Chapter IV: The Secret of Lincoln's Lair

Bristol Meyers

2012-01-02T01:13:00.002-06:00

It's just been an exhausting couple of weeks, that's all. You know, the holiday season, it's pretty intense in my line of work. It could've been worse. More intense, I mean. I shudder to imagine if I were still working in a Toys 'R' Us this time of year. All the same, New Year's Day is one of the most hectic days of the year if you work in a restaurant that serves brunch. There are twice as many hungover people and half as many places open. What I'm trying to say is that I didn't get around to cleaning my apartment today. Tomorrow for sure.

Today I learned that in polo, every player needs three horses. Otherwise, the horses get worn out, and those things are expensive.

I really admire horses. They don't ever quit. You can literally work a horse to death. They'll do it. It doesn't matter. They'll do it. They're renowned for their unparalleled work ethic, and their huge dicks. If you're born as a horse, you've won at life.

Chrysalis

2011-12-31T16:49:00.002-06:00

New Year's Eve, and I was in my local grocery. Saw the crowds, with their carts and their kids jamming up the snack food aisle and the liquor aisle, and all I could think was "fair-weather fans."

Those are my aisles.

I realized, purchasewise, that I've been treating every evening as a holiday. That's the bright way of looking at it. The dark way is in explaining that I eat junk and I drink junk 'til I fall asleep well after midnight.

But I make it into work on time, and I work hard, and take pride in my work, and they love me at work, and they frequently say so. And they pay me the money that keeps me alive, the money that I put into my body, to survive, and then a touch more money, making it worthwhile to remain in that condition. Thereby allowing me to make it into work again. And that's how I've fallen into my most recent funk.

My New Year's resolution is to pursue more creative outlets. I haven't acted, haven't written, haven't read, haven't drawn, painted, built, or made music in months and months. I haven't had the energy or motivation. But people keep giving me journals as gifts. Nice, leatherbound journals with acid-free paper. That's a clear incentive. An open-ended commission. And most importantly, it's support.

I wonder if that's why I create. Clearly I don't do it for myself, or I'd be doing it instead of talking about doing it. I don't do it for money; there's no money in it. Either I don't realize how much I need the thing itself or I'm so fucking shallow that I need an audience to watch me chase it down. Either way, thanks for listening. I mean it.

My other New Year's resolution is to clean my room. I can, I will do all these things. Starting tomorrow.

Central Perk

2011-08-23T19:49:00.003-05:00

On the train today, I noticed a pet supply store. It's in the Wicker Park neighborhood. There are pawprint decals on the windows and mannequin canids. The name of the place is "Wicker Pet."

And I thought to myself, Really? You bought and established a pet shop in Wicker Park, and you chose not to name it "Wicker Bark?" Was Wicker Bark already taken? Explain yourself.

Maybe they didn't want to be cutesy. That's fine. I respect that. But only if you can come up with something better. More attractive. Catchier. The thing that bothers me the second-most is that they went ahead and put "Wicker" into the name, and then side-stepped the punchline in favor of something even less remarkable. The thing that bothers me the most is that it bothers me at all.

At work, we have a lamb sandwich on the menu. It's not called a lambwich. Missed opportunities get to me, I guess is what I'm saying.

On Modern Environmentalism

2011-08-05T22:48:00.001-05:00

Keeping it moving. I start a new job next week. That's when the restaurant opens. I'm waiting tables again. I think I'm getting fairly good at it. I know better than to get too specific, but it seems like it's gonna be a really nice, clean place. Exclusively organic/humane/local/eco-friendly/sustainable fare.

Sustainable. One thing that strikes me as interesting--not just with this place but on the whole--is how much our cultural verbiage has changed in just ten years. It seems to me that in the Nineties, all the activists were saying "save the planet." And the rainforest, and the whales, and so on. No one says "save" anymore. It's "sustain" now. As though Earth is a cancer patient for whom we can only delay the inevitable. Make her comfortable. Enjoy our last moments together. Prolong her life, if possible, but not her suffering.

If you'll allow the analogy to go on, who's the cancer? Who's expanding too fast and who's selfishly consuming the resources that the body needs to keep itself, as well as the disease, alive?

"Save" implies that if we sacrifice our modern comforts we just might be able to reverse the damage that we've done. "Sustain" implies that we can find alternatives that keep the planetary motor running just a little longer. This new attitude is very telling of--as I'm sure I'm not the first to point out--what seems to be an era of compromise.

On the bright side, if we really do finally trash the place, maybe NASA will get the funding it deserves.

Hammertime

2011-08-04T22:43:00.001-05:00

I still try to keep a private journal, but until recently my thoughts have been unfit for sharing. I'm more discerning now. But after so long, what could possibly be so important and so interesting as to draw me back here?

Yeah, it's sharks. You guessed right.

I still don't have cable, but on that Internet I watched a National Geographic special called "Shark Superhighway." It's about hammerheads, which are the best of all. They travel in schools, which is unusual for sharks, and because they travel that way, they might be migratory, which would also be unusual for sharks.

In the special, a group of marine scientists and conservationists attempt to capture a hammerhead and attach a satellite beacon to its dorsal fin, because if they can prove that hammerheads are migratory, and that they follow predictable migration paths, then they can petition for restrictions on open-ocean fishing in the areas they pass through and protect them from extinction.

Anyway, they do it. And the narrator says,

"...All the team can do is wait for the tags to send in their data. But the tags will only work if the sharks rise up to the surface. Just a few feet below, and their signals will be too weak to reach up into space. But if and when they do, the satellite will beam their information back down to Earth. The team will receive it in the form of an e-mail."

ATTN: SCIENTIST@SCIENCE.COM

FROM: HAMMERHEAD@PACIFIC.OCEAN

SUBJECT: Re:

MSG: HEY. BRUCE HERE. DON'T KNOW IF YOU REMEMBER ME. I'M A HAMMERHEAD. ABOUT 9', 600 LBS. I'M ONE OF THE SMALLER ONES. YOU PROBABLY MEET A LOT OF HAMMERHEADS, I KNOW. WE MET OFF THE COAST OF DARWIN ISLAND. I SPENT FOUR AND A HALF MINUTES ON THE BRINK OF DEATH WHILE YOU HOSED DOWN MY GILLS ON YOUR SCIENCE BOAT. YOU TURNED ME INTO A CYBORG. MAYBE THAT RINGS A FUCKING BELL?

ANYHOODLE, JUST THOUGHT I'D LET YOU KNOW WHAT I WAS UP TO. SWIMMING MOSTLY. EATING FISH AND LARGE FISH AND RAYS AND RAYS AND SOME FISH THAT ARE SMALL. MY GIRLFRIEND'S PREGNANT BUT WE'RE NOT READY SO WE MADE THE TOUGH CALL AND SHE'S AGREED TO EAT HER YOUNG. BUUUUTTTT... YOU'RE PROBABLY MORE CONCERNED WITH WHERE I AM RIGHT NOW, WHO AM I SHARKING KIDDING? NOT SCIENCE. THAT'S FOR SURE. HERE ARE MY RECENT COORDINATES:

LAT1: 1.443N LON1: 92.092W LAT2: 0.352S LON2: 82.252W

ALSO. FYI. E-MAIL IS VERY LABORIOUS FOR ME. PERHAPS IN THE FUTURE WE COULD KEEP TABS ON MY LOCATION VIA FOURSQUARE OR EVEN TWITTER. JUST FRIEND ME AND IT WILL SHOW UP ON YOUR FACEBOOK. I HATE YOU.

THANK YOU FOR CONSERVING MY SPECIES, HUMAN OVERLORD.

YOURS,

BRUCE CYBERSHARK
SHARK INDUSTRIES
OCEAN

2011-02-12T11:08:00.002-06:00

So, my new project: sorting through the music, images, and documents that survived the great hard drive crash of '11.

(It feels weird to me, abbreviating 2011 as '11. Like something's missing, almost. I never felt that way about the last century.)

I've deleted all the inessential photos. Duplicates and blurs and such and things that just don't matter anymore. The documents I haven't got to yet. I'm not ready to read through all that junk. I'm working through my music folder now. I have a lot of crappy songs, as a result of my "gotta catch 'em all" completism. I will not show them mercy anymore.

The other night I watched a documentary about punk music, called You Weren't There. I felt like I could stand to learn more on the subject. I think that punk efficiently conveys emotion--angst, mostly--and on that level it succeeds at being art, but part of the point of it is that it's unpleasant to listen to, and on that level it fails at being music. I consider it as being closer to performance art. To play a punk song, it's required that you dress a certain way, behave a certain way. The music itself is just part of a larger spectacle. This is true of some other genres, but most of them don't carry it so far. What I'm saying is I think it's fun to watch but pointless to listen to in isolation.

2011-02-09T11:02:00.000-06:00

I was on Facebook last night, browsing through the "people you may know" thing, and seeing that apparently there are some famous faces in my book now. I don't really know these people--I know they don't know me--it's just kinda cool to be able to say "No, Facebook, I haven't actually met Tim Meadows, but thanks for letting me know that we have nine friends in common." And then I actually did run into him today. He showed up, along with a number of other referential alumni, for Joyce's memorial service, which I helped run and set up and disassemble in time for the eight o'clock curtain. Somewhere between 800 and 1,200 people showed up to honor her. That's how awesome she was.

The city shut down part of our street. There were cops stationed outside and plainclothes officers patrolling the interior. I'm not an expert on the subject but I'm not sure that Chicago's seen a funeral of this magnitude since, I don't know, maybe Benny Goodman's.

We all got very drunk. I hailed a cab. As soon as I got in, the driver lurched forward and stopped abruptly and I hit my head on the partition. I buckled my seatbelt and he started giving me an oral history of Eastern Europe. By the time he started talking about Area 51, I looked out the window and realized This guy has no idea where he's going. Classic misdirection. I helped him find my street, by which point the conversation had moved on to conservative media. He concludes by shaking my hand and telling me to just pay him "whatever you normally pay. Ten dollars or whatever."

So, that was Tuesday.

2011-02-08T02:07:00.001-06:00

Dream: I'm at work. Everytime I dream of work, it has to be in an expansive labyrinth. No exception this time. I'm navigating my way to a problematic group of about fifty people. Collectively they're committing every breach of theatre etiquette in the book, and breaking a few laws besides. I try to talk to them; I beg them to control themselves. They look at me like I have two heads, both containing shit-for-brains. They ignore me, patronize me, wave me away, I lose patience and I use harsh words. They all get up at once and proceed single-file to the lobby. One of them is dressed like Batman. At least this will make a good story, I think, I can tell my friends that Batman got me fired.

I'm tearing up from the stress. A woman--not quite Amanda, not quite Dawn, at least half Julie--says she's sorry. "For what?" I ask her. She says, "I'm sorry Mel fired you. Is that... Isn't that why you're crying?" The next person I see is Mel. She tries to apologize and I cut her off. "I've heard already. Spare me." She tries to hug me and I walk away, all the way to the exit, where I realize I'm not wearing shoes. I left them in the managers' office. I can't leave without shoes. And I can't go back because I've already made my dramatic exit.

Dream Within the Dream: The alarm rings. What did I even set this for? I don't have a job anymore. I hit the snooze button again and again. The alarm rings. Waitaminute... I wasn't fired at all--that was just a dream! It's ten P.M. The shift is almost over. "No call, no show, no job." I'm in the maze again. Let me go home.

Reality: The alarm rings. What did I even set this for? I don't have a job anymore. I let it ring for a while. I reach to turn it off. Waitaminute... It takes me several moments and a cigarette to determine that a) I am indeed awake, and b) that my employers are expecting me in ninety minutes. Lucky I cleared away the cobwebs just in time. Otherwise I don't know how I'd've explained my way out of a dream come true.

Also I remember dreaming something about Irish people being mad at me, but I can't recall why or what about now.

2011-02-05T04:46:00.006-06:00

You've heard by now about the blizzard. It rocked my apartment, not in the sense that I was hosting a Pink Floyd laser light show, but in the sense that my three-flat was swaying from side to side. Also, it was like a Pink Floyd laser light show. I had never seen thunder and lightning during a snowstorm before, and was ignorant that it was even possible. So, according to Youtube, was our local weatherman, who flipped out while reporting on location, repeatedly exlaiming "HOLY SMOKES!"

Around the same time, by coincidence, my hard drive crashed. And my phone hasn't been holding a charge for a while. So I never got word that the theater was closed. I braved my way to work only to find it locked. I was grateful for the night off but unfortunately my tauntaun froze before I reached the first marker.

As far as I've heard, our theater has only shut down twice before. Once was for another blizzard (though they ended up jury-rigging a show anyway, by insistence of the actors), and once for September 11th.

Even now the snow is still up to my knees. I'd never seen snow collect in dunes before.

Two days after the storm, the "state of emergency" was lifted from downtown, and I ventured out to blow some savings on a new computer. It's a laptop. Very sexy. It came in a box with "The computer is personal again" written in nine languages in a Tim Burtonish font. My roommate Clint used the computer skills he learned at Hogwarts to help me extract the important stuff from my old harddrive. (I was amused to find that "IMG_666.jpg" was a photo of a woman I particularly dislike.)

When I marched back to work this evening, there were flowers set out in the lobby and everyone was hushed. I asked if everything was alright. I was told that Joyce had died.

Joyce was our Producer Emeritus. She was an exceedingly sweet old Jewish woman--turned eighty last year. She had a red cardigan and a black cardigan. She moved slowly, but her wit was rabbit-quick. Anytime I asked how long she had been working here, the response was simply "since forever." I was never sure how much authority Joyce wielded, or whether she'd become more of a beloved figurehead, like the Queen Mum. But I could readily see the respect she commanded; the esteem she was held in. It was made clear to me many times how many performers owed their careers to her.

But what I liked about her, given my limited scope of perspective, was that she was nice to me. We'd talk sometimes. I'd hail cabs for her or help her down the stairs. When she found out that I napped on the kitchen floor during the twenty-four hour charity improv marathon, she chastised me, "Why didn't you come sleep on my couch in my office? I have a blanket for you. Jim Belushi's mom made that blanket for me. It's a good blanket."

She was, in general, a stick-up-for-you kind of gal. When our theater celebrated its fifty-first birthday, there was a luncheon planned for the day staff and office workers, i.e. "the boys and girls upstairs." Joyce related to me, "Now Jared, I don't usually raise my voice..."

"I can't imagine you doing it."

"But I was furious. I said, 'forgive me if I'm mistaken, but I believe the actors have something to do with this theater.'"

I don't know whose budget it came out of, but everyone on the night staff got free pizza and cake and beer that night.

What's hard for me is that I consider her such a fixture, and I've known her slightly less than a year. I cannot imagine the loss of the men and women who've known her for decades. I half-believed her death to be an elaborate prank in bad taste, until I saw her office door in a quite novel state: closed. With a single red rose tied around the doorknob.

A few weeks ago, I worked a wake for Mary, a teacher of comedy writing in our training center. I observed that "we'll have to have another wake to get rid of all of these leftover tissue boxes." While I don't put blame on myself--that would be superstition--I do regret the comment. "These things happen in threes, you know," I'm waiting for someone to say it. So I can punch them in the jaw.

Oneiromancy

2011-01-27T01:14:00.003-06:00

I slept all day today. I don't know why. I know I was tired. Maybe it was residual fatigue from the last stages of my cold. Maybe I'm old now.

I dreamt I was in a car accident. That used to be a recurring nightmare of mine, where I would be cruising along and suddenly it would come time to, you know, stop the car, and either my legs were paralyzed, or the brake pedal had disappeared entirely. I've never been a confident driver, so it's easy to see how that anxiety would manifest itself in dreams. But this was the first driving dream I'd had since I engaged a deer in mutually assured destruction, nine months ago. I woke up at five P.M., sweating, my right leg bucking uselessly against the blanket.

By extenuation, I could say that losing control of a car in my dream signifies anxiety over a lack of direction or control in my waking life, but I'm not sure that's right. I have a plan now. My room is clean and I'm well-medicated and I feel like I know what to do. Perhaps I have a lingering subconscious fear that I have overlooked something, something as obvious as a brake or an airbag. Or perhaps, like the dozen other fairy tales I dreamt this afternoon, it meant nothing at all.

Paging Dr. Jung...

The Tertiary Adventures of 100 Proof

2011-01-25T17:00:00.006-06:00

Last night was the office holiday party. Yes, I know Xmas was a month ago, but January 24th is the feast day of Our Lady of Peace, which would probably be just as important to believers if Bing Crosby sang about it and there were presents involved.

I did get some presents, though. There was some company swag--a blanket, a calendar, a bracelet charm shaped like a bentwood chair. I need to find a friend who's really cold, wears jewelry, and doesn't know what day it is. There was also a raffle, where I won an overnight stay at the swank Sheraton Chicago Hotel & Towers.

"Hey Megan, what are you doing after this?"

"I don't know. Why?" said my beautiful friend.

"I just won a night in Heaven; I was wondering if you would join me."

I couldn't hear her response over the party, but at least she didn't slap the shit-eating grin off my face.

On top of that, we had a Secret Santa gift exchange, and Steve got me a soft, luxurious Italian leather notebook, with heavy paper that's perfect for ink drawings. I gave Danielle some sweet tea and a Threadless tee with a big watercolor sunflower. I packed it up in a burrito bowl and paper sack from Chipotle, which I think she appreciated. Inside jokes, etcetera.

I then proceeded to get absolutely shitcan hammered, which, along with extramarital groping, is the point of an office Xmas party, I think. Over the course of the evening, I had three glasses of Jack, a glass of beer, a glass of wine, and at least eight cups of a notorious punch that I heard referred to as "Allison's cougar juice."

Some of the night staff put on a parody show, and afterward there was karaoke with a live band. All in all, there are a lot of very skilled performers in our building. Which comes as no surprise at all. What is surprising to me is that I don't feel hungover in the least. I must be hangover-proof now. Which, if you have to pick one useless superpower...

What, You're Too Good for "Gilded?"

2011-01-23T04:17:00.004-06:00

I told them I was sick and they could tell I was sick. One of the managers gave me some generic Dayquil and let me go home after the matinee was over. I thought it was very nice of her. I bought some more generic Dayquil at the Walgreens outside of work. (I've always been trepidacious about taking drugs for minor ailments, even more so since Shea told me his horror story about the time he accidentally went Robotripping at a screening of The Exorcism of Emily Rose, but desperate times, etcetera.) I did not have to buy more Chapstick. It was in the finger of one of my gloves. I... I don't know.

I spent most of the rest of the evening... I can't remember if I took a nap or not now, but I spent some time reading The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, which Gabe loaned me. I came across a word in it that I didn't know the meaning of, and in my irritable state I got mad at myself. Was I that far removed from the habit of reading that consumed me for so many years? Had my vocabulary atrophied? Or, even more maddeningly, had I not read enough as a young man, that the secret of this word should still be locked from me? I threw off my blanket, lit a cigarette (as the characters of Kavalier & Clay do every three pages or so), and looked up "aetataureate" in an online dictionary, which had no definition for it, and then in a search engine, which explained that it was not a real word at all but a nonce word that Chabon invented for the story. "Of or pertaining to a Golden Age," the Internet said, but I didn't understand the etymology of it. So I looked that up too. It turns out aetatis is Latin for "of the age of," and aureate means "gold" or "gold-colored" from the Latin aureatus, "decorated with gold." So, that's what a nerd does on a sick day, if you were wondering.

Also I played some game on the Internet about evil robots or something. You know, as long as I was there.

Woe, Woe

2011-01-22T06:11:00.005-06:00

Been fighting a bug all day. Came on me yesterday, on my way to work. Nasty thing. My guess is the Common Cold. I won't call it Rhinovirus because that makes it sound much cooler than it is.

I've suffered worse, and Friday is my day off anyway. So I've been resting, drinking orange juice, resting, reading, and resting. Not that it makes any difference. A cold lasts a week. There is no cure, outside the efficacy of the human immune system. Still, fatigue persisted all day, and now it's 6:00 AM and I'm working a matinee in a few hours. I made myself a spicy bloody mary, to clear my sinuses, and to help me sleep. I don't have any pharmaceuticals in the apartment. It's just me and homeopathy. Boozeopathy. The bloody mary is inflaming my chapped winter lips. I hopped on a train to get to a convenience store this afternoon, solely for lip balm. I've misplaced it already. Oh, why must they be so insufferably small?

Send in your answers. Winner gets a lifetime supply of Chapstick. Which is just one tube of Chapstick. You'll NEVER USE IT ALL. YOU'LL LOSE IT FIRST. WE'RE MAKING FUCKING MILLIONS OFF OF WINTER.

The Simple Life

2011-01-03T15:49:00.000-06:00

The Internet is down, putting a kink into resolutions 5, 6, 10, 11, and 14. When I got home my roommates were all playing video games. Not playing together, mind you. They each had their own. Aaron was in the middle of a sword fight, Clint was in the middle of a gun fight, Gavin was in the middle of redecorating. Gavin doesn't know it, but I'm organizing a Simtervention for him.

The People's Glorious Resolution

2011-01-02T15:41:00.001-06:00

I was told the balloon drop didn't drop balloons properly. Instead, an enormous, squamous sausage of netted balloons descended wholesale and unseparated on a certain section of the audience. The net was tied too tightly. I was not the one that tied the net. As such, I feel comfortable blaming everyone except myself. I'm glad I wasn't there to see it. After the day of setup, Jesus H., I would have lost my goddamned mind.

My Rules, for Myself, for the New Year:
1) Drink only when absolutely necessary for the retension of sanity.
2) Shower before you go to bed. You're always too tired in the morning. Or the afternoon. Whenever you wake up.
3) You're too old for acne. Use facial cleanser daily.
4) Don't make love unless you mean it.
5) Write something every day.
6) Don't forget why you came to this city.
7) Only eat food that contains food.
8) Support your friends; they will return the favor.
9) Art comes from chaos, but tidiness engenders productivity.
10) Keep in touch with your family; they miss you for some reason.
11) Once invested, see a project through to its conclusion. Even if it's doomed to fail, you'll learn from it.
12) Dress nicely. You don't need a reason.
13) There are a lot of things that you can get away with, but socks cannot be worn two days in a row.
14) Read.
15) Stay on your medication, if you know what's good for you.
16) Avoid the number seventeen.
17)
18) Take more pictures.
19) Make more pictures.

20) Be thriftier than ever.

21) Make yourself proud.

The Living Present

2011-01-01T05:55:00.003-06:00

They told me they could use me for a special project, one that would pay a little more. I had a feeling that they meant I would be blowing up balloons for eight hours. I was right. All in all, it's not a half-bad way to make a C.

We had an air compressor, so I didn't have to use my own breath. Although, out of curiosity, I did inflate a few in the old fashioned way, to test my lung capacity. After two and a half years of packaday smoking, it hasn't changed that I could tell.

We rigged up the many hundreds of balloons in a big net above the theater. At midnight someone would pull a length of plastic fishing line and the whole thing would come undone, creating a bombardment. We also made use of a tank of pressurized helium, cardboard cutouts, ribbons, streamers, plastic hats, noisemakers, leis and other party favors. When the rest of the staff arrived, everyone was dressed up and the girls were beautiful, in many cases more breathtaking than balloons. This was to be An Event. My shift ended at six, just as the crowd began filing in. I was half-tempted to stay, just drinking and watching the shows I'd seen a thousand times and generally getting in the way. I would have had very good company, and I would have been able to see the fruits of my labors, so to speak. But I had been unable to sleep the night before. I was exhausted, and I nodded off a few times on the train home.

Back in my apartment, feeling a little refreshed, I popped open a bottle of Chandon, a decent California brut that I paired with a fine assortment of microwaveable pizza rolls. I chain-smoked until I fell asleep around ten, I suppose, and woke up in time for what would have been midnight if I lived in Oregon.

In other words, it was like most nights, more or less. I can't stand for it anymore. I'm not asking 2011 to be better, necessarily, just different. It's not a request so much as a commitment. I can make this a new year, at least for myself. I can stop moving from one rut to the next. I can progress instead of merely aging. I've said that before, probably. And I don't doubt I meant it every time. Clearly there is something in my nature that must change before anything else can. I've a few ideas already.

"What we call failure is not the falling down but the staying down."--Mary Pickford

Voyages of Discovery

2010-09-17T15:26:00.002-05:00

Where the hell is my lighter? It's not in my pocket. I don't see it on the floor anywhere. Where is my lighter?

Fuck it, I'll use the stove to light this cigarette. The stove makes fire.

