Back to the Future Caps!

Remember these?
http://www.bttf.com/backtalk/20040910.shtml
These are the coolest things in Back to the Future II, and now they're available again. Score!
And happy New Year to those of you celebrating.
My goal: post one thought every day, despite my business. Or busyness.

Jets: hot.
Maxim: fun.
Products: yes.
You: hello.
Echidna: sparrow.

I'm back...in another state

Weeks have passed. The sun has risen and set. Rains have fallen, crusts of the Earth have shifted...

I am back, but this time I am not in California. I write from New York, where I reside uneasily after a transition that took me across country and to the offices of Maxim Magazine, where I now work on secret fun projects.

Coming soon is a day-by-day account of my road trip, taken a scant ten days or so earlier.

365 is back, East Coast style.

THIS IS AWESOME...GOOOOD

The Dwarf in Entertainment Weekly

Amazingly, word has reached the EW staff on the screenplay adaptation I wrote that's now making the hype rounds. From the July 16 edition, on newsstands now, on page 16:

"...The Station Agent's Peter Dinklage is ideally cast in The Dwarf, an adaptation of Swedish writer Par Lagerkvist's dark 1945 novel, which, according to producer Marc Rosen, is "the Huckleberry Finn of Sweden." Dinklage's character is the tough enforcer for a prince in Renaissance Italy, and in the end, Rosen promises, "the body count is Shakespearean." Which means it's high; the Deal Report looked it up."

We'll see where else it pops up...

Blast From The Past... Old Stories, Part One by Scott Stein

Bass over Athens

He turned away from the blue domes and cracked plaster minarets of the Byzantine church bubbling forth from the shoreline, smooth and naked on the bleached rocks like some form of rain-smoothed mineral deposit.
He turned his head away. Crouching in within his crumpled grey jacket, leaning into the dusty yellow wall. His poly-something hood was pulled over his head like a giant blinder. He stared at dusty yellow brick.
He had seen the two-headed fish. It was there.
He dared not move, because two-headed fish floating above Greek Orthodox churches tended to make him nervous. It matched the color of the domes, that much he could tell. It was a big fish, a grouper or bass or something—or maybe it was a tuna...oh, who cares. It was a big floating two-headed fish. Name and make didn’t matter.
He was crazy, wasn’t he? He was goddamn insane, that’s what he was, for seeing this fucking two-headed fish while on vacation on the coast of Athens. He needed help.
I mean, for God’s sake, at least these visions shouldn’t come while he was on vacation.
At work, okay. He’d dealt with that in therapy. Wrapping meat for Pathmark can do that to you, he supposed. I mean, day in, day out, stretching Saran wrap on chunks of cow...it got to you, after a while, it got annoying. But fish? Big, floating two-headed fish? It should be a giant filet mignon, or at least a Roumanian tenderloin or a good piece of veal. Maybe even a two-headed cow. But a fish? Maybe this was a calling to be working in Seafood.
And it was always the same type of two-headedness. Of course, one wouldn’t think there are many ways to be two-headed, and neither did he, until he saw this particular version of two-headedness, all unnatural and optically incoherent as it always was: two fish head/torsos, joined at the midsection by a ring of splayed and angular fins. They always looked in opposite directions, and one was always right-side up, while the other was upside-down. It looked like a cruel science experiment, or a demented fusion of leftovers.
The fish, on the other hand, never looked the same. Sometimes, it was as small as a minnow, darting in front of his vision as he groped the top shelf for rice Chex at the supermarket; on other occasions, it was large and grotesque, appearing blatantly and glaringly as he rounded a bend, hovering over a parking lot or lazily weaving between skyscrapers, as graceful as a blimp as it beat its great frayed and molding fins in the air that shouldn’t have held it up. It appeared, then it vanished, not by vanishing but by swimming out of his line of sight, and he could never touch it, and whenever he began to block it out of his mind enough to forget about it, it appeared again.
Oh, cruel fish, what was thy purpose? He kept his head to the wall in fear, ignoring all the passing tourists. Let them stare, goddammit. He wasn’t going to lift his head back towards that Greek church. He didn’t want to look into that fish’s eyes again. They were wide-open dead, great and grey and sluglike, unblinking and accusing. They were the stare of the African frog he had once seen on a field trip to the Bronx zoo, that day when Mrs. Firestorm or something like that took them all to the reptiles and amphibians building, and he had come walking alone to the frog tanks, and every one seemed empty; then he came closer, pressing his face to the glass, and remembered something about natural protection when he saw it, right in the open, fat and ugly and utterly terrifying, and staring straight at him the whole time. Reptilian and carnivorous, he thought as he jumped backwards and nearly knocked over a father of four. And intelligent. No, it knew something. It knew something he did not, and it was spying on him, goddammit, that fucking frog was spying on him...
And this fish was the same. It kept spying on him, coming after him, and it didn’t belong her, it didn’t belong out of the water...
Okay. Composure. Catch your breath. It’s just a fish...a floating...fish...
No, it’s not. It’s more. It’s two-headed, and it’s intelligent, and it knows something, and it’s following me around, and it’s swimming out of water, and it scared him out of his mind.
Okay, time to face the music. He was seeing fish.
And he had been for some time. He always tried to forget it, rationalize it, pass it off as a dream or a lack of sleep or poisoned air, but the crucial thing was, he saw such things. And he shouldn’t be.
Therapists told him he was deluding himself, but he was really deluding them. He hadn’t told them all the whole story; he only told them some things, that he was afraid of fish, that he saw fish—but they were coming after him. Yes, they were, to warn him or kill him or tell him something that they were going to do—but they wanted him.
He didn’t know if anybody else had seen the fish.
Well, he would have to know that—if he would or wouldn’t be alone in this, that is. Well, he had to run down some sort of checklist.
His therapist—well, he doubted it. Therapists were purportedly stable.
His wife—probably not. Besides, he didn’t think he could ever tell her. I mean, he hadn’t so far. How could he, after all? Honey, I’m seeing flying multi-headed fish—but don’t worry, I don’t think it’s serious.
His coworkers? Perhaps. He’d have to ask them next time he was in work. It might be the meat, or some chemical in the packaging—or a lack of oxygen. Maybe those cold temperatures drowned the oxygen, or forced it out of the refrigerated workroom—who knows what vile measures Pathmark practices. He’d read that Jungle book by Sinclair Lewis. He knew the whole story about those places.
He had to ask others. He had to find other seers, if there were any. Group therapy, consolation, who knows—it would be better than his therapist’s self-referential “swim in lake you” crap. Self-reference didn’t help, and neither did those drugs he gave him—Prozac? Thiamine? Methychloro-di-somethingorother. It was bullshit. No pill could kill these fish.
He had to get home, now. Shit, why did he go to Greece? It was sunny, but he didn’t know his way around here...there was nothing in English, you know, and it was so cold here in the sun...
There had to be shops. He didn’t know how to call home. He had a wallet, and he could ask for a phone book, and maybe the shopkeeper would know something about these fish.
He began to look around him, at the crowded streets and cramped buildings. Small angry cars honked and people shuffled busily, without stopping to look at anything unless it was particularly interestingly gruesome. Greek police blared away somewhere nearby. Maybe his therapist told them about him. His therapist didn’t want him going anywhere, because he said it might disturb his bearing on his superego or some shit like that. Perception. Can’t live with it, can’t live without it.
He looked at his feet, surrounded by halos of cigarette butts and old flattened sculptures of frozen chewing gum. His shoes were untied, again, but he didn’t remember forgetting to tie them. Then again, he didn’t remember putting on his shoes. He bent down to tie his shoes, and with a sudden thumping impact some city-blinded pedestrian collided with him in a way that left the pedestrian upright but sent him sprawling. He heard a distant and unconcerned “sorry” as his face fell on the stubbly concrete slowly, like run-down footage. He felt his cheek rip, and he exhaled. He watched feet glide past him like urban kelp, schools of two-headed fish darting between them like an aquarium tank. The fish were there to remind him again—of something. Everything was crucial. That man who knocked him down spoke English.
A conspiracy, he thought, picking himself up and stumbling down the river of people until he came to an open door, an awning, racks of potato chips—a store.
The rush of the river faded away with the sound of a door closing, and the chime of a rusted bell.
He wandered to the deli counter, out of breath and suddenly very terrified.
A man approached the other side of the counter, staring at him strangely.
A native. He tried to communicate desperately, even though he didn’t know any Greek, throwing together whatever mythological names he could think of, Greek dishes, and mentionings of the word “fish,” hoping that would do the trick.
“Sir...can I help you?”
Oh, thank God, a native speaker.
“I’m...I’m really scared, you see...I was just knocked over on the street, and I...I’m having these messages, or hallucinations, I’m not sure which...and I’m trying to call home...”
“Are you here to buy anything? Do you want a sandwich?”
“Oh, jeez, I’m afraid I don’t have the currency...”
“I’m sorry, sir, but if you don’t want to buy anything, I’m afraid you’re going to have to leave...”
“But can’t I use the phone?” He began to really panic now, because he saw a big trout in the display case, pressed against the glass, staring up at him.
“We don’t have a phone. Look, I would appreciate it if you left now...”
“But I...God, why are you people so cruel to tourists?” He paced the room rapidly, boxes of Cheez-its and Oreos circling past his eyes, then bottles of soda. He couldn’t focus. And if he did, there might be fish.
“I’m sorry, but you can’t buy anything without money...” the man behind the counter looked at the man closer, then turned harsh. “You were here last week. Get the hell out.”
“No, I’ve never been in Greece before...stop, you’re confusing me...” He turned around, facing the crackers and soda, trying to latch onto reality with his eyes. “Please, I just want to go home...I need to get home...”
“I’m giving you ten seconds to find your own way home, or I’m calling the cops.” The other customers froze still a long time ago, eyes latched onto the event as they collectively converted to TV mode. “Sorry about the commotion, he’ll be out of here shortly,” he addressed the customers. And then they all turned to him, fixed on him, wordless, pitiless, just watching and waiting.
“Oh, come on, please, I need to...God, stop doing this, please, I don’t know what’s going on...I don’t know where I am...please...” But he could say nothing else, and when he saw the man behind the counter reach for the phone, he left.
He fought upstream against the river, shouting for help in English as a giant fish hung in the air above like a the Goodyear, ethereal fins whipping the air into breeze as its eyes watched the spectacle unfold further. He groped and pushed and fell and bled until he saw the Greek church, and he ran to the wall and around it, stopping at the overlook to the shoreline, falling to his knees, crying, hands dug into pockets and gripping the fabric until he pulled and clenching turned them inside out, hoarse horrid screaming sobs cutting through the air, assaulting nobody because nobody listened. God, the fish had done this to him! Those fucking, evil fish...where was he? Where do I live?!!
He saw a slip of paper flutter to the sidewalk as he unclenched his hands from his outturned pockets, picked it up in his hand, read something about unknown name or localized loss, it meant nothing. He had done this before, he realized. That man was right. He had done this before.
He stood by the wall for some time, looking at the perfect church in Greece despite its fish because the fish and it were reality, constants, and he knelt and prayed to Greece day after day, with nothing else left to do; but one day there was a tear in Athens, and the tear grew bigger until eventually Greece peeled off the wall, and as it blew away down the street he realized that neither the fish nor Athens were real. And so he sat down, staring at this place he knew utterly nothing about, and he cried for a longlonglonglong time.

