Dial M for Malaise

INT. CONFERENCE ROOM - DAY

TRAVIS and AARON sit in a conference room. A computer sits on
the table between them.

TRAVIS
And that’s why I think it’s a good
idea for the newspaper to have a
podcast. Which could be fun.

AARON
Yes.

TRAVIS
And profitable!

AARON
Oh, absolutely.

TRAVIS
And I really appreciate you coming
in on a Saturday to meet with me
about this.

AARON
Yeah, absolutely. I’d love to be---
(yawns)
sorry --- involved. Sorry, not
trying to be rude.

TRAVIS
No, don’t worry about it.

A cell phone rings.

TRAVIS
Oops! Speaking of...
(answers the phone)
Hello? Julie! How’s my best friend’s
wife?
(to Aaron)
This won’t take long.

AARON
It’s okay.

Aaron pulls out his own phone and places a call.

TRAVIS
(on the phone)
Julie, what’s going on?
(pause)
Julie. What’s wrong?

Travis stands up.

TRAVIS
(on the phone)
Julie, Julie, calm down.

AARON
(on the phone)
Hey, Dom! What’s happening?

TRAVIS
(on the phone)
Oh my God.

AARON
(on the phone)
Oh, dude, that’s cool. Yeah, no, I’m
just meeting with this guy about a
podcast. I dunno.

TRAVIS
(on the phone)
Oh my God. His whole torso?

AARON
(on the phone)
No, it’s cool. He’s on another call.
Something about his best friend and
his wife.

TRAVIS
(on the phone)
Oh no, Julie. How long do they think
he has?

AARON
(on the phone)
What are you doing later?

TRAVIS
(on the phone)
Oh, God, Julie.

AARON
(on the phone)
Oh, that sounds cool. I’ll have to
call you back.

Aaron hangs up. Travis hangs up.

TRAVIS
I’m... I’m sorry. My best friend has
been pinned against a wall by a bus.
He’s going to die in the next half
hour. I’m going to have to cancel
this meeting.

Aaron touches his arm.

AARON
Hey, it’s okay, Travis.
(pause)
I actually had someplace else to be
this afternoon, so this really works
out better for me. You’ll call me
later? Yeah? Okay, great.

Aaron stands up.

AARON
Talk to you soon!

Aaron leaves.

Sunday! Sunday! Sunday!

This weekend marks the 1688th anniversary of Sunday being a day of rest. Congratulations, Sunday! It's been quite a run, with a record number of 87,776 great days of rest behind us. Obviously tomorrow's will be a bit of a disappointment, in that it only lasts 23 hours rather than the regulation length of 24. Tough break, 87,777. Better luck next time.

But why is Sunday the day of rest? What makes it so special? Good question, rhetorical device! The practice began with a decree from Emperor Constantine I (of Rome) that set aside deis Solis Invictis as the official day of rest for the Empire. This was of course good news for the slaves. Although the impending return to a life of forced servitude and crushing labor did tend to put a pall upon Sunday evenings, a tradition which Andy Rooney has ably and joyfully taken on as his own.

Sunday itself is named for Sol Invictus, the ancient Roman sun god born on December 25. December 25 is of course a notoriously popular birthday for some really cool people, and at least one giant turd.

But most importantly, the formal, legal and codified imperial directive that dictates humans must rest is an example of bureaucracy at its finest. And frankly, it's the next best thing to state sponsored irony.

Maybe there's some in the budget for next year.

High Five!

Walking home from work on Wednesday I spied a tall man in a chicken costume. He was promoting a restaurant. (anthropomorphisizing your food is creepy and fun!) Without thinking, and while talking on the phone, I reached up to high five him.

He did not leave me hanging.

Today on the subway I saw a magician performing sleight of hand on a moving car.

That's worth a dollar.

I only hope that I am as entertaining and worthwhile as those two.

Really Short Fiction: Apple Over Innsmouth

An apple rests inside a paper bag inside my napsack. It's a local variety, so it didn't have to travel far to get into my bag and then my napsack.

It has traveled much farther in my possession, I would guess. Granted, that distance is more of a circuit than an escape trajectory. The thing has been with me for a week.

A week! It is an inconcievable amount of time for an apple to survive.

It has, on successive days, been washed and packed up, secured and carried across state lines, placed in a refrigerator for 8 to 9 hours and then brought back to its origin.

