May 2005 Archives
May 25, 2005
Motherfuckers on the Sidewalk
Today, I was walking along a somewhat narrow sidewalk in Century City. Now, this sidewalk wasn’t as bad as a lot of the ones in Hollywood, where you can barely squeeze two people across. There was easily enough space for four people to walk side-by-side comfortably. But here’s a little thing about sidewalk etiquette: when you’re in a group walking four-wide, and the sidewalk can only fit four people, your entire group consists of big fucking douchebags. This only changes if you, seeing somebody coming from the opposite direction (or being aware enough to know people are approaching you from behind), make room for the other pedestrians.
Having been in LA for several weeks and accustomed myself to the self-absorbed nature of this town, I’ve pretty much gotten used to this kind of thing. It’s not quite as annoying as people who very slowly merge into lefthand turn lanes and make me miss a green light, but it’s pretty irritating. Here’s how I’d handle it back in Chicago: as I approached the person nearest me, I’d slam into them with my shoulder, intentionally whacking them a little harder than necessary. I’m not sure this is a “Chicago thing,” per se. I’m just not a very nice person, and I believe very strongly in certain types of human decency.
But here’s how I’ve handled it here so far: I shy away and walk in the grass, or stand around like an idiot and wait for them to pass me, then resume my walk. This has happened to me almost every time I’ve been out walking (which hasn’t been often, thanks to this sprawling horror of a city), but why do I shy away from being as rude (ruder?) to them as they are to me? Because of the Columbia College mantra: “When you’re in LA, don’t piss anyone off, because they could be your boss someday.”
Back to today: I was walking, fresh cup of coffee in tow, to my car, when in the opposite direction came a four-wide group of yuppies eating ice cream and having an enjoyable conversation about, I assume, money and the virtues of capitalism. As I approached, the person on the end nearest me looked away from the conversation, looked right at me — directly into my eyes, even — then turned back to the conversation. He didn’t move or swerve to avoid me; no, I ended up in the grass, again, in order to avoid him and not spill my coffee.
I stood there for a moment, my “Hulk smash”-style rage boiling. I turned around and looked at their backs as they continued to walk in that “la-de-da, I’m so great” way, and I made a decision: fuck every single one of them. I’m sick of being a less-than-nothing toad. If, someday, I’m a candidate for a job and I happen to run into a guy that I smashed into and spilled both coffee and ice cream on, and he recalls the incident and refuses to hire me — fuck him, because I don’t want to work with people like that anyway.
More importantly, that led me to the decision that I’ll be who I am, because being that person is way better than being the monkey-boy to some fucking tan surfer dude. Will it lose me jobs? I don’t think so. You know why? Three cubicles away from me, the assistant to a lawyer sits there and screams at his boss all day long (his boss screams back). He is who he is, and he’s making a living, and they have a mutual respect for one another because the lawyer wants to be a ball-buster but the assistant will not allow his balls to be so thoroughly decimated.
So there you have it: I’ll bottom out in a year and return to Chicago.
Posted by Stan on May 25, 2005 8:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | Stories of Hilarity and Humiliation
May 8, 2005
Roots
Note: This was originally posted in the form of a comment at a blog I stumbled upon thanks to Google.
I first discovered the miracle of the boner in fifth grade. I had no idea what made it start, I had no idea how to make it go away. It would either just hang limply or suddenly stand at attention. Who was I supposed to talk to about this? I told my friend Mike, who had a sister in high school and consequently was pretty knowledgeable about sex.
“It’s a stiffy,” Mike said. “I get ‘em, too. You’re supposed to stick them in girls’ pussies.”
“They let you do that?” I wondered.
“My sister does, all the time,” Mike replied matter-of-factly.
“Cool,” I said, somewhat in awe. “I don’t know any girls. How do you make them go away?”
He shrugged. That summer, we often rode bikes to the Playboy factory in the industrial park, searching for discarded issues in the Dumpsters. We’d hide behind the bushes in Mike’s backyard and ogle these newfound sexual objects, these women. If a girl was particularly attractive or in a particularly erotic pose, we’d gladly drop our pants and show them our boners, but beyond that, we really had no idea how to get them to go away. We just knew, even in the fantasy world of Playboy, that women would be gratified by the mere sight of our 11-year-old units.