Well, I'm Gone

From Sony Online Entertainment. My spirit lives on, however. Follow me to NY, and read more crazy news here. I'm not really departed at all - same address, same shit...that's the beauty of placelessness on the internet!

Fuckin' Hilarious

Like Winnebagos? Read this!
Winnebago Man Goes Fern

I'm in Variety!

Holy Cow. I just got back from Sweden, and spent four days hanging out with Peter Dinklage, who is an amazing person. He's attached to play the lead role in the screenplay I've written, The Dwarf - adapted from the book by Par Lagerkvist. Check out the Variety article below:
(my first Variety article!) Fingers crossed.

*****

Dinklage returns in 'Dwarf'
'Station Agent' star to enter Par Lagerkvist adaptation
 
By JORN ROSSING JENSEN

STOCKHOLM -- Peter Dinklage is attached to star in "The Dwarf," an adaptation of the 1944 novel by Swedish Nobel Prize winner Par Lagerkvist.

Dinklage and producer Marc Rosen spent the past few days in Sweden to discuss the project with potential financing partners. Rosen wants to set it up as a European co-production between Scandinavia, Germany and Italy, where the story is set.

The story takes place at a prince's court during the Italian Renaissance, where Piccolino, a dwarf consumed by anger and hatred, schemes and plots for his noble master.

Rosen screened Dinklage starrer "The Station Agent" for Swedish distribs and pitched the script of "The Dwarf," written by Scott Stein.

"The response was great," said Rosen, who confirmed he has offered the script to Swedish helmer Lasse Hallstrom. Hallstrom and Rosen also are developing another project, "Nike."

Rosen is a senior exec at David Heyman's Heyday Films, but he is developing "The Dwarf" outside that company with January Studios, although Heyday may yet become involved.

Lagerkvist's son, Bengt Lagerkvist, has approved the latest version of the script. It will be only the second film from the works of Lagerkvist, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1951, after "Barabbas," the Anthony Quinn starrer produced by Dino de Laurentiis in 1962.

Chevalier Brown and his Compatriots, Melleruse and Vigorish!

Cancelled.

Chevalier Brown and his Compatriots, Melleruse and Vigorish!

Coming soon.

Chevalier Brown and his Compatriots, Melleruse and Vigorish!

Coming soon.

Cool Fonts!

Fonts, Fonts, Fonts!

A world full of mad people?

I keep thinking of the Mad Tea Party in Alice in Wonderland... Alice is intrigued to meet these people at their endless tea-party. They ask her a riddle, and when she asks it back, they fear that she is mad herself. She leaves them to this world, pouring endless tea, dreaming endless dreams. They are the mad ones no one talks about, not even in Wonderland. Maybe these are the drunks at the bar... or the lost at the opium den. To Lewis Carroll and the nightmares of Alice Liddell, these are the demons of the civilized world... the Mad Ones.

Maxim's "95 Things To Do This Summer"

I wrote about half, so check em out in the July issue, out now!
(no byline, but that's because they're encouraging my secret undercover identity)

My favorites I did that amazingly made it in:

Aug 14 - If you're old, make today the day you don't die!
Aug 11 - Ride a whale and teach it to shun man.
Sept 7 - Make today Immigrant Labor Day and honor your hard-working green-carded friends by underpaying them.
July 11 - Outsource all your annoying friendships to India.

