The Plan

NOTE: As I write this, I can hear a co-worker singing “Red, Red Wine” in the bathroom. Badly.

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I filmed my first scene last night - my first scene for the Dopler Effect, and my first non-pornographic scene ever, I think. I don’t want to say too much about it, but it was a fantastic experience. Well, it was for me; I can’t really speak for Aberto, who spent several hours tied up on the floor. Man, if I had a nickel for every time I’ve had to type THAT out….

It took around seven hours, but it wasn’t wasted time. We really got a lot done. I completely forgot to eat, surviving mainly on excitement and verve. I’m actually feeling pretty beat up today, but I can’t necessarily figure out why. The throat makes sense (there was a lot of screaming) but I’m not sure why my legs are so destroyed. Christ, maybe it was pornographic.

I have a lot of faith in what those guys are doing. I expect the series to be a lot of fun. Now I just have to fight that comedown you get after something like this. Luckily, Carla’s gearing up her film and Westward Expansion is right around the corner. It’s an important reminder, however, that a big chunk of life as an actor is the search for the next project, the Next Thing.
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I have some fun photos to toss up, including my favorite-thus-far juxtaposition of flyers taped to a phone booth, but I need to find my camera. I don’t think it’s really lost, I think I just need to do a little house-cleaning.

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I woke up in the middle of one of those dreams that are so soft and sweet that an extra hour of sleep would feel like the most precious gift. Even in a car.

Of course it was about her. One of her, at any rate.

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I realize now that I’m just sort of moody, but I’m really hoping to develop it into full-on brooding.

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A strange happening in the night: I was awakened around 3-ish by the sound of shouty fighting right outside my window. This was odd, because my window is a driver’s side Toyota window, which placed the shouting directly in the street. The combatants were a couple who were allegedly attempting to park.

So the guy opens his door and bangs my car. I’m sure this happened in the service of some subtle dialectic point which I couldn’t quite hear from right next to him. He didn’t hit the car that hard (and if you’ve seen the left side of my car, then you know it would be undetectable visually) so I didn’t really do anything about it.

So dude storms off, leaving chick to parallel park behind me. I would never traffic in stereotypes, but god DAMN girls can’t parallel park. She hit my rear bumper three times. Again, between my sleepiness and the fact that she wasn’t hitting me very hard, I decided not to worry about it. After all, the last thing I need to do is start an angry discussion that will sooner or later include the disclosure that I live in the damn thing. I have a feeling that will generally suck up most of my credibility.

The thing is, it would have been really funny if I had come screaming out of that thing as soon as they woke me up, blankie a-flappin’ in the wind, screeching some automotive equivalent of ‘you kids get off my lawn!’ Ha ha!

I would have been shot so many times.

At the very least, I’m getting in on the ground floor:

Living in a car now touted as a plus

The Fark.com discussion where I am no doubt about to be eviscerated.

There’s gotta be a way I can peel some money outta this…..

Yeah, that’s right. It’s a Backstreet Boys lyric. Don’t mess with me.

First things first: I auditioned a few weeks ago for a sci-fi thing that I heard about through my friend Emma (if you saw Anniversary at the Alliance, she was the Princess and a fetus….that’s a phrase I never expected to type.) I found out a few days ago that I’m in, and while I have very little in the way of details, I’m extremely excited. There’s a link on the side where you can check out the trailer. Emma’s the one who’s going to teach you about DARPA.

Carla’s script for the short looks sweet, but I don’t want to say too much. She wants to have the thing shot by the end of November, so that one looks to be firing up pretty quick here as well. She’s linked on the side there, too. Yeah, she’s gorgeous.

Westward Expansion has made the transition from a WIP to a play. I’m really happy with how it’s going, and we still have a ton of time. It’s going to be a lot of fun. Cecil’s writing that one and it’s opening at the Alliance on November 9th - both the Alliance and Cecil are over there on the side. The sidebar is pretty much the place to be.

