somehow managed to dance with someone far more talented than I deserved and we hit a Nuevo Tango Tanda, a series of dances to modern interpretations of the music, and I had the chance to fly with creative improvisation. She was so incredibly responsive and equally playful that it was like suddenly finding myself doing tricks in an fighter jet. When it came to a close I could barely thank her I was so high and shaking and I swooned off the floor blushing, stumbling and giggling like a little girl for the next half hour, hugging my friends and grinning like an idiot. It was beautiful.

As with the Tango experiences, the dancers, too, came in many flavors. China. Bulgaria. France. Taiwan. Japan. Germany. Canada. Russia. So few people spoke English as their first language, and as Tango comes from Argentina, Spanish was the secret handshake of our underground society.

Ours was just one event taking place at the huge hotel, and as I passed one older man in the hallway, he asked me, “Como esta?” I grinned and replied, “bien, gracias”, knowing that we had just confirmed each other as part of the same tribe, the same enthusiastic group of people carrying bags of expensive shoes as we walked around the hotel in our socks. The same people who hadn’t slept for days and couldn’t wait to feel the floor again. The same people willing to fumble through awkward new movements until they became smooth. Lovers of the dance called Tango.

When I was born in Hamburg, Germany my dad used an all mechanical Nikon camera to scoop up the light bouncing off of my pink baby flesh, new to the world, and raced home. He returned to the hospital with printed photographs, and mailed copies to a slew of excited relatives around the world. The image traveled via an ancient form of internet powered by a rusting Fiat Spyder and a series of postal employee handoffs. It was brought to life by my dad’s skills with a series of chemicals, tanks, special papers and something called an enlarger: a long-necked metal bird who’s eye looked ever downward. It waited patiently to imprint the next invisible image, the paper’s secrets only unveiled later as they slowly emerged beneath a clear chemical bath in the dim red light in a process that remained forever magical. My father stood before me now, holding that magical bird by the throat, saying, “I don’t know who would even want this stuff any more”.

He had only been back from the hospital for a few days, and I worried about the way he was exerting himself as he yanked out drawers and boxes. Days ago he hadn’t been able to stand on his own. No matter how skilled the doctors that had rerouted and repackaged his heart, his body had, in effect, just been hit by a mac truck. But my genetic code is half his and so he couldn’t handle inaction any more than I can. The time of film photography had passed and now that I was back in town it was time to tear apart the old dark room.

My parents designed and built our house to have, as a central component, a dark room for printing and developing our own photos. It had a water supply, drainage, and counter space for all of the baths. Strips of drying developed film hung from the ceiling: long black tape filled with tiny images of people in reverse black and white. There was, as in nearly every room in the house, an old stereo system playing classical music. Those old systems with their already obsolete 8-track tape decks still had radios that were “perfectly good” and never cost more than five dollars. When developing film, the room had to be completely dark and so the howling of a tenor opera singer filled the space left vacant by light. I remember feeling through the process, carefully loading the film strip onto the spool and into the stainless steel canister, slipping it through my fingers to be sure I could keep track of it, those voices ringing through my head and keeping me company.

“I think your mother has a piano student who is taking photography. We can see if she wants anything before we just dump it at the Goodwill.”

In the first house I remember as a child, in West Chicago, I helped my dad tape black plastic over the windows in the one tiny bathroom. We broke apart hand-rolled film spools and developed them on top of the back of the toilet. I was terrified to handle this mysterious material that could be destroyed by the touch of light or my fingers, but he made me struggle through the process, insisting that I learn by trying. He produced endless pictures of my sisters and I, large black and white images including one of myself with a mop of home cut hair covered by a crushed felt cowboy hat. That particular image grew and changed with me over time. At first it was fascinating, then embarrassing, and at last adorable as I grew older.

“These are some pretty nice lenses.”

In Jr. High I produced my first monster movie made entirely of still images. It was really more of a comic book. I rolled my own film, built a structure out of cool-whip containers and lego people, and had a dinosaur-like creature arrive to destroy the whole thing piece by piece. I used a classic dark room trick, and by waving a cutout piece of paper over the image as the enlarger projected it into the waiting paper below, I created the creature’s fiery breath that set the raised roadway full of matchbox cars ablaze. I called the creature Schalk, an old German world I found in a German/English dictionary that meant, “trickster”. The book was a school project, and so the deadline had me covered in chemicals, alone in that dark room, for days. At last I crawled upstairs to rejoin my sisters and sat exhausted holding my dry, cracked hands. For years afterwards, as I walked through the halls at school, I would hear the both taunting and endearing mock cries of terror, “Schalk! Schalk!”