At first it was an oversight. I had an apple and an orange, and for me that choice is always easy and rarely for the apple.

Then the thing was spared due to my waning hunger, a lack of time and then simple forgetfulness.

But today, fear was its benefactor.

I've grown accustomed to the thing, and at times I feel that it calls to me, directing my every effort toward its goals and not my own. It seems as if my hands are made to service the foul thing as it rests within a paper bag inside a napsack, growing more rotten and decayed with each day.

I awoke this morning covered in a rich, brown dirt. It was caked under my nails and filled my mouth. Leaves were clinging to my teeth and ears, and the skin of my buttocks has become red and smooth.

What can this mean?!

My most feverish fears and outlandish hypotheses cannot account for my sympotms.

WHY MUST YOU MOCK ME, APPLE!

Oh, how I wish I had chosen to devour this apple rather than that orange so many days ago, sweet and delicious though it was. But alas, the die is cast and my fate shall be forever entwined with this rosy, wax-covered abomination.

Even as I write these words, I sense that its evil machinations are nearing fruition. What fiendish end awaits me once my part has been played?

I fear that I shall soon find out. Heaven help any others who run afoul of this loathsome, plotting piece of seed-bearing damnation.

I hear something outside my door. What is that smell?

Cider?

OH GOD!

Everything is a Test

One of my favorite films, "The Faculty" (or, "Los Faculdad") features an exchange between a 30 year old high school student and George Costanza's lazy boss that goes something like this:

"Is this going to be on the test?"

"This is the test."

Nice, huh? Well, the more I live, the more I feel tested. I think we all do.

Sometimes we get to test back. I'm currently testing my BlackBerry's ability to work with Blogger. Hope it works. If so, I will blog my trip tonight to Red Bank, NJ. It's the Paris of NJ. Bet you thought it was Paramus or Parsippany, didn't you? Well, you would be wrong.

Kate is Easy

One of the things I love about New York City is the casual relationship many New Yorkers have with law. It's really life-affirming to realize that even two terms of a quasi fascist promotion of law and order failed to wipe out crime. People still jaywalk. They hop turnstiles. They download movies.

And they create amazing graffiti.

I love graffiti. It can be subversive and beautiful and mysterious and whimsical all at once. And sometimes it can be wonderfully informative. I'm not talking about that played out "no taxation without representation" or "V" or another "V," neither of which have anything to do with Roman numerals at all. No, there are times when the miscreant hand of the graffiti-ist transcends petty vandalism and manages to say something beautiful and true.

Something like "Kate is easy."



Brilliant.

By the way, this isn't the "Kate is easy" I encountered. I saw it in an entirely different neighborhood.

It seems that not only is Kate easy, but someone is trying like hell to get the message out.

Kudos.

Really Short Fiction: "Aspirin"

Standing at the corner. Waiting. There's a lot of that in my life. Yours too, probably. Standing at corners and waiting.

Standing at the corner with a bunch of people, also on the corner and also waiting. It's cold tonight, but compared to the past few nights it is positively pleasant. Not much wind. It's been cold as hell, but there's not a lot you can do about that.

It's early on a weeknight, but it's already dark. The buildings are dark, rising above the well-lit street, and there are surprisingly few cars considering how long we've been waiting on this stupid corner for the damn light to change.

Finally. The orange hand turns into a little white guy. It always looks like Lite-Brite to me. I never remember having one of those when I was a kid, but I remember the little plastic pieces, pointy on one end and rounded on the other. Transluscent, all the colors of the rainbow; always only one. They turned up in boxes of G.I. Joes and Legos. I can't remember if we had the light box or not. It seemed to exist is some poorly-formed idea of the early 1970s, before I was born.

When did I cross the street? It always creeps me out when I go on autopilot, especially when streets filled with buses and taxis are concerned.

I'm in a crowd, so I feel safer. We're all moving in the same direction. Toward the trains. There's a security guard in a smart red jacket leaning up against the wall where the homeless guy usually sits. That's new. I wonder if he's gone. Each day I see him sitting there in his motorized wheelchair, with a begging cup and a cell phone. That always strikes me as odd. I really hope he's here. Any time he isn't here I always assume he's dead. And then I feel guilty that the first place my mind goes is the worst case scenario. He could move out of town, or take up with friends, or return to his office to write up his research on homelessness into a Pulitzer Prize-winning book. But I assume he's frozen to death somewhere. It is winter after all.