Something had to be done. I needed to consult with an expert. At the time, my father was working two jobs, so he was barely home. I decided to go to my mother. I told her that, every once in awhile, unprompted, my penis stiffened.
She looked at me for a long moment, then solemnly led me to a bookcase in the garage (where all great reading material should be kept, bookended by Chilton’s auto guides and a socket set) and pointed out a series of thin hardcover books, titled The Life Cycle, which dealt with the various, horrible aspects of puberty. “If you ever have any questions like that,” my mom said in that wise matriarchal tone she had, “just consult these books.”
In the 30-minute sex ed class we had in fifth grade, we men discovered a term called “masturbation,” but nobody really knew what it meant. We knew it was a way of gratifying ourselves — and, more importantly, making the boners disappear — but we didn’t know anything beyond that. Nothing about orgasms, very little about ejaculations, and most detrimentally — nothing about how to masturbate. The first thing I did when consulting the books was look up “masturbation.” It said something to the effect of, “You can stimulate yourself by encircling your erect penis. This is called masturbation.” I looked up “encircle” in the dictionary, and I was on my way.
As was often the case during this period, I snuck and watched late-night HBO. I had analyzed the TV Guide’s subtle codification of nudity: BN meant butts, N meant boobs, and SSC meant everything. I had discovered a film that HBO often played called Husbands and Lovers (I often confused it with Woody Allen’s dramedy Husbands and Wives — this was a horrible mistake to make while in boner territory, and it led to my early and unwarranted dislike of his work), which not only had women on display at almost all times but also had a bit of male nudity. It was the closest thing to porn I had ever seen at the time.
Upon discovering how masturbation worked, I waited for two weeks before Husbands and Lovers was on again, and I was ready to finally try masturbation out. I huddled under a blanket in the dark, clicked on the HBO, waited until that nudity got my li’l guy going, slid my hand around my penis, and —
Nothing happened. What the fuck, man? I just sat there, hand limply surrounding my unit, until it got all warm and sweaty and finally shriveled back into oblivion. This was the first — but certainly not last — failure of my unit.
In the fall of sixth grade, I often spent time with a kid named Dave, who was the resident porn junkie of my little clique. We’d go and hang out at his house after school, listening to Pink Floyd and sneaking peaks at his dad’s ridiculously huge collection of Playboys. On a really overcast, windy day, we stood outside the school waiting for his mom to pick us up. I sat on my gigantic backpack, and he stood, keeping lookout.
He looked down at me and asked, “Do you masturbate?”
“No,” I said glumly. “I don’t know how.”
“Oh man,” he said, “it’s so easy. You just pull on it with your hand.”
Pull on it? Yes, I could see how that would affect things. This was the component I had been missing all along. I just sat there with my wet-noodle hand surrounding my dick, expecting something to magically happen. That weekend, I decided I was exhausted and needed to take my nap. Under the light of my extremely nerdy, illuminated globe, I removed a large, empty box from my top closet shelf, grabbed a Cindy Crawford magazine from my secret supply under my bed, and attempted this pulling concept.
I was slow and goofy at first, sliding my hand forward and completely off before I learned it’d save time and energy just to gently rub back and forth. The main thing I remember about these early incidents was the smell of semen. It smelled weird to me, and while I retain a sense memory of the odor, I can’t place it to this day. The closest thing I could say is it was something like salt and rubbing alcohol, but that doesn’t really do it justice.
Many a Star Trek: The Next Generation episode was defiled by my masturbatory tendencies, and I slowly improved in efficiency and technique. I wished it wasn’t such a private thing, because I could have bragged about many things that humiliate me now — number of times per day, disturbing locations that don’t involve my bedroom or home bathroom, the shortest time from grip to spurt.
While I’m no longer beaming with pride at my masturbatory habits, I will say that, as I’m currently alone and often a little depressed, waxing the poetic warlock really does the job of perking me up, and I’m thankful for that.
Happy night-before-Mother’s Day, everyone!
Posted by Stan on May 8, 2005 12:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (4) | Classic Issues, Friends: Can’t Live with ‘Em
May 4, 2005
Actors
It’s pretty well known that I fucking hate actors. When I was in high school, I used to act a bit. I was on the speech team. Performing was an interesting thing, but I always — for the most part — hated actors. It’s all part of the weird self-hate thing that I have, and I’ll argue that that was when it was at its worst: I enjoyed performing because, even though I wasn’t any good, I felt like it was an opportunity to try to “be” somebody else, which was satisfying since I disliked myself so intensely. But at the same time, I hated everybody around me — sometimes openly, usually secretly — and I’d be one of those “mysterious” actors who sat in a corner, brooding, while the rest of the people were shrieking at each other to demand attention.