I shouldn't have leaned over so much. Now my hair is on fire. I'm pretty sure about that. It's just a few hairs. A very small clump, I think.

It could be a good idea to turn the stove off now. Maybe I'll borrow a lighter from someone.

"You know, the scariest thing is that you did that while completely sober."

"Lesson learned, I guess."

The burned hand teaches best. Fucking Gandalf said that.

Adding insult to injury, I discovered later that night that my lighter had been in my other pocket, merely hiding between the folds of my wallet.

You can't tell by looking that I burned a few hairs. It really was a very small clump.

In news that isn't making me feel like an idiot, the MadLab Theatre in Columbus, Ohio contacted me about producing Shadow. I borrowed Aaron's phone and spoke with their managing director; they seem like a really really cool group. The show is going to be running the four weekends in March 2011. I think my birthday falls on one of those weekends. That might be a fun way to spend it. I hear Columbus has a very nice zoo, too.

It's gone a long way in renewing my confidence. In pulling me out of my browser-game-playing funk and making me want to work harder on writing and propagating what I write. I have some fun projects lined up for myself.

The Day I Went to a Men's Wearhouse

2010-09-04T03:49:00.002-05:00

Afterwards, when I thought about it, I would realize that I'd never been into a Men's Wearhouse before. I had seen them, in malls and in strip malls, but I hadn't yet in my life had occasion to rent a tuxedo. My friend Jimmy had me set to be a groomsman in his wedding, and he directed me there for a fitting. “Go,” he said severely, “Go swiftly, and carry with you the envy of all men everywhere.”

Jimmy was not habitually one to wax poetic, so his words left me viewing the prospect of tape measures prodding my balls through a new and eager lens.

It looked ordinary from the outside. The inside, too, was as I had expected. Rows upon rows of men's suits in blacks and grays and browns and silvers. Shiny neckties. Leather belts. Shoes that were both leather and shiny. There were no sales clerks or whatever you would have me call them in sight. But as I approached the counter an elderly man in an immaculate white tuxedo appeared beside me, as if conjured out of thin air. Had there been a passageway I overlooked? And how was it that he moved with such spectral silence?

“Welcome,” he said, and here he paused for dramatic effect, in my opinion overdoing it by just a little, “to the Men's Wearhouse.” By what I perceived as sleight-of-hand, he profferred a martini and held it out to me insistently. As it looked unpoisoned, I accepted.

It was a perfect martini, made from aromatic gin, and stirred, not shaken, as only a purist would prescribe. I said, “My God, this astonishing. But I thought I was here for a fitting. My name is...”

“We know why you're here, Mr. Braltonby.”

“Actually my name is...”

“Everyone who enters the Men's Wearhouse is given an assumed name. You can do as you please here, and never have to answer for it. The outside world will never know. And we'll pretend we don't know either. What happens in the Men's Wearhouse stays... in one place and that place is the Men's Wearhouse.”

“Yeah, Braltonby, I thought it kind of sounded like a made-up name,” I said.

The old man smiled. “Our tailors will be with you presently. Why don't you wait in the Game Room?” And with that he parted a rack of blue-gray suits as though they were a curtain, revealing a low-lit corridor, with walls of solid marble trimmed in gold filigree. He did not follow me down the corridor. For a moment I thought I heard him laughing after me, but I turned and he was gone.

The Game Room was as bright as a dive bar. Most of what light there was came from an incalculable array of arcade games, and high-def plasma televisions hooked up to every video game system known to man, some of which, I was quite sure, had not yet been released, not even in Japan. This Vegas ensemble barely made perceptible the distant, oak panelled walls, which were decorated with the heads of ten-point bucks, and portraits of every great manly man from Davy Crockett to Sonny Crockett. Suddenly a merry, booming voice cut through the air. “Braltonby,” it called.

“I think so?” I answered, turning to find a man seated on the leather sofa, the one next to the billiard table. He was at once both plump and haggard, looking for all the world like Winston Churchill. I could not be convinced it was not actually Winston Churchill.

“The name's Tompklinson,” he said with a knowing wink. And this is our good friend Dardingsworth.”

I looked Dardingsworth up and down, and asked him, “Aren't you Harrison Ford?”

“Dardingsworth,” muttered Harrison Ford, shaking his head.

Tompklinson, or whoever he was, offered me a seat next to him on the sofa. He put his arm around me and chortled, “How's your martini? Perfect? I expect so, my good man. Would you care for some caviar? Or perhaps the bean dip and Fritos.” He laughed brightly as he saw me reach toward a Frito Scoop. “Excellent choice, sir! Might I suggest pairing it with a refreshing can of Pabst Gold Ribbon?”

“Gold Ribbon?” I asked.

“You can only find at the Men's Wearhouse. There's a cooler on your left.”

“The shit's fucking awesome,” said Harrison 'Dardingsworth' Ford.

I popped open a can of Gold Ribbon and, after a sip, exclaimed, “Impossible! This is even more watery than the Blue Ribbon! I could drink a million of these!”

“Why, it's more watery than water!” said Tompklinson, “Modern technology, wot.”

“Fucking awesome,” rejoined Harrison Ford.

And “To Jimmy,” we all toasted.

Tompklinson rubbed his hands together excitedly and said, “We're so glad you could make it, Braltonby. We've been in dire need of a new sparring partner for this next round of Halo 3. Are you prepared to be schooled, young man?”

“As if!” I contested.

“Afterward, we'll engage in some vintage Duck Hunt on the Nintendo Superscope, before heading into the lobby to hunt ducks.”

“Real ducks?”

Tompklinson nodded eagerly. “You're guaranteed a hit in the lobby! Or do you prefer deer hunting? Or even bigger game? Something to the tune of a robot rhinoceros? The Men's Wearhouse has plenty of M-16s on hand, if you forgot to bring your own firearm.”

“Real rhinoceroses are endangered,” explained Harrison Ford, out of fucking nowhere.

“How do you feel about hunting the Predator? You know, the titular Predator. From the film.”

Suddenly, the old man called out from the cigar-hazed shadows. “Mr. Braltonby, your tailors are prepared for you.”

“Sorry,” I said to my new friends, “Time's a-wastin'.”

“No worries,” said Tompklinson with a grin, “But do an old man a favor, yes? Give this to Milchetshire on your way out.” And with that he tossed me a football.

Across the room, Brett Favre was absorbed in a Virtua Fighter console.

“Milchetshire,” I shouted, “Go long.”

Brett Favre rushed to the other end of the Game Room, and obediently caught his football. There followed a mutual thumbs-up.

“ALLRRIIIGHHHT!” cried Mick Jagger, looking up at us from his heated session of Guitar Hero.

As I left for the fitting room, Tompklinson called out to me one last time. “Do come back after the chicken wing dinner,” he bellowed, “We're all getting together to fart and grow regrettable moustaches!”

The man in the white monkey-suit was waiting for me in the fitting room, along with two blonde models, nearly nude. “Braltonby,” he intoned, “meet Bambi Jubilee, and Martha.” The girls, from their kneeling positions, each held up their flexible cloth tape measures. The old man continued, “They're here to give you your tuxedo fitting, with happy ending.”

“Proceed,” I said boldly. And, “What is this place?” I whispered, as the girls depantsed me. “Have I stumbled into a waking dream?”

The old man laughed melodiously. “Only the best for Jimmy's friends. It's a well-kept secret that the Men's Wearhouse is a secret club for men that only men know about. Secretly.”

“What about...?” and I left the sentence unfinished as I gestured to the girls, who were engaging me in lewd activities while tabulating my pant length and shoe size.

“Oh them? Yes, they're actually men.”

“I am no longer completely comfortable with this arrangement.”

The old man laughed again. “I'm only kidding. They're whores, actually. But they're blind and deaf. They'll never share our secret.”

I was confused, and so, confusedly, I asked, “They're deaf? Then how did they hear me assent to this handy?”

“There are such things as safe assumptions, Mr. Braltonby.”

I nodded sagely. “Do women have a secret club as well?” I ventured.

“You have heard of Victoria's Secret?” returned the man in white.

“So Victoria's Secret is, like, the opposite of all this?”

“No,” he said, “They just sell lingerie.”

“So the 'secret' is that there is no secret?”

“Now you're beginning to understand women,” said the old man, partly vanishing behind a rack of suitcoats.

“This is all wonderful,” I said, “Do you do bachelor parties?”

The old man re-emerged, his head lowered, I thought, in sorrow. His eyes clambered out of his furrowed brow to lock with mine, quite seriously. “Once you take the vow of marriage, and align yourself completely with a woman that you love, the secrets of the Men's Wearhouse are closed to you, forever.”

“But how? Why?”

“You cannot lie to a woman you love truly,” he said, simply. “The opacity of our club can never be entrusted to married men. We have, like, mind-erasing things.”

“Like in Men in Black,” I said.

“Exactly. Yes, yes. Awesome movie.” And with that, he disappeared. It would be years later when I finally recognized him as Sean Connery.

And as I came on Bambi Jubilee's face, I understood the sacrifice Jimmy had made, both for his bride Kate, and for me. A life of bachelorhood and bean dip, and all the clandestine pleasures of manhood, tossed aside in favor of one woman, one true love. By the time I write this, Jimmy will have already forgotten about the hidden corridors of the Men's Wearhouse, but I never will. Even if, someday far in the future, I attune myself to the graces of a soul matching my own, and Will Smith appears before me with a neuralizer, removing from me every thought save those of my beloved, I will carry these memories of Jimmy, and Kate, and of the Men's Wearhouse, in my heart. And so, "To Jimmy."

Fit to Print

2010-09-02T01:00:00.003-05:00

I don't think the problem with my phone is a money problem after all. The phone says it's a money problem. The phone is supposed to deduct money from me automatically. There's enough money in my account to deduct from. But I think it might be trying to deduct from my debit card, which is cancelled. I'll figure this out. I'm not poor again yet.

I'm still trying to quit smoking, though. I've been very good all week. And only a little bad today.

Tourist Season is drawing to a close, which means that work might be a bit less stressful for a while. In place of Tourist Season, autumn is approaching, meaning that we now serve Sam Adams's Oktoberfest, which is my favorite Sam, and Sam is my favorite. On the other hand, summer is ending, so we'll probably stop serving Magners soon. Like sands through the hourglass...

I have a toothache that's been bothering me for a while. One of my incisors, not one of the front ones, but the next one over on the left, my left. It looks fine in the mirror so I fear that it may be a cavity. It would be my second cavity, I think. And while the money's going up, I don't think a trip to the dentist is in my near future. I don't get health and dental for another seven months. Perhaps a lot of aspirin, and eventually, a pair of pliers. If those kids in Norman Rockwell paintings can pull teeth, then so can I. I'll get it replaced when I'm a millionaire. Which, incidentally, is when I'll start smoking again.

I've made a list of all the things I want to own someday. It isn't very long, but it's a motivator all the same. Quit smoking, and you'll have these things sooner. Get your ass in gear. Get fame, get wealth. They are means to these ends. A library, a minibar, and the rest are all geared toward creative pursuits. Cameras, computer programs, things like that. Carpentry stuff is lower, just above fencing equipment. That's something I want to learn to do one day. I want to learn to play other musical instruments, too. Violin especially. And I want to speak Russian. Look at me with my reasons to live.

Note to Self: Buy Toothpicks

2010-08-28T00:07:00.004-05:00

It's partially my fault. I went out to buy groceries this afternoon, and what I came home with, aside from some bread and noodles, was in majority vodka and condiments.

I'll make a goddamned delicious bloody mary out of it, but I can't telephone my own brother because my roommates still owe me mountains. I can't even send Justin a text. I hope they get jobs soon. I don't at all enjoy being a creditor.

I don't know. I hardly use the thing. Last time I checked I had about a million hours left. I know I didn't use those up. They've run dry anyway. That's just the way phones are, I guess. How on Earth would they ever make money ethically?

I plan (again) to quit smoking on Sunday. This Sunday. Please do hold me to it. It's an epic expenditure saved.

2010-08-24T03:05:00.009-05:00

I was standing outside my workplace, smoking. I notice a few people heading back inside. "Joe's having a rehearsal," they said. Joe came to my staged reading, so I felt obliged, and, you know, I like watching rehearsals anyhow, when I can get away with it.

I heard you had a thing tonight," I said, in a statement that encapsulated absolutely everything I knew about the project.

Joe nodded, and he asked "Are you free tomorrow?" I told him I was working, but I could try, I could try really hard to ask off. And he said, "You do improv, don't you?" I replied, with earned reluctance, "It's been years... I'll sure give it a go, though."

"Great," he said, "I have this idea..." And he went on to prospectively enroll me. We rehearsed for an hour exactly.

Glad Tidings is the name of his group/troupe. It's improv bent toward religious satire. You can't just do improv in Chicago. The city's flooded with it. You have to have a hook.

I spent all of the next day with my nerves shot. No one could cover me, but I was almost on a stage. I am not disappointed. Nothing ventured, as they say.

Speaking of that phrase, I have an update on 8 Across. It's won nothing except the admiration of a few close friends. I still stand by what I said before. The good things and the bad things. It's the best film I could have made in forty-eight hours on a budget of zero dollars and zero cents. We still see the entire venture as an excuse to pool our skills and keep them pooled. As of right now I have more creative projects than I know what to do with. And I hope it stays that way. I am deeply, embarassingly in love with everyone I've worked with as of yet.

60 Down

2010-08-18T01:12:00.002-05:00

Where to begin? Nine o'clock ante meridiem, Friday, I guess. That's when I woke up, and stayed that way for sixty hours. It was for a good cause. And as grueling as it was at times, the 48 Hour Film Project was also some of the most fun I've had with clothes on.

I stayed at Cory's apartment, fingers poised over his laptop, while he went to Red Bull headquarters to find out what our genre, character, prop, and line of dialogue would be.

Most of us involved were Second City people. So our plan was that, whatever genre we received, we would make it comedic. If we got horror, it would be a horror/comedy. If we got romance, it would be a romcom. I get a text at seven sharp from Cory. "THRILLER/SUSPENSE?"

One of the stipulations is that you may combine genres provided that your film remains true to the genre you are given. A true thriller/suspense film can't be comedic. It can have humor to a degree, but spoofing the genre would destroy the intent of the genre.

So I sat down to write out a suspenseful thriller featuring a sales clerk named Denise or Duncan Kerrey, a mug, and the line "I am sure you are mistaken." I knocked it out in three hours or so. I'm not terribly proud of the script, but given the time constraints it's satisfactory.

The entire team met up at Cory's, at midnight, and did a read-through. Script changes were asked to be made. "It's dramatic," they said, "but it's not suspenseful." So I took their suggestions and a couple hours later we had a new version. Clint worked out a shooting schedule for us and then I sent him home. His job wasn't easy. Some of our locations were time-sensitive, and some of our actors were that way as well. Joanna was acting in a play the next day, and Sarah needed her rest because she'd been sick the previous week and school was starting for her next week. Being only sixteen, her mother came along for the adventure. If she were my daughter, I'd have done the same. Otherwise it's "have fun hanging out with a bunch of twenty-something guys I've barely met; see you in forty-eight hours."

We began shooting around 3 A.M. Our cinematographer, Eric, works for Fletcher Cameras, and he brought along some of the best goddamned equipment I have ever had the priveledge of working with. Our sound designer, Sam, certainly didn't short-change us either.

No one can say that the movie is technically flawed. Frame for frame, the lighting is good, the sound is good, the composition and the editing are good. Any legitimate criticisms will be for the story and/or the way in which it's told. Which is on me. Which I like. Because those are the things that you're supposed to be thinking about and critiquing when you go to see a film.

Around 9 A.M. Saturday we'd wrapped with a third of the actors. We'd lost two locations we'd been counting on, due to the commotion over the weekend's air show. The Blue Angels would continue to plague our production over the next seven hours. At the same time, Sam and Eric were requesting more script changes. "No," I told them. We'd already shot half the movie. I didn't dislike their ideas but we couldn't switch horses midstream. We had to keep moving. And anyway, I told them, the script was already too long. It was going to run over the seven-minute time limit. "We've only filled up one card so far. This'll be a five minute film," they attested. Weary as we were, the discussion could have easily transcended into argument, but Cory, actor and executive producer, peeled himself out of his hour-long nap and said, "Okay, what can we be doing right now?"

Around 9 P.M. I was going over footage with the editor, Justin. By midnight he was sewing the film together. "We've got plenty of B-roll if you need it," I said, "but I think the film is going to run over." He said, "I'm looking forward to the B-roll. I'll be surprised if this reaches six minutes." The video and audio editing process was the hardest part for me, just because there wasn't much for me to do. At best, all I could do was check in every few hours and say "Terrific, keep it up," or "Let's try this instead." I mostly kept out of their hair, and tore my own out.

By 7 A.M. Sunday, Justin had a rough cut. It was an eight minute film. I didn't say "I told you so." I said, "Okay. What can we cut? Let's start with the scenes that are the longest."

Naturally we didn't get to do everything we wanted with the film. Eventually I had to insist, "It's time to print. Unless you see an error that's egregious, we have to let it go. I didn't have time to be a perfectionist when I was shooting it; we don't have time for perfectionism now.

When it came time to render the film, Justin estimated it would take twelve minutes. Plenty of time. Twenty minutes in, I asked why the computer said the rendering would take another hour. We were doing it in multi-pass, for the best quality. Unless we did single-pass, we ran the very real risk of not having a film at all. Justin couldn't bring himself to sacrifice the quality. "Someone else click Cancel. I can't do it."

The deadline was 7:30 and we handed in the film at 7:00. And then we celebrated. I only had a few drinks, and I was the first to head home. I spent a little time hanging out with my roommates, who had Netflixed Watchmen. "I accept this challenge," I said slurredly, "Who watches the Watchmen??? FUCKING US."

I didn't make it through the opening credits. Apparently--and I have no memory of this but was informed the next morning--I became extremely confused. I entered a sort of fugue state, operating under the belief that we were still filming. I kept asking them where everybody was and what scene we were on. They told me repeatedly to go to bed and I shot back that they needed to GET OUT, JUST GET OUT (of our home) so that I could get this imaginary movie done.

I woke up on the couch somehow and it took me a few days to pay off my sleep debt. My mind recovered first, and then, eventually, my body.

I called the movie 8 Across. The screening is this evening at the Landmark Cinema. I don't care if it wins no awards and everybody hates it. That's not why I did it. What matters to me is that we accomplished what we set out to do. A lot of people don't realize just how long it takes to make a movie properly. Under ordinary circumstances, I'd call this a lovely short film. Given that it was made in two days, it's an incredible short film. That's what I think.

Just When You Thought It Was Safe

2010-08-01T11:51:00.002-05:00

Shark Week came early this year. I don't have cable, but a friend from work offered to record the new episodes for me. I need to do something nice for her. I was thinking a wedding ring but she already has one.

I was very drunk a few nights ago, and I punched through a window in my home. I don't remember why. But I'm fairly certain that if I thought I could actually do it, then I would not have done it. It was a storm window, I think they're called, so there's a further window on the other side that's still intact, and outside of that window is a chain-linked barrier to keep outsiders from breaking the windows. There is nothing to prevent insiders from breaking the windows.

A few friends from S.C. and I have signed up for the upcoming 48 Hour Film Project competition. We've got most everything lined up for it. I'm to be writing and directing, and I'm looking forward to it. I participated in one as an actor, in St. Louis, in 2004, and had a lot of fun. To prevent you from entering a film you made beforehand, they randomly assign you a genre, along with a character, prop, and line of dialogue that must be used. In '04 our group got "mockumentary" and we decided to save ourselves a lot of time by not writing a script, and improvising dialogue on set. I remember our movie made it into the final ten, or something. I was nominated for Best Actor, which ended up going to someone in SAG, but we did win Best Screenplay, which I think is a big accomplishment considering we didn't have one.

Continue Button

2010-07-21T14:54:00.003-05:00

I think I may have developed a debilitating video game addiction. I say debilitating because it really is preventing me from doing other things I should be concentrating on. At the same time, though, it keeps me from dwelling on things that I probably should not be concentrating on. And there are certainly worse vices. I already have worse vices.

I read an article not long ago about the way that some video games use psychological manipulation to keep you playing, regardless of whether you are actually having fun. So I'm choosier now about which games I play. I keep checking myself, asking am I enjoying this?

I can quit anytime I want.

I went to an audition for the first time in a long time. Or at least, I tried to. I couldn't find the place. I sent an e-mail to the director, apologizing. It's hard to apologize for being an idiot but it's something that I have to do from time to time.

If you were wondering what happened to them, I've been asked to remove the entries here regarding The Second City. I won't say why or by whom, because I've learned my lesson. We all do hard work there, from the entreprenurial masterminds to the performers to the nacho-slingers like myself; if someone wants that work protected, they can count me as an ally.

Alcohollywood: Origins

2010-07-17T11:02:00.002-05:00

Clint and I are planning an Internet video series about movie drinking games. It's to be called "Alcohollywood," and Clint gets full credit for the name. We've picked out an opening roster, one film for each letter of the alphabet (plus numeric), parsed out among every genre, and we plan to take commenters' suggestions. You can start now. I'm building a wheel for it, just like the one on Animaniacs.

Wheel of Morality
Turn, turn, turn
Tell us the lesson
That we should learn

Our oh-so-diverse opening roster includes:
1408 (Horror)
Air Force One (Action/Adventure)
Beauty and the Beast (Animated)
Citizen Kane (Drama)
Dumb and Dumber (Comedy)
Evita (Musical)
Fellini Satyricon (Foreign)
Ghostbusters AND Ghost (Comedy & Romance: DOUBLE FEATURE)
Hoosiers (Sports)
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (Action/Adventure)
Jakob the Liar (War)
Krull AND Kull: The Conqueror (Fantasy & Fantasy: DOUBLE FEATURE)
Love Story (Romance)
March of the Penguins (Documentary)
Nicholas & Alexandra (Historical)
O (Drama)
Platoon (War)
Quarantine (Horror)
Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (Historical)
Star Trek (Science Fiction)
The Third Man (Mystery/Suspense)
Unforgiven (Western)
Vertigo (Mystery/Suspense)
WALL-E (Animated)
Xanadu (Musical)
Yojimbo (Foreign)
Zardoz (Science Fiction)

If you know us, you can probably pick out which ones I nominated, and which ones he did. Then again, you might be surprised. At any rate, you'll have to watch to find out what the rules are. Rest assured that we are experts. Specifically, Clint is a movie expert; I am a drinking expert. Stay tuned.

Don't Feed the Reincarnations

2010-07-08T08:51:00.004-05:00

This entry is not about my cat. It is about a different cat. I met one on my way home, in an alley. It was starving. Short-haired, monochrome, with a little off-kilter box moustache. A white face, with what resembled a human head of black hair parted down the middle. Basically the cat looked like Hitler after a long night of drinking. It wasn't her fault.

I brought the thin thing in and gave her some of Moneypenny's cat food. Surprisingly, they only sparred a little. I say surprisingly 'cause Moneypenny hates cats. She doesn't know that she's a cat.

There are only a few species that can pass the sentience test. Rule of thumb: if you put a cat or dog, no matter how advanced in years, before a mirror, it'll be a while 'til they figure out it isn't an intruder, that is if they ever deduce it at all. Meanwhile a human child, no matter how young, will recognize its own reflection. I've heard that dolphins, apes, some parrots, and elephants can also pass the test. Where they found a mirror big enough to suit an elephant, I don't know.

Chap (that's what I named the cat that looked like Hitler) ate its food and mewed and then I opened up the door and let it disappear. I'll be charitable, sure, but I'm a one-cat man.

Go Us

2010-07-06T04:07:00.002-05:00

Another fun Fourth of July, come and gone. We watched the first half of one of my favorite "Go U.S.A.!" movies, a little gem called Air Force One. I don't think I'd seen it since it was first in theaters, and I was surprised at how certain parts of the movie carry much heavier connotations today. Particularly the opening scene where President Harrison Ford delivers a pivotal speech on the absolute necessity of America solving the rest of the world's problems, especially in regards to terrorism. I don't think I need to explain what I'm referring to, but it's important to note that this is the "good guy" talking. Suffice it to say that the movie is showing its age.

And of course, "GET OFF MY PLANE" is forever stuck with an unforeseen subtext in the post-9/11 era.

Around nine, the fireworks began in earnest. "We might be able to see some of the city fireworks from the deck," I suggested. Clint and I went outside, where our downstairs neighbors were connecting a ladder to the roof of our three-flat. So we climbed up and got the panorama. I just spun in slow circles taking in the display. The show was phenomenal, made even more so by the fact that it's apparently not legal to buy or sell fireworks in Illinois. Every single rocket I saw must have been bought in Indiana, or Michigan.

