The Greatest Teacher, Failure Is
or : Yoda Was Right As Usual
I got an email the other day, imploring me to continue writing on this here Substack and for some reason I refused. I sat down and played Fire Emblem Three Houses and just refused to write. But then I realized I had a great companion piece to the last one, the Dark Souls one, the one that nobody read.
Much like when you get bested by a boss in Dark Souls, you have options when life throws a curveball your way ; You can get depressed and play JRPGs and try to be 13 again, you can (assuming you’re of-age) drink or take an edible to numb yourself or you can crack your knuckles and get back to business.
For me, it’s generally those three but not in the same order. I’ll loaf for a few days, drag my feet, complain loudly, make a big ol’ fuss and eventually get back to it.
What does this have to do with Star Wars? Oh I’m so glad you asked.
A main theme, both implied and explicit, in Rian Johnson’s The Last Jedi is that failure is both inevitable and a learning moment. Yoda even says as much directly to Luke after appearing to him right as he’s reached his lowest point. By this point, he’s cut himself off from The Force and refused to train the new hero Rey, he’s found out that his best friend Han was killed by Han’s son Ben and that Ben, once Luke’s student, is now running the very same type of Empire that Luke and his sister Leia fought against in their youth — their father was a Jedi in the Old Republic and was seduced to the dark side, becoming the fearsome Darth Vader, an eerie parallel. He blames himself for Ben’s turn (as does Ben) and is sulking alone, wallowing in his misery. He goes to burn the “sacred texts” - the last remnants of Jedi wisdom from the ages past, his last connection to a sect that has taken everything from him. And then comes the little Muppet bastard Yoda. Yoda burns the tree for him, removing all doubt and telling him that not only has he passed on to Rey what she needs as far as the good things but also “failure most of all. The greatest teacher, failure is.”
(Now obviously this doesn’t apply to all failures, some would say a failure like the failure of intelligence services in the US to prevent 9/11 is not necessarily a learning moment, but we’re talking smaller ones here)
I bring this up to kind of show my hand a bit, since I keep learning this lesson over and over in my own life.
In my teens, I went to an all-boys Jesuit high school and wanted so badly to fit in. I tried a lot of different things and eventually settled on the theatre. I loved the whole experience. You had dozens upon dozens of hours making the costumes, building sets, daily rehearsals, making friends with your castmates, goofing off and then, eventually, the final test was the performance and the whole thing just worked. After that, you struck the set, sent the costumes to Goodwill and picked up a new script. I was 100% certain that after high school, I would go on to tread the boards and do some capital A Acting.
My first year of college, I dropped out of the theatre program. I had failed, literally failed, an acting class because the required reading on Stanislovsky was too dense and I was too dense to apply it. (On a side note, have you read An Actor Prepares? It’s 300+ pages of poorly translated Russian notes from 1936. God-awful and should NOT be required reading for modern actors. Even Meisner wasn’t this dreadful.) I was told, in blunt terms, by my mother and others that “the dream is dead.” And I believed it.
I went about my life and did normal things, avoiding the inevitable until I was forced to make a choice. In order to continue college, I had to change my major or continue on and I chose the “easier” of the two and became a TV/Radio major. TV/Radio, by the way, is degrees of difficulty from doing Theatre - there’s more writing, more reading and more everything. But by the time I graduated I was able to write scripts, was able to confidently read copy on-air, had hosted a TV talk show, was able to edit both on tape and digitally in both audio and video, was fluent in the language of cameras, board operation, live directing and so many things that I’ve now forgotten.
Fresh degree in hand, it was off to find a job and my fortunes in either TV or Radio. If you know what I look like in real life, you’ll know that I don’t necessarily have a Face for Radio but I’m not the Ryan Reynolds type either. TV stations never returned my applications, Radio stations didn’t have on-air announcer gigs and so I again settled. I went to work for a talk station as a Producer. When you hear Producer, I imagine there’s a lot of things that come to mind, but few will tell you the ugly reality and it’s this : in the modern parlance Producer is a glorified phone-answering guy and commercial box ticker. Despite this, there were times when I was able to adjust the outcome of events by being diligent - including one memorable night when I arrived at the station to the news that the US had executed Osama Bin Laden, which didn’t go down like it did in The Newsroom, no one congratulated us on “doing the news”
Years went by. I was still part-time, doing the occasional hockey game live but mostly I was stuck on overnight shifts. Now, don’t get me wrong, I loved the host I worked with and was happy to be there, but the overnights take a toll. It was 2009 and we were buying a house and we found out my wife was pregnant and it was yet again an inflection point. Would I stay in the vain hope that an on-air slot would open up and that I would get my shot? It had been 5 years at this point and the chances of this happening were very slim. And so a choice was made. I would go to work regular people hours in a regular-ish people job for a bank.
