This is a promo video that I made showing viewers all the different places my book is currently available. Although I didn’t get to all of them because I made the video on my one day off from work. I drove around Orange County like a mad man that day, filming and speaking to all the shop owners just to get my book on their shelves. All part of the hustle. And although I put this thing together in a rush, I still think it came out pretty damn good, music and all.
This is the first video I made to promote French Park. This is also the first video I ever made using only my phone and pure, sheer conviction. But when you love doing something, whatever it is, it’s as easy as being. In the case of this video, I took a walk one night through French Park with a friend of mine and recorded willy nilly. Then the next day, I tied it all together in a way that reminded me of David Lynch movies, then I wrote a song on my acoustic guitar, dubbed it over the video, and like magic, the song and video synced up perfectly! Hand to God, that’s the way it happened. It sort of just fell out of the sky. These things happen.
This was a promo video for French Park as well as a commentary on modern poetry. Someone gifted me a book of modern poetry and I was hungry one morning for some steak and eggs so I decided to burn the poetry to light my grill so I could cook up my steak. When I was filming it I loved all the follies (the camera falling, excessive salt pouring, two yolks in one egg, the beans spilling out of control) and so I kept all of these supposed mistakes and turned them into fate. There’s a fast rhythm in this video that I really like because it’s sort of musical, the way it tumbles and rolls along.
In truth, I can’t recall the exact way in which I began to write this book, although I’ve tried to pin down the answer to that question many times before, if only for my own sake.
The two closest versions of inceptions that I can think of are as follows…
As quickly as they manifested, I spontaneously wrote the opening lines in 2015 for what I knew would become my first novel, and did not revisit them until months later only to write a few sparse pages that would not be touched again until 2020. The other version is the reversal; that I initiated the book after going out on a date with a woman (whose name in the book is Celina) and as soon as the date was over, I rushed back home to write down everything that had happened because somewhere inside of me I knew that we would eventually fall madly in love with one another. (Those were the aforementioned sparse pages.) But I knew I could not finish our story until we were finished, and so, I waited. Four years later, heartbroken and dejected, I returned to find the seedlings of the manuscript and picked up where I had left off.
The best reasoning for why I decided to take this route is that I felt the story about my life in French Park had to be written, so to speak, by life itself. It had to end by its own volition just as it began. As I saw it, this was the only manner by which to attain a, not only realistic, but a natural feel for the arc of the story. In hindsight, I know for certain that this was the best way to go about it since there is absolutely no way I could have ever come up with some of the dire events that take place in the book on my own. The same goes for the jubilant moments of sheer beauty, the kind that make up a love story as intense as the one I lived.
It is true that reverie is a recurring theme in this work, but it is mostly utilized in the narrative as a tool to try and discern the turbid present which is devoid of the prudence hindsight proffers so well after the fact.
This is not a straight love story by any means. Nor is it simply a story about a struggling writer trying to finally become an actual writer. Even though those are the two main veins to the story, it is more a depiction of all the confusion, the struggle, the anguish, and the torturous self-reflection that embodies the road one must trek atomized in order to try and discover our individual purpose for existence. It is a spit in the visage of the modern cosmological eye of this society’s consciousness. All fear is abandoned. Social constructs are not only ignored or merely brushed aside–they are abolished. It is spirit and form acquiesced with the hope that together they will engender a universal tone that resonates in the hearts of those who have walked a similar path.
ERIC COCOLETZI 