To read the rest, go buy the magazine, cheapskate!
Or use this link.

How Much Do You Know About Dolphin Sex?

This should help.

WARNING: You will be disgusted and horrified. Don't worry, no pics - it's just a memoir!

Get Ready... for the Wallet Phone

It's in Japan, which means it's coming over here:

The Wallet Phone!

Of course, this will really make it suck when you lose your phone.

Whoa...This Name Is Shitty!

Who named this unfortunate woman? And more importantly, who hasn't been telling her to change that name in America?

It's like having crapped pants at work, and nobody tells you to go fix that up.

:(
(courtesy of Dean Cameron and Padraic Duffy)

What Can You Outrun?

Bees? A slingshot? What about a crossbow?
A list of the speed of things.
Good for when you're writing a screenplay...or living a videogame life.

Yay! The Lakers are Dead!

Thank you, Pistons, for finally taking the wrecking ball to the "Dream Team" of La-La Land.

After sticking it forcefully up Kobe, Shaq and "I am Satan or Colonel Sanders, I can't figure out which" Jackson, there will be a complete dismantling for the former Minneapolis Lakers. Seems like good punishment for beating the T-Wolves.

Kobe, if he goes to the Clippers or the Knicks (or even the Grizzlies), will become my new favorite NBA player.

As for Shaq - learn accuracy.

Malone and Payton - you losers brought the curse on.

OK, I'm sorry, Lakers fans. But you bought a threepeat. That's enough.

An Earthquake Today

I was in my closet sorting clothes and talking to my girlfriend when everything started shaking like I was in a boat someone was rocking. I screamed, and tried to find something to hold onto. I was on the fourth floor of an apartment building. Things threatened to fall off the walls and shelves, then the quake stopped.

I had been in one quake before - in 1999 in Los Angeles, at the end of a midnight screening of Fight Club. The theater started rolling right as Ed Norton was blowing up the skyscrapers in Studio City. Strange synchronicity.

What Happened Today in Other Dimensions?

The best blog ever:

Today in Alternate History.

What happened today, in other parallel universes throughout their histories.

:)

OK, Best Reagan headline yet, courtesy of The Onion

"Reagan's Body Dies."

In Case You Were Wondering, It Was Delicious

For those of you who still believe the governments of large nations don't bullshit most of the time:

(NY Times)

During a photo session after meeting with Bush, Chirac did not mention the dispute over Iraq or NATO, but spoke instead of how much he had enjoyed the G-8 summit, particularly the food.

``I can tell you that over the last few days, this cuisine here in America was certainly on a par with French cuisine,'' Chirac said.

``He particularly liked the cheeseburger he had yesterday,'' Bush said.

``It was excellent,'' Chirac said.

Who's the Third?

Celebrity deaths come in threes.

Ronald Reagan, Ray Charles.
Who's next?

Now Here's A National Tragedy

Ray Charles is dead at 73.

This is the saddest news all month.

I'm Not Really Sad That Reagan Died

There. I've said it.
Wasn't he already dead now, for years?

Why would people wait for hours to mourn him?

I see one remaining function of Reagan: he made it possible for (Bush)x(2) to be president.

So, congratulations. Good job.

24-Hour Theater Writing... Part Two

I'm writing another play overnight, to be done at Sacred Fools Theater, on Melrose and Heliotrope in Hollywood, CA, at 11 PM this Friday, June 11.
www.sacredfools.org

Come cheer on the madness!

My Bathroom Floor is Getting Funky

My lease is expiring on my apartment in soul-sucking UTC (I'd rather keep the acronym than give it the gift of a name). Thus I cannot bear to do anything about my bathroom floor.

There is some stain in the corner, a shadow of something that isn't a shadow at all. And dustballs, like little tumbleweeds, roll across the linoleum desert whenever I take a piss.

Clothing is also scattered. So be it.

My neighbors upstairs, the Crackhead Student Nazis, bang around every night around 1 am like epileptics without their padded clothes. I've tried going up and complaining, and am always intercepted by a duo of plain-faced college girls who front the operation with an apologetic dumb look. Their boyfriends, they shrug, and apologize again. Later on, back in the corner prefab square of my room, I hear occasional bellowing grunts drifting through the window on a breeze that smells like stale curry.

My next goal is to dump my garbage on their doorstep every morning around 4 am. Would this start a war? I must remember to remove any identifying documentation.

5 Breakfast Cereals I Wouldn't Eat

1. Clam Fudgey
2. Bran Nightmare, and Sparrows
3. Sparrow Crunch
4. Brain Nightmare, and Clams
5. Choco-Grandma

Time to Think About the Future

Today's dictate to you all is look forward.

Think about the future. Think about what comes next, I mean. The Next Big Thing. Look beyond our politics, our technology, our fads. See to the level beyond the next level. Be unafraid to take big leaps.

I think we've suffered lately in science fiction and good, inspiring (or frightening) visions of the future. It takes an eye on the present and an eye disregarding the present to accomplish that. We are moving forward very fast right now, but to just ride the wave is to do disservice to our role in shaping our future, not just being passengers to it.

So, today, dream. Dream about a new world, a strange place. Read something new. Be fascinated. And think big.

Big Brother Watch

"I think in these days of corporate fraud and in these days of terrorism we're seeing more and more reason to store forever," Kagan said. "Don't ever say anything on e-mail or text messaging that you don't want to come back and bite you."
Text Messages Used in Kobe Case
This should be updated, perhaps in a few years when all computers have ubiquitous always-on networked connections, to "Don't ever write anything on any computer that you don't want to come back and bite you."
Ah, what an innocent world we live in. To think, we actually believe that everything we say and do is evidence against us.
What room do we have for writing?
Privacy: Get ready to say bye-bye.

I saw the Cicada Invasion in Princeton

Hundreds and thousands of clicking, whirring, buzzing, writhing and dying cicadas filled the damp atmosphere of Princeton University over Memorial Day weekend, where I was celebrating my unexciting 8th reunion. Cicada attack! They apparently re-emerge every 17 years, meaning that these are the grandchildren of the famous Bob Dylan song.

Their kids will emerge on the weekend of my 25th reunion. Yikes!
See one emerge like an alien parasite from its creepy dead skin!

NYC Water Not Safe For Kosher Folk: Thank the Copepods!

Filters are now being installed for glatt-kosher folk in NYC, due to the discovery of copepods in the water system. Not that they're a bad thing. They're just not good for those who can't religiously eat crustaceans.

What are they? They're little bug-critters. Find out all about copepods.

Copepods are your friends!

A nice little tutorial on some word usage

Courtesy of McSweeneys:
Read This Before You Write Anything.

Beware the Worm!

Whatever you do, watch out for The Worm Within.
Join the discussion at the end! Fun!

47% of the US thinks Bush is doing a good job

According to CNN.
Wait a second...
Nearly HALF the country of the United States currently thinks that Bush is doing a good job?

Is it that these people:

1) Don't believe their friends, family and TV shows which all regularly proclaim, "Bush sucks donkey balls."
2) Don't have television, family or friends
3) Are all inbred relatives of Bush
4) Are fake people created by a secret CIA-based agency
5) All of the above

I just don't understand. I guess these are the same people that believe that EVERYTHING is going well, even Uncle Phil's terminal lung cancer, because "God meant for it to be that way."