“Here, just throw all of these pieces and the chemicals in a box and leave them at the bottom of the stairs. At least we should keep them together.”

I started picking out and sorting old cameras, with their black leather covers and old metal bodies, into a box. They don’t make anything out of metal any more.

“OK, I have to go lay down.”

My dad headed upstairs to sleep and I continued placing the lenses, filters and paper together in low cardboard boxes for the last time. I grouping them carefully, perhaps just to honor them. Perhaps just in case there was some last bit of use in them, one last person who still loved the feel of doing things by hand, of seeing images grow like blooming flowers in a watery bed, who wanted to feel the touch of the slippery surface when moving the print from one bath to the next, who loved the sound of the timer humming as its hand swept slowly back towards its place, the image held glowing before them until, with a click, it vanished again into darkness.

With no small sense of wonder, I watch myself say hello to the waitress, a nerdy young Vietnamese woman with enormous black rimmed glasses, and I watch myself order food. It is absolutely incredible to me. My body is clenched so tightly with pain that I can barely sit up in my chair. I just climbed down out of the back window of my house, following my suitcase and guitar, to avoid seeing any of the people, the loving friends, gathering outside my bedroom door. It would have been too much. Too painful. How are the words, “and an order of spring rolls” coming out of my mouth? But there they are. Moving out into the air between us. Independent of everything that is me they emerge and elicit a smiling response from the waitress who dashes off to bring me the first food I’ll attempt to eat since yesterday, well after the sun has set and I looked into her eyes for the last time. After I touched her hands for the last time. After I held her in a tango embrace, both of us crying, trying to remember every detail of her eyes, her nose, the curve of her hip, just touching and holding for the last time.

The waitress stops by later and, bending down to look up at my face, which I cant seem lift from my chest, says, “You’ve got the look.” I freeze. I don’t want to talk about it. Is it obvious? Does she know? I don’t want to talk about it. I have nothing to say. Just move along and stop noticing me. I’m not really here. I’m sick and you might catch it. Maybe I can just run for the door. If I rip a handful of money from my wallet and just throw it on the table… “The look of someone who’s pretty full,” she says.

I glance over at the pile of uneaten food before me. The bowl of my favorite noodles. The pile of spring rolls. “Yeah, I guess I’ll need some boxes,” I hear myself say.

As always, follow the photo link to the photographer’s site.

Epilogue:

Returning up the path, I walk slowly at the center of a stream of joggers with their dog entourages. I’m sweeping a banana through the air, idly practicing knife fighting techniques learned while making a training video with an old Cuban man years ago. Somewhere at the tip of a still hidden grin, my philosopher’s sense of humor begins to twinkle faintly. Somewhere just behind me, the three law students that just ran past make jungle noises.

Also:

It’s easy to feel the great depth of life after falling into a dark well.
Don’t forget that, all along your journey, the sky above was infinitely vast.

There are two ways to approach children’s material. You can write material that you think children will like, or you can write material from your own loves that, it just so happens, turns out to be what all humans love. The incredible thing that I discovered about the farting aliens is that kids do in fact enjoy that movie. So when George set out to make a movie that kids would like, he was successful. But my guess is that as those children grow older, the sweet memories of alien farts will grow foul and dissipate until they are no more. There isn’t much in that thin cloud to carry forward into adulthood. Meanwhile, there are adults well into their forties and fifties who are still captivated by the magic of the first Star Wars (Episode IV) film.

Dr. Seuss (Theodor Geisel) never had any children of his own. Apparently he used to say, “You have ‘em; I’ll entertain ‘em.”¹. Audrey Geisel, his wife, said that he was even, “afraid of children to a degree”.² It was Geisel’s childlike imagination and his love of language and play that made his art something that reached all ages. He was writing what he himself enjoyed.

If adults aren’t as charmed by my children’s songs as their children, I’m not reaching deeply enough into my vault of imagination. I’m not tapping into the universal core that we humans share that makes us crave and delight in stories. From a practical standpoint, children insist on hearing the songs they love thousands of times, and so parents are the ones carefully selecting material least likely to encourage themselves to damage expensive stereo equipment. Thinking long term, this allows well written metaphors to have an effect on both children and the adults they become, as they carry the best stories of their youth with them. Their understanding and interpretations change and expand as the person evolves, continuing to encourage them for a lifetime.

