We all have several key archetypes in our personality makeup: protector, victim, wizard, hermit, etc. These patterns are common among all people and are diverse enough to keep things interesting. Although we’re not strictly limited to these constructs, they do influence our behavior greatly, and the knowledge of your types can be a source of tremendous power and self discovery.

For me, one type dominates all others – The Saboteur. This is the guy who, if left to his own devices, would leave you penniless in a heap in some Slovakian hostel. He sees permanence and structure as the enemy, and strives to kick the supports out of every scaffold in your life. That is the darker side of The Saboteur.

But here is the upside – he is also the only archetype who can excise the unimportant things in our existence that we sometimes cling to. He is the one to strong arm a CEO to leave a cushy top floor office and start up an animal rescue in Kenya. He is the one to leave traps in your alibi when you walk a tightrope of lies. He will force you to throw out your junk food, burn your bras, cancel your cable, and terminate a friendship.

In my case, I made peace with The Saboteur long ago. But it took a decade or more of confusion in my twenties, wondering why I quit college, botched a sales job in Manhattan, walked out of relationships. It took almost fifteen years of hindsight to see how all of those instances were way points, and The Saboteur stepped in to block the paths that didn’t lead me to where I am today. That’s not to say that those roads were wrong, or that the ones I followed were right. It only means that my archetype understood my vector more clearly than I could, and steered me like a lumbering container ship toward the ports that were preordained for me.

I feel him strongly now, as I deconstruct my life in preparation for my new role as a father. There is an awful lot of stumbling, as the crutches are ripped out of my hands, but my legs are more solid than I had ever imagined and I lurch forward. He faces me now, like a drill sergeant dressing down a recruit, screaming my flaws at me. And I am deeply thankful for it.

In the past year, I have written maybe twice. That’s just piss-poor. I can’t live like that – my brain will dry up like a mushroom and rattle around during the commute to work. Now that I am closing in on forty, a reprioritization seemed to be necessary. I wanted to conserve and focus my attention on important aspects of my creative life. In order to get things back on track, I had to reduce my massive e-footprint.

Some stuff was easy. Twitter. God, I hate Twitter. The electronic analog to playing fetch with a short, crappy stick. I didn’t ever warm up to Google+ either, so that was a quick close. LinkedIn? Useless, unless you want to know where people who quit your company went in order to reclaim their sanity.

Facebook was a bit trickier. On one hand, I wanted to share the little daily wins and foibles with my close friends and family, but in another sense, that was exactly what I was trying to stop myself from doing. The entire problem was that I was constantly reporting on the minutiae of the day without allowing time for reflection on what those tiny moments meant or added up to. So I downloaded all my data and closed that account too.

I also have changed the way I read news. I had a large number of news sites in Google Reader, which was helpful in keeping up with all the day’s happenings. The problem was that I really don’t need to keep up with all the day’s happenings, dammit. But in order to maintain the reader at zero unread, I was forcing myself to gulp down massive amounts of feed whether or not I had the inclination to be hungry for it. My mind was growing fat on simple stories with little nutritional value.

I look back at some of my earlier posts, and I remember that I am occasionally a writer, sometimes a passable one. I aim to improve on that. Aside from posting here, I write nightly in a journal. It is a snazzy little pleather-bound number with a piece of elastic to keep it closed. I pretend I’m Ernest Hemingway in my shipboard bunk, but I’m probably more like Gilbert Gottfried in a Kentucky Fried Chicken. In any case, the side of my brain that uses a hand to write ideas in script format was aching for exercise, and only now is it being satisfied.

I honestly don’t know how far this will go. I only concern myself with the process, and refine just the areas that I know will make me happy in the short term. My hope is that my hopes and experiences will be preserved in the struggle on the page, like some kind of writhing insect that gets trapped in amber, only to squeeze out of a too-small shell and escape until the next sap catches me at the wrong time. It might not be pretty, but at least I might outlast the dinosaurs.

As of October 3, 2011:

I have no Facebook account.
I have no Twitter account.
I have no Google+ account.
I have no Blogger account.
I have nothing in Google Reader.
I am not known to YouTube, LinkedIn, Vimeo, Yelp, Reddit, Digg or Buzzfeed.

And now I can feel my soul coming back to me.

The cavernous studio. The alarmingly blue background at the back wall. The utilitarian pink floor tiles. And Peter Stelzer - a tall, thin, professorial figure, scowling down at his microwaved coffee, standing guard with an elbow slung over the video camera. I don’t think I was greeted until Marla swept in with an armful of scripts to be used that night. And I was early. I don’t think Peter liked that.

