I Did A Stupid Thing Last Night

Here's what I did last night at The Loony Bin. It sounds like I have a lisp.
Open Mic

Look At Me, I Can Write A Melody

So, here’s the result of the filmerica video-shitting competition I mentioned. I think it turned out great. I wonder if it would have benefited from another 24 hours? Anyway, it was really cool to see people take a script I wrote and turn it into a video. I still think it would have been funnier if we had included a male prostitute with a black eye crying to his pimp, but when you write in committee you have to make concessions.

Here it is: “Foul Friendship”

And if you can't view the Quicktime file... I feel bad for you but I have no control over that shit.

Your Head Will Collapse If There’s Nothing In It

I’m losing my damn mind. And I’m very thankful for that.

It happened Saturday night, when I managed to lose my iPod twice (and as I type, I just spelled that twise, as though I were a recent transplant from 18th century London, or perhaps drunk). The iPod isn’t what is important. It could just as easily been my keys, my wallet, passport, medication, anything “important.” It just happened that it was my absent iPod that brought about this sea change.

Let me roll it back a bit. This weekend, I participated in
filmerica.com’s “72 Hour Video Shitting Competition.” They give you some parameters and then you have 72 hours to shit out a short video. If you do this, you will be forced to submit to group rule, forego sleep, eat nutritionally dubious food and spend a lot of time standing around in the heat. As any cult leader will attest, these are some pretty happy tools when it comes to breaking someone’s will. I spent the last day of the shoot in a bit of a rage, due to my lost iPod, and my unwelcome quiet time in the car. I had looked for it in every conceivable place, but I was confident that I would find it after the shoot. Not so much. By about 4:30 on Sunday afternoon, it was becoming clear to me that my iPod, much like an antisocial cat, would be found in it’s own sweet time. So I adopted a new policy of “fuckit.” And yes, that is spelled correctly.

I had emptied my book bag time and again, torn apart my bedroom twice, and rooted through garbage that had been sitting out in triple digit heat before I began to think that there were, perhaps, better ways for me to spend a Sunday afternoon. “Better ways” in this case might have involved throwing myself down the stairs for a while.

There was a huge amount of rage involved in this decision. And even as I think about it now, it still pisses me off. Why? Well, I’m not what you would consider a competitive person, in the conventional sense. Growing up, and into adulthood, I rarely give a damn about how I compare to other people. I rarely feel the need to “beat someone” at something, save for those tasty times when I can make sure a highly competitive person fails. Instead, I have spent my life competing against myself. I always think I could be a better friend, a better son, a better worker, a better student, whatever. And in this case, I realized that I had no one to blame for my situation. It was my fault, because I had not been a better, more conscientious person. I was careless with my shit, and I left myself holding the bag. It was as if the Seth of the night before, like some kind of Langolier ghost, was laughing at me while he hid a four hundred dollar bauble somewhere that I would never find. He was beating me, pwning me if you will. I could not beat him, no matter what I did, and my rage, my frustration, was his trophy. So I did the only thing I could do. I conceded the match, packed up my gear, and left the field defeated, but a better player for having learned from my failure.

I may have been reduced to listening to CDs in the car, like some damned animal, but I was at least in control of myself. And I took control of my Sunday afternoon. After all, there is an ever-increasing number of iPods in this world, but the number of Sunday afternoons I have gets smaller each week. And I’m going to try like hell not to spend any more of them fighting with myself.

Oh, and I found my iPod the next day. I’ll just say it was hidden in plain sight and leave it at that.

[and to my reader(s) in Korea: Anyong Haseo! Drop me a line sometime!]

Chou Chou Chou, Ii Kanji.

Happy VJ Day! Over 50 years ago, we ended our war with Japan and set about rebuilding them to fight communism and eventually purchase lots of flashy, but ultimately unimportant, parts of the United States. I believe it was possibly the last great Republican President, Abraham Lincoln, who said the best way to defeat your enemy is to make him your friend. Of course, that was in the primitive, dirt-faced 19th Century, before we learned that firebombing civilians and dropping atomic bombs is a pretty good way to defeat your enemy, too.

