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God Bless Hank Jupiter
52 Plays6 months ago
An epic tale about the magic of friendship, inspiration, and art.
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Transcript
Introduction and the value of belief
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When we find people who can believe in us long before we can believe in ourselves, that is fucking priceless, man. Fucking priceless, man. Shit.
00:00:14
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Welcome, friends, to life's effing nuts. I am JR, one man's stories and ruminations on being human in an upside down world.
The power of art
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The power of art to create a spark. I'm gonna turn the clock back to 2004, 20 years ago.
Academic struggles and personal meaning
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I had dropped out of college. I tend to like not like the phrase dropped out, because it has a connotation of being a bum or a loser. I tend to try to avoid that, but in all for all intents and purposes, I did drop out of college. To be honest, I literally cheated and charmed my way through high school. I'm not proud of it. I didn't even think twice about it. I didn't have the ability when I was younger to step back and say like, what's really going on here? Is there a way to make this situation better? I didn't have that ability. And so I just did what I had to do to survive, to get by, pass the buck and keep moving. But if I was to quickly say why, I just do not enjoy academic learning.
00:01:20
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If there's a skill that I genuinely want, if I want to become a better writer, because it will serve me in a very particular way, I love learning. But back then I was young, I didn't know really who I was or what I wanted or where I was going. And so I wasn't able to connect any of the classes I was taking, any of the skills that were being offered at the school to anything that meant
Emotional challenges at home
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anything to me. I dropped out of school. I had gone on this very intense internal inward plunge. When I stopped going to school, I didn't necessarily have a plan. Initially, I thought, I'll just like choose an interesting city and just go live there. And so I spent a little bit of time in Missoula, Montana, but ultimately some part of me felt like I needed to regroup and sort of reset. So I went back to live with my parents for four months.
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I guess it was the spring of 2004. It was probably one of the darkest, bleakest, emotionally painful, psychologically painful four months of my
Facing depression and finding companionship
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life. Also like I was incredibly distrusting of people and I generally felt very uncomfortable and it was it was kind of painful to to connect and to be around other people. I did my best. At my core, I'm a social person, so even though I was in these very dark places, I still found ways to have social connection. So I was like trying to not lose my mind entirely, but i just it was just dark. and And basically, I had a very strange relationship with my strained relationship with my parents at that time.
00:02:57
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And so I would stay away from the house as long as possible. I would leave really early, like 7.30, hop on my bike. And I would try to stay away from the house until maybe like nine o'clock so that I wouldn't have to interact or engage with them. There was just so much tension, such an intense lack of connection. And I'm sure also my parents were very worried and concerned about me. I could feel the worry and concern and that that would just make me feel more isolated. So just it was ah it was a difficult time for me and I'm sure for them as well. you
00:03:42
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There was just an intense overwhelming sense of darkness and isolation that I was experiencing, like brutal. For all you listening out there, I don't know if you've ever experienced depression or isolation or sort of like mental derangement, but it's not fun. I was in a very dark place.
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I felt really tired often, like just overwhelmingly tired and drowsy and my body and mind felt really heavy. It was like I was in a bathtub full of oil and like trying to move my body, but it's just like I was just like fighting against so much physical resistance.
00:04:27
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And there was a ah lone bright spot during this time.
The bond with Hank Jupiter
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Most Fridays, I would go up to the Getty Museum with someone who was becoming my mentor, someone who I later gave the name Hank Jupiter. I went through a period of time where I created like fictitious names for all my friends with their consent. I like playing around with names a lot, and so I landed on the name Hank Jupiter. At the time, I didn't call him Hank Jupiter, but I'm going to refer to him as Hank Jupiter for this podcast. And I had met Hank Jupiter the summer of 2003 at the Ojai Foundation. It was a retreat center in Ojai, California, where I'd spent, I think it was seven seven weeks to over the summer. I participated in a program called Paths of Service.
00:05:07
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where I did 20 hours of work in the community and on the land in exchange for being able to stay there and be part of their sort of retreat center programming. And he's an Irish immigrant with ah an incredible sense of humor, a wonderful raconteur, philosopher, storyteller. But I remember early in that summer, 2003, we were working on this project, this fire-clearing project, like weed whackers and rakes and hoes and things like that. I don't know if it's backbreaking labor but it was like it was hard work and it you know it was hot out there and so it was a grind and I just remember Hank and he was an older man at that time I don't I mean probably in his 50s and the whole time while we were working he was telling stories and telling jokes and he just had this lightness to him that was so attractive and appealing to me and then also he loved taking breaks he worked hard
00:05:58
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But you also love taking long spacious breaks. So often we would have tea breaks and we would philosophize and tell stories and make jokes. And he is a lover of language the way I am. So we would just spin these threads that were so much fun. I was just like, I fucking love this spaciousness and this lightness of being. And so he made a huge impression on me. It was hardly anyone in the world that I truly felt like at ease with or comfortable with or who I enjoyed engaging in or interacting with.
Art as inspiration and healing
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And so when I came back to LA and in 2004, I immediately sought out Hank because I was looking for some kind of light in my life. And so we got in the habit of going to the Getty Museum every Friday. I would meet him there. I'd ride my little rickety bike. I was not a fan of museums. But with Hank, it was a totally different experience. Sometimes we wouldn't look at the art at all. We would hang out all day. They had this beautiful little garden in the back of the Getty overlooking the whole city of Los Angeles. Sometimes all day we'd sit and lounge in the garden and drink wine and eat.