* * * * * * *

The last time I left Marla and Peter’s house in Scottsdale, AZ, I was frustrated. The class as a whole had given a third-rate effort, and I was no exception. There is no guessing when you are doing poorly – Marla will come right out and say how terrible you were. Peter will quietly stew until you slip up and try to defend your actions. Then he will holler at you for 5 minutes. And during this time, it starts to sink in how he already knew what your defense was going to be before you finished the scene, and he has had to sit there and WAIT for you to go through your whole process before he could finally respond. A lot of waiting happened in those classes, on Peter’s part, since his mind was constantly working at roughly fourteen times the speed of our own. This night, he slipped away into the recesses of the house as students were filing out and saying goodbyes. I usually shake his hand and say goodnight out on the front stoop. I guess not this week.

Classes like this were common, because the instruction was quite uncommon. A lot of topics get covered at once, and if you don’t grasp them all to some degree, you will have problems. It worked out well for me, because I never did appreciate being taught in a remedial progression, no matter what subject. I want to hear the top-down justification for the discipline I’m studying, and then be given the exercises to justify those conclusions, until the exercises and the philosophy are indistinguishable. In this instance, acting classes consisted of Peter unfurling the suppositions with menacing precision, and Marla translating these into exercises we actually had a chance to understand. It was a beautiful combination of approaches to witness in action. Every class was actually two classes in one – one instruction gentle, honest and compassionate, the other brilliantly brutal.

And I knew I was learning from a genius, because I really was derailed intellectually on a weekly basis. Lots of times at their house, I would be huddling on one of their studio sofas, trying to appear calm, as Peter tried to drive critical shards of understanding into my head like some kind of unrelenting late-night jackhammer. And he wouldn’t stop until you showed some kind of recognition. And you couldn’t fake it, because frankly, none of us were actors of that caliber. What Peter was teaching was Stanislavsky, Morris, Hagen and Meisner, all at the same time. But what he had done had never been done before. He had teased out the Grand Unifying Theory of all of these masters. Yet in its raw equations, it was hard to comprehend for the layman. Nevertheless, Peter kept hammering.

And I knew how lucky I was to be there.

Once I started going to class regularly, my entire acting body structure changed. I prioritized the application of what I had learned, and concentrated on discrete topics during each performance. I picked up two acting awards in quick succession. I started getting complements about performances, even when I thought I could do better. And even in class, once in a while, Peter would actually say the word “good” after I finished a scene. And when class was good, it was fantastically good. When it was bad – well, it was hard to look Peter in the eye. While Marla was always critical and encouraging, Peter just looked disappointed. And I came to realize that this really mattered to me.

I wanted to do well for Peter because I noticed a pattern. When he really cared about your progress and knew you could do better, he yelled at you much longer. He did this because he wanted to devote his time to getting you to realize the truth about your performance, and the ways in which you were lying to yourself. That’s when it became so blindingly obvious: he was exerting all this passion because he cared about us. Suddenly, it wasn’t yelling at all. Peter was grabbing us by both shoulders and shaking us awake.

I wanted to get to know Peter more, so I would try to be there just a little early to be able to talk to him. I learned that he was frustrated with his ability to provide everything he knew his family deserved. I discovered how devoted he was to his kids. And I saw immediately how much he loved Marla, and how lost he was when she was away – even if only for a day or so.

I worked very hard and tried to listen to every word Peter said in class. Then one night, after finishing a scene, the most remarkable thing happened to me. Peter looked up at me from his seat on the couch as I walked back to sit down. His face was strangely relaxed, almost quizzical. “That was a good job, James. That is really rewarding for me to see.”

I’m not certain, but I think I was beaming for an entire month.

* * * * * * * *

I remember moving to the sofa on the right side of the room. I wasn’t sure if I deserved the sofa over the chairs, but I do remember I wanted to appear confident.

“Yeah, so uh… I’ve done some theatre and a Cox commercial. Oh! And I do voiceovers.”

Peter said nothing. He lifted his cup, sipped, and sighted me over the brim. I felt like maybe I was a backyard shrub, and my fate was being weighed – whether to prune back and water, or yank out the roots and cover the hole with gravel.

Apparently, there was something there to save.

Thank you, Peter.

I remember with great clarity the frustration of not being able to verbalize the conundrum that had me caught in a cognitive circle. I am here, you are there, he is over there – that much we have established. But why can I only see out of my eyes? Why is this life played out through only my experiences? In short – why am I at the center of this universe that I just entered?

