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December 10, 2009

Windows: A Fucking Disaster

Does anyone know anything about Windows? Every time I try to learn, it seems that I lose all sense of sanity and logic. It’s an operating system that reminds me of the following dull anecdote from my community theatre days:

A couple of techies attempted to build a doorframe. The end result resembled something out of a German expressionist film. You guys know what a doorframe looks like, right? It’s pretty much a rectangle, all right angles and straightness. This was a sort of indescribable rhomboid disaster that did not, in any way, resemble a frame on which one hangs a door.

The director, stage manager, and master carpenter did the sort of simultaneous double-take generally found in a teen sex-comedy after a super-hot chick walks by in a wet bikini. Only it wasn’t the thrill of arousal they felt. It was the confusion and mild amusement of something that could only be created by someone making minimum wage at a part-time job.

Instead of trying to explain how, exactly, they fucked this up or why they felt they could present this doorframe instead of just pulling the nails out and starting over, the two techies attempted to sell the director on this particular doorframe. Because, you see, the play was a comedy, and comedies are always wacky and full of odd set designs and strange artistic flourishes, right? Right? Right?!! It would’ve been all well and good except for the part where, in order to fit with the doorframe, a custom door with no right angles would have had to be fabricated, which cost money and time and made no fucking sense. Also, it probably wouldn’t have opened or closed properly.

For those not clever enough to comprehend this analogy, Microsoft are the techies, and Windows is that fucking doorframe. Common sense doesn’t apply, and in order to wrangle that operating system into something remotely usable, one has to fabricate an insane door for it.

Here’s what I’ve managed so far: after many long months trying to figure it out, I finally (quite by accident, to my great annoyance) found a way to make Final Draft — that’s right, the screenwriting program — modular. I don’t even know if I’m using the correct vernacular, but here’s one of the basic problems with Windows: the setup programs shit files in the most inconceivable places, and every goddamn program gets so entwined with the fucking registry, you cannot do a simple task like, say, copy an .exe file to a USB drive and use it on a different computer.

For those Windows evangelists (all five of you) scoffing that you can’t do that on a Mac, either, get ready for my rebuttal: YES, YOU FUCKING CAN, YOU GODDAMN RETARDS. Because the shit’s modular. Maybe you couldn’t have in the pre-OSX days, but a new era dawned, oh, eight or nine years ago.

Anyway, I finally found a utility that tracked every goddamn file Final Draft installed and figured out a way to shove them all into a few folders, put them on my thumb drive, and — voilà — a mostly functional, modular version of Final Draft. It has two drawbacks:

1. If you intend to use it on multiple computers, you have to authorize it when you launch and deauthorize it when you stop using that computer.
2. There’s nothing to be done about the goddamn motherfucking fonts.

The first drawback means little to me. This little project consumed me for one reason: I want to fuck off at my shitty day job, because why wouldn’t I? At work, I don’t have the required administrative privileges to install programs, so I had to come up with a workaround. Mission accomplished, and I can leave it authorized until I can leave that dump for greener pastures. (Hopefully January!)

It’s the second drawback that bugs me. See, Final Draft installs a font called Courier Final Draft, obviously a variant on the well-known Courier font. This is fine and awesome; I wouldn’t even mind using Courier itself, but why not use Courier Final Draft, the one designed to use with the program?

What I object to is Courier New, which you’ll be shocked to learn was developed by Microsoft. It doesn’t take some semi-insane, obsessive-compulsive font nerd to realize that Courier New is not only fucking ugly as sin, it also does major hoodoo to the line spacing. As a random for-instance, I just changed the font in a script that just went out. It’s 119 pages with Courier Final Draft; with Courier New, it’s 137 pages, and it’s solely because there’s weird, unnecessary vertical spacing. (Even adjusting Final Draft’s line-spacing options still puts it at 124 pages.)

I wouldn’t call myself a page counter, per se. I don’t follow the script-guru “Moment X must occur on Page Y” philosophy, but certain things should occur within certain basic ranges of time in the story, and I do subscribe to the “1 page = 1 minute” philosophy. So if you have an inaccurate representation there, it throws the whole thing off.

So, for instance, when I spent the past few days plowing through the first draft of one of the many script ideas I took the time to step-outline while trying to figure out how to get Final Draft to work without installing it*, I was hovering around 40 pages before reaching my outline’s predetermined act break point. Yet I didn’t say to myself, “This is kind of a long first act.” Instead, I said, “I don’t feel like I’ve written enough for this to be 40 pages. Something must be wrong with Courier New.”

And boy was it ever. I always knew Courier New looked different (read: ugly), and college taught me that it’s the go-to font for padding term paper page length requirements. (Of course, midway through my college experience, profs wised up and either barred the use of any Courier-based font or went from page requirements to word requirements — foiled again!) Still, I never paid much attention to just how much it fucks with the page count until I got home, changed the font to Courier Final Draft, and found myself back on good old page 32, which felt just about right for what I’d written.

So that’s fucking annoying. On one level, I could say, “This is freeing — without having to pay attention to inaccurate page counts, I can just write without putting any artificial barriers on when things need to happen.” Which is awesome, except for the part where I like artificial barriers. My desire to write screenplays isn’t an accident or act of opportunism: the blank page frightens me. Constraints, artificial or otherwise, make me feel much more comfortable. To me, it seems weird and a little stupid to go to all the trouble to learn new page approximations to get into the Courier New habit. And why the fuck should I have to?

This all goes back to my lack of administrative privileges. If I don’t have those privileges, I can’t install new fonts; if I can’t install new fonts, I can’t install standard Courier, much less Courier Final Draft (were I to hack the planet, I’d go with the one that’s less obviously tied to a non-work-related program).

I tried looking up little workarounds; for instance, one of the ways I get Final Draft to work is by sticking all those .dll files that get shoved into the C:\WINDOWS\system32\ directory into the folder with the Final Draft .exe, which is one of those little Windows tricks I’ve picked up over years of struggling to make it a useful operating system. I had hoped something similar would exist for fonts, but no. The closest I found was some convoluted instructions that are only good for one session.

Today, I stumbled across a small app that allegedly registers fonts in Windows even if a person lacks administrative privileges. I have no idea if it’ll work (I’ll keep you posted).

