April 2007 Archives
April 30, 2007
Inept Investigation
People who know me well are aware of my sad delusion that I will, one day, be a grizzled and world-weary private investigator, using my profession to confirm my most cynical doubts about the world and as an excuse to never get close to anyone. That’s the life for me. That, or riding around the U.S. Highway system on a Harley, going from town to town and performing odd jobs until I have enough money to move on (and solving many mysteries along the way).
But here’s the thing about me solving anything resembling a mystery: I’m not good at it. I’m also not experienced, so if (for instance) somebody decides to tail me, I can’t outmaneuver them in eggplant-colored 1993 Chrysler Concorde. I probably couldn’t even outrun them in a gold ‘74 Firebird, no matter how well it corners.
As a result, we get the situation I had this morning. You might recall that last week my mother was laid off, and I talked her into waiting until Monday to go and stalk her coworker. If you are too lazy to read the other entry, here it is in brief: my mom was hired to do a job, a young and cute girl was hired to help out (doing the same job) despite being fairly incompetent, and my mom’s boss had a huge, not-so-secret crush/flirtation with the new girl. When they laid my mom off, they said the college girl would also be laid off, but since they’ve also proven to be huge liars, she didn’t believe it.
So we drove over there this morning, shortly after the college girl would arrive but also early enough to avoid anyone leaving for a lunchbreak, sticking to the backroads and driving my car so they wouldn’t recogize my mom and/or her car. In traditional private detective fashion, I insisted on being highly caffeinated during these proceedings (the drunkenness usually comes later, to wash away the bitter stench of failure). Unfortunately, a stop at Krispy Kreme for mochas ended in disaster. Note to Krispy Kreme employees (who I imagine read this blog because I am the fat trendsetter): mochas are not the same as hot chocolate. Thank you for the caffeine-withdrawal headache.
The primary objective was to spot the college girl’s car in the parking lot, without being seen. It’s in a business park littered with one-story buildings, some of which (like my mom’s former place of employment) face the parking lot. My mom knows they have a tendency to stare out the windows at the parking lot, so she was afraid that stopping or slowing down too much would give us away. Sort of a big issue when the secondary objective was to photograph the girl’s car in case something lawsuit-esque ever happens. (Mom seems to think there’s a case for age-discrimination; she might have someone if she can get other employees to testify in her behalf, but even then it all just seems like a lot of hearsay without any hard evidence.)
The other big problem with the primary objective? My mom has no real idea what kind of car the college girl drives. She knew the color and that it has a spoiler. That’s it. She also knew that there was another car with an identical color, but it was fancier and more than likely belonged to someone working in the law firm next door. Did she have some idea of the college girl’s license plate number? No. Make and/or model? “Well, it was sort of sporty, but not too sporty — the other one was really sleek, like a Corvette but not actually a Corvette.” That narrows it down!
I weaved my way through the parking lot, following her instructions on how to get to her particular building. As we approached, there weren’t many cars, and none of them were the “sort-of blue” color she had attempted to describe. Then, past a big minivan, there was a dark-blue car. I barely got a look at it, but what I saw looked “sleek” to me, and not in a “sporty but not too sporty” way. Like the kind of annoying sports car where the seats are practically horizontal, like a bed, because the windshield and ceiling are so low-slung.
“That’s it,” my mom said glumly. “That’s her car?”
“Are you sure?” I asked, slowing down so she could snap a —
“Don’t slow down!” she snapped. “She’s parked right in front of the windows, and they’ll see her.”
“But —”
“Just keep going!”
I kept going, circling around to the other side of the building and exiting to go home, and then we got into an argument about it. I thought, based on the descriptions of the two similar cars, that she had identified the wrong one. I wanted to swing back around for a second pass, but she got all paranoid and told me to keep driving. Then, when we were about halfway home, she started hemming and hawing that maybe she had rushed to judgment. She didn’t want to go back again and risk being seen, though. We agreed, since she got the make and model of the car in the parking lot, that we’d look it up online and see what it looked like.
That didn’t end well. I was driving, so I didn’t get a look at the car; my mom misidentified the car model (and possibly the make) so we had no luck tracking down a car that doesn’t exist. What the hell? This is why Jim Rockford always tried to avoid his clients getting too involved with the investigation.
In my quest to use real investigative tactics, I’d stake the place out on Thursday (the college girl’s next scheduled work date). I’d show up 20-30 minutes before she was supposed to start and watch; that way, the car doesn’t matter. I see her, in the flesh, walking from her car into the building. Thanks to the magic of Facebook stalking, I already know exactly what she looks like. The way the business park is laid out, there are several vantage points where I could watch the building and its little sub-parking lot and not be seen.
Also, if I did need to figure out the make and model of the car, or snap a photo, I wouldn’t care about stopping. They would have no idea who I am, assuming they could even see me inside the car (I think they could see the car slow or stop, but based on the angle, I doubt they could see inside).
So, new plan and new story!
Posted by Stan on April 30, 2007 3:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Family: The Horror…
Comments Enabled
During my months of not blogging, I got a little tired of the excessive comment spam so I disabled public comments. However, I’m getting a lot of hits from vaguely interesting search terms and am wondering if people want to comment but are discouraged because they can’t do so anonymously. So the public comments are enabled again, and I’ll deal with the spam; hell, if nothing else, it’ll be a reminder that I have a blog I can whine in.
Posted by Stan on April 30, 2007 12:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) |
April 29, 2007
Dennis Wilson’s Pacific Ocean Blue
After bandleader/songwriter/producer/arranger/brother Brian Wilson’s breakdown in 1967, the Beach Boys had to fend for themselves. It was a strange, tumultuous time, producing some of the band’s most ecclectic and bizarre music. Some of it is great; most of it is awful. In one of the band’s many hilarious-if-it-weren’t-so-depressing ironies, Dennis stepped up as the brother who was by far the band’s best songwriter (after Brian).
Rarely taken seriously by the other band members, mostly because he rarely took the group seriously, many of his songs were rejected in the group’s democratic selection process for album cuts. Dennis was considering a solo album as early as 1970, and Beach Boys versions of songs that would later appear on Pacific Ocean Blue were being played live as early as 1969. If you look at the band’s creative output from 1969 (when his first compositions appeared on Friends) through 1979, the standout songs are nearly always written by Dennis. (One notable exception, Brian’s “‘Til I Die” from 1971’s Surf’s Up, remains one of the Beach Boys’ best songs.)
With Dennis’ rampant drug and alcohol abuse and womanizing, it’s probably not a huge surprise that a solo album originally conceived in 1970 was not finished until 1977. But part of this has to do with the difficulty of his recording process; despite many liner-note attributions to the usual gang of Beach Boys session musicians (no actual Beach Boys, because even back then Mike Love was lawsuit-happy and threatened to sue if Dennis Wilson tried to release a solo album featuring other Boys), legend has it that Dennis played every instrument and most of the vocal parts himself, meticulously experimenting with arrangements (thanks to the relative safe haven of Brother Studios, where he could record for free).
The third contributing factor was that the Beach Boys simply didn’t have enough material for complete studio albums. Even though nobody respected Dennis’ efforts (or perhaps they were jealous that somebody who was so much more interested in having a good time could write songs that were far more interesting, mature, and contemporary than anything they could create), he still wrote and produced a whole lot of songs for the Beach Boys, many of which were originally intended for the solo album. That put him behind, and unlike Bruce Johnston and Mike Love, he wanted a solo album that wasn’t just rerecordings of material from Beach Boys albums.
The end result of Pacific Ocean Blue came at the Beach Boys’ weakest period. After a hiatus partially prompted by a total lack of good material and extensive touring*, a huge “Brian is Back!” campaign led up to the release of 15 Big Ones, fifteen songs, most covers of hits from the 1950s. It has a few supposed Brian Wilson originals that don’t sound like anything Brian wrote before or since, leading to theories that these had music by Mike Love and lyrics by Love and either manager/scumbag Jack Rieley or therapist/scumbag Eugene Landy. It’s easily the worst album in their history. Even worse than Wild Honey.