So, to break it down, in Chicago:
ILLEGAL: Fireworks
LEGAL: Handguns

ILLEGAL: Smoking indoors, or within fifteen feet of a door
LEGAL: Absinthe

ILLEGAL: Feeding a pigeon
LEGAL: Placing rows of spikes on windowsills and ledges to kill pigeons

No Adaptation Without Representation

2010-06-28T15:48:00.004-05:00

This one's a doozy.

About two years ago, I was in a Kirksville bar when a man I didn't recognize asked me if I was Jared Latore. I replied honestly, and he said, "I heard Matt Szewczyk is making a movie based off something you wrote."

"That's news to me," I told him.

I approached Szewczyk (who can now find this entry the next time he Googles himself) about the rumor. He admitted that he had written a screenplay inspired by a poem I wrote and shared in our Creative Writing class, and was planning to film it, and that he would have gotten away with it too if it weren't for those meddling kids. I let him know that I was definitely not okay with him using my story without my permission, because that is called stealing and stealing is wrong. He promised not to make the film and we resolved the issue as gentlemen.

Then, a few nights ago, I found out that Szewczyk, now in New York City, was about to complete filming that movie based on my poem that he told me he would never make. Did I find out about this because he told me this time? No, of course not. I found out because he was posting screenshots of the film on fucking Facebook.

I wasn't sure what to do. I had nothing to gain from the headache of getting a lawyer and trying to stop his film from happening, but at the same time, I couldn't just let him walk all over me and bully me out of my work like that. We exchanged the following e-mails, which I want to make as public as possible, but if you don't feel like reading them all, I'll summarize by saying that I said "I'm upset by this" and he said "It's not your story anymore. I made it better, you see," and I said "I'm still the author of the source material. It isn't legal for you to take it and if you make money off of it, I'll sue you for my share."

"Matt,
Are you seriously making Conquest, the movie based on the poem that I wrote and asked you not to make a movie out of? And--for the second time--without at any point feeling the need to tell me about it? Because that would be a very inconsiderate thing to do. It's something that would irritate me. You know that I own the rights to that story, right? It isn't your story. It doesn't belong to you. It's not yours for the taking.
Just Checking,
Jared Latore"

"Hi Jared -
The project I am directing is not based on your poem anymore then [sic.] one might say the [sic.] The Lion King is based on Hamlet. While your poem was an initial inspiration for my imagination, the project's story and visual design are creations of my own.

You were right, two years ago, when you said your poem was not ready to be taken to the screen. Since we last spoke, I re-wrote Conquest completely, creating a new screenplay with fleshed out characters who have motivations and flaws.

If you do ever have an opportunity to see the film, I'm sure you will find any resemblance to your work minute.
Best,
Matthew Szewczyk"

"Matt,
You need to know that under current U.S. copyright law, no existing intellectual property (unless, like Hamlet, it resides in the public domain) can be adapted into a new format without the consent of the original author, regardless of any and all artistic differences between the adaptation and the source property. A film like I, Robot, for example which bore only a "minute" resemblance to its source novel, was still legally required to purchase the rights to the source story from the Asimov estate. Aquiring the rights to the work that inspired yours--however distantly--is not just a courtesy; it is a legality.

Additionally, copyright law maintains that an original work, published or unpublished, is copyrighted from the moment of its completion, unless a pre-existing copyright nullifies your full ownership of that work. After the first time you tried to adapt my story without my permission, I took the extra precaution of applying for, and receiving, a formal government copyright on the piece. This means that it would be illegal for you to secure a copyright on your film without first noting me as the author of the source material.

Again, no matter how different your movie featuring a romantic encounter with Death is from my poem featuring a romantic encounter with Death, copyright law is not quantified by the dissimilarities between an adaptation and its source material. This is what makes it a copyright law and not a copyright guideline.

Fortunately for both of us, I do not feel that I have anything to gain personally by taking legal action to halt the production of your film. However, if the film ever receives distribution, or is screened in a venue that charges admission, I am prepared to sue you for my rightful share of its profits. Willing or no, I am your collaborator on this project.

The truth is, Matt, if you had only asked me beforehand, I would have given you my blessing, and even now, an apology for trying to appropriate my work, or elements of it--not once but twice--would go a very long way. But I will not be bullied, I will not sit quietly, and I will not have my protests ignored.
Sincerely,
Jared Latore"

You know, it's just the kind of thing that ruins your whole day. I don't know where people like that get their sense of entitlement, and I don't understand what his motivation is. You wouldn't go into the wine business to bottle other people's wine. If you're interested in making art, why wouldn't you want to make your own art? I think that maybe, like a lot of priviledged young white people, he proceeds with the assumption that everything is his, and is better for his having touched it. Your art is his art because he wants it and that makes it his. Fortunately, there are laws against such delusions. It's just such a hassle if you want them enforced.

The Third Time is a Charm

2010-06-15T03:10:00.002-05:00

A great deal has happened since my last entry. I have met so many strange, beautiful, and awful people in this vibrant city. From now on I must take better care to make note of my notable encounters, or they will be lost forever when my memory shuffles them out. I have crossed paths with the generous, the insane, the disgruntled, the broken, the guileful, the charming, the genuine. Oftentimes several of these traits are bundled claustrophobically in a single person.

I suppose there are two recent highlights that I should especially mention. The first is getting to see a few friends, including Dan and Jess, briefly, and Meredith, as she passed not once but twice through the city. She got me on a bicycle. I have ridden a bicycle once or twice in the past decade or so, and only then experimentally. As far as it being "like riding a bike," that adage is only half-true. The ability to balance returned instantly; the ability to manuever definitely did not. Once we found a clear path, my terror started to fade, and I enjoyed myself. I also recently got to see Katie, along with a few other of my friends and coworkers, at the staged reading of Custum Culur, which is what I want to mention next.

Last night the newest draft of Custum Culur received a staged reading at The Second City. It's true what they say about having connections. The script went over much better than I was expecting it to. Apparently the story made sense to everyone this time around, which is good, and the problems that were criticized in the previous draft seem to have been fixed, at least by all accounts. I respect and put a lot of stock into the opinions of everyone that was in attendance.

One of my coworkers, Shea, asked me today how it went, and said that he thought such an endeavor was "brave." I sort of agree with him. I feel that writing is a very vulnerable art form, much more so than acting. When you are acting, you are being judged, certainly, on the quality of your performance and your level of skill as an actor. Perhaps the audience is also judging your physical appearance, other superficial things. When you are the playwright, they are judging not only your skill, but also your ideas. The quality, and relevancy, of your thoughts and feelings. In order to share them you must either be willing to face humiliation for your art, or have an ego that's immune to it. I hope I'm the former, or at the very least a healthy mix.

Shakespeare Had an Easy Time of It

2010-05-25T01:53:00.003-05:00

I've discovered a significant difference between submitting scripts to US theaters and UK theatres. Aside from the spelling, I mean. The average response time for most American theaters is six months to one year, and it comes as a form letter with your name and the title of your play mad-libbed in. The average UK theater will get back to you in three months with detailed feedback and apologize for the delay. I know that the assessment of new works is a huge undertaking, but I don't believe that US theaters are two-to-four times busier than UK ones. I wonder if the interest in new works is higher in Europe or if they have a more efficient method of assessing them.

Other things on my mind right now:

I want to start getting into ice hockey again. Right now the Chicago Picasso is wearing a 2-D Blackhawks helmet. The Chicago Picasso is a huge sculpture on Clark and Washington that looks like a cross between a horse and a microscope. Being a Picasso, there's no way to be sure that what the helmet is sitting on is actually the figure's head.

I had a conversation with one of my managers about the feasibility of finding time for work and acting. He said to me, "Just do it, and then fucking figure it out. Too many people waste too much time being careful." I think that's true but I already risked so much and worked so hard just to get here that prudency seems like a necessary evil. On the other hand, what am I doing here?

Expenses

2010-05-04T14:19:00.004-05:00

The way the schedule was working out, I was able to spend time at home from 2:30 P.M. to 5:30 P.M., and 12:00 AM to 4:30 AM. Too small a window of opportunity for me to fall asleep in, and very little point in trying. After just a few days, I was zombified. I knew I needed to let one job go before I started weeping coffee.

Did I keep the job with higher pay, good benefits, and conventional hours, or did I keep the one that I actually enjoy doing?

You guessed right. I still work at The Second City.

Money is what you trade for things you need, to live, and want, to make your life enjoyable. If I enjoy my job, I don't need as much money. Just "living" money. That's my reasoning. I can't tell you if it's correct. I guess I just want to be able to not worry about money while also not spending literally every conscious moment working. I'm spoiled.

I Have No Mouth and I Must Smile Courteously

2010-04-30T00:24:00.004-05:00

Another two days of training, and another two mountains of discarded "practice food" later. Today at the train station I saw a man scavenging a garbage bin for food. As he was wrist-deep rooting through it, a woman came up and spit her gum into his trash. She walked away. He folded his arms on the rim of the bin, lowered his head into it, and could be heard weeping.

There is a dumpster full of sandwiches in our enclosed, surveillance-protected garage. The restaurant is on the ground floor of a financial district skyscraper; I find it hard to believe just how tight the security is. We don't have access to our own employee breakroom. The breakroom is a single-stall bathroom with a bunch of coathooks in it, shared by forty employees. No one ever knows where the key is, or was last. You can either spend your ten minute break looking for it, or just hold your bladder for eight hours.

Otherwise the job is fine. It pays well for something that's not rocket science. There's an electronic ordering kiosk across the room that has the same job as me. I can no longer say that a robot could do my job, I now have to say that one of my co-workers is a robot.

I'm still trying to work out a sleeping schedule with these two jobs. Right now between work and commuting it's an eighteen hour day. That leaves time for sleep and not much else, and I promised Mom before I left O'Fallon that I'd try to sleep sometimes.

Born to Do This

2010-04-28T01:58:00.007-05:00

First day of training at my day job. Essentially it's my nine to five from seven to three.

"We knew we picked the right guest service position for you from the start. We were worried because you seemed very quiet and downkey at first but then you hit the registers and it's like your true personality came out and we were like, wow. So we're glad that we've already found the place where you can really shine." I really hope they're wrong.

The store is very corporate (apparently they're big on the West coast and just now expanding) and very much addicted to modernity. They have a Facebook and a Twitter of course, plus a mobile phone application: I send out a "cookie alert" to every registered fancy-phone-haver the minute we pull hot new cookies out of the oven. Come running.

I had to do a fingerprint scan to access the register. The scan system doesn't make the register any harder to open with, say, a crowbar. And it's exactly as reliable as, say, a key. But you know what year this is.

And anyway it seems they have money to burn. The kitchen made scores of items today, just for practice, meanwhile we had lunch delivered from another store location. We ended up with every trashcan brimming over with baked goods and sandwiches, made from scratch, from ingredients that weren't exactly cheap. Mind you, this is the city; I passed three beggars on the single block I walked from the bus stop to work. And another with no legs as I walked to the bank. But I always feel guilty about wasted food. My grandfather taught me that. He lived through the Great Depression; I lived in his house for a year when I was nine. To this day it unnerves me to see the destruction of edible things. I took a lonely croissant home with me, ate it for dinner. It was all that would fit in my pocket.

So I'm grateful, and proud, to have a job--two jobs--especially in times like these. My next stops are still ambitious and completely unrelated, but this will tide me over.

2010-04-22T12:52:00.004-05:00

Ideas for Hopeless Specialized Stores:

"Hot Tropic" Clothing and accessories that evoke an angst-ridden teenage wasteland in the heart of an island paradise. The only outlet on Earth featuring all-black Hawaiian shirts and coconuts sculpted into your favorite Nightmare Before Christmas characters and scenes. It's Jimmy Buffett meets Jimmy Eat World.

"Camino Royale" A themed hotel/casino where the hosts and waitstaff enact the roles of all the literary giants that appear in Tennessee Williams' Camino Real, plus James Bond, bringing you the authentic glitz, glamour, and hint of danger that accompanies a dream of alienation and inevitable obsolescence. Bond girl "escorts" are available, specially trained to make you feel worse about the vacuum of meaningful relationships in your life as you spiral into irreversible decay. Bilingual.

"Thyme After Time" A grocery store for the modern economy! Specializing in foods that are slightly past their expiration dates, but are "probably still good. I mean, it hasn't been opened yet. Those dates are designed to give you a little leeway, I think. It's still sealed and everything. I really bet it's okay." Free smell-checks available upon request. Fresh items include yogurt, which used to be milk, and cottage cheese, which used to be yogurt.

"F-Zero-G" An arcade where you can play the classic Super Nintendo hit F-Zero in free-floating sensory deprivation tanks. Your suspension in the water-filled tank simulates a perfect zero-gravity environment while shutting out all outside sensory stimuli, giving you a completely immersive F-Zero experience. One and two-player modes available. No other games available.

"La Desierto" Actual authentic Mexican cuisine, featuring rice, beans, and tortillas. You can't afford meat. Fruits and vegetables are scarce due to the arid climate. Sanitation is poor. BYOF (Bring Your Own Food).

The Manual Manual

2010-04-21T16:18:00.007-05:00

I went through orientation for my new day job. Four hours of filling out forms and listening to lectures on company policy and food safety. Free coffee though, and a fantastic danish.

The night job is still going fine. Semifamous faces have been dropping in from time to time. In the past month, I've narrowly missed meeting Tina Fey, Jennifer Hudson, Harold Ramis, and Fred Willard.

I'm trying not to get wrapped up in work. A routine is a debilitating thing. I have been to a few auditions. I come prepared and well-rehearsed, but end up floundering. The flesh isn't weak, but the spirit isn't willing. I'm trying to find a doctor here. I get health insurance in three months but I don't want to let three months' of opportunities slip by. I'm embarrassed enough as it is. So I say I'm going to start calling around, but then I say I need a cigarette to work up the courage, and then I say I should eat something first, shouldn't try to do this on an empty stomach, then I say maybe a drink would make it easier, and by that time I've lost sight of the fact that it's just a fucking phone call. And then it's either too late in the day, or I leave a voicemail that is never responded to, or I get lost in a robotic directory system.

Get over it, is what I tell myself. Do you want this or don't you? If this were for someone else's benefit, if I was searching for help for a friend, it would be done by now. But it's my problem, and I wonder if there is some part of me that is avoiding help because I am afraid of what I'll have to do once I am finally equipped to do it. Or there may be some other reason. There may be ten other reasons. I don't know. I don't know why it's hard for me to do things that are easy, when the hard things don't faze me at all. From now on I must try harder to be of use to myself. I must tackle perfectly surmountable problems. I believe that I can overcome this on my own and I want to prove that to anyone who knows what I'm talking about.

This Isn't Turning into One of Those Cat Blogs, I Promise

2010-04-18T04:38:00.003-05:00

I got my cat back! I had the day off; Clint and I drove to O'Fallon in his car, for no other purpose. She is on my lap now, reaching out with one paw for the nice shiny coins on my makeshift desk. She's been purring a lot.

She used to be extremely trepidatious whenever introduced to new surroundings, crouching low to the ground and methodically stalking the perimeters of each new room. She's moved so many times now that it doesn't matter anymore. She made herself at home, heading immediately to my old familiar blanket, the one with the lions and the tigers on it. "Next stop, living room. There's a couch that doesn't have my hairs all over it yet."

I suspect she's just happy to be rid of my parents' dog. She has resumed her game of constantly wanting either in or out of my room, a thing she never did there. Isaac Newton invented the pet door because his cat did the exact same thing while he was busy trying to develop things like calculus and laws of motion. I intend to invent a pet teleporter so that I won't have to cajole my friends into making twelve hour round trips anymore.

Bookwyrms

2010-04-15T04:55:00.005-05:00

I don't get downtown much. I usually breeze by it on the el-train on my way to Old Town, where I work. There's a lot to do there but most of it's expensive. I'm usually either at home, writing and researching (and/or taking advantage of Clint's Netflix subscription), or at work. I've got nice views of the city from my deck and from Second City's three-story parking garage, where I take smoke breaks. It seems like I'm always looking at the loop, and never in it.

Not today though. Or, shit, yesterday, it's five a.m., isn't it? Today I made a special trip to the Chicago Public Library. Specifically, the branch on 400 State Street, the Harold Washington Library Center. It is magnificent. Like a lot of Chicago architecture, it's a fusion of contrasting styles, equal parts modern opulence and rustic old-world class. Big red building, green roof, can't miss it. Especially since it's the largest public library on Earth. That's not exaggeration, that's a Guinness Record. I'm talking a designated city block and nine stories of stories. The bookworms there are the size of those sand-snakes from Dune.

In terms of personal satisfaction, I consider my new CPL library card to be the best investment I've made since my cat, with the cat in first, followed by the card, and my bed coming in at a distant third. And I'm going to see my cat again tomorrow.

I Never Liked the Thing

2010-04-09T17:02:00.002-05:00

I thought that the car getting destroyed would put an end to my car troubles. It's sitting in an autobody shop in Springfield. They're calling it a "total loss." They use the phrase repeatedly.

They're charging me forty dollars for each day it sits there. There's some confusion with my insurance company. The body shop wants me to sign the title over to them so they can... I don't know what they'll do with it. Sell it for scrap, I suppose. I hope they don't need me to be in Springfield to sign over the title. Because it would be pretty difficult to get to Springfield without a car. And I can't spare the time anyway. On the other hand, I rack up forty dollars for each day that title takes to travel by mail. Also, I don't have an outgoing mailbox.

They're really pissed off at me for not calling them back but I don't know what to tell them. This is one of those insurmountable practical matters that would probably be very simple if I could ever be made to understand it. Which is just the sort of thing that makes me want to crawl into bed and wait for tomorrow. I sometimes do. But that is a childish antic and no one has patience for those anymore. Not from me. And it just makes me feel worse about myself. If I was able to overcome a phobia of checking e-mails, then I can figure a way out of this. In the meantime, as blog as my witness, I swear that I will never own a car again.

On Tour

2010-04-08T13:16:00.007-05:00

My co-workers asked me how I was settling in. "The place is fine," I told them, "I walked home last Saturday night and..."

"You walked?" "Isn't he ridiculous?" "You're not allowed to do that anymore." "Now that I know you, I want to keep you in one piece..."

I said, "Let me just tell you what happened. Let me tell you what happened to me when I was walking home to East Garfield Park."

The room fell silent.

"As I was walking home from here to East Garfield Park...around three in the morning...dark...I ran into a man who politely asked me if I would give him exactly thirty-five cents. I told him no and I walked away."

People who know this area and people who have lived in this area have told me that the summertime is when it gets "terrible." I have heard the people here described as "animals," and as "super-zombies." From all that I can ascertain they're human beings. I am sick of hearing horrifying cautionary tales about my neighborhood.

My friends are not racists. Garfield is sketchy. But people mind their own business if you stick to yours, and nothing good can come of paranoia. What's strange to me is that a neighborhood of mostly blacks is considered unsafe while people talk about moving to Boys' Town because it's considered extra-safe. As though blacks will commit violent crimes but gays somehow can't.

I visited Boys' Town on Monday. One of my friends was celebrating her birthday at a bar there. I had never been to a gay bar before. It smelled nice and everything was clean: not my kind of place.

In Boys' Town they have bright Roy G. Biv phalluses on all the streetcorners. Apparently the city paid for them. I'm all for celebrating your heritage, but I think maybe some of that money could have been used to clean up the broken glass that lines the sidewalks in East Garfield Park.

Then again I should probably mention that the other day I saw a Chicago Transit Authority worker take the garbage out of a recycling bin and put it into the nearest trash can.

Car Season

2010-04-06T14:07:00.002-05:00

I've been Internetless for a little while. There are some things I've been waiting to tell you. They both happened on April 1st, but neither are fools' jokes.

I left for O'Fallon not long after work, around midnight. I wouldn't have been able to sleep anyway. Excitement.

I like driving the highways at night. It's just me and a few trucks now and then. Oh, and deer.

I hit a deer on the highway going sixty-five miles per hour. They apparated out of nothing but fresh country air, by the sheer will to exist and spread mayhem. I saw the silhouettes, I hit the brakes, there was an airbag in my face before I finished cursing. So the airbags work. That's good to know.

I was okay. My car is not okay. The deer is dead. Motherfucker deserved it. I don't know what amount of damage constitutes "totalled" but I know my insurance won't cover this mess. I was planning on selling that car. Now it would cost more to repair the car than I could sell it for in good condition. I say good riddance anyway. I have had too many car accidents in my life. I hate driving and I hate deer and all other animals except my cat and I hate the whole rural Midwest.

I had the car towed and Clint picked me up early on his way to Chicago. I waited in a gas station/Quizno's where I lifted up my shirt to check for bruises and watched the sun rise. Did you know Quizno's serves breakfast now? They do.

It's a good thing I had packed everything into my trunk and moved into Garfield beforehand. The purpose of this trip was to reclaim my cat. Now I don't know how I'll get my cat. I miss my cat.

Later that same day I got a call. I got that job I was telling you about. The day job. It's a coffee place that's opening up in a skyscraper downtown. I had to pass a security check just to get to the interview.

It's called Specialty's, and they just worked out some manner of merger with Intelligencia, which is supposed to be extremely fancy. I think Specialty's is in charge of the baked goods and Intelligencia does the coffee. I will have to try this coffee. They gave me a cookie at the interview and it was exceptional even by cookie standards. As you know the bar for deliciousness in cookies is quite high.

It's weekdays only, so it will never interfere with my night job at Second City. It pays a little better than Second City, plus I get insurance and such things. And I won't have to worry now about money when I ask off time from working at the theater to do theatre. I start in late April.

Kitty Kevlar

2010-03-31T10:37:00.005-05:00

In a few hours I move into my new apartment in East Garfield Park. Then I go to work and then I squeeze in eleven hours of driving to pick up my cat. Then I think I'll have a drink.

The only thing that I don't like about my job is that on Fridays and Saturdays they do two evening performances, which means I don't get off work until two in the morning. That's not a problem in itself but by that point the trains and buses I need are shut down. So I have to walk, take a cab, or pay for a parking garage, and if I take a cab or use a parking garage I lose all the money I made that evening. So I walk, don't I?

My coworkers said I was crazy. Danielle, a sweet girl, she told me she would force me to share a cab with her this Friday. I told her that by Friday I wouldn't be living anywhere near her anymore. Most of the Chicagoans I've spoken to have never even heard of Garfield Park. It's West side. According to my friends it is a bad part of town. But according to Jim Croce it is not the baddest part of town. The block I live on is newly renovated, well-lit, near a busy intersection, lots of locks and so forth. I'm not worried about my home, just getting to it.

Joe said, eyes wide, "You walk an hour and a half?"

"Yeah. I like walking. I'm young, I can do it."

"Are you too young for bullets?"

I think they are overreacting. But this is a city. There is crime. I'm not naive. But I am also not afraid of death. Injury would actually irritate me more.

I guess if it looks like it's really bad, I'll see if I can have Fridays and Saturdays off. That would take me down from working seven days to five days, which would definitely put me in need of a second job.

Regardless I am glad to be finally setting up my actual place. This has been an adventure already.

Chapter IV

2010-03-30T11:46:00.003-05:00

You may notice that this website looks a little different. I may make more changes soon.

We are at Chapter IV now. The title is not an attempt to cash in on my suspicion that our sixteenth president will soon become a phenomenon to rival the zombie zeitgeist of the 2000's; it is so-called because I now live in the "Land of Lincoln." I will let you know what the secret is as soon as I uncover it. Until then I can tell you that the search is exactly how it looks in the picture.

It started as irreverence, but now I think I will make a new chapter whenever I feel that I have entered a new stage of my life, such as now. It's not The Seven Ages of Man but it's a nice way to look at things and it kind of makes me feel like I'm the protagonist/author of The Neverending Story. For better or worse it will someday be a completed story of my life, probably entitled Jared Latore and the Citadel of Mild Disappointments, or somesuch.

2010-03-26T10:57:00.005-05:00

I'm going to be participating in a staged reading on Monday. I didn't audition for it or anything; what happened was I met a guy at Beckett's pub. He's one of Kevin's friends, and he's the literary manager for a theatre company called Mind the Gap, which is dedicated to bridging the gap between amateur and professional theatre, and not to be confused with a New York City theatre company called Mind the Gap, which is dedicated to producing British works in America. Recently Kevin told me they were looking for actors for this reading, and I told him I'd ask off work. One of those "it's who you know" situations, I guess.