But what it really boils down to is, all actors hate themselves equally. They all want to be someone else because they’re so insecure, they can’t take who they are, or maybe they’re too afraid to get to know who they really are, so they escape into a character. Since many actors fucking suck, this maybe isn’t 100% true, but I think there’s quite a bit of truth in it. No matter how bad an actor is, he’s trying to be somebody else. Otherwise, why the charade?
But actors are full of charades. Most of them are so hungry for attention, they dominate the conversation, they launch into “funny” stories or characters. They all want to be the party’s Robin Williams, and even Robin Williams’s shit got old 25 years ago. So you get a bunch of actors who want to be the center-of-attention-bundle-of-energy at a party? Shit, let’s go smoke some weed in the backyard, because it’s just obnoxiousness overload.
And that was the thing I never figured out, and that was the thing that made me bow out of performing altogether after high school (we’ll ignore the fact that I sucked, because while I sucked, I could still get parts). I’m misanthropic and depressed (and depressing) because I internalize my insecurities. I hate unleashing that shit on the world. It’s not fair to everybody else that I’m so insecure I have to keep talking talking talking, be the center of the conversation, be the noisy firecracker. I became very aware of how fucking annoying that kind of person can be, and I made a conscious decision to not be that way. I always prefer being the guy who sits quietly in the back, observing and mocking (orally and mentally) what’s going on. That’s how this blog was born.
With that said, I was filled with anxiety and dismay when I learned an acting class would be coming in today, and we had to come in prepared with a few short scenes (no more than eight pages), which they would rehearse a bit before performing. I was dismayed because, shit, they’re actors, and they’re gonna be coming in with their actor shit and ad-libbing all over town because it’s so “in the moment” and “true,” and just kill me now. I was anxious because I did really want to hear some of the scenes allowed, just to hear the rhythm and to see whether or not people get the jokes. I hear them in my head and I say, “I can play every single part, even the female sexpot in her 50s,” because I understand the speech pattern and the timing…
…but I’m not everybody, and despite getting some pretty good notes yesterday from this development guy who read my script, I’m still unsure of its comic worth. A comedy writer came in a few weeks ago and told us, “A joke isn’t a joke until someone laughs,” and while I don’t agree with that philosophy 100%, in this case I do, because these are words on a page, and if I’m the only one laughing at them, there’s a problem.
I picked out a few short, dialogue-heavy scenes that I thought would be interesting to hear aloud. One, I feared, was far too melodramatic. The second was just a brief exchange that I wasn’t sure was as amusing as it could have been. The third was kind of a longer, more complex scene, which I chose to see if those kinds of long, multiple-person scenes work well.
And they were off. A really attractive Latina actress and a guy all the writers kept referring to as “the prettyboy” were playing, respectively, a dour bride-to-be and her accountant fiancé. In the scene, he accuses her of having a “mental and emotional” affair with the main character, because she can’t have one physically. He has this whole monologue, which is very Aaron Sorkin and (in my opinion) quite cheeseball. I’ve always aspired to write high-quality, Sorkin-esque dialogue, but this is like late-fourth-season West Wing — it’s no “Two Cathedrals.” It’s what happens when eunuchs try to write dialogue about relationships.
But this actor, playing the accountant, saved the entire scene. He was actually a really good actor (the less said about the attractive Latina, the better). He hit all the right notes in the first reading, then I asked him in crappy actor-speak to “bring up the rhythm.” I don’t even know what that means, but it sounded appropriate. And he completely reinvented the performance on a dime, so I totally respect that. What I respect even more, though, is the way he handled the end of the scene, after the melodramatic monologue, when his fiancée responds, and he sits back down and launches into a dull job story…the dude started ad-libbing hilarious dialogue, and the melodrama of the previous monologue evaporated, leaving a scene that is actually legimately dramatic.
See, folks: actors aren’t all bad.
