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eddie_offermann

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Everybody needs to vent a little now and again, don't you figure?

I vent with a bottle of booze and a handgun.

Created on 2000-09-13 06:12:33 (#15114), last updated 2009-11-21

12,314 comments received, 10,224 comments posted

Paid Account, previously an Early Adopter [Gift]

3,890 Journal Entries, 78 Tags, 19 Memories, 300+ ScrapBook Files, 1 Virtual Gift, 38 Userpics

Basic Info

Name:	Eddie Offermann
Website:	My vfx blog

Bio

Online portfolios:

My film and tv effects website
My photography website
Model Mayhem

Something like a bio:
When I find something that I'm not comparing to anything else but like or dislike it anyway - then I'm liking it (or disliking it) for what it is, not what other things are. Most things (people too) have few qualities that are not relative to other things - identifying those qualities without making reference to other things is problematic but the only way to see them as they are.

I believe in understanding, not tolerance. I believe in using words when words can take the place of guns and bombs - but I believe there are some things a gun can say that words will never make completely clear.

I like long walks on the beach, but that doesn't make me a romantic because I'd generally rather do them alone. That's true of most things, actually. I am now a proud member of the Church of Sailing. If Jesus wants to save my soul, he's gonna have to meet me in the ocean somewhere, because right now a day or two at sea meets every spiritual need I might have. It restores something inside me that little else does.

I have a tattoo on the back of my neck (you can see it in one of my profile pictures) with sanskrit lettering underneath that reads "mokshyase" which means "You will be free" and refers to Moksha - the liberation from the cycle of rebirth. To me, it means leaving your mistakes behind and finding a new life - it means not repeating my past. It brings to mind Proverbs 26:11 - "As a dog returns to his vomit, so a fool returns to his folly."

I did one of those survey things recently and it asked:
My favorite place to be: Here's what I wrote.

I love walking down Melrose on a Saturday afternoon. I love the Farmer's Market early on a Sunday morning before there's hardly anybody there. I love Venice Beach at sunset when the shops are closing or the Santa Monica pier when the rides are shut down and everyone's going home. I love Hollywood Blvd on a Friday night when it's packed with people: especially people that have never seen it before and are all posing in front of the Chinese or taking pictures of their favorite celebrity's star on the walk of fame. I love the bustling insanity of the garment district and models posing in the windows on Rodeo on a sunny weekday afternoon. My favorite place changes but is often where I am at that moment.

The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle states that if we measure the position of a particle, we cannot also measure its velocity. Therefore if one aspect is measured, the other aspect of a particle is assumed to be within a given range with a certain probability. In any such measurement, a little bit of energy is added to; or removed from the subject in order to find out its value. In other words; the subject is disturbed by the measurement. This invalidates any other measurements.

This applies to life as well as physics.

For instance, to measure the temperature of an object, I can stick a thermometer on it. This steals a bit of heat to warm up the thermometer. The object is disturbed. So I can know right now what the object?s temperature is, but I cannot know what it would have been had I not disturbed it.

Our lives, our loves, and our futures are not a bit different from this.

Sometimes this journal attempts to capture where I am, right at that very moment. Sometimes it attempts to describe where I think I am going. When it attempts (or I attempt) to do both, we usually fail miserably.

I'm not gothic, nor a punk, nor a rivethead, nor a raver. If I had to pick something, I wouldn't. But I'm a product of my past, and that's a couple of the above - which will probably be pretty obvious as you read my journal.

I've got my interests, and they come out in my entries.

Recently, I've been going through some absolutely astounding changes. After trying to take care of my mother during the downspin of her alzheimer's, something sorta... broke. I came to believe that everything in life is so temporary that to let life happen around you without actively taking part in it is not merely wrong but bordering on deeply immoral.

Years ago, I vowed to myself that before I died I would become utterly jaded. I took that vow, that "life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in an attractive and well preserved body, but rather to skid in sideways, chocolate in one hand, martini in the other, body thoroughly used up, totally worn out and screaming" - and lived my life accordingly.

But I hit "jaded" a little faster than I'd expected. I've done the rockstar thing... large quantities of most of the drugs... make the Big List of Bad Drugs and I've done them... sex... not much left not done there... and woken up from a night of drinking not knowing how I got where I found myself in the morning more times than I can count. For a while there, we're talking several times a week.