They followed 15 Big Ones with Love You, the most bizarre album I’ve ever heard, and I’ve listened to a lot of weird shit out of morbid curiosity. Weirdly, repeated listens (which come as a result of the initial amusement/”what the fuck?” factor) actually reveal the album as something…well, “good” is too strong a word, but it’s not nearly as bad and off-putting as it initially seems. It was also a mild triumph because, insane as the music is, it’s all pure Brian Wilson. He wrote and produced every track, and you can tell because it sounds like the kind of album a lunatic would love.
This was followed by 1978’s M.I.U. Album, 1979’s L.A. (Light Album), and 1980’s Keep the Summer Alive. And holy shit, if there’s a worse run of albums in any band’s catalog, I’d love to hear about it. The uneven output from the late-’60s through mid-’70s all had at least a few great songs that transcended the mediocrity (or outright shit — thanks for “The California Saga,” Mike and Al!). Excepting Love You and the tiny offering of Dennis Wilson songs on these albums, there is nothing to redeem these albums. They are absolute shit from start to finish, with Light Album tamping down the shit with its 10-minute disco remix of a song from Wild Honey (their worst ’60s album) that wasn’t even good in the first place. Shit!
It’s really tough to believe that Pacific Ocean Blue even came from the same universe as the Beach Boys of the late-’70s. An album full of passionate, heartfelt, depressing songs, with boundless surprises and an interesting contemporary sound — the total opposite of the cold, calculated, deliberately out-of-date style of lounge-lizard-wannabes Mike Love and Bruce Johnston. At this point it seems like Carl had just given up, Al was along for the ride, and it’s a known fact that Brian went back to bed after Love You. How could the same band — the same lead singer, in this particular case — produce a song as bad as “Mona” [download link removed 3/13/08] in the same year Pacific Ocean Blue came out?
I guess the important thing is we have it, the one and only Dennis Wilson solo album. A second album, supposedly titled Bamboo, was in the works, but only a few songs (of varying quality and stages of completion) survived. Brother Studios — and Brother Records, the band’s imprint — were shut down shortly after Pacific Ocean Blue, so he had nowhere to toil. He had no money. He — I swear I am not making this up — knocked up the illegitimate daughter of cousin Mike Love (he knocked up his assistant in the mid-’60s) who had been largely disowned by the family. She was underage at the time, but he was determined to see this through — and only a year and a half after the baby was born, Dennis drowned. He had alcohol and drugs in his system (no surprises there), but at the time he was pretty beaten down and many of his close friends suspected suicide. Quite a downer. But it’s nice that we have this one album…
…Oh, except we don’t. Even though you can buy the entire late-’70s Beach Boys shitfest (a shitfest that continued through the ’80s and ’90s, CDs of which are all currently available), Sony Music has left Pacific Ocean Blue out of print since 1992. Does the twofer release of Light Album and M.I.U. really sell that well?** Jesus.
So fine, then. Fuck Sony. I have it. And I’m putting out there for the Internet masses (all both of you who read my blog, who have probably stopped reading by this point because as soon as you realized this was me ranting about Beach Boys history, you checked out). Because what will Sony do? Say I’m depriving them of money from an album they no longer print? Hell, if anything, I’m promoting this album, exposing them to it so Sony realizes there’s demand for this album and it will make money. Also, I’m saving all the people trying to buy out-of-print copies for hundreds of dollars. Sure, maybe the CD copy will be better — if it’s actually one of the original CDs and not just somebody burning a CD-R of these same lower-quality MP3s. So download to your heart’s content.
Update, 3/13/08 — Sorry, random Internet folks. I offered a download of this album, in its entirety, for the reasons above — but some sites have abused it. These spiders troll the Web, looking for illicit MP3s, so if you do a search, up pops all the MP3 links — without this entry. Consequently, the server was getting hammered to hell with requests. It has nothing to do with a C&D from Sony or anyone else, which once again demonstrates how little folks care about this album. It has more to do with bandwidth abuse and reducing the server load. (A site with virtually nothing but HTML text — even six years’ worth of my long, rambling entries — should not be approaching 1GB of bandwidth usage 13 days into the month. That’s inexcusable.)
If you aren’t a Beach Boys fan but like ’70s rock, this is worth checking out. It sounds absolutely nothing like the Beach Boys (from any era), even to the extent that Dennis Wilson’s voice was so ragged by the late-’70s that it doesn’t even have a sunshine-pop vocal sound. It’s more like Bob Seger with a sore throat.
*Ironically, their biggest hit album of the ’70s was a compilation of all their old hits that coincided with American Graffiti and exploited the nostalgia craze for all it was worth. Even more ironically, while the band could barely play their instruments during their initial wave of popularity, the mid-’70s incarnation of the Beach Boys was one of the best live acts around, despite Mike Love’s horrid between-song “banter.”
**I’m aware that Capitol owns all the old Beach Boys stuff and Sony owns the Dennis Wilson album, but come on!
Posted by Stan on April 29, 2007 10:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Random Musings
April 28, 2007
Riddle Me This
Why do so many people on MySpace think it’s a great idea to add those floating letters, icons, or advertisements drip down their pages, rendering them unreadable (and in many cases, unclickable) to anyone looking at them? Not to mention slowing browsers to a grinding halt. Sub-question: why do so many people on MySpace think it’s a great idea to add some kind of translucent coloring over top of everything, so the whole page looks washed-out and, again, unreadable?
Fuckin’ MySpace. This is why nobody should be allowed to have free, semi-editable webspace. Unless they know how to use “text-shadow.”
Posted by Stan on April 28, 2007 11:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Random Musings
April 27, 2007
Jack Endino
As part of my ongoing (some would say “misguided”) effort to blog daily until things start to really heat up like the epic Stan-Gina arc in 2003, sometimes I will have so little to write about that I’ll just post random links. For the fun and uselessness!
So I listened to a bunch of old Alice in Chains CDs in a fleeting attempt to recapture my misspent youth by…sitting in my room listening to CDs. It didn’t work so well. There wasn’t enough weed or flaming bags of dog shit, but it did get me thinking about semi-legendary Seattle grunge producer Jack Endino. Not that he produced any Alice in Chains stuff. His name just popped into my head, because he did produce music for a lot of bands that broke through after Nirvana (and including Nirvana’s Bleach).
Not that I run around committing the names of music producers, big or small, to memory. The name sticks out doubly because in the liner notes for Bleach, they write that Jack Endino recorded it for $600. When I was in junior high, thinking I’d be some big rock star, I remember thinking, “Yeah man, if I could just save up $600*, we could cut a record and be huge!” Based on such high-quality songs as “Petrified Leafblower” and “Cyclone Fence,” perhaps I was in over my head.
Nonetheless, the name stuck in my head and Facelift stuck in my CD player, I proceeded to look up Jack Endino to see what he’s been doing (answer: not much). He does have a website, though, and in particular I stumbled across two music articles that are pretty funny if you know a little bit about music production and/or have ever experienced the joy of tuning a guitar in a studio setting. If you don’t know anything about either of these, the humor may work about as well as your average aviation joke.
How to Overproduce a Rock Record! (somewhat reminiscent of the Mixerman saga, but focused more on the technical stuff than personnel problems)
Guitar Tuning Nightmares Explained (be sure to scroll down for the bizarre surprise ending!)
Yup, that’s all I got tonight. Deal with it. At least I’m blogging instead of going to a party I was invited to but didn’t attend because I don’t like anybody I’m friends with.
*Two hundred weeks of allowance.
Posted by Stan on April 27, 2007 10:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Random Musings
April 26, 2007
Mom Gets Canned
Hilariously misguided paranoia may run in the family, but there are occasions when they’re still out to get you. For months, my mom’s been bitching because she felt like her superiors were trying to oust her from her job. It’s a part-time job, nothing special, and last summer they decided to hire a new girl when they needed extra help but my mom (foolishly, in retrospect) didn’t want to increase her hours. She was a perky, extroverted college student, in contrast with my mom’s frumpy, irritated housewife.