It still makes me wonder why Windows has to be so fucking stupid about everything. Why can’t it just do shit without having to apply a bunch of crazy hacks and exploits? Oh right, because of all the horribly flawed security issues that make those hacks and exploits a reality. Holy fucking Christ do I hate Microsoft.

Update 12/11/09: I still hate Microsoft, but the “RegisterFonts” utility actually worked…sort of. It does indeed register my off-books fonts, but Final Draft is a little quirky about recognizing them — you have to go into the “Elements” controls, change the font in one of the elements, and click the “apply to all” button in order for it to display in anything but Courier New (I assume this is because it’s the next “authorized” font on the list, but who the fuck knows with Windows).

*For those of you saying, “Gee, Stan, why not just set up an MS Word screenplay template?” I have to respond: the toilet bowl I work for is so goddamn cheap, they won’t pony up for MS Word alone, much less the MS Office suite. Instead, we’re forced to use OpenOffice, a Java-based dungheap that costs nothing except an unfortunate tax on shitty-computer resources. OpenOffice alleges to support MS Office templates, but its support is shoddy at best, yet as far as I can tell it doesn’t have its own native templating system. It’s also surreally counterintuitive when it comes to basic tasks like setting up margins and indentation points, so the whole “set up a template” idea is a bit of a non-starter.

“But, hey,” you say, with a sudden stroke of inspiration, “you could always just write a text file without any tabs and then paste it into Final Draft and set up the correct formatting, right?” First off, get off my back, all right?! Secondly, I fully admit that this is my issue more than that of crappy software, but I just can’t write like that. I can outline until the cows come home, or write awful fiction or boring blog posts or whatever in a blank text file. When it comes to screenplays, I just can’t tolerate anything but Final Draft. I admit I’m spoiled, but I also paid my hard-earned money for it, so blow me. [Back]

Posted by Stan on December 10, 2009 4:25 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (0)

June 28, 2009

Comedy Bronze

Hey, remember The Webmaster? Good, because I…basically forgot about him. Per that last entry, we left off with me deciding I’d wait a week before asking him to remove all my content, plus my login/password, and then I’d post them all here. That was on May 2nd, and I haven’t posted any of that stuff here. Why? I…basically forgot. That, I guess, illustrates how much that crappy film-review site means to me in the here and now.

Thankfully, my friend Mark decided to jog my memory by e-mailing me a Craigslist posting featuring the following hi-larious “job posting,” written by The Webmaster:

[Website name redacted] is looking for interns to review films and TV shows on DVD then write reviews. There also exists opportunities to attend press screenings and perform interviews with filmmakers and celebrities via telephone or one-on-one.
This is part-time work which typically only takes up roughly three to four hours of your time per project.
This is a non-paying internship.
Anyone who tells you they can make money off the web is either lying to you or does not understand how the web works. Only a handful of sites make any real money. We have been in business online for 13 years and have yet to make a profit. We do this because we love what we do, and you should, too.
If you’re interested, send writing sample and level of interest. Be honest; if you cannot meet deadlines then you probably should not try this - deadlines are a part of any writing job.

Bitter? Nah…

Mark sent me the posting because it gave him a good laugh, and he thought it’d do the same for me. It did, but it also reminded me that I had yet to write The Webmaster back and make my demands. In fact, The Webmaster sent me one final (apparently) e-mail on May 27th that I ignored, then forgot about. It’s similar in tone to the previous e-mails, but it sort of maintains the passive-aggressive pseudo-guilt trip while heightening the defensiveness. Check it:

To: Stan From: The Webmaster Subject: [Blank]

Hey, Stan,

Just checking in to see what’s up. That last email from you was really a surprise and honestly out of left field. I had not heard from you in some months then tried reaching you for several months and was wondering what happened to you and was a little bit concerned. I apologize for calling the old phone number I found on some class papers from that class, but you weren’t answering emails or your phone messages. In all fairness, how am I to know who you want me to call or not call if you don’t tell me before hand? Seems a little unreasonable. And you seemed more upset at me than it just being about that. If you’ve been upset at having agreed to do the work on the site but did not share that with me, then how am I to know what you’re thinking or how you’re feeling.

I appreciate all you’ve done. It’s a huge improvement. But to suddenly disappear and then respond with such negativity really surprised me, because you hadn’t voiced anything about being upset before. I’m sorry if you resent me or what you’ve done, but I did not cause it. You volunteered to do this because you were interested in doing something with your time. I did not coerce or force you to do any of this.

I’m open to discussing any of this.

All the best,
The Webmaster

If you go back and read the post I linked above, you’ll note that most of the first paragraph is a heady combo of bullshit and revising history. If you change “several months” to “several days,” it’s a little more believable, but then, I think, it makes my reaction a little less “unreasonable” and “out of left field.”

However, “in all fairness,” he does make a semi-decent point in the second paragraph. I did volunteer because I was interested in doing something with my time. Now, as I explained to him in my last correspondence, I am working two jobs that pay actual money. Why would I continue to make something that I’ve always been aware has never paid and will never paid a high priority?

As I’ve said, I never ignored him — in fact, with the exception of the Twitter debacle, I handled most of his requests pretty quickly, because they were mostly easy tweaks. But I did stop volunteering to review things, and I did stop writing my column. I could blame it on my increasing wrist pain, but the honest truth is that I grew disillusioned with it. I’d worked on it for over a year without hearing any feedback from anyone except Mark and my mom, so I felt safe in assuming nobody was reading. This was reenforced by the total lack of reaction when I stopped working on it, unannounced. Not even The Webmaster noticed this until about three months after I’d stopped.

Admittedly, this was irresponsible, but I did intend to get back to writing it. It turned into a low priority, but it didn’t cross my mind that I’d never write another column until I had to see a doctor about my wrist, couldn’t type for a month, and then had to deal with a massive influx of scripts throughout April and May, during which time all sorts of shit went down with The Webmaster. But even if I were still writing for the site, I would have looked at the ~18 columns I’d need to power through in order to catch up and said, “Fuck it. It’s over.” At which time I would have likely e-mailed The Webmaster to tell him someone else can take over the column for me, or we can just archive it. And if that doesn’t sound like professional behavior, you’re right, it’s not. But it’s amazing how professional I can be when somebody’s handing me a paycheck.