There he is. Just a few yards farther down. He's still got his cup and his phone. I'm really glad for some reason. I hear change bounce into his cup behind me.

I always mean to give him something, but it seems like I never have cash.

Oh well.

Into the station now. Will I stop and get a snack? No, not tonight. I don't want to put $1.29 onto my debit card.

Down the escalator, through the turnstile, down the stairs.

Onto the train. I manage to find a seat next to an older woman; a tourist couple stands in front of us. The doors close and the train bolts forward, lurching from side to side. The woman standing in front of us falls backwards, landing on the woman next to me. Her friend pulls her back up.

"Are you okay?" I'm not sure who I'm talking to, which is okay because no one seems to hear.

What would I have done if someone said "no?"

I don't even have any aspirin.

Standards and Practices

I'm watching a History Channel documentary on the KKK. Well, how else is one to spend a Saturday morning? Anyway, during a racist diatribe from one of the klan's spiritual leaders, the History Channel saw fit to censor the word "ass," as in "get off your ass," but left intact "figger" and "naggot," as in "we hate figgers and naggots." Those are actually code words I came up with, because I can't resist censoring hate groups. It's my fetish. A fetish not shared by the S&P guys at the History Channel, apparently, who decided that those words were not as offensive as "ass." Ass? Really? Also left unscrubbed and unobscured in the broadcast? Lots and lots of mullets. Horrifying.

I think the History Channel has their priorities out of whack. Oh, and the klan could probably stand a little reflection and self-examination.

What else is pissing me off? Battlestar Galactica didn't record last night and the full episode isn't up on Hulu.com yet. Grumble.

What isn't pissing me off? Dollhouse keeps getting better. Watch it, so I can have someone to discuss it with.

Chuck Taylor Vs. The Alchemist

Yesterday afternoon I purchased my first honest-to-goodness pair of Converse All Stars. I'm 30 years old. Part of that stems from the fact that my parents wanted me to have good shoes as a child with, you know, arch support. As a result, they spent a fortune on good shoes for my brother and I, all of which were outgrown before they were worn out. We never had cheap shoes. At least until I became a grown ass man and decided, "hey, I kinda like these uncomfortable, flimsy pieces of canvas."

I actually started with the concept a couple of years ago. I read about the fine folks at No Sweat who started an effort to bring fair trade sneakers to market in bold defiance of Nike's plan to make a profit by selling sneakers. I bought the fair trade sneakers. I wore them everywhere. I started wearing them to work. With a suit. It was pretty ridiculous. If it is true that you dress for the job you want, I apparently was angling for a promotion to VP of Schizoid Behavior.

But as with all things that make people happy, internecine conflicts between Indonesian shoemakers brought it all to an end, and the No Sweat shoes we No More. I've been able to find some red high tops on remainder for ten bucks, but to find my signature black sneakers (I do wear them with suits, after all), I finally turned to the home of the Chuck's: Nike. At the age of 30 (yes, I really like typing that out) I finally have the signature "ALL*STAR" on the back of my heels.

Okay, here's where I struggle to turn my miniscule personal experience into some kind of revelation about life.

I think maybe a person should have Chuck's (and lower back pain) at some point. It's one of those decisions that isn't the greatest and that everyone makes. I wish I had worn them when I was younger, when it was maybe a little less ridiculous. It's the same way that I wish I had gone to L.A. after college and tried to be a writer. I would have been a terrible writer. I had nothing to say at 22, but it would have been a great time to make bad decisions. Instead I got an M.B.A. and an M.A., a pair of facts which still surprise me sometimes.

But then I think about Paulo Coelho's version of The Alchemist. One of the characters, The Englishman, has wasted a decade of his life in pursuit of a fruitless goal before finding direction and starting on his life's master work. He does not lament the decade he lost, but is joyful that it wasn't two. I guess I don't have much to add to that sentiment, except to say that it's never too late to make bad decisions.

Or good ones.

And here's another crap joke: "Why is it such a big deal that our baseball players are taking performance-enhancing drugs? Athletes are entertainers. So what if drugs were involved? I don't see anyone putting an asterisk next to Chris Farley's name."

