Breaks the Chain and Frees the Animal

Went to get out of the house today but couldn't decide where to go. 

I'm all executive dysfunction this afternoon. Do I clean the house? Do i clean the garage? Do I respond to the family emails that have been moldering in my inbox? Do I fix the to wonky fence planks in the backyard? Do I rearrange my closet? Do I apply to another ten job postings that aren't going to call me back? To I read another hundred pages in the slab-thick novel I started because I'd read everything else in the house? 

Do I start a YouTube Channel? Do I go back to school? Do I finally get around to burying my parents? Do I flee the country? Do I memorize the Bible? Do I take up professional poker? Do I get a tan, even though it's February? Do I staple bagels to my face and then remove them with a pitchfork? Do I teach my new dog old tricks? Do I eat some Trix? Do I turn some tricks? Do I solve the human condition? Do I set out for the New World? Do I binge watch the 007franchise, and if I do, do I include the original 'Casino Royale' or 'Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare.'? Do I learn to pray? Do I learn to hunt? Do I worry if Ethan Hunt is a better spy than James Bond? Do I do it all again?

Do I forgive myself?

Does it matter?

This Coffee Sucks

This place is as different as it ever was the same, and I think that's the point - seventies color choices, nineties music, 'oughts architecture, and tomorrow's prices, today. So many hard edges and no friendly faces. No friendly faces anywhere, not on the passers by outside, not on the distant faces of the fellow patrons lost in bluelight portals, not in the face of the barista who can't be bothered to say hello, who just stares expecting me to talk first. 

The whole world seems unfriendly these days. Real friends seem fewer while para-social friends' curated facades turn to paste. Desolate job market. K-shaped economy. It's all trickled down, hasn't it? Hustle hassle Hansel hopes the last good thing doesn't get enshittified before he becomes a late-adopter and I'm just angry all the damn time.

 

 An entire world of silent compatriots getting fucked by assholes on the hedonic treadmill.  

I can't find a parking space.

I can't find coffee cheaper than gasoline.

I can't find real wired headphones.

I can't find what you're talking about in the ToS.

I can't find a decent book, or anyone who's read a decent book in the last year, but plenty of people who'll go on about the audiobook they listened to set in the world of their favorite video game. 

I can't find a reason to be excited about anything. 

I can't find a reason for Martin to be in the Garden of Eden.*

I can't find a passable carbonara.

I can't fiend in a world without cigarettes.

I can't find the 'on' switch for the hedonic treadmill.

I can't find a way out of the morass we've all made for ourselves because we were too nice to the assholes before we realized how far their assholism could go.

I can't find a way out of the morass I've made for myself because I was too nice to my alcoholism before I realized how alcoholic I could go. 

I can't find a place where the alarmists were wrong. 

I can't find my passport.

I can't find the reason I started writing today.

I cant't cope with the word 'enshittification' not tripping the spell-check.

Maybe I'll write more tomorrow.

* No, you're not supposed to understand that part. This is about my depression, not about you.

Forty-Two Steps from the Street

I feel silly for even dwelling on it, on an attachment to a possession or a place. The people we know and the things that we do are so much more important and sentimentality over the objects and spaces is only a distraction from the real meaning of things.

I first moved into this place in my early twenties, still in my delayed junior year at University.

The space is strangely laid out, with washer and dryer in separate rooms and a floorplan that is one part railroad loft and one part one part castle-keep. Splat plaster starbursts conceal a bow in the ceiling as pronounced as the one in the slat-wood floor.

This is the place that I would leave before dawn each day for the three hour transit ride to the last place I tended bar. This is where I was on my way back to when I had the accident that almost cost me my leg. This is the porch that my upstairs neighbors accidentally set ablaze, lives saved only because of my insomnia. This is the kitchen in which I cooked dinner for every third date I've had in my adult life. This is the room in which I slept a thousand nights with the third date that stayed around for five years but never with the third date I took the knee for. This is the porch on which I've enjoyed my nightly cigar what can only be three-thousand times now. Wise Gods, has it been that long?

Eleven and a half years. I've called this place my home longer than anywhere else, longer than the cottage in England, longer than the little house in Wisconsin, longer than the suburban colonial in north Atlanta, far longer than any of the dorms or corporate rentals that followed.

The Martians of Heinlein's future history held that spaces, homes, even entire cities must be relinquished when they become psychically saturated. As the ether of all our yesterdays fills them, they must be abandoned, left uninhabited as mausoleums for memories, museums  of our personal histories.

It's nearly time for the grown up things that I've been so successful in deferring for a decade. It's time for a house, four un-shared walls, a one-line address, and all the expectations that come with it, and I don't know how to feel.

I teared up for a moment my last night under this roof, but I cannot explain to myself why.

Collect Your Courage & Collect Your Horse

---

Either the weight will get lighter, or my legs will grow stronger; it's the only way for things to be. Setting the load down is not an option. I've carried it this far, feeling it slowly accumulate mass with each new quarter of the map, with each new stage in the journey.

