The Plan

* If you want to find vicious racism on the internet, it isn’t exactly hard - but what boggles my mind is the racism you find in Youtube comments. You don’t get much more mainstream than Youtube, and it seems like ANY video that has more than a few hundred views will eventually devolve into a racist flamewar. Everybody hates everybody on Youtube. Find your favorite combinations, it’s fun!

* I’ve been tempted to start posting messages in whatever freaky-meet-me-in-an-alley Craigslist-style singles forums I can find, but I don’t know if that’s out of desperation or general self-loathing. I’m fairly sure that simply contemplating such an action has given me herpes.

* Carla Sabah’s Don’t Gag Me! website is up and happy. Check it out.

* The Dopler Effect is going strong. It’s pretty damn dark. I love it.

People who are angry at Barry Bonds for using steroids are kind of pathetic. Of all the people and groups that might deserve some blame for this sorry state of affairs, Barry is way the hell down at the bottom.

Third place goes to the MLBPA, for deciding that image is more important for their members than, say, functional testicles.

Second goes to the league, for half-assing the entire issue for years.

First place, of course, goes to you, Mr. & Mrs. Baseball Fan.

Why?

Because after the strike, you were so angry at baseball that you didn’t watch it as much. You told baseball you didn’t care anymore. And what brought you back?

Sosa and McGwire.

Two acne-scarred giant-headed monstrosities banging dingers.

You made it clear what you wanted to see, and you’re getting it.

No * for you.

One of my Christmas goodies this year was a secondhand Blackberry courtesy of Erica, and it’s insanely useful. In fact, I’m posting this from it. It does, however, limit the amount of text I can enter, so expect more smaller posts as I learn it. Still and all, I get to plug in a little bit. I even found a Google Talk client for it, so hit me up if you have gmail. And, you know, know me.

A couple of days ago, my shampoo bottle opened up inside my gym bag - especially irritating since, even though I live in a car and have extremely short hair, it’s expensive shampoo. Luckily, it managed to concentrate itself on my electronic equipment (gym radios; 1 for FM/AM, 1 for TV) which should weather the sudsy storm nicely. Sigh.

The panic moment came when I tried to clean the shampoo off of my combination lock and all the paint came off of the dial. It took me a minute or two of trying to figure out what the hell to do with a lock with no numbers before I realized that there were numbers imprinted into the metal. Catastrophe was, once again, averted.

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Westward Expansion opens tomorrow night at 8pm. There’s a link to the NowCasting page for it on the sidebar, as well as a link to the Alliance. $10

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This isn’t a political blog, but I want to point out once again the fact that the ability to hand power over from one party to another without bloodshed is still a relatively rare thing in the world. Regardless of your political persuasion, congratulations, America.

WESTWARD EXPANSION

Opens November 10th, runs Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays until December 19th

With special wackiness as 365 Plays runs. Closed Thanksgiving.

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This is Tech Week for Westward Expansion. If you don’t do theatre, tech week is supposed to be the time when the acting work is done and the lighting, sound and prop people take over. In reality, it’s usually that plus unfettered panic from just about everybody.

This always happens. That’s theatre.

This should be an interesting show; it has a lot going on, it melds experimental and conventional elements and it’s short - which should serve to enhance the aforementioned melding. The final week is going to run concurrently with the Susan-Lori Parks ‘365′ week for the Alliance, which means we run every night that week. I’m strangely excited about that. It makes me feel nostalgic for a time that I’m fairly sure never actually happened in my life.

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Don’t Gag Me!

We’ll shoot Carla’s movie December 3rd & 4th. It should be a ton of fun. The script is snappy and funny, and Carla’s hot as hell. The acting will, of course, be outstanding.

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Last night, whilst attending Brendan’s birthday celebration at the Whaler on Washington, an extremely drunk woman either fell or bent over a table at me. Lacking any other means of support, she latched onto my neck with fingernails that must have been eight inches long and made of adamantium. I’m not saying she hit my brain stem, but I can still smell colors. She said something that might have been angry and might have been erotic, but I was too busy not feeling anything to know for sure.

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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.

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.

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.

I was at the 99¢ Store on Lincoln (get used to it, I’m po’) when I suddenly realized that everyone around me was speaking French. We’re talking about a fairly large number of people here - say fifteen or so. The cashier, the customers, the children begging for toys and mercury-laced candy. Even the crazy guy standing behind me and muttering to himself was muttering in French, although in his case I could tell that he didn’t REALLY speak French. This relieved me somewhat, since it implied that he was an American crazy person who was really making an effort to stand out, as opposed to a French crazy person who was just really lost.
I can’t say with 100% certainty that this really happened; even now it seems more and more dreamlike. But I’m pretty sure. Maybe there’s some French enclave out there that I knew nothing about.

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There’s nothing quite so disappointing as the realization that the people you work with get their casual conversation from sitcoms and things their parents used to say.

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I have a show coming up which I’ll say more about shortly, in addition to a few other things - not least of which is the song with Darrell, which I hope to finish up soon once Dancing with the Bad Man starts up. All of the music in the show is his.