Anyway, while The Webmaster did not “coerce” or “force” anything upon me, he did — as I pointed out previously — make certain promises that convinced me to participate in something I would have otherwise turned down, like that he’d use his elaborate network of contacts to help me find a decent, well-paying writing job. He also sort of misrepresented the site, leading me to assume it was a semi-professional endeavor. It was not, at all. I’m still wondering how he got so many actual PR firms to send real press packets and screeners to himself and his staff. The only conclusion I can draw is that it’s really, really easy to make a shammy film-review website legitimate in the eyes of soulless publicists.

Point being, he can deny responsibility all he wants, and at the end of the day, he’s not responsible. I found out pretty quickly that I’d been handed a lemon, and I stupidly wasted a couple of years trying to turn it into lemonade. So yeah, that’s my bad. Now I’m making up for it. Still, I think I have the right to resent someone, at least a little bit, who more than once made promises involving big fat dollar signs that actually amounted to big fat steaming turds.

So I had my laugh, but then I realized I should shit or get off the pot in terms of getting all my old articles. I was very angry when I wrote my last post, and I wanted to be pseudo-confrontational in demanding he remove them, but it’s been nearly two months. I’m still pissed, but I’ve regained enough of my trademark cold, calculated rationality to realize that a mini-confrontation like that just isn’t worth it. I figured I’d just go to the site, load up my writer page, and copy/paste all the text.

I figured wrong.

The reviews? They were fine. I actually grabbed the HTML source so it’d retain all the formatting, so that was cool. But the column? They showed nothing but blank HTML files…

Why? Well, it goes back to one of the ways I had to design around the CMS. Like most CMSes, it allows for multiple categories. However, it doesn’t strictly allow for different templates for each category. I developed a workaround, using a plugin that tells the system to use X template for Y category and sticking that code into the basic template. My column had its own category, but I discovered as I clicked back to the main page that The Webmaster had replaced my column with another…

I looked at the new version of my column — which, as of my discovery last night had no posts — with horror and disgust. It’s not that The Webmaster’s new web monkey — don’t think for a second I believed The Webmaster decided to take an interest in HTML or graphic design — did anything offensive to the web design; in fact, it displayed a test page that looked exactly the same as my design, with two key differences. First, it had none of my columns, instead listing test posts. Second, the new web monkey had altered my header image.

Look, I don’t have a background in web or graphic design, either. I redesigned the film-review site largely by the seat of my pants, rolling the site’s old, ugly layout into a new, more aesthetically pleasing package. The only real creative input I had was in differentiating what I considered different “main sections.” Each of these sections — reviews, interviews/features, and TV — had different color schemes to separate them aesthetically. For another holdover from the old design, the image of a film reel shoved into one corner of the web page, I added an image of a TV screen to differentiate the TV stuff from the film stuff. It’s pretty elementary.

So the header images were pretty simple: either a film reel or a TV set in the corner, the name of the section in big block letters, and the section’s color scheme highlighted in the background. I had always intended to send the Photoshop files with the templates for each header to The Webmaster, in case he ever needed to change them. Some of them — including the one for my column — specifically mention the writer’s name or mention a particular sort of mission statement for the section that may end up changing. However, The Webmaster never took much of an interest in the redesign, so I never took the time to send him those files.

As a result, I guess theoretically one could argue the new web monkey did the best he could. He took a portion of the original header image that did not contain any text, enlarged it to cover the full area of the header, and added new text describing the new version of the column. The new typeface doesn’t match the one I used for graphics — Futura, one of the most well-known and easy-to-get fonts in the history of time — and the web monkey made the mistake of also keeping the non-enlarged TV in the corner. The result? A jarring, somewhat comical change in color and background-pattern sizes, with no attempt to feather it or anything else to make it look the tiniest bit professional.

You know what I would’ve done if I had to come in and clean up after somebody else’s design? I’d just find new graphics and start from scratch, to give the overall site coherence. But hey, maybe I’m just anal. And for those of you thinking that’s a lot of work to change one aspect of the site, you’re wrong: it’s nothing more than one background pattern in three different hues, with different text for each section and a different “icon” in the corner. I used one .psd file for the entire thing, simply hiding and unhiding layers to create the appropriate combinations. Like I said, I have no background in graphic design, I barely have an idea of what I’m doing, yet to me this is just common sense.

What could I do, after discovering I could no longer access the text of my columns because (a) I lacked access to the backend, and (b) this new/horrible design for a new/horrible TV column had decimated my column’s HTML files? For all The Webmaster’s goofy paranoia in stripping me of said backend access, he’s made no effort to change any of the passwords for FTP access or the MySQL database (it’s entirely likely he doesn’t even know what the latter is). He also never deleted my CMS account. I guess he realized doing so would permanently erase all of my reviews, as well, so he merely unchecked every available preference to lock me out. Funny thing about that, though: the MySQL database stores all the username preferences, which one can easily toggle by replacing a “0” (no permission) with a “1” (permission!).

With my “superuser” access restored, I logged in to the database and saved every one of my columns into one large text file. I took a few moments to snoop around and confirmed my suspicion that he’d brought in another web monkey: the activity log was flooded with this user deleting templates, creating templates, creating test posts, altering templates, etc., etc. I snooped around to look at the other new templates, but I only found one — a test template for a new version of the index page, which retains my design but adds horrible/unnecessary ClipArt to each of the sections. Again, it doesn’t fit with the aesthetic at all, and… Seriously? ClipArt? This shit is so generic, it might actually have been taken from MS Office’s stockpile of ClipArt. Or maybe a free GIF site. To each his own, I guess, but it’s fucking ugly.

At first, it pissed me off: some douchenozzle is soiling my design. My mind combines three unfortunate personality traits: intense anger manifested through elaborate pranks concocted with the maturity and wit of a 12-year-old pothead. I had the following thought, and even though I’ve tried to push past it, committing to this prank is so fucking tempting: rather than allowing them to sully my design, I should rewrite all the templates to reflect The Webmaster’s old, rickety, crap design. Fine, keep the CMS backend. Who cares? But all my graphics and spiffy Web 2.0-ification can go. He can return to his GIFs and his GoLive default templates, and the new web monkey can try to concoct his own redesign.