I've dragged friends and family and foes alike on this trip, and I've no out but up and over and through. It is my quest, my calling, my meal ticket.

It doesn't seem all that long ago that I was still moldering in that suburban coffee shop dreaming about the days that I am now living, afraid to admit that they might never come. It seems even more immediate that I stood on a rooftop amid the singular, alien, darkness of a blacked-out Manhattan, convinced that I had chosen all the wrong things, that my ambition was folly and that any weight I might take up would be only the weight of disappointment.

The load is heavy, but precious, and like a merchant on the silk road I weary not only under the weight but under the apprehensions of miscreants and ambitious comrades who would take it from me were they to see me footing falter.

And still, I keep walking.

Every day, China is closer.

Five Years to the Day

I had almost forgotten. It's been half a decade and he's not been at the forefront of my mind for some time. It's strange to think that, for a quarter of the time since I met him, he's been in the ground. No less...

Here's to Volvos
And Coffee
And Linux
And Disco
And Cyberpunk
And Dog Collars (Sometimes Candy Neclaces)
And Metal Briefcases with their Attendant Felonies
And Bananafone
And Mozart's Army
And The Future
And Darmok at Tinagra


"You know that thing that we do?"

"Where we entertain only ourselves?"

"Yeah, I think we're doing it now."

"I am comfortable with this state of affairs."

Under My Feet, The Grass is Growing

---

What am I doing here?

The walls are red and the floor is polished and the shutters are fake, nailed to the wall with no hinges to turn on.

A homeless man is asleep, sitting upright against the church wall across the lane. A yellow, sallow, fallow fellow, I presume to be sleeping because I'm not brave enough to check if he's dead.

The sun never rises high enough because it's always daytime in outer space.

Rain in the East pulls the pollen and putrid pollution out of the air; rain in the West seeps into soil and sweetens the stinking sewage, and any comments to the contrary are crass and condescending in the contemporary context.

Seriously, what am I doing here?

Who invented drop ceilings? Probably the same taste terrorist that invented drop biscuits and drop D tuning.

Strangers are running in the rain, congratulating themselves on their fortitude, as if sweating amidst drizzle was the test of one's mettle.Run in the rain on Venus and I'll be impressed.

Pico de Gallo is one millionth of one millionth of a Gallo, so I should stick with guacamole because avocados can't do math, though there may be merit to the bulk discount.

The man on the other side of the divider speaks like a robot with a hole in it's throat. A humming buzzing, retro-future sound best left to Cold War paranoia on the silver screen and to the Cylons from before the reboot. I'd put in my headphones and silence him with bubblegum pop if not for what he was saying.

Christ on a skateboard, what am I doing here?

The music is terrible. The food is worse. The company is detestable. And, it's just too damn loud.

Mealy-mouthed miscreants masticating moldering munchies always arouse my antipathy. Ah, arrogance.

I could sneak out the back, walk the long way home, going west across continental Asia, and come back for my car in a half decade or so.

There is finally an excuse for all the things I've been wanting to do but I'm sure that everyone will know that it's just an excuse and suddenly I'll be the selfish asshole that's being so so so. So what? Other than I didn't want to do any of that in the future so I'll squander my excuse for lack of an actual reason.

Whatever, I'm out of here.

I Deserve a Break Today

---

This is a strange moment. I've not had a moment like this in some time, several years, at least. The sensation is so strange I'm half wondering if I'm imagining it, half wondering if I've missed something truly substantial and that the hard back-of-head smack of my own forgetfullness is about to assault me like a mis-played tether ball. It's odd, just plain odd.

The office is quiet.

I mean the office is really quiet. The body of tasks that I'm supposed to pursue is done for the day, still an hour before my vendors on the west coast close. The shooting company is in the field, only half way through their deep-split workday, but I've gotten no panicked calls. Accounting finished early and headed home thirty minutes ago. The flights are booked and no one has called to change. Supplies and equipment, all ordered, paid for, and distributed. I haven't gotten an irate call from an agent or manager since lunchtime. All the little fires that normally vex my day seem cold and smokeless.

Old-timers, meaning anyone who's tenure in the industry precedes mine by more than fifteen years, tell me that this is how it used to be, how it's supposed to be. My disbelieving ears keep hearing that, once-upon-the-good-ol'-days, a Production Office was a languid place, occupied by just a few souls who existed only to copy Call Sheets, make Sides and proofread Production Reports. The rest of the time was spent practically idle, cracking jokes and waiting for the benchmark calls from set.

The Production Office Life [TM], as I've known it, is a potent cocktail of  money headaches, departmental neediness, bureaucratic frustration, above-the-line yelling, quiet weeping, studio bow-scraping, pounding stress, and a potent dose of an exotic herb called 'fucking-hurry,' all milled together under high pressure for fourteen hours daily, served with a side of exhaustion and garnished with the constant reminder that we're the most anemically compensated of all union departments.