The second scene is the very first exchange between the accountant fiancé and the main character, who is hellbent on stopping the wedding. The accountant is smarmy and condescending, almost giving the impression he knows who this guy is and is just fucking with him for fun, so he’s instantly both likable and dislikable. It’s intended to be a brief, amusing scene.
The guy playing the main character was bust-a-gut funny, and if he hadn’t been about 30 years too old for the part, were I to produce and direct this screenplay on my own, I would’ve cast him. The guy playing the accountant, different from the actor playing the same character in the first scene — he was one of those “actors.” He started ad-libbing very badly, and then quickly going back to script to salvage his ruining of a scene I’d written.
I’m not a big “the words are God” kind of guy. I love writing, but my feeling is, if I want the words I write to be 100%, iron-clad text, I’d be writing a fucking novel. Nobody’s gonna to go to the movies and just read each page of my screenplay for two hours, so the words don’t mean shit. However…I do like to think I know what I’m doing, and I write the words for a specific reason. If an actor has a more interesting interpretation of the text, more power to him. If, however, he plays with the words and just fucks them up, that drives me crazy.
And yet, the guy playing the main character redeemed the scene for both of them by being unbelievably funny. He had the timing, he got the jokes, and he made my day. He was The Guy. This was a scene where the other actors watching actually applauded (they didn’t with the other two), and the teacher of the class leaned over to me and said, “Great scene!” Great scene!
Finally, the last scene. This wasn’t terribly complicated, but it involved three characters instead of just two (gasp!), along with characters entering and leaving. Unfortunately, the actor playing the “Jeremy Piven” best-friend role was not exactly giving it his all. He was driving the scene, and his character was supposed to own most of the beats, so it kind of just sat there like a wet noodle. The guy playing the main character was the same as before, and he was still hilarious. Meanwhile, the third character — the main character’s mother, who is sleeping with Jeremy Piven — was that same Latina. During their moments together…it was pretty painful. And yet…the dialogue got laughs anyway. You know why? Because even with the worst reads in the world — drumroll please — the dialogue is funny.
I hate it when I get all pleased with myself, but this was one of those times. I was really thinking, “Shit, maybe I’m not such a bad writer after all.” I dunno, I think little doses of confidence like this are good, because if and when I’m in the position to pitch it, I’ll have these moments to think back on to muster up the passion to really believe in the fact that the script is good, and not just for a first-draft written in 12 days. It’s by no means perfect, but considering the conditions under which it was written and the newness of it — it’s just good.
That’s right, I’m a genius and everybody loves me. Allow me to become very shallow and self-absorbed and ramble on about how great I am.
Maybe I should go back to acting!
Posted by Stan on May 4, 2005 5:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Career-Based Rambling
Things I Learn While Shopping at the Grocery Store: An Ongoing Struggle — Self-Checkout
Most grocery stores that have leaped into the 21st century have what’s called self-checkout, a marvelous new technology wherein you check yourself out, scanning the items, weighing the fruits and vegetables, inserting the credit cards, et cetera. Since it’s a new, imperfect technology, most stores also have a human monitor for the self-checkout, sitting in this raised desk that looks over the entire self-checkout area, not unlike a lifeguard station.
I’ve used the self-checkout at grocery stores in Chicago, and it’s very easy-to-use and handy because usually when I go to the grocery store, I buy a pack of gum and some coffee. I’m not buying dinner for ten, and in my experience, Chicagoans are terrified of the self-checkouts and avoid them like the plague. You never have to wait for the self-checkout, which is why I use them.
And then there’s Ralphs, with their U-Chek-Out. I don’t know what they did, but they’ve managed to take all the simplicity and fun out of the self-checkout. It has crazy sensors that make sure you’re bagging and/or leaving your items on the shelf next to the scanner, because putting it back on your cart is madness. And it’s very sensitive. At one point I held two items, one in each hand, and the scanner kept coming up wrong. The ivory-tower lady looked down upon me and said, “It’s ‘cause you got something in your hand.” What in the name of God is sensing that I have a completely separate object, held at a safe distance, in my opposite hand?
Now I know why people from Chicago hate the self-checkout: paranoia. We’re by no means backward rubes (well, most of us…), but in that area there’s a general sense that if a machine knows you are putting items in your cart or holding them in your hand without scanning them, perhaps this technology should be buried under 30 feet of steel and never seen again by human eyes. Nobody seems to be bothered by it here, but I was pretty freaked out.