I wonder what it takes for those 47% to change their mind... probably nothing will. Brain death is generally irreversible.

East vs West

My grandparents came to visit San Diego this weekend, bringing the intensity of the colder and wetter climes to bear upon us, the well-nourished, sun-blessed and generally mild and glassy-eyed SoCalese.

If environments make creatures behave and even evolve differently, then New York makes people into quick, sharp, small monkey-creatures of little patience and great intensity to feed and breed.

Southern California evolves a comfortable, slow-moving, drifting, sliding type, of long aquatic movements and tendrils of relaxed comfort. Gentle and sleeping seals, prone to barking or being selfish, but mostly seeking the prized jewel of respite.

Monkeys like the seal's beaches. Seals like the monkey's warm jungles. But a monkey can't live on a beach, and a seal can't live in a jungle.

Then there's the Midwest: grazing, lumbering and wary buffalo. Good land, good food, and lots of distance to look out for intruders.

Improv and 24-Hour Playwriting Weekend Concludes

All went well, I have to say. I was satisfied with both.
And I also realized the satisfaction such crazy events bring to my life. I swear, I could be working as a waiter and be doing these shows and I'd feel like every day was a small success.
Not that working in a cube doing grunt tasks isn't satisfying...
Thanks to all who came to either. And to those who didn't, well, you stink like poopie.

Ever Have Unexplained Fear?

I have that feeling right now. A tight turning of a ghost sensation, and it's making me sit in the dark morning and feel like the future is surprisingly, endlessly, open and empty.

Ah, the joys of the movement of time. What's past is long gone, and what's to come is not even halfway real.

The Future is Sweden...

...and I've known this since I was trapped there during 9/11/2001.
Swedish Trends
Once more reason why America is most definitely not on the cutting edge.

This is madness...

From IMDB:

Video Stores Buying From Wal-Mart Instead of Distributors

Video rental outlets are discovering that they can purchase new movies from mass merchants like Wal-Mart, Costco, and Best Buy at a lower cost than what distributors charge, Video Store magazine reported today (Monday). It quoted one "rentailer" as saying that he could cut his budget by 27 percent simply by buying from Wal-Mart and other discount chains. The trade publication disclosed that a survey that it coordinated showed that more than 41 percent of rental outfits are purchasing from mass merchants.

The Screen Writers' Marching Song

Rise up and sing!
Courtesy of the latest issue of the WGA magazine "Written By," start marching to this ditty penned in 1934 - back in the days of witty socialism, alcoholism and spry assholes.

I.
Arise, ye movie writers, and cast away your chains!
Executives are human after all!
Shall they still rewrite our scripts, the children of our brains?
And shall we be a supervisor's thrall?
NO! NO! NO! NO! A million million no's!
Not in vain our fountain pens are filled!
The writers all will join
And executives will loin
To monkey with the Screen Writers' Guild!

II.
They pay us weekly salaries, a measly grand or two.
And think we ought to work because we're paid!
Shall we yield and do our job? Will YOU? Will YOU? Will YOU?
Defend the rights the tyrant would invade!
UP! UP! UP! UP! Attack them from the rear!
Never shall the voice of art be stilled!
Through gory battle scenes
Drive your gleaming limousines!
Ye heroes of the Screen Writers' Guild!

III.
Ye gentlemen and ladies that push the fervent pen,
The time has come and Freedom is in sight!
The cudgeled brain grows weary. When a bottle is your yen,
Have at it! And remember: write is write!
DRINK! DRINK! DRINK! DRINK! Write a masterpiece
Till twenty thousand pages have been filled.
They'll all be thrown away,
But the producers have to pay
To members of the Screen Writers' Guild!

Can you feel the beat?

More Bad Album Art!

More, including "The Braillettes" and "Roger."

Worst Album Covers Ever

This is magnificent fun. I like "Joyce." I use it now as my desktop.

When I Have a Theater Company, I'm Naming It The Jellyfish

Jellyfish Theater Company. Sounds good, no?
Don't take it, it's mine. Mine!

Poor Little Asian Boy...continued

By the way, notice in the previous link how, by the bottom of the long scroll, he's already become a kind of celebrity?

This is funny...and a little sad

First Found Magazine. Now, we revel in undressing people photographically as well as textually.
Poor little Asian boy.
Is our age an age of public humiliation?
By the way, I find the animation quite amusing.

Ugly Celebs!

These pics are hideous. Which ones do you still find attractive now, eh? (I still thought some were cute.)

Buffalo Wingmen Article Online

Check out the whole thing on Maxim Online:
Buffalo Wingmen
The pictures, well, those you have to see in the issue itself.

Southland Tales: Donnie Darko followup film

Director Richard Kelly has a weird and captivating website for his next film, Southland Tales, which apparently takes place in 2008 Los Angeles. Can you explain what's going on in this website?

Wanna See Me Do Theater in LA or San Diego This Weekend?

Friday: Come see Fast N Loose at Sacred Fools Theater at 11 pm. I'll have a short play performed that I haven't written yet - a subject and some "things" are assigned Thursday night, I write it by Friday morning, it's rehearsed and performed Friday evening. More info: http://www.sacredfools.org

Saturday: See me in an elimination improv match at San Diego TheatreSports' 26-hour Improvathon! I am performing at 6 pm, at 6822B El Cajon Blvd. near San Diego State. More info: Improvathon

Two spontaneous theater happenings!

Um...Bar Codes on People?

It's articles like this that make me realize that we are gleefully ignoring all sci-fi signpost warnings.

"What do you do with Semacodes? In theory, you can stick a Semacode on any physical object about which people want more information. At San Francisco Bay Area transit stops, people have pasted Semacodes linking to real-time arrival information from NextBus. This week, the art group etoy will issue Semacoded uniforms to 500 children participating in its etoy.Day-Care-2 project at the Nieuwe Domeinen arts and architecture festival in Amsterdam. A quick scan of the uniform would link to the children's Web page with real-time information about them."
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,63493,00.html?tw=wn_tophead_2

Neat idea, chilling execution.

Mmmm...Pork Faggots.

Eat Mr. Brain's Pork Faggots.

Going Buffalo Hunting in Maxim

Check out an article I wrote with my good friend and adventuring partner Josh Metnick in this month's June Maxim. Link will be added when available. Eating raw buffalo liver is one of life's more disgusting pursuits.
For pics of the hunt, look at some I shot that day in Crow Nation, Montana:
Buffalo Pics

E3: Are Videogames Getting Boring?

I just came back from E3 2004 in Los Angeles, and I'm reflecting on what was a largely unremarkable show. I wasn't phased by much, and I saw no game that I "had" to go buy. The PSP device by Sony is amazing, however, and the only part of this year's show that wowed me. It'll kill the Nintendo portable market instantly. Its screen is beautiful.

I think the videogame industry is facing a lack of new ideas. MMO games and portable networked devices are the next wave for the mainstream, but innovation is rare right now.

Could this be the beginning of a glut that leads to a videogame recession?

Is anyone Republican out there?

I'm curious. Who is Republican, exactly? And why the hell are you? Please email me with an interesting explanation and I'll post it on 365.

I just sit around, thinking, "No one I know is Republican. Hmmm...then how can Bush be getting any approvals? Could it be that I don't know any Republicans? Or are those Republicans in hiding, persecuted, alone? Maybe I should solicit their friendship."