I want to be the planter of seeds, not the forgotten cotton candy. I want to be the New Hope, not a Phantom Menace.

Very early in life, in grade school, everyone smart and cool that I knew wore glasses. My dad and his scientist friends from around the world were energetic, smart and creative. My mom worked at libraries full of books and the people who read them. As far as I could tell from a quick survey of adults, before growing to the age where my peer group was supposed to shun them, being a nerd was awesome. So of course I saw glasses as graduation into the club.

When it came time to test my eyes, I acted like my vision was worse than it was to get my first pair. I was so proud of them. I’ve never been one to recognize a tauntworthy act before it was too late, and so the glasses immediately became a prop in my lifelong trend of unwittingly and constantly assuring my place as a whacky outcast. At some point I had a pair of glasses with little superman logos on the sides. Those tiny logos branded me for years. On “punk day” in Jr. High, I famously wore a big plastic white lawn chain and had multicolored yarn hanging from the corners of my glasses. Yes, every one of my classmates still has a copy of that photo in their yearbooks.

Later in life I got with the program. I started paying for haircuts and went to the mall with my lawnmowing money to get a couple of pairs of trendy shorts covered in brightly colored flowers. I swapped my glasses for contact lenses and got my first girlfriend. Years later the dusts of Burning Man brought the glasses back and the convenience made them stick. Somewhere around that point I started researching lasers, and followed their evolution over the years, waiting for the right moment.

Squeamish: Skip this paragraph
The first round of surgeries required a tiny metal blade that cut a flap out of the surface of the eyeball, allowed the laser to make adjustments, and then let the flap close back into place and heal. Then tiny water jets were used for the cutting. At last, lasers were built that could both make the flap and do the adjustment. I decided that I would let people play with those lasers for a while, and then get the process done at the sweet spot where I was still young enough to heal quickly but the lasers had been around for long enough to be well tested.

There were a number of reasons I decided to do the process at all. The most valid was my love of travel. If I wanted to continue making documentaries in third world countries, I had to seriously consider the risks of having my glasses crushed or stolen and ending up blind in a remote place where I didn’t speak the language.

I also deeply love swimming and, now, surfing. Contacts washed out, goggles were repeatedly snatched by the ocean, and wearing nothing meant not being able to see land from the ocean, or whomever is trying to get my attention from the side of the pool, or that old man in bright yellow floaties who’s screaming and trying to get out of my way. My vision was so bad I couldn’t see much at all beyond a few feet.

Lastly, I really liked the idea of being able to wake up and look, and see, deep into the eyes of someone I love.

So I researched a variety of places when the time seemed right. I found two large places that seemed decent and one smaller place where the doc had just invested in a newer machine. I then made two important choices.

Squeamish: Skip this paragraph
The one remaining negative side effect with any real chance of happening was that some people had a reduced ability to produce tears. This lead to dry eyes and the potential need, in the worst case, to keep eye drops around. This would have defeated my goal of being totally independent in a remote village somewhere. From what I read, there was a procedure that took longer but was almost certain not to produce this potential side effect. Instead of making a small flap and replacing it, the top surface of the cornea is actually removed and is allowed to grow back. Thanks to a wood splinter and a circular saw before I started wearing safety glasses, I’d actually done this part of the procedure to myself once before and it worked out fine in the end.

So I decided to do this more lengthy process and to go with the smaller place. Someone had recommended it to me, and I liked the idea of the individualized care and attention I’d get there.

I wasn’t wrong about the care. The doctor spent a lot of time with me and I appreciated her attention to detail, right up until the operation. When I arrived I discovered that someone had forgotten to order a tool needed for the initial procedure. There was an alternative way of doing the same thing, and from my research it was just as valid, but I was already nervous and that certainly didn’t help. I finally decided that I needed to stop worrying and trust the professional. I’d also carefully planned the whole recovery process into the crazy calendar of my life and it would be a lot to reshuffle. I went for it.

The care I got following the procedure was great at first. Again, I received lots of attention and things seems to be coming along well. The first few months are the fastest part of the healing process, but I knew the whole thing could take as long as six months. I started to have some issues and got a few types of drops to deal with them. It was amazing to be able to walk around and, while still a little wonky, see. Swimming in the ocean was an incredible experience. Taking a shower was an incredible experience. Waking up was amazing.

