Earworm. Part 349.

This song has been stuck in my head for days.  Well, not this version exactly, the album version, which is a little longer and doesn't come attached to this boring, dull, boring video. 

You can just tell that the hack director said to the lead singer, "You need to use your arms more."  Result?  Contrived 'acting' by a guy who is not an actor, he's a musician.  If he was an actor he'd starve to death because nobody would hire him because he kinda looks like he's having an episode. 

Anyway, please push 'play' then close your eyes and simply listen. 

Thank you and good night.

Holy crap.

Yesterday was my birthday. 

When I was in my twenties and I thought I was getting old, I would always play the Cure's "Inbetween Days" the day after my birthday.  The opening line seemed symbolic to my fragile sensibilites. 

Now I listen to it out of tradition; a reminder of another year gone by.  Most years I don't feel like I've accomplished much (the curse of being a cynic) but this year I feel good.  Optimistic even.  My screenplay writing has gone a smidge slower than I thought it would but I feel that what I've written is pretty good.  That's a decent trade off if you ask me.

Holy Crap II.

The house I live in is old.  Thus it is hot in the summer and cold in the winter.  We've been in a hot stretch lately and when the heat of the day hits, it's hot in this here house.  I woke up this morning and according to my fancy phone, it was 66F outside and according to the thermostat in the kitchen, it was 80F inside the house.    Right now it's 93F outside (with a slight breeze) and 85F inside.  Some days I want to walk in front of a train because I figure that if I live the hospital will have A/C and if I die, well, it won't be any hotter in hell than it is in my room.

Holy Crap III.

If you aren't excited for this, I'm not sure we can be friends...

In the second one, the cuff straightening thing made me laugh out loud.

Okay then.  Off to sweat and kvetch about sweating and write and stuff.

I'm prob'ly going to hell.

When I moved to Helena last September, there were problems.

I had been communicating with a lady  about moving into her apartment and being her roommate and I thought that all was well.  I was wrong.

I arrived with my car packed to the roof, ready to move into my new place, and the lady hesitates.  After weeks of emails and phone calls, now she says she has to speak to my references.  I was a little taken aback that she couldn't have asked for this information earlier, you know, before I was standing in her living room, ready to unpack.

Mind you, it was about 9pm so I was confident that nothing would be resolved that night.  I gave her the information and checked into a divey motel that cost too much. 

I call her back the next day and she doesn't answer so I leave a message.  I text her.  I go by her house.  Her stupid, old dog barks at me.  She's gone off grid.  Whee. 

She texts me later that night (after I've checked out of my dive) and tells me that she's run into a "slight problem" and she'll get back to me tomorrow.  I check into a cheaper, dumpier dive.

The next day is more of the same.  And the next, and the next.  Meantime I'm checking every resource I can think of to find a new place, because this one seems to be falling apart. 

Turns out that the lady was a little nutty.  She wanted me to sign a lease with her (no problem, I thought, not knowing all the facts) but she's not the owner of the property; she's leasing .  So if there's a lease to sign it's with the landlord, right?  She doesn't see it that way.  She wants me to sign a lease but her landlords tell her she has no legal right to sub-lease because her current lease forbids it. 

After eight days it all falls apart.  She tells me that I can't move in.

That night I pray to some nebulous, vengeful diety that her old dog self-combust and die within 24 hours.

For seven days I had been looking for other options.  Not so easy.  Helena is a college town and the fall semester had started a few weeks earlier.  Apartments were full.  Also expensive.  The rental market in Helena is insane.  I'm not picky, and I couldn't find an acceptable one bedroom for under $750.  (on a related note, the apartment I left behind in Idaho Falls was a 2 bed, 1 1/2 bath with a washer/dryer, garage, patio, and was mostly furnished all for $600 per month)  Also, after spending eight nights in a motel (an unexpected cost, along with eating out every meal) my budget is dwindling.

At this point I have given up on finding my own place, and I feel that I must return to the concept of finding a room for rent instead.  Oh well.  As long at the roomates aren't crazy, it'll all be okay, right?

So I find a place through Craigslist (what could possibly go wrong?) and I can move in in two days AND I can pay my rent/deposit two days after I move in (payday, I have been working nights at Hastings while living at the super creepy Motel 6) so...awesome.

Except that it's not.

There are four people in the house, including myself, and the other three are not my ideal roommates. 

Things that happened while I lived there:

My food disappeared.  I assume the unemployed/underemployed roomies stole it.

People I did not know (roomies friends/acquaintaces) entered my room various times, usually in the middle of the night while I was sleeping (no lock on my door, natch) to ask for cigarettes and/or money.  Oddly enough, I declined.

Fights.  Actual, literal fistfights.

Rampant drug use.  All three roomies and their friends/acquaintances pretty much every day.

Parties.  Including underage drinking.  And naked guy on the couch the next morning.  Ugh.

