A Few Quick Ones

I saw a homeless woman sitting on a manhole cover on the sidewalk. The odor of the fumes from the manhole didn't bother her, at least they were warm. She happily ate her meager food.

A few blocks from work there's a fire hyrant where someone wrote the words "Create Dangerously" in gold letters.

Yesterday, in the rain, a couple huddled close to each other. He held the umbrella over their heads. He was over six feet, she was close to five. Even though she was still getting wet, she seemed happy.

I get a religious feel from the Giants' stadium when it's empty. I don't like to watch baseball but I like ballparks. Maybe churches should have grass indoors, then then wouldn't feel so much like tombs.

We don't have enough statues in the city. I look at pictures of old European or Asian cities and that thought strikes me. We need a more majestic and haunted look to our cities. City planning via Tim Burton. We need more statues...if only for the sake of pigeons.

All lined up in a row

I was going to write about how I saw V for Vendetta and how the comic is better, blah, blah, blah...but I don't want to be "that guy." You know what I mean, the guy who gets angry because he goes out in his fancy new Bizarro t-shirt and people tell him, "Nice Superman shirt, dude."

Imagine the Comic Book Guy from the Simpsons, "Ahem...this my dear sir is a Bizarro shirt. Notice how the color of the shirt is purple rather than the traditional Superman blue. Also, the "S" logo is backwards." You know, the guy who thinks he's better than everyone who isn't a fanboy.

So in the effort to not be that guy, I will not be writing anything about how the movie V for Vendetta isn't as interesting as the comic book.

You're welcome.

(By the way, Bizarro is what you get when you try to clone Superman using primitive Earth science. It comes out pasty white and it says the opposite of what it means. Ergo, "Hello," is goodbye, and "Goodbye," is hello.

...yes, I'm a dork.)

I have to admit to some disappointment in the careers of certain promising, young movie directors like the Wachowskis and Bryan Singer. The Wachowski brothers made Bound, which was a promising movie, but now all they make is big budget stuff directly or indirectly based on comics. Bryan Singer made the Usual Suspects, which is one of my favorite movies. Now he's going for his THIRD comic book movie with the Superman movie.

I dunno, where did all the promising filmmakers go?

Christopher Nolan who made Memento? He made Batman Begins.

Terrific...

The King is Alive

My goal of writing a little bit here every day seems to have not worked out. C'est la vie.

It seems hard to think of new things to write about. It's not though. I can think of at least five things that would be worth writing about.

1) The strangely Zen state of mind I go into while riding the crowded L-Taraval train back home.

2) That scientists think they have discovered how to make bionic limbs that will be several times stronger that regular ones.

3) The simple pleasures of going for a walk even when your feet are killing you.

4) The possibility of theater undergoing a dramatic 21st century reimagining.

5) The joys of being a teacher's aide for a screenwriting class full of 18-year-olds who like nothing more than Sci-Fi and action.

There, five whole things I could talk about for hours and yet I've opened my Blogger account several times, written half an entry and deleted it.

It's not like I'm terribly busy either. I want to do it.

I wish I could say I've spent my time meditating on a whole new film grammar in which to express myself. Something that takes the symbolism of David Lynch and combines it with the humanistic touch of Pedro Almodovar to create a cinema that rewards repeat viewings with stories that are so multifaceted that you discover new things everytime you see it.

Mostly I've been hiding in my room, making blueprints for the unstoppable robot army I hope to unleash upon the world someday.

I've got too many brain cells for MySpace methinks...

Been on MySpace for almost a year. For the most part, I like it. It's allowed me to reconnect with people I haven't seen in ages and keep track of friends that move away.

I could chuck the rest to be honest.

I got a friend request from a girl saying, "Just checkin out ur profile, If u wanna b friends just hit me up sometime." The picture was of a reasonably cute early 20's girl wearing a tight tee shirt and sucking a frozen popcicle. Instead of appealing it was appalling to me.

The bad grammar didn't help either.

It's sad, I couldn't tell if she's a serious friend request or a stealth ad for a dating web site. I don't answer friend requests from people I don't know anyway, but once in a while I get these requests along the lines of, "U cute, me want to meet you. Nothing serious," and it makes me want to spay and neuter a huge cross section of the population on the site.

Browsing through MySpace I see too many profiles with people trying way too hard to be sexy. Welcome to MTV World, where skank is akin to Nirvana.

I miss subtlety.

Thank you "Me from Two Weeks Ago"

I hope by now you all know the story about the shoe maker and the elves that would make shoes at night to help him. The shoe maker could not make ends meet so the little buggers cobbled shoes together and voila...in the morning the guy had merchandise to sell. He'd always wonder how he would make these shoes in his sleep.

The other day at work I was asked to do something only to find I'd done it already and completely forgot about it. I've had this since I was a wee little one. I remember one time in high school I'd forgotten to do bring a book the teacher had asked us to bring only to find it hidden away in one of the many caverns in my backpack. Once I needed bus fare only to find I had put some money in a pocket of my jacket that I never check.

It's almost like I'm conspiring against myself in a good way. My sense of timing and my selective amnesia work together to bail my ass out of trouble without my knowledge.

I half expect to one day find a treasure chest full of gold with a note that says,

"Dear J,

Pay your debt, take a vacation, and when you come back, start a business.