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I’ve been talking a lot with friends and colleagues about why we pursue this nonsense career. I still feel like there’s something noble in coming out here and doing this, mainly because I don’t see the goal of life as a game with a scoreboard. The point is just to live, not to score goodie-two-shoes helpy points or own a bunch a stuff - and we give up a lot of security to pursue this silly life. Don’t worry, I’m also aware that it’s kind of dark and uniformly selfish. These things aren’t necessarily limited to acting or the industry, but dammit, I don’t know everything.

I see three types of people out here: first are those who ‘know’ they can do it. I put myself in that category - nobody else can, you either feel it or you don’t. I could be wrong, obviously, but that isn’t the point. The point is that I’ll keep at it forever because I know I can and if I don’t I’ll be dead eventually anyway.

Category two is those who don’t have that rock-hard certainty, but plug at it anyway. This describes most people out here, I think. Basically it’s ‘normal.’ People who don’t get what they want out of the industry and say ‘the hell with it, I’m going to law school’ are twos.

Category three is people who just don’t have the heart. I don’t know if they know it or not, but after a while it becomes clear to the rest of us. I worry about them. They can still make it, but it won’t do them much good - Kurt Cobain would be in this category.

It’s not particularly important to me to have categories except in how it helps me define myself in relation to others (see? selfish.) Why do I ‘know’ I can make it?

I’m incredibly insecure, and I’m also extremely arrogant. My current theory is that the former applies to who I AM and the latter to what I DO. Somewhere in the collision between the two, in the swirling interior nexus where my need for love and approval fights it out with my talent and the work I’m willing to do, there’s an answer.

For now, this illustrates where I am: I get people thinking they recognize me all the time. Sometimes they tell me that I look just like somebody they know. Sometimes I’ll be at a bar or something and hear people trying to figure out if they’ve seen me in something (they haven’t.) Sometimes I’ll walk by someone on the street and I’ll see that double-take and know they’re wondering if they know me.

And what I think to myself is: Wait a year. You will.

The cooler has been quite the little boon. The ability to keep milk on hand is enabling me to continue my controlled starvation (thanks, Slim Fast!) longer than I would have thought. It’s also been a rather unfortunate reminder of some basic rules of physics and chemistry.

Originally, the cooler lived in the trunk wrapped tightly in a blankie. The idea was to insulate the thing so that my ice would last as long as possible. What actually happens is that the cooler pees on everything.

Ok, not really, but I will say that if any little children out there need ideas for a science fair project involving the production of astonishing and completely uncontrollable levels of condensation they should contact me immediately. Or not. I don’t really like kids.

The cooler will live in the backseat for now, because a river can run through whatever it wants as long as it doesn’t end up in my trunk. I’m thinking about sectioning off a part of the backseat to sort of hide the thing, but there’s a Monster Garage/Pimp My Ride level that I would prefer not to hit. Sooner or later, I would electrocute myself.

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I realize I’m losing my mind from time to time. I’ll try to develop a schedule and stick to it. You know, so we’ll all be on the same page.

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I still have a lot of cool things I’m waiting on performy-wise. Everything sounds good so far, but I’m basing that on astonishingly tiny amounts of information.

Sometimes, it’s all you can do.

I’m very grateful that, when things get a little too rough or scary, I can still find solace in the almost incomprehensible absurdities of existence - the most absurd being, of course, that there is an existence at all.

My life is pretty ridiculous. I mean, I sleep in a car. One of my grandest ambitions is to spend the rest of my life pretending to do things in front of people. I suffer from inflicted celibacy, but that’s OK because I seem to be single in the bones. I find that I can finally commit to a fitness program when I leave myself no alternative. I have some serious debt issues, and I’ve ensured that my chances of having a ‘normal’ future are virtually nil. The way things are going, it looks like I’m in exactly the right place at the right time.

I love it.

The gag, of course, is that your life is no less ridiculous than mine.

The nuts and bolts of the universe - such as we understand them at this point - can squeeze the brain until understanding drips out your ears, but there’s no reason to cast so far afield for befuddlement. I’ve mentioned it before, but bread blows my mind. Well, not bread exactly - I mean, I can accept that there is such a thing as ‘Rye’ - more the process by which someone (or some group) managed to envision bread in grains, and then make bread happen. Don’t bother looking it up - the early history of bread is filled with ‘probably’s and ‘perhaps’s. Wikipedia puts the emergence of bread in the Neolithic era - around 11,000 years ago, at which time the Food Network was only available in France.