So, come on, Republicans! Explain your idiocy to me!

Music and Time

The power of a beat is that it can slow down or speed up time. Literally, I think. At least, one's perception of the passage of time alters. And that, considering we are imprisoned by our brains, means that time is literally altered. How else to explain a song's staying power in only a minute and a half, a minute and a half that can easily go by unnoticed otherwise? Time slows, or expands, during the playing of that song. The beat keeps its time, and your internal clock adjusts, changing your time. Thus the power of music and particularly drums throughout history - and the ritual religious role of drums. And also why drummers are such wild sexy icons.

Japanese Anime: A Tutorial

For those who have been excised from the learning process on the extensive genre of Japanese Anime, I was reminded of the form's tendencies during a viewing of "Tamala 2010" last night at Landmark's Ken Theater. A rundown:

1) Female character seduces people in child-like way
2) Female character proves to be a form of robot or protean alien-being with infinite power and knowledge
3) Untold destruction ensues, with melted bodies and the alien-knowledge-girl-thing attaining innocent destructive omnipotence
4) Limbs melt off
5) Life returns to normal; a bird flies

Our iteration involved a cuddly cat-person from CatEarth.
So, save yourself the trouble. Or, create your own anime!

Now, Beheaded Soldiers

I think things can now be labeled bad in terms of American foreign policy under Bush. Our goddamn citizens are being beheaded for screwups by what Bush's men are calling "contractors."

This era is indeed our worst since Vietnam, which was before I was born. I can only imagine that, in a few years, blockbuster otherworldly feel-good epics and commercialism will sweep over us much like it did in the 80s.

PS, note to Nader:

GET THE HELL OUT OF THE RUNNING.

I am a Princeton alum as well. But you are fucking things up. This isn't an ego trip. Campaign '04 has one mission: oust Bush. Get behind Kerry and make this a unified front. Otherwise, you can take your 5% and hand the presidential extension to the man who seems like he will soon instigate World War III.

Zephyrhills Can't Stand Naming its Streets After Martin Luther King...

...and I can't stand a town name that sounds like a contagious syphilis variant.
Read more on this idiotic town.
Can you believe that places like this exist in the U.S.?
I have a dream...a dream that white rednecks will erase Martin Luther King's name from signs because they worry that it will affect their real-estate values. It was a nightmare, actually. I hope nobody ever abandons me in Zephyrhills without a case of penicillin.

EverQuest II site now live!

The website I've been working on for the last few months has finally gone live.
http://everquest2.station.sony.com
I edited or wrote most of the content up there, so go check it out.
Our team did a really nice job.

Today's Spam-People

Fake people or characters that my spam assumed today:

Whiskey Q. Czech
Hijacked U. Resolves
Handfuls S. Flunked
Housebroke M. Scorne
Herculean L. Hippos
Aery L. Gunsmith
Qekesqh Jikixireg
Adulating V. Mischie
Razors M. Divested
Mesmerism M. Defamat
Tub I. Adventurous
Adorn A. Buttery
Yoga O. Postponement
Nikon K. Pincus
Astronautics P. Caki

Okay, the alien contacting me from another homeworld has clearly got to be "Qekesqh Jikixireg," using some energy beam email system. As far as great character names, I love Aery L. Gunsmith, or who doesn't appreciate Tub I. Adventurous? (very Ignatius Reilly) The most improbable has to be "Astronautics P. Caki." Come on, Spam! Can't you do better for a first name than "Astronautics?" I'm just not buying that one.

The middle initials, I am considering right now, work quite well. Kudos.

My Sister was on Broadway

In a dream I had last night, my sister starred in a Broadway production and was a critical success. It was just something she tried out. I told her that she would most likely become a star now and get other gigs, maybe films. She said that her agent had said as much. She's actually a doctor, but she tried acting in this dream based on a favor someone asked...or something like that. I woke up disoriented. My room was very warm, and I had fallen asleep with my light on.

My Favorite 3 Sci-Fi Writers

Screw you, Neal Stephenson!
These science fiction authors eat your lunch, Mr. "Cyberpunk is dead."

1. Rudy Rucker
The Wetware Mind of this mathematician madman keeps me happily awaiting another bizarre treatise. Go get his software-wetware-freeware-realware tetrology and be happy. Just picked up "Frek and the Elixir," which seems to involve something named Mr. Pig and a talking cuttlefish in 3003 bio-enhanced Earth.

2. Paul di Filippo
So hard to find, so worth it. A friend of mine borrowed "Ribofunk" and somehow lost it. It's a great book that I miss, damn him to hell. He likes alternate worlds, steampunk, and alternate thoughts. Kind of a new Ray Bradbury.

3. Jeff Noon
Crazy Manchester man. Crazy, crazy Manchester man. Sets his rock-punk hallucinogenic tales in worlds filled with dream-feathers, zombie-people and pollenating girls. "Vurt" and his others including "Pollen" and "Nymphomation" will have uou hating/loving him. "Automated Alice" and his fragmented "Pixel Juice" are awesome. Forget bookstores- go overseas or use Amazon.

I'm thinking of inviting President Bush to my 30th birthday party

Do you think he'll come?
I'm considering making him the "life of the party." We'd fill him up with liquor, have him get some lapdances, then maybe we'd forget to take him home with us and he'd drunkenly wander off a bridge.

If anyone knows his address, please forward it on.

Today is Happy Day!

Happy Happy! Happy times!
Forget sadness and atrophy. Today is the day we make new friends, buy an ice cream, or keep on our diet, do that good deed, push a car up a hill, knit a sweater or some booties, bake a lovely multi-layered cake, see a fun film about someone becoming obese on fast food, or just dance and GO KOOKY!

IT'S A FUN FUN DAY!!!

Not feeling too crisp
Some days are better than others. Today had a strange flavor to it, and I wonder if I was the only one who noticed. Has the world started to dissolve?
Issues like my iPod losing its data fill me with despair. What is the point of creating order in the midst of disorder? But of course, everything falls apart. That's the struggle of life. We as humans like to believe everything is simply order, but we build massive tools and structures, only to have them eventually collapse.
Collapse is the natural quality of existence after order.
It fills one with futility to contemplate it, but that's the feeling. How can one do work in this state?
It takes effort to keep the universe moving. Every piece of art that's created begins to decay, and will continue to decay. It is the mark of man against the disruptions of nature.
We have many toys, but the simplest ones celebrate the uncertainty. A bouncing ball. It moves surprisingly. We are amazed.
The elaborate ones: an iPod, a Palm. Rigid functioning, easy to break down. A million ways to collapse.
A digital camera.
We shuffle our important ideas through collapsing bridges of technology, racing to get to a distant and ever-receding finish line. Marathon of stupidity.
If you read this blog, email me at jetscott@mac.com and tell me you do.

Jeb wants brain-dead women kept alive, BY ALL MEANS NECESSARY!
Thank you, Bush! I like keeping brain-dead people alive, too. It makes me feel good.

News Flash: Massive Friends Spoilers!
I have a friend who's a head writer on NBC's Friends, and he has leaked the following info about tonight's final episode. It's a doozy!

***

***

MASSIVE SPOILERS

WARNING



MASSIVE SPOILERS

***

***

***

Ross is an alien. And he eats every last one of them.