During this whole time, I had joined a band of friends and we had done some shows and were releasing a record after years of practice. Things were looking up on that front, but then on the eve of the release of the first and only album we made, the guitarist quit for religious reasons. Reasons, by the way, that never seemed to bother him in the years of playing crappy punk clubs for zero dollars. The band was in free-fall just as I was moving careers and it was all too much. We kept going though and eventually stuck it out a few more years, were working on a second album and then, again, more lineup changes and it all just fell apart. No second album, no success story, just a final show at a now-closed nightclub that barely anyone remembers.
My job at the bank I still had, although the monotony was really grinding me down. A parade of sad and desperate people wanting money followed by long periods of downtime followed by weekends where the lobby was full from 9am til well past 1 in the afternoon. Then I got my ass beat.
I’ve told this story elsewhere, but it’s still surreal because it did actually happen. I was working the counter and a guy comes up and wants to withdraw money. Fairly normal banking stuff. I ask for his ID, he says, “You want to be my friend?” — side note, people at this bank were usually a little odd in some way, no idea why but it usually didn’t hurt to humor them — and I said “Sure.” He extends his hand and I reach out to shake it. The next few moments all happened very quickly as he grabbed my wrist and began punching me in the head. I’m fairly certain I screamed and thrashed and tried to get away and eventually my head hit the floor. Other team members tried to block him from leaving, but he got out of there and went home. I heard later that when the police arrived at his house, he held his hands out in surrender and said “Yeah, I know why you’re here.” The full story wound up being that he was a veteran who was off his meds and he had believed I had shortchanged him days prior. He served no time and his case was dismissed. I was shuffled to a different branch and continued on as though nothing had happened. I’m still in disbelief that the entire episode was real.
A year or so after that, I was fired over a careless transaction and was again rudderless. We now had twins to provide for and were thankful for WIC and Unemployment as they helped us float on for a while.
My friend Shawn, who I knew through his now-ex-wife, had suggested I join up with a IT call center job and I eagerly took it. After a few years away, I was back on overnights. That job was a nightmare that I also can’t believe was real and I’ll go into detail at a later date, but it lead us both to seeking new opportunities. We found a new place and both got hired and wound up getting paid well for the move. Things were looking good. Still working overnights, but it was more than a lateral move.
I threw a barbeque in my newly-renovated back yard and, through a series of escalating dares, wound up forming a band with Shawn that night.
At work, I had failed to apply a certain procedure correctly for a few weeks in a row and the company we were hired by wanted me fired. Thankfully, my boss was able to talk them out of canning me after my first 6 months and I’m still employed there today. But this failure was a learning moment and procedures for everything were followed to the letter, every time thereafter.
As a band leader and writer, I was writing tons of new material and the first EP was taking shape. Same as it ever was, on the eve of that release, the guitar player left and we were stuck with an EP that he played on which was never to be released. We continued on, linking up with new players and writing more and eventually actually releasing a full-length record to middling response. The trajectory of this is sadly familiar - new players, new songs, new album, disappointment. Eventually, in a bid to get our name out there, I signed a bad contract that made a lot of people mad and wound up costing us money and the whole band blew up in my face. Everyone but me and the bass player left.
For a few months, I just ignored it. Never again, I said. But I wouldn’t let it go, I got in contact with a fan who was a comedian and played guitar and we hired a new drummer and we got back to work. We released a vinyl single and another EP. The bass player dropped out before a big show and had to be replaced by a guy from work, who filled in perfectly. He joined for as long as it took to make another full-length album. He also left on the night of the release show. We got another bass player. We played everywhere and did everything possible to make it work. But it didn’t. The guitar player moved away and I went back to writing stupid songs and emailing them to myself.
At work, I was chugging along and keeping my head down. Nothing to distract me but also nothing really happening. The same thing every day, a copy of a copy of a copy
I’d been toying with the idea of a podcast. Listening to Chapo Trap House or Your Kickstarter Sucks during my workdays was my one source of respite and I heard these guys, unpolished and sometimes incoherent, doing the work and making money and I thought “why not me?”
But the ideas never came. I sat on the name and social media handles because you never know. Then one day, much like starting the last band, I approached a friend at a backyard barbeque and said we should make this happen. But it didn’t. Or should I say I didn’t. It was my idea, the impetus was on me.
After the increased isolation of Year One of the COVID times was when it was finally time. We got set up in my small studio space in my renovated garage, bought some mics and made the first 20 or so episodes. It felt good, things were happening. We got some guests, made some moves and were doing alright.
Because we built a decent setup and because I can’t let go of the idea of acting, I’ve been doing auditions. I got cast in a very funny podcast called Midnight Pals as the voice of Stephen King - a voice, by the way, that is based on the guy whose overnight show I produced on the radio. That is coming soon and I can’t wait for you all to hear it. I’ve also been cast in an animated horror series Meek. Seems that acting dream might not be dead after all.
All the same, little failures keep happening. Sometimes I’ll forget to inform a guest of something or think I hit record and lose an entire episode or delete the wrong file. But this time, I’m not giving up like I did before. This time, I’m taking all the things that the gross little frog puppet told me and all the things I learned from beating Isshin The Sword Saint and I’m going to keep going until you either get sick of me or I become niche microcelebrity style famous and then you get sick of me.
Either way, you’re stuck with me.