Over the last twenty years, as movie-making has gotten more complex, as productions have gotten larger in scope, as studios have closed the dual fists of oversight and due diligence, and as the analog/chemical modes of working have been subsumed by the chaos of digital/virtual production, more and more work has fallen to the Production Office. While we were once, as it's told to me, simply an in-house printing shop and and record keeping service, now we are the logistical cerebellum of the film making organism, with all the associated expectations, responsibilities, pitfalls, and most of all, hours.

Not today, though. Today the world is quiet and everything is squared away. The shooting day is underway and all the paperwork is done. The muckity-mucks are out of the building and nothing is on fire. Today we get to breathe a little. It makes me nervous.

I'm going to go prep the Sides.

Smoke 'em if you got 'em.

What's the Matter, McFly? Are You CHICKEN?!

---

I don't know that I've reached the age where I get to lead my thoughts with "kids today...", but I'm going to do it, anyway.

Kids today are scardy-cats. They are cowards, absolutely yellow, the lot of them.

Neither my niece, nor her husband, both barely old enough to drink, have drivers' licenses. They're both terrified of driving. My neighbor's twin sons, fifteen next week, have never learned to ride bicycles or to swim in water deeper than they are tall. My college roommate's daughter, now nine, is petrified to leave her house without a parent in tow. I literally do not know anyone under the age of twenty that possesses the spirit of adventure, the lust for independence, or the recklessness that typified youth in any earlier generation.

I'm just barely old enough to have had an upbringing that resembled that of my baby-boom parents rather than that of my generation-me juniors. We had eight, and later sixteen-bit Nintendo, with its pixelated Marios and and bloc-art Links, but video games were not yet ubiquitous until the age of the Play-Station, which was first released when I was in college. In my particular case, it helps that my mother allowed me to own a video game system only when I reached adolescence for fear that it would turn me into a couch potato. I griped and sulked at the time but I am retroactively grateful.  

For anyone my age or older, our childhoods were spent unsupervised and outdoors. On weekends and during school breaks, children would depart their houses in the morning, form packs, and wander the neighborhood until the street lights came on, obligating us to return home. We would climb things, we would dig under other things. We would run. We would ride. We would wrestle. We would go far afield, from the quarry the next town over, past he settlers' ruins in the village park, across the river to the miniature mountain that was so good for sledding in winter and rolling-down in summer. Bicycles, skateboards, sleds, inner tubes, play swords, river swings, discarded tires, jungle gyms, and water balloons were what fun was built from. And, we did it all without helmets, pads, rubberized matting or a tether to home.

And, yes, we got hurt, often. Scrapes, cuts, bruises, bloodied noses were daily occurrences that were shrugged off, not doted upon. Occasionally, we got hurt badly. While I was lucky to have gotten though my youth with only a handful of stitches, John broke his arm when his driveway basketball hoop came out of the ground. Justin took a branch to the head while climbing a tree and had to be carted away in an ambulance for fear that he would bleed out. Kai broke his jaw when the front wheel came off his bicycle. Chuck lacerated his arm to the bone because his army knife was sharper than he realized. Josh had his stomach pumped because those weren't wild blueberries. By experiencing and witnessing these hard knocks, we developed a healthy respect for danger and the means for evaluating risk.

This is how you learn your capabilities. You climb the tree as high as you feel safe doing, and each time you climb higher. Occasionally you fall and you learn how not to fall the next time. It is the risk of injury, the reality of pain, that teaches you to navigate the physical world.

This is what leads so many young people to be afraid of mundane things. They've never put themselves in harm's way. They've never gotten hurt, nor done anything that might get them hurt. They've been indoors, playing consequence-free video games under the watchful eye of helicopter parents. On the rare occasion that they find themselves outside, they're on milquetoast ergonomic prefab playgrounds that take them no higher than the couch they would otherwise be sitting on. They've never gone without hand sanitizer, let alone without a net.

A Google Image Search for the Words "Dangerous Play" Brought up this Picture of Clancy Brown

Go Figure

 
 I'm not saying that we should be flippant or reckless with the safety of our children. Bicycle helmets are good idea. Nerf arrows and paint balls are certainly better alternatives to BB's. A cell phone in the pocket can be a lifeline, but it should not be a leash. Fireworks warrant supervision. Lawn darts* are best left in the recesses of picnic-tragedy memory. But, making childhood too safe is self defeating. Life, by its very nature, is an exercise in the application and mitigation of risk. Without the opportunity to learn that, our kids end up safe and sound, living, but not experiencing life.

So, parents everywhere, call me a hypocrite if you like. Lambast me that my opinions will change if I ever have a child; you may be right. Until then, though, I implore you, send your children outside. Shove them out the door if you must. If they won't go on their own, go with them. Climb trees, make mud pies, ride bikes. Explore ravines and paddle in the river. Play bloody murder. Scramble over the rocks and under the fallen logs. Let them see the view from high atop jungle gym and let them see how far from home they're willing to wander. Keep the soap, the band-aids and the Bactine stocked and don't fret until the street lights come on. Your kids will be better off for it.




