Notes on Al Handa’s On The Road With Al & Ivy: Book One: Becoming A Face

I found reading Al Handa’s story about his experience of being homeless to be thoughtful and observant about the different kinds of people who experience that life.

In the title of his work, ‘Becoming A Face’ has a specific meaning. Al lived in his car with his companion, Ivy, a small dog. Becoming a face meant law enforcement recognizing that Al was homeless and living in his car. So anytime there was a problem or a complaint about the homeless, that could make Al a target.

In Al’s situation, he put in the effort so his car did not obviously appear to be lived in. He kept things in a trunk, and brought out items as needed.

Having Ivy as a companion also served a purpose. Ivy’s senses meant he could alert Al to a problem before Al was aware. I’ve often wondered why so many homeless have a dog as a companion. Al answers that question.

In the community Al lived in, he realized different people were taking care of each other’s dogs when someone had an appointment to keep.

Al also made the effort to stay groomed by paying to shower at a truck stop. This allowed Al to spend time in a coffee shop to charge his cell phone. The young people working at the coffee shop became aware of Al’s situation, and they would occasionally slip him a treat.

One issue Al mentions is that when he lost his tech job and his living situation, he at first spent money to stay in a motel. That just meant when he could no longer afford that, he had less money to serve as a cushion in his new life.

Returning to the issue of grooming, when I had a gym membership in a national chain, I could spot the people who were living rough who maintained a gym membership so they had a place to shower and groom.

Al’s story is also very specific about the types of homeless he came across. Some folks had the money to buy a small travel trailer. Others would find an isolated place by a river to camp. Single women would find another female companion for safety, and needed to find a safe place to camp or sleep. Some women would accept being in a relationship with a man for the safety it might provide.

In Al’s story, young people would come to a homeless camp by the river on the weekend to buy drugs and party. That drew the attention of a predator who would rob those young people and steal their jackets and shoes to sell.

In my life, I would take a friend out to dinner sometimes at a restaurant near a parking lot with food carts. That attracted the homeless at night, which was fine with me. But it also attracted the people who preyed on the homeless, which scared my companion.

Because Al became a face to others in the homeless community, he would meet and get advice about where to park or where to avoid. He also met a few who had lost a living situation but managed to find a way out of that life.

One sad aspect of Al’s story is the young women who would trade sex for drugs but would find themselves trapped into being a sex worker.

Al’s story is gritty and insightful, but also shows the human kindness that can be found.

There are many gems in Al’s story.

With the situation in the United States, I suspect more people might find themselves becoming homeless. Al’s story is a valuable guide to how to survive that life.

His book is available on Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FGWKK19K

Experiences With the Energy Body Update January 2026

1/7/2026

This is my latest energy body update. I now have a website at https://www.experienceswiththeenergybody.com. I post these updates there. My journal, Experiences With the Energy Body, is available at Amazon and Draft2Digital for .99.

I’ve mentioned my 11 week cycle. At the end of the last cycle, that intense band of energy around the crown of my head and the concentration of energy at the top of my head (the Thousand Petal Lotus in yoga) began to glow with energy.

I assumed when I started my next cycle, I’d start from that point. Instead, the focus became my chest/heart, neck/throat, and forehead between the eyes.

When I was young and did bellows breathing 3-4 hours a day, I never picked the body part/area that would be the focus of the next 11 week cycle.

Most recently I’ve been focused on my shoulders, the weakest part of my body. I avoided exercising my shoulders because of how weak they are. I realized from talking to a friend, I needed to double and triple the exercises to strengthen my shoulders.

That led to energy passing through my shoulders causing the muscles at the top of my shoulder where it connects to the body to spasm and relax. Then today, I had an experience of the full shoulder area glowing, which meant energy was fully transiting my shoulders. I was very pleased.

My goal now is to open that band around the crown and open the energy flow at the top of my head. When I accomplished that when I was middle aged, I felt like I connected to the wider universe. Information poured into my mind that became A Story is a Promise, my writing workbook.

As I’ve mentioned, paintings of Christian saints with the halo are symbolic of that band opened.

I believe a narrow focus on the body and mind keeps people from experiencing a connection to the wider universe. The universe is alive, but that’s not always easy to experience with a focus on the world.

For those who have made it this far, again, I now have a web site for my energy body journal and these updates at https://www.experienceswiththeenergybody.com

Blessings.

Movie Notes on Song Sung Blue and The Housemaid

Song Sung Blue

This is the story of two tribute singers (Don Ho, Patsy Cline) who come together to form a Neil Diamond tribute duo, billed as Lightning and Thunder. The film does a wonderful job of conveying the world of tribute bands and the friendships formed among the muscians.

