red HANDS production diary

Discipline

We’re shooting this month and I’m starting work again at my day job the day after tomorrow. It’s time to get in shape – I’ll need to be really on my game and focused to deal with everything that’s going to be thrown at me. This means more spinach and no more booze until my birthday, 2.2.9, and more working out. This fall I’ve slipped into the writers cave and I need to be in better physical shape so that my brain becomes stronger too. This round of training will serve as a first step for the next, more extensive round I’ll need to get into for when my band goes to Austin for South By Southwest, and then the spoken word/performance/lecture tour after that.

I love discipline. I make myself write ten pages a day, force myself to bike over twenty miles a week, eat off a strict calorie bank. I find that discipline creates structure, boundaries, and increases creativity. That’s probably why I drifted over to Zen when I became a Buddhist. Fuck that other weak hippie shit. Also, on the more practical side, I have really bad IBS so if I'm not pretty disciplined from the ground up I'm usually rolling around in terrible gut-poison agony.

But you have to be careful. If I’m too disciplined I crank too hard and go berserk (Icarus was a pussy and all that) and then crash hard and much time and potential production gets wasted. It’s an ebb and a flow. As I up the discipline to see this section of RED HANDS get made I’ll have to up the unwinding too. This means more movies, more goofing around with the wife. If I can hit the right balance for this month I’ll have a work/lifestyle methodology I can tweak and fine tune to get me through to the end of this production, which I’m hoping will be the early part of the summer. If you want to help out, finance, share expertise, whatever (Red Hands is about COLLABORATION and COMMUNITY) then shoot me some thoughts here or at pacificvagrant@gmail.com.