The only thing holding me back — other than the vague, nagging realization that it’s not worth my time (not just the time required for redoing the design, but the time required dealing with the fallout) — is that this isn’t really my design. The Webmaster was very hesitant about the prospect of a redesign, so I didn’t do much more than make his version of the site look a little spiffier. Once he’d dipped his toe in the water, I’d start springing more advanced features like horizontal menus, non-Verdana fonts, and redundancy elimination. Of course, we never got to that point. I didn’t even last six months after launching the redesign.

Let’s talk about the redundancy, though, because it’ll become important in a minute…

I’ve always felt the site suffered because of The Webmaster’s odd choice to repeat information all over the site. Right off the bat, we have two main pages: index.html and main.html. The index is the first thing you see, and there’s a link to the main from there. Although they have different layouts, both pages contain pretty much the same information, listing the latest reviews. There’s an archive page that also lists every review on the site — this, at least, is necessary because the reviews fall off the main pages once they get too old. But because the archives page — as mandated by The Webmaster — is divided into full lists of each category, is it really necessary to include separate archive pages of these categories? (To make that clearer: you have an “Interviews” portion of the archives page, and then a separate archive page listing just the interviews. Necessary?)

Well, I discovered this morning — now that the reinvention of my old column has officially “launched” — that The Webmaster has mandated still more redundancy: they have a TV section that lists all TV reviews — except my former column. Now they have the new version of my column, which…lists all TV reviews. They’ve also added new sections for “theatrical releases” and “DVD releases,” despite the fact that these categories already exist. You might ask why, but merely asking yourself that question means you’ve officially put more thought into the website than The Webmaster has.

Does this rambling collection of thoughts have a moral, or any kind of point? If it’s not “never do free work for people,” it’s this: people aren’t worth it. I’m an angry and spiteful kind of guy, but I’ve reached a point of spiritual awareness where I can — for the most part — avoid making horrible snap decisions as a result of anger. When I calm down, I always realize that it’s not worth the time, energy, and/or expense. I could completely decimate The Webmaster’s site — do much worse damage than merely rewriting templates to give the site that vintage 1999 look it had when I started writing for it (in 2006) — but life’s too short.

I guess where I’m at is: will The Webmaster learn a lesson? He’s already justified his side of things to such a degree that, in his mind, he bears no responsibility. Although, if you parse those e-mails again, it’s clear to me that most of his defensiveness comes from guilt. Despite that, he’s justifying and spinning so he doesn’t have to consider that maybe he doesn’t know how to run a website or a business or interact with other humans respectfully. If I fuck with him, it’ll only reenforce his conclusions and wash away what little guilt he feels. Other than briefly amusing me, how will that help? He’s not worth it.

Oh, and here’s the happy-ending postscript: since I had to hack the database and log back in anyway, I just quietly deleted all my old posts myself, without interacting with The Webmaster at all. No muss, no fuss.

Posted by Stan on June 28, 2009 10:53 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (0)

March 6, 2009

Podcast: Worst Moviegoing Experiences

Today’s podcast is brought to you by this article. As usual, excuse the choppy editing. The unedited cut ran over 50 minutes, and let’s break it down: if you listen to this version and think, “It’s kinda boring,” imagine how it would sound if it were nearly twice as long.

In case you decide to skip around or break it up, here’s the “table of contents”:

1:16 – Paulie
9:19 – Apocalypse Now Redux
16:24 – Star Wars: Episode III: Revenge of the Sith
25:07 – Death to Smoochy

Be warned that this podcast contains a rainbow of obscenities, so consider this not safe for work.

Click the Play button to listen to Podcast #6: “Worst Moviegoing Experiences” (64kbps MP3, 28:42, 13.1MB)

Posted by Stan on March 6, 2009 5:12 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (6)

February 25, 2009

Podcast: Problems at the Goddamn Grocery Store

Be warned that this podcast contains a rainbow of obscenities, so consider this not safe for work.

Click the Play button to listen to Podcast #2: “Problems at the Goddamn Grocery Store” (64kbps MP3, 5:37, 2.6MB)

Posted by Stan on February 25, 2009 4:28 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (1)

January 7, 2009

Bait and Shit

Fuck T-Mobile, man. Fuck them!

Here’s the skinny: I have a wireless router, and it’s a piece of shit. I’m also both cheap and poor, which works out, so I’ve mainly been bitching as much as humanly possible about what a flaming dog-pile off hairy shit this cocksucking router is. I periodically scan sales for good router prices, but nothing has hit my sweet $20 price range. There are some routers that periodically pop up on Frys’ for $15, but I always seem to miss them before they sell out.

Not too long ago, a friend alerted me to a deal T-Mobile was having — an upgraded version of the router I already have, with more RAM and an ability to support the third-party firmware that will supposedly rescue my router from its extreme suckitude, for $20, with additional money off if you use Microsoft’s retarded Live CashBack thing. That might not be what it’s called. I just abuse it for savings. I don’t commit it to memory.

It seemed like a fine deal, people on nerd forums suggested all was on the up and up, so I rolled with it. When I placed my order, it warned me the router would be backordered until after Christmas. I wasn’t ordering it for a holiday gift, so I didn’t care. I proceeded through, got a confirmation that, again, warned me of its “backorder” status. Again, I didn’t care.

Four days later, I received the following e-mail from T-Mobile:

Dear T-Mobile Customer,

Thank you for ordering the T-Mobile @Home® Linksys router. Due to high demand, this router is currently out of stock.

We will be upgrading your order and shipping you the T-Mobile @Home® HiPort™ router instead. You should receive your order on or before Tuesday, December 23. We’ll send you an e-mail once your order has shipped, so you’ll know it’s on its way.

We thank you for your patience and apologize for any inconvenience.

Sincerely,

T-Mobile Customer Care

The… Fuck?

I didn’t order this piece of shit to get it on or before Tuesday, December 23. It warned me twice of its backordered “will not arrive by Christmas” status, and I placed the order anyway.

I also didn’t order the router because I wanted any old piece-of-shit router. I want the specific piece-of-shit router I ordered. The goddamn T-Mobile @Home® HiPort™ router doesn’t even support the third-party firmware I so desperately desire.