*Those of you younger than 30 probably don't remember lawn darts. They were two-pound steel spikes with plastic fletches that you would hurl up in the air in the hopes that they would land approximately where you wanted and not on the head or through the foot of one of your playmates. Why? Because life was cheap in the Reagan years.

Death, Incarnate

The Best You Can Hope for is do Die in Your Sleep

---

I came into the tournament with the fifth-smallest stack. Out of a field of thirty-two, all of whom had spent the last four months accumulating points in the twice-weekly regular games, only four had fewer chips than I. The initial chip leader had me stacked better than eight to one. I was doomed.

Or so I thought.

I doubled up less than twenty minutes in but played too conservatively for a while and, by the time we were down to twelve, I was dangerously short stacked. I got aggressive, almost reckless for a bit but stayed in, keeping my stack at almost precisely the tournament median.

The four hand and the three hand rarely made it to the flop. It was all-in's and folds for fifteen solid minutes. I called once and put someone out. The other guy did likewise and it came down to just the two of us. Again, we took turns going all in on our hole cards and letting the other fold. I was weak-willed, I suppose, as I let a fairly substantial lead get nickle & dimed away.

Then I remembered something I once heard Doyle Brunson say in an interview, "When it's heads-up, any two cards will do."

He went all in before the flop and, our stacks almost identical, I called with King-Seven. He had pocket Queens but I caught a Seven on the flop and a King on the turn. When we counted out, I found that I had him covered by less than two percent. I had won.

Sure, it was tavern poker, a free gimick to keep patrons in the bar on slow nights. Sure, the grand prize bounty was only a hundred dollar gift card. Sure, no one but I will remember these events in six months time. The stakes don't really matter. What matters is that, on that one night, on that one occasion, I was a champion.

The truth is that, in any form of competition, there are many more losers than winners. Only a tiny fraction ever get to stand at the top of the podium in any capacity. Many people go their whole adult lives without ever having that, without ever being able to say, "Today I defeated all comers."

For what little it counts, I got to say that.

Candle & Bell

---

The  Ex-Wife gave me a book for my birthday. It's a fine, leather bound book, with thick, rough-hewn pages that were milled and pressed by hand. It's a beautiful thing, really, a joy of craftsmanship. And, it is blank. It's meant to be a journal, perhaps a scrap book or a codex for pencil sketches. I'm glad to have it.

But, I've no idea what to put in it, none whatsoever. 

I've kept a steady journal my entire adult life. It's grown to dozens of hand written volumes all neatly stashed on a shelf in my bedroom. It's been a good exercise, both for writing as a craft and living as an art form. Keeping my thoughts on paper has been good for me. I pen my missives in cheap, board-bound little diaries that I buy at Barnes & Noble for three dollars apiece. I'm much too prolific to do otherwise. 

This book, though, is special. I can't simply fill it with the mullings and chaff that overflow my other journals when they get sick of loitering between my ears. I've no skill in the visual arts; I can't draw. I could compose something especially for it, but I tend to go through so many drafts that I'll end up wanting to rewrite whatever I put in there a dozen more times.

It's such a lovely thing, such an artifact that I feel I need to do it justice with what I put into it, that I must counter the thought of its giving with the thoughts behind its use. Do I make a scrap book of it? No, she'd hate that. Perhaps I could take a stab at a more traditional diary? A store for pictures, a memoir of particular occasions, a collection of rubbings? I'm quite at the loss.

Suggestions?

The Rockets' Red Glare

---

It was early morning, not yet seven, and sixty thousand of us had roused ourselves before dawn on a bank holiday and trudged through chill and drizzle to run one of the world's largest foot races.

It was a pretty good event. The rain petered out after the first fifteen minutes. The pace groups were well distributed. The minor changes to the route were insignificant. The shirts were a better design than in years past. The volunteer staff was awesome. Sure, Piedmont park was a muddy mess, but that goes with having sixty thousand exhausted people muddle across the grass following a night of heavy precipitation.

One thing vexed me, though, and vexed me badly. And so, I have this to say to the five or so percent of participants that I hereby declare guilty:

Take your hat off, stand still and be respectful during the national anthem.


I don't care that is was raining. I certainly don't care about the state of your hair. I could give a shit that you were phyching up for a major physical challenge. It doesn't matter if you're a citizen, an alien, or a visitor. It doesn't matter how important your phone call is. I'm not saying you need to salute, put your hand on your heart, sing along, or even face the flag. I am saying that you need to be respectful: lose the hat, quit the chitchat and quit moving.

This isn't about jingoism or about misplaced nationalism. It doesn't matter whether you voted for the guy in the Oval Office. It doesn't matter if you agree with the most recent act of Congress or with a current Supreme Court decision. It is of no consequence if you object to particular statutes regarding taxation, firearms, foreign policy, capital punishment, or the legal status of the unborn. This is not about politics or creed; it's about country.