The play is called Memory Fragments, it's a new work by someone named Sam Wallin. It's science-fiction, which is very cool because that's a genre you don't often see onstage. And you know I'm nuts about science-fiction in any case. I love the stuff.

So, I'm glad to be doing some acting (or voice acting, if your parameters are very strict), especially so soon after arriving in the city. In less than ten days after setting foot in Chicago, I've found a good job (and possibly a second, fingers crossed), a nice girl, and an acting role. What's incredible to me is that I wasn't really looking for any of these things yet. They just sort of fell into my lap. I was going to hold off on these searches and begin them in earnest once I moved into my actual apartment, but Chicago is impatient. I like Chicago's style.

I also like their Chicago-style hot dogs. And I've never liked hot dogs, but these are brilliant.

It Might As Well Be Spring

2010-03-22T15:03:00.003-05:00

I don't want to jinx it, but it looks like the John McClane of winters is finally over. Normally, winter is my favorite season. Normally I don't like spring--I never feel up to it. I see the frenzy and the charm of renewal and it unsettles me. I think these feelings put me in a minority, but I know I'm not entirely alone, because there are songs like "Spring is Here (I Hear)" and "Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most." It is good that I can have community in music.

But I did say normally. This year is different. I feel ready for rejuvenation. In fact I am impatient for it. I cannot wait until I move into my own place. I cannot wait to see a doctor. There is so much I want to get done here. I have a long and arduous process of building connections ahead of me. When can I start?

Beer to Liquor

2010-03-20T13:37:00.004-05:00

Didn't really do a lot on my birthday. I got to sleep in, I went for a walk. There was a board game night. I had a great time for the first time in a long time with some friends I hadn't seen in just as long. I had a few beers and a few glasses of wine. As the saying goes, "Beer to wine...should be fine." When that was gone I drank a little vodka. As the saying goes, "Beer to wine to liquor...what the fuck are you thinking."

When I woke up this morning it was snowing. Today is the first day of spring. I am beginning to understand the meaning of the term "Chicago winter."

If I Leave Here Tomorrow

2010-03-16T02:54:00.004-05:00

Not bad for a last day in O'Fallon. I worked my last shift at the restaurant. In addition to what I earned I was given a hundred bucks, a margarita, and a hug.

When I got back my mother said, "I guess I'll give you your birthday present a little early."

"You didn't have to get me anything."

"I didn't," she said. "I was just going to give you some money. I thought you'd like that."

"I would like that."

As she wrote out a check she asked, "You know the trick...the trick about having two wallets?"

"Like a decoy wallet."

"Yeah," she said, "in case you get...uh...in case..."

"In case I get mugged."

"Yes, mugged, thank you." She said she'd forgotten the word but I suspect she couldn't bring herself to say it. She handed me the check and gave me a pat on the shoulder. "And always lock your car."

She's worried about me. Even moreso than she lets on. I can't help that.

I was only going to bring some clothes and a toothbrush to last me until April 1st. But as I was packing it occurred to me that everything I owned would fit in the trunk of the car. Not the trunk and piled up in the backseats spilling over into the passenger seat--just the trunk. So I said what the hell and I loaded up everything except the cat. It would be rude to impose an extra guest on my friends. My parents said they didn't mind. I'll come back for you in April, Moneypenny.

I'm still not going to use anything except the toothbrush. But I'll like having it all with me just the same. Normally it would be risky to have everything in the car, even if I lock it like mom told me to, but I reiterate, it's in the trunk. The car looks empty. And none of it is really valuable anyway. Irreplaceable, some of it, but not worth much cash.

In my experience important things always happen all of a sudden, and usually at an inconvenient time. Personally I wouldn't have it any other way. I like surprises, good and bad. How dull would life be if I ever knew what I was going to be doing in a month?

And this way, by the way, by the skin of my teeth, I have managed not to turn twenty-four in O'Fallon.

I would at this point like to mention that I have never been on a roadtrip without hearing "Free Bird" on the radio at least twice.

I Never Want to Make This List Again

2010-03-12T04:18:00.003-06:00

I am compiling a final and definitive list of theatre companies that afford or can be begged for production opportunities. At least as final and definitive as I can manage. I am going into some detail. Only what detail is necessary. The list is alphabetical. I have been working on it for the past seven hours. I am at "C."

2010-03-10T01:48:00.005-06:00

I won about seventeen bucks betting on the Academy Awards with some people at work. I would've made tons more, but most everyone said they weren't interested in the pool because they didn't know anything about the movies, and I could only get two girls to bet with me. So don't talk to me about who got robbed at the Oscars. I got robbed.

Except for I did come out on top. Basically I picked correctly in every category except Best Actress. I knew they were saying that Bullock was going to win, and those two girls knew to pick her, but I couldn't endorse it and I'm not looking forward to hearing the phrase "Academy Award-winner Sandra Bullock" in every romantic comedy trailer for the forseeable future.

I must admit however that her acceptance speech was the best part of the show and I've always thought she seemed like a cool person in general. She has personally been very helpful to me in the past. I once tricked a girl into seeing 28 Days Later with me but telling her that it was a sequel to the Sandra Bullock comedy 28 Days.

Sometimes they have movies on the TV at work, and I got to see Miss Congeniality that way. I absolutely couldn't stand it. Maybe I'm too old now or too high-brow or whatever but it's hard for me to get interested in a completely superficial movie like that.

Between the work TV and some full movies that they have on YouTube and a couple that I watched on demand with my brother over Xmas break, there are quite a few movies I watched for the first time in the past six months that I still remember seeing.

The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T
Dr. Seuss wrote the screenplay for this movie, which was then rewritten by some Hollywood guy, and Seuss ultimately disowned the final product and called it terrible. He's more or less correct. The bulk of the story is an extended dream sequence where the kid from Lassie is being chased through a variety of Seussian landscapes, occasionally stopping for a musical number or to learn something about the importance of the American family unit. It's easy to tell which parts are Seuss's and which were "improvements." His stamp is unmistakable, but despite a number of very creative moments, it doesn't translate to film as well as it should. On the whole, the movie is still better than Ron Howard's Grinch or Whoever-the-Fuck directed Mike Meyers in The Cat in the Hat, and if I had the funds I would remake this film, because it deserves to be good.

The Vampires' Midnight Orgy
This is not a porn. In fact a better title would have been The Vampire's Extremely Brief Scene of Midnight Implied Sex Between Two Consenting Adults. It's an Italian B-Horror movie from the 1970's. It is very, very much from the 1970's. I don't know how much was lost in translation, but despite the constant, gruelling exposition it's never exactly clear what's going on, or even if vampires are involved. They seem more like zombies, actually.

Overboard
I have a weakness for fish-out-of-water comedies, and this one is pretty entertaining. Goldie Hawn plays an extremely wealthy woman with no sense of human decency who pisses off hick-from-the-sticks Kurt Russell. She gets amnesia, and Kurt Russell takes her in, pretending to be her husband. He then basically tortures her with an unrelenting stream of impossible housework and emotional abuse until she succumbs to Stockholm Syndrome and falls in love with him. The premise, and all that it implies, makes this movie much more interesting than it was probably intended to be.

Flirting With Forty: A Lifetime Original Movie
This one was definitely at work. Lifetime was running a movie marathon on Valentine's Day, and Theresa (that's the owner), she loves the things. In this one Heather Locklear plays a woman who is almost forty years old. She meets a handsome young man in Hawaii, and then keeps flying back to Hawaii to have sex with him. Her friends, her employers, and her ex-husband accuse her of neglecting her work and her children to fly off and embrace her nubile twenty-something studmuffin in order to feel young again, mostly because that is exactly what she is doing. But of course they just don't understand. The man refuses to leave Hawaii and move in with her because he likes surfing.

See Jane Date: A Lifetime Original Movie
Jane spends the movie not dating. And explaining to everyone within earshot that she will not be dating because she doesn't need a man to be happy. In the last five minutes of the movie, she changes her mind, and goes on a date with a man that she suddenly needs, and will presumably go on to happily marry him.

Mega Shark Vs. Giant Octopus: A SyFy Original Movie
My turn. Mega Shark bites the Golden Gate Bridge in half. The Octopus is equally formidable. The Army is trying to... do something about it, I guess, with the help of a few sexy scientists who are as bad at science as they are at acting. Five out of five stars.

The Wrestler
Shot in the hyper-realist documentary style that has become popular, and the aesthetic is well-suited to this story. Mickey Rourke is exactly as good as everyone says he is in his role as a washed-up professional wrestler hopelessly clinging to a persona that no longer exists. Marissa Tomei turns in an equally brilliant performance as a noncommital stripper who is the closest thing he has to a friend. Director Aronofsky's attention to detail wrings a powerful story out of a small world.

Inkheart
For a movie that should have been about the power of creativity, the characters possess very little of it. Brendan Fraser (and a few others) have the ability to bring books to life by reading them aloud. Andy Serkis is an escaped book character who has taken up residence in our world, because he says he loves it here, and his ultimate goal is to destroy our world, because he...is contradictory, I guess. Fraser attempts to stop him in every way except by using the power that is his only exemplary resource and defining character trait. When literary characters and objects are summoned, they are all from works that reside in the public domain, for painfully obvious reasons. The story contains so many plot holes that its commentary on the power of great writing seems less like a testament and more like a conceit. Speaking of plot holes...

Gospel of Deceit: A Lifetime Original Movie
This has to stop. The plot of Gospel of Deceit contains more twists than a four-dimensional pretzel. The developments become increasingly implausible until, finally, the woman whose husband, the local minister, hired the man she was having an affair with--who either was or was not the long-lost son/brother she gave birth to after being raped by her father, and whose child she either is or is not pregnant with--to poison her, shows up in the middle of his sermon to confront him about the proceedings and also his affair, and he pulls a gun on her in front of the entire congregation and a live television audience. Everyone except the protagonist goes to jail. In summary, the film is so concerned with delivering a major plot twist before the next commercial that it loses all coherence. These...these movies are sort of beyond criticism.

The Secret of NIMH
No, I hadn't seen this before. I didn't make it all the way through and I never found out what the Secret was. I think it was about an advanced civilization of mice that had developed clothing, permanent shelter, and medicine. Dereck Jacobi is some kind of wizard that they listen to because he has a wise-sounding voice. They have to escape scary things like cats and farmers. The protagonist mommy mouse annoyed the piss out of me. I probably need to go back and watch The Rescuers to make sure I haven't grown to inexplicably hate all mouse cartoons. That would be a shame.

Stream of Conscious List

2010-03-06T04:53:00.005-06:00

--There are a lot of things that need doing before the move on April 1st. I won't bore you with my to-do lists. I have been making a lot of lists lately. I'm not a very organized person but I love making lists. My lists have lists. I have lists of favorite idioms. I always lose my lists.

--I have loads of lists regarding playwriting submissions. I'm excited to have time to write again. The lists keep getting longer. I ordered The Dramatists Sourcebook with a Barnes & Noble giftcard I was given for Xmas. It cost me $25.01. Which meant I had to charge $0.01 to my debit card. The Sourcebook was worth every penny. It seems very useful in general but it's worth mentioning that neither of the theaters that produced my play are in the book.

--I now have a list of hundreds of suitable opportunities. Many of them are in Chicago. I've been combing directories like the Chicago Theatre Database and, yes, Wikipedia for links to the individual websites of Chicago theater companies. I've compiled a list of Theatre-related job opportunities and submission and audition opportunities in the city. It took a while but I'm very serious about this stuff, you know.

--Everything else I have to do is pretty practical, actually. I'm lucky that I seem to have a normal amount of energy this week. No idea where it's coming from. Maybe I'm getting enough sleep.

--I've been considering putting in my two weeks' notice a little early, to give myself more time to get things together, but, I need the money. Money I can't spend to see The Wolfman (Danny Elfman did the score), Shutter Island, The Ghost Writer, and Alice in Wonderland, although I have some reservations about that last one. My only problem with it, because of course I haven't seen it yet, as that they're calling it Alice in Wonderland but they're not telling the story that belongs to that title. It's Tim Burton's fanfiction sequel. Why not call it Return to Wonderland or somesuch? Especially since Disney has already made a movie called Alice in Wonderland? Are they trying to fool me? I guess it doesn't really matter. I keep hearing people refer to it as "Johnny Depp's New Movie." Not Alice in Wonderland, endlessly adapted literary treasure, not Alice in Wonderland, renowned visual stylist Tim Burton's extension of the same, just "Johnny Depp's New Movie." As though it didn't matter what it was exactly. That bothers me for some reason.

--Danny Elfman did the score for Alice in Wonderland also.

--I'll also admit that I want to see Extraordinary Measures (though I doubt it's still in theaters). Judging from the posters, the premise appears to be this: "Harrison Ford and Brendan Fraser are two men who wear suits--one of them wears a tie...one doesn't." And the trailer promises only that they will be walking down hallways together. But it is "Harrison Ford's New Movie."

--I guess that was an aside that just went on too long. I'm not very good at organizing these things.

Snow Job

2010-02-21T02:01:00.002-06:00

They have the Olympics on at work sometimes, and it has come to my attention that my dream girl is probably a professional snowboarder or skiier. Someone who does something really cool that I have absolutely zero interest in doing. I would provide the same quality for her, and we would remain exotic to each other forever because we have nothing in common. Plus, have you seen the American snowboarding team? They're adorable.

I would also consider falling for a NASA scientist. It's the same principle. And I have learned from the movies that brilliant astrophysicists are invariably bombshells, but they wear glasses so that you can tell that they're smart. The only problem would be that no matter what I did or tried to do, she could legitimately belittle it by saying "Whatever--It's not rocket science."

Oh man what if she was both? Is that too high a standard?

"If They're Going to Die then They'd Better Do It and Decrease the Surplus Population"

2010-02-20T02:21:00.006-06:00

I landed an apartment, but I can't keep the job. Back and forth, back and forth.

Figuratively, and literally. Six hours is a helluva commute, and it's been wearing on my body, and my wallet.

I wouldn't have to start working officially until April, when I move. That's not the problem.

The job is, I'm a canvasser for Save the Children, going door-to-door and asking you for money. The other job was as a waiter for The Chicago Club, which is a League of Extraordinary Gentleman-style secret society where millionaires, corporate bigwigs and politicians get together to influence each other. I got called back for a second interview, but through an unfortunate and unintentional extended game of phone-tag, I managed to convince them that I am incapable of using a modern telephone, a quality which they found undesirable.

I walked around the Loop, killing time until my orientation and assessment period. There I saw a dead man and a Punch-and-Judy puppet show on wheels, complete with spooky circus saxophone. Not at the exact same time.

They had told me to familiarize myself with their "rap sheet," which is the script of things I am supposed to say. I discovered too late that by "familiarize" they meant "memorize verbatim." It's interesting, the way it begins: "Hi. How are you? Great. My name is _____ and..." It's to persuade the clients that I am a human being with an identity, and not an organizational avatar. It doesn't fool anyone.

Peepholes and venetian blinds exist to keep people like me away. Solicitors, and thieves. I believe that high-pressure sales tactics are a form of robbery. In this case, however, I romanticized that I was robbing from the rich to give to the poor. But of course, you don't actually canvass the rich. They didn't become rich by giving their money away to impoverished children. Save the Children knows that. They send you to lower-middle-class income neighborhoods, because statistically they tend to give the most. You're robbing from the moderately disadvantaged to give to the destitute.

If you've ever wondered why door-to-door solicitors refuse to take no for an answer, it's because we're not allowed to. We are literally not allowed to leave your doorstep until you either sign up for a monthly donation or slam the door in our faces. It doesn't matter how many times you refuse; we have to keep our mouths running. This bothers me because in all things I habitually respect a person's right to say no. No means no and it kills me to have to rape their time, and mine, droning on repeatedly in an effort to wear them down. They hate me for it and I hate myself for it. I hate canvassers. The fact that I canvass now hasn't changed that.

I have had many jobs that could be considered unpleasant, and I endured my share of threats and grievances working as a kiddie lifeguard in the bad part of Kirksville, but never in my life had I experienced so much hatred and open hostility from total strangers in a single evening. As soon as people see the clipboard, they go into defense mode. They hate me unconditionally before I even open my mouth. And after I open my mouth, they go into attack mode. You'd think I was working for Murder the Children.

The ability to withstand this abuse for a noble cause would be heroism. But I am not a hero. And frankly I don't cotton to the use of unscrupulous tactics for the sake of good, because I think that's self-defeating. Many of the people I talked to were as poor as I am. It is never okay to exploit people, not even for your righteous, righteous cause.

But even that wasn't the problem.

During my training period, I finally hit the bottom of the valley. Exacerbated by the fact that I was exhausted from the trip, and hungry, and too cold to feel any part of my physical body, and I had to pee (there is nowhere to pee in the ciy) I was unable to make eye-contact, or speak above a mumble, or even remember my lines. I've been here before.

I didn't make a dime for them. I'm required to raise one hundred and twenty dollars a day, minimum, or they will fire my ass.

They are going to fire my ass. Sooner rather than later. And even if they don't, the aggravation isn't worth eight dollars an hour (plus commission if quota is exceeded [that's a joke]). Please God, let me be a waiter again, and while you're at it, please find someone to save the precious children, or better yet, save them yourself.

Better Off

2010-02-14T01:57:00.002-06:00

Maybe this is folly, but I got a job in Chicago, possibly two. As of last Thursday. I don't want to say too much about them because I don't want to jinx anything.

I have to admit, I did a little bragging to my parents. I made a point of telling them that I was bragging. I wasn't actually inordinately proud of myself--it's just a job--but it hurt me to know that they didn't believe I would ever secure even menial employment in a city, and it felt good to prove them wrong, in a matter of days, without even trying all that hard.

The job shouldn't start until March 1st. Which gives me a little time to figure out such things as a "living situation." Thanks to everyone who has written to me in various corners of the Internet with advice. It has all been taken into consideration.

I'm taking a trip up there in a few days, for even more interviews, which means--yes that's right--Mardi Gras in Chicago.

This is going to work.

Coming Up Short

2010-02-09T03:37:00.006-06:00

It's February now. Almost the middle of it. I can't tell if it's actually still snowing outside or if the wind is only blowing snow around.

I had plans to move to Chicago on the first of March with two friends, but these plans have fallen through, as my plans have a habit of doing. I hope this setback will be as temporary as possible.

What happened, if you want to know, was the landlords were nervous because we didn't have jobs in the city. They wanted us to get cosigners. I couldn't get a cosigner because they were nervous that we didn't have jobs in the city. I didn't want to get a cosigner in the first place. My apartment should be my responsibility and I felt terrible about asking. And all the while the leasing agent was breathing down my neck, calling every day and making me feel like an asshole for not being able to immediately give him all the forms and cosigners forms and information and verification and miscellany that he needed so that he could close his fucking deal. How the situation escalated into a nightmare for all parties before it even began, I'll never understand, but that leasing agent sounded crushed when I called it off, and I hope he cried himself to sleep on his five hundred dollar pillow.

I got to save myself the "cosigner fee" and I got the rest of my money back except for the "credit check fees." I should have asked how those credit checks went. I've never taken out a loan. I don't own a credit card. I don't know what I would buy with one.

It's frustrating because I felt like I did everything right. I've been working hard to save up money for six months. I have enough to move and live comfortably until I can secure any menial bill-paying job that I can. It's frustrating to me that that isn't enough.

It's frustrating for another reason. If a career in theatre is already considered completely unrealistic, how much more unrealistic must it be if a career in waiting tables is now believed to be completely unrealistic? There are one hundred and thirteen thousand, five hundred and seventeen restaurants in Chicago. I am a waiter with three years' experience. Those used to be what you would call good odds.

But mostly it's frustrating because I pride myself on my cleverness and very frequently these little things will pop up to remind me how unbearably stupid I actually am when it comes down to the fundamentals of living a life. Things I haven't been able to read about because I'm just supposed to know them. They asked me for a recent paystub. You know what? I'd been throwing them away. Nobody'd ever asked for them before. I didn't think they had any use. That makes me sound stupid, doesn't it? And that's just Exhibit A.

So the plan now is to try to find a job in the city, and then try to find an affordable apartment again. You've probably heard it said that you can't find a place in the city unless you've got a job in the city, and you can't find a job in the city unless you're living in the city. This is true. I expect this plan to fall through as well, and to take a long time in doing so. I would like to know at what point it is appropriate to stop making plans and start taking desperate measures.

And you've probably decided this for yourself already, but the next time I say I'm moving somewhere, take it with a grain of salt. It's just the optimism talking.

Inkjustice

2010-01-29T03:51:00.005-06:00

My printer cost me thirty bucks. A cartridge of ink costs fifteen. Do you see how that's weird?

Why does the printer, which is a relatively complex piece of machinery, cost only twice as much as a product that has been around for thousands and thousands of years? We had ink (well, paint actually, but it's the same concept) before we had the wheel. We had ink before we had paper. It can't be that complicated to make. It's dye, and water. So it can't cost them much to produce it, either. Is there petroleum in it? Is that what they use? Why would they do that?

And why are there different kinds of ink? I can understand that a company wants to make printers that only work with their ink cartridges. But why make printers that are only compatible with one specific type of their ink cartridges? Why not make one type of ink that works with all of their printers?

I just want to know. Nothing about this conforms to my understanding of economics and it's ruining my day. It almost seems like they're just blatantly ripping us off, doesn't it? Yes, it seems a whole lot like that.

For thirty bucks, I can get two ink cartridges, or five thousand sheets of paper.

Which I did.

I Sometimes Wonder Which Mascot Would Win in a Battle Royale

2010-01-26T04:00:00.005-06:00

I'm not sure what constitutes a 'sports bar.' In our restaurant, we have seven HD televisions that play nothing but ESPN, and pennants with the logos of various St. Louis and Chicago teams on the walls, but the management insists we're "not really a sports bar." Which I suppose is why we were so dead on the night of the championship game. So I sat down and watched it, mostly.

Maybe you don't understand. That's something I haven't done in a long time. My coworkers, they seem surprised, they ask me, "you don't watch sports?" I tell them, "I understand sports. I can watch the game and know what's going on, but I don't know the stakes. I don't know which teams are doing well, or which teams are supposed to win. I don't follow sports...I don't watch a lot of TV in general."

The Saints vs. the Vikings was a helluva game, I thought. I wasn't rooting for anyone in particular, and I still thought it was exciting. Everybody else was rooting for the Vikings--they had money on it.

The last time I watched a game all the way through--I looked this up--was 1996. Superbowl XXXI. Everybody in my class was into it, and I picked a team to fit in. I went with Green Bay, because everybody else went with Green Bay, and also I thought the cheese hats were hilarious. There was only one kid on board with the Patriots, Scarpace his name was. He pronounced it like it didn't rhyme with Scarface, we pronounced it like it did. The day after the Packers won, we were all waiting to rip him a new one, but he insisted that no "superbowl" had ever taken place.

The year before that, 1995, I watched the World Series, becoming a Braves fan for the same reason. Everybody else went with the Braves, and also I thought the chanting they did was hilarious, what with the tomahawk arms and the racism. I saw no reason why I should be a Cardinals fan, just because I was from their city. Most of the Cardinals weren't from St. Louis, after all. I owned a Packers shirt and a Braves shirt for many years. I still own my Braves hat, and wear it occasionally. I bought it in Atlanta. My dedication to the Braves remains completely arbitrary.

I got rid of every other hat when I moved. I like the Braves hat.

I have told two people this: if I were any good at sports, I wouldn't have been an actor. I tried little league soccer and baseball, but I was prone to daydreaming, forgetting I was in a game, and anyway I was afraid of wasps. My father even coached the team one year. He mostly kept me in the outfield, where I would do the least amount of damage. "Son, you're cut," you don't know what it's like to hear that, but he was right to do it. I was always relieved to go back to the bench, where I could have a paper cone of water and draw things in the dust with a stick.

Brief Excursions, Grief Expulsions

2010-01-24T04:08:00.004-06:00

There has been a fog hovering over O'Fallon for weeks now. I heard that it extends all the way down to Cape Girardeau, at least, and I can tell you that it grays the landscape up as far as Kirksville too. It is possible that this fog has enveloped all of Missouri, and perhaps the entire country has been transformed into a Stephen King novella without our realizing it. My theory is that he has run out of stories to adapt for film and television, and is now releasing his works direct-to-reality.

(Mr. King, you can have that idea for free. Could be a hook for Secret Window 2.)