Perhaps waiting in line is worth the effort.
Posted by Stan on May 4, 2005 5:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Random Musings
May 1, 2005
Trauma
I couldn’t have been more than seven years old when my father burst into the bedroom that my sister and I shared, waking us both from a sound sleep with the noise and sudden brightness of the kitchen lights. “Come on out here, children,” he said lightly. Though raised for 13 years in the backwoods of eastern Kentucky, my dad had lost most of his accent, but he still has certain bizarre affectations you don’t often hear in suburban Chicago.
Bleary with sleep, my sister and I slowly got out of bed and wondered what, exactly, was going on. We had a rather odd childhood, with my father being an unruly alcoholic, so being awakened in the middle of the night for strange reasons was — well, still strange, but not as questionable as it maybe should have been.
“Where are we going, Daddy?” my sister asked through a yawn.
“We’re goin’ down to Kmart, getcha some toys,” he said pleasantly. Excited, we slipped on our snowpants, boots, coats, hats, scarves, mittens, and were ready for a trek out into the winter night. The idea of toys made us dismiss any potential concerns we may have had at the fact that it was after 11 o’clock, long past our bedtimes.
We followed Dad outside, and he walked right past his rusty, red pickup truck. My sister and I exchanged confused glances. “C’mon,” he said, gesturing for us to follow without stopping or looking back.
“Are we walking?” my sister whispered to me. I shrugged; she was the older one, so if she didn’t know, I figured I should be concerned. Kmart was at least 20 minutes away by car, so walking in the middle of winter seemed like a silly idea.
We followed him up the slope behind our house to the big soccer field where the Park District usually held games on summer Saturdays. He continued, huge footprints in the deep snow, until he reached a tall lightpost flooding quartz illumination all over the white field.
“Get down,” he said when we caught up.
“What?” I thought in my Daniel Stern, Wonder Years internal monologue. “Why are we out in this field? What’s happening?”
“Your mother says you been bad again,” he said. It was true; we were often caught sneaking out of the house or watching television when we weren’t supposed to. In this particular incident, I don’t remember what we did; I just remember the gory aftermath. “Get down,” he repeated sternly.
We got down, sitting Indian-style, as we usually did in school.
“Flat on your bellies,” he instructed; we obeyed. “You know how to do push-ups, right?”
My sister and I exchanged nervous glances. Sure, we had done push-ups in gym class for the stupid Presidential physical fitness thing, but neither of us were particularly athletic. My sister was generally more concerned with her hair and clothes, and I was concerned with not caring about sports. So yes, we knew how to do push-ups, and at this point it had dawned on us that maybe we weren’t getting the Ghostbusters firehouse playset after all, but would we do well enough to please him?
“Gimme 10 push-ups,” he said.
We set our hands down on the cold, hard-packed snow, making prints in it. And we started doing push-ups.
“One!” he called after we had — eventually — completed the first. “No girly ones, son,” he said to me.
“Two!” he called after the second. “Come on, we got all night, and you’re doin’ a hell of a lot more than 10 — this’s just a warm-up.”
“Three!” We continued, I don’t remember for how long, but eventually he was satisfied, and our faces had turned a pale shade of blue, so he trudged us back to the house and sent us to bed, freezing and probably dehydrated.
The next morning, whatever we had done, my sister and I made a pact never to do it again. And it’s really one of those childhood traumas that stick with you because, yeah, my dad was probably drunk out of his mind at the time, but that doesn’t stop the fact that this brought out the absolute worst in who he was. Was he normally — when he was sober — a caring, loving father? Yes, but if you crossed him, he’d take you to the dark side, which in this case involved a seven- and nine-year-old doing manly push-ups in the snow in the middle of the night, for something that was most likely as simple as refusing to eat peas.
It was this incident that really made me lose my trust in most people. Yes, I still trusted people, but this caused the downward spiral, and as more and more people — adults in places of authority, in almost all cases — began to betray my idea of who they were and show me their worst faces, I pretty much lost faith in humanity. Consequently, few things make me happy, as anybody who’s given even a cursory glance at this blog knows. I get depressed a lot, and I isolate myself a lot, because I don’t want to blindly trust somebody and end up doing more push-ups in the snow.
Posted by Stan on May 1, 2005 4:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | Family: The Horror…