I fully understand that refusing to stand for, to uncover for or to otherwise acknowledge the National Anthem is a valid form of political protest. But, let's be honest, you're not Tommie Smith or John Carlos, you don't have the world's eye; you haven't organized with like minded individuals to accomplish targeted social and political goals. You're just a prick who thinks you're too important to take sixty seconds to pay homage to the nation that provides for you economically, enfranchises you politically, and defends you martially. You probably under tip in restaurants and talk in the theater.

I'm not proposing a law, nor any other mode of coercion to force individuals' compliance on this. This is the U.S.ofA., after all, and we hold that it's your privilege to do pretty much whatever you want, even if what you want is to be a ass. You're not any less of an ass for being allowed to be.

And, just so I've said it, if you're an American and you find yourself in another country, or in the presence of others from another country, you should pay as much homage to their national anthem as you do our own. It's just the respectful and civilized thing to do.

Play it, Jimi.

Haste Makes Movies

---

For as much as I love my job, and as much as I like to talk about it, I've gotten to the point that I don't like to talk about my work with anyone that might want to sell me something. The world at large seems to think that Hollywood is an infinite well of dollars, overflowing with cash. While we're known for some extravagances, a movie is not simply a money spigot. I can't have a conversation in a bar anymore without someone accosting me about either how to get a job, which I've covered before, or how they can they hock their particular product or service to the productions in town.

They're not wrong to do this; doing business with a film production can be very lucrative. I know a number of businesses that truly took off once they began to work with film and television productions. Be warned though, we're a hard nut to crack. Most local companies just don't have a head for how we conduct ourselves. Certain vendors just know how to play the game our way and, most of the time, those are the vendors we go with, whether or not they're the cheapest or the nicest .

All of that said, I have only two pieces of advice if you want to do business with the movie industry: be fast and be available.

Some industries have ingrained turn-around times: by close of business, twenty-four hours, three to five business days. Not with us. Call me back in the next five minutes. You need to have fast call backs. You need to have same-day service. You need to be able to deliver quotes, invoices and other documentation as soon as they are asked for. You need to be able to fix problems as quickly as they arise. We're on a mission, not a campaign and everything needs to be done right now. If I have to wait for something, more likely than not, that means that the whole show is waiting for something. Much like how we're up shit creek if certain people oversleep, we're just as bothered if I can't know in ten minutes if a certain piece of equipment, a certain location, a certain bit of documentation is available.

More often than not, it's the vendor that meets our time scales that gets our business. And, our time scale is almost always right fucking now.

Additionally, we work all hours and we need our vendors to be available at those hours. All of the professional class rental houses, all of the entertainment-centric travel agencies, all of my clearing houses, facilities managers, processing labs and freight companies have after-hours numbers where I can reach an actual person, usually, someone I know by name.

It happens on every show that I get a phone call in the middle of the night saying that the weather has turned south, that an actor has gotten ill or, sickeningly, some other vendor dropped the ball, and we can't do tomorrow's work as planned. Everything needs to be rearranged by six am; can I get the right kind of camera mount, the right kind of vehicle, the right kind of expertise in place in the next few hours?

That's pretty much it. Whether you're trying to get my show to rent your dumpsters, buy your expendables or use your underwater welding services,*  be fast, five minutes fast, have all the information at your fingertips, and be available 'round the clock. Do these things you've already got a big leg up on just about everybody else that isn't already a movie specific company.

To people like me, the most hateful words in the world are "Three to five business days."



*Yes, I've had to hire an underwater welder. That was a fun show that presented some unique challenges.

Hold me Closer, Tony Danza

---

I was never one of those music obsessed teenagers that poured over liner notes*, but there are some song lyrics that have always bugged me a little.

When Marc Cohn took his walk in Memphis, was it raining the whole time, or just when he got off the plane?

If, as told to me by Alannah Myles, Black Velvet is a new religion that will bring me to my knees, is there either a portrait of Elvis Presley or a cadre of dogs playing poker involved?

Mr. Cohen, Mr. Wainright, and Mr. Bono, has it not occurred to you that if this woman tied you to a kitchen chair, broke your throne and then cut your hair, I assume without your permission, that you might not be in the most healthy relationship?

Does Tommy think it matters if he and Gina make it or not? He seems to be kind of ambivalent about it. On the one hand, he says it doesn't make a difference but two lines later he swears that they will, in fact, make it.

Why does Billy Joel feel so much pressure from watching Sesame Street on channel 13?

Everclear wants to buy me "a new car" that is "perfect, shiny and new." Did they just run out of adjectives half way through the chorus?

What is it that Marvin Lee Aday won't do for love?

Finally, Paul Simon, please explain the entire Graceland album to me. I just don't understand what you're talking about.

Just some things I've been wondering about.


*For those of you born after 1990, we used to get music on physical media, like records, tapes and CD's. These would usually include a booklet containing information about the band, the particulars of the recording and the lyrics to the songs. It was like having your own little piece of Google.

Winter is Coming

---

It's been a mild summer in Georgia and I'm thankful for it.