Even simple bread takes a lot of steps that, to me, are astonishingly non-obvious. You have to start with whatever grain you’re going to use, many of which don’t really look like food in their natural state. You have to grind your grain up into flour, which is tough to imagine happening by accident, and sort of weird to imagine happening just for the hell of it. You have to mix your grain with water, which is quite a bit easier to see happening than the other stuff. Then you have to cook your mush. I kind of figure that immediately after gaining the ability to control fire, early people went around cooking and burning every damn thing, so this one doesn’t boggle me too much either. All of them together, however, sprain my noggin.

Robert Spuhler and I were discussing gelatin not too long ago -a substance whose provenance is so unlikely that I’m pretty much convinced gelatin doesn’t actually exist.

These things shock me because the road from their initial appearance to their final product - the processes by which they are refined - are so distinctive and unnatural. To see bread in wheat amazes me.

But there are plenty of other ways to be shocked. You want to marvel at the age of the universe and the interconnectedness of all things? Try this one on for size: Gold.

Most of you know this, so in brief: the order of introduction of elements (according to current evidence and theory) in the early universe goes hydrogen, hydrogen, hydrogen, and then helium as things cool down enough to allow the formation of atoms, and so on through the Periodic Table, adding heavier and heavier elements until we get stars. Yay! The thing is that if we end there, we’re missing a lot of elements (obviously, since several are essentially manmade.) It turns out that, as far as naturally occurring elements are concerned, anything heavier than iron can only be synthesized in a supernova - including, of course, gold. So for Earth to have any gold at all, many many stars had to be born, live out their entire lifecycle, and explode - before our planet was anything more than the tiniest cloud of dust.

That’s pretty cool, but now think about the California Gold Rush. Think about South Africa. Think about your idiot friend who thinks he NEEDS gold Monster Cables for his home theater system. Wonder if The Wizard of Oz really is an allegory about the move away from the Gold Standard. Think about that spike in Promontory. Look at your wedding ring, or those earrings. If you’re me, you can think of the ruined motherboard in your sorely-missed laptop. Hell, in all likelihood you have trace amounts of gold inside of you. Every bit of it, every last ounce, came from really far away.

The stuff that started out as some undefined potential, became hydrogen, became a star, became gold and became the frame for your glasses has been around for a LONG time. The stuff that makes you is no different.

Now THAT is ridiculous.

The answer, of course, is Talk Radio.

I know that the Internet doesn’t make people stupid, and I know that there aren’t a higher percentage of stupid people on the Internet than there are in the general population. Unfortunately, one of the things that the Internet does do is embolden the Stupid to express themselves on topics where they would normally be silenced by some primitive limbic shame.

You can generally assume that whatever it is they’re trying to dribble into your favorite forum, message board, mailing list or chatroom is going to be offensively dumb - but I often find myself so enraged by the ignorant fluff surrounding their ‘point’ that I never actually get to it. When I run across one of these classic idiocies, I don’t worry about the state of our country, I weep for the fucking species.

who cares?

Any discussion of any pop-culture or current events question (i.e. ‘Who killed Dumbledore?’, ‘What did Michael Bay say about Starscream?’, ‘How many fucking Koreas are there?’) will see this one eventually. It’s meant to say ‘you’re dumb for being interested,’ but it invariably comes across as the kind of petulant whining one usually only hears from fourth graders and Puritans.*

Who cares? The other 500 people posting in the forum, fucktard.

Twisters

Twisters are really irritating because they tend to show up in discussions that show signs of intelligent debate, and then fuck everything up. In a nutshell, they take either the topic at hand or a specific comment made by someone else and twist it. Understand, we aren’t talking about your standard strawman nonsense. These cats throw out responses so mind-bogglingly incoherent and/or unrelated that it’s a wonder that their brain stems don’t just give up and spontaneously pop out of their heads:

MisterBoppo: I don’t see how we can afford to keep fighting without a major tax increase.