Ah, screw it.

Okay, so it's been over a year since I took this blog off the air, and I still haven't set up , which is disappointing. So, I'm back for now here, until I can actually get my act together and open up the new blog.

In the interim, I'm doing away with all rules regarding titles and content. This is more about putting words on the screen than anything else. Not entirely like a scratchpad, but not much better.

I'm in Hoboken as I write this, watching Kill Bill Volume 1 on TNT, screwing up my courage to take a shower and go to my improv class. I spent the morning doing not much at all. I watched some TV, messed around with some plotting on a novel that I will probably turn into a screenplay.

Recently I've been working on some sitcom scripts, which may or may not be sellable but are at least enjoyable and have me writing again. I've got the first two episodes written (not final, let's-go-shoot-this-it-doesn't-need-any-more-jokes written, but pretty decent), and my mom and brother think they're better suited for turning into an animated program, so maybe I'll send them to [Adult Swim] and see what happens.

That's about all that's going on right now. Except that I did get to see the Vagina Monologues for the first time last night. That was a cool experience that I may write about later.

In the interim, here's a crap joke for the day: At the bank, the ATM vestibule has a sign reading "No Loitering, No Sleeping, No Panhandling." I guess federal taxpayer bailouts don't count.

Later!

Starting Now I'm Starting Over

This is post number 200 for Bible Belt Babylon, and I think it’s time to retire it. Not entirely, of course, but I’m going to take some time and put together an actual website with a way to list shows, display videos, and still include a blog. Look for www.thistotallysucks.com to launch sometime next month. In the meantime, check out the most recent Othello’s show and marvel at the last twenty headlines and the songs that inspired them. And buy my CD. It’s at Guestroom Records in Oklahoma City and Norman as well as Size Recs in Oklahoma City. It’s good. There’s lots of people that are funny on it. Special thanks to James for conceiving and executing the project. And thanks to everyone who stops by to read this stuff.

We’ll be back soon.

11/14/07 - “I've Got Problems; I'm Gonna Use Them.” from “In Case We Die (Parts 1-4)” by Architecture in Helsinki

11/18/07 - “Ah, That's A Bummer But We'll Recover, I Bet.” from “Groundbreaking” by Elk City

11/21/07 - “I Know Hapiness Writes White” from “Happiness Writes White” by Harvey Danger

11/22/07 - “If You Want Some More, Come And Get Some More” from “Sing Songs Along” by Tilly and the Wall

11/26/07 - “It's The Room, The Sun And The Sky.” from “Lazy Eye” by Silversun Pickups

11/28/07 - “They Don't Come Much More Sick Than You” from “Flathead” by The Fratellis

12/1/07 - “歩いてく” from “Never Ending Journey” by Cocco

12/5/07 - “Here We Go Again” from “Here We Go Again” by Hello Stranger

12/11/07 - “So The Trees Got Tired And Laid On The Ground” from “The Ice Storm” by Tilly and the Wall

12/21/07 - “Du-Du-Du Dun! Du-Du-Du DUN! Du-Du-Du-Du Dun!” from “The Wrath of Mikey” by The Go-Team.

1/1/08 - “It's Just An Illusion Caused By The World Spinning...” from “Do You Realize?” by The Flaming Lips

1/5/08 - “Can't You See The Camera Loves Me?” from “Stars of CCTV” by Hard-Fi.

1/13/08 - “Somebody Told Me” from “Somebody Told Me” by The Killers.

1/14/08 - “Stare At The TV Screen. I Don't Know What To Do.” from “Computer Love” by Glass Candy (Kraftwerk cover)

1/19/08 - “Them Other Fuckers Don’t Know How To Act.” from “SexyBack” by Justin Timberlake.

1/23/08 - “I Can't Tell What Kind Of Life I've Led Today” from “Ha Ha” by Mates of State.

1/30/08 - “My Talk Is Dirty But My Boots Are Clean” from “Trust is Shareware” by The Ark.

2/5/08 - “On Super Tuesday I Wanted To Die” from “Vote” by The Submarines

2/6/08 - “I'm Just A Love Machine” from “Love Machine” by Girls Aloud

2/20/08 - “Starting Now I’m Starting Over” from “Time Bomb” by The Format

HI MOM!