It was partly, but not entirely, because of this fog that Kirksville seemed incredibly alien, but still on some level familiar. Everything in my vision seemed frayed at the edges, as though I had found my way into a vista of incomplete memory. Jamais vu--the routine made strange.

Arriving late afternoon, I was there to see a famous play called Art; Ron and Randy were in it, Joan directing. While I was at it I got a few people together for a reading of Custum Culur. I intended to keep these things secret--I wanted to surprise the Artists and I try to keep my readings fairly private. "Who told you I was coming?" I asked Joan. "The very walls," she said.

I got to see a lot of people, some of whom didn't even live in the town anymore, but were there for the same reason as myself. I got to catch up on a few things that were happening at TSU. I got to hear the rumors and the snide opinions, the sentient web of hurt feelings and petty judgments that make up a drama department. I got to hear about Dana's new directing project. The Learned Ladies, set twenty years in the future. I threw a chair across the room.

I got to have a lot of fun. The show was more than worth the trip. The reading was valuable. The company was refreshing. We spent some time together after the show. Eventually they went to their respective beds. I had to be at work in the morning. Deciding I wasn't tired, and wasn't due to be for some time, I drove home.

At 5AM, the fog was no less eerie when I pulled into my parents' subdivision, and I fell under the distinct impression that I had not been to Kirksville at all. It's hard to see the beginnings and endings of things in this fog. The trip could just as easily have been in the future as the recent past, and my old high school is just a block away from here. I have to forcibly remind myself that I haven't been here the whole time. "I left and came back, I left and came back, I'm back but I did leave once."

A Wrinkle in Time

2010-01-15T00:08:00.002-06:00

The second set of bags under my eyes is becoming pronounced. The first set has been there for a few years. I've done age makeup enough times to know exactly where my wrinkles will eventually appear. I didn't think eventually would start today, though.

I'm losing the elasticity in my knees and the spring in my step in general, although that could be my imagination.

I must sound ridiculous to you, with these complaints. In fact I hope I do.

Because it's a pretty sad day when you consider that you're not moving forward as fast as you're aging.

Be Afraid, MGD 64

2010-01-13T21:30:00.004-06:00

Budweiser is now making a beer that is lighter than bud light. They are still making bud light. This new beer is "the lightest beer in the world." It is also the least alcoholic. Which means you have to drink more of it. By which point, calorically speaking, you could have drank a budweiser.

The marketing campaign, according to the sheet they sent my boss, is directed toward "23-37 year olds seeking an active, balanced lifestyle."

I am glad to hear that our society's standards for health have lowered to the point where beer is considered part of an active, balanced lifestyle. I hope it soon becomes "part of this complete breakfast."

Select 55, welcome to my list of things I love about America. I am not being sarcastic.

UPDATE: Scientists say we cannot possibly get any fatter.

2010-01-11T22:59:00.003-06:00

I am devastated. Absolutely devastated.

There will be no Spider-Man 4.

Instead, Sony Pictures will be rebooting the only-nine-years-old franchise with a younger (and ostensibly hipper and more X-TREME) version of the cast, set in a high school, set for release in 2012. The Mayans saw this coming.

The wild and unprecedented success of 2001's Spider-Man began the wave of exhaustive resurrections of every character in the Marvel canon that continues to this day. Superhero films of the 00's, while occupying a broad spectrum of quality, were more often than not creatively wealthy, and sometimes even artful and mature. After the success of Christopher Nolan's Batman Begins, when superhero films (and genre films in general) were suddenly expected to be "dark," director Sam Raimi clung steadfastly to the goofy, awkward humor that was always Spider-Man's appeal, even when his producers mandated that the popular "dark" character of Venom be shoehorned into the already-finished script for Spider-Man 3. I've always thought that the much reviled presence of "emo-spidey" was Raimi's attempt to satirize the idea of "dark" superheroes. Not that it worked, exactly. And in fact it was Raimi's determination to never make another movie as bad as Spider-Man 3 that led him to repeatedly reject the scripts for Spider-Man 4 and eventually decide to leave his most successful franchise forever.

The script went through versions by James Vanderbilt (author of Zodiac), the Tobey-friendly Gary Ross (author of Pleasantville, Seabiscuit, and Big), and Pulitzer-winning playwright David Lindsay-Abaire. According to Raimi, nothing could keep the story from continuing to suck. The film was to have starred Tobey Maguire and Kirsten Dunst as usual, as well as John Malkovich as The Vulture and an unnamed actress as Black Cat, Marvel's carbon-copy of DC's Catwoman character.

Sony may be considering a treatment for a Spider-Man movie that James Cameron wrote in the early 90's. I have read this treatment. It features Dr. Octopus (Cameron wanted Schwarzenegger for the part), who in this incarnation has weird nicknames for his tentacles and continually spouts the lame non-catchphrase "okey-dokey." It is retarded.

But Sony has to make some kind of Spider-Man movie, because the (very profitable) character belongs to them only so long as they keep using him. As soon as they stop, they lose the rights to Disney. But if they're taking it in the direction that they say they are, they might as well give it to Walt & Co. What can starting the still-young series all over again in a high school accomplish, except maybe add more teen angst? Which, if I'm not mistaken, is what made the franchise start to falter in the first place.

Sam, if it's a writer you need... I'm just saying... Please. Give me the keys on this one. I promise I won't wreck it.

Encounters with Charity

2010-01-10T00:48:00.007-06:00

I dropped another hundred and eighty bucks on the car today, for the new wheel. Please note that I did not round up to two hundred--more on that later.

I went across the street to McDonald's for a small lunch while I waited on the repairs. After I finished I sat in an empty booth at the end of the store and scrolled through the contacts on my phone for quite awhile, trying to think of somebody to talk to, and something to talk about.

A stranger, a woman, came up to me holding out a little plastic card, and she said, "Maybe this is going to sound crazy..."

I looked up at her.

She continued, "But I carry these around until I feel like I see someone who really needs it, and then I give them out..."

Oh, God, I thought, it's some kind of rewards card. Like the kind I used to have to push on customers at Toys 'R' Us. She wants to get me to sign up for some "great new way to save money."

But then she handed me a Wal-Mart gift card. "It's only five dollars, but I thought maybe you could use it."

I was a little dumbstruck. And ashamed for jumping to sour conclusions. I accepted, and I thanked her. She said, "Happy 2010. Bless you."

"You too."

I guess I must have looked really sad, or really poor, or something. There was a time when I never would have accepted such charity. And even now, if she had offered me a five dollar bill, I would have turned it down. But something about it being a card made it okay. It strikes me as a very clever, proactive way to be kind to strangers. It's a Wal-Mart card; she knows I can't use it to support a crack habit, or anything. Technically I could still use it to buy cigarettes or cheap whiskey, but I would feel terrible, I would feel like I was abusing her generosity. She had a little boy in tow, presumably her son--she could have given that card to him, had him pick out a toy or some candy, you know?--but she gave it to me instead. On an intuition. On good faith.

Technically I'll have to quit smoking in order to not spend the card on cigarettes. Because if I'm buying anything at Wal-Mart, I'm going to buy cigarettes while I'm there, and if the card is used to pay for a sum total that includes the price of cigarettes, then the card is paying for cigarettes. I went twenty-four hours without smoking earlier this week, and I was almost fine. The physical cravings were no problem; the psychological addiction, the compulsion of habit, was no problem. My will is strong enough to deal with those. But nicotene helps ward my thoughts away from admittedly destructive places, and after just a few hours without it, my brain starts falling back into its old familiar patterns. I'd like to entertain the idea that the memory of her kindness would buoy me through it, but it's never worked like that and I know it. Mind over matter is not a solution when the problem is the mind. A stronger commitment to my medication is the answer (I don't want to hear).

Anyway. I went to pick up my car. "Bear with me," the mechanic said, "how much did they tell you this would cost?"

"Well, they didn't say exactly, but it was on the printout that I signed. It said two hundred and twenty."

"How does a hundred and eighty sound?"

"That sounds really good right now."

"The computer does the prices automatically," he told me, "but two hundred is too much for a used wheel." And he didn't have to tell me that. I had no idea how much wheels are supposed to go for. I would never have known the difference.

So, it's refreshing. To be able to relate a true story of people displaying fits of sudden and unprovoked good.

"Used to Ramble Through the Park"

2010-01-08T03:12:00.004-06:00

I tried to make it to another audition in the city. I got lost in the city. But the audition was for a show in a church for a play that I don't even like and the pay wouldn't have covered the gas money, so I'm a little glad I didn't make it. I spent a few hours parked on the side of some semi-busy street, thinking about the places I'd rather be and how to get there, or whether I'd be better off in St. Louis, working my way up through the ranks where at least I (thought I) knew where to start. It was at that point that I saw an opossum crossing the street, and I made my decision with irreversible finality. Because of the opossum. I don't want to live in any city with opossums. Rats? Fine. Pigeons? Fine. Sewer-gators? Bitchin'. Those are city critters. But the opossum is a woodland creature. A trailer-park mainstay. It didn't matter that I was in the city itself. That opossum looked right into me with its beady black eyes as if to say "You're still in the Midwest, y'know. Wanna go square dancin?'"

It was kind of like that little fox in Antichrist telling Willem Dafoe "CHAOS REIGNS," only in a goofier voice.

I've decided not to pursue any more St. Louis auditions for the time being. As many opportunities as I might find here, there are more elsewhere, and I don't want to be tied down to a production that won't go up until summer or early 2011.

I don't want to turn twenty-four in O'Fallon, that's what's haunting me at the moment.

I've been thinking a lot about New York City. Anywhere else seems like either a stepping-stone or a compromise. It's the ebb and flow of history. Our ancestors washed up in NYC and spread throughout the country looking for opportunity, and opportunity sucks their bleeding-heart-n'-artist progeny back into the city in only a few generations.

I know I change my ideal destination a lot. Maybe I don't like the idea of staying in any one place for too long. I mean, I went through five homes in the five years I was in Kirksville. Six if you count the dorms. Seven if you count Meredith's apartment. Eight if you count Baldwin Auditorium. What, was I running from something?

Of course, I can't afford to live in New York City. Not on a waiter's salary. Provided I get a job as a waiter there. Provided I can get a job without a place, or vice versa. Sometimes I wonder how anyone does anything at all. I wonder if an independent living is supposed to be this confoundedly hard, or if it's just the time I'm living in, or the path I've chosen.

I've been tackling submissions again. This will be the submission campaign to end all submission campaigns. Previously, for Shadow, I sent out about fifty different submissions. Of those fifty, twenty-five have responded, and of those twenty-five, two accepted the play for production. I'm now preparing to send Shadow manuscripts, samples, and/or query letters to some two hundred and thirty more theaters. I don't know how much that's going to set me back. But I want to get it all done in one fell swoop so that I can start sending out Custum Culur. And then my next play, and the play after that, and the play after that, and I if I didn't have to spend so much time on all the submission B.S., I'd have a great deal more time to write. No one has ever adequately expressed, at least to me, that aspiring to be a playwright costs thousands of dollars and takes up whole years of your life. And that, by the end of it, you're not doing it because you believe in yourself or in the power of what you have to say--you're doing it because you've invested so much into it that you don't have the energy to do anything else. Somewhere along the line you stop sharing your work out of hope, and switch to desperation. You just start flailing blindly, having sacrificed all thoughts of direction or purpose other than the task in itself. Shadowboxing, I think, is the term.

Review of James Cameron's "The Smurfs"

2010-01-05T02:41:00.013-06:00

In only three weeks since its release, this movie has made over a billion dollars worldwide, putting James Cameron into an exclusive club of filmmakers with more than one film that has earned a billion dollars. This club consists of James Cameron. It's been over ten years since his last billion dollar movie, which, incidentally, was also his last movie. The pre-release buzz for Avatar has been hotly fussed over by a media that couldn't decide between anticipatory glee or dread, but ultimately, at least at the box office, Cameron has cemented a status as Emperor of Blockbuster Juggernauts, and he did it without superheroes or Johnny Depp. Welcome back, Jim. Bravo.

Is the film deserving? As a cinematic experience, Avatar is a triumph. It is a motion picture in the truest sense of the word, and its main character is its setting. Cameron dwells on the lush visuals of his alien landscape, which are rendered in intimate detail, but the story, while not exactly seeming like an afterthought, doesn't measure up to the gravitas that is visually imposed upon it. The characters are one-dimensional archetypes (the gruff guts-and-glory general; the brilliant and uncompromising scientist; the dweeby computer guy; the other dweeby computer guy). What little dialogue there is, is entirely expositional, and attempts to inject things like "style" or "emotion" into the writing come across as forced, and occasionally cheesy. Most significantly, the computer-generated aliens are generally more expressive than their human counterparts. As a whole, I believe that the story of Avatar would have been more poignantly told without any words at all--the story is simple enough, and the images specific enough, that the telling could have relied entirely on music and the awe-inspiring visuals that are its director's greatest strength.

Otherwise, the most interesting character is the spineless corporate weasel (Giovanni Ribisi), who is named Selfridge, because he is selfish (yes, really). This archetype recalls Paul Reiser's Weyland-Yutani stooge in Cameron's Aliens, and halfway through the movie he inexplicably stops having lines and starts having pained "what have I done?" gazes, giving him the most developed character arc in the film.

The story is actually about a paraplegic space marine (Sam Worthington) who is assigned to work himself into the good graces of the indigenous peoples of an alien moon and convince them to leave the tree that they live in and hug, so that the Government or Something can blow up the tree and strip-mine it for a mineral called unobtainium (yes, really), which is valuable for some reason. To this end, they use SCIENCE to transport his consciousness into a mock-alien body so that he can walk among them.

The aliens are called the Na'vi, because it's not officially a fantasy or science fiction word until there's an apostrophe in it. The Na'vi are blue like Smurfs and they live in giant vegetables like Smurfs, in perfect harmony with nature, like Smurfs, and they have their own language like Smurfs, and, like Smurfs, they really only have one female character.

Sam Worthington falls in love with Smurfette (Zoe Saldana), possibly because she happens to be the first female he meets. In a seriously classic moment, the two share a sensuous onscreen kiss that is rife with moral and psychological complications. Is it okay to mate with another species if your mind is in the body of a member of that species? If you turned into a lemur, would you fuck a lemur? Right away, or eventually?

Worthington, having "gone native," aligns himself with the Na'vi and generally does a very bad job of getting them to move. The humans come in and blow up the tree anyway, and he is ousted as a traitor by both the Na'vi and his original race. He redeems himself in a lazy "he is the chosen one" plot device, and uses his new status to convince the various Na'vi tribes to unite for a retaliatory attack, and to convince the god of Pandora, a tree, to send Mother Nature to kill all humans.

Basically, it's Pocahontas, but the Indians win. Except for the parts where communing with nature proves to be an effective tactical strategy, since Nature here has the power to fight back, like in The Happening, which I may remind you, also featured a dialogue-heavy scene between its protagonist and a tree. Also excepting the parts where Worthington discovers that he is the unknowing messiah of a strange world, which actually makes the movie more like Harry Potter and the Native Americans. I feel that a human victory over the Na'vi would have made for a truer, harder-hitting, and infinitely more relevant story. If Cameron's intent was to allegorize the plight of history's invaded and imperialized civilizations, then it was his responsibility to tell their story correctly.

Cameron's SCIENCE raises many questions, and the film contains a few plot holes that frankly should have been noticed at some point during its ten years of production. I'm not talking about the whole human-avatar interface technology--Cameron isn't required to explain that any more than he is required to explain how the humans' ship reached another solar system (possibly even a whole other galaxy) in only five years, which would have necessitated faster-than-light travel. But when he, as a writer, violates the rules that he himself has set up, he has to know that someone like me is going to call him out on it.

The inconsistency that bothered me the most was that Pandora appears to house seven gajillion species of plant, and about six species of animal. Early on in the film we get a glimpse of an evolutionary sibling of the Na'vi, which makes it clear that natural selection is at work on this moon. This in turn raises many questions. Why should there be such wildly various species of flora, when, if the fauna is as undiversified as it appears to be, there should be fewer ecological niches to fill? Where are the Na'vi getting the feathers for their arrows when all of the flying creatures appear to be mammalian? But the most confounding extrapolation concerns Cameron's attempt to literalize the Na'vi's communal bond with nature by giving all living things a tentacled, biological USB port, allowing the Na'vi to jack in to plants and animals with their dreadlocks and control them (yes, really). The problem is, half of the animals on Pandora are openly hostile to the Na'vi and resist control, and if this is the case, why would they have evolved the USB tentacles in the first place? How does it benefit the host species? Or, if at some point in the past every one of Pandora's species were symbiotic, why did some of them eventually develop hostility? Is it divine intervention? From that tree? To what purpose?

Also, what is unobtainium, exactly? Its name would seem to suggest a new element, but any element not already accounted for on the periodic table would be too unstable to exist in nature. If it is a mineral or compound of some kind, why couldn't it be manufactured on Earth? For example, if unobtainium can only form on Pandora because of its lower gravity, wouldn't it be cheaper to simulate a low-gravity environment in a lab, rather than mounting an expedition of spaceships, military, scientific, medical, and mining vessels, facilities and personnel to a moon lightyears away? And if you can afford to do that, what do you need unobtainium for anyway?

Many apparent errors can be explained away by Pandora's lower gravity, such as flying mammals the size of Boeing 747's, and the floating mountains, which may have a density low enough to rest on areas with consistently dense water vapor. But the low gravity raises more questions than it answers. The humans appear to have no trouble moving around in it, and they never appear to have artificial weights for compensation, and the lower gravity doesn't seem to affect the way things like water and arrows move.

And finally--and this really bugged me--when the humans are in Na'vi bodies, why do they have the exact same voices? Don't they have new, alien vocal chords? Or at least different vocal chords?

Do these inconsistencies hamper the film? Only just. Avatar is primarily a visual spectacle, a motion picture, and the story is there to support the images. And the images are beautiful. And as faulty as the story may be, at the end of a decade in which major motion pictures were required to have "source material," from comic books, to theme park rides, to reboots of old franchises and revitalizations of others, it's refreshing to see someone championing originality in the blockbuster. It borrows from history, and from ubiquitous tropes, but it's a goddamned new story. And for that, Jim, thank you. Please make another movie. But next time, don't bother writing it first.

Enterprises of Great Pith and Moment

2010-01-03T02:52:00.005-06:00

Four hundred and fifty dollars--that's how much it's cost to repair the car--so far. They fixed the alignment but the wheel itself is also bent, and they have to order a new one. I don't know how much a wheel costs. I mean, it's just a wheel right? It's a pretty simple invention.

It's only upsetting because I feel like I just made that money. Do you know how long it takes a waiter to save up four hundred and fifty dollars?

I dropped the car off before work and picked it up between shifts. Involved a little bit of walking. It's not perfect now, but it's driveable. It's safe to take on the highway. So I begged a co-worker to cover my Sunday evening shift for me, sent an e-mail to the theater as requested, and got myself psyched.

And I just realized that I sent my e-mail to the wrong address. I misheard her over the phone and ended up sending my desperate, last-minute message to casting@ssstl.com. It's actually casting@sfstl.com. SF stands for Shakespeare Festival. I don't know what I thought she meant. Shakespeare Sextival?

So, that was the last little kink, and I'm afraid it puts an end to things. But it's not exactly a weight off my shoulders.

I tried to try. That's the important thing.

Jared Latore is Going to Punch the New Years Baby in the Face

2010-01-01T19:46:00.007-06:00

I hate to say that this decade is getting off to a bad start.

The cop asked me what I was doing sitting in my car, in the city park, at 1:30 A.M. on New Year's.

"I just didn't want to be at home tonight, y'know?"

"You didn't want to be at home? What's wrong at home?"

"Nothing," I told him, "It's trivia."

He could tell I was sober, so he just ran a check on my I.D. to make sure there weren't any warrants out for me. I told him I'd leave the park if it was a problem. He told me it wasn't, but he stuck around for quite some time, just watching me, so I went back to my parents' house. I have now officially been approached by the police more times for doing nothing than for breaking a law.

When I got back my parents were in bed, and I drank the bottle of cheap champagne that I was now very glad I'd decided not to open in the park.

I woke up in the afternoon and continued to lie in bed awake. I didn't even want to go out for a cigarette. Before long I could hear my parents arguing about their Christmas gifts--and, you know, that doesn't really bother me but I don't enjoy listening to it either--so I drove out and spent a few hours sitting in a Burger King parking lot.

By the time I decided to drive back, it was dark and it was snowing. I underestimated how icy the roads were and I slid through an intersection and hit a curb. My car looks okay but it seems like the right front wheel is out of sync with the other three, which makes it difficult when I want to drive in, say, a straight line. I don't know how much it will cost to get that fixed--my insurance is state minimum. And I doubt I can get it fixed in time to make it to the auditions on Sunday, if I can even get someone to cover my shift on Sunday. I called them a week ago for a Monday audition slot but they didn't tell me that Monday was full until today.

So, my plans have been thoroughly fucked with. That audition was going to be the deciding factor on whether I moved to St. Louis or another city. Now I guess the decision has been made for me. Not that it matters, because I won't get too far in any direction without my car. It seems like every time I solidify a plan of action to reclaim a functional life, a tiny spanner gets tossed in the works. Between this and the chincident and a thousand other little things, I can't help but feel that I'm being conspired against. That for whatever reason the stability of the cosmos is dependent upon my being a loser.

When I came to O'Fallon four months ago, I didn't have a clear destination or the means to get there. In four months, that has not changed. One by one my plans have fallen through and I am beginning to lose hope. But I will try my damnedest to make it to that audition. It doesn't matter if I make it in or even make it there. I'm just determined not to throw up my hands and quit because I'm frustrated. Because that's what my father would do, and it's a trait I recognize too often in myself.

It's just a disappointing start. In all honesty there's a part of me that doesn't even want to know what January 2nd will bring. But I will give it a try. And I will keep trying, in spite of myself, just because I refuse to give the universe the satisfaction of an easy victory.

Reflections on the Decade and Predictions for the Next Few

2009-12-29T01:39:00.021-06:00

Sometimes I think about the things I'll have to explain to future generations. Like, if ever they have to do an "interview an old person" assignment for their social studies class. And, until we reach the point where information can be directly downloaded into the brain, they will. And I'll probably be explaining things to them regardless. I'll be ranting. "In my day, we didn't have a Matrix that you could just jack into. Nobody said 'I know kung-fu.' We had to say 'I learned kung-fu.' It took years to learn kung-fu, and we liked it." I have whole dialogues planned out.

Forget digital media; forget CDs even, I'm going to be describing casette tapes and VHS. I'm going to be telling them about an era that, in my view, was completely different from the current one in nearly every way. I'm not talking pre-9/11. I'm talking pre-Toy Story. A time when drawings were drawn by hand and photographs had to be "doctored" and personal computers were not a necessity. I remember when my parents first bought a PC, with a version of Word that had a blue screen that you typed white letters on. Computer paper came in reams connected by perforated strips that you had to tear off the sides, and clip-art was considered cutting-edge. And when they finally caved in and got the Internet, you couldn't use it and the phone at the same time, you had to get a second phone line or you might miss an important call, because it was a dial-up, which also meant that it took several minutes to connect to the world-wide-web, and it didn't always work. My point is that it sounds archaic already--and it was only a decade ago.

2000 was the dotted line between us and our parents. Suddenly popular was a new technology that the older generations had a little trouble understanding, but came like second-nature to our undeveloped brains. We were excited, perhaps overwhelmed by the possibility of access to secret knowledge, and the power that would follow it. That this secret knowledge turned out to be an intimate understanding of media piracy, social networking, and lolcats has been this decade's greatest disappointment. Is that really all we could come up with? Leeroy Jenkins and the Rick-Roll?

The next technological/cultural revolution may not take a generation to appear. It may not even take ten years. And when that happens, we, the twenty-somethings, will be the ones left in the dust, with our ancestors, many of whom are still living, and the current of global culture will be entirely in the hands of pre-teens. Think about that for a minute. After High School Musical and Twilight, can you imagine pre-teens being a more important demographic than they already are? Or are they called tweens now? I can't even keep up with the terminology. Do you see why I'm worried?

We are headed irreversibly toward a society in which no one will ever have to be disconnected from the Internet. In such a society, not having constant, instant access to the sum of human knowledge would be considered a learning disability. That's not necessarily a bad thing. What is a bad thing is that we will inevitably come to rely on that power, and that power doesn't actually exist. As my father gruffly pointed out when my mother was having trouble looking up a song today, "Not everything is on the Internet, you know." And do you know what I did when he said that? I laughed. I was sure he was wrong, and that if he gave me ten minutes I could find that song. I believe that we will eventually adopt the opinion that if it isn't on the Internet, it's not worth the trouble of finding. And that is a troublesome prospect.