Love, J from Three Years Ago."

The Future Blows My Mind

Arthur C. Clarke said,
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

So if you were to take a time machine to the dark ages and hand them an iPod they would worship it as a magical singing talisman way after the batteries ran out.

This, of course, after they burn you at the stake for being a witch.

Lifers

I worked as a carpet cleaner in 2000, during what I lovingly refer to as my lost year. I quit school, and had to fend for myself. A friend suggested carpet cleaning because it paid really well. He had applied and thought it'd be great if I worked there too. Only he didn't get hired and I did.

I was excited because of all the money I stood to make, and unlike everyone else working there I had no obigations to anyone but myself so all the money was profit in my head.

I knew on my first day I was going to quit. It was just a matter of when.

I hated every day of it. Waking up at 5am so I could get there at 8am. Driving all day. The actual carpet cleaning wasn't bad but it required hustle I just couldn't muster. Every day I'd be partnered with a different person. There was the wisened elder statesman of the group, who was the king of the salesmen but a poor conversationalist. He refused to drive the van at all and heaven help you if you changed the radio station. Then there were the young guys. Really great guys who married young for whatever reason and worked their asses off. It shocked me to find out one of them was two years younger than me and already had two kids.

Then there was one weird guy no one wanted to work with. I called him Odd Duck. Usually he worked alone and I can tell you that is tough work. The boss put me with him several times so he could train me. This guy had the worst interpersonal skills coupled with the best of intentions. We'd talk movies and actors and he would ask questions like, "If you were stranded in a deserted island with (ACTOR X) and there was no hope anyone coming to rescue you, would you sleep with him?"

I told him I don't answer dumb questions, but he'd press it for hours. I began to understand why he worked alone.

Once we got done early and he asked me if it would be okay for us to do one last job for the day for a family member. It was a no pay deal. I wasn't doing anything so I said yes. We drove to a little gated community (it wasn't as fancy as that name implies). We were to clean the carpet of his ex-sister-in-law's house. I didn't ask questions, it was none of my business, but I could make out the story from what they said to each other and from the things in the house itself. It was a fresh divorce, there were still pictures of the happy couple hanging on walls and in the closets neatly hung and pressed were men's shirts. By the way he kept repeating her name during conversation I sensed a hint of longing on his part. She was nice for the little time I met her, but she wasn't really with us there in the room. When we were done he said he was sorry it had taken longer than he thought and he thanked me.

A few days later Odd Duck asked me if I wanted to team up on a regular basis. That day was my second to last.

Hypno Bedhead and his Cabinet of Curiosities

"I feel as though I am in some sort of cocoon right at the moment.
What will come out of it? I don't know, but whatever it is,
I hope it has big effing teeth.
The better to bite people with."

That's my mantra for the moment. Although I don't repeat it over and over again. I write it on every little scrap of paper, cocktail napkin, post it note, etc. I do this all the time, I latch onto a phrase and write it everywhere. I open Word on my computer and I type it as big as it'll fit on the page completely and then I find the best font for it out of the 50 million I have.

This is what I do instead of writing.

When I asked my favorite screenwriting teacher if my procrastination spelled doom for my career she told me, "That's how I know you're a writer."

I'm hoping I'll be doing this instead of my usual procrastination methods. Although in my pursuit of the best looking mantra I can make I have taught myself Photoshop in record time (Word wasn't doing it for me anymore neither in amount of time wasted nor design-wise).

Any writing is better than none, right? Right?

Can't See the Forest for the Trees.

A homeless girl approached me at the train station. Her eyes were glassy and she was missing her front teeth. She looked like someone had dropped a third world orphan in the city. "Excuse me?" she said.
"No," I said.
"You don't even know what I was gonna ask."
I said to her, "You were gonna ask me for 30 cents." She looked at me, shocked, like I looked into her most private hell and drew it out for all to see.

She was so out of it she couldn't remember she'd already asked me for 30 cents not even five minutes prior. It felt like I broke something. Hearing the exact number might have been too much for her and in that moment she realized some truth she couldn't face. She went away embarrased. I hadn't meant to be mean.

This city will break your heart if you let it.

Wisdom Teeth/Little Gray Men Connection

Wisdom teeth are so called because they come so late in life. The term probably comes from the time when to be twenty-five was to be oldest bastard in the tribe. Back in the days before regular flossing and brushing, wisdom teeth came in handy in case your others rotted away. Nowadays, not so useful. Mine were coming in impacted, which in this case means my wisdom teeth were coming in sideways towards my back molars. They would keep me up at night, not with pain, but with a pressure against my back teeth.

The dentist decided to remove all my wisdom teeth at the same time, which meant putting me under. Partway through I woke up. I was still numb but I could feel people touching my mouth and I could hear them. There was a white paper sheet over my face and a bright lamp pointed right at me. The team of dentists working on me looked like shapeless white blobs and I was so zonked out I couldn’t make out what they were saying.

Then the thought struck me. This has to be how alien abduction stories began. Bright lights, unable to move, people probing you, unintelligible language…it all adds up. Some yokel out in Devil’s Rectum, Middle O’ Nowhere gets drunk out in the woods, passes out and then has flashbacks of having his wisdom teeth pulled out. Eventually it becomes local lore, and then national, and then the X-Files comes along and elevates it to cultural phenomenon.