RIDE LIKE HELL
Julie and I moved to California in August of 2011.
A few months earlier, in April, I saw an ad on Facebook for a contest run by Bombardier Recreational Products, the makers of a three-wheeled motorcycle called the Can-Am Spyder. They were looking for two new “ambassadors” to spend six months riding the Spyder, take pictures, make travel videos, and write articles about their adventures. The prize: a Spyder, to keep, and a cash stipend for six months of adventuring.
With only a few months to go before the big move I was totally broke. Julie bought a used car for us to share, a fifteen year old Mercury Sable. I had no job prospects waiting for me out here and she was going to be going to grad school full time. Winning this contest would be a huge help.
To enter you had to make a short video and write a 200 word article. I wrote about how I’d driven cross country many times, I’d been to almost every state, but I’d never done it on a motorcycle, despite riding for the previous fifteen years. The video included a bunch of road trip footage alongside shots of my sad, broken down Honda 650, in pieces in my parents' garage.
Sometime around the end of the month I got a phone call from the marketing rep in charge of the contest who said, "I'm afraid I have some bad news... you're going to have to stop riding that Honda." I was shellshocked. It was the biggest thing I'd ever won (up to that point).
BRP planned a three-day media event in Manhattan Beach at the end of May where the other new ambassador and I were going to meet the rest of “The Spyder 5,” be presented with our brand new Spyders, and go on a couple of iconic rides in Southern California. After the event was over they would ship the Spyders back to our home states.
On the phone with the marketing rep, I said, “Can I ride it back to Ohio?”
There was a long pause. “Are you sure?"
I was not. The longest ride I’d done at that point was 350 miles. I said, “It’s the whole point of the campaign, right? To have adventures.”
A few weeks later I was here in LA, riding around with a camera crew and the guy who literally wrote the book on motorcycle touring. We rode the canyons through Malibu, up the PCH, had lunch at Neptune’s Net, then back down again. It was a blast. I remember coming through one particular turn toward Malibu where the ocean opened wide in front of me and thinking, “I can’t believe I get to move here at the end of summer.”
After the event was over and the rest of the Spyders and BRP reps left, I checked out of the hotel and went to Target where I bought a tent, a sleeping bag, a waterproof duffel, and some bungee cords. My plan was to camp out in National Parks or KOA campgrounds. I told everybody who asked that I thought it would take me three to four days to make it from LA to Ironton. There were tons of people on the Spyder message boards and Facebook wishing me well, excited to follow the journey.
I spent that night with my friends Jonathan and Ashlee in Pasadena. I woke up early, got breakfast, filled up the tank, and set out on the Great American motorcycle adventure. I was living my EASY RIDER dream, just me and the open road. I was a man about to make his own myth.
Halfway up the Cajon Pass a thunderstorm hit.
I went from smiling ear to ear to white-knuckling so hard my hands ached for a full day afterward. I was freezing thanks to the rain that had already soaked through my clothes. I could barely see through the visor of my full-face helmet but I didn’t want to stop on the side of the highway because I was terrified I’d get clipped by a car in the low visibility and it’s not like I could have put on rain gear anyway because I hadn’t thought to buy any back at the Target. I was absolutely miserable.
It was forty-five minutes into the trip.
The rain let up on the other side of the pass and gradually I warmed up. I made it to Vegas where I pitched a tent in the KOA campground at Circus Circus — yes, there’s a KOA campground at Circus Circus — and took a nighttime ride on the strip. Suddenly the trip was fun again.
But later that night a freak thunderstorm blew my tent over. It collapsed on top of me, inches from my face. The wind blew so hard that I couldn’t have gotten it back up if I wanted to. So I stayed like that the whole night, a shivering human burrito, the rain slowly infiltrating and soaking the dry clothes I had changed into hours before.
The next morning, I made it twenty miles out of Vegas when my knees and hips started to hurt from my position on the bike. I pulled over at truck stop, got a Subway sandwich and sat in the booth, regretting all of the choices in my life that had led me to that point.
Just before I took off again a guy pulled up next to me on a crotch rocket and asked where I was headed. I told him I was hoping to make it to Grand Junction, Colorado later that day. “Bad idea,” he said. “There’s a blizzard in Grand Junction, you can see it on the livestream cam.” I believed him but I pulled out my phone and sure enough, white out conditions ahead.
This was the “all is lost” moment that writing gurus talk about. My lowest point, the moment when I realized I’d made a huge mistake. There was no way I was going make it home in three days. I wasn’t a hundred per cent sure I would be able to ride the whole way, period. There was no way in hell I was going to camp out again, that was for sure.
I pulled out my phone and started looking for other routes. There was a road going south to Kingman, Arizona, from there I could take 40 across. Route 66. The Mother Road. Fine, let's get it over with.
I got to Kingman, rented a very cheap hotel room, then rode to the CVS where I bought a bag of Epsom salts, a bottle of Aleve, and a pint of Maker's Mark. Sitting in the hot bath, drinking a couple of healthy pours from a plastic hotel cup, I felt like a whole new person. I decided I was going to finish, no matter how long it took. My goal of doing the whole trip in three days was tied to an unrealistic expectation. For some messed up reason I though doing it quickly would prove I was a real rider. But I was focused on the wrong things. I forgot the basic law of road trips, of any adventure really, which is, “It’s the journey, not the destination.” So I let go. And that’s the moment everything changed.
