My Time as a Human

When George Lucas set out to make Star Wars he was a young man with a dream. He wrote a story that excited him and shot a film about a fantastic world that absorbed him. Years later he continued the series with a film stuffed with farting aliens and racial stereotypes.

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.

A lot of people ask me about my Lasik process, but it’s a long story and hard to tell. It’s not easy to admit spending a huge amount of money and time on something that didn’t work out very well, especially when it involves radically altering one of my primary senses. I also feel deeply humiliated talking about problems that may very well have been caused by my own bad choices. My hope is that by writing publicly, I’ll help other people make better choices and avoid having to retell the whole saga in person.

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.

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Something about this guy Zander bothered me from the start. We met at an NLP class filled with the usual assortment of therapists and social workers and the types of restless characters who just want to learn everything they can. He was introduced to me as someone I should meet; that we would have a lot in common. He read as one of what I often refer to as, “soft hippies”, people who speak softly, move slowly and spend a lot of time doing yoga, poking people with needles and humming. Some of my friends are soft hippies, so I wasn’t going to write him off for that, but there is an odd attraction to the genre for people who play the part but are very, very broken. I had the misfortune of knowing one who studied chinese medicine and performed acupuncture and massage, as well as stealing from the people around him and treating women like chew toys.

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 from India in 2008 I was a rocket boosted panther on roller skates. I was feeling great about my skills and I had proven to myself yet again that I could both do and enjoy the work for which I had been birthed: sleeping in old buildings with broken windows, no heat, and little water, repairing gear on the fly, solving computer problems, shooting while running across muddy fields, and interacting passionately with people who didn’t even speak my language.

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