As Lighting and Thunder become popular and even perform as the warm up act for Pearl Jam, a tragic accident maims Thunder.

Her life disappears in a haze of pain medication and grief.

The movies explores how blended families come together and how medical bills can drive a barely getting by family into poverty.

As Lightning heals, the duo again perform and the movie ends soon after that high point. I found the movie very affecting. Haven't cried this much at a movie in many years. Yes, it's formula, but well performed and heartfelt, and the music is fun to listen to.

Recommended.

The Housemaid

This is a dark and twisted tale of a young woman on parole who surprisingly to her gets a job as a live in housemaid for a wealthy husband, wife, and daughter.

The wife is unhinged and taking drugs to control psychotic episodes. In the past, she was suspected of murdering her parents.

But all is not what it seems in this clever film. And what is real steadily mutates.

This is a good film for folks who like dark stories. I enjoyed the twists and turns.

Rental Family

This is a sweet and heartfelt film starring Brendan Fraiser as a down on his luck American actor living in Tokyo and getting by doing cheap commercials. He's offered the job of pretending to be a young bride's groom at her wedding. He doesn't want to do the job, but finally does. Then he learns the purpose of the fake wedding was so the bride could have the life she wants.

He's then hired to be the pretend father of a girl whose mother wants to get her accepted to a prestigious school, and as a journalist pretending to interview a once famous, now elderly Japanese actor.

Only Brendan begins to really feel like he's the girl's father and that he should help the elderly actor make a journey to a special place. Complications multiply, but the film ends with Brendan having a deeper realization of who he is at a Shinto shrine he casually visited with the elderly actor.

Recommended.

For more capsule movie notes, visit https://www.storyispromise.com/quikcuts.html

Notes on Emma Pattee's Novel Tilt

In Emma Pattee's Tilt, a young, heavily pregnant mother is in an IKEA in Portland, Oregon searching for a baby bassinet when a major earthquake levels parts of Portland and all but one bridge over the Willamette river. At first trapped, she's rescued but loses her purse and phone in the rubble.

Her rescue can also be viewed as a metaphor, a birth into a new life.

Her first goal is to track down her husband at his job working at a cafe. When she reaches the cafe, she finds out he lied about working and instead is auditioning for a play, something he said he wouldn't do with the baby's birth immanent. To find him, now she must find a way to cross the Willamette river on the only standing bridge.

The novel is organized around going from the present to the past, meeting her actor husband when she's had a first play produced and has a fantasy about becoming a famous playwright. When she meets her later husband, he has a fantasy about becoming a famous actor.

Each jump to the past brings us nearer to the present. We learn how she gives up her fantasy, but her husband has clung tightly to the idea that somehow he can become a famous actor.

The chapters in the past collectively operate as a series of jolts that affect her marriage; mini earthquakes, so to speak.

When she finally reaches the last bridge standing across the Willamette river, it's blocked. The metaphor is that it's one of the last bridges that connected her to her marriage to her husband.

The novel makes the young woman's grueling journey heart-felt, compelling, and painful. By the end of the novel, she's ready to begin a new life.

I very much enjoyed the soon to be mother's journey through the broken city, passing by many, many landmarks I'm familiar with.

Recommended.

Find Emma's novel on Amazon at Tilt

For more of my novel reviews, visit https://www.storyispromise.com

Introduction to Experiences With the Energy Body

This journal is an account of my experiences of my energy body, also known as prana or life force.

To learn more about my journey, visit https://www.experienceswiththeenergybody.com

I began this exploration at a time I had started to practice hatha yoga postures. It opened a door I passed through to learn about my energy body over a period of a year, with 3-4 hours a day of meditative work.

I considered this the first quest of my life.

Later I did some visualization and energy body work that opened a tight band of energy around the crown. I considered that the second quest of my life, and my experiences were detailed in the first edition of this work.

This 3rd edition of my journal conveys the beginning of a third quest, to understand the flow of energy around my face and head, including some drawings with renditions of energy flow.

I'm now including drawings of principle lines of energy throughout my body in this edition created July 2025.

My explanations of my understanding of my energy body will be interspersed with details of my life.

The journal is my attempt to share what I have learned.

Facebook Posts

As I began this quest in May of 2025 to map the energy flow around my face and head, I decided in August to begin offering posts on Facebook that tracked my progress. I will continue to add those posts here.

July 27th, 2025

For the last week I've been feeling two currents of energy running on both sides of my chest and over my heart. I enjoy it when I can feel the energy flow in part of my body. It's part of the process of fully opening the flow of energy.