I just have to ask: why? I’ve done a lot of online ordering and my day, even reaching back to the hoary days of mail-order, and I can’t recall a single instance of being “upgraded” against my will. I’ve had phone support people attempt to upsell me, but they’ve never done anything insane like, “Say, I know you said you want the cheap old Boss orange distortion pedal, but I’m going to go ahead and put you down for the Dallas-Arbiter Fuzzface pedal instead. It’s only $120 more, but you can get those good Hendrix and Billy Corgan* sounds.”

You might think this is an exaggeration. “They just upgraded you,” you’re saying. “It’s not like they illegally charged you more for something you didn’t order and didn’t want.” Don’t you ever get tired of being wrong?

The total cost of the router, after all my scheming, was around $18. That’s what they charged my credit card on December 13th. On December 17th, the date of this e-mail, I got an additional charge of $35 and change, which approximates the “upgraded” router’s usual $50 pricetag plus tax or maybe shipping. I have no idea since they never sent me a goddamn invoice, those jackal prick motherfuckers. Even when I got the fucking box with the router in it, the packing slip invoice didn’t include a total price. What kind of operation is this?

“What’s that?” you ask cautiously. “The box arrived. You didn’t call their customer service and cancel?”

Fair question, reader. I’ll tell you why: because the “upgrade” e-mail included an inexplicable (and unnecessary) image attachment, my mail program filed it as junk. I didn’t notice it in the junk folder until more than a day later, and it literally shipped while I was on hold waiting to talk to one of their douchenozzle, ass-faced CSRs. I figured there was no goddamn point in wasting my time. They couldn’t cancel it now that it’s shipped, and I’d end up having to call them again to get return authorization on the package.

It’s a moot point, anyway. While I waited on hold, I browsed those same mystical forums that alerted my friend to the sale. Everyone had been similarly baited and switched, and after waiting for hours on hold, the CSRs — and their supervisors — told every caller that, because of the holidays, they couldn’t possibly cancel an order! It’d ruin everything, especially their quarterly profit figures! As for the additional charge, the CSRs came up with the laughably convoluted explanation that they have to charge something in order to process the upgrade and ship the order. No explanation on why they couldn’t charge $0.00 or $0.01 instead of the exact balance of a non-sale router and shipping/tax — they just promised that the extra charge would be removed…someday.

None of this — except the additional charge — would bother me if they had asked. An e-mail saying, “Hey dude, we know the holidays are coming up, so we can upgrade you to X router for $Y if you want. Give us a call or respond to this e-mail and we’ll hook you up.” A phone call with similar patter would work, as well. I wouldn’t even mind a hard-sell approach. I’d say, “Blow me,” and hang up, but the point is to give me the option. I ordered what I ordered for several reasons, none of which include “Christmas.” It’s a steaming bowl of bullshit to just assume I need it for the holidays and switch the order up without asking, and then charge more for it, and then refuse to cancel the order. I don’t know the laws on this, but it feels illegal.

I considered trying to haggle with customer service to get the router I actually wanted, but after the business practices they’ve exhibited, I don’t want to do anything but kick every single shithead employed by T-Mobile in the nuts. And I know they employ a bunch of women, so I want them each to undergo the long, brutal process of gender-reassignment surgery, on T-Mobile’s dime. Then I want somebody to create some kind of sensory receptor that will approximate the feeling of getting kicked in the nuts (because I hope and assume their man-molded junk doesn’t have the exact physical properties that will give the same feel of beating on the spermatic plexus with a heavy wooden spoon).

I know nobody reads this blog, but maybe some T-Mobile employee will try to get ahead by Googling “how to fuck over more T-Mobile customers” and stumble across this post. I welcome comments from any and all T-Mobile employees. Explain your company’s justification of this sort of business practice. Don’t forget to leave your mailing address so I can kick you in the nuts.

*Back in the olden days, getting a Billy Corgan sound was considered a selling point, not an embarrassment. [Back]

Posted by Stan on January 7, 2009 3:45 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (0)

November 23, 2008

Flamer

After some dabbling, I’ve made it a policy to not post on messageboards. I’ve noticed three possible outcomes of posting as a newbie: you’re either totally ignored, flamed by longtime posters (especially if you have a dissenting opinion), or you end up saying something you think is totally innocuous but is taken way too seriously by other posters, leading to more emotional drama than you should need from people you haven’t met. But I’m getting old(er) and (more) curmudgeonly, so when I stumbled across a forum that references this old post, I got mad. And I decided I would flame, because I’m mean and petty and I was a little bored.

This was the forum post:

Taking the post on its own, without the context of the three previous pages of posts, I concluded that this dude was taking a potshot at me. I got a little hung up on starting it with “But,” because what the hell? I scrolled up, but none of the previous posts indicated any kind of context that he was responding to anyone — it came out of thin air, so when I glanced at the location (Skien, Norway), I figured, “Eh, maybe he’s just not great with English.”

And I was pissed. For reasons enumerated in the finely crafted flame below:

Quoting ‘jostber’ on Nov 13 2008, 11:04AM:

But these “Smart Girls” lyrics are a bit dubious:
http://www.stanhasissues.com/archives/2007…worst_song.html

Dubious they might be, but don’t say I didn’t warn you, jackass:

Quoting ‘Stan Has Issues&trade’:

Lyrics (approximated based on what I’m hearing; if you hear him saying something different, drop a comment and I’ll correct it):

It’s not like I passed this off as something I copied directly from Dr. Eugene Landy’s original, vomit-stained lyric sheet. I went back through and noticed a couple of misspellings (“plain” instead of “plane” — WHERE DO I GET THE BALLS?!), but I still hear all the words the same way. Why don’t you do what I ask rather than scoffing at me on some fruity jazz message board? I’m an asshole, but I hate being wrong. If I agreed with what you’re hearing, I’d change the lyrics without question, as I clearly stated.

Or maybe you didn’t read that part because you were too busy trolling for the MP3 I had to delete because too many fruity jazz message boards were direct-linking to it instead of referring to the post. In your infinite disappointment, you settled on linking to said post with a condescending remark about my ability to hear and transcribe slurred words nearly drowned out by a thunderous and terrible synth beat. I’m not putting illegal MP3s up out of the kindness of my goddamn heart. Learn how to read or keep your mouth shut about my ability to write.