The mercury has not topped one hundred degrees (38C). Normally, there's a fortnight in Georgia's high summer when the heat hits you like a blast as you exit buildings, like the whole world was made of the exhalations of diesel exhaust and the puffing from your dryer's rear vents. You sweat openly on the stroll from the door to the car. Streets are nearly deserted during the day's hottest hours.

Those who know no better will point out that most western cities, Phoenix, Albuquerque, Vegas, often top us by fifteen and twenty degrees on the hottest August days, but that old adage about wet and dry heat is not a lie (As I type this, the humidity is 91%, and it's not expected to rain today). For a third of the year, the southeast feels like a pile of wilted vegetables. From Louisiana to North Carolina, people stoop and slouch like fifty-six million deteriorating popsicles. It's hateful, oppressive.

 It's nearly done, though. The forecast indicates that the temperature will begin to fall in the next week, signaling the end of summer weather. Like an aging pole vaulter, the midday high will cease to top itself, its best showing creeping lower and lower with each pass until, some for or five months hence, it bottoms out in the forties (4-5C). Overnight lows will be below freezing. I can't wait.

I grew up in England and in the upper midwest and, despite nearly a quarter century here, I have never gotten used to the slick, sweaty, subtropical heat of the American southeast. Snow is so much more appealing than kudzu.

I'm taking my heavy coat to the cleaners. I'm going to give my long sleeve shirts a good wash to exorcise six month's of closet whiff. I'm just itching for the leaves to drop. Winter can't get here fast enough.

It's been a much colder and wetter year that usual. Maybe it will snow.

I can hope.

A Day of Ghosts

---

A dear friend of mine departed to move cross country today. We were once daily parts of each other's lives but we're not nearly that close anymore, having seen one another on only a half dozen occasions in the last year or so. Despite this I can't help but feel that there isn't a certain finality to today.

It is likely that we will never see one another again.

And so, I spend most of today thinking that, out of the corner of my eye, I see all my haven't-seen-since friends. Hey, that looks like Izzy, but she went off to be a third-world missionary a decade ago, married a UNICEF auditor and never came home. That's the same kind of car that my ex-girlfriend drove, but she totaled that car years ago. The voice chatting over my shoulder could be my favorite boss from my days in fine dining, but he got divorced, lost his citizenship, and had to move back to Switzerland when the president still had a middle initial. Passing in the street, a man has the same build, same gait, same combination of sunglasses and beaten baseball cap that were so distinctive on my college room mate, but that guy is much too young. That guy over there might be Kitten, but he turns around and I remember that Kitten has been buried and that's just someone with a similar taste in hairstyle.

There's all sorts of discourse, all manner of cultural artifacts about meeting people, about making friends and currying new relationships. There are self-help books, networking mixers, social media, gamified relationship apps for my smarter-than-I-need phone. The whole world seems crushing down with geologic force meant to press us into one another's company until all the billions are friends, though I don't know what that word would mean in such a situation.

We don't think or talk much about the people who walk out of our lives. I don't mean the people we've wronged, or been wronged by; I don't mean the people we've willfully discarded. I mean the people we've idly left behind: the coworker we never see once they've been transferred, the study buddy who falls from memory once we've graduated, the cousin we lose touch with once the family elders have passed, the moved away neighbor, the coffee shop chum, and the magnanimous lover that we just never talk to anymore.

There is no ritual, no customary set of gestures, no incantation to recognize the passing of a person out of our life, and perhaps there should be. Goodbyes are as important as hello's.

Press Close, Magnetic, Nourishing Night!

---

Two weeks since my last show ended, another week until the new one begins, and I've found myself where I so often do, given this situation.

I've gone full-on vampire.

I went to bed at ten o'clock this morning and got up at seven in the evening. I slept through the entire meaningful part of the day and I don't even feel bad about it.

I stopped being a morning person some time around my sixth birthday. I've never liked getting up early and I've never been any good at it. When I get up before noontime, I'm groggy all through the day. I'm sluggish. Everything seems oppressive and disengaging. Even my memory suffers in the bright light of day. I don't do my best work; I'm not at my most effective or alert until dusk. I'm perfectly comfortable seeing the sun come up just before I go to bed.

Sure, it takes some getting used to and it takes a certain panache at scheduling each day. I have to be sure to be up past nine in the morning so that I can accomplish those things that can only be done in the daytime: in-person banking, doctors' appointments, most shopping, auto repairs and often eating anywhere that doesn't offer "breakfast anytime." That does present its challenges, true, but so does wrestling with an alarm clock every dawn.

And so, until the next show forces me back to the diurnal,  pay no worship to the garish sun.

You Can't Win if You Don't Play

---

"Wow, something happened here, didn't it?" She asked, more of a statement, really an acknowledgement that I looked like hell. And, I did.

