Noisy Red Whiteness

I would love you with
The constance of the night sky,
With the even hand
Of always rising and eternal setting stars.
But that would be too easy,
And easy, I'm not allowed.

So, I love you like the even,
The unerring, the constant hum
Of the power box outside
My bedroom window.

It's less schmaltzy-fairytale-boddice-ripping-bad-promise romantic,
It's true.
But no less true.

Like that hum,
Love invades my thoughts, distracts my contemplations, interrupts my sleep and wrecks my solumnest moments.

But, it's always there,  not demanding of me, not imposing on me but reminding me of things that I'd forgotten I'd forgotten.

You should, take the time to listen.

What is it Good for (hoo) Absolutely Nothing (say it again, now)

---

An old friend of mine, we'll call him "Suit Guy" because he wore a suit all the time and that's what pretty much everyone called him, had some very strong feelings about daylight savings' time. "Antiquated," he would say, "A productivity scam from a bygone era," and "Simply an excuse for greater government interference in our lives," and "A bane to IT professionals everywhere." His reasons for chagrining DST and the associated biannual transition were so myriad and so profound that I was forced to wonder about the specifics of his childhood.

While I admired his enthusiasm, I really couldn't give a shit about his cause. He had some strong arguments and he might have eventually brought me around if he'd been a bit more even handed. After the third or fourth time he launched into his anti-DST tirade in any given week, I'd refuse to spend time with him for at least a handful of days, so put off I was by his agitation over something I considered to be at the heavy end of trivial and I was hardly the only one who felt this way.

At work today, my boss complimented me (if you can call it that) on rarely putting up a fight

I said, "I'll tighten up the formatting on this, shrink the type so that it can fit on one page."

"The UPM likes the type and the font," she replied.

"Okay, however they want it."

She thought it very zen that I never push back on these kinds of things, that, even when it means more work for me, I never make a row over the little annoyances, at the sniping on formatting, at the vagaries of scheduling and rescheduling, at the the constantly omitted add-ons, at the mercurial habits of the Above-the-Line types.

Why would I, though?

I don't slide past these minor frustrations because I'm particularly zen but rather because I think the formatting of the daily prep schedule memo isn't something worth making a fuss over. There are a number of things that I think are very much worth making a fuss over, we just haven't gotten to those things yet.

"When something worth getting worked up over comes around, I'll pick that battle at that time." I told her. "Making a stink over things that are of no real consequence only makes it harder for me to win a real fight later."

This was a lesson that I had inadvertently learned from Suit Guy. His singular* conviction over something so inconsequential to everyone else ensured that he would lose almost any other argument. He had spent all his rhetorical capital and had so inured those around him to his ire that nothing else from him had any gravitas.*

Put another way, save your ammo and don't sweat the small stuff as long as the checks clear.




* He he was also an Esperanto enthusiast. He vocally advocated the adoption of that synthetic language as a global frankish tongue. Why peddling this fundamentally good, albeit impractical, idea took a back seat to spitting venom over DST has never been clear to me.

Falling on my Head Like a New Emotion

---

Los Angeles is calling. It has been for a long time, maybe half my adult life. At times, a myriad of seductive purposes have kept me here: comfort, familiarity, finance, love. I've known better the whole time but I stayed for so many reasons that don't bear parsing, if only to spare my ego. The lamentations of friends, the admonition of confidants, the necessity of my profession's glass ceiling push me moreso westward each day.

One thing I'll miss, though, miss so, so much, when that fast approaching day comes, the rain. Right now, here in Atlanta, it's pissing down, a torrent of Biblical reckoning. The sky is open, the heavens are flashing, the tears of the assembled gods spill hostilely the brows of those brave enough to traverse.

I love it. I love it, need it, so much. I walk in the rain, always heedless, fearless, unbothered for the protection offered by the brim of my hat; I always have. All my best memories are of the rain: my childhood in perpetually precipitating England, the night of my first standing ovation, that great birthday rafting trip with the river so swollen, the first time I realized I was in love.

When you do the math, Atlanta rains one day for five. Los Angeles, for all its other glories, personal, professional and psychological, rains less than one day in twenty.

What am I to do? Killyin, First & Above, Collegecrush, Nolan-of-Arty-Hands, anyone else with an opinion, what am I to do?

I do so hear love and lust and purpose in the thunder. How do I do without?

The Words of the Prophets are Written...

---

There's a picture hanging screw in the wall of my bathroom.