The question wasn’t megalomaniacal; I was honestly confused. I just wanted to know why, considering we all have to live together, we were not able to physically experience life through other people, but instead were trapped in just one body with two little light holes. But I was too young to use language, so I couldn’t ask my mom. And even when I arrived at a point in my development where I could form the questions, they never came out right. So I never got an answer.

As I entered my teens, I started to pick up on the fact that not everyone has this question in their mind. Most people did not see things the way that I did – that everything that looks separate and distinct is actually just another side of the same thing. People in my school would do things that were deliberately destructive, not realizing that the ripples of pain they caused were more than just dropping an ice cube in a glass – it was a huge muddy rock thrown into a public pool. It’s not that these kids were bad people. They simply weren’t aware of the connections.

And I was jealous.

I saw for the first time the advantages of being self contained. Freedom from being worried about how others feel. Independence from people who tried to enforce their beliefs on you. Power to make choices that benefitted only you.

Then, on April 9, 1986, when I was 13 years old, I was in a car crash. The vehicle that I was riding in with my grandfather struck a tree at over 60 MPH on a curvy mountain road. We both walked away, but I was never the same. The scar on my forehead took 9 stitches and most of my innocence. It was then that I became determined to live for myself.

For most of high school and then into college, I did the things that all kids do – I worried about how my skin looked, I tried to look cool at parties, I goofed around when I knew a girl was nearby. But I was disconnected and drifting. I never settled on a major. I left school twice. Even the one meaningful relationship I had in college only existed in the microcosm of student life; though deep and wonderful for almost two years, it quickly fell apart when I left. My father died of pancreatic cancer. I returned home to help care for my grandfather; he died within months. I felt like I was grasping at vapors – not understanding what I was after, and not getting it, either.

I shuffled along through a string of dubious employment choices and unhelpful relationships before finally making a running dive at age 25 into Corporate America. I started as a helpdesk drone at GE, and worked my way into a traveling engineer job. And I was good at it. I worked problems that no one else would touch, traveled places no one wanted to go. When I got back from a job, I would buy seafood salad at the store, and go back to my apartment and have a meal and smoke Lucky Strikes until it was time for bed.

It was to be the water receding before the coming tsunami.

]]> http://scaffadaffa.com/what-would-happen-if-two-space-watermelons-smashed-into-each-other/feed 0 http://scaffadaffa.com/the-summer-garden?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=the-summer-garden http://scaffadaffa.com/the-summer-garden#comments Mon, 09 Aug 2010 16:42:00 +0000 James http://scaffadaffa.com/?p=293
Hard to say how much more this cucumber and watermelon plants are going to put out… we just found out the irrigation controller had been failing for a week, so we lost a lot of leaves since these pictures. Regardless, the cukes were really tasty (the 7 we had so far) and the melons look and sound pretty good (click the pic for a link to the full set).

]]> http://scaffadaffa.com/the-summer-garden/feed 0 http://scaffadaffa.com/the-value-of-smoke?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=the-value-of-smoke http://scaffadaffa.com/the-value-of-smoke#comments Mon, 12 Jul 2010 14:52:00 +0000 James http://scaffadaffa.com/?p=291
Let me preface this with a disclaimer…

Actually, let me not. I hate trite disclaimers. So here it is:

There is a reason why every culture of the world has smoking traditions and why tobacco is a part of many spiritual rituals. If you are smoking, and so long as you know the long-term risks and will stop eventually, follow through with what you are doing. You are doing it for a reason.

My grandfather smoked a pipe for- well, probably 90 of his 99 years. His fingertips were badly burnt and his teeth had long since departed because of the resin, but I believe that it was during those times when he would sit motionless, pulling long draws on that hot bowl, that he got the closest to enlightenment. Soon after he would stop, knock out the hot ashes, and get up and start again on the task at hand, whether is was welding a tangled hay elevator or solving complex algebra.

I smoked a pipe during college, and it made me feel very close to him after he had gone. It was always outside- since, ironically, a good smoke can only be had in fresh air. I also smoked unfiltered cigarettes after college, which was my late father’s vice. In total, I smoked some form of tobacco for the entire run of my twenties. And I’m glad that I did. Because now I understand the value of smoke.

The breath is life. All meditation disciplines involve some form of breath focus. Similarly, when you concentrate on keeping a small fire alive with your breath, your awareness moves to the breath outside of your body. It enhances your connection to the spiritual fire of the rest of the world.