Only a few minutes before, I'd been in a good place. The show had finally hit a stride. The days, though still long and demanding, had become predictable. Until this week it had been ten blue bolts, two biblical plagues and at least one unfolding movie-maker nightmare each day. Nothing was going right. Balls, once confidently juggled, had fallen to the floor so that I could see which ones most resembled eggs and which fine china. I'd been exhausted, at wit's end, and for the first time in my career, I spent more than a fleeting minute wondering if I was really cut out for the job. Three weeks into photography, though, the dust devils petered out and a rhythm had finally established itself.

Finished with my work in a paltry thirteen hours, I took to the hotel gym for some long-ignored exercise. I was twenty minutes into what I had planned as a ninety minute session on the recumbent bicycle. The hills were set at maximum, my pulse had finally broken 140 and a glistening torque of perspiration encircled my neckline when I felt a hand on my shoulder. I turned and found my late-shift office counterpart standing behind me. I extracted my headphones and he said those three tiny that every man in my job fears to hear. "FedEx didn't come."

Shit. This is bad, very bad. This is the kind of terrible that I would express as a DefCon level if I could ever remember whether higher or lower was worse for DefCon kind of stuff. It was seven fifty-seven in the evening. The latest FedEx dropoff in this are was at eight-fifteen and it was twenty minutes away by car. Moreover, one of the packages was a first overnight for an Oscar-winning makeup artist who was attached to our lead actor, and for whom we'd already fucked up one major cross country shipment. It's Friday and I'm the only one who hasn't left town that knows the route.

Without a word, I dash out of the hotel gym and sprint the seven flights of stairs to my room to get my keys. I run back down the six flights of stairs to the lobby. On the last flight, I slip on ten years' accumulated slime and put my head into the un-finished cinder block wall, scraping my face and shoulder. Bleeding only slightly, I run to the parking deck, where I find my distressed colleague putting the last of the packages in my car (he knows I never lock my doors.) I crank up the engine, tailgate out beneath the retracting arm and veer into traffic. I probably average ninety miles an hour down the highway to the airport FedEx dispatch.

My car fishtails as I swerve into the lot and I screech to a halt just in front of the entrance. I arrive two minutes late but before they lock the doors. Panting, drenched in sweat, swaddled in dirty workout clothes, reeking of burnt rubber and bleeding from the face, I hand the stack of envelopes and packages to the fairy-tale monster of a woman behind the counter.

 "Wow, something happened here, didn't it?"  she says, not really expecting an answer.

 "Yes," I said, "Victory."

Infinity PLUS ONE!

---

The English language has some foibles, probably more than the majority of concurrent tongues. Our grammar is uneven, ascriptions of meaning can be arbitrary and there are oh-so-many-instances of 'that's just how you say it.' The most discerning of us, even professional linguists, have trouble with some of the minutiae of the language. I, for instance, will probably never master "Lay" and "Lie." But there's one point of English, moreover, one point of rhetoric that really apprehends my impala.

Not all words have a superlative. Their tone, their insinuation of meaning, cannot be increased through the application of adverbs or descriptive clauses and trying to do so will turn an otherwise articulate individual into a babbling yokel.

There are three such instances where I find individuals make these errors.

First are words that already connote the ends of the spectrum that cannot be surpassed. They tend to come in pairs and the generally end with the suffix "est": most/least, biggest/smallest, furthest/nearest. This is the mistake that seems to appear the least. It's almost a toddler's trope, something said by proto-lingual children who have not yet reached the conservation phase of psychological development. No less, I oh-too-often hear adults say, "That's the most dumbest thing ever." Those people are idiots.

More vexing are those people who misuse words that connote an absolute state*: unique, impossible, omnipotent, infinite**, individual, universal, etc. These ideas do not have varying degrees. These words cannot be superlatized because anything that modifies them alters their very definition. One thing cannot be more unique than another; they are each one of a kind or not.

What nettles me is hearing absolute terms coupled with superlatizing words in ways that are intellectually lazy. "She's the most unique person I know," is a non-statement. They mean "She's the most engaging, creative, memorable or the least like those around her, person that I know."

Finally, there are those places where superlatives are not strictly incorrect but where they are rhetorically clunky, the moments when the idea encapsulated in the word does not lend itself to being altered: very historical, most immense, extremely starving. Even though there's no structural error to this last set of examples, they're the ones that bother me the most.

Words are weapons. Keep them sharp and use them wisely.




* I concede that there is some metaphorical wiggle room with these terms. For instance, when referring to pre-natal development, we often say that one woman is more pregnant than another even though pregnancy is a binary state. I'm unbothered by such use, though I'd like to see someone come up with a more elegant way to express that thought.


** I understand that, when used as a strictly mathematical term, there are degrees of infinity. I'm not referring to these instances, which are very narrow in scope (which is funny given this particular word).  The folks who are going to make this mistake are not using the word in this sense. Besides, I'm not a mathematician, I'm a language harpy.

The Magic Number

---

They say the first million words are practice.*

Who 'they' are, I've never been so sure but 'they' have been responsible for every great flub in all of human history. "They're preparing for war." "They've been trying to cure cancer for a hundred years." "They've developed a handy appliance that can scramble an egg while it's still insides it's shell." "They never see it coming." I'm not sure how much stock I put in what they have to say about it.