I've been walking on a treadmill in a gym. While walking I visualize two bands of current running up the back and top of my head.

I expect this to be a slow process to open the energy flow in those channels.

Here's an image of my initial map of the energy flow around the top of my head. The map becomes more detailed as I continue this work.

August 4, 2025

In my energy body work, I'd spent time visualizing currents running through channels that came down my face. My goal was to open those constricted channels. I was surprised when those channels ran down my body and met at the base of the lumbar spine. There are also channels of current that run down each arm and leg. I knew about that from my energy body work in my twenties, when I did bellows breathing 3-4 hours a day for a year.

Interesting path to be on.

One way to understand energy flow in the body, think of a new house. Turn on water faucet, full flow. House 30 years old, turn on faucet, 50% flow. 60 year old house, 25%.

Various things constrict the energy flow in the body over time. Diet, lack of exercise, aging, dumping life force into negative thought patterns, just giving up.

Here's a map of my full body, front view.

Experiences With the Energy Body Available in Print and in Color

Bill Johnson offers a detailed account of how he developed and expanded an awareness of his energy body. In his twenties, Bill did bellows breathing for a year. That experience helped him to open restrictions in his body's energy flow. In this 2nd edition available in print and color from Amazon, Bill maps the energy flow around his face, head, and body and records his experiences and suggests techniques others can use to experience their energy bodies.

His book offers an insider's peek to those who struggle with managing and learning from the integration of body, mind, and energy body and what it means for the creative process.

Additionally, he provides some biographical details and endeavors that add color and insight into his treatment of this little-explored realm.

Available at https://www.amazon.com/Experiences-Energy-Body-Understanding-Together/dp/B0F5P47FK5/

Throwing Your Characters Over The Edge,­ Setting Out What’s at Stake in a Story, by Bill Johnson

When a story’s action shatters the lives of its characters, those characters are thrown over the edge into new worlds. They become dramatic characters because the choices that face them are stark: how will they, can they, survive in these new worlds? How will they change? Can they avoid changing?

In years past, several movies found different ways to throw characters over the edge: The Sweet Hereafter, The Five Senses, and Last Night.

The Sweet Hereafter begins with a man, woman and baby girl sleeping in an idyllic setting. This quiet, peaceful opening begins a story about loss, by starting with a scene that suggests the opposite, a loving, fulfilling moment in life.

We then cut to Mr. Stevens, played by Ian Holm, a lawyer, who takes a call from his estranged daughter. She’s a drug addict and also, we later learn, the baby in the first scene. Because of her drug addiction, he has ‘lost’ his daughter even though she’s alive.

We go from Mr. Stevens, to a father watching his teenage daughter, Nicole, getting ready to perform at a country fair.

Each of these scenes takes place at a different time, but each carries embedded meaning that serves the dramatic purpose of the story. The chronology of the events of any story is not linear. A storyteller chooses those moments in time that best evoke a story’s journey.

Mr. Stevens arrives in a small Canadian town as a lawyer seeking to represent the parents of children who died in a tragic bus accident. Because he’s tormented over the loss of his daughter, he’s focused his life on using others to prove that someone is at fault for every tragedy, that every tragedy has a root cause that can be known and understood. He says to a potential client, “You’re angry, aren’t you? That’s why I’m here. To give your anger a voice. To be your weapon against whoever caused that bus to go off the road.”

As we learn more about each parent and the children involved in the accident, the scenes that lead up to the accident develop more and more dramatic power. But when the accident finally happens, we see very little of it. What we see is the shocked look on a father’s face as he watches the accident unfold, then later sees a blanket put over the bodies of his dead children.

Then he looks up and sees them laughing, running toward him in the snow. At the moment of their deaths, they are more alive to him than ever.

Later, as he looks at the hulk of the bus after the accident, he hears the screams of the trapped children. This is a motif that recurs several times. People looking at the bus hear the screams.

The loss for Nicole’s father is not that she ends up in a wheelchair, but that he loses his dream of helping her become a rock star, a dream he wants to share with her in an intimate way.

As the story advances, one thread occurs years later. On a plane, Mr. Stevens finds himself sitting next to a young woman who was a childhood friend of his daughter. This brings us to a revelation of what happened in that opening scene. In that idyllic bed a hidden menace struck; baby black widow spiders bit the baby girl. As she began to swell, there is a long ride to the hospital during which Mr. Stevens holds his daughter in his lap, a knife ready to cut into her throat if she can no longer breath. Was this the turning point that turned his daughter against him? He can’t know, only wonder and grieve.

