Still the Real Deal

This is how it's done, kids.

Oh Mickie, you're so fine ...

Ok, faithful blog reader(s), here is the 5 min. video I’m sending off to the good people at On The Lot, a new reality series from Mark Burnett (Survivor, The Apprentice) and Steven Spielberg (some Jewish guy). This video is a scaled down version of the 12 min. preview of my upcoming feature film, "Love: A Documentary", with a few new clips added to the mix. The required 45-second intro was directed by my precocious new filmmaking colleague--the lovely and talented Voix. If you happen to know this hyper-talented but shy and reserved newcomer, please give her some props for her great work on a tight ($0) budget.



Alright, time to come clean. Voix is my gal pal, and she happily agreed to spend last Sunday, a very rare full day together, shooting video of me wearing silly clothes and making even sillier faces for the above latest vanity project. After that, she engaged in even more ridiculous, unwarranted grown-up behavior by spending a good part of the afternoon walking around a depressing and typically soulless gigantic Walmart in my neighborhood helping me surreptitiously videotape nearly ever corner of the store to be used as a green-screened backdrop for my over-budget and under-produced Walmart-TV film project. The fact that she spent her day off helping me, not with a "Well, you owe me one now" or "When can we do what I want?" attitude, but rather seemed to fully enjoy the whole ordeal simply because she could help me with something that was important to me and only me--well, if there's a better definition of real love I haven't found it.

I truly hope y'all have found someone just as special on this Valentine's Day.

"Annus Horibilis"

Which is a term that was famously coined by Queen Elizabeth II and is Latin for “What a bad fucking year that was”.

Not to be confused with Anus Horibilis, which is currently playing on The Spice Channel, and has it’s moments.

Anyway, this term can be used to describe the last year, which sucked ass, in my opinion.

In April of last year, I stepped on a broken glass and nearly passed out and bled to death before I could crawl to a phone. I spent the next two weeks bed-ridden, then was on crutches for a month, and then walked with a cane for another month. When I wasn’t drugged up, it usually hurt like a motherfucker.

Also, my wife and mother of my children left me, which was unpleasant.

Yes, that year was a piece of crap.

Apparently, not a great annus for most of my friends and family either, I’m finding. Just found out that my cousin, who, like myself, is 38 years-old and has two young children, is divorcing her husband, primarily because she is not a fan of his banging their live-in Russian au pair.

Word of this latest marital dissolution brings to NINE (9!) the running total of friends of mine who, like me, have gotten divorced in the last twelve months. This accounts for roughly half of my friends on the planet.

Seriously, what are the odds?

Well, having taken four courses of advanced statistics during my collegiate years, I can say with confidence that that just seems like a lot.

As with the discovery this year that the majority of my friends are in therapy, I’m starting to take this personally. So, I’m led to believe a statistically causal relationship is at play here on the order of one or more of the following:

1) Being embarrassingly inept at human relationships, I’m naturally drawn to as well as attract others with the same interpersonal affliction.

2) Just knowing me causes enough emotional and psychological upheaval that one’s very concept of long-lasting love and commitment is shaken to the core, causing one to doubt the viability of any and all sustaining human bonds.

3) Most of my friends are in their mid-thirties and it is often around this time that, following the initial excitement and novelty of getting together, then getting married, then finding a career, then maybe having kids … that we are forced to take a hard look at the reality of the rest of our lives and who we really are and what we want to be, and, well … the other person ain’t always in that picture (apologies, as I think this was once every episode of thirtysomething).

4) Long-term relationships aren’t really natural, or even sensible, and exist only when either or both parties delude themselves into buying into some romanticized ideal of “True Love” or some crap.

Ok, I’m gonna take #1 & #2 as givens.

#3: I think there’s a lot to this social construct.

#4: I don't believe this, but I've noticed that there are a new breed of books out now that all have this concept as a central thesis. Saw a television program the other day in which Kurt Vonnegut, world-renowned authority on anthropology studies, stated that marriage and coupling is unnatural--that the human specie thrives best in “packs”. Maybe there's something to his theory on some level, but have you seen Kurt Vonnegut lately? Seems like a bitter old man that probably hasn’t gotten laid in ages.

Anyway.

Discuss.

Rosebud ...

Not proud, but it happened.

Over lunch yesterday, I took my digital camera into Walmart to download all my pictures from the last year using a kiosk in their Camera Dept. I couldn't get the machine to work, so I asked the dept. manager to help me.

He couldn't get the machine to work right either, so together we had to manually select a few hundred pictures, about a third of which were photos I took for my Walmart movie last year of the inside of the same Walmart near the same dept.