Then there’s the office manager, whose bizarre, attention-whorish behavior has forced me to assume he is Michael Scott, Steve Carell’s character from The Office. The immaturity, the thinly veiled (or not veiled) racism/homophobia/misogyny stemming more from ignorance than from real hate, the obsession with being the center of attention and the most well-liked boss on the planet, the aversion to doing any actual work…the only differences are that he’s a fundamentalist Christian and he’s married with three or four kids. Oh, and he used to own a business that tanked when he lost a discrimination lawsuit after firing a black employee for, apparently, not being white.
It probably goes without saying that he’s a liar. This was confirmed about a week after my mom started working there. He’s new, happens to have moved into the same town (not a huge coincidence considering the job is only two towns over) so initially he attempted to bond with my mother over living here; she hated him right off the bat, though, so it didn’t work terribly well. One story he told her shortly after she started was about going to this water-park in town. He said he went to take a shit in the public facilities and was apparently by himself. A trio of junior-high-aged kids ran into the bathroom, screaming and heckling him, beating on the stall doors, throwing paper towels around, whatever. Eventually, somehow, it reached a point where they crawled underneath the stall walls and into his stall, and basically stood there making awkward, Beavis & Butt-Head-esque jokes while watching him attempt to take a shit.
After this, he claims to have flipped out and (one of the many holes in this story — nobody seems to know how he magically escaped from a tiny restroom stall containing three other people) went to tell an employee, who filed a report. Then he supposedly had a conference call with the “top dogs” at the Park District on the morning he told my mother (and the rest of the office) this story; it was a long-winded, bizarre, pointless explanation of why he was half an hour late. I’m sure everyone in the office relished the mental image of him taking a shit.
Inconveniently for the boss, it happens that one of my best friends from high school works for the Park District, and specifically manages the water-park when it’s open during the summers. Her exact quote: “That didn’t happen.” She would have, at the very least, known about the report and the conference call; more likely, she would have been involved in the conference call. To sum up: that didn’t happen.
Which begs the question: why make up such an outlandish story to explain something like, let’s say, “Oh no, I overslept.” Why would someone go into detail about something as humiliating and privacy-invading (both in the context of what happens in the story and in retelling it) as three 12-year-olds terrorizing you while you take a shit? Especially when it didn’t even happen. See that whole attention-whore thing? I would say he’s just trying to pull one over on all the employees, but after a long time hearing these crazy stories, his problem is that he’s not a practical jokester — he just thinks he’s smarter than everybody and can make up insane, pointless stories to remain the unquestioned center of attention. Unlike The Office, nobody in reality has the balls to point out that he’s full of shit and his stories are littered with logic gaps and continuity problems.
And then there’s the new girl. The boss became enamored of her pretty quickly, flirting with her in that sleazy disgusting way fat, middle-aged, married men flirt with women half their age; and she flirted right on back because, hey, he’s the boss. If he can be flirted with, he can be manipulated, and she had very little problems manipulating him. Soon enough (whether it was her doing or not), it became pretty clear that the boss was trying to hustle my mom out the door.
Unfortunately, he had no grounds to actually fire her. Even worse, as the college girl settled into the routine, it became pretty clear that she was both lazy and incompetent, so if he were to say, “We don’t really need two people for this job, so we’re keeping the college girl,” my mom would at least have some grounds for an age-discrimination lawsuit; the dude’s a jackass, but after having his own business fail as a result of discrimination, one would assume he’s smart enough to not fire her over that. Furthermore, my mom had her direct supervisor (just below the office manager) and the owner of the company on her side, so his hands were tied and all he could really do was fight like hell to keep the college girl.
Then he tried not-entirely-subtle ways to get my mom to quit. Treating her like crap didn’t work, so he finally just decided to ignore her. It’s always funny when people who are really self-obsessed and in constant need of attention think that by ignoring people, it’ll hurt them; if the person they’re ignoring can’t stand them, as my mom can’t stand the office manager, it’s pretty much win-win. Their jobs barely coincide, so it’s not like him ignoring her would cause huge problems with her getting the job done.
So things went on like that for a few months, with my mom bitching about the unfair, preferential treatment of the college girl, being treated like shit by the college girl herself, and basic “I’m a disgruntled employee” complaints like not being told specific things pertinent to her job (by her direct supervisor), being aware people were talking shit about her behind her back, having her desk moved out from under her like Milton from Office Space — all of these things led her to elaborate conspiracies about how they were going to fire her and she was just waiting for the ax to fall.
My dad and I tried to reassure her, using things like logic (which should never be applied to workplace scenarios) to say that there’s no way they’d fire her, and then, on Wednesday…the ax fell. Twenty minutes before she was supposed to leave, the office manager and her direct supervisor took her into the conference room and explained that they were laying her off, they had already laid off a customer-service people and would be laying off more, and that the college girl would be laid off Thursday (today, because she has Wednesdays off). They also said maybe in a month, if business picks up again, they’ll hire her back.
What happened? Why all the layoffs, even beyond my mom and her problems with the boss? Funny story: the boss is 100% incompetent. Remember how I said he doesn’t want to get any actual work done? He literally doesn’t do any work, and as a result the customer-service team he supposedly manages were not providing adequate customer service, and they lost a huge chunk of business from a big company, then several smaller companies withdrew their business completely. This is entirely his fault, and my mom saw his getting fired coming and just hoped she could outlast him.
Here’s where the paranoia kicks back in: my mom doesn’t think they’re canning the college girl. She questions the customer-service girl they laid off on Tuesday, wondering why they didn’t lay my mom and the college girl off on the same day. Wednesday is the only day the college girl takes off fully, so my mom’s theory is that they’re laying her off on Wednesday, they’ll lay the college girl off on Thursday but lying. She’s been lied to enough that it’s at least somewhat reasonable to argue that they’re full of shit, although it seems odd that her direct supervisor would go along with it. Maybe her theory is “at least half-assed help is some help.” Technically the office manager is her superior, so if he says, “We’re keeping the college girl,” she can argue but can’t do much else.
Again, trying in vain to apply logic to a workplace scenario, I argued that maybe they’re just rolling the layoffs so that people start disappearing but nobody knows why until they’ve been cut loose. This doesn’t work practically — usually all the employees know the second someone else has been fired — but it doesn’t stop employers from attempting it.
It also seems reasonable for the “surprise” factor that they’d let the customer-service person with the least seniority go, because they are liars and they have a hard time holding on to customer-service employees. They could easily say, “I guess she’s just not coming back” and pretend to be all surprised and just hope none of the other employees have had time to befriend her. They told my mom, who isn’t in customer service but it’s all the same cubicle clusterfuck even if they’re jobs don’t overlap, that she was sick. They could easily tell the college girl my mom is sick, if she even asks, and then, “Okay, sorry we had to lie [ha!], but we have to lay you off.”
Unfortunately, thanks to my voyeuristic tendencies and the Internet revolution, I made the mistake of looking up the college girl on Facebook, because, as it happens, she goes to my school. I didn’t bother for awhile, when all I had to go on was a first name and the knowledge that she went to my school. When my mom finally found out her major (which seemed vitally important to her, I guess because she was trying to gauge whether or not the college girl would just up and quit in two years when she graduates), I figured the needle in the haystack had just gotten a lot bigger, and I managed to find her profile. I wanted to see if she had a blog or LiveJournal or something that explained her perspective — was she really trying to manipulate my mom out of a job to protect her own ass, or did she (as I suspected) just not give a shit? I didn’t find a blog or anything, just the job under her “occupation” heading, along with a pretty glum description of her duties.