***

***

END SPOILERS

***

OK, you heard it here first!

iPod Emergencies, and the Future of Tech
I updated the songs on my newly-updated-for-iTunes 4.5 iPod this morning, and received a rude surprise: all 4000 of my song ratings were wiped out. Play count data was also screwed up, with some songs now registering upwards of 16,000 plays.

I was initially devastated to see several months' work of song-rating go away in the blink of an invisible eye, but it afterwards set my mind to thinking. We rely very heavily in this age on "instant creativity" encouraged by companies like Apple - make your own playlists, rate your songs, make your blogs, create your web documents. These alternative forms of creativity that we take some element of personal stock in are tied to the capitalism-driven missions of individual companies. (See any blog site, for instance.)

The problem is that, as we place our creative abilities in the hands of a company and its tech, we also succumb to the whims of its buggy quirks. Which can involve being instantly erased.

Backups, I hear you say. But backup to what? Hard drives are inconsistent, paper is messy and it decays - especially with the cheap ink made by most printers.

Many science fiction visionaries see a "reputation economy" driven by places such as eBay and Amazon, where rated posts drive up your social currency. Some say that currency will become as great as real currency. But what happens when that currency is jeopardized by future failings of the network?

Two chief inventions must happen in the next 10 years:

-massive improvement on energy sources (batteries, and also less electricity-taxing networks)
-a permanent (meaning, cuneiform-on-stone-tablets) method of encoding large amounts of data (terabytes) for posterity

The latter can happen with nanotech and the potential to write data into hard crystal lattices. The former is slightly less important for data futures, but certainly points out our vulnerability.

It may seem strange that such a small glitch as losing my song ratings can drive a thesis of this magnitude, but a form of information senility could easily be descending upon us if we're not careful. It's already here - photos leaking beyond the government's grasp, worms that no one can stop, security flaws undiscovered, beta software being sold as finished product. I see big storms coming, and it only takes a few reads of the supposedly outdated cyberpunk authors to start dreaming bad dreams.

As personal and global networks become intertwined, we are making ourselves one bio-mechanical being, prone to infection as a whole.

There is a reason for isolationism, and we may discover that soon, I fear.

A creationist dinosaur theme park!

"Mr. Hovind, a former public school science teacher with his own ministry, Creation Science Evangelism, and a hectic lecture schedule, said he had opened Dinosaur Adventure Land to counter all the science centers and natural history museums that explain the evolution of life with Darwinian theory. There are dinosaur bone replicas, with accompanying explanations that God made dinosaurs on Day 6 of the creation as described in Genesis, 6,000 years ago. Among the products the park gift shop peddles are T-shirts with a small fish labeled "Darwin" getting gobbled by a bigger fish labeled "Truth.""

The whole article in the New York Times. And, PS - if you aren't subscribed for free to the New York Times online, you're a silly idiot. Sign up now, in five minutes, and you get free Times news. It's nice.

My 2004 Jets Draft Review. linked once again for your viewing pleasure.
Staff Writer for a sports website is another one of my latest freelance endeavors. Hope these keep snowballing.

I'm a sports writer now:
Check out my first article, a review of the New York Jets' 2004 draft.
http://www.footballhuddles.com/modules.php?s=&name=Sections&sop=viewarticle&artid=190
I'm a Staff Writer for FootbullHuddles.com.

What's your birthday color?
http://www.pantone.com/birthdaycolor/bdaycolor.htm
Mine is "Peach Bloom." I'm not sure if I agree.

I check ESPN.com's NFL section about a hundred times a day. Is that wrong?

Downloading is inevitable. The trick is to make downloading safe and piracy-free.
Ask software companies- they don't avoid downloads. They make sure those downloads can't be distributed for free.
Music guys, look at the software industry. Then realize that you ARE software, smarten the hell up, and stop being idiots who sue college kids just because everyone can easily copy your vulnerable product using mass-produced consumer technology.

OK, more college students being sued across the nation by our music industry:
http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/internet/04/28/downloading.music.ap/index.html
I say fuck the music industry. I say we boycott them.
This is absurd. College students sharing songs, being sued for $3000 each.
Feeling like your art is being compromised, being stolen, is one thing. I understand that concern. But never in a history of popular art that spans centuries can I remember a ritualized suing campaign taxing middle-level consumers of a product for abusing product rights in this fashion.

I know there are people who are pirating internationally, who pose a much greater threat to the music industry than these highly-visible, scapegoat students. The music suits choose to string up their potential consumers, thus guaranteeing the birth of a generation of young adults hell-bent on the music industry's destruction.

Better be careful, RIAA. Abuse them today, and they'll come back when you're old to spit on your grave.

If you're a major-label artist, I feel pity on you. You've come into a system that sucks and is guaranteed to be overhauled in painful fashion.

Make it clear: I oppose piracy. But this is not the way to fight it. Be like Apple, not like the profiteering shits you clearly are.

As long as we have brains, they are capable of functioning at faster and more intriguing levels than our conscious minds can handle.

Unconscious, quick moments lead to revelations. No brain function is random.

Last night I spoke in a demon voice and acted in a scene by myself, taking my own orders on what to do next.

It was an improv assignment. Inner Demon Voice.

The scene worked out well, even though I had no idea what was coming next. I tied in a twist ending, even.

Instinct is good. Instinct makes us smarter and stronger than contemplation, often.

Good improv lesson: don't think. Do. Right now. Logic works itself out. It's true for writing.
Give it a try.

All these emails from strange names would make a great basis for characters in a play.

Mesolithic E. Mainlines has got to be a classic character. I see him in an Ignatius J. Reilly type of mold. What a weird world we live in! Mysterious missives from strangely-named characters urging you with aphoristic advice and trying to sell you "cheap meds."

If someone tried to argue that we weren't living a science-fiction life straight out of Philip K. Dick, I think this convinces otherwise.

If I win the Pulitzer Prize based on these characters, I'd like to thank Spam.

Receive word from Mesolithic E. Mainlines this late evening:

Would you believe it?
A man convinced against his will is of the same opinion still.
If a man had as many ideas during the day as he does when he has insomnia, he would make a fortune.

I never knew I had so many friends! But "Buy Cheap Meds" has many employees, apparently, who send me daily messages in an attempt to win my admiration and respect. They share words of joy and contemplation.

The latest from Dunked G. Turbulent:

Howdy!
In dreams and love there are no impossibilities.
We know our friends by their defects rather than their merits.

Adelaide P. Romanticize, where have you been all my life? She writes:

Salut!
The ideal friendship is to feel as one while remaining two.
Debt is the worst poverty.

And, of course, my ominous spam message from Lingos Q. Smack:

I've heard a lot about you
Who is not satisfied with himself will grow who is not sure of his own correctness will learn many things.
The attainment of an ideal is often the beginning of a disillusion.

From Philanderer Q. Tunnelling:

I'm so sorry! :)
All tragedies are finished by a death, all comedies by a marriage.
I never loved another person the way I loved myself.

The latest message I received from one "Conglomerating U. Isle":

Adieu.
I've only been in love with a beer bottle and a mirror.
We make the world we live in and shape our own environment.

I saw this wonderful poem sent to me via spam. I thought I'd share it with you.

Old Whore Fucked Doggy Style
Brunette Bitch Sucks Hard Cock
Brunette With Glasses Sucks Cock
Sexy Granny Wants To Show Of Clit
Mature Hoe With Filled Mouth

Stephen King: write less.
Neal Stephenson: write less.

