Heart and Mind

Personal Documentaries

I like documentary-type shows like "Behind the Music" and "E! True Hollywood Story." I think someone could make a whole bunch of those kinds of shows out of things in my own life.

I absolutely believe that, but it's not because I feel like my life has been more interesting than most other people out there. It's just that life, in general—whether it's yours, mine, or the-guy-next-door's—is interesting. Truth, to me, is always more interesting than fiction, and I guess that's why I write memoirs and other little bits on life that fall into the non-fiction category.

I think there are stories everywhere, even though there are a lot of people out there that don't recognize this fact. We're living 24-hours a day, everyday, and among all the mundane, other stuff is happening. The stories are there in that "other stuff."

It's really all about a shared life. I would love to produce a series of "True Hollywood Stories" about my life, but, in actuality, any given episode wouldn't be about my life. It would be about a time and place in history that involved multiple people and I was just one of them. If we lived solitary and never interacted, there would be fewer stories, but once you put people together in any given circumstance, you start creating a rich sociological landscape of interacting personalities, goals, desires, and temperaments that is far greater reaching, ironically, than any contrived drama you'll find in the movies or on television or in a book. Because it's bigger than all that stuff. When you write a work of fiction, you have boundaries to work within. You have to keep everything tidy or the story will get too long and confusing. But in real life, there are no boundaries, and we simply must do our best to follow everything.

Old jobs, old bands, old friends, old places I've lived...whenever I sit down with someone who shared one of these old experiences with me, the conversation starts sounding like an interview that you'd see on "True Hollywood Story." We look back with a sense of clarity and we attempt to re-tell the story from not only our perspective, but we fill in as many blanks as we can and cover as many angles as we can, describing what exactly happened. It really does start sounding like a documentary.

I guess I've always been the kind of person who recognizes that the most important life in the world is the one you experience. I've never thought famous people's lives were more valid than my own or more valid than anyone else's.

I guess my goals have always been to be productive on my own terms and to touch the people whose lives happen by chance to cross over into my life. I know that I've known a lot of people who've touched my life, despite their seemingly ordinary day to day activities.

This is probably a shitty blog entry, because a) this topic is way to broad and deep to accurately portray on a sleepy Monday evening and b) because of reason a, I think I'm doing a pretty lousy job of explaining myself. But I reflect a lot about life, the meaning of it, and my experiences in this world, and it's a totally heavy trip. So sometimes I just feel like talking about this kind of stuff. I think we all have great stories. Often the only difference between your story and that of some famous person on "Biography" is that more people know of the latter.

posted by Steve @ 10:27 PM