Six months in, things had stagnated. I still couldn’t see computer screens very well. I wasn’t producing tears well at all. I was using a lot of different drops to deal with blepharitis, dry eyes and inflammation. Eventually the doctor, despite all of the time spent with me and attempts to work with me, gave up and admitted not understanding the problem. Lack of experience had won out over effort.

A few months later I went out to California to help a friend go through the same procedure. Her doctor at the Stanford medical center was excellent. I almost considered flying out to have him work with me, but he instead recommended an Austin based doctor I should try, a Dr. Dell, who not only had years of experience by was also known as a researcher as well as a practitioner.

My first experience with Dr. Dell was exactly what I had avoided the first time around. I arrived to a huge, crowded, noisy space packed with exhausted or bored people heaped in chairs under incessant television screens. My first appointment took, literally, more than four hours, only ten minutes of which were spent talking to the doctor. The preceding hours were spent being shuffled from dark room to dark room to wait or fill out yet another form. I will say that within seconds of looking at my eyes he recognized and named all of the problems I’d been having and thus at least demonstrated some skill.

Almost immediately he noticed something he thought looked like an allergic reaction. He suggested I ditch the pile of eye drops I was putting in each day and within weeks my eyes improved enormously. With a brief series of steroid drops he managed to get rid of the inflammation and get things stabilized to the point that we started talking about another procedure to correct the first.

The advantage of now working with a researcher was that he was aware of all of the latest information about the field and had been working on new techniques. The risk, of course, was that I was going to be a test subject. While I was certainly not the first to be corrected, I was definitely part of a small group of people being used to try a new technique. In effect, the first operation had given me lenses that were slightly off center and this approach would shape things up. I was assured that the worst that would happen was that I wouldn’t experience much benefit. Of course, I would also have spent months unable to see and even more thousands of hard to replace dollars.

Having already spent months and months and the equivalent of my yearly salary on this project, I wasn’t about to quit. Knowing I’d have to live with my eyes for the rest of my life based on whatever I did, I made the choice to give it a shot.

We started with the right eye first, as it’s the eye my brain decided years ago wasn’t going to do much of the work anyway. I hardly noticed that it was blurry those first months, and it actually healed quite quickly. My eye stayed healthy and eventually I was able to see much more clearly at night and my ability to see computer screens and lit objects improved. It never got to the level of my vision years ago, but I’m pretty happy about it.

I just had my precious left eye zapped this last week. Again it seems to be doing quite well, and by watching how the right eye healed the doctors were able to better calibrate this adjustment. They anticipate it being even better. My right eye became famous a few months back when it was held up at a conference in vegas as an example of a success story with the new procedure, thus getting more screen time than me. I hope that didn’t use up my fifteen minutes. Really. There’s more to me than meeting the eye.

So of course the obvious question everyone asks at the end is, “would you recommend this”? Despite the assembly line, cattle style introduction to working with Dr. Dell, once I was farmed out to his optometrist, Dr. Cunningham, I was much happier with the time and attention I got. While Dr. Dell still performs the operations, Dr. Cunningham takes the time to work with patients on a daily basis. I think if you found a solid doctor, and if your vision was as bad as mine was, this could really be a wonderful life-changing experience. While it’s impossible to know for sure, I think if I’d started where I am now, with this doctor, I would have been happy and healthy long ago.

Click photos to find photographer’s sites

Zander didn’t strike me as being quite that type of broken and he had all of the credentials of an interesting human, including the usual healing practices, travel and being certified as some kind of sufi cleric. It was for this reason that, driving out to lunch together that first day, I was at first intrigued by his completely flat, lifeless responses. He didn’t seem to be excited about much of anything, and maintained the ever so slightly bitter twinge of orange juice just over the line. By the ride home I was bored by his holier than thou attitude and had pretty much written him off until I happened to ask the right question and got his recent bio. He had just traveled through the US and southeast asia and then spent a long time in Africa holed up and writing. He returned to New York to have the tough city kick him into gear, but after enough time being kicked around he decided that it wasn’t helping much, abandoned what he had there, and came back to Austin. It was an almost dot by dot outline of my own potential travel route through the next year or two of my life, and I was fascinated to hear his thoughts on the adventure.