You two should try working on haikus.
But don't listen to me...you're both millionaires.

I say this because Wizard and Glass and Cryptonomicon were ruined, I feel, by verbosity. Nice stuff, poor execution. I love Neal Stephenson, but I don't love the big C. It's cute...in some hard-to-define way. I didn't enjoy that.

And Stephen King can write 50-100 pages about drinking a glass of water, can't he? He makes love stories the way 3DO makes game machines.

Now reading: A Confederacy of Dunces.
I am excited to get into this for the obvious reason that the book has been acclaimed so many times, and yet I have avoided it. Also, it covers New Orleans - a town I'm fascinated with but have never visited before.

They all speak like New Yorkers there. How did that happen, exactly? I guess the Dutch background? That sounds like good BS. "It's the Dutch." I may be right.

The last four books I've read:

The Dark Tower IV, Wizard and Glass - PASS
The Fountainhead - read
Cryptonomicon - PASS
Pattern Recognition - read

I have a great deal of obscure books on my shelves, but I must get through these popular reads now and be done with them. The side stuff can come later. I'm looking forward to reading a book about the Philosophy of Holes that Mac Wellman suggested I check out.

Are you sick of this yet?
I don't care: I write alone.
You lurk in silence.

pure disenchantment
stemming from old humankind
same shit, different cells.

Yay Tigerman!
http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_365440.html?menu=news.latestheadlines

There's a Tigerman
Living in San Diego
He wants a fur graft

Reputation-land
Rated and judged by your peers
Shoot me now. My thanks.

daily war headlines
posted faster than we read
how many dead now?

David Bowie's pants
Keep sliding down his ankles
He yelps, helpless, pained

raw fish slices, yes
are not fresh or recent fish
frozen post rigor

Haiku day.

Peanut popcorn man
Puts a clown nose on my nose
Peanut popcorn me.

FYI: Peter Dinklage, actor and star of The Station Agent film that was acclaimed last year, is attached to The Dwarf screenplay adaptation I wrote. One of our producers is flying him to Sweden to meet with Bengt Lagerkvist, son of the author of the original novel, Par Lagerkvist.

I await more news like an eager spectator.

This is the best soul food in San Diego, hands-down. Go visit immediately for: fried chicken, fried catfish, ribs, hot links, collard greens, okra, mac and cheese, cornbread, sweet tea, even chitlins and oxtails - plus a cool gift shop and assortment of Negro League baseball jerseys.
http://entertainment.signonsandiego.com/profile/169532
They'll be glad you visited - and so will your bulging stomach!

My Maxim piece on how to change a lightbulb:
http://www.maximonline.com/stupid_fun/articles/article_5721.html

My Hot 100 contributions: (i.e., I wrote the copy)

2. Beyonce Knowles
4. Anna Kournikova
8. Paris Hilton
11. Eve
12. Carmen Electra
13. Scarlett Johnansson
16. Kim Smith
17. Angelina Jolie
21. Elisha Cuthbert
28. Shannon Elizabeth
29. Ashanti
30. Sara Foster
32. Mariah Carey
34. Uma Thurman
36. Britney Spears
37. Krista Allen
38. Liv Tyler
40. Shania Twain
41. Giselle Bundchen
42. Brooke Burke
43. Charlize Theron
45. Liz Phair
46. Paige Butcher
51. Gina Gershon
53. Naomi Watts
54. Shakira
60. Monet Mazur
64. Fergie
68. Rachel Hunter
69. Milla Jovovich
70. Monika Kramlik
71. Victoria Beckham
72. Cameron Richardson
74. Bianca Kajlich
76. Elena Lyons
78. Vanessa Marcil
81. Daisy Fuentes
82. Thalia
85. Maria Menounos
86. Victoria Pratt
87. Christina DaRe
88. Lindsay Price
90. Jill Wagner
93. Nadine Velasquez
99. Amanda Swisten

Go check it out on newsstands!

Question for the day: is global-hiving going to really happen, or will there be backlash before then?

Reading William Gibson's "Pattern Recognition" right now. I'm on delay because of waiting for paperback editions of hot books.

I'm intrigued by the trend of cyberpunk authors (Stephenson, Gibson and Sterling) giving up their science-fiction domains and focusing squarely on the present. I hope this is only a brief illustrative trend.

Don't give up the ghost, guys! "I believe cyberpunk is long over," Stephenson said (along those lines) in today's interview with Wired. Well, who knew that these original authors were all about genre definition? I think they are all original, and have been labeled under a genre for definition purposes. Like many schools of modern art.

I just feel that the strongest suit these three had was their collective original ideas. By bowing to the faulted present, it's only an illustration of our ephemeral flaws along the way to the Next Big Thing.

Focus on the next page. Today is already over.

Although, I will say I like Pattern Recognition more than I did Cryptonomicon. The "Big C" was full of witty and intriguing riffs, but it being a "yarn," I felt it cheapened itself more than Pattern. Snow Crash and The Diamond Age were parables disguised as yarns.

Who is going to step up and show us the future? Because there is a Next Big Thing beyond our current Thing, and if we don't see it, then we won't get to it.

Capisce?

blue.

Upcoming pieces by Scott Stein:

-April's Maxim has a short one-page piece called "How to Change a Lightbulb" that explains, oddly enough, how to change a lightbulb. It's not meant to be taken seriously.

-March issue of Jungle magazine: "Brand Names" sidebar taking joking look at brand names that rock stars might start. Also, "Career Changes" sidebar looking at six famously-flexible careers. (Wall Street Journal reprint)

-May Maxim: Six summer movie previews plus interviews with Ben Stiller, Jennifer Love Hewitt, Roland Emmerich, Alex Proyas and David Goyer. Also, wrote half of the Maxim Hot 100.

-June Maxim: feature piece on hunting buffalo on a Crow reservation in Montana. Features picture of yours truly chowing on raw buffalo liver.

-July Maxim: "Things to do this summer": worked with cast of others to brainstorm brain-damaged ideas for self-entertainment this summer.

Category: Game News
Now kids in Japan can chase imaginary treasure within up to 400 meters with their cell phones:
http://www.wired.com/news/games/0,2101,63011,00.html?tw=wn_tophead_1

To this date, my plays have been:

Levels
Bad Family
Delta
Eugenica
Utopia Parkway
A Short And T-Shirt Day
Cups & Balls
The Barrens
Empirica
Four Walls
All You Can Eat
China Hands
Custard
Cooking With Your Own Semen
Fifth Wall
Scott Stein's First Play
The Dark
Mr. Clean
Tales About Toads
Hans My Hedgehog
Western
Forget Me Not
Dogwatch
Project 365

A dream:
A boy made of wire was delivering a package to our hotel room. He saw my mother and said, "she is beautiful. I want to see her again." I got so angry at his intrusion, I bent him into a ball and left him outside. My mother, when finding out, said, "that was too aggressive. That could come back and have bad ramifications."

Later, I entered a tremendous elevator that had an upstairs- and its own private suite. It was being occupied by someone, and the door was locked. I wondered who lived in the elevator.

Later still, we watched Cirque du Soleil perform a show in the street, dressed as homeless people who had suffered.

boingboing.net

Great stuff.

Chicken does what you want!
http://www.subservientchicken.com/

10:52 am

The car exuded this smell and it wasn't clear where the smell was coming from. Exhaust pipes were outside. His face was inside. His nose maybe smelled the air conditioning vent gone foul from some seclusion in a cave-like parking condition, tainted with a seed of someone's airborne mucus or a bacterium or just plain old mold. Who knew about the origins of car stink?