I was ready to post this, man. I signed up to the forum, I pored through previous and later posts, and I knew it was absolutely the right move to make. I didn’t realize that his “dubious” remark was a callback to himself, from eleven posts and four hours earlier. In fact, I stumbled across them by accident, because not even his posting history clarified it: he had several posts — including one in this same thread — between an earlier remark (“I think those lyrics are pretty cool. :)”) and his later remark.

Such bizarre, weird separations exist between the two posts that I could be in denial and the two posts have nothing to do with each other. I do believe this to be the case, however, and now I have an affliction I can only call “flaming blue balls.” Hold on, let me check Urban Dictionary to make sure that isn’t some kind of homophobia-related disorder. Okay, looks good. “Flaming blue balls” — because I wanted to flame, I had a great one going, but at the last possible moment, the forum said, “No, baby. I’m not ready for this.” By which I mean, this jostber dude was spared by posting too many times on the same page and was lucky his initial, Jethro Tull-related post was on the same page as the “dubious” remark.

But one day, gentle readers, I will flame, and you will bare witness to the glut of traffic and comments I’ve secretly yearned for since bashing Juno lo, these many months ago.

Posted by Stan on November 23, 2008 4:26 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (0)

August 8, 2008

Trip to the Post Office

I had to go down to the post office to mail a small package. What should have been a 10-minute errand (including drive time) turned into a 30-minute disaster, the likes of which haven’t been witnessed on this planet since the sinking of the Lusitania.

A few years ago, the post office installed a gigantic kiosk-machine that allows you to automatically do what you normally have to wait in line for years and have someone else do. It has a handy scale, prints out all the postage, and has a gigantic slot to put bulky packages and stuff into. It’s a massive time-saver because so many people fear technology, meaning there’s rarely a line to use the machine. I don’t mean to sound overly detailed or condescending, but I feel the need to explain because I do not believe these machines exist in every post office (for instance, another post office 10 minutes in the other direction doesn’t have one).

So I go to the machine, and I find two little kids, maybe six or seven years old, playing around with the machine, with no adult supervision anywhere to be found. When they first installed the machine, they had a random postal employee sit on a little stool to make sure people used it correctly. I wished someone like that had been around, but alas…

I said to the kids, “Excuse me,” trying to sound polite, gruff, and irritated at the same time.

Both of them turned around, stared at me slackjawed, then resumed their fucking around with the machine.

I don’t know the social etiquette of dealing with little kids. Honestly, it almost never comes up. I just know that I don’t want to be accused of something unsavory or illegal by following my heart and grabbing those kids and shoving them out of the way. So I just kinda…stood there, and contemplated whether or not I should just get in the damn line.

Fortunately, a few moments after I showed up, a kindly old postal employee came up next to me. We exchanged confused/annoyed looks, and then he tried in his kindly-old-man way to coax the kids away from the machine, or at least find out who they came to the post office with. They finally admitted they were waiting for “Mommy,” but they refused to move.

The kindly old man went into the waiting room and called, “Anybody out here got two kids waiting? We got an SOS.”

I shit you not — the mom was standing there, but she pretended not to hear. I watched her tense up with potential embarrassment even before she turned — after the postal clerk sighed and turned his back on her — and started making shooing motions at her apathetic kids.

I hate to get on my old-man soapbox and complain about parenting skills, but what else can I do? In my day, my mom would have smacked the shit out of my sister and me — publicly and awesomely and deservedly — if we had behaved like this. But, in fact, we wouldn’t have even gotten the chance, because she would have forced us to wait with her through the whole line, no matter how long and boring it seemed. And, hell, even if she had hypothetically let us run loose, we were well-trained enough by that age to know that if we were doing something flagrantly wrong, and Grown-Ups wanted us to stop, we’d fucking stop. To that end, I seemed to recall people in kindly-old-man authority positions being fucking assholes. None of this mamby-pamby, “Would you mind letting this gentleman use the machine, please?” Fuck that, man. I have vivid memories of balding men with snooty voices barking orders at me, and you know what? I deserved it, and I knew I deserved it. And again, in a hypothetical land where a situation had escalated to the point where a kindly old man came searching for my mom, she would have gotten out of line to deal with it, and I probably would have gotten the shit smacked out of me twice — once for misbehaving, once for making her have to wait in the line a second time.

Kids these days need to get smacked. Repeatedly. So do parents.

Posted by Stan on August 8, 2008 1:39 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (0)

July 14, 2008

Defeating Childhood

As a lad, my favorite series of video games was Capcom’s Mega Man. I didn’t much get into the SNES X series, but those original games — I don’t know, maybe it was my childhood love of robots and futuristic sci-fi, but for games with such simplistic stories, they opened a world of imagination that you don’t always get with modern, “realistic” games.

I couldn’t tell you if it was the announcement of a new Mega Man 9 in the classic, 8-bit style that did it, or just happening to coincidentally find a YouTube instructional video at around the same time, but I fixed my old, worn-out NES. It didn’t take quite as much effort as I thought; just a lot of screwing and unscrewing. Probably the hardest part was leaving a certain level of looseness to the screws; strangely, the spring that keeps the cartridge-holder depressed will fail to work if all the screws are hand-tightened to their tightest.

Once it worked again, the first game I popped in was Mega Man 2 — still, for me, the series’ peak. The game features some of the greatest music ever created (not just in video games!); stages, weapons, and bosses that are clever but not “we’re running out of ideas” silly (Top Man?!); and overall, it feels like the perfect length. The stages are a little longer than the first game, and they’re more challenging but not in the punishing way that is still the first Mega Man’s trademark. Unlike later games, the stages don’t go on so long that they wear out their welcome. Later games may have had better graphics or neat new moves (the slide!), but nothing ever topped Mega Man 2.

I played through Mega Man 2 in one sitting, on difficult. I felt cocky — as a kid, it was hard enough to beat it on normal. Beating it on difficult felt like a bad-ass revolution. I moved on to 3, which is tougher and harder, but it just loses a little something. The best thing about it, for me, are the memories I have of my sister and I spending hours — weeks, really — trying to get ahead, poring over strategy guides and Nintendo Power tips. My sister and I never got along well, but Nintendo — one-player Nintendo — was a different story. We were completely cooperative, each willing to give up the controller if a certain section of game required the playing strengths of the other, but for selfish ends: we both wanted to get to Dr. Wily and see the end of the game.