Deceit.  I give roomie money for power bill, she does not pay said bill.  On a related note, after paying her, she smoked a lot of weed and drank a lot of booze.

There are many things I am leaving off of this list for the sake of time/space.  This post is already too long. 

I moved in in the middle of October, I moved out at the end of January.  I moved about 100 yards.  Not even one whole block.

Since then, roomie has harassed me via text/phone for money I do not owe.  She's crazy, she lies, and she's stupid.  'nuff said.

So.  Why I'm going to hell, you know, besides wishing the death of a canine.

Yesterday I'm out running errands and I come home and I see police and fire trucks at the old house.  Instead of wondering if everyone was okay, I became giddy at the thought of that house burning and those people suffering.  Alas, it turned out to be next to nothing.  Sigh.  I normally do not advocate the pain and suffering of others, but right now I'm sad that it didn't happen.  The (non) story is here.

I know that I'm supposed to forgive and forget, but I'm not wired that way.  Eventually it will fade away, but for a while at least I want the people who wronged me to get their karmic payback.

Sometimes I'm just a shallow, petty man who wants to see bad people get what's coming to them. 

See you in hell, roomie.

'merica! - or - Hillbillies and Holidays

Happy Fourth of July everybody.  Hope yours was cool.  Mine kinda sucked.  Here's why.

Had to work.  When you are employed in the travel industry, holidays are just days.  365 days a year, we are open for business and that's just the way it goes.

Had to go to Walmart.  Well, I didn't have to, but it's on the way home from work.  What I saw was a potent cocktail of redneckery and festive holiday attitudes. 

Here's what went down: It was hot.  Not quite the ass-end of Mercury hot, but still uncomfortable.  (side note. I spend about 94% of my energy while at Walmart trying to ignore the people. Just how I'm wired) So I'm walking toward the store ignoring people when the foot traffic stops. I look up and see two, shall we say, less than desireable males, stopped dead in the doorway comparing LoJacks.  With pride.  With no sense of humor or irony.

LoJack Dude 1: Yours is newer.  Does it (something slangy and unintelligible)
LoJack Dude 2: Nah, nah, this one's straight GPS bro.  Runs offa satelite.
Me: Ugh.

Inside the store is the most horrific collection of ...I don't even know how to explain these people.  As I drove home I attempted to define what I would have to do to fit in with them.

1. Get a lobotomy.
2. Sustain several concussions to the remaining portion of my brain.
3. Acquire a mullet/rat tail/pony tail.
4. Have an aggressive inability/misunderstanding of how/why to get/stay out of someone else's (my) way.
5. Wear enough flag apparel and buy enough beer to give Toby Keith a boner.
6. Be loud, stupid, ignorant, purile, vapid, etc.
7. Become clinically depressed that our county is currently a high fire risk thereby forbidding by law the sale of and/or use of personal fireworks this year.  Total bummer that Johnny Law removed your best chance of losing some fingers and an eye this year, Cooter.
8. Go to Walmart for the social aspect of it all. (I go because it's easier on the budget than the other stores near my house).  These fine folk go because it's a hoot an' a holler celebrating their general retardation of thought, style, substance and evolution.  I'm not sure when it became acceptable to be dumber than a stump.  In fact I completely missed out on when we started celebrating this ignorance.   Pretty sure that the cast of Jersey Shore would totally smoke these guys on Cretin Jeopardy.  Today's categories are Spray Tanning, Tractor Pulls, STD's, Nascar Collector Plates, Jorts and Inbreeding.

Got home after this freak show of humanity and twisted my ankle walking on a flat, even, unobstructed floor.  I assume this is the cosmos' way of reminding me that I'm getting old and if the government had any smarts they'd step in and put me to sleep.

So here I am, sitting in my chair, ankle throbbing, grateful that my spine touches my brain, and hoping upon hope that wherever the demolition derby/rodeo is held tonight, while all the Walmart shoppers are once again gathered lemming-like in one place, whatever diety they pray to (Dale Earnhardt doing a kegstand?) sees fit to hurry natural selection along its merry way and send a meteor to cleanse that scabby patch of earth of their presence.

Not that I'm bitter or anything.

Whew.

A few weeks ago the Boston Celtics season came to an end.  They had too many injuries to go any farther.  It kinda sucked to watch a team give everything it had and come up short just because a few guys had injuries.  But that's sports. 

Now that the season is over the big question (for me, at least) was, what will Kevin Garnett do?  He's an unrestricted free agent who has openly talked of retirement and falling just short of the NBA Finals had to leave a bad taste in his mouth.

Well, today the 6'11" hypercompetitive, trash talking instigator of a power forward gave us his answer and it is that he will play for another three years.  For the Celtics.  Be still my beating heart.  Seriously, I have been Cheshire Cat smiling since I read the news. 

Sometimes I hate how sports take up so much of my time and often crush me for days when my teams lose or suffer some setback.  But on the flipside of that, I love when they uplift me, entertain me, and give me something to cheer about.  Not everybody sees it that way, but I do. 

