Upon the death of my father at the beginning of 1997, I crept back into the head womb of my early childhood life and punctured the membrane of some pockets that had been clinging to its walls. Experiences seeped out, but I had punctured quite a few…And I believe one remembered experience seeped into another and perhaps now they are forever mixed, but still, fluid… like some psychic egg yolks that have run together. From this, I believe Christmas on Mars started to coagulate.

Obsessed with the dark and magic

It was always night when me and my brothers would go to these cold, empty warehouses, with our dad. We would walk through the endless dark hallways, enter giant desolate rooms dimly lit by only a single light hanging on an extension cord from the ceiling. Our dad would set up a couple blinding work lights in the corner and go at refinishing some woodwork on some expensive desk that had been damaged. While he worked, me and my brothers would try to explore the scary abandoned building. I say try because our dad would yell at us if we strayed too far… and for good reason. I later discovered that elevator shafts had no doors or railings to prevent someone from falling down them and there were rats everywhere, nibbling on the leftover remains from an old cinnamon candy assembly line factory on the sixth floor. But the fear and the mystery were too fascinating and we found ourselves using these warehouses to play out imaginary scenarios as we fumbled through what would once be a dungeon in a haunted castle and another time an insane asylum… and I clearly remember us playing as if we were in a space station on another planet. The concrete structure made every sound a giant moan of reverberation. The atmosphere was lonely and bleak and death seemed possible… but so did magic… I was happy.

Obsessed with light

My dad also sometimes worked after hours at this little garage shack (it still stands around the corner from me house) in a residential neighborhood. I went with him one night as he was going to weld the broken frame of my bicycle back together. It seemed to take forever and I remember standing outside watching the trees light up from his blaring welder’s torch. I became aware of, and then hypnotized by the intense shadows. Seeing the blasting, flickering strobe effect, I suddenly started to understand how light and shadows worked. You see… I always like drawing, and me and my brothers would always share our knowledge of drawing with each other. But we had reached an impasse. We collectively had trouble figuring out how light and shading worked (to make our pictures look more three dimensional. I was only 6 years old, and we were very competitive with each other) But watching these trees getting flooded with this overexposed flare shine showed me… and helped me… and changed me.

That night after I got home, I drew for hours, putting shadows on everything… and from then on, whenever I wanted to, I could entertain myself.

Obsessed With Isolation

My brothers had quite a few drug burnout friends in the late 70s. And with the Apollo moon missions still relevant in their paranoid, conspiracy theory minds. I remember them huddled around a bong talking about a doomed Mars mission. According to them (my brothers’ burned out friends) the landing and colonization of Mars had already happened and failed and of course the world would never know about it because of the massive government cover up. The story was always vague, but as I remember, there was a space station with a couple dozen crew people. They (the crew all had some kind of brain damage caused by the long journey there… and because they were all mentally compromised, they somehow bungled the controls of the oxygen supply and died.

I don’t know if I ever thought about whether this was real or not, but I did have a lot of anxiety (and still do) about what it must be like to be so far away from earth and how the slightest mistake could kill you and everybody else. Life, even the advanced world of super technology, seemed fragile.

Obsessed with how death makes you ponder the nature of happiness.

My Mother claimed that she never slept. She would sit up all night watching tv and catching up on household maintenance and probably was just having a couple moments to herself (there were six kids, a couple of dogs, and always a bunch of friends around) Television back in the mid-70s would stay on well into the night, mostly showing old movies. Anyway… one night, me and a couple of my brothers came in quite late and found her sobbing. She explained how she had been watching what was, to her, was a very sad old film. As best she could tell it was from the 40’s and it was about a submarine or a ship or maybe some forgotten outpost. She described it as a dark mysterious place with levels, hatches and hallways. There was a group of workers who, because of some mechanical catastrophe, were facing certain death… and how once they accepted that they were going to die, they were magically visited by some entity or super being type of presence. She couldn’t say whether it was God (she didn’t believe in God) or some powerful extra terrestrial, but that they, the abandoned workers, were transformed by the experience and made happy despite the obvious despairing situation.

Well… me and my brothers thought this sounded like a cool movie… but she didn’t know what it was called and the moment uneventfully ended… but the concept lingered in my min and her sadness made me think, “some day I will see this movie and see what all the fuss is about.”

At first it seemed very possible… but as time when on, the movie never made itself visible to me. As video stores emerged… still nothing… and eventually even the internet could not discover it. I slowly started to realize that this movie never really existed. My mother, I came to conclude, had probably sat down and started to watch, maybe the middle of one movie… fell asleep… woke up and saw, maybe the beginning of another movie, or maybe she simply dreamed part of it. But, you have to remember she was quite sad and moved by she encountered and I, in turn, was affected by her.

I think I had so believed that I would one day see this movie and had so built up in my mind what it possibly could be that, upon finding it was not actually a movie… I somehow felt… perhaps some eruption from the subconscious… “I will make that movie!!!”

Obsessed with making a movie
I have tried to justify all the time and effort that has been used up on making “Christmas on Mars” Perhaps it can never really be so… but I am relieved to know and to say that IT POSSESSED ME… I DID NOT POSSESS IT. I can trace back (that’s what I’ve done here) these strange, powerful experiences that guided me to, somehow, finally hatch this otherworldly egg that has been incubating in my brain since I was a child. To not have surrendered to this overriding obsession would surely have made me insane… I’m not proud of that… so I went where the obsession took me… please forgive me.

Wayne
2008
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