I spent several years doing graphic design, video production, multimedia development and the like for the Defense/Aerospace industry.  After a while it got old... I loved what I was doing, started to hate who I was doing it for. Not that I'm not into making things blow up - but when you're in that industry, it's the same thing blowing up, all the time.  Tried to go commercial, timing was bad, and I ended up teaching visual effects work for about five years.  Then, I quit my job without a place to live or a job to start, drove to California and watched my entire life fall into place like I'd been here for a decade. I work in Santa Monica and live in West Hollywood. I'd put on weight by the time I moved out here, and within a couple months I'd lost 30 lbs. For over 10 years, I'd shaved my head... suddenly I grew out my hair: everyone thought I was actually bald. My entire life changed in so many ways... I became someone that I'd forgotten I could have been.  I travel as much as I can, now. I feel like I'd frittered away at least a decade on nothing. I'm able to travel a good bit for work (I do visual effects in the feature film and high end commercial industry). In the last couple years, whether for fun or for work, I've spent time in San Diego, Chicago, St. Louis, Boston, Las Vegas, New Orleans, Flagstaff, Dallas, Oakland, Tijuana... Several of those I've been in several times. Did I miss somewhere? Absolutely. A few were more forgettable. Barely missed getting to spend a week in Peru - that regret will be a constant reminder to keep my passport updated for work. I got to see everything from Lake Michigan to the Grand Canyon, from the beer can house in Texas to the WigWam motel in Arizona.  

At this point, if you want to know more: you can google me. My movie credits will show up on IMDB, you'll find a couple blogs, my website with my demo reel and resume: my life's an open book to the internet. Some people think all this exposure is bad: that it means "they" can find things out about you that you'd rather "they" not know. I know from experience, there are very few secrets these days. You want privacy? Unplug your computer and keep it that way.

Oh, but yes - a lot of the journal is friends only. Recently I've gotten a lot more relaxed about posting everything publicly, but more often than not the only older public entries are ones I just forgot to click 'friends only' on and then decided to leave public. If you want to be added, add me. Maybe I'll add you back.

"God does not work salvation for fictitious sinners. Be a sinner and sin vigorously.... Do not for a moment imagine that this life is the abiding place of justice; sin must be committed."
- Martin Luther

"The cure for anything is salt water: sweat, tears or the sea."
- Karen Blixen

"Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you have imagined."
- Henrey David Thoreau (I quote him often)

"Why do we do it? Because we choose to live the dream, instead of living the life."
- Darren Aronofsky, introduction to Requiem for a Dream

"Whatever he was - that robot in the Garden of Eden, who existed without mind, without values, without labor, without love - he was not man."
- Ayn Rand, "Galt's Speech," Atlas Shrugged

"To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of the women!"
- Conan

"The wise man can pick up a grain of sand and envision a whole universe. The stupid man will just lay down on some seaweed and roll around until he is completely draped in it, then he'll stand up and go 'Hey! I'm Vine Man!'"
- Jack Handy, Deep Thoughts

" love is fer thems that dont got tonges what reach tehy butt!"
- PrettyGreyMana

"The conspiracy behind the conspiracy... the Conspiracy that rests behind all the lies... When you strip down all the truths and untruths, and uncover just the most basic of all hidden things, you will find that the greatest conspiracy of all is that there is nothing and all that has been known by you has been plotting to keep this hidden.

Reality plots to keep you from discovering that it does not exist."
- N₂O

"My life so far seems like a series of punctuated moments... Falling one after another, each moment giving way to a new life that does not build on the last but rather merely looks back on it as a reference to where it was and where it is now.

I'm trying to make it different than that - to find myself in one great moment that stretches forward and backward forever. A moment from which the rest of it all makes some kind of sense.

But I wonder... does that moment exist for anyone? Or are my expectations a fairy tale, my desires like Thoreau's Walden - an escape only possible, itself, as a punctuated instance of realization. Thoreau had to leave Walden... 26 months in his idyll and though he carried it with him forever, philosophically, it was but a punctuated moment which thrust him, again, back to civilized society and everything that gives us and takes away from who we might otherwise be.

What is right... what is good... If we have a safe home, friends, food to eat and opportunities to take to celebrate, is it proper to ask for more? or are we in fact already THERE and thus every moment spent looking for something else is another step away from home?"
- Me. 16 July 2005

"Be not afflicted, my child, for who shall assign to thee what thou hast left undone?"
- Henry David Thoreau - Walden (paraphrasing from Vishnu Purana: Book I: Chapter XI)