So welcome back KG.  Glad you never went away.

Why I failed at Script Frenzy :(

Back in March I wrote about how I was so very psyched for Script Frenzy, NaNoWriMo's offshoot program, and then I went and sucked very badly at it.  Here's why:

Simply put, I don't write for speed, the premise that these programs are built upon.

I spent about two months planning and outlining my script so that on April first I would be ready to unleash my brilliant story upon the world in a mere thirty days, but it didn't happen because I can't work in a sheer volume capacity like I would need to to finish my script in a month. 

I tried though, and I have the crappy pages to show for it.  I wrote nineteen pages in six days and I hated almost every word of it.

As I wrote, knowing I needed to fill the page count quickly, I did something that I don't normally do, I wrote from the gut and the gut only.  I started off by following my outline, but I quickly discarded it because the structure was slowing me down.  So I started to improvise and I was getting my page quota accomplished but my story was going off the rails in a bad, bad way.  Pretty soon what I had was unrecognizable and nearly worthless. 

Once I realized that the wheels had come off of the process, I stopped writing for speed and tried to rewrite what I had.  It was so far from the outline that I was ultimately wasting my time. 

Finally, as the end of April neared, I scrapped the mess that I had and started over.  I have, in the two months since, written the same 20-ish pages while following the outline and it is much better (opinion) while still holding to the ideas and structure that I had originally planned (fact). 

So while disappointed that I failed at vomiting out 100 pages in 30 days, I feel that I learned something valuable about myself and my own writing process and ulitmately this is a good thing.

I smell.

So...most days I think I kind of suck. 

How is it that as a grown man, a mostly rational, semi-educated adult, I can lack focus, determination and ambition when it comes to the really important stuff?

How at one moment I am concerned with big issues like responsibility, integrity, honor, equality, about being held accountable, about saying what I do and doing what I say... and then the next instant I'm concerned only with boobs, 'splosions, cartoons and napping.  I struggle sometimes to find balance.

Is this common or am I simply a child grown older?

After getting divorced I went back to school, did alright, had some medical issues, dropped out with the intent of going back the next semester and then never did.  I was thinking about that a few months back and was schocked to realize that that was eight years ago.  EIGHT.  I was stunned into silence.

Cue the depressing introspection.  Listened to the Cure for a few days, was pretty hard on myself, then started to come out of it.

That's when I decided to make some changes. 

I currently have a plan to become a writer who gets paid for writing.  Specifically, I will write screenplays and sell them.  I have told very few people about this plan mostly out of fear.  I don't want to fail and have people ask me how it's going, when I didn't get it done.  But that's stupid.  I'm going to continue to put my plan into action and at the end of it, I'm going to be proud of what I've done. 

I've written two screenplays and I'm working on my third.  My current goal is that I will have the third done by the end of the year, then I will spend three months each revising/editing/rewriting the three scripts, and then I will figure out how to sell them and profit from my efforts.  That's it.  By October 1st, 2013, I will be the proud owner of three finished and excellent screenplays and I will find out how to make a living from them (and future efforts, of course).

But back to my original point...sometimes it's hard to find the drive and focus to acomplish this goal.  The defeatist me wants to watch movies and play video games and believe that these goals are hard and I deserve a break.  The ambitious me wants to kick ass and eventually see something I've written starring Brad Pitt directed by Joss Whedon and Wes Anderson (in a historic team-up) and adored by Quentin Tarantino as I walk the red carpet at Cannes being lauded by French journalists as an erudite champion of film and how did they ever survive without me?  Zombie Gene Siskel will rise from his stuffy, psuedo-elitist grave and he will openly weep at the depths of emotion I have plumbed with the best writing ever.

So please, faithful reader(s?) please bust my chops on this stuff.  Call me, text me, email me and ask me how I'm doing.  Demand proof when I say things are gong well.  I'll happily show you the disastrous first draft, then the rewrites, then the polished diamond that will be my as-yet-unnamed third script.  If I say that I'm having troubles, offer support and kindess pretty please.  Unless of course you want to watch me continue my career of customer service to the unwashed, barely literate philistines that have a way of getting into my (admittedly) small comfort bubble and prob'ly want nothing more to see my dreams crushed under the heels of their remarkably unfashionable boots.

On a related note, I have always been a can't-see-the-forest-for-the-trees kinda guy.  So instead of only working on my script every. Single. Day., I will heartily attempt to write this blog much more frequently just so I'm writing a variety of stuff.  Find some balance, I guess.  I don't want to get stuck in a rut, so to speak.  So check back here often, and again, bust my chops if I'm not getting it done.  Only there will be no busting, because I will accomplish these goals.  It's taken my whole life, but I'm finally at a place where I have a clear vision of what I want to be and what I will be.  It's been a winding road full of pitfalls, false starts, crappy ideas, and bad decisions, but I've come out the other side a better person and I'm ready to make this happen.  So there.