Earlier this year, Amazon remotely deleted copies of 1984 and Animal Farm from Kindles everywhere, because the editions were bootlegged. Now, if you go to a bookstore and buy a book, that book is a possession, and if they discover they sold you a bootlegged edition, they can't make you give it back. On the Kindle, books are a service, and Amazon has the power to decide what you are allowed to read. If we reach a point in the future where all information is digital, and there's no reason why we won't, what happens if something gets deleted? If a corporation, or, to move further in Orwell's direction, a government decides that a book isn't legal, that work could be removed from the public consciousness completely. It gets burned in the memory-hole. And is there a limit to what might possibly be "deleted?" Songs? Films? Bank accounts? What about an identity?

And if they delete you, do you get your money back?

I've been having a problem that illustrates my frustrations, and is also probably very telling about who I am as a person. The gist of it is, I began receiving mysterious calls on my cell phone. I don't usually answer unfamiliar numbers. When I get them, I'll look the number up in a search engine to see who it belongs to, or at least where the area code is coming from. These numbers directed me to websites with threads of comments saying, in different ways, "They say they're from Verizon but I have my doubts. Does anybody know?" Looking up the area codes led me to cities in the middle of Bumfuck, Arkansas, and such places, not somewhere that I'd expect a telecommunications headquarters. I kept receiving calls from them. Different numbers, different area codes, the same comment threads. They never left a message. "Wouldn't Verizon leave a message?" I thought. "Even just an automated one?" Eventually, they began calling my parents' phone. And what makes the whole thing so unusual is that I have never had an account with Verizon Wireless. My phone is with Alltell. And my phone before that was with Virgin Mobile. But a week ago I tried to make a phone call, and I was automatically redirected to my account at Verizon, the one that didn't exist. They said they'd disconnected my service. They wanted two hundred dollars. "Fuck it," I said, "This phone doesn't work anyway, not unless it's plugged in. Not since I dropped it in a swamp."

I hadn't noticed that my service had been disconnected, I use the phone so rarely. I apologize if anyone has tried to call me over the past few weeks.

I considered letting the matter be. I can function without a phone number. But employers ask for them, and theaters ask for them, and girls ask for them, and I need a phone if I am to exist in the societal entity, which is to say if I am to exist at all. If I don't have a cell phone, I may as well live in the swamp I dropped it in: the world will happily exclude me. So I went and bought a new one, with a really great, cheap plan, and I followed the setup instructions, and it will not activate. I have two phones that don't work and I may never know why.

Longfellow once said that "Most people would succeed in small things if they were not troubled with great ambitions," but I have always held the opposite opinion. Here to put the phrase completely in line with my own thinking is, predictably, my Danny Elfman, who sings in the rock song he composed for Wanted, "I can deal with fate, but not the little things."

As I put these links in here (and, hell, as I write on this blog), I am aware that communication is all too easy, and that I am as big a fan and victim of it as anyone. Global communication has become as instant and constant as the retrieval of knowledge. "Globalization" and "multiculturalism" have been among the defining words of this decade (along with "green," "lol," "epic," "patriot," "emo," "viral," and "i," which I guess is actually a prefix), and it may follow that, as we become fully digitally immersed, the barrier between the conception of an idea and the expression of it will shrink to the point where we will be able to convey pure ideas directly. The concept of language would become obsolete (bear in mind we are already speaking in "abbreves"), and art, as a means of expression, would no longer be necessary. Formerly, this was a fiction called telepathy. Every mind on the planet would be connected in a network of impulses and instant reactions, forming what is basically one complete unified neural network. Formerly this also was a fictional concept, the "hive-mind." And at a point when information, interaction, and experience are all conducted most efficiently on an immaterial plane, the physical body will become a hindrance. I am not the first person to say this. The umbrella terms for it are "transhumanism" and "technological singularity" and there are some serious science-type people saying that it may happen within the next twenty years, possibly ten. There is even a religion, or cult if you prefer, composed of people who think that this would be the best thing ever and are dedicated to speeding it along. This religion is called Singularitarianism. As for my part, I do not think it would be the worst thing ever. I do not think it will be the best thing ever. But I do think it will be.

Also for my own part, I cannot see such a network doing anything other than collapsing in on itself. Isn't it hard enough to get one brain to work correctly? This is December 29th, 2009, and I am making it clear that I think there is such a thing as information overload. So when the tweenage hive-mind envelops us in an alternate non-physical fantasy vampire universe while thought-screaming "It's us or the Amish, now choose," don't say I didn't warn you.

It is important, now more than ever, to remember that as humans we are searching for truth, not information.

"The number of books will grow continually, and one can predict that a time will come when it will be almost as difficult to learn anything from books as from the direct study of the whole universe. It will be almost as convenient to search for some bit of truth concealed in nature as it will be to find it hidden away in an immense multitude of bound volumes."
--Denis Diderot, Encyclopédie, 1755

I'll Tell You Where You Can Put that Sticker

2009-12-17T00:35:00.003-06:00

The restaurant has been pretty slow, so the big guys came up with a special to draw in some more business. After-School Special: high school students get a personal pizza and a soda for four ninety-nine. Plus tax.

The only problem is that teenagers, unlike people, have no money or sense of human decency. So while I wasn't surprised to get tipped a dinosaur sticker and a temporary tattoo of a butterfly, I still felt like running after them and shouting "Remember this day! You're gonna be me someday you little twats!"

Learning to revile the young is an important part of growing up. What I mean is that we never stop going through phases.

In the meantime, that butterfly is going to look very trendy on my lower back, right? And the girl who tipped in quarters? Yeah, there's a Pac-Man machine in the pub.

Secret Agents

2009-12-16T00:13:00.006-06:00

Looking for theatrical literary agents is proving more difficult than I ever expected. Which, since I was pretty pessimistic about it to begin with, is saying something.

I've written before about the Catch-22 of production and publication, where the publishing houses literally will not even look at your work until it's been produced by a major regional theater, because they want to be sure that it will be successful before they print it, and the major regional theaters aren't interested in plays that aren't published, because they want to be sure that they will be successful before they produce them. What I failed to realize at the time is that the entire system is made out of Catch-22s, which is a credit to the creativity of the theatrical world.

Literary agents never handle theatrical works, and theatrical agents never handle literature. There is a select group of about two or three theatrical literary agencies that, between them, seem to handle most of Earth's playwrights. These agencies do not accept unsolicited submissions. You have to have representation to aquire representation.

The reason the whole process is so exclusive as compared to, say, book publishing, is that people buy books--a person will pay for a book for their own personal entertainment or education and that's a book sale, and that's the end of it. People do not buy plays--a theater will pay for a play to use as the basis for a collaborative endeavor that people will pay to see. So there's more inherent risk in publishing a play. And you can't sell risk.

Maybe I just need to keep submitting my works to theaters until I get enough of them produced that somebody wants to find me. But, honestly, I don't know how long I can endure that. Average response time, if you ever get a response, is six to nine months. At that rate, if I write two plays a year, I'll be hopelessly behind in two years, that is if I have time to write in addition to searching for theaters and building submissions in addition to maintaining a life, that is if I can even afford to keep sending these things out. My point is, this can't be done as a hobby.

I don't know who I'm setting this all down for. I don't want to be one of those experienced non-writers whose main literary output is a "helpful blog" drawn from their bottomless hearts with "tips on fleshing out your characters" and "how to write that query letter." If I'm to be a non-writer, I am determined not to pretend to be anything else, and in fact if you'll look closely you will see that there is no advice in here at all. This is just what I'm discovering as I go along. I certainly wasn't prepared for this. I think this is meant to be for future reference. If I ever do make it, I don't want to forget how hard it was to get there.

A guy at Twigg's stopped me today and he said, "I was eavesdropping, and at first I thought you were an asshole, but then I thought, no, this kid is really sharp. You seem like a bright young man; what are you doing working in a bar?" So I tried to explain what I was, and what I try to do, and he went on to tell me how rich he was and how he got to travel to Asia and the Middle East to close six billion dollar deals all the time because he was a businessman and how he wished there was some way he could help me. He said he knew the guy who wrote Crimson Tide, would that help?

Almost Starwolf

2009-12-13T02:11:00.006-06:00

I don't do auditions. I don't know how to audition and I hate auditioning and I think that Hell is going to be an eternal cattle-call where I'm underprepared and all the decent roles have been pre-cast and I forgot to put on deodorant (remember, this is Hell) and frankly everyone just has a much nicer headshot than me. And it's a musical. In short, the actor's greatest phobia is of being the least interesting person in the room.

So I don't think of auditions as auditions. I think of it in terms of a performance. I've been invited to perform a monologue and/or a few short scenes off the cuff, for a very small group of people who have an active interest in seeing what I can do. I don't go in with the hope of getting cast in a show. What show? This is the show. And it helps to think of it that way. Because many of the elements that influence casting decisions are things that I have no control over. So I just give a performance. And at the end of the day, regardless of the outcome, I got to act a little. Which is something that I supposedly enjoy doing with my time.

I went to audition for a professional Theatre company in St. Louis last week. It was a two-for-one audition special. Mauritius was a thriller about postage stamps, and they eschewed monologues and call-backs in favor of my preferred audition format, which is the "We're doing cold readings and I want this thing cast by Happy Hour" approach. The director informed me that my reading was "really, very, very good," and then repeated it in such a way that I knew his praise was meant to be a consolation prize, and then made a point of asking me how old I was. Ah, I thought, I get it.

At the professional level, you will almost never be cast outside your age range, since actors of the appropriate age are always in supply. (This is bad news for me, as I actually have very little experience in playing twenty-somethings.) The same is true of any characteristic. Which is why I was a little worried about the second audition.
I made it to call-backs for Based on a Totally True Story. I walked in, mind you, with a brand-new cartoony chin bandage, prompting a lot of what-happened-to-yous and you-didn't-have-that-yesterdays. Much elaborate speculation ensued as to the best possible story, before settling on, as I have said, werewolves. Many potential nicknames were bandied about before the group agreed on "J-Wolf." I considered this a sign that I was moving up in the world, figuring it was an improvement on one of my many high school nicknames that never stuck, "J-Dog." Or it may have been "J-Dawg." People said "dawg" in those days. I am getting off topic.

I felt as though I gave a decent performance, but what worried me was that both of the characters I was eligible for were gay, and I was pretty sure that I was the only heterosexual that made it to callbacks. I wondered if there had been some mistake. "I'm sorry, J-Wolf, I thought for some reason you were gayer yesterday. Now that you have what is likely to become a wicked-awesome scar, I can see that you are in fact a manly-man indeed." I will admit that I was reticent about 'acting' homosexual when I was being paired in scenes with actual homosexuals. I was afraid that if I attempted to affect gayness, it would be perceived as mockery. Not that I would have taken the low road of stereotype and fabulosity in any case, mind--I was just hyper-aware of what I was doing and how far I was going with it.

I think that, given time to develop it, I might have pulled off an appropriate characterization. Then again, I can characterize age too, but why do things the hard way?

Ultimately, I was not cast in either play. And it may be that I am making a mad attempt to rationalize the process and shift the blame away from my shortcomings as an actor. As far as criticisms go, "You're not gay enough" is not the worst one, and it's certainly much easier to take than "You weren't good enough at acting." Whatever the reason, I won't be beating myself up, because I felt like I did a decent job this time, and I actually had a good time, and my only disappointment is that they seemed like they would've been really great people to work with.

My question is what to do now. I had a thought, that, if I 'broke into' the St. Louis Theatre scene, I could maybe get an apartment in the city and work on getting some professional acting credits, until I felt like I was ready to move somewhere really cool. Now I'm not so sure. There are more auditions for some different companies in January, for shows in the late spring and summer, but I don't want to stay in the Midwest that long if I don't have to. I will be able to move soon. There is no "ready;" there is "might as well."

Meta-Mattress

2009-12-09T22:43:00.005-06:00

I was doing the obligatory gift-shopping today, and I didn't find anything to buy for anyone, but I did come across a product called the "convoluted foam mattress."

What makes a mattress convoluted? Did the manufacturers go so far out of their way to create a mattress that it sacrificed the integrity of the mattress itself? Doesn't the name suggest that the mattress doesn't really need to be there? That its ultimate value is somehow worth less than the trouble of owning it? The name seems very forced to me. I guess it's supposed to conform to your body contours or something, but I think that's a bit of a stretch.

What they need is a good slogan. "Sex on the Convoluted Mattress: Doing it the Hard Way."

However this does give me hope for my idea of a mattress, that instead of using springs, has an interconnected system of microchips that detect your body weight and automatically adjust, just like springs would. It's called the circuitous mattress.

Those Things Will Kill You

2009-12-07T14:46:00.003-06:00

I woke up Sunday morning feeling groggy. I lit my first and got a little dizzy. That hasn't happened since I first started smoking. By the time I went into the bathroom for a shower, I was stumbling, and I couldn't feel my legs, and I just bit it, and my chin hit the sink on the way down. I didn't even get to turn the lights on first.

I laid on the floor for a few moments, collecting myself. I don't think I passed out, but my head was spinning. I noticed a lot of blood on the floor. I figured, "Oh, I guess I hit my chin. I'll deal with that in a minute. I have to take a shit first." I still had my priorities.

When I got to the mirror I noticed a chunk of my chin was missing. I still haven't found it. But it didn't hurt, and the bleeding had already slowed down considerably, so I just put some anti-biotic cream on it with a little gauze, and some medical tape that I applied in the shape of an "X," like in cartoons. I never understood why cartoons use X-shaped bandages, but now it makes a lot of sense.

So, that's the true story, and I hate having to explain it to people because it's equal parts a) embarassing and b) sounding like something I made up to hide the actions of an abusive husband. I have been accepting solicitations of better stories. The most popular suggestion so far seems to be "werewolves." I understand that werewolves are very "hot" right now, but I think the scenario strains plausibility. Even if I were attacked by a werewolf or someone who believed him-or-herself to be a werewolf, they would certainly go for my jugular and not my chin.

I would like to say it was a motorcycle accident, possibly involving a jousting tournament at a steampunk renaissance fair. Would you respect me more or less if that were true?

Either way, I'm thinking now might be a good time to grow a beard again.

So maybe it was a werewolf after all?

Noel Coward

2009-12-05T22:51:00.006-06:00

Six Twenty-One Zumwalt Crossing has a holiday display that would be the envy of the neighborhood, if it were not also its bane. Lights? Lights are fine. I appreciate lights. A front lawn full of giant inflatable Christmas-themed Disney characters? Fine. Whatever polishes your halo. But the music...the speakers piping Midi carols for the whole block to hear, that, I cannot stand. I am powerless to stop them. How can I cite them for disturbing the peace when they're blaring Peace on Earth, Good Will to Man, etcetera? How am I supposed to enjoy my cigarettes in the calm of pre-dawn when the ice-cream-truck-ready renditions of Yuletide's Greatest Hits are parked next door? Humbug, humbug, humbug.

The restaurant switched to Christmas music the day after Thanksgiving. Not a second later. I've heard more easy-listening piano versions of "The First Noel" than I care to count.

I'm afraid to go to the shopping mall. I'm afraid of the shoppers, whipped into a frenzy by the primal rhythms of the Little Drummer Boy.

It's too, too much like my least favorite Christmas song of all time, "Silver Bells." I interperet that song as a blatant exaltation of consumerism. "Are you spending yet? Have you spent enough? The shoppers rush home with their treasures, see? Everybody's doing it. Come on, this is Santa's big scene."

I also hate "Here Comes Santa Claus," and I don't think anybody actually likes "The Twelve Days of Christmas." And the parodies are even worse. I read an article once that speculated that the reason December's most gratingly repetitive song seems to make no sense is because the lyrics were designed as an allegorical catechism song to help Catholics learn their faith, during a time when they were so oppressed that they had to carol in code. I subsequently read a hundred articles that offered the insightful counter of, "What? That did not happen in history. You made that up, didn't you?"

There are two carols I am on the fence about, because I consider them problematic. The first is "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas." There are two different versions of this song. The first one, in its many incarnations, uses the original lyrics from the musical Meet Me in St. Louis, in which the song first appeared, as made famous by Judy Garland in the film version. The second version is a watered-down, namby-pamby feel-good cop-out.

(You see? I'm in the spirit. I'm being very generous with hyphens.)

The latter version is more popular, and more frequently covered. You know it from the lines "From now on our troubles will be out of sight." And so forth. Originally, "From now on" was "Next year all" in every instance, but the most egregious wussification comes in the bridge:

Original: Someday soon, we all will be together, if the fates allow
Until then, we'll have to muddle through somehow

Revised: Through the years, we all will be together, if the fates allow
Hang a shining star upon the highest bough

Hang a shining star upon the highest bough? That's...that's just random Christmas imagery. Where did that come from? Do you have some form of Christmas-related Tourette's Syndrome? Could you have at least made it "so hang a shining star upon the highest bow?" Were you hoping that no one would notice? And more importantly, why didn't they?

I'm not championing the original version just because it was the original version. I don't care about that. I just feel that "Christmas will be better next time" is a more complicated, more emotional statement than "Christmas is great. CHRISTMAS IS ALWAYS GREAT." At the very least, it's more unique.

The other holiday tune I'm ambivalent about is John Lennon's "Happy Christmas (War is Over)." The original is a blithely sarcastic expression of the inherent hypocrisy of blind and insulated Christmas cheer. Every cover version I have ever heard is an expression of blind and insulated Christmas cheer. I'm looking at you, Jimmy Buffett. Don't sing to me about global unity when you live on an island.

For the record, my favorite Christmas songs are "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen," "O Come O Come Emanuel," "When My Heart Finds Christmas," "Winter Weather," "Silent Night," and "What Are You Doing New Year's Eve?" Which is more of a "holiday season" song. Sue me.

"When My Heart Finds Christmas" is from Harry Connick Jr.'s first Christmas album. I was a little surprised when he released a second Christmas album. I was heartbroken when he released a third. I love you, Harry, but I know you don't love Christmas that much.

Then again, everybody's getting in on it. I never thought in my lifetime that I would see a Bob Dylan Christmas album. Partly because he's Jewish, and also partly because he's Bob Dylan. I can't express it any more clearly than that. And yet Christmas in the Heart exists. I read one review that stated, and I'm quoting from memory, that "When Dylan sings 'I'll Be Home for Christmas,' he makes it sound like a threat." That makes me want to buy it a lot. I'm not sure whether or not the whole album is an elaborate, straight-faced--or to put it bluntly, Dylanesque--joke, but he's giving all the proceeds to charity (not that he needs the money), so I'll give him the benefit of my many doubts. That's the seasonal thing to do.

CSI: O'Fallon

2009-12-02T15:12:00.003-06:00

We had some crime scene investigators come into the restaurant today. Nobody died. They just came in for the food, or maybe they were investigating our criminally low prices! They had jackets that said "CSI" and everything, and one of them was a really, really cute girl. Maybe the cutest I've ever waited on. Young, and blonde, and shy. She didn't seem like the type of person who would be interested in drawing chalk outlines. I wonder if they just gave her the jacket.

Pick up lines I did not use include:
"Thank God you're here! Someone has stolen...my heart."
"I'll dramatically take off my sunglasses if you dramatically take off your top."
"Do you perform autopsies? Because I've got you under my skin."

So, everything worked out for the best.

We have cops and rangers and the like come in all the time, actually. Always in uniform. Always with the gun. I want to tell them, "You can leave the heat at the station, chief. The steak will be dead when we bring it to you." I'll admit that seeing the gun gives me a thrill, but it unsettles me at the same time. I don't trust policemen because I don't trust people. In my experience, you can't assume that anyone is more than a stone's throw away from crazy. Who knows how much stress this Dirty Harry is under? Suppose an underdone pizza is the straw that breaks the camel's back, and boom, shootout. Thirty dead. I think it would be a funny idea for a film or play to have somebody stage or deliberately provoke a mass homicide in order to get closer to a CSI agent that he has a crush on. But of course I would never do that in real life. I'm just writing down incriminating statements here to catch the attention of that foxy piece of F.B.I. I met three weeks ago. Special Agent Soup-and-Salad Combo.

I had a cop dine-and-dash on me not too long back. Now, it's true that we used to give cops their meals for free, but we had to stop doing that because we're right next to the sheriff's office and they were starting to take advantage of the deal, so this guy had been paying for his meals for a while. I considered calling 9-1-1 to report his theft. But I wasn't sure they would get the joke. If anyone were to ask me "What's the worst tip you've ever been given," I wouldn't want to have to answer "a fine for obstruction of justice."

12-01

2009-12-01T17:44:00.005-06:00

Happy December.

Autumn is all gone now. I can't believe I spent it all in one place. I am, as ever, keenly aware of the rate at which time is passing me by. A third of my life is now over. Maybe more. That sounds too dramatic, doesn't it? But numbers are numbers; it can't be helped. I feel as though I might be having a midlife crisis, only I don't have the money for the hot new car and girlfriend combo. I can't throw my life away and start a new one; I don't have a life now. I can't reflect on my wasted youth; I am actively in the process of wasting it.

No, that's not true. I am trying. I have to keep reminding myself that. I'm working, I'm saving money. I'm compiling a list of literary agents to send submissions to--it's going to be just as tiresome and enervating (and probably as expensive) as sending the play out to theaters. And I wrote a new play. It's called Custum Culur and it's about a man who can control his life. You don't always have to write what you know.

I had my first midlife crisis when I was eleven, but no one took me seriously. "Don't worry," they said, "You weren't supposed to have accomplished anything by this point. You're too young." And yet now I feel like I'm behind. The world moves much faster now than it did in my century. I feel like I've been playing catch-up my whole life. In college, in making the rent, in my friendships. And now I'm trying to manufacture a career? From scratch? It's absurd!

I think the reason I'm so anxious, overwhelmed, and ashamed, is only because I have expectations for a future. I know that there will be a future, and I want so badly for it to be different from the present, and the past.

I've been having a recurring daydream, where I'm sitting on an examination table, and a doctor tells me that I have an inoperable brain tumor. I have a year to live. And I hear him say it and I am just overcome with relief. I don't have to worry anymore. I don't have to fret about never accomplishing anything; the opportunity, and therefore the obligation, is gone. And then I go about smashing my computer and burning everything I've ever made, and generally erasing evidence of Jared. And then I get in my car and I drive until I can see the Pacific, and I disappear. And I never tell anyone about the tumor. Everyone I know assumes that I was just a dick who blew them off because I was too good for them or something, and in time, they forget about me. So I never existed. So I never failed.

I guess I'm just exhausted. I'm getting nowhere fast and frankly I'm beginning to think that there's nothing wrong with measuring my life in bags of cat food.

2009-11-13T23:50:00.002-06:00

I can't think of anything more rejuvenating than being able to take your work outdoors for an afternoon.

Buried Hatchet

2009-11-10T02:52:00.002-06:00

Well, everybody's getting a little testy. We've been rehearsing for a month and our nerves are on edge, but we're finally at the place where we should have been two weeks ago and I think, as usual, that the final result will be worth the struggle. I think this is the most exhausting role I have ever attempted. I cannot speak for the other actors, but I believe they feel similarly affected.

I am sympathetic to photographers. As much as we dislike doing a photo-call for some ignorable suburban journal right before doing a run of the show, their photographer is, at the same time, thinking 'Oh God...I have to go photograph some pompous community actors...' I am sorry to say that we didn't prove him wrong.

He thinks he knows what he's doing; we think we know what we're doing. Compatibility is the issue. The cast was as defensive as he was assumptive. These sentiments fed on each other. There was a mutual sense of time being wasted. But you know me, I (almost) kept my mouth shut.

"Old Guy on the Couch--are you in this scene?" he asked. Snap, snap.

"I am, but they have the focus."

"So you're just kind of chilling in the background there."

"Yeah."

"So basically you don't do a whole lot in this play."

I think he was kidding, but I was offended all the same. I told him, with exaggerated patience, "The character is too sick to move very much, but moving isn't the same as doing, and he goes through a wide range of emotional action." I didn't intend to get a laugh there, but everyone did. I did say it lightheartedly. I suppose that's how you diffuse a situation. Either that or I'm a fool, and I'm going to look a fool in about eight days.

But, Jesus, the tempers are starting to flare, and Christ, the frustration is mounting. Mostly mine. We don't go up for a whole 'nother week. We're adding lights and make-up. I'm doing my own make-up. I have a bald cap and wig that I'm trying to make look respectable, or at least not ridiculous. I'm adding gore effects to it. I don't have the patience for tempers, attitudes, and lame, diffusive jokes. Is this what I missed so much?