But there’s a secret shame: I’ve never beaten the first Mega Man. As a kid, it was fucking impossible. I’m not kidding; the only game I ever played for the NES that gave me more trouble was Metroid, a game I still can’t beat (though I can get way farther nowadays than I ever could at the tender age of nine). But, you know what? I never even owned the original NES Metroid until long after the system was past its prime. Some might remember an unusual time when the Super Nintendo eclipsed the NES in popularity; despite Nintendo’s insistence that they’d keep developing equally for the NES, it quickly became clear that their buyers didn’t want that. New games for the NES dwindled, but apparently Nintendo still wanted to push some hardware. I distinctly remember them repackaging well-known classics — like Metroid — so I got a brand-new, unused copy in, like, 1993 or ‘94 (probably the latter, since that’s when Super Metroid came out).

Point being, Metroid doesn’t hold any kind of “recaptured youth” element to me. Sure, I played it at friends’ houses and witnessed the awe-inspiring, Custer’s Revenge-like magnificence of the Justin Bailey code — but I didn’t sit there for hours trying to figure out how to beat it. Mega Man, on the other hand… It only became more infuriating when I’d beat Mega Man 2, 3, 4, 5, etc., then still go back to the first and not be able to make it to the boss on the easiest stages.

Now I’m older, wiser, and about 1% more patient — I figured, with a functional Nintendo, I could crack it.

I figured wrong. The game is a fucking nightmare.

Okay, that’s a slight exaggeration. In addition to being older and wiser, I’m also lazier. I set some ground rules for myself: no winning in ways that I wouldn’t have known about when I was a kid. For instance, I don’t remember the correct boss order. I could spend ages figuring it out through trial and error, but what would I have done at age eight? Talked to a friend who beat it and find out from them, or borrow a strategy guide. I don’t feel like it’s cheating Googling a walkthrough to find a good order, though I wouldn’t allow myself to look at anything other than the order (even though if I had had a strategy guide, I would have had complete maps of every stage and details on how to beat each enemy and boss).

That said, the stages are pretty easy — much easier than I remembered. I had a lot of trouble with Ice Man (that second set of randomly appearing blocks has a really hard pattern), but once I got it, it was a snap. Of course the bosses are easier; with the correct order, you kill most of them in two or three hits. So that’s all good, right?

Wrong. Remember how you’d have a good buzz going, playing some awesome game, and you’d get farther than you’d ever gotten before —

— and it’d freeze up? Yeah, that hasn’t changed. In fact, considering my console is over 20 years old (nothing on this blog has ever made me feel older than that statement, but there it is), it’s probably worse than it used to be. Without the password system implemented in the second game, you have to start all over, every single time. It’s all well and good, except if it’s going to freeze up every time, you’re screwed.

It doesn’t freeze up every time, but predicting it is an act of futility. I’ve gotten to Dr. Wily’s castle several times, but that rascally motherfucker has a torture chamber that would make Macaulay Culkin look saintly. When I finally get to that stupid rock monster, he kills me, and I’m always on my last life by that time. So then I finally found out the yellow devil/select trick to beat him — but ever since then, some kind of disaster has struck before I’ve gotten to Wily’s castle. It freezes, I get some kind of absurd RF interference from a nearby parked taxi (that really happened; my NES is kickin’ it so old-school that it’s still connected using the original RF/coax box), somebody calls and I pause the game then have to do something more productive than playing a video game…it’s a cruel mistress.

But I will not rest until I’ve beaten Mega Man, and when I do, I will feel truly unstoppable.

Posted by Stan on July 14, 2008 5:07 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (0)

April 27, 2008

Dumbass

Man, did I feel like an asshole last night. Readers of this blog know that I have a tendency to just say shit, unchecked. The problem with the blogosphere is that anyone, including someone who has no idea what he’s talking about, can start a blog, and somehow people will take that person seriously, quoting from him or her as if an opinion-based blog — even one that occasionally reports fact — is a legitimate source.

A few weeks ago, I wrote a little puff piece of On Deadly Ground, Steven Seagal’s underrated 1994 directorial debut. In that post, I got all defensive because I felt like Vern, the author of Seagalogy (the book that inspired me to watch Seagal’s first dozen or so movies back to back), had unfairly trashed On Deadly Ground. Like I said, I’ll just say shit. There’s no filter here, so even though I’m constantly wrong, I don’t expect to get called out.

Well, Vern called me out. In a very reasonable, polite way that had me instantly feeling guilty. Last night, he left a comment on my post:

Good post. But as the author of SEAGALOGY I have to disagree that I trashed ON DEADLY GROUND. I love this movie and in my book I defend it on many of the same grounds that you did. I praise the complex construction of the bar scene, say that the movie is “daring in so many ways it’s ridiculous,” that “as a director I honestly think Seagal did a good job,” and list in detail all of the Seagal trademarks and themes that this movie has the ultimate example of. I’m not sure how you could interpret that chapter as a trashing, but it’s disappointing to find that out.

Anyway, good to see someone else enjoying the movie and even having some respect for what Seagal was trying to do.

So I went back and re-read his chapter on the movie, and I realized — not only was he absolutely write about not trashing him, my post on the subject makes similar points. I’d like to chalk my mistake up to the sampling of negative reviews I’ve read, or maybe the fact that I read Seagalogy faster than I needed to and, let’s face it, his movies share enough similarities (that’s one of the points — recurring motifs and themes that cross the movies) that I might have had it confused with a lesser effort by the time I wrote about On Deadly Ground.

I still felt like shit. I wrote a polite response, and he didn’t seem to mind enormously. He seemed happier that someone else found enjoyment in On Deadly Ground than that I unfairly attacked him even though we liked the same movie for many of the same reasons.

I went back and edited the post (there’s an explanatory note as to why at the bottom), but man…it’s really embarrassing to be so thoroughly wrong.

Posted by Stan on April 27, 2008 3:25 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (0)

April 4, 2008

Guilt by Association

In early 2005, Stan Has Issues™ attempted a noble but failed experiment: a dual blog, Stan and Anne Have Issues™, which would temper my frustrations and cynicism with…slightly less frustration and cynicism. Don’t bother going back into the archives to find the posts from this almost-mythical era; they’re all gone now. You can take a wild guess as to why the dual blog fell apart, but I don’t have much interest in delving into it.