The next day I drove through The Painted Desert and The Petrified Forest National Parks, feeling like a visitor to some alien planet. I saw trains moving across the horizon line, the whole thing in eyeshot, from locomotive to Caboose. I saw elk and armadillo and rattlesnakes. I bought a pickle soaked in red Kool-Aid at a gas station on a Navajo reservation and showed the Spyder to some kids who rode by horseback. I got a steak at The Big Texan in Amarillo. In Shamrock, Texas, I saw the inspiration for some of the architecture in the movie CARS. I was deep in America, taking it mile by mile, moment to moment.
I gave myself a mantra. "Be here now."
It was glorious.
Which is not to say that the rest of the trip was without peril.
I got a hotel room just North of Oklahoma City to wait out a tornado warning and watched footage on the local news of a semi truck that had been obliterated by a twister on the same stretch of highway I’d been traveling on just a few hours before.
Oh, and at one point I stumbled into a $25 hotel room on Old Route 66 in the middle of the night and I was so tired I didn't even turn the lights on or get undressed. A few hours later I woke up in a room that was WALL TO WALL RED. The carpet, the wallpaper, the curtains, all of it was BLOOD RED. I was so disoriented I didn't know where I was for a good thirty seconds. Sheer terror. I legit thought I might be missing a kidney. Anyway...
Ten days after I left LA I finally crossed the Ironton-Russell Bridge and rode the last couple of miles to my parents’ house in Ironton. When I pulled up the family was waiting for me outside, taking pictures and videos on their phone. My dad grilled steaks and I told stories from the road while we sat around the table together. It was the perfect ending for that adventure.
Over the next month I put on 5,000 miles, riding from Ironton to The Fingerlakes, back down to The Great Smoky Mountains and more. Unfortunately (fortunately) I had to pack it in the truck for the move to LA in August, but when I got here the adventuring continued.
Until Christmas Eve in 2012, when I got the call that they were ending the program. Forgive me if you’ve heard this story before, but for the new folks, I told my girlfriend, “I have a choice. I can either get a regular job or sell the Spyder and buy myself some time to just write. I can bet on myself.” With Julie’s encouragement, I sold the Spyder and invested that money in my writing career.
It was an incredibly difficult decision. That was the first brand new vehicle I’d ever owned. It was more than a motorcycle. It represented a major accomplishment. It represented freedom. We’d been across the country and back a number of times at that point. It was like an old friend.
But, I knew I had to sell it in order to reach the next stage of my journey. In a weird way, I was able to do that because of the lessons I learned on the road. There was a different kind of freedom in letting it go.
A few months later, EXTANT placed in the TrackingB TV pilot contest, which led to my then-manager, which led to me signing with WME, which led to Amblin Television and Steven Spielberg and Halle Berry and CBS. I used some of the money from the sale of the Spyder to enter that contest.
Every now and then I have to remind myself of those lessons. To let go of expectations and destinations. Future stuff. To let go of prior accomplishments. Of things that symbolize those accomplishments. Past stuff. Time to let it go. One step, one breath, one moment at a time.
Bet on yourself.
Be grateful for the storms.
Be here now.
I dug up the video I made about my cross country trip and it's funny to see that I didn't talk AT ALL about how miserable I was for the first twenty-four hours. Would not have been a great marketing tool. Seeing this brought back a lot of great memories. Almost enough to get me back out there...
Exploration and Exploitation
After last week's newsletter I started reading about other artists who achieved creative breakthroughs, searching for common denominators. I came across this fascinating article about a scientific study that looked for patterns in "hot streaks" of artists and scientists. What they found was a pattern of "creative exploration followed by exploitation." I found it fascinating and somewhat heartening.
Experts discover a pattern that drives artistic breakthroughs • Earth.com — www.earth.com researchers from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University discovered a pattern of creative exploration followed by exploitation that generally led to artists’ and scientists’ most successful breakthroughs.
The GOTE
My junior year at CCM our department head, Dr. Aubrey Berg, taught our acting class. The basic technique came from the book Acting One, written by Robert Cohen, an acting teacher at UC Irvine.
For some reason this particular technique really clicked with me and it still comes into play in my writing all the time. I found myself thinking about it a lot this week and thought I'd pass on a thumbnail sketch and a link to learn more if you're interested.
The GOTE system breaks down like this:
G = GOAL. Some people use the term "intention" or "objective." The bottom line is to know the character's overall goal and the goal in every scene. "What do I want to achieve? What would my victory look like in this scene?" It's the thing you're fighting for and you may or may not get it.
O = Some people say "obstacle." That's what I always thought too, but then I watched the video below where Cohen says O stands for "OTHER PEOPLE." Acting is interacting. You win something FROM or through that other person. (That other person is then your obstacle, in many cases)
T = TACTICS. This is the part I love the most. The tactics are the things you do to achieve your goal. It's how you get what you want. He breaks it down into two basic categories: THREAT and INVITATION. You can raise your voice (threaten), you can seduce (invitation). There are thousands of tactics - flatter, amuse, punish, humiliate, discourage, encourage, bully, and on and on - and the ones your character chooses (the ones you choose for your character) tells you a lot about who they are.
When you're an actor you look for the tactics you can use within the given text. But when I'm writing, I'm thinking about, "What are the most interesting ways for them to get what they want in this scene?" I'll often give a road map via emotional POV in the action lines. For example, "Addy can see this isn't going anywhere. Fuck it, she's done playing nice."
E = EXPECTATIONS. In the video he talks about feeling the character's expectation for a positive outcome. They're really trying to achieve this goal. Seeing that pursuit, trying and failing and trying again, is what helps the audience forge a bond with the character. We empathize with their hopes, dreams, and struggles to achieve their goals. I'm always asking myself, "Why does the audience care about what happens?"
If you're a writer or an actor I highly recommend watching this video of him teaching the first day of class. Pulling out the GOTE sheet helps spark my imagination every time.
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