Now I find myself checking her profile constantly to see if she’ll update it once she finds out she’s canned; so far, nothing. My mom, I shit you not, wants me to drive her (so they don’t recognize the car) to the office tomorrow to see if her car is still there. I kinda think that’s stupid because her supervisor told her specifically she could come on Friday to get her last check; that either means that they’re really laying her off, or they already know the college girl won’t be there. There’s a possibility that they slipped, but really the only way it’s a sure thing is if she is there. It’d be safer to wait until Monday or Tuesday and catch them off guard.
It’s pretty sad how much I enjoy pseudo-investigation events like this.
Posted by Stan on April 26, 2007 3:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Family: The Horror…
April 25, 2007
The New Grift
I’ve reached a new phase of unemployability that has complicated life for me a bit, in the most annoying way possible. The past several times I’ve had job interviews (phone or in-person), I’ve been told something like this: “You are grossly overqualified for this job, but I’ll tell you why we called you…[insert list of reasons why my resume ‘popped’]” Maybe this is some new human resources flattery technique. “On the chance we don’t hire you, we want you to know that you’re overqualified, even though you’re…not.” I guess I could rule that out because most of these jobs are through friends, and I hear back from them that I didn’t get the job because the department manager thinks I’d get bored, or they don’t think I’d fit in with the other workers because of my gigantic, college-educated brain. I often shoot back with things like, “I am not easily bored” or “My college was pretty crappy,” but it never does any good.
I seem to find two sets of jobs: those I’m overqualified for, and those I’m hilarious unqualified for. I can’t seem to find a happy medium of a job I’m exactly qualified for, at least according to my experience level. Every job I’m unqualified for on paper, I think I can do. Otherwise, I wouldn’t apply. But I do apply, shamelessly manipulating my resume into something that’s about as close to fiction as you can get while still being honest. I have, on occasion, been called in to interview for the “unqualified” jobs, so I’ve had it both ways: “You’re overqualified for this job, so we’ll see.” Or “Wow, how did you even get a call from HR?” Those are rough.
So what are my options? I could go back to retail work, where nobody gives a shit if you’re overqualified because if you were any good at anything, you wouldn’t be applying to those shit jobs. However, I’m holding out for a hero until the end of the night. Nothing serious — I want something that’s just a general office thing, but that’s what I’m overqualified for. So shit, why not apply for a bunch of editor positions at publishing companies? I wouldn’t mind something bottom-rung, but I never see those jobs advertised, even on the companies’ websites. Am I looking in the wrong places? No idea, but fuck, if I can sham my way into a job where all I do is, for instance, look at submissions and say “yea” or “nay”? A job where all I do is sit around reading is pretty ideal.
But my resume, treading in dishonest waters as it is, couldn’t withstand being spread any thinner. It’s time to pull out the big guns, the complete and utter lies that I’m embarrassingly good at because, well, I have that giant overqualified brain and I like to pretend I’m a writer, so I sit around working out every single stupid detail, every single problem that could lead to me being caught, and try to have all the answers. Now, obviously, I don’t want to blow my wad by giving them all the answers — at least, not right away. But I need to know the answers. It’s how grifting works.
Speaking of elaborate cons: last year, I came up with an idea based on something a colleague told me in Los Angeles. In talking about how roughly 90% of movies and television are adapted from something else, he suggested I go trolling used bookstores for obscure little novels, track down the author or his agent and buy the rights for a song, then turn around at sell the screenplay version at a 10,000% profit (that was his estimation).
“But I have ideas,” I scoffed. “I don’t need to adapt someone else’s.”
“It’s not about using someone else’s idea,” he said. “It’s about having a prop — something they can touch and look it. They’re never going to read it. You can take one of your screenplays, find a random story that has a few vague similarities, buy the rights, and call it an adaptation. I guarantee you they won’t glance at more than a page or two, and by the time they finally read your screenplay — six months later — they won’t remember anything except the prop.”
So I went one better and wrote a novel, based on one of my screenplays. And no, this is not the novelizations of Honey, I Shrunk the Kids or Back to the Future they used to sell through the Troll Book Club — this was an actual effort to rewrite the screen story as a novel, filling it out with details, additional subplots, altering the storyline and characterizations in the script to make everything a little bleaker.
I didn’t think too much of it; despite the valiant effort, I accepted that this was hackery at its worst, so I put this whole plan in motion. I found a free self-publishing service that did not require use of their logo or advertising in any way. “Free” is fun, but for an additional one-time fee they’ll list you at a bunch of e-tailers, again without their logo — it’d have my own fake publisher’s name. I designed a complete, fraudulent website asserting the reality of the fictitious company, complete with a roster of authors and an arsenal of novels.
Using the “they won’t glance at more than a few pages” theory, I’d have a few copies printed up, maybe even leave them with producers I pitched to, maybe they’d be interested enough to google — boom, there’s the company website. Boom, there’s the Amazon.com listing — real publisher, real novel. The only trouble would come if they went a little bit past the surface and started, for instance, checking out ISBNs or just typing titles or authors into the Amazon search engine.
Then two things happened that made me rethink the strategy: (1) I started to get nervous that, with potential deals for tens of thousands of dollars, it seemed likely they would look past the surface, and I’d be fucked. (2) The feedback for the novel started coming in, and I got the (possibly misguided) idea that, with a rewrite, I could get it published legitimately. But that is a process that takes almost as much time and hand-wringing as selling a screenplay. So I’m going for it…
In the interim I need…something to do that pays money. I have a publishing company domain, a complete site design and nearly-complete content. All I need is a use for it. Like, say, asserting the existence of a 100% fake company that I can put down on a resume, claiming I’ve been working there as an editor for three years (which is usually the amount of experience they want), telling my mostly unscrupulous and far-too-supportive references to back this up, manufacturing samples of past work, roping a friend into helping create the “false front” with phone and e-mail fraud (not a felony!).
Is there any possible way this could work? It’s doubtful, but I’m at the end of my rope and I really want a job that is only partly demeaning. So fuck it — why not go balls to the wall for a few months, and if it goes horribly awry I’ll just go back to my original methods?
Besides, it’s not like I can go to prison for defrauding businesses in order to get a job. Right?
Right?!
Posted by Stan on April 25, 2007 10:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Career-Based Rambling
April 23, 2007
My Sister’s Dog
Several months ago, my sister and her husband bought a puppy, an Irish terrier who is about the cutest little puppy in the history of time.
Click the image for a larger size
I mean, come on! How is that not cute?
They bought her from a farm in Oregon, and took her back to the big bad city of Seattle. And here’s where the big problem comes: they both work full-time, so they crate her, for almost the entire day, and all night, only letting her out for maybe 20 minutes while they’re on lunchbreaks, then all evening until they go to bed. Meanwhile, the puppy develops odd anxiety issues like a serious fear of humanity, cars, and rain. Granted, she wasn’t exposed to “city things” (like an overabundance of people and cars, and perhaps she lived in the three-mile stretch of Oregon where it doesn’t rain constantly), which is what they attribute the anxiety problems to, but…imagine if you were trapped in a darkened box most of the day and all night, with no way out escape?
I’m not a pet psychologist (or a human psychologist), but it just seems like basic logic that this would cause some angst and stress. My parents and I expressed our distaste for the crate, and in one of my sister’s trademark instances of goofy irony (and a trademark instance of her not reading carefully), she forwarded us a website that explains how crating animals is a good thing. And true, a bit of it is pro-crate, but near the bottom it says the following:
Never crate your pet longer than you know he can wait to eliminate, and definitely less than 4 hour intervals during the day.
…
- The use of a dog crate is NOT RECOMMENDED for a dog regularly left alone all day, although some individual animals can tolerate it. If it is attempted:
- The pet must be well exercised before and after crating.
- The crate must be equipped with a heavy, non-tip dish of water.
- Your pet should get lots of attention and complete freedom each night.