But I keep coming back to Lincoln’s words, and I think there may be some hidden meaning that we’ve been missing. What if he really mean the best way to defeat your enemy is to make him THINK you are his friend and then stab him repeatedly between the ribs as soon as he lets down his guard? I think that may be the key to victory in the GWOT (George Wanted One more Term). I call it the “21 Jump Street Strategy.” As you will recall, the detectives in 21 Jump Street did not bring down drug runners and suicidal teens through sheer brute force, but instead through infiltrating social groups at local high schools to gather evidence and intelligence that they then used to fight crime. It’s brilliant! If only we had trained professionals who knew how to infiltrate terrorist cells and gather information about nascent threats to our shores.

Fortunately the British still do that sort of thing. Sneaky, nasty spy games are how we make ourselves safer in this world. I think the days of angsty little nations picking a fight with the hope of involving the United States are over. No one wants to go toe-to-toe against us anymore. Even nations like North Korea and Iran could only hope to defend themselves against our military advances for a brief time, and perhaps make the cost in American lives so unpalatable that we back down. However, if they were to attack us... well, lots of people know how to read history books. But that doesn’t mean some asshole in an Afghani cave or a small house in Cornwall won’t get a wild hair in his ass and blow up a plane. It can happen. If someone wants it bad enough, it will happen. And it may cause some unpleasant unease, but we may have to rely upon shifty-eyed Richard Grieco types going undercover to try and stop it.

With Your Opinion Which Is Of No Consequence At All

Remember the first season of Charles In Charge? When Scott Baio was tasked with shepherding some truly dorky kids through those awkward years and Willie Aames’ character wasn’t a complete botard? That was a pretty sweet show. It made unapologetic reference to playing Dungeons and Dragons, which I’m convinced has never been cool, and became a part of mid-eighties American culture without giving in to the self-parodying tendencies that would ruin the last few years. If you were born between 1970 and 1980, and were not born in an Amish community, you remember the theme song, and probably a few episodes. But that doesn’t make it good, now does it?

I thought about that recently as I watched “The Tooth Fairy” on DVD. Let me save you some time and possible spoiler angst: it’s not a great movie. It’s not even particularly good. But it does have some memorable scenes, and a few memorable lines, my favorite of which was “What’s your dick doing over there?” It takes itself seriously, but not too seriously, and it looks beautiful. But the script is a bit weak. Okay, it kind of sucks. The story centers around a witch, in northern California of all places, who steals baby teeth and hacks kids up with an axe. Lochlyn Munroe opens a bed and breakfast in her old house, and she attempts to murder everyone who sets foot inside. Pretty standard Saturday afternoon SciFi Channel fare. The film takes some chances by putting children in danger (and yes, there are some Little Dead Rascals roaming about), but sadly not every child actor is Dakota Fanning or Haley Joel Osment. Speaking of talent, I am a huge fan of Lochlyn Munroe’s work in comedies. He is a truly standout performer in comedies. As a dramatic/action actor he is still serviceable but lacks the dynamic presence that made A Night At The Roxbury watchable.

It’s not all bad, however. As I mentioned above, the death scenes in this are topnotch. There is some real terror early on in the form of some Straw Dogs-cum-Deliverance Bubbas at a gas station, but they quickly become more comical than threatening. I would have liked to see more creepy townspeople, like in Dagon or Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Unless you’ve got Tim Curry as Pennywise, ghost stories probably won’t scare me, but the thought of some six-fingered mouth-breather out in the woods who decides to start killin folk is positively terrifying.

In the final analysis, I would not buy this movie. I would, however, watch it on cable for the blood, the brief nudity, and the message that yes, sometimes people who look, act and dress differently than the rest of us are evil and need to be burned alive.