I saw an actor at an audition the other day I’d not seen in many, many years. He’s older than I, and it took me a second to place him. His face was gaunt, his shoulders hunched, and he looked like he hadn’t slept, bathed or eaten in a week. Poor soul, I thought, he’s had some tough times…
After a moment, a second actor, cut from the same cloth, sauntered over. The two recognized each other, greeted a fond hello and started in on some idle chatter that soon turned into a litany of complaints, laced with profanities and full of bile. It was uncomfortable for anybody within earshot. Endless moans about part time bar jobs, unemployment and getting old. Read more…
Everybody has problems, and everybody looks for answers. This is the human condition. I have a certain faith in humanity, and believe that if there were a magic bullet solution to suffering, it would have been discovered by now. The best I’ve seen has been through mindfulness, but that’s no panacea, of course. It’s just one approach.
Some people go for therapy, others for chocolate, and sometimes these things work. How long they last is anybody’s guess, but there is one thing that has to precede any prescription for change, and that is desire. That is, if the desire for change is there, then any manner of things will work, and work quickly. Taking long hikes is the cure-all, if you believe that taking long hikes is the cure-all. If you don’t, then you get blisters and nothing more. Jumping up and down and yelling, “Booga booga booga” for fifteen minutes a day is another option, and again, you’ll either feel better, or feel stupid. It could be pez, it doesn’t really matter… Read more…
The title of this musing sounds like a metaphor. It probably is, though in this case it’s also somewhat literal. To that end, I worked with a mechanical ape in a short film last week and, as predicted, he was a source of endless fascination while providing an interesting challenge in not being upstaged too badly.
To the metaphoric end, “wrestling the ape” could represent any type of challenge. In my case, ape and ape coincided, and the metaphor arose in having to deliver the emotional part of my performance in the fifteenth hour of the last day while sick. I could see the challenge looming, and it weighed about 600 pounds. Read more…
I saw an actor at an audition the other day I’d not seen in many, many years. He’s older than I, and it took me a second to place him. His face was gaunt, his shoulders hunched, and he looked like he hadn’t slept, bathed or eaten in a week. Poor soul, I thought, he’s had some tough times…