- If you do not have time to take a puppy or dog outside to eliminate and exercise as recommended here, you should reconsider getting a dog as a pet. Crate or no crate, any dog consistently denied the attention and companionship it craves, may still find ways to express bored anxiety, and stress
But no, it wouldn’t be being locked up all day. Clearly she’s just having trouble adjusting to the city. Oh wait, that’s not even it — they took her to a puppy training course, and the instructor suggested after the third or fourth week (when the puppy showed no signs of improvement regarding the anxiety) that they put her on medication. My sister put her foot down about this.
Believe it or not, despite her hilarious self-absorbtion, Tracey usually seems reluctant about the crate. Sure, she sent the article defending it, but you can usually catch a hint of “I don’t think this is right” in her voice when she talks about it, to the extent that she decided to call it “the spaceship” to make it “fun” for the puppy (and to justify the cruelty to herself). However, she went along with it because she and I never had a dog as kids; Jack did, so she’s deferring to him in most cases. He thinks the crate is fine — they do the crate. He is gung-ho about the anti-anxiety pills — Tracey rebels.
While she never blamed the crate, she did talk him into letting the puppy out, to roam around the house at night. They figured if she can do that without consistently waking them up or getting into trouble, after a month or so they’d start letting her out during mornings, then all day — and she’d be free, at least within the confines of the house.
Still, on the recommendation of their training instructor, Tracey and Jack had a dog behaviorist come over, check out the environment, check out the dog, and see if she really needed medication. His inexpert diagnosis: she could have House favorite Addison’s disease. It’s rare in dogs, even rarer in puppies, but apparently the puppy came from “a litter of one” (I believe this is the slogan of the U.S. Army’s surprisingly successful canine unit), and this is a “special enough” circumstance for the behaviorist to suggest that Addison’s could be the culprit.
According to a 100% accurate website that was the #1 Google hit for “Addison’s disease in dogs,” here are the symptoms of Addison’s disease in dogs:
Most dogs with Addison’s disease initially have gastrointestinal disturbances like vomiting. Lethargy it also a common early sign. Poor appetite can occur as well. These are pretty vague signs and it is extremely easy to miss this disease. More severe signs occur when a dog with hypoadrenocorticism is stressed or when potassium levels get high enough to interfere with heart function. Dogs with this problem will sometimes suffer severe shock symptoms when stressed, which can lead to a rapid death. When potassium levels get high heart arrythmias occur or even heart stoppage which also is fatal. In some cases, especially secondary Addison’s disease, there are no detectable electrolyte changes.
Apparently their puppy has “two of the four main symptoms” (I’m not sure which two — it doesn’t say much about anxiety, though the “severe shock symptoms when stressed” is discouraging), so they took her to the vet for the first in a three-stage test: a blood test. The blood work came back “suspicious enough for the vet to proceed to step two.” So I think it’s good to check for Addison’s, since it’s a serious disease that could kill the puppy if it’s unchecked…
…but it seems pretty unrelated to the anxiety/stress. It says many of the symptoms worsen (or new symptoms appear) when the dog is stressed, but the disease doesn’t cause the stress. So let’s say they save the puppy’s life…what next? Will they stop the constant crating? It’s been about four months since my sister said “maybe in a month we’ll let her out during mornings,” and the last we heard — a couple of weeks ago — they had just bought a new crate because the dog was outgrowing the old one.
The thing about the dog that really bothers me is that it seems like they bought her for the wrong reasons. They treat her like a toy, not a living creature, and then they wonder why she has issues. They bought her because my sister’s nurturing instincts are kicking in, but (according to Jack) they aren’t ready to have kids. Solution? A dog. But they aren’t treating the dog in the same way they would treat a child. I’m not saying you would necessarily leave a baby to her own devices when you leave for work, but that’s exactly the issue: they’ve always said that they’ll have kids when they stop traveling and when my sister is ready to give up her job, because those are the sacrifices they need to raise a child. They aren’t willing to make similar sacrifices for the puppy, and while they don’t really have to in the sense that Tracey needs to quit her job, they could split the difference by dog-proofing their stupid house and letting her run wild. Or locking her in the big downstairs bathroom so she has more room to breathe. Why does she have to be locked in a crate that’s barely large enough to fit her and a water/food dish? Especially when they won’t acknowledge that maybe the crate is part of the problem?
I mentioned jokingly to my parents and to Lucy (who knows more about the puppy situation than anybody ever wanted to) that I should e-mail my sister and say if they let me live there for free and give me a fat per diem (that’s a fancy word for “allowance”), I’ll be a dogsitter. Even though I’m allergic. Supposedly Irish terriers are one of those hypoallergenic dogs, so it won’t be too bad as long as I’m not constantly fondling her. Which ruins all my fun.
Anyway, both my parents and Lucy actually jumped on that idea, thinking — in all seriousness — that it is a great idea for the benefit of the puppy, and that if I’m just there for a few months the dog will adjust to some semblance of normalcy and can put her traumatic childhood behind her. I’m not sure if I’ll actually do that, but now that I’m committed to blogging daily, I’ll keep both of my readers posted.
Posted by Stan on April 23, 2007 12:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Family: The Horror…
April 22, 2007
Bulletin!
I’ve been on MySpace for almost a year at this point, and I’ve seen the following bulletin posted by at least four different people in just the past month or two:
You’re on my friends list. I’d like to know 25 things about you. Just hit reply. Thanks!You’ll be surprised how much you didn’t know about your friends after this!
1. Ever punch someone in the face?
2. How old are you?
3. Are you single or taken?
4. Eat with your hands or utensils?
5. Do you dream at night?
6. Ever seen a corpse?
7. Have you ever wished someone dead?
8. Do You Like Bush, the president?
HERE COMES THE EQUALLY INTERESTING PART…9. Whats your philosophy on life and death?
10. If you could do anything with me, and have no one know, what would it be?
11. Do you trust the police?
12. Do you like country music?
13. What is your fondest memory of me?
14. If you could change anything about yourself what would it be?
15. Would you date me?
16. What do you wear to sleep?
17. Have you ever peed in a pool?
18. Would you hide evidence for me if I asked you to?
19. If I only had one day to live, what would we do together?
20. What is your favorite thing about me?
21. Do you think I’m attractive?
22. What’s your favorite color?
23. If you could bring back anyone that has passed, who would it be?
24. Tell me one interesting/odd fact about you?
25. Will you post this so I can fill it out for you?
The first couple of times I saw this, it seemed pretty innocuous. I didn’t read through all the questions, and I actually think some of the early questions could lead to a little more insightful rambling than your average online survey. I’d start filling it out, and then I’d get to the later questions and get tripped up.
15. Would you date me?
How can you answer this honestly and elicit a positive response from the person who sent the questions? It’s a simple yes or no question, with enough of a gray area for you to say something retarded like, “Durr, I don’t know, maybe if the right cirucmstances presented themselves and blah-blah-blah, then I guess so, but it’d be complicated.” That seems like the only road to prevent awkward feelings.
If you answer yes, either out of honesty or politeness, the only way this will have a happy ending is if you are being honest, and if they feel the same way and both are unattached. If you say “yes” and you’re lying, but the sender is interested, that’s an unnecessarily rough situation to get into based on a MySpace bulletin. If you say “yes” and you’re being honest, but they don’t reciprocate the feelings, it’s just going to lead to awkwardness, especially if they’re seeing someone.
But what if you’re both into it and one, the other, or both are involved with someone else? What happens if you feel like this MySpace bulletin has caused the stars to align, and you can finally be with this person you’ve had a crush on since fifth grade, so you each dump your significant others to get together and…it’s the worst possible relationship in the history of time, and each resents the other for being forced into a corner based on something as stupid as a question on a MySpace bulletin?
Saying “no” is equally hazardous, but for the opposite reasons: whether you’re being sincere or not, telling someone “No, I’d never date you,” is offensive. I mean, how could it not be? It’d be way easier to go the half-assed “Gee, maybe if things were different, I don’t know,” staying wishy-washy enough for them to not do something crazy like dump their boyfriend of seven years for your middle-of-the-road non-answer. But then what if you say “no” and are lying, but you get a response like, “Phew, I’m so glad you said ‘no’ because I always thought you had a crush on me but you and me dating would be horrible!” And then you have to hide the hurt feelings and pretend to be friends with them, all the while resenting their casual dismissal of you as a lover and secretly plotting to break them up whenever they start dating.