I sent him an email a few days later asking if I could take him out to lunch in exchange for his take on his travels. He first offered to trade me a lunch for shooting a video of one of his talks (knowing I was a filmmaker). I was a little miffed, but I’ve learned that most people don’t realize the many hours it takes to set up a shoot and cut footage, let alone the cost of equipment. I wrote him back and this time he ignored the lunch discussion completely and instead suggested I come to his workshop on, “finding yourself”. I was furious. The interaction had gone from a friendly lunch of peers to a sales pitch that implied that I was a lost sheep.

Sure, I was angry at the implication that I didn’t already see the Buddha, but I think I was more upset that the friendly exchange had morphed into a sales pitch. What later intrigued me about my response, however, was that he was doing exactly the kind of thing that I can imagine myself suggesting to a friend. “Why don’t you take advantage of your experiences and try to put together a class?”

In my own sphere I have to struggle with the same requests I just complained about with Zander. People frequently ask me to lunch to pick my brain for everything I’ve spent years learning about filmmaking. If I was a lawyer, no one would expect me to offer that lunch for free. The people asking me for free knowledge are rarely interested in hiring me later, so there isn’t even that incentive. At the same time I feel like a jerk refusing, or asking for money, if there is even a modicum of friendly rapport.

I remember when someone I thought of as a friend called me after a stint apart and, after my initial excitement at hearing from him, I realized he was only calling to try to get me to his band’s show. I found out that another friend got the same call around the same time, and we both felt like we had been cheated or let down. Neither one of us went to the concert. But then, how else could this guy have rallied people to his show? How do you get the word out if talking to your friends becomes gauche?

Where is this detesting of money leading? This sense that life skills and hard earned knowledge have no value? When it comes to music, it’s even worse. At a time when no one buys CDs, DVDs, or other tangible forms of art that were once socially accepted means of making a financial contribution, passing the hat or asking fans or friends to promote a live performance are all that’s left.

I’m now convinced that the safest option is to learn how to dig holes. No one denies that what you are doing is “work”, and no one is going to ask you to come by for lunch and till their flower bed for free. Years of hauling heavy camera equipment through the mud, poring over books or staring at a computer screen is invisible. Shoveling is right in people’s faces. I have friends who actually do shovel dirt for a living and, if anything, clients feel so bad for watching them work that they not only pay them, but tip them and give them Christmas gifts. Maybe if I start now I can be in line for the free cookies by December…

As always, photos link to photographers’ flicker sites

When I returned I immediately had a shot at another job custom made for my skills: traveling cross country in a small RV to capture and retell people’s stories about healthcare. I was ready to rock and roll… but I didn’t get the job. The documentary I was shopping at the time got a few nibbles, but nothing came through. Suddenly I went from the top of the world to twitching and muttering and swinging my arms wildly in the dark, looking desperately for something big and worthwhile to chase. My claws and teeth were long and sharp and, like a cat, they needed to be cut down regularly with work or they’d grow out of control.

But it’s dangerous to simply chase whatever comes by. Wandering through a film festival and talking about my latest projects I learned an important trick. I went on about an introverted guy living at the center of a huge crowd in a plexiglas box. I talked passionately about an inspirational traveling musician who was shot defending an elderly man. But the moment I said the words, “and I just got back from India shooting a…” the yawning listener would leap at me like I was their long lost mother. “What? India?! What did you see? What did you do? Can I see it?” They were ready to buy and watch the film without knowing what it was about. There are a lot of great films to be made, but some topics lead to uphill battles either to make them visually interesting or to sell them. Others sell themselves. As most take at least two years to make, I realized that I needed to take it easy and put some real thought into my next project.

I decided to take a year, 2009, to figure out my next direction. I wouldn’t allow myself to leap into anything without some real thought, and I wouldn’t begin implementing anything huge until Jan 1, 2010. Almost immediately I realized that this went beyond film projects, and I worked actively to make sure everything was on the table. If my next big move was to become an amazing boatswain or french maid, c’est magnifique. This opened me up in a variety of ways, including the realization that it might be possible to find what I was looking for in a position working for someone else. I hadn’t even realized that I’d never considered that before. I also started playing and writing music again, something I’d tried hard to restrict as it wasn’t making me a better filmmaker. The whole concept even lead to a re-evaluation of my dating life, and I decided to take the same approach there, stay single, and refuse to let myself dive wildly into any committed, long term relationships.

Now it’s November. I’ve researched a number of documentary projects, but my standards are high enough that nothing has clicked. I’ve explored the idea of using my scribbling skills to pursue some of the topics that I found unsuitable for film as books. Sure, no one reads, but books are a lot cheaper to make than films. In the end, I have a couple of projects in the works, but nothing huge has leapt out at me yet. Here is what I have learned.