Well, maybe a little.

Boo

2009-11-02T00:33:00.002-06:00

How I Spent My Halloween

If it weren't for the guy in the Dracula tuxedo t-shirt, it could have been any other day.

And that's what scares me.

Positively 40th Street: A Travelogue

2009-10-28T00:36:00.010-05:00

It was 11:00 PM when I got off work and left O'Fallon driving as East as I could go. It would be fifteen hours until I reached my destination, but I felt secure in knowing that I had stayed up the night before making brilliant mix CDs for the trip, and that I would never be more than an hour away from a large cup of gas station coffee if I needed it.

With the astringents coursing through me, there was more than one occassion where I was forced to pull over and piss in the dark on the side of the highway. The first time was in Poseyville, Indiana. It was early morning and the sky was overcast with shades of ash and ochre, and delicate electric pink. I would piss again on the way back, in Kentucky, far away from any human source of light, where the stars perforated the night sky. Rural Kentucky has an excellent view of the universe. It makes you want to stand out in a field and piss forever.

Somewhere back in Indiana my CD player decided it was no longer interested in playing CDs, but would gladly eject them for me. I flipped through the radio and, several minutes later, began to panic. "Oh no... oh, God, no... they can't all be country stations..."

You can rely on most cities having at least one classic rock station, but they don't exactly coordinate their efforts, and as you drive across America you'll hear the same Top 40 hits over and over again. I'm pretty sure I got to listen to every song in Fleetwood Mac's discography, and I heard Journey's "Any Way You Want It" about six million times, which is actually seven million times too many. That song is indebted to me. It owes me one million unlistens.

Somewhere around Louisville, at 4:20 AM (Eastern time) they played some old blues songs about marijuana, followed by a reading of "The Raven" as translated into beatnik lingo. "Suddenly there came some real percussion, as of some daddy layin' down a rhythm on my pad's door."

The mountains of West Virginia were coated in a glorious autumn palette that man has yet to emulate in painting or capture on film. A heavy fog lumbered through the valleys below. This view alone was worth the drive. It could have been Middle Earth.

The mountains gave way to level ground and the pastel sensibilities of coastal cities. It was unseasonably warm, even for their latitude, and the air rushing through the open windows was exhilarating. I was nearly there. "Won't Get Fooled Again" was playing as I drove through the tunnel under the bay, and I screamed along with the music as my car burst back into daylight. Somewhere in Miami, David Caruso was either applying or removing his sunglasses.

I pulled into a parking lot and tried to take a nap, but anytime I stay up longer than twenty-four hours, my body forgets that it needs to sleep at all. So I ate dinner in a Greek restaurant with a sunday parlor ambience--dim amber lights and slow-spinning fans, with plastic jack-o-lanterns and gentle gauze ghosts roosting in the exposed silver ductwork overhead. There were several pictures of Marilyn Monroe in the men's room. For those of you who have never been in a men's room, let me tell you that it is not usual to see her there. Maybe she's really big in the East coast. I know I heard "Candle in the Wind" at least three times as I drove through the state.

I met the cast, crew, and producers before the show. They were tremendously friendly. Actors especially tend to be outgoing people--as a rule they will greet you with hugs, not handshakes, regardless of whether they've met you before.

It was an intimate black box theatre, and they brought in extra chairs as the crowd filed in. They served concessions, and I was given a beer gratis (Sam Adams Octoberfest--I highly recommend it) just before the show began. I am enjoying this trend of "playwrights drink free" nights. I believe it should extend to bars as well. It goes a long way in settling my nerves.

It was a great show. The actors, the direction, and design were all skillful and inventive. It's so fascinating to see the differences between productions. Some of them are very fundamental. I am happy that the script is legitimately open to interpretation. I believe that the whole art of performance is in the individuality of expression. Sandra, the director, told me that "not every writer thinks that way," but I think it's a credit to the production that I was able to see things that surprised me in a play that I wrote myself.

I had been waiting for the rain, which finally arrived in Act IV, when, in the play, it also rains. Shadow has had a curious history with rainstorms so far. It rained during one of the first read-throughs, and during auditions, and during the first night of the Truman production. It rained in New York during the staged reading. It rained in O'Fallon, where I was, on the opening night in Norfolk. And now again, on closing night, with me there. Why Nature has shown an interest in the play I cannot say, but I had a feeling that she wouldn't fail to spook me out again. How many coincidences make an omen?

Afterward, I spoke with the managing director, Frankie Hardin, who is also a playwright. She asked me what I liked and disliked about the production. She told me the things she liked and disliked about the script. She went on to say that "A lot of people have been talking about your play. But the one thing that absolutely everyone has said is, 'He's so young. And he wrote this. He's a writer.'" That sentiment above any other has encouraged me to devote more time to writing. I can only play the youth card for so long. The play would not be half as impressive if I were twice my age. No one wants to hear from an aspiring old playwright.

She also told me just how substantial a role serendipity had played in their decision to produce my script. "Our literary manager just happened to hand me your work on the one day when I had an afternoon to read it." I laughed. "Don't laugh," she said, "I have a stack of scripts this tall. Running a theater takes all my time. I have no time. You happen to be very lucky."

Frankie gave me a copy of VEER Magazine containg a review, which, like the one in the Virginian-Pilot, was very positive, but not thoroughly glowing. I know a lot of people say that you should never listen to the critics, but the faults they spoke of were only the things that I had been secretly dissatisfied with myself. In a way it was relieving to know that I wasn't just imagining them. I believe the play does need revision, and I believe I know exactly how and where.

I had brought a bouquet of calla lilies for the cast, which, contrary to Simon, I felt were very reasonably priced, considering their size. They gave me a copy of The Shining that they had all signed, which was very nice, and also very good for me because I haven't read it yet. They then asked me if I was coming to the cast party. I thought about it for a moment. "Well," I said, "I'm certainly not going home tonight."

The party was at the house of Jonathan, the producer and scenic designer. This was a grown-up party. Everyone was cool and we joked and talked and goofed off and ate hamburgers and drank responsibly. I got to hear about some of their show-related inside jokes--my favorite (and theirs, I think) was in using "daquelbatabs" as a euphemism for boobs, which is especially funny when said in the voice of a consternating eighty-year-old woman.

Jonathan generously offered me his guest bedroom. I slept from four AM to ten AM, and hit the road again. I made a short stop in Virginia Beach, because when the ocean is only twenty minutes away from where you're staying, you need to see the ocean before you leave. Dizzy and giddy with exhaustion, I took off my dress shoes and walked along the shore, bathing my feet in the chilly waters of the Atlantic. I think I shall never grow tired of seeing the ocean.

I made another, longer stop on the way back to visit Monticello, the home that my longtime hero Thomas Jefferson designed and lived in for many years after his retirement, because I knew I might not ever have a reason to pass through Charlottesville again. Thomas Jefferson had a nice fucking place. What's amazing to me is how many things he invented just so that he could have them in his house. The dumb-waiter, the swivel chair, self-closing doors, an early version of storm windows, efficient use of natural light, he made his own clocks for Christsakes. On top of all the other stuff he did, and, you know, he did a whole, whole lot of stuff. But this isn't a Wikipedia article. Suffice it to say that my awe and admiration for the man has only deepened.

The sun was setting as I left Charlottesville, and I was introduced to the meaning of "purple mountain's majesty," although the fruited plain must have been hidden from view.

I wasn't sure I could make it through Kentucky. I was shivering from the dark, sharp breeze and twitching from the caffeine and nicotine. My throat was so dried out by the coffee and cigarettes that I could no longer sing along to the radio, not even when "Satisfaction" came on for the third time in as many states.

I was extremely paranoid by the time I reached St. Louis. I had no idea the freeways would be so crowded at six AM. I was certain that the universe had been waiting to put me in a car crash at the most ironic moment, at the very end of my journey, when I was only a few more miles from home.

I made it into my parents' garage at seven, just as my mother was getting ready to go to work. I felt physically ill from the lack of sleep, and when I got out of the car it was hard to walk because inertia was clinging to me and my body still felt like it was moving forward.

I went into my old room. While I was gone my parents had come in and rearranged all my stuff. I guess that will always feel violating. And my cat had pissed on some of my clothes, just like she did when I was in New York, as if to say, "I own you. This proves it. You're not allowed to leave." There is no such thing as a vacation. You absolutely cannot escape the world. It will wait very patiently for you to return. I just sighed. I took a shower and went to work.

Blue Harvest

2009-10-18T22:50:00.006-05:00

I quit my job at the toy store so that I could spend more time working at the restaurant. On average I make more money there and it's a less humiliating job. I'm looking for an overnight job now. That's the only way to effectively raise my income without being in two places at once. I tried cloning myself, but then there were just two of me to feed so it kind of cancelled out the benefits of having a double. So I started making clones that only lasted twelve hours, but they kept developing existential turmoil and questioning the nature of the soul and fighting for their perceived right to exist and "ungodly experiments blah blah blah" and honestly you can only tell someone "I created you, I can destroy you" so many times before it gets tedious. But apparently I opened this whole can of morally uncertain worms, and I ended up just pulling the plug on it all. I realize now that subservient robot doubles would have been the better option all along. More details on my experiments will be available in my upcoming autobiography, This Whole Can of Morally Uncertain Worms.

It has already been optioned for a film version, to be titled Attack of the Clones. Which is funny, because there's this girl at work who--by the way, I'm not lying anymore--her name is Corellian. I didn't have to ask her if it was from Star Wars. She told me. For those of you who aren't nerds, Corellian is the demonym for Corellia, which is Han Solo's home planet. We call her Corey for short. Except for our boss, who calls her Salamander, because she makes salads. Our boss's name is Vader. He has a drink on the menu called Vader's Purple Martini, which is the restaurant business equivalent of building your own lightsaber.

What the hell was I talking about?

Right, overnights. I want to work them. I don't like that there are still hours of the day when I'm not working. I'll still have enough time for split naps. I don't want to sleep too much. I want to be exhausted. I want to feel the strain of the work I'm doing. I want evidence that I'm moving ahead.

Unfortunately, jumping to hyperspace ain't like dusting crops, boy.

That was supposed to be the end of this post but it just occurred to me, why would Luke need to dust crops, if he's a moisture farmer? Will the water not grow unless he dusts it? How does he dust moisture that is underground or in the air? And what does he dust it with? Actual dust?

Maybe there are some water-retaining alien cacti, a thousand miles from Luke's actual farm, that he sprays with space pesticides. Does he spray them from his landspeeder? Do rebel cropdusters use x-wings while imperial cropdusters use tie-fighters?

And why is there a "harvest time" when the crop is moisture? Is the ground moister during certain months of the year? Is there a rainy season where the ground absorbs more water? And if there is a rainy season, why do they need moisture farmers? Why not collect the rain as it falls instead of farming it out of the ground?

Maybe Han doesn't know what kind of farmer Luke is, but, come on, he's from Tatooine. It's a desert planet. Take an educated guess. Or maybe he meant the comment as a general insult to farmers everywhere. But then, why do farmers anywhere in that galaxy need to dust crops? How is it that they can genetically engineer an army of perfect clones but not genetically modify space corn to be more resistant to mynocks or womprats or whatever?

This is why I need to work more. Otherwise I spend all my time trying to figure shit like this out.

Was Today Columbus Day? I Really Don't Feel Like Looking it Up.

2009-10-12T22:31:00.002-05:00

I've had a very productive day today. It's amazing what you can accomplish when you're up by noon.

A Shallot in the Park

2009-10-11T13:44:00.003-05:00

Okay. So, there's a review up for Shadow in The Virginian-Pilot. It's a newspaper with a daily circulation of about 180,000. The review is mostly very positive, which is a big, big relief. And the negative points he brings up, I think are fair. His main criticism seems to be that at times it's too draconian in its woefulness, or, in other words, it gets a little emo.

To be honest, I'm at a point now where I'm so distanced from the script that it's hard for me to see anything but the flaws. I'm my own worst critic, as the saying goes. But I have absolute faith in the professionals at the 40th, and I believe they chose my play for a reason. In fact I would be hesitant to revise it, for fear of spoiling whatever magic made the story appealing originally, because I'm not sure I can remember what that magic was. I think perhaps it does need more contrast, but I would have to be very careful not to tone it down or cut the balls off it, because, after all, it's not A Ray of Light in the Dark or A Glimmer of Hope in the Dark or A Quantum of Solace in the Dark. It is a woeful play. Maybe I'll write a gleeful play sometime and that'll balance things out.

My only criticism of the critic comes from when he quoted me from memory, and even then, only in the first instance, and only because he misquoted me in such a way that the line no longer makes sense. Suffering is not like a seed. It's supposed to be sieve. Does my play make so little sense that you can play Mad-Libs with it? Suffering is like a kumquat. It's a filter. You pile-drive a human soul through it, and you get a marshmallow Ferrari.

Joking aside, it's a weird feeling that someone is writing about me. I've never been reviewed before. I'm glad they had some nice things to say.

Let's Get the Hell into Dodge

2009-10-07T02:36:00.006-05:00

I realized recently that this is the first real break I've had from theatre in nearly ten years. I started in earnest in 2000 and it was always one show right after another; as soon as one play closed, there were auditions the next day. And if I wasn't acting I was props master, sound designer, house manager, anything to stay involved. And now it's been, I think, about seven months since Lone Star. This break has not been refreshing. It has made me realize that I never want to have a break from theatre. Which I suppose means that on some level I need it.

My parents still get letters addressed to me, from the community theater where I would act whenever I wasn't involved with a production in high school. When I came back to O'Fallon, I decided I wouldn't audition for any pro bono roles, because I need to be making money, and that's how I need to be spending my time. I shouldn't have even read the letter, but I did, and they're doing Buried Child. I wasn't sure I had it in me to resist the opportunity to be a part of that phenomenal play.

Agonize, rinse, repeat. I never got anywhere near a conclusion, but I did make a list of pros and cons. Ultimately, what it came down to was a coin toss, half an hour before the auditions started. Heads I go, tails I don't. It came up heads.

Mentally, I cycled through my hundred sound excuses. "Best two out of three," I said.

Heads again.

"Three out of five."

Heads.

I found myself in the bathroom, brushing my teeth, putting on nicer clothes for the audition. I shouldn't be doing this. I flipped again, for four out of seven.

Heads.

I was driving to the theater. I still remembered the way. If this turned out to be a mistake, I wouldn't even have the excuse of saying that I thought it was a good idea at the time. I would only have "My money told me to. Repeatedly." I got out of the car. "Five out of nine?" I pleaded.

Heads.

Whatever electromagnetic force was controlling my quarter was also propelling me into the arts building. It smelled just as I remembered. Faint plaster and carpet shampoo. There were pictures of past productions hanging in the lobby.

The director asked, "Have I worked with you before?"

"Not as a director. But I used to do shows here, about five years ago."

"Of course. You were Hysterium in Forum. My hair was longer then. Who are you reading for?"

"Well, I thought I should read for Vince. He's closest to my age."

"Do you have experience in playing older characters?"

"As a matter of fact..."

From that point forward I read for Dodge. I got to read with Greg, an old friend, a few times. Afterward he came up and put his arm around my shoulder. Said it was good to see me. I put my arm around his waist (he's very tall), and I told him, "It's great to be doing this again with you." Which was true.

It is significant that this play is Buried Child, a play about a man trying to reclaim his past. A play that insists that progress and tradition are irreconcilible. I am terrified that I will fall back into my own past, and be trapped there, like Dodge. The past can be seductive. I am afraid of it because it may preclude me from my future. But I am also terrified of my future.

I was surprised by how young most of the other auditioners were. That's something that has changed. Where was the rest of the old gang, I asked.

"So-and-so's getting married. Whatserface is moving. Jane Doe had a kid."

So the past had moved on without me. This was just the building. In a way it was a relief.

This is a challenging role in a good play, and I'm happy to be a part of it, and I'm happy to give it my time. I will make time for it. Because I'm starting to feel creative again, and that's worth making sacrifices for. And if the universe works the way I think it does, after getting this role, and the second job, a third good thing should happen to me soon.

Lotus Eaters

2009-10-04T20:38:00.006-05:00

I had one of those dreams the other day where you dream that you've woken up but you haven't really. Only it was peculiar because it happened five times, in a row, and each time the world I'd woken up into was weirder and more terrifying than the one before. It was a dream within a dream within a dream within a dream within a dream within a dream. On the sixth time, when I finally woke up into our reality, I was physically shaking and gripping the sheets, under the spell of sleep paralysis, conscious but unable to move. I managed to look at my clock, and saw that it was nine A.M. I had only been asleep for two hours. I was still only half-awake, and the spectre of sleep was trying to pull me back in, and I was fighting it, because I knew that if I started dreaming again, I'd never manage to wake up with any certainty.

At some point during work today, I became unsure of whether or not I was dreaming. I dream about work a lot. And when I'm at work, my brain goes into a sort of dream-state; I'm sure it's emitting alpha waves, at least.

I wanted to wake up into Dream #3. No.s 1, 2, 4, and 5 were terrible, but 3 was okay. I'd hate to see 7.

My sleeping schedule is like this: I get two or three hours of sleep before work, and then, when I get back, well, I'd be exhausted anyway, so this way I can take a three-hour nap without feeling guilty. And then I've got the whole night to myself. To do whatever. I wish I was doing more. I have time.

When I don't have work, I'll sometimes drive out to a parking lot, just to get out of the house, and sit there smoking and listening to the radio and watching the people go buy. If I get hungry, I'll go and get a can of Spaghetti-O's for eighty-eight cents and eat it in the car. I have to be careful, though, because last time I also bought some art supplies and I shouldn't have done so.

I feel I should be doing something more creative with my time, but I'm doggedly uninspired, and I don't have more than half a heart to do anything. Mostly I make CD's to take in the car because I'm sick of the radio. But sometimes I take my sketchbook with me too.

I have always hated sleep. But lately I find myself looking forward to it, because I either can't, or can't bring myself, to do anything useful, so I'm bored with myself and with consciousness. I feel like I'm being dragged back to sleep all the time. Where is my drive to escape? I couldn't have given it up easily. This is dangerous. I must not become complacent.

I Want to Be a Guinea Pig

2009-10-02T23:13:00.005-05:00

I found an advertisement for a research study on clinical depression, offering five thousand dollars to participants. You bet I called them. They said, "We love your height and weight, you're on the right medication, your age is perfect..." I've never felt so qualified for anything in my life. So they gave me a time and an address, and I went into this hospital and pissed in a cup, and they asked to see my drugs. They noticed that the bottle was from 2008, and they asked me how long I'd been taking them. I told them I'd been off it for a while, but started back up a month ago (which is true if you multiply days by ten like I do). I don't know why I didn't think to lie harder and say I'd brought an old bottle by mistake, or something, but they probably would have found out eventually. At any rate, they told me I wasn't eligible for the study because I hadn't been taking it long enough and they had no way of documenting my allegience to the drug they were studying. And I was so, so disappointed. I asked them to put me in their database for future studies, and told them to enjoy my urine.

Five thousand dollars is what I would make working two jobs for five months. And they were prepared to just give it to me. With that much, I could go anywhere, provided I could get a job lined up for me there. I think I'll try to look for more medical studies. For that kind of money I'm willing to go into seizures or start seeing ghosts or whatever. When life gives you lemons, you make lemonade, and when life gives you shit, you can maybe still make some kind of shit-ade or something and get someone to pay you to drink it on a dare.

The Theatre is Undead

2009-09-30T23:34:00.015-05:00

There are posters for the show in Virginia:

I think they're pretty good. I love posters. I always have. And I think the only thing that could be better than a poster is a poster with your name on it somewhere.

I got word that the 40th Street Stage is going to be closing, and that my script will become their final production. It's certainly an honor, but at the same time it's sad that their theater has to shut down. They have a history of producing new works, which is good and noble and important because new works and experimental works are what keep the Theatre relevant, and relevancy is what keeps Theatre alive.

I'm planning a trip to see the production, because I want to show my support. Plus, you know, how often does this happen? It's looking more and more like this could be the last time it happens. Plus plus, I searched the route on Google maps, and Virginia Beach, Monticello, and the Edgar Allan Poe Museum are kind of on the way, so I might check a couple things off my To Do Before I Die list on the drive back.

Balagan or Barkoman or Something

2009-09-29T14:27:00.008-05:00

"It's his brother's birthday, really, but I don't want him to feel left out. I want to get him...what are those things, that transform into other things?"

"Transformers."

"Which one is the one that he'll like? 'Cause, you know, his momma doesn't know."

"This one's a Megatron. He's the main villain. If I were four years old I would love this."

"This just looks like a plane."

"Well...they're, they're robots in disguise."

I stopped short of singing the theme song for her, but after a moment I did go on to insist that they are in fact "more than meets the eye." I do all my best work in the action figures. I suppose I've taken my knowledge of geeky pop culture for granted, and I certainly never thought it would be useful in any way. Then again, I never expected that I would ever have to explain to someone who Darth Vader is, or that, no, Superman does not come in any other colors.

I mean, that's easy stuff. (Please tell me that's easy stuff.)

What's funny to me is how many people come into the store having no clue about what their kids are interested in. They give me an age and a gender and I do the best I can. If they know anything, it's just the name of the thing their kid asked for, and they consistently make a point of mispronouncing it, and letting on that they don't know anything about it, as if to say, "I dunno, apparently I have a kid or something, and this is supposed to be something they like, I guess. I wouldn't know; I'm a grown-up. Honest, I'm not buying this for me." The way people act so embarassed and evasive, you'd think I was working at an adult toy store. They want to buy something and be done with it, as though the thing alone will make their kid happy, like it's an extension of the pacifier. I wonder why so many people seem to take an active disinterest in the things their kids enjoy. Instead of complaining that you can't understand their obsession with the hippest new Pokemon knock-off, ask them about it. Is there any show so complicated that only children can understand it? Even if it is Japanese? Ask them what they like about it. Maybe even watch an episode with them. Maybe it is crap, but it isn't about what you're watching, it's about who you're watching it with. And you can show them the things you liked when you were a kid, too! Looney Tunes are still funny, I promise, and in an age when you can listen to seventy-year-old radio shows like Buck Rogers and The Lone Ranger online for free, how hard is it to pick up The Muppet Show on DVD? You know, share that with them. The best feeling in the world is discovery, and the second-best feeling is re-discovery. And in learning about each others' interests, you'll learn something about each other. Cherish that. Because when your child becomes a teenager, you're not going to know anything about them anymore.

The other day, my father was watching a film on cable, and I made some comment about it. He said, "Oh. I didn't know you watched movies."

I know I write about work a lot, but that's most of what I've got going on right now.

Dad told me about a pub near the house that was going to open soon, and might be hiring. I walk by there almost every night on my way to buy cigarettes, but he's the one that noticed it. I applied, and it turned out to be the easiest interview of my life. So I've finally got my second job now, as a waiter, with opportunities for career advancement (to bartender).

As long as I keep the toys out of the bar and the booze out of the toy store, I should be okay.

2009-09-21T22:51:00.002-05:00

I looked up The Jazz Singer on YouTube--I don't know what made me think to do it--and the video had this message:

NOTICE: This video contains an audio track that has not been authorized by WMG. The audio has been disabled.

Little Hamster Things or Something

2009-09-14T02:11:00.004-05:00

Sometimes when I'm at work, I find reasons to go by the front of store displays just so that I can walk past the Beatles video game demo screen and listen to the sample song snippits. I get excited if I find a Koosh ball in the bike section because I know I'll get to hear three seconds of Paperback Writer on my way to put it back. I always try to find little things to make jobs enjoyable.

The store doesn't play music generally. Some department stores do and some don't. I don't know why. If I walk into a clothing store, and it's silent, I get a sense of dread, but if I hear music in a Wal-Mart I wonder if there's some national holiday that I'm forgetting.

There are a lot of things that make my job enjoyable, actually. For instance, I'm learning more about human nature. Zhu Zhu Pets are the big thing right now. Every hour on the hour someone asks me where they can find "these little fake hamster things or something." We're always out of them. I've been working there almost a month and I've never seen one, only the empty shelves marked "limit two per customer." I've never seen one and I work in a place where I see unicorns on a daily basis. The customers tell me they've looked in every store and they can't find any. There is absolutely no proof that these things exist, but people believe in them unconditionally because they saw one on television. If ever anyone wanted to conduct the world's most kid-friendly Orwellian conspiracy, it would not be hard.