As far as the body of the smoke itself, if it is inhaled, I always found that it put my own physical body in context. I was conceived and born, and I will die and dissipate. This is a shared trait with everyone who has come before me, those who will follow me, and every one of my friends of today. It made me comfortable with my own mortality.

I don’t have a pipe or a pack of Lucky Strikes these days, but it is not because I don’t have a need for them. I learned to how to listen to my body many years ago, and unfortunately, I no longer have the capacity to both smoke and lead a healthy life. But there was a time when I did, and there are those who do today. If you are one of them, don’t self-judge. For a short time, you have a powerful tool for advancing your understanding of the world and yourself. When you are done, use that knowledge.

This post is not endorsed by the American Cancer Society.

]]> http://scaffadaffa.com/the-value-of-smoke/feed 1 http://scaffadaffa.com/being-a-survivor?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=being-a-survivor http://scaffadaffa.com/being-a-survivor#comments Fri, 04 Jun 2010 16:05:00 +0000 James http://scaffadaffa.com/?p=290 (This was actually meant to be a response to a post by Maile. It got kinda out of hand, so I decided to post it here.)

Being a survivor sounded like fun when I used to curl up in the big red chair and listen to my live-in grandfather’s stories, his gnarled hands cradling a burnt corn cob pipe as he drew puffs of slightly bitter smoke. His Midwestern drawl would lend a sepia tone to every new adventure he divulged I learned about the hard times of the Dust Bowl, growing up as the rambunctious youngest brother of eight kids, the Great Depression, and donating steel for the War. He was still a powerful man into his 90s, repairing farm implements and tearing apart diesel tractors (even though he stopped to rest and smoke for durations almost exceeding the times he would work), and contributing greatly to our welfare on the farm up in the mountains.

Then I started to lose people.

At first, it didn’t register. Here I am, eating breakfast next to a nonagenarian who only last year was patching the barn roof. He’s fine, how can anyone be gone?

It got worse. The people I lost got younger. Best friends. And much closer. My dad.

I remained very philosophical about it, while slowly the joy leeched out of me. I was sampling the acrid bite of existing beyond the lifespan of my friends and family. I saw my grandfather from a very different perspective now – no longer as the grizzled champion of longevity, but as a young man who watched as important people who brought light into his life disappeared, leaving him behind in a dry and darkening room.

And then, he was gone.

It was not altogether unexpected, since he was 99 and had been weak for several months. His best friend was hit the hardest. In response, Alfred took up the task of retelling the stories, now filling in the lurid details that I had not been privy to. It lent an entirely new dimension to my grandfather, and I regretted very much not being old enough to hear these stories directly from him. I grew very dependent on Alfred during these years. He made me feel like my grandfather was still alive, just up the hill while we worked away on a cord of wood by the creek in the waning days on the fall, the chill blowing down through the saplings and settling in the valley.

Then the news. Alfred had mesothelioma.

I watched as my connection to my grandfather slowly severed, conducted all this time by a man who was in pain from his passing. I also realized that I was losing a father for a second time. Alfred had been guiding me for so long, I thought my values were my own spontaneous creation. But they were not. Alfred and my grandfather were the lights that were leading me.

The second light went out.

Many years have passed. I must admit that even as new joys were entering my life since then, the drought I felt in my heart since losing these people has been long and severe. But not permanent, and certainly not irreversible. I have since learned that joy is water in a reservoir, with the people in my life filling it constantly. Surviving through the lean years means having the vision to see the high watermark both in the past and in the future.

I have a little wellspring of my own now, fed by the memories of these people. I will keep it flowing for as long as I live. But the pain is always there. The difference these days is that I use that pain as a bracket to contain and fully realize the new joys that enter my life, even if only for a while. I think I know my grandfather better now. His goal was never to be a survivor. He just wanted to live.

]]> http://scaffadaffa.com/being-a-survivor/feed 0 http://scaffadaffa.com/game-5-section-121?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=game-5-section-121 http://scaffadaffa.com/game-5-section-121#comments Sat, 24 Apr 2010 07:13:00 +0000 James http://scaffadaffa.com/?p=287
DSC02904, originally uploaded by leathej1.

It was not meant to be a winning night for the home team during the first playoff hockey game for Yoshiko and I. We missed seeing Shane Doan, and apparently, the team missed him too. I very much wanted the new guys on the roster to contribute more (although Wolski has 3 goals in 5 playoff games), but only the old guard of Jovanovski scored. Penalty killing was our strength tonight, which was encouraging. But the team looked lethargic and shaken – and I think I am learning the vital importance of having the captain on the ice.