I’m more interested in this fun fact: Google “stan and anne have issues” (without quotes). Go ahead, do it. I’ll wait. Come on, you lazy asshole. Click this. Too silly for you? How about “stan and anne” (with quotes)? Two random names, one of which has not appeared on this blog in nearly three years and has been almost entirely stripped from the archives, and yet it still tops Google. Even without the quotes, stan and anne only sinks to #3. And even just stan anne only sinks it to #9 — still on the front page. It’s weird.

I don’t claim to know or understand how Google compiles and filters its results. I know that, thanks to Google bombs and other attempts to manipulate search results, things have gotten more complicated than the circa-1999 philosophy of “if it gets the most clicks, it gets the top spot.” Still, it seems awfully fishy that this blog would still be the #1 for these key phrases, so long after one half of this blog became little more than a memory.

(Also, if you’re wondering why I was starting searches like these in the first place: I discovered, while narcissistically Googling this blog, that several blog search engines still list this place as Stan and Anne Have Issues™, complete with a tacky tagline I wrote. I started searching for “stan and anne have issues” so I could try to update all of these search engines. I wonder if that accounts for the Google craziness…)

Edit 4/5/08 — I neglected to mention the irony that posting about Stan and Anne Have Issues™ is less likely to remove the Google association with that name. You no longer need to point it out.

Posted by Stan on April 4, 2008 5:56 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (0)

March 31, 2008

Photo Blog: Over the Counter

In January, I received a helpful e-mail from my health insurance provider. It informed me that Zyrtec — the allergy medication I’ve taken since I was 15 — would now be providing prescription-strength pills over the counter, so if I attempted another prescription refill, they’d have no problem charging me $145 instead of the usual $15.

I don’t usually take my allergy medication in winter, because there aren’t as many outdoor allergens to ruin my life. But allergy season is upon us, and as such I finished my Zyrtec prescription on Sunday and had to take a trip up to Walgreens to find the over-the-counter version. They had a bunch of options: five tablets, 14, 30, or 45. I would have preferred to go big, for maximum value, but the 30- and 45-tablet options were locked in little cabinets. I don’t really like pushing the button and having someone from the pharmacy assist me, because, aside from the other sordid reasons, there’s a girl working in that pharmacy who I unintentionally stalked for about three months about eight years ago.

Now, when I say that, don’t get all in a tizzy thinking I’m some psycho nutbar. Different people have different definitions of “stalking” (apparently). Standing behind a tree in her front yard, chain-smoking and staring at her bedroom window — that’s stalking. Asking a girl on a date multiple times, including prefacing one or two of them with flowery (and, I’ll admit, embarrassing) declarations of love — that’s just a delightful cocktail of persistence and stupidity. No matter how you define it, there’s nothing more humiliating than seeing her. She actually stopped working there for awhile, but now she’s back, and I’m compelled to switch over my prescription pickup location to a slightly farther but much less awkward location. But fuck, it was Sunday, I didn’t want to drive 10 minutes when I could have driven three.

I also didn’t want to risk having to see or speak with her if I could avoid it, so I didn’t push the little assistance button. Even though it was kind of a rip-off, I grabbed two 14-tablet thingies and went home.

Then I tried opening them. I’m usually not easily daunted by something as simple as medication, but look at the way it’s packaged:

In case you can’t tell from the photo, that’s 14 pills, each individually packaged in plastic about five times larger than it needs to be. I went to the tool drawer to grab an array of tools I thought might help.

Unfortunately, when push came to shove, the only thing that could possibly work were my fingers.

Here’s the thing: perhaps the only parts of my body that have any kind of strength or dexterity are my hands. I’m a sloppy guitarist, an incompetent video game player, and a fast typist — my hands have developed Samson-like power.*

I flipped over the package and found some handy instructions:

Easy enough, until I pushed the damn tabs and yanked it back

That’s right: the size of the holes are too small to get the pill packages out. I’m sure they did this so the packages wouldn’t all spill out at the same time, but they made them too small. It took a concerted effort just to get one out. I decided to improvise.

Yanking off the entire back worked wonders. Not only did the individual packages not spill out — the plastic packaging acted as a handy bowl to hold them.

I got my first look at the individual package:

There’s some nice, handy perforation. I’ll bet that’s how you get to the pill.

Hmm, TEAR BEND TEAR. That seems like more effort than what’s needed, but still, I’ve dealt with worse over-the-counter packaging. Or I thought I had, until I attempted to TEAR.

With what I can only describe as a Herculean effort, I tore off the little tab. Unfortunately, my hands are only at a Samson strength level, so it took an unreasonable amount of effort to accomplish very little.

In fact, it accomplished practically nothing. It tore, but it didn’t exactly burst forth with the sweet nectar of allergy relief. Still more effort was required, because I did not yet BEND and TEAR (again). So I bent.

Bending opens up a tiny slit in the foil. I slid one of fingers underneath it, tore, and —

What the FUCK?! How is it still not open?! One more swipe finally got it:

That was completely unreasonable, a waste of time and effort that took more than five minutes when it should have taken about three seconds (like it does with every other over-the-counter medication on the planet).

I discovered an easier way, which I will pass along to the few readers who have stuck with this post. Fuck TEAR BEND TEAR. Here’s what you do: bend it, hard, with the brute force of a powerful hand (or perhaps a pair of pliers, if you’re a weakling) and slam that fucker in half. It’ll pop open a much wider, more useful slit that penetrates both layers of that shitty foil. You’ll know you did it right if you hear the distinctive pop that normal would suggest you’ve done something very, very wrong.

Tear that open like a Hershey bar on Easter, and you get to the pill:

There you have it. Putting forth a minimal amount of effort, you can bust apart that shitty packaging. If you get no other regular exercise, you may want to do it the hard way. Keep in mind you’ll need to do this 13 more times (or 27 if you doubled up like I did), so by the end of it you should be pretty bulked up, at least in the general hand-wrist-forearm area. On a related note, you’ll accumulate a bit of a mess:

Is this why they’re charging so much for the over-the-counter variety?

*Please don’t cut them off. [Back]

Edit 3/31/08 — I can’t find any kind of explanation for the ridiculous over-packaging. There are some blurbs about Zyrtec-D getting the usual meth treatment — behind-the-counter, photo ID, etc. — but regular