13. What is your fondest memory of me?18. Would you hide evidence for me if I asked you to?
19. If I only had one day to live, what would we do together?
20. What is your favorite thing about me?
21. Do you think I’m attractive?
These are all, to varying degrees, loaded questions that all seem to be fishing for the same thing: how interested are you in me and/or will we ever be “more than friends”? Give the wrong answer, and you risk ruining a friendship forever. Even a “funny” question like #18, depending on the answer, could speak volumes about how serious the respondant feels about the sender. It’s rough, but it reveals a bigger question that I’ve started to wonder every time I see this bulletin posted:
Why is this person posting this particular bulletin and searching for answers to these uncomfortable questions, buried near the end for people who aren’t smart enough to read ahead?
For this question, I have no answer. Sometimes I wonder if they’re looking for sincere answers from their opposite-sex friends, and if I had a crush on the girls who have sent it, maybe I’m missing the boat on something because I usually ignore it for fear of humiliating myself if I admit the crush, or humiliating myself if I don’t.
This is why online survey questions should never be more insightful than “Coke or Pepsi?”
Posted by Stan on April 22, 2007 4:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Friends: Can’t Live with ‘Em
April 21, 2007
White Trash Jamboree
The Players
Grampa: Spent many years as an accountant, eventually reaching the point where he was responsible for auditing banks for the city. Since it was during the most corrupt period of Richard J. Daley’s Chicago, it goes without saying that he made far more money than he should have, and much of it was probably ill-gotten.
Aunt White Trash: The second of ten children. She was very sickly as a child, and as a result became my late grandmother’s obvious favorite. A serious coke addict in the ’70s and ’80s, she finally met a man who got her clean by beating the hell out of her, then knocking her up. Three times. Then he left her, so she accepted an excess of “secret” handouts from my grandmother. Around the time my grandma retired to Arizona, Aunt White Trash hauled her kids to Berkeley to live off the state of California while she spent ten years trying to get a bachelor’s degree. This was not ten years of hard work and part-time work; this was ten years of being a full-time student, with nothing resembling a full-time job, and no real parenting (her usual M.O. was to lock herself in her bedroom and turn up Pink Floyd when the kids were being particularly obnoxious, which was often). When the state of California decided they no longer wanted to support her, the post-collegiate plan was to move in with my grandmother and leech off of her full time. Unfortunately, she died before that could happen, so she moved back to Illinois to leech off my grandfather. Despite him being a hard-ass who didn’t particularly like her, Grampa gave her way more opportunities than anyone expected. We have the feeling he made some deathbed promises.
Becky: White Trash Aunt’s oldest daughter, now 20. She had a baby two weeks ago. I’ll reluctantly admit that she’s really smart; in fact, she’s way smarter than her mother and has been since roughly the age of four. The combination of tricking and outsmarting her mother and having an obsessive desire to be the center of attention has led her to rule her entire family, like Billy Mumy on that Twilight Zone where he could make mysterious things happen…with his mind! She stayed with her family until she graduated from high school, at which time she moved back to California as quickly as humanly possible. She got pregnant and threw her back out, and has now quit her job and is living off a disability check and the earnings of her manseed provider. Nobody knows what he does, but based on his Middle Eastern name everyone in the family except me and my sister assume he’s part of a sleeper cell.
Darlene: The forgotten middle child. I barely know anything about her except that she has serious anger issues. Oh, and she’s 19.
D.J.: Or as my dad calls him, Damian. My dad seems to think D.J. has demon eyes and is a potential serial killer; I never got that vibe from him. He’s 17, into skating, video games, playing terrible faux-punk, and being a jackass.
Aunt Matriarch: The de facto matriarch after my grandmother passed, in charge of finances and mediating goofy-ass family affairs (of which there are many in a family of ten kids with a lot of ridiculous history).
Aunt Twin: My mother’s twin sister, who has lived for many years in New Jersey. Last summer, she decided to buy a house in Rockford, where Grampa lives. She had been talking for years about moving back to Illinois and has finally made good on it now that both of her daughters are out of college and away from home (in addition, her oldest daughter moved to Chicago). She chose Rockford because, in addition to the proximity to Grampa, it’s also far enough away from Chicago that she can separate herself from the rest of the family when they get too irritating.
Uncle Drunk: The baby of the ten, who has made a lifelong career out of embarrassing, Arthur-like drunkenness. He had a wife, two kids, and a good job, all of which were lost many years ago because he chose the bottle instead. Now he lives in Grampa’s basement and acts as a manservant in lieu of paying living expenses.
There are other bit players in this story (including my immediate family, but these are the most important figures. Now, on with the story…
The real inciting incident here happened in late 2001. Unexpectedly, my healthy, active grandmother passed away. She had been doing a lot of traveling and, as a result of many hours spent on disgusting airplanes, got a disease that wouldn’t have killed her if she’d gotten it checked out sooner; she didn’t have it checked until she got back home to Phoenix, but by then it was too late. A House-like diagnostician attempted in vain to figure out what was wrong as she withered away in the ICU, even going so far as having a team at the Mayo Clinic try to figure it out (this is where ill-gotten Grampa money, plus his late-in-life career-switch to auditing insurance companies, comes in handy). By the time they figured it out, it was either too late or still a misdiagnosis.
She was pretty much the rock holding the family together. Grampa was always the kind of guy who would hide in his sanctuary-like den, watching television, during family parties. Not to say he didn’t love his family; he just didn’t like all the “excitement” of having 800 relatives over, which happened often when I was a kid. We had scheduled family parties every month for birthdays, but I seem to recall family parties breaking out for no particular reason; if more than three of their kids showed up at the house, it was a party. I could see how someone who likes to quietly smoke a pipe and watch Rockford Files reruns would be annoyed by the chaos.
So the family splintered; many animosities that had existed for years came out at her rather unpleasant, alcohol-fueled wake, and that was that. A few clumps of siblings got along, but for the most part everyone was separated by either physical or emotional distance (or both). Aunt Matriarch was forced to step in as “the rock,” but her heart wasn’t really in it. Not as much as my grandmother’s, anyway.
As I mentioned, Aunt White Trash’s big plan was to move in with my grandmother and leech full time. When that didn’t happen, she tried to beg Grampa for money; he said he’d co-sign on a condo if she did two things: graduate from college and get a decent job. She did both of those things, but the job she got was back in Illinois. They bought a condo in a slum in the suburbs of Chicago. Aunt White Trash worked for about three months, then remembered how much she liked not doing anything ever. She faked an illness and, after many weeks of calling in sick, was finally shitcanned.
Somehow, Aunt White Trash managed to work her crocodile tears on the usually-tough Grampa. Was it because he reclaimed his faith when his wife died? Was it because he made some kind of odd promises to his wife or to God or possibly to a nurse’s aide he mistook for Jesus? Nobody has the answer there; we’re all pretty baffled as to how her usual manipulations worked on someone who was, for much of his life, a total hardass (especially when it came to money). But she called him and wept, and he made a deal with her: he’d buy a house in Rockford, where the housing market was starting to boom, and she could be his tenant. She’d need to find a job, but in the meantime he’d lowball her on the rent as long as she took care of him in his old age.
Perhaps now is the time to explain why he ended up “retiring” to Rockford, commonly regarded as a shithole, in the first place. You might have noticed that my grandmother retired to Phoenix. Well, Grampa had a mistress for a few decades, and they had an “arrangement” for the sake of the kids. Plus, they’re Catholic; divorce doesn’t happen. Even when she moved to Phoenix and Grampa moved to Rockford, into his mistress’s home, they were still married according to the laws of both God and man, preserving the sanctity of marriage.
