For years, I’ve been making myself appear smarter and more interesting than I actually am by quoting dialogue from director David Mamet’s films. At some point, anyone who knows me well has been amused/bored/irritated by some of the following nuggets:

From the movie Heist: 

Jimmy: So, is he going to be cool?

Pinky: My motherfucker is so cool, when he goes to bed, sheep count him.

[In a bar]

Betty Croft:  Take it easy, baby, that stuff’ll rot your stomach lining.

Fran Moore:  Yeah, but I get to drink it first.

From the movie The Spanish Prisoner: 

Jimmy Dell: Always do business as if the person you’re doing business with is trying to screw you, because he probably is. And if he’s not, you can be pleasantly surprised.

Nobody talks like characters in a Mamet screenplay.  His prose is a miracle – at once both profane and poetic, thoroughly colloquial and charmingly anachronistic.  But smart. Always smart. And illuminating – like the line from the movie Redbelt that I quoted a couple of posts ago, and especially this monologue from the movie version of Glengary Glen Ross, written by Mamet and based on his famous stage play of the same name:

Now, a little context – Pacino is playing a vaguely amoral real estate salesman, trying to persuade Jonathan Pryce to buy a worthless piece land by playing on his fear he’s done nothing adventurous in his life.   Of all Mamet’s work, nothing resonates with me quite like this monologue, in particular the question “Where’s the Moment?” It speaks to me not because I think my life has been boring – I’ve had several interesting moments in life. I’ve just managed not to be “present” for almost all of them – I was there in body, but not spirit.

Thanks to my work in TV, I’ve been lucky enough to go places and meet some  interesting people – James Brown to Al Gore to Jack Layton to Lady Gaga – but  I can hardly remember any of these encounters. At the time, I was watching things unfold through the viewfinder of a camera, and less concerned with what was being said than if the shot was composed right, or if it was in focus, or if I was recording clean audio. My lack of mental presence has not been without consequences: The normally affable Ben Harper once flipped out on me during an interview because I was so distracted I asked him the same question twice.   It could be I’ve met my hero Mamet himself, and I’d have no fucking clue.

The result is I’m one step removed from a lot of the things I’ve done, which feels pretty much the same as having not been there at all. People ask me what I remember about all the places I’ve been, the people I’ve met, and I tell them I have no idea – I more or less watched the whole thing on TV like everybody else. I was not unlike news photographers killed in Vietnam – viewing the action through a camera rendered them oblivious to the real danger they were in.

(That’s probably why I’m not much of a picture person in civilian life.  When I see people at concerts taking pictures on their smartphones, I feel bad for them. They don’t know what they’re taking themselves away from, and all for a shitty picture that’ll only bore others to see later.)

I haven’t picked up a video camera in a long time, but that doesn’t mean my ability to be present automatically improved.  For a time, that camera was replaced by lingering regrets about the past and worries about the future.  I’d like to think I could push those things out of my mind when I need to, but I could always feel them close by.

Which isn’t to say I remember nothing.   There are some great moments that have stayed with me,  memories that still feel as real as the day they happened; discovering the Beastie Boys could play as a punk 3-piece at Lollapalooza in 1994; racing motorbikes with my uncle in an Eastern Washington desert;  diving in an underwater cave in Mexico and seeing a stalactite that resembled the Virgin Mary; swimming with a six-gill shark off the coast of Pender Island in BC;  a night on Capri I once spent with an ex-girlfriend; kissing the woman I dated after that girlfriend at a concert – The Dears were playing “Lost in the Plot.”

These moments stay with me because I wasn’t holding a camera, or worrying about making a deadline, or ruminating over bad choices – I was just “there.”  I didn’t consciously put things out of my mind, I didn’t meditate (although I’ve tried this, with dubious results) – I just happened to be there when the wheel went round.     Actually, that’s not true – during all those moments I recall being focussed, exhilarated, and full of wonder.

So meditation is one thing, but I suppose the real trick to staying present is to always be doing something you love, something that can still surprise you.   All of which is just a long-winded way of saying that nothing puts me in the moment like being with my infant daughter.  Just today, she giggled as I played with her. It was the first time I’d heard my daughter laugh, and it made me cry.  It’s a funny thing – the world falls away, and it’s me and my little girl, and everything’s just fine.  I’m not missing anything when I’m with her, and that more than makes up for all those amazing events I can’t remember.

baby mama's boyfriend

Baby Mama and I went to a movie yesterday – perhaps the last one we’ll see together for a long time (that doesn’t involve Pixar animations).   We saw Horrible Bosses – a benign comedy chosen primarily for Baby Mama’s crush on Jason Bateman.  I didn’t mind it, although I had trouble suspending my disbelief for the part about the guy who hates that his uber-hot boss Jennifer Aniston keeps trying to have sex with him.  During a scene where the guy feels harassed because she’s wearing just a lab coat and panties in the office, one moviegoer in the theatre actually said out loud “How is that a problem?” – thus vocalizing what every straight guy in the place was thinking.

as bosses go, i strongly believe it could be worse.

By contrast, I had no trouble at all believing Jason Bateman’s monologue at the start of the movie:  “My grandma came to this country with 21 dollars.  After working hard her whole life and taking shit from no one, she turned that 21 dollars into 2000 dollars.  That…sucks. Grandma’s problem was that she took shit from nobody.  These days, the key to success is taking shit.”

Baby Mama’s boyfriend isn’t wrong – as I learned from my McQueen experiment, standing up for yourself and doing your own thing rarely gets you anywhere (unless you’re Steve McQueen, and he’s dead).  As I mentioned in a previous post, people claim to admire individualists, but in truth they usually try to oppress and kill them. If you’ve read of a true maverick who successfully blazed their own unique trail in life, it’s probably for the same reason you’ve read about a recent plane crash – it happens so infrequently that it’s newsworthy.

For many males, this is perhaps one of the most emasculating truisms of professional life: in the workplace, a handful of us get to call the shots while the rest of us have our shots called by that handful.   In such a top-down management structure,  some shit-taking may be required, and no doubt it’s hard for a man to feel like a man when he’s kissing his boss’ ass – unless, of course, that boss is Jennifer Aniston and he is literally kissing her ass.

Not me, though.  Just like Jason Bateman,  I’ve learned to appreciate the art of going with the flow…basically, of puckering and planting.  Perhaps it’s the failure of my experiments in hubris, or the recognition that fatherhood requires me to place my unborn child (and my responsibility to provide for it) ahead of my own ego – regardless, I now believe there could be few things more manly, more necessary to being a Better Man (and father)  than knowing how, when the occasion demands, to eat shit and call it pudding.

To explain why, it might help to re-frame the discussion using terms other than “eating shit” – that suggests any man who understands the dynamics of his workplace and acts accordingly  is a bit of a pussy.  Really, this is about adaptability, a subject I’ve covered before:  Navy SEALs are expected to adapt to shitty situations all the time, and I doubt they hear people calling them pussies that often.

resistance is futile

So maybe it would help to quote some more movie dialogue, this time from a character in the David Mamet film Redbelt: “Everything has a force. Embrace it or deflect it–why oppose it?”  That movie was about jiujitsu, and the character was describing a prevailing concept of that particular martial art.  The meaning is simple enough: resistance is futile.

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