The story turns when Nicole is asked to testify at a deposition. When she balks, Mr. Steven’s tries to manipulate her by telling her that people feel sorry for her because she’s in a wheel chair, and testifying is her chance to be angry and get revenge.

She appears ready to go along, but instead, she lies at the deposition, and there is no longer the basis of a law suit against the town or bus manufacturer.

Nicole’s reason for lying is set out by her voice over recital of the Pied Piper, in part, “One was lame and could not dance the whole of the way/and after years, if you would blame his sadness/he was used to say/it’s dull in our town since my playmates left/I can’t forget that I’m bereft/of all the pleasant sights they see/which the piper also promised me/for he led us he said/to a joyus land...where waters gushed and fruit trees grew...and everything was strange and new.”

Nicole has left behind the world she once knew. As she narrates at the end of the story, about Ian, “I wonder if you understand, that all of us, Delores, me, the children who survived, the children who didn’t, that we’re all citizens of a different town now. A place with its own special rules and its own special laws. A town of people living in the sweet hereafter.”

Unlike many films, the Sweet Hereafter does not suggest grief and loss can be resolved. It only suggests that life goes on for the grieving, and that we all grieve in our own way.

A beautiful film.

Another recent film, Last Night, uses a great device to throw its characters over the edge: it’s the end of the world; it’s happening at a clearly defined moment; no one will be spared.

Each character in the story reacts to this situation according to what’s important to them. Some simply want to gather with family like it’s a Christmas dinner and pretend all is well. Others riot. Another character arranges to have sex with every woman he’s ever had a fantasy about, including his high school English teacher. Another man spends his last hours calling people to let them know the local gas utility has appreciated their patronage.

The story’s main character, a young man, wants to die alone. The natural question, why? Fate brings him together with a young woman desperately trying to find her way home to a lover. This also naturally raises a question, why her desperation to get home if the world is ending?

He tries to help her, because helping her means he can die alone. But fate keeps bringing her back. And as the time draws near the end, we find out why he wants to die alone: the loss of his wife who taught him about love has left him bereft. He doesn’t want to go through that loss again. Then it comes out why she’s so determined to go home: she doesn’t want to die a death at the hands of a common fate; she and her lover have made a suicide pact.

She asks him if he’ll kill her. The catch is, she needs to fall in love with him to go through with her plan.

He doesn’t want to get this involved, but the story ends with the two of them facing each other, guns pointed at the head of the other. But instead of killing each other as the world ends, they do something else that acts out what each was really looking for, what each really wanted to share with someone else.

This story raises a question that has stayed with me, what would I do if the world were coming to an end in the next 24 hours? >p> A lovely film.

The Five Senses has a plot that revolves around a missing little girl. The mother of the young girl blames a masseuse whose daughter was supposed to be watching the little girl. The mother’s feelings of grief, loss and anger are deeply felt.

There are many beautiful scenes in this film, but several stand out. In one, a young man begs the masseuse for a massage. The masseuse at first refuses, then gives in. During the massage, the young man begins to cry. The only time he’s touched is when he pays for a massage. Something in his life has thrown him over the edge, outside of normal human contact, and he craves being touched.

Another character is a doctor who eavesdrops on the conversations of others in the office building. The natural question, why? It comes out that he’s going deaf and he’s trying to store as many auditory sensations as he can. After he admits his situation to someone, he’s taken to a concert and shown that he can ‘listen’ to the music by feeling its vibration on church pews. This moment allows him to feel he can survive in what to him would be the most barren of all worlds, one without sound.

In a turning point, the mother of the missing girl accepts the masseuse in her life as someone who understands how she feels. The lost girl is found, and what else is found is the relationship that had been lost between the masseuse and her teenage daughter.

This is a beautifully told story about how we perceive the world through the senses, and through the memories of our sense experiences.

* * * *

One way to discover what drives a character is to ask, what is the one thing a character would miss the most if he or her were to lose everything? What a character craves most in life might be a commitment to the truth, a loving relationship, a sense of justice. Throw that character over the edge into a world where what they value most is taken from away, and that character must react.

Another way to frame this question, what is most important to YOU, the reader, in life? Create a character who loses that, and you can explore your own feelings and thoughts to understand what drives your character to act, to gain some goal, to discover how to exist in the new world you’ve created.

* * *

The Sweet Hereafter. Writing credits, novel by Russell Banks, script, Atom Egoyan. Directed by Adam Egoyan. Released 1997.

Last Night. Written and directed by Don McKellar. Released 1998.

The Five Senses. Written and directed by Jeremy Podeswa. Released 1999.

For more of my movie reviews, visit https://www.storyispromise.com