Through interviewing people over the years, both for films and in general, everyone is full of great stories and great ideas. You just have to find the right way to trigger them. I’ve told a lot of people that I’m looking for the next big mountain to climb, the next big challenge that brings all of my skills to bear, but received nothing but nods. There’s no trigger there. On the other hand, lately I have pointed out to a few people that if I don’t find anything by my deadline, I may just start traveling and put myself out into the world. I mentioned Vietnam as a possible starting point. Behold: a trigger.

Instantly I met a girl who just returned from three years in Vietnam and was excited to offer me contacts and stories. A few days later, walking down the streets of Austin, I met another woman who was about to move to Hanoi in January and who offered me a swank place to stay, for as long as I wanted, near the embassy. Then an old friend appeared and asked me if I wanted to be his business partner in setting up a hostel in another smaller city.

If conquering Vietnam was the mountain, the end goal, I’d be set. As soon as you can proclaim your mission people will rally to your aid. But without a mission flag, the ships full of opportunity will drift by, they themselves unaware of what they contain.

Got an idea for the mountain? Big problem you think needs addressing by someone with film, writing, computer, mechanical, building and music skills? Drop me a line. I’m wide open.

As always, click on images to see photographer’s site

The first step was to find a good location. One of my teammates picked a spot surrounded by fallen trees. My first thought when I saw it was, “that’s the perfect place to hide a scout pit.” My second thought was, “wait, if that was my first thought, it’d be the first thought of someone searching for it.” I then realized that I had to dig my secret den of sleeping in plain sight. That was, until I realized that I’d thought of that idea second, and so would someone hunting me. In fact, maybe someone looking for me would be so sure I’d never fall for hiding my pit in the obvious place that the obvious place was exactly where I should dig. Soon this lead to the inevitable game of, “clearly I cannot chose the glass in front of me.” At last I split the difference by finding a spot in a fairly open clearing with enough saplings protruding from the ground that there was just barely enough room for a person to fit between them. More importantly, it would be hard to imagine that someone could fit between them.

I started by carefully clearing away and saving the top layer of decaying leaves and twigs. They were going to be the camouflage I would use to rebuild the forest floor as it was. Then I started enthusiastically carving out the dirt beneath with my small shovel. I had known we’d be traveling some distance to the site of our hidden camps and so I opted for a collapsing german army shovel. I think it cost me about $25 at a military surplus shop. The little green tri-folding tool took some serious abuse without complaint. One edge was serrated, which was perfect for cutting through the tough layers of roots near the surface. The front came to a point, and I could use that to hack at the thick clay to loosen it up before shoveling it out. Unfortunately, despite all of it’s great features, the shovel could not escape its tiny size.

After six hours of furious digging, pauses to pant and stare blankly at the ground, mad, aimless stabbing at dirt, ceaseless sweating in the rain, and general psychological mayhem as I forced myself time and again to keep digging, I still wasn’t done. I just couldn’t move enough earth with that tiny shovel. It didn’t help that I’d also come across a number of massive rocks. I’d had to use a whole slew of levering and digging and tugging tactics before I could heave them out, their resistance stubborn and unrelenting until the last. It was like trying to get my housemate Dhruv Bansal out of bed for a morning game of squash. Actually, in both cases pouring water on them helped to some extent. So did yelling.

Graham emerges from one of our scout pits

The class had to continue, so in the end we compromised. Our team of four joined forces the next morning to finish two scout pits and we rotated nights sleeping in them. I was really disappointed in myself for not having been able to finish one completely solo, but the massive blisters on my thumbs and palms (in rock climbing we call them “bloody flappers” when they reach that point) were enough badges of honor to justify moving on to the next challenge.

As it turns out, the scout pits were really comfortable. The walls weren’t wet and muddy, but solid and cool to the touch. The thick layer of dirt on top was enough to stop water from getting in and acted as insulation. There was plenty of room and maybe it was because I live with six housemates already, but the guests didn’t bother me. There were only a couple of large spiders, crickets, and beetles that decided to wander through my crude door to join me and none of them had any intention of harming me. I actually enjoyed having them around. It made everything feel more authentic somehow.

In the morning I climbed up out into the early morning light, the dewey ground and the smell of the damp leaves all around me, feeling very woven into the woods. I felt refreshed and exhilarated. I wasn’t a stranger wrapped in plastic, I was alive and a part of it all.