She passed on about two years after my grandmother, so Grampa was left alone and semi-terrified in his old age. Having somebody out there permanently would be good for his own sake. Unfortunately for him, having Aunt White Trash and her brood out there was not good for anyone, especially him. The only clear incident I recall of them “taking care of him” is when he fell down on the driveway and got disgusting, old-man welts and cuts all over his arms, knees, and face. And instead of bandaging him up, they ran and got the camera, uploaded the photos to the family’s Yahoogroup, and wrote a few sarcastic comments about how useless old people are.
Say, did I mention Aunt White Trash never got a job? Yeah, so she was freeloading and then accusing the freeload of being useless. Hardass Grampa would have tossed her ass onto the street (and they live on a busy street, so that would have meant instant death by Rockford-pickup), but Loving Old Man Grampa just took it.
So, shocker of shockers, about a year after Aunt White Trash moved out there, Uncle Drunk moved in. If you’re following the timeline, this is around early 2004. Uncle Drunk had been leading a confusing, largely itinerant lifestyle. He had a somewhat secure job at a glass shop (the kind of place that does things like, for instance, airbrushing the Bears logo on a mirror), and an apartment over that shop. So he had a small source of income that, 99% of the time, he’d blow pretty quickly as soon as he met some woman on the Internet who agreed to meet him. He’d run off with them for a few months, but inevitably he’d end up back at the glass shop, until the glass shop finally canned him for taking too much time off (they didn’t care much about him being a drunk, so don’t think he cleaned up or something).
Having lost his only prospect, who put up with a lot more than he should have, Uncle Drunk moved into the basement. He was a freeloader, too; this can’t be denied. But he was doing crazy things like cleaning the house, running errands, making food, and making sure Grampa was all right. Which begged the question: if he was doing all that, what the hell was Aunt White Trash doing?
Answer: nothing. She certainly wasn’t having a job to support herself, wasn’t taking care of her kids, wasn’t helping Grampa in any way, and then constantly lied about everything to make herself out as both victim and hero. Which is something she’d been doing since her coke-addict days, so by this point everyone was used to the lies and just kinda smiled and nodded while talking shit about her behind her back.
The entire White Trash brood, as well as Grampa, were pretty quiet for awhile. Nobody liked the situation in Rockford, but there was little to be done about it; Grampa was the man in charge, and if he wanted to waste his money supporting her and Uncle Drunk, that was his prerogative. A few of his greedier children were obsessed with the money, which is why Aunt Twin moved out to Rockford: if he was going to be leeched dry before he died, she was going to get while the gettin’ was good. But then the bombs started to drop.
Last summer, just as Aunt Twin was finalizing plans to return to Rockford, Aunt Matriarch sent a long, detailed e-mail to all of her siblings explaining what, exactly, had been happening in Rockford since they moved into the house in mid-2003. Some of the highlights:
- Darlene had never been to high school. Ever. They moved just after she finished junior high, and they never signed her up. Rockford’s school system is such a clusterfuck that nobody called her on truancy. Which is not to say public education is the greatest, especially not in Rockford, but it wasn’t like she was sitting around with her nose in books, educating herself (unless Meth Labs for Dummies counts); she just didn’t want to learn and her mother didn’t care enough to force her to go to school.
- D.J. had a live-in girlfriend for reasons nobody could explain.
- The entire White Trash family had basically become shut-ins in the house they didn’t own, not allowing Uncle Drunk or Grampa inside, and they rarely left the house, especially Aunt White Trash. She only left occasionally to go to Grampa’s house (across the street) and demand money from him. Because of the nasty tone, which was so serious it constitutes verbal and emotional abuse (we’re unclear as to whether or not this escalated to physical abuse), Uncle Drunk would intervene, but he’d usually end up getting berated by Grampa until he went back down to the basement. He stopped intervening except when it got really severe, but again he’d be insulted and told to go away.
- Because of the shut-in thing and complete and total laziness, the new house — you know, the one that was supposed to turn a huge profit in Rockford’s booming market — was a den of filth.
- There’s approximately a $75,000 inheritance set aside for all the kids; Aunt White Trash, in less than four years, has spent double that. This doesn’t include back rent (because Grampa qualifies the house as an “investment,” so the rent they never pay would really just cover a mortgage he would be paying anyway; yeah, that doesn’t make sense to me, either) or the untold thousands given to Aunt White Trash in the past, before our grandmother died.
The purpose of the e-mail was to go into details about what had been going on so we understand why they served Aunt White Trash with an eviction notice, giving her 30 days to pack her shit and leave, and why they might be escalating this to something a little more serious because the 30 days had already passed when Aunt Matriarch sent the e-mail. She was urging the in-state family to rally together in a demented intervention to show Grampa we are not overly fond of him being abused and bled dry, which was guaranteed to be the greatest family event in the history of time. I was really looking forward to it, and I was allowed to go because they wanted as much support as they could get (they also wanted potential movers, since one strategy was to stage an intervention, but if that didn’t work we’d just move all their stuff out onto the front lawn).
But the intervention was canceled. Apparently it’s a slippery legal slope to evict tenants, even if they don’t pay you rent for three years and trash your property. They wanted to “do it right,” so things were a little more complicated than forcibly removing them. On top of that, Grampa was wishy-washy to a confusing degree: every other day he seemed to change his mind, going from extreme “get them the fuck out of here now“-type rage to “they’re family, we can’t just throw them out on the streets”-type kindness. With such mixed messages, Aunt Matriarch e-mailed on several occasions that she was “washing her hands” of the business; she never quite did, though.
Meanwhile, Aunt Twin moved to Rockford with the intention of protecting Grampa (and her all-important inheritance) from Aunt White Trash, documenting nasty behavior and generally being around him at all times for protection. Believe it or not, while she did want to leech quite a bit, she had a hefty chunk of change from a surprisingly successful home-business and an even more successful divorce settlement, so with the help of a small per diem (mostly in the form of free food), she could buy a house without having anything resembling a job but still come across as less of a freeloader.
Several months passed where nothing was accomplish; we’d hear a lot of weird stories about the White Trash brood sneaking around, wait until Aunt Twin and Uncle Drunk let their guard down so they could sneak in and demand more money. We’d hear about continuing efforts to get them out but Grampa being thoroughly unhelpful with the process. Aunt White Trash mysteriously broke her leg trying to get a suitcase from the attic (to pack!); unfortunate “accidents” like that kept giving them a stay of execution. Not much was resolved until things reached critical mass a month ago.
Sitting in her van, just about to pick up her seven-year-old product of alcohol and a broken condom from school, Aunt Twin caught a rare glimpse of the White Trash kids leaving the house. Darlene, D.J., the live-in girlfriend, and…Darlene’s mysterious Texas boyfriend, whom she met on the Internet and had gone to visit on several occasions, who had apparently moved into the house. The freeloading was bad, the live-in girlfriend joining in on the action was worse, but now there were five people holed up in that house, and two of them weren’t even family.
Livid, Aunt Twin called Aunt Matriarch, and they phone-treed the hell out of the family until the intervention was back on. But there was a downside: no grandkids. They figured the situation would be humiliating enough, they didn’t want to worsen things by having us around. I was pretty disappointed; I wanted to film it. Cops would love this kind of thing.
When the intervention happened, unfortunately nobody thought anything had come of it. In a preemptive strike, Aunt Matriarch had led the siblings to the police to ask if there was any way they could have a police escort. None of them knew the live-in girlfriend or the Texas boyfriend, but they already knew of Darlene’s penchant for violence and D.J.’s “demon eyes,” so there was obvious suspicion that their choice in lovers would have similar issues. Plus, with them being half as old and with Winnebago County’s hilariously relaxed gun laws, they had real safety concerns.
The police told them they’d have a squad car coming by, but they don’t generally do security detail for domestic squabbling. Ironically, Aunt White Trash refused to leave the house or let anyone inside, didn’t want to talk to anyone. She called the police with the intention of having them all arrested, but the surprisingly fair-minded cops took both sides of the story and used their intuition to realize something shady was happening. They were allowed into the house to talk with Aunt White Trash and her kids; when they came out, they were asked about the condition of the house. One of the cops non-answered that he’s seen young children returned to worse environments.