I'm also finding myself in a wonderland of that's-what-she-said jokes, although I have no one to share them with. All the products with names like "Sensory Balls" and slogans like "Try Me--I'm Posable!" are going to waste.

There are some minor downsides, too, of course. I am starting to develop symptoms of:
--A psychosomatic allergy to glitter
--An appreciation for Disney princesses that is unhealthy, weird, and wrong
--An irrational disdain for Spongebob that he probably doesn't deserve

But the strangest side-effect of all has been my dreams. They aren't like the actors' nightmares or waiters' nightmares that I used to get occasionally, where something goes terribly wrong and it's not my fault because how was I supposed to know the impossible could happen but I have to fix it anyway. No, these are just me, straightening shelves, helping people find things, over and over again, as soon as I shut my eyes. I haven't been dreaming about any other subject. I worry that it might be a terrible thing that my dreams have become mundane.

But I should also say that everyone who works there seems really nice.

I've been thinking about what I'm going to do once I've finally saved up enough money to try to move again. It occurred to me that, whether I move to Seattle or New York or L.A., I'll probably be doing the exact same thing I'm doing now. Just working and spending and trying to write or act. I may live my whole life through and never get the chance to do the things that make life worth living to me. Am I entitled to the life I want to live, or do I just think that because I'm an American?

You see, I went to an audition for a paid acting job in Saint Louis. I mumbled, my physicality was non-existant, I had no energy, and no control. I can't act unless I'm on my medication. It's a long, intimate explanation, and I'm not going into it here. What I'm getting at is that I've been off it for a while, because I wasn't expecting any acting opportunities, and that's the only reason I take it, because I'm strong enough to deal with all the other shit. I'm going solo because I'm trying to prove to myself that I can rely on myself. And I can, but not for much. It's clear to me now that I can't be myself and the person I want to be. To live as I was made, and never accomplish my ambitions, would be to live a life with truth, but no meaning. To chemically "correct" my mind in order to be able to pursue my goals would be to live a life that is meaningful, but technically untrue.

All I can say, and think, is that I would trade everything I am and everything I have ever done to be the inventor of the Zhu Zhu Pet. And I do mean that.

45 Links Is a Multiple Of

2009-09-09T19:13:00.005-05:00

I made a joke about District 9 the other day and I am making the same joke today. Because I am thinking about seeing what I'm hoping is a wacky animated reboot of District 9, called 9, and I am wondering why you would open a movie called 9 on 9/9/09 and have the showing at 8:25.

Here is the joke: I was thinking about seeing 9, but I don't think I will because I missed 1, Two, Three, 4, 5ive, Six, Se7en, 8, and 8 1/2.

Maybe I will catch the District 9 musical, called Nine, which is coming out later this year. Failing that, I will probably rent either 9, Nine, Nine, Nine, Nine, or Nine, or of course there's always Nine 1/2 Weeks, Nine Months, and Nine to Five, but I'm really in the mood for something more like Nine Lives, The Nine Lives of Fritz the Cat, The Nine Lives of Tomas Katz, Nine Lives, Nine Lives, Nine Lives, Nine Lives of Alice Martineau, Life Times Nine, Nine Lives (The Eternal Moment of Now), The Man with Nine Lives, Nine Lives Are Not Enough, Catwoman: Nine Lives, Crusty Demons: Nine Lives, The Nine Lives of Marion Barry, Two Days Nine Lives, His Nine Lives, Nine Lives, Nine Lives, A Cat's Nine Lives, The Cat's Nine Lives, The Nine Lives of a Cat, or even Tillie of the Nine Lives. Or maybe I'll just wait until Nine Lives comes out.

Be careful when naming your movie.

The Beatles: Rock Band also comes out today. Get it?

Spider-Mouse

2009-09-04T03:52:00.006-05:00

This is old news now, I guess, but I'm really unhappy that Disney is buying Marvel.

I think that Disney has made and continues to make the finest animated stories, but I can count on an amputated hand the number of live-action Disney movies that are good.

I think about the Marvel movies that have come out so far. Think about all the things that make the X-Men franchise interesting, for example. The heavy-handed simile for the gay community "well...have you tried not being a mutant?"; the ideological parallels between Professor X and Magneto, and Martin Luther King and Malcolm X; the holocaust survivor fighting back against a new era of racial intolerance; and of course the partial nudity--would you find those in a Disney film? Or would it be about a group of tweenagers that form mutant power-based cliques but, in the end, learn something about each other, and, as a result, togetherness? And will Rogue learn how to be beautiful in time for prom?

Their casting machine is also an issue. I don't want to know which superhero Zach Efron would be.

Five'll get you ten it's Angel.

The transition won't be an immediate slap in the face, since the studios that have been producing Marvel movies until now still own their respective franchises. Sony still owns Spidey, for example, for now. And I've always thought that Sam Raimi's Spider-Man was a little Disneyesque, which is in keeping with the character. He's whimsical. He makes puns. But, as much as I enjoy Spidey, and Tobey, and Raimi, et al, wouldn't I feel emasculated for seeing--and what's worse, enjoying--a Disney film?

With all the deconstructivist superhero film and literature that has surfaced, from Watchmen to Mystery Men, it's hard not to approach the entire genre with at least a modicum of irony. We can no longer take these characters at face value. They can either be self-conscious, as in the re-booted Batman franchise, or tongue-in-cheek, campy fun, like Spider-Man. Ang Lee's self-serious outing was a colossal failure. Not even kids will buy that gamma radiation turns you into an incredible hulk anymore. I asked one. The era where we "will believe a man can fly" has passed. A superhero film has to either embrace its absurdity, or pretend to not be a superhero film. And Disney is not known for making films to be taken ironically. They tell stories honestly. While other studios are making fun of fairy tales (yes, there is going to be a Shrek 4), Disney is still making fairy tales.

Marvel has always been DC Comics' goofy, fun-loving little brother. The question is how much sugar you can coat a story with before we have to conclude that, yes, comic books are just for kids again.

With great power comes gr... FOUR BILLION DOLLARS??? POWERS SOLD!

Child's Play

2009-08-31T02:58:00.003-05:00

First day of work at the new job. It was a little overwhelming, but then, that's the first day of anything, isn't it? The only thing I'm worried about is selling the extra stuff, like the little rewards cards and things. That's the biggest part of my job, actually. And I'm all about helping people find stuff--that feels good--but it's hard for me to go up to a stranger and convince them that they need something. But I'll get used to it.

What I will never get used to are those motion-activated cats and dogs and babies. They are going to startle the shit out of me everytime I walk by.

But I Spent All Afternoon on This Thing!

2009-08-28T00:14:00.004-05:00

No one around. The cat and I sleep away most of the daylight. I smoke a lot of cigarettes and play a lot of fetch. There are three frogs who come and hang out with me on the driveway every night. And there are at least six spiders in the front yard (arboreal orb weavers--they seem to follow me around).

What I'm saying is that I haven't been able to make a that's-what-she-said joke in weeks.

The arboreal orb weaver is unusual among spiders in that it destroys its own web each night. So, yeah, we're friends.

I like to think that the webs get a little better each time.

Good Morning, and In Case I Don't See You, Good Afternoon, Good Evening, and Good Night

2009-08-22T16:58:00.005-05:00

My parents have Foxnews on all day, so I hear it whenever I'm online at their computer, like I am now. They just had a segment a minute ago about how there are more people than ever applying to be game show contestants because they believe they have a better chance of getting on a game show than getting a job. If they're just fearmongering like a lot of people say they are then they're doing a very good job of it.

I have a job, yes, but they haven't given me any hours yet. Maybe next week, they said.

At any rate one job won't be enough. Certainly not a part-time job. Everybody needs all the hours they can get.

Last night and all through today I found myself wishing I was blind, or deaf, or had some similar disability, so that I would be excused for having a hard time finding a decent job. As it is I have no excuses. That's what's hard. Knowing that I simply am not useful in any practical way. I'm still sending out applications.

I feel as though I'm trying to escape Earth's gravity. And I have to make a spaceship out of flammable, flammable money. Even if I make it out someday I might not survive.

I'm sure everybody goes through this. Except for trust-fund babies. I could have it much worse. I could be one of the aliens in District 9, which I want to see, but haven't yet, not least because apparently I missed the first eight District movies.

I had another attack of solipsism earlier today. I was out walking aimlessly and I noticed that the clouds were perfect. Normally you look at a cloud and it looks like a rabbit or a sandwich or whatever, but these didn't look like anything but clouds. And they were lined up in such an ordered pattern, and they weren't moving at all. It felt like I was in a dome, like in The Truman Show.

I wonder what my ratings are like.

Anthropomorphic Giraffe

2009-08-17T22:57:00.005-05:00

I got a job, at Toys 'R' Us. That's pretty charming, right? Working at a toy store? You can see me doing that?

It's a secure job. I don't have to worry about whether it'll be going out of business, like I did with some of the jobs I had in Kirksville. And it's definitely not something where I'll look back on my deathbed and say It was blood money... every nickel.

But one never knows.

The nature of this job is almost novelistic in its appropriateness. Like, if you were writing a novel about a young man named Jared and you wanted to symbolize his inability to grow up and make it on his own as an adult, you would set him in a toy store.

I, on the other hand, would set him in Stockholm, accepting the Nobel Prize for Pterodactyl Robotics, but that's only because I have a vested interest.

Meanwhile, there's a blurb up on the local theatre listings for Norfolk:

"In this play, we meet Simon, a man with a woman problem. Every woman he dates winds up dead in this dark and delicious new comedy by Jared Latore."

Which also sounds like it could be a promo for a sitcom directed by Wes Craven. Which I would definitely watch.

"He's a children's author! She's a corpse! Join them Friday nights 7/6c on Everybody Loves My Haunted Penis!"

Religiously.

There're also some less formal descriptions in audition listings calling it "very witty in a Mametish way and rather twisted" and having two darks before delicious. It's weird--it's like I've got this other life, which I'm not really a part of, I just read about it, where great people say great things about me to get audiences in their seats, and then I've got my real life, where I'm "between homes" and it takes me two weeks to get a job as a toy salesman. And, you know, I want to be in that other life. Because, well, it's mine, dammit. Must I aspire to be myself?

For now I'm looking for a second job, probably as a waiter or bartender or something where I can work evenings.

The show runs four weekends from October 9th through Halloween. Really exciting stuff.

Further Hungered

2009-08-14T21:54:00.004-05:00

Shaquille O'Neal was in town yesterday and I didn't know about it. He was shooting a reality T.V. program with Albert Pujols just a block from where I'm staying. Not that I would have gone to see him, anyway--you'd just think I would've heard about it.

At least now I know what those black helicopters circling the neighborhood were all about.

Also:

Dear Greg the Bull Shark,

Thank you for contacting Discovery Channel.

We sincerely appreciate you taking the time to write us. Please know that we will take your comments under advisement.

Thank you for expressing your interest in our programming.

Sincerely,
Viewer Relations
Discovery Channel

Bullsharkshit you will.

Puzzle Me This

2009-08-13T22:19:00.006-05:00

It's been a week, and I've had three interviews now, out of a dozen or so applications. No official word but I feel pretty good about at least one of them.

In the meantime I've been looking up freelance/telecommuting type stuff. I applied to be a novel-excerpt-reader for a novel-writing contest, which I think would be fun.

I also found a site that pays you to write quizzes. You know, like those Facebook quizzes I hate. The ones with titles like What Kind of Kisser Are You and Which Old School Sesame Street Character is Your Patronus. The quizzes that do your introspection for you. They come from somewhere, and that somewhere pays you eight british pounds sterling ($13 real money) for each one you write. After looking over the forms I can tell you that all the things I thought were lazy shortcuts ("oh, there's only six different outcomes," "you can kind of tell which answer is supposed to go with which superhero") are actually requirements. They're easier to mass-produce that way. Still, money is money, and I tried to write one, but, I couldn't do it. It wasn't worth the creative energy I had to put into it to make it something other than an eight pound piece of crap. And I can't willingly make something that I know is crap. Accidentally, sure, it happens all the time. And sometimes I don't realize it for a long time, if at all. But I won't do it on purpose. But I don't have much pride left and that might change.

So for now, if you want to know Which Obscure '60's Batman TV Show Villain you are, you can just figure it out yourself.

AN OPEN LETTER TO THE DISCOVERY CHANNEL FROM GREG THE BULL SHARK BY GREG THE BULL SHARK

2009-08-09T23:46:00.011-05:00

This week we present our first featured guest writer, Greg the Bull Shark, who asked me to post his open letter, which he has also e-mailed to the Discovery Channel. I have made only minor adjustments to grammar and syntax for the sake of clarity in interspecies communication.

AN OPEN LETTER TO THE DISCOVERY CHANNEL FROM GREG THE BULL SHARK BY GREG THE BULL SHARK

DEAR DISCOVERY CHANNEL!

MY NAME IS GREG THE BULL SHARK AND I AM A SHARK AND I WOULD LIKE TO COMMEND YOUR STATION FOR ITS CONTINUED TRADITION OF EXCELLENCE IN MAKING HOME MOVIES OF ME AND MY FRIENDS AND HOW I EAT THEM. HOWEVER I AM SAD (SAD IS THE SHARK WORD FOR HUNGRY) TO SAY THAT I WAS VERY DISAPPOINTED (HUNGRY) IN THIS YEAR'S PRESENTATION OF SHARKWEEK, WHICH I FOUND HUNGERINGLY SHARK-DEFICIENT.

I AM A GODDAMNED HERO FOR COMPOSING THIS OPEN LETTER TO THE DISCOVERY CHANNEL FROM GREG THE BULL SHARK BECAUSE IT WAS VERY DIFFICULT BECAUSE I AM A BULL SHARK I CANNOT EMPHASIZE THAT ENOUGH.

BEING AN ELASMOBRANCH I AM ABLE TO TOLERATE FRESHWATER AT THE EXPENSE OF PRODUCING TWENTY TIMES MORE URINE THAN NORMAL. THIS BADASS BUT UNFUN SUPERPOWER ALLOWED ME TO SWIM UPRIVER UNTIL MY AMPULLAE OF LORENZINI (HUMAN TERM FOR ELECTRIC SHARK RADAR) FOUND A TRENDY WATERFRONT CYBERCAFÉ, WHERE UNFORTUNATELY I ATE EVERYONE I'M NOT SORRY. ALSO I HAD TO TYPE WITH FINS. ALSO I HAD TO MAKE FREQUENT WATER BREAKS. AND ALSO I CAN NEVER STOP MOVING OR I WILL DIE.

NEEDLESS TO SAY YOUR SPELL CHECK HAS BEEN AN INVALUABLE AND TIME-SAVING TOOL.

MY FELLOW SHARKS AND I HAVE THREE MAIN REASONS WHY YOU CAN SUCK OUR CLASPERS:

SHARKING FIRSTLY, WE ARE HUNGERED BY YOUR DECISION TO AIR PAID PROGRAMMING RATHER THAN SHARK PROGRAMMING DURING THE EARLY MORNING HOURS. WE REQUIRE A FULL TWENTY-FOUR HOURS OF SHARK PROGRAMMING BECAUSE SHARKS DO NOT SLEEP.

EVER.

NORMALLY WE ARE VERY TOLERANT OF INFOMERCIALS. YOU WILL NOTICE THAT WE ONLY VERY GINGERLY ATTACKED ANTHONY SULLIVAN WHILE HE TESTED A SHARK-PROOF SUIT DURING AN EPISODE OF THE DISCOVERY CHANNEL ORIGINAL SERIES
"PITCHMEN." WE RESTRAINED OURSELVES EVEN WHEN BILLY MAYS BEGAN CHUMMING THE WATER, AND THIS IS ONLY PARTIALLY BECAUSE WE WERE SAVING ROOM FOR BILLY MAYS (R.I.P.).

BUT SHARKWEEK IS OUR TERRITORY. AND WHEN YOU ARE IN OUR TERRITORY YOU ARE FOOD WE EAT YOU WE ARE SHARKS, WE'RE FUCKIN' SHARKS, WE'RE SHARKS.

WHICH IS WHY WE ARE ALSO HUNGRY THAT YOU TOOK BREAKS DURING SHARKWEEK TO AIR YOUR ALREADY HIGHEST-RATING SHOWS, SUCH AS "THE COLONY," "OVERHAULIN'," AND "CASH CAB." THE FACT THAT SPIELBERG'S JAWS WAS ONE OF THE CASH CAB ANSWERS DOES NOT EXCUSE YOU.

YOU USED TO DO SHARK-THEMED EPISODES OF YOUR REGULAR PROGRAMS. IS YOUR HUMAN ECONOMY SO BAD THAT YOU MUST AIR SHARKLESS MATERIAL TO SUPPORT YOUR SHARK MATERIAL? DURING SHARKWEEK?

CONCERNING JAWS, WE ARE INSATIABLY HUNGERED BY THIS YEAR'S DECIDEDLY ANTI-SHARK AGENDA, BEGINNING WITH THE VERY FIRST EPISODE YOU AIRED, WHICH SUPPOSEDLY TOLD THE "TRUE STORY" THAT INSPIRED THE FILM.

FOR THE RECORD THE TRUE STORY IS THAT WE THOUGHT SHE WAS A SEAL.

YOU TRADED EXCITING SHARK FOOTAGE ABOUT MAJESTIC SHARKS FOR SHARKPISS-POOR REENACTMENTS OF FAMOUS SHARK ATTACKS, ALL WEEK LONG, IN A CLEAR ATTEMPT AT CHARACTER ASSASSINATION JUST LIKE YOU ASSASSINATED THE CHARACTER OF PRESIDENT JAWS. WORDS CANNOT EXPRESS HOW RAVENOUS THIS MAKES US.

IT IS FOOTAGE OF OUR HARD WORK THAT PUTS BLOATED WHALE CARCASSES (OR WHATEVER) ON YOUR TABLE. AS SUCH WE SUGGEST THAT YOU MAKE BETTER EFFORTS TO RESPECT THE SHARK COMMUNITY. BECAUSE WE ARE ALWAYS HUNGRY, AND SOME OF US LIVE UP TO A HUNDRED YEARS.

YOURS AQUATICALLY,
LOVE, GREG THE BULL SHARK

House It Going

2009-08-08T02:17:00.005-05:00

In the three days since I've been here, there have been arguments about everything from money, to haircuts, to how to open doors. But in spite of everything I am too grateful for their hospitality to complain.

So I've simply switched my sleeping schedule, becoming fully nocturnal, so that I can miss out on the daily battles, and have some privacy at night.

The bank took away even more of my money, until my account wouldn't cover a meal at Il Spazio. I got them to give me back $120 or so.

I've applied for about a dozen jobs so far. I've got interviews for two, coming up.

Nothing glamorous, but I am surprised they contacted me so quickly. Suprised and glad.

Ejector Seat

2009-08-06T01:18:00.003-05:00

Back in O'Fallon. I'm staying with my parents because there isn't anything else I can do. Tried talking to the bank--they still haven't gotten back to me. Try again tomorrow. I've got an account with a hundred bucks that I can't use, because my "available balance" is still negative. I can't spend a dime of my own very real money without paying them forty bucks for the privelege. What good is an account if I can't spend the money I put into it? I would be better off burying it, making a treasure map.

So, without any warning, not even to me, last night became my last night in Kirksville. I had always thought I'd be able to give that town a victorious middle finger on my way out, but somehow it defeated me. I dream of the day when I can come back in a multimillion dollar private helicopter, lean my ass out the door, and poop on city hall. A couple of other buildings too. I'm gonna need a lot of poop. It's going everywhere, and the town won't notice the difference.

It being a Tuesday, Randy convinced me to go to karaoke for a final time. It took a lot of convincing. It would have been easier not to, but it was good to see them one last time. Nobody knew I was leaving, not until I thanked them for "a very interesting five years" right before I sang "My Way" for the first, last, and only time. Everyone stood up and applauded afterward, but not for my voice, and it may always be the sweetest thing I've ever seen.

When it was over, I went to Aaron's and finished the whiskey I left at his place that one time. Thus ended my days of forgetting booze in people's houses at random and en masse.

Over the past few days, Randy has done his very best to help me in everyway possible. It is hard for me to believe that I have a friend like that. Thanks to him, and thanks to everyone, I have been feeling better. Two days ago I was so angry and so upset at my own patheticness, my own failure, that I couldn't stop shaking. Now I just have that hollow, blowsy feeling like you get after crying, only I haven't cried. I haven't cried since 2007 and I don't intend to take it up as a hobby now.

This is not the end of the world. This isn't even the end of my friendships. This stay is probably going to be a good thing for me. Certainly a temporary one. I am trying to bear a positive attitude because a negative one would destroy me. I fully believe what everyone keeps telling me: "it's okay."

Country Song

2009-08-03T16:52:00.009-05:00

This morning I picked up the guitar for the first time since I left. The high E string snapped right away. Two strings lower and I could have made a clever thong-related joke.

Afterward I packed up and moved all of my stuff into the auditorium. I'm going to sleep here until I find a place. I was hoping it wouldn't take more than a day or two. Gavin told me about some apartments in town that lease month-by-month.

When I saw my relatives in O'Fallon, some of them gave me money to help me with "my little trip out west." I told them I probably wouldn't make it there for a while. They told me to take the money anyway.

This afternoon, I tried to buy some cat litter with my debit card, and failed. I went online, and found out that the USBank started charging me overdraft fees when there was still about $150 in my account. Which meant that those dollars were sucked away pretty quickly, bringing my total below zero, where they continued to charge me overdraft fees. I had an account worth negative $566. The bank was already closed. I deposited all of the money my relatives gave me (minus the cost of one bag, cat litter), bringing my total back up to, oh, $150. Which is apparently when they start charging overdraft fees. Which means I can't use that money. Which means I have no money.

I am talking to them first thing tomorrow.

Clint told me about this online job he's doing that seems very much not like a scam, so I've got that going for me, and I'll be making a trip to Maritz tomorrow too. Or I may just have to give in and try to stay with my parents for a while. I don't know. I'm confused. This is not where I thought I would be.

This is the best time and the worst time for it to be Shark Week.

But I wouldn't be a proper Artist without a "broke and homeless" chapter of my life, and I can still play Blackbird without the E string. Lots of other songs besides.

The O'Fallon Zoological Society

2009-08-02T08:54:00.004-05:00

"How many legs does an insect have?"

"Six!"

My little cousin Sophia is staying the night here. My mom has taken the opportunity to re-embrace her philosophy of education-intensive babysitting. Sopia doesn't always remember the right answer, so I've heard the questions a lot. There's the one about the insect, and its companion-question, "How many legs does a spider have?"

"Six!"

"No. Let's count them."

There was one interruption, when they thought a junebug was attacking them. It turned out to be a moth. I killed it anyway.

I wasn't in a good mood, so I just stayed in the other room, doing research online all night. At one point, when I went to the bathroom, I found a fly had somehow trapped itself in with me. Some other somehow, it landed on its back in a puddle on the counter by the basin. It was stuck.

I observed it.

Scramble legs about fruitlessly. Rest. Repeat. Its tactics were not so different from my own. It took the insect ten minutes to scoot itself over to a corner, where it flipped and catapulted itself right onto its back again, in the same puddle. Scramble, rest, repeat. Another futile, drawn-out scurry to the corner. It tried doing little fly-sit-ups, taking breaks to dry its hind legs. It tried rolling over, too, but its wings were plastered to the surface. I wondered how long it would take the fly to run out of energy. It was not going to simply give up, and accept a slow death by starvation. It kept scrambling, and resting, and repeating, because it had nothing better to do. Then suddenly, with no leverage of any kind, it flipped itself over. It slurped up some of the water it had been lying in. It looked like it was kissing the ground. Then it used its hind legs as diminuitive windshield-wipers on its wings. It made damn sure they were dry. I watched it all because I felt like I was in a similar position. I needed to see how he got out of it. If he could.

My father told me this morning that in terms of processing power, a modern computer equates to the brain of the cockroach. I don't know how true that is, because he also said that apes are as smart as humans but lack the ability to pass knowledge on to their children, and I'm sure I've read otherwise.

Meanwhile, their new dog Heidi was eating The Autocracy of Mr. Parnham, a book by H.G. Wells that Katie gave me. It was an original edition, from 1930, one of the few books I hung onto after the Great Sale. A dog chewed up the last book Katie loaned me, Collected Ghost Stories of M.R. James, I think. A different dog, a different year. I bought her a new copy.

I like this dog mostly. I play fetch with her every time I smoke. But any species that eats books is not okay in my... in my book.