This autobiographical documentary uses actual footage shot in real time with after-the-fact voice-over to tell a monstrous tale of a failed relationship and the catastrophic aftermath.

It has never been published online due to permissions issues.

This video documents an extensive adventure I had while I was in my early 40's. It began when I was on vacation in Palm Springs in 2001, and had a chance meeting in a sketchy leather bar. I met a crazy artist type and we hit it off. I wound up spending the rest of my vacation with him, and we had a ball. I tried to keep it going when I returned home, but we quickly fell out of touch. However we got back together in 2003 and started a whirlwind romance that took me to some exotic locations and introduced me to some interesting people. That was when the fun really began. Back then I had a video camera with me at all times, and often kept it rolling without much regard for how the footage might be used. So much of these experiences wound up getting documented.

In 2004 I took a leave of absence from my day job and we got a place together in Palm Springs. It started out well, but it didn't take long for the relationship to fall apart, and it ended in an epic meltdown. I ran back home with my tail between my legs and resumed my work-a-day life there. That was when the phone harassment began. He would call me incessantly to subject me to verbal abuse, and that continued on and off for many, many years.

I knew I wanted to document the experience in a video. I had extensive footage from our time together, as well as some other random footage that I'd been holding onto but hadn't found anywhere to use. I had also been saving recordings of the harassing voicemails that had been piling up. I knew it would be a powerful piece.

It took a while to organize the footage and decide on an approach to stitch it all together. When I finally started editing the final product, I found it to be a very labor-intensive process. Just when I was making some real progress, the iMovie software crashed and corrupted the file. I wasted a fair amount of time trying to recover it, and then procrastinated for a very long time before I finally just started over from scratch.

Once I got past the painful process of recreating what I had done initially, things started to come together and it became a little more enjoyable. It was kind of fun going through the footage of the good times, and bringing it together into a cohesive presentation. One thing that proved to slow me down, though, was authoring the voiceover material. I had a lot to say, but I had to boil it down to the essentials, and I needed to word all of it just right to convey the emotions and concepts I wanted to convey, and to do so with concision and brevity. In the process of bringing it all together I really mastered the craft of incorporating music. The trick I found was that the levels of the music should drop abruptly when the voiceover starts, and increase in volume somewhat gradually when the voiceover ends. It worked well, and the final result was slick and professional.

The whole latter part of the video was the endless voicemails. It was a difficult process to listen to them all again slowly and carefully. This guy was really good at his verbal abuse. It ranged from harshly critical and threatening to dire and desperate. Reviewing all that audio in detail was like living the abuse all over again. But I was able to categorize them, cut them into usable snippets, and layer them all back together in an effective way. That brought the video to a close. I finished it in 2009. Little did I know that the phone harassment and verbal abuse would still continue on for years to come, but I had to draw the line somewhere.

When I was all done I thought that the final product was exceptionally good. It was not necessarily the best work that I had done, but I think it was the work I was most happy with. I thought I did a very effective job of telling the tale, and all the actual footage and audio made it a visceral viewing experience. Unfortunately the people who saw it didn't agree. I had a private screening here at home for some friends, and none of them particularly liked it. I've shown it on occasion to individuals, and it's never gotten a good response. And I submitted it to MIX, and they passed on it. I was a little shocked by that. I thought that they of all people would see the value in it and want to share it with their audience, but not so much. To this day I don't really understand why it has gotten such a poor reception, but it seems to be pretty universal.

I was never able to put the video online because I didn't have permission from my ex to use his image or his endless voicemails, not to mention any of the footage was actually shot by him. While I think I could make a case that I had a legal right to publish it, I wasn't up for the fight. His verbal abuse finally tapered off by the late 20-teens, and I knew it would all start back up again if he ever caught wind that the video was online. So it will forever languish in my private collection.