With that, they were sent packing. Grampa was enraged by what he perceived as jealousy from Aunt White Trash’s sibling, the cops refused to do anything, so they all drove home a little disillusioned…
…until they heard word a few days later that the cops were just trying to keep the situation from reaching a Cops-esque shirtless battle royale. My dad didn’t misread the cops’ nauseous looks as they emerged from the White Trash domicile, and they surreptitiously went back to the station and contacted the whoever it is (the EPA?) who investigates squalor pits. Nobody actually looked at the house; the White Trash brood pretended to not be home, so whoever came by just dropped a business card in the mailbox.
Aunt White Trash called Grampa with a fictitious story that the EPA condemned the house and they’d be forced out; she was doing this to get more sympathy, but the plan backfired: the combination of his kids’ anger (which he finally realized was jealousy) and the supposed condemnation of his investment snapped him out of it. He kinda-sorta cut her off, giving her only enough to get the fuck out of the state, to get back to California, move back in with Becky, and never bother him again. Oops!
But it wasn’t over yet. They continued to squat until Grampa literally called up a moving company and had a truck parked out in front of their house. It sat there for three days until they finally decided to load it up. This was confusing since Aunt White Trash had stated several times that at this point, with the family turned against them and Becky giving birth a few days earlier, she just wanted to get back to California. So she demanded $5500 for a “fresh start,” plus another $1000 to repair Darlene’s car (which had mysteriously disappeared, along with Texas boyfriend — nobody knows where either of them went, and it’s assumed that the $1000 is just her wanting to milk it).
We breathed a sigh of relief; with them on the road, at least they couldn’t continue to be abusive and bilk Grampa out of more money. Right?
Wrong. Aunt White Trash demanded a wire-transfer of $700 on the road because her shoddy minivan broke down in Springfield, Illinois, and she wanted to buy (not rent) a new van. I’m no expert on cars, but I’m pretty sure any minivan you buy for $700 might get you as far as St. Louis before the transmission falls out. Again, we’re operating under the theory that it was a lie to get more money.
Ten days passed with no word; we assumed they had made it to California and ditched the family who had turned on them “for some reason.” Then we received an e-mail from another uncle, who pretended to be neutral so he could hear both sides of the story. They had made it to the Arizona-California border when, trying to exit, both cars were rear-ended by a truck that was out of control. Even if we’re ignoring the fact that, even in a jalopy, it doesn’t take ten days to get from western Illinois to the Arizona-California border, the way the accident was described made no sense.
Here’s the scoop: one car had rear damage, the other car had front damage. Neither car had both front and rear damage. I’m not an expert on the laws of physics, but I’m pretty sure if a truck slammed one car from behind and it rear-ended the car in front, both ends of at least one car would be damaged, or if we’re to assume the truck somehow hit both separately, how is it possible that one has front damage? The obvious conclusion is that these two cars hit each other and then they made up a story about a truck for more sympathy; it’s harder to sympathize with “we suck at driving and all have substance-abuse problems so we may or may not have been driving under the influence of something.” Uncle Drunk actually called local hospitals until he found one where five people has been admitted after a car accident and the rough descriptions matched. So that, at least, means the car accident really happened.
I have no way to explain what transpired next. Grampa wired more money for them to rent a car to “tool around town.” I don’t have an encyclopedic knowledge of car rental agencies, but don’t they all require credit cards for transactions? I guess I could see them accepting cash if you slip them an extra hundred or something, but it struck me as fishy. Even fishier, both cars were irreparably totaled, so…what’s the deal with the layover? Why do they need a car to tool around town? Why do any of them need to stay in town for any reason? They were discharged from the hospital, they have no usable vehicles…
This leads back to conspiracy theories about substance abuse issues and people being arrested and the cash more likely being used for bail or bribe money. Finally, we were left with a still-shady-but-far-more-likely scenario: they needed an additional one-way car rental to get them all the way back to San Francisco, the rental contract for which was purchased over the phone with a credit card and corrupt, silver-tongued Grampa talked them into charging his card without having to be there in person to sign for it.
There are so many logic and continuity gaps here that you can tell most of this information was provided by liars and then interpreted by confused people trying to create a coherent story out of shit that makes no sense. The one thing that’s clear is, now that they’re back in San Francisco, they have been cut out of the family. All of Becky’s not-even-veiled begging for gifts and money after having her baby? Unanswered. Baby photos? Unacknowledged. Nobody really knows what will happen to them now, and it’s unfortunate to say this, but nobody really cares. After decades of lies, manipulation, and laziness, they’re on the opposite end of the country, and everyone’s okay with that.
It’s really a weird feeling, being so numb to family, not sharing in the joy of a new life because we know that Becky is only keeping this baby to start up White Trash: The Next Generation. Yes, she’s on disability and has no plans to go back to work; worse than that, she’s had several abortions and is only keeping this baby because she’s finally old enough to exploit California’s overly generous welfare program. How are we supposed to feel good about bringing new life into the world for such disgusting reasons?
And then you realize that, just as they’re using the first granddaughter of my parents’ generation as a cash cow, they’ve done the same with the family — not just my grandparents, but everyone, when they could, only reaching out for fistfuls of cash or free gifts whenever they thought they could get something out of us. How do family members get to be like that?
I have no choice but to blame Matthew Lesko.
Posted by Stan on April 21, 2007 1:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Family: The Horror…
April 24, 2007
The Wedding Party
Hermann Walzer (Armin Rohde) is a man used to getting his way, often (we learn) by way of violence or temper tantrums. While at the reception for his son’s wedding, his new daughter-in-law (Lisa Maria Potthoff) complains that the shrimp cocktail appetizer seems to have gone bad. Hermann reacts first by shouting at the hotelier/restaurateur, Franz Berger (Uwe Ochsenknecht), then stalking off without paying the bill.
Unfortunately, in his rage and haste, Hermann leaves the bride and his own wife behind. Berger decides to hold them as hostages until Hermann pays the bill, locking the front gate to keep the Walzers out. What follows is a baffling—but hilarious—hybrid of comedy and war film, maintaining a tone as dark as midnight in a coal mine. It builds an uncomfortable tension as the level of violence escalates, heading toward a disturbing conclusion.
When guests at the inn notice Berger has kidnapped two women, they decide they want to leave. He reluctantly allows it, but they are caught by Hermann sneaking out of the back entrance and held hostage themselves. Hermann sets up a base of operations in the abandoned winter home of an American, where they find an arsenal of weapons to aid in what becomes a series of inept attempts to invade the inn.
Writer/director Dominique Deruddere (adapting a comic book by Jean Van Hamme) adds a variety of subplots stemming from this conflict, most of which subtly reenforce a theme questioning which is better: rational diplomacy or “cowboy” violence? There are quite a few characters, from wedding guests to hotel guests to employees, that Deruddere services ably, managing to bring them all together in the grim third act. His balancing of the myriad subplots and characters is impressive considering usually films (especially comedies) with an excess of either suffer for it. Deruddere also strikes a great balance between the comedy and drama; as the stakes are raised over and over again, the tone shifts, and by the end the comic elements are completely abandoned.
This attention to the tone keeps the suspense tightly wound, but it also allows me to forgive some of the schmaltzier moments. One of the more interesting subplots involves Hermann and his “weak” son, Mark (Arne Lenk). When Mark finally attacks his father physically, resolving the subplot by finally expressing his pent-up rage and winning his father’s respect, what could have been sappy sentimentality feels ingrained enough in the characters to satisfy.
The Wedding Party is an excellent combination of dark humor, suspense, and psychic angst. Unlike many recent American thrillers, it’s smart enough to know few situations have clear-cut heroes and villains. Most folks are a little of each.
Posted by Stan on April 24, 2007 4:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Reviews