He better be paying attention now. Sudden braking almost plowed him into a station wagon of eighties-make, done over with Star Wars decals. The original series. A peeling Vader sticker glared at his errant eyes.

No time like the present to pay attention.

He saw, in the distance, that her house still stood. The terrace had been covered over with a long elastic tarp, the sort for circuses or fumigation, or off-season. From this span, the wooden shingles burned faint yellow in the daylight-savings sunset.

The driveway was empty.

He turned slowly, hunched down in his seat a little. His eyes couldn't help but look towards the mailbox...its flag unraised, of course. But it used to stand upright like a red soldier. A little curved off to one side, a soldier with a limp. The metal was peeling off its dark black paint.

Slow parking, idling up to the overgrown bushes. A gentle application of the parking brake.

Soon he had already found himself wandering in the front door. At some point previous, the key, the smashing of the window, the covert operation. The smell was similar. Was it the smell of abandonment? But it happened even with items unabandoned, like his car. Was it the smell of spiritual abandonment? That faint biological taint? Did it know, when it spread its wings, how people had already departed?

Fourteen steps up the old carpet, kicking up small puffs of dust. He held the staircase's railing, smooth, grooved. The paintings used to greet him at the top of these stairs - one of the piazza, one of the big bowl of fruit with a single fly perched on it. She always called them reproductions, and at that age he had misunderstood and thought they were somehow birthed by another set of paintings. He saw living still-lifes, mysterious pieces of art haunted by their own purpose. He had named them Father and Mother, a long line in a family tree of paintings that had extended perhaps as far back as grandma herself.

If he sat in that big fruit bowl, next to the single fly, he would be able to rest his arms on the giant pear and his legs on the cushioned bunch of grapes, and rest his ear close, and they would speak to him. They would tell him of the whole family line, of the original story. The parts grandma never told.

The parts about grandpa.

Of course, this is how the world of children goes.

The wall was bare, now.

At the top of the stairs, he ran his hand over the old plaster. His fingers left a small smudge. The streak was a small line, a brief curl.

He continued down the hall on auto-pilot. Before long he was back in the room at the farthest end, and he closed the door behind him. He crept to the far corner, the barren wood floor, where the bed used to stand. An electric blanket underneath had its own nest of wires and purred its own heat, and under that protection he'd sleep a magical sleep. Eyes further and further away.

He laid down on the bare wood, curled in a small ball.

He smelled the floor. Full grain. Dust crept in his nose.

He sneezed, again and again.

He wiped his own nose, and tucked himself in.

He laid there, for a while. Maybe the rest of the day. Then he got up, brushed the dust off his shirt and pants. He centered his glasses on his head, wiped them clean.

He descended the stairs, locked the door.

And he drove away.


11:12 am

It's another day, and another month for rip-offs. I got a speeding ticket for pacing traffic, plus my girlfriend's car broke down a day after it was "repaired." On top of this, I ate at a Chinese restaurant where I was charged 20% on top of my bill, without my knowledge. I discovered the "addendum" when I logged onto my bank account. Very nice. Then when I called to complain, I logged back onto my bank account and found another duplicate charge from the restaurant. Wells Fargo will be looking into it if the transaction goes through.

Is it something about April and people being assholes? It's not my fault if whatever drives you drives you. Just keep it out of my face.

A 20-minute short story. (i.e., one that I wrote in 20 minutes)

Mirror

Tuesday, March 30, 2004 – 2:11-2:31 am

I looked in the mirror. Before this, I was puffy, large, clearly an enlarged man, an overweight man, an expanded man, an experiment in biological whimsy. Now, I was a normal man, one besieged gently by slight weight problems dangling off himself, just little taunting bits of flesh being vestigial and superfluous. You could see, underneath, a nice smile, a tight chin, and a fighter’s profile. To himself, he was different. With thirty pounds to account for the process.

I knew that I had a physical obsession with mirrors. That man in the reflection was unknown to me in a very real sense now, and being alone for seven hours staring at it, my final conclusion was that the mirror-man was staring at me for different reasons than I was staring at it. He was looking at himself with a challenging glance, a humorous snarl, a toothy affectation that wasn’t present on his own face. He could feel the difference. He was clearly frowning, according to his cheek muscles, and that bastard in front of him, oh yes, he was very clearly grinning. Wasn’t he? That lip was upturned in a way that couldn’t be belied. Asking for a hand to punch the glass.

Ever since that weight was lost, each morning became a longer glance. Six seconds would suffice at the fat self, a quick reminder that he was alive, not about to die this morning, teeth not too fuzzy. Zippers zipped. The glances got to a state of longer duration at five pounds. His eyeballs drifted, off his main eye-to-eye contact and down the frame, to points ignored for a good period of epochs. So many that if you were to subscribe to the belief that one’s presence of witnessing an object brought that object into existence, these places would long since have withered into legend and lore. I now saw those places again, dared to cross the straits and saw my profile and let it hang. And at ten pounds, I stared some more.

It wasn’t that he was falling in love with me. He’d stare like a good doctor, a family member, a friend. It was hard to explain. I knew after fifteen pounds that I was no longer going in to stare at him; he was going in to stare at me. That’s how he became different. And I was no longer his twin.

I wanted to continue enhancing this effect, by whatever means possible. I would starve myself for full days, water fasts in a darkened apartment. He wouldn’t answer the phone. He waited, hoping to see the figure in the mirror one last time before the end of the day, and he wanted it to be good and sweet, without mercy or forgiveness.

At thirty, at last, the process was complete. The skin hung loose and angry, and even the eyes were of a different color. He was dressed differently than me; his arms had different types of hairs. His nails, different proteins. His lips, curled.

His eyes were cold.

I didn’t return his gaze, even when he stared at me. This day, in the mirror, I didn’t look back.

What to say as a preamble? Days followed. He withdrew to his bed, and dreamt. I grew despondent and unplugged my phone, threw out my clothes, shattered my TV. I didn’t realize what he meant to me. He felt the same way. They couldn’t reconcile, however. So they didn’t even try to fake a hello. The rest of the weight loss was habit, please understand. The stay in the hospital was even therapeutic. After all, he came to visit. Would he have done otherwise if I hadn’t been so extreme in my behaviors? He came right up to me, looked me in the eyes once again, and there was a form of apology. We made silent differences, and I left him in the hospital bed, and I went home. He knew why I visited.

I don’t keep that window open. I don’t polish the glass. I don’t have mirrors in my house anymore. And we’re both fine with that.

Welcome Back!!!!

After a prolonged absence of many, many days, about 2 years, I'm back because I forgot my password and my email address. No longer. Now I am spouting more shit.

Since my extended absence, I:

1) Got laid off from Sony
2) Worked freelance and got scared
3) Worked briefly in NY for a spin-off of Maxim magazine, Maxim Goes to the Movies, which while being well-received may never get published again because the owner may sell the company to build England's largest forest of trees
4) Went on a buffalo hunt
5) Got re-hired by Sony
6) Lost weight

OK, so now we're square. I was recently published in the Wall Street Journal for a small series of observations on famous career changes. You missed the issue, but I'll post the text here soon.

Peace. Patient readers who have waited two years, I'm back with a vengeance!