As the dept. manager's expression became progressively more quizzical as we looked at more and more pictures of the inside of his own store, I slowly let out a mini-series of obnoxious rotten egg farts I had been holding in at work all morning. It felt good.

S’pose I should start blogging again.

Eh. I don’t know.

It’s becoming apparent to me that roughly 95% of my interaction with the world outside of myself is channeled via the internet, including the 50 hours I spend each week at work staring at a computer screen and corresponding with my colleagues primarily via email. When I get home, I write even more emails and interact with other human beings via MySpace, blogs, YouTube, etc., etc., when I’m not surfing the web for information on anything one can think about that might perchance pop into my head.

Is this a good thing?

A few months ago, I started seeing a blue spot through my left eye from looking at a computer monitor 16 hours a day. Since then, the spot has become less prominent as my brain has adjusted to it and essentially started ignoring it (no shit, I looked it up and this is what happens over time). In other words, my body was trying to tell me to maybe not focus all my available attention on a computer screen during all waking hours, but my brain said, “Fuck it—keep the funny video clips coming, bitch”.

Outside of the inevitable degradation of our eyesight, it seems the internet-age has wrought a somewhat more profound seismic change in the way we interact with the world: The systemic phasing out of the unmitigated experience.

I could drone on at this point about this concept, but I think you know what I’m talking about. Suffice it to say that, in retrospect, the Unibomber was quite prescient twelve years ago when he sequestered himself in a cabin in the woods and penned his rambling, alarmist manifesto about the impending emergence of an inhumane, technocratic society. He just happened to underscore his point in an unfortunate manner by bombing people he didn’t like.

If the internet was more prevalent back in 1995, he could have simply bombarded his adversaries with unsolicited porn spam, like a friend of mine does, and he’d still be enjoying the desolate Montana wilderness and continuing to expound upon perhaps the truest truth with regard to our collective culture in 2007: We as physical beings have been conditioned through evolution to achieve emotional well-being through directly interacting with nature and with each other; thus, our further devolution into a world of interaction increasingly mitigated by technological conduits will continue to sap our starving souls of sustenance.

But … the genie has already left the bottle hasn’t it?

Our bodies know this way of life is wrong, but our brains will continue to block out any foreboding blue spots, proverbial or literal.

Yesterday, Steve Jobs unveiled Apple’s long-anticipated “iPhone”, which allows human beings to--at any time, anywhere--call someone, email them, text message them, create and send them photos, video, and music, and coming soon, sexually stimulate them, transmit feelings of love, and assuage their existential fears.

I’m sure, if you hit the right buttons, it will also let you read Thoreau’s On Walden Pond.

It occurs to me that I haven't blogged for a while

Discuss.

These words.

Children are playing at the end of the day
Strangers are singing on our lawn
There's got to be more than flesh and bone
All that you've loved is all you own

In a land there's a town
And in that town there's a house
And in that house there's a woman
And in that woman there's a heart I love
I'm gonna take it with me when I go


- Take It With Me, Tom Waits

in Julia's brain is

the lyrics to "Sweet Caroline"

the formula for linear regression

an inexorable hope for a benevolent God that she can't force herself to believe in

a decent recipe for caramel brownies

an intractable, latent fear of never understanding herself

a healthy amount of serotonin

controlled uncontrollable rage toward something or maybe someone

the notes in an A-minor scale

certain cyclical thoughts that go away less the more she tries not to think of them

a well-researched opinion on Affirmative Action

something that makes her see geometric shapes in her surroundings when she's nervous

the rules to double deck pinochle

an unacknowledged desire for hardships to befall her contemporaries

two good stories about getting really drunk in college

an unsettled feeling she can't describe to herself

the directions to her dentist's office

empathy toward the less fortunate

a memory of her and her brother running through a sprinkler during her seventh summer

Un-Optimized Ineffeciencies

According to a distressing new study, internet surfing by employees costs American corporations $178 BILLION annually in lost productivity:

http://www.websense.com/global/en/PressRoom/PressReleases/PressReleaseDetail/?Release=050719976

This is particularly disturbing following a number of other recently published reports that have similarly calculated annual losses in productivity for American corporations on account of the following employee activities and issues:

- Writing personal emails: $92 billion

- Thinking unproductive thoughts: $232 billion

- Talking to people: $112 billion

- Establishing emotional connections with co-workers: $73 billion

- Wallowing in existential lonlieness following unsatifactory sexual intercourse: $82 billion

- Non-value added physical movements: $104 billion

- Laughing longer than necessary: $253 billion

- Brain cell depletion on account of the aging process: $204 billion

- Overzealous attention with regard to offspring: $201 billion

- Ambivilance toward human exisitence: $110 billion