I cannot, for the life, remember what used to hang there. I don't know how long it's been empty. I have a vague recollection that something used to go there but I don't remember if it was art of some kind or a functional item. I don't remember which roommate put it there or when it was taken away. I certainly don't remember if I liked it or used it.

I've been in this apartment for eight years; it's the most familiar of spaces to me so there's no surprise that some of the details go unnoticed. Habituation is a real thing. Our brains just stop paying attention to the things that we see most often. This is not a small oversight, though.

How much of my surroundings am I habitually ignoring? What else is falling beneath my notice? Is it only the familiar things, the close things that bear no thought, or am I missing something bigger? Is this the result of being here for this long? Is it that I need a change or has something more profound happened?

Most bothersome.

Don't Save Me 'Cause I Gotta Save Myself

Like I've written once or twice before, the freelance nature of my profession leads me to work in fits and starts, twelve and thirteen hours a day for months at a time, followed by weeks of unemployment while I seek out the next project. Typically, I welcome this. It's a vacation of sorts that lets me reset my psychological and spiritual mechanisms, unburdened by the stress and shimmy of a buzzing production office.

Unfortunately, the winter doldrums of film and television production often leave me unengaged for longer than I'd like and this is not at all good for me.

When I don't work for an extended period, I float. I loose my center. I become despondent. With little to fill my days but television, blogging, the occasional household chore and extremely long walks, I find myself keeping much too much of my own company. I go into and stay too deep into my own head. I worry. I obsess. I ponder my own mortality. I freak out about my negative income stream. I mull and muse on all the roads not taken. My fickle fears, my silent inadequacies and my petty jealousies make meals my excess attention. I start to really dislike myself.

This last bout of idleness has been both uncharacteristically long and particularly difficult, full of unwelcome surprises, hostile uncertainties and aimless obligations. Plans went astray. Friends turned away. I felt that I couldn't please anyone who mattered and I didn't understand what I'd done to earn the Gods' ire.

I was hired onto a new project this week. They haven't guaranteed me a slot for the run-of-show, just for the next two weeks but it doesn't matter. The gloves are back on and the challenge is afoot. I'm back where I belong, doing what I'm meant to do and all of the minutiae that is best unconsidered can be left thus.

A very dear friend, who's wisdom I trust, worries that I define myself too much by my work, that I'm too bound up in something that should be extrinsic to my sense of self. She fears that my dedication to, my obsession with my work is like an untreated disease or an addiction that will ultimately bring me low. She is probably right but, for as much weight as I give her consideration, I don't know if she understands the alternative.

I've heard that retirement is a killer, that people live longer if they have a reason to get up in the morning, if they have a job to do. I can see now how true that is in me. I'm glad to be back where I belong.

Picture's Up.

Let There Always Be Never Ending Light

---

He was subtle,

Subtle like a piano from the sky.
Subtle like an extinction impact.
Subtle like a vodka bottle to the face.
Subtle like a young Macaulay Culkin on speed.
Subtle like the 1812 fanfare.
Subtle like a Whitesnake concert.
Subtle like a mushroom cloud.
Subtle like two terrorists brawling in the street.


"You know that thing we do?"
"Where we entertain no one but ourselves?"
"Yeah, I think we're doing it right now."
"Acknowledged."



Two years to the day.

Show and Tell - Until You Go to Hell

---

Some years ago, I worked the door at a punk rock club. Eighties night was full off college douchebags. Ska night always brought a fight between Nazi skinheads and sharp skins. Boston night always had guys in newsies' caps throwing elbows at kids in Jameson shirts.

As a security guy, Goth/Industrial night was always the best. That group, of which I considered myself a member at the time, doesn't start fights. I got to spend most of those evenings chatting with the promoters and the entertainers, secure in the knowledge that I was going to break no teeth and send no one to jail that night.

Sadly, attendance at G/I night had been flagging and the head promoter was looking for a gimmick, something akin to jacket night at Turner Field or ladies' night at any shitty sports bar. But, something that would appeal to kids that luxuriated in tight vinyl and preferred their techno with a particular accent.



This is when I hearkened on "Give a Pint : Get a Pint" night, a goth-themed blood drive. Anyone who donated blood that evening would get in for free and would get a ticket for a free drink that could be redeemed on a later date.

The promoted dubbed me a genius.

Though, as he explained to me the following week, the Red Cross wouldn't sign off on the idea. Then again, can we really trust the Red Cross's judgment? These are people who won't take my blood because they're afraid that I have Mad Cow Disease.

So much for genius.