00:07:10
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delicious, delectable snacks from Trader Joe's. He would like play a riff, metaphorical riff, and I would sort of riff off of that. He would riff off of me, and we could do this for hours. We might go to the the private little library at the Getty and read some obscure text for for a long period of time. Other times we might sit in front of one piece of art for the whole day and have these philosophical conversations like underneath the piece of art. As it started to become spring, the days got longer. more sunlight. It was very small, but it was like my soul was becoming a little bit lighter. There was like a tiny little crack of light that started to come in and that coincided with this photography exhibit at the Getty and something beautiful happened.
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you
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I'd never really thought about photography. It just was not on my landscape. I've oriented very strongly to music and poetry and writing. But something clicked inside of me when I would look at these photography exhibits. I was like dumbfounded, mesmerized, in awe at these photographers' ability to simply capture what they were seeing. freeze frame life into these tiny little moments. And I think often the kind of photography that would capture my attention most was photography that seemed to pay homage to a place. And so I started to feel like inspired, I would go home from the Getty and and I hadn't really done deep writing in a while prior to that, I would come home and I would have this just
00:08:47
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sort of crackling in my soul and I would want to write and slowly, like I said, I could just feel something moving inside of me. Finally, after having gone through this, just this brutal depression and darkness and pain, I sort of allowed this new little crackling in my soul to build and to grow and I didn't force it I sort of just let it start to rise inside of me and without even like thinking about why I was doing it or how I was doing it or what it was gonna look like there was a camera at my parents house I think it was my sister's old camera and I just decided that I was going to go take pictures in Santa Monica
00:09:36
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I simultaneously was having like a very intimate love affair with the city of Santa Monica.
00:09:46
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I immediately found my groove and my rhythm around photography. And even though I was very inward facing, credibly socially awkward and just uncomfortable, having that camera in my hands, it shifted my orientation so strongly. Like suddenly I felt incredibly bold and courageous and unafraid.
00:10:12
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Like basically what I was doing and and looking back potentially it was even an invasion of privacy in some ways but I would just go to all the places that I've been going over the last several months and I would just be very still and I would just look at everything and and just wait for these little moments. And I still have the pictures to these days and I still think they're fucking cool. I think I did it for two full days, maybe three full days and eight hours went by in the snap of a finger. I was so locked in. and so energized and immersed and had such a clear sense of purpose and connection. The metaphor of like being in a pool of oil, of like thick sludge to suddenly be in this total flow state. And this really strange, beautiful thing happened where the more that I focused and the more that I looked closely at my surroundings, the more that I saw. And I'd never experienced this in my entire life. I can't see anything specifically or individually.
00:11:11
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But once I started snapping pictures, all of a sudden, like I could literally see tiny little things that I wanted to capture that for me exuded the essence of what was really happening on the deepest possible frequencies. And and it it was very exhilarating. In some ways, it was a little overwhelming. My scope had never been so refined in my entire life. And I guess it was overwhelming in the sense that like I wanted to capture everything. I was seeing so many things. I think that was part of the reason that the the time just flew by because like I didn't want to stop. There was just so much beauty and so much life and so much nuance. So many tiny little wrinkles of human experience.
00:11:52
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I felt like I had a million dollars and I was in a candy store and was a candy addict. There is no end to the amount of beautiful
Embracing new beginnings
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things here. This is amazing. It became this rocket fuel that ultimately allowed me to get out of this very dark place.
00:12:18
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because I felt this sort of spirit alive in me. On a whim, I went up to visit my grandparents in Sacramento. And once I was on the open road and it was summertime, my spirit was, I was like a ah phoenix rising from the ashes. Like suddenly my wings expanded and my lungs filled with oxygen. And I was out of that, the worst depression and sludge that I'd been in in my entire life.
00:12:51
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And I spent a few weeks up in Sacramento and then I ended up taking a Greyhound bus. And for those who've listened to the podcast before, you've heard some of these little stories, but i this was sort of the beginning. I ah took a Greyhound bus to Oklahoma and then hitchhiked to New York City and in a lot of ways never looked back.
Conclusion and gratitude
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I mean, I've definitely struggled. I've had other periods of turning within or darkness or depression, but That was the worst depression ever and and I just thought it was a pretty cool, just the power of art to create a spark.
00:13:39
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I should give a full shout out to Hank Jupiter on this. Even though I was dark and depressed and heavy and angry and probably like bitter and skeptical and cynical, even with all that intense stuff, he never received me as if I was this dark person. He sort of saw the spirit and the hope and the possibility and the potential in me long before I was able to connect with it. When we find people who can believe in us long before we can believe in ourselves. That is fucking priceless, man. Fucking priceless, man. Shit. And then secondarily, the power of art, man. Thank God for those photographers who captured that art and that beauty. And thank God for the Getty who had that exhibition that that ignited that sense of vision and hope and possibility in me.
00:14:39
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Thanks for tuning in to Life's F&Nuts. I hope you enjoyed that story. New episodes drop every Tuesday on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, and you can follow us on social media at Life's F and&Nuts Podcasts. I'm JR, see you guys soon.