That quip, having been quipped, I now wonder, how much have I written? And, I mean deliberately, conscientiously written. I'm discarding texts, notes, holiday cards and casual emails. How much have I written where I put any craft into the smithing of words, any muse or music? A handful of essays for minor niche publications, a dozen volumes of personal journals, hundreds of blog posts, easily a thousand pages of academic research and professional documentation and, most importantly, three aborted novels.

How many words is that?

Let's say my journals, the small hard-backed kind I've been scribbling in since I was a teenager, each 110 leaves, have space for 100 words per page. That's 22,000 words per volume, of which I've filled about one every nine months for at least fifteen years. That's 440,000 words right there.

According to my software, this blog has some 358 publish posts. That number surprises me, though I don't know whether I feel it's high or low. Taking a guess at my output on my handful of previous blogs, I feel safe eyeballing a career 500 posts of greatly varying length. A glance at a few puts my guess at a median 500 words. That's another 250,000.

Academic and professional correspondence, I can only begin to guess. I know that the stack of college papers and work documents I keep at home require a drawer almost a foot deep and it's nearly full. That's just the stuff I chose to keep. Everything I wrote my freshman and sophmore years is long since discarded and the greatest part of the words to paper for work I never think twice on. This is just the stuff I thought worthy of one day rereading. 250 words to a double-spaced page and easily four reams of paper in that drawer! Even if pithy memos make up a third of the lot, that's 350,000 words.

Dozens on dozens of false-start short stories and half completed novellas. Sheaves of scenes, character descriptions, vignettes and word studies written only for pleasure and private practice. How much? Much more than will fit in a stack of binders, perhaps 250,000 more words. And, then my first two novels, neither of which I wrote with the intention of publication. The first I wrote because I was inspired, eager and bored with the rest of my life. Although, it's too long, it might be readable, with a good dose of editing and a fiscal quarter's re-writing. The second, also indulgently long, might have a good twist of phrase or two, but I'll never offer it to be read. I wrote it because I was angry and heartbroken and too poor for therapy. Call them each 100,000.

Someone check my math: one million, four hundred and ninety-thousand words. My math is sketchy, I concede, but even give or take twenty-five percent, that still puts me well over a million words penned in my adult life. That's a lot, much more that I thought I actually had to say.

What about that last novel? That third one that I was pecking at over the winter. The one that was coming out so easily? It needs revision, certainly, everything I write does but, is it time? I don't feel ready but I don't know how much more practice is practical. What am I to do with words 1,490,001 - 1,580,000? If, as they insist that the first million words are practice, then I think I'm about done practicing and should be getting dressed for opening day.**

How's this going to turn out?



* By "they", I mean Stephen King, to whom the quote is most often attributed, but I had to feign ignorance or you would have been bereft of my world-weary wit.

** Did you think that was a sports or an art/theatre reference? Just curious. That assumption says a lot about a person.

 

Glad I Left the Swamp

---

This is a repost, but it's as true now as it was when I first wrote it.

The film, more than any other, that made me want to one day work in the movie business was the original "The Muppet Movie."

I can even remember the scene, right at the very beginning, just after Kermit is done singing "The Rainbow Connection." Dom DeLuise, lost in the swamp and beset by alligators, says to Kermit as he sits on a log in the middle of nowhere, "Singing, Telling jokes, playing the banjo, who knows, if you get your tongue fixed, you could make millions of people happy."

As Arnie, the agent, paddles away in his rowboat, Kermit muses for a moment and says aloud, "Millions of people happy?" And, the scene cuts to Kermit, riding his bicycle and on his way to the dream factory.

Kermit left the swamp, traveled across the US, gathering a band of dreamers, dodging the machinations of a murderous fast food entrepreneur and having all sorts of misadventures with the express intention of "Making millions of people happy."

It's been more than twenty-five years since I first saw that movie. Since then, I've seen it at least fifty more times. I even wrote a paper about it my senior year in film school. More than any lust for fame; which I'm not likely to get, more than any greed for riches: a losing proposition in today's media market, that one statement did more to inform and inspire my younger self to this career than any other, "To make millions of people happy."

I don't much acknowledge that ideal anymore. In the interim decades and through two different movie careers, I've become much more of a mercenary. I don't pick my shows based on their message, their artistry or what awards they might win. I pick my shows based on the rate of pay, the length of the engagement, the places I might get to travel and how much I like the UPM. Owing to the fact that my work is administrative and virtually none of my contribution actually ends up in the screen, whether or not anyone who watches or likes the movie doesn't much figure into my professional calculus.

This morning, though, I remembered what that old desire was like. I got a hint of why I got into this in the first place combined with a token to my own adult vanity, a touch of mercenary pride and the chance to "Make millions of people happy."

Weekend of April 13th, 2013, we're number one at the box office.