Guff: Tax increase!?!?!?! I didn’t hear you bitching about taxes when I had that bear in my yard!!!! And the children!!! Haven’t they been molested enough??? LEAVE MY TAXES ALONE YOU CHILD MOLESTING BEAR LOVING SON OF A BITCH!!

MisterBoppo: *dies*

The Lazy Angry Stupid ‘Expert’

I realize that name, poetic though it may be, doesn’t necessarily conjure up the same strong image for you that it does for me. The game here is to make a bunch of deductions about whatever the topic is and come up with a conclusion, completely ignoring the fact that you don’t know what you’re talking about AND could have learned exactly how wrong you were had you spent ten fucking seconds on Google. Imagine that you’re reading a page about the Segway, for instance, and you see something like this:

“I’m no engineer, but I bet you could get the same kind of performance if you just strapped a couple of babies to your feet, doused them in kerosene, and fired ‘em up. Segway sucks. First post!”

How could you not destroy something beautiful?

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* I don’t mean that figuratively; I’m referring to actual Puritans, the whiny little bitches. First it’s “Waaah, we’re being persecuted, we can’t worship freely,” then it’s “Waaah, they’re trying to worship freely” and finally it’s “Waaah, witches are hard to burn.” Every damn time.

http://www.flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=263204439&size=m 

If it’s night, and you’re single and alone, the Santa Monica Pier may not be the ideal place to kill some time. Every single person there will either be part of a happy couple, part of a group comprised of happy couples, or all by themselves and sobbing because they recently stopped being part of a happy couple.

My favorite Pier person is the rose lady. At night, when the arcade is closing and the crowd thins a bit (the Pier is never empty), she really turns on the hard sell: “Roses! Romantic, no? You love her?” Ouch. I’m going to have to talk to her one of these days.

It’s not a depressing place for me to be, but a side effect of my project is that I often feel like an outside observer. There are few places where that feeling is reinforced with the intensity that it is on the Pier. Still, it combines so many things that I like: the ocean, lust, that strange energy created when music, people and neon lighting all come together.

I’ve been there before when not alone, and when not single, and the attraction is easy to see. It’s full of people, sure - but after midnight the crowds thin out, and there are all sorts of dark nooks and crannies. And everybody else is thinking the same thing that you are. What nonsense couldn’t you get away with?

Just don’t get skewered by the fishermen. Those dudes are madmen.

One of the hassles of car living has been that my grocery options are limited: I can’t buy anything that won’t keep, and I can’t buy anything that needs to be cooked. In an effort to cut costs in my lean period, I decided to tackle at least one of these.

 I haven’t dealt with a cooler in a long time. I’m sure there were day trips in Berkeley where we used them to keep our alcohol cool and tasty, but I’m just as sure that I was drunk as hell, so I can’t really remember. I associate them with camping and fishing trips from my vague childhood.

The thinking was basically that ice is cheap, and if I need to buy more every two days or so, it’s worth it in the fact that I can buy a hunk of cheese or turkey or whatnot and not have to eat the whole damn thing in one sitting. So far, it’s working, but I’ll let you know if I start to feel dysenterish.

Yesterday (Thursday, October marked the end of the fourth week of the Plan, and so far I have to say it’s working out pretty well.

In a nutshell: I’m looking better, feeling better and taking advantage of more opportunities as an actor.

Now, I don’t want to do the rose-colored glasses thing; there are difficulties, to be sure. The financial picture is still pretty ugly - I have a lot of debt and a teeny income stream - but headway is being made on expense reduction and debt consolidation. Now all I need is more freakin’ money.

Some of the personal progress I’m making has been (and continues to be) painful. It’s necessary stuff, and I can’t imagine how or when I’d be facing it if I wasn’t doing this, but that doesn’t make it fun.

Having said that, I think this may end up being a defining moment for me. One of my hopes with this is that I come out of it ‘improved’, both personally and professionally. When I get out of the car, I want to be able to say ‘things are different now, and they’re only going to keep getting better.’ It’s becoming clear to me that this is something that I can actually have.

To be totally honest, I feel like I’m on the verge of the best time of my life.

So far.

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You know what won’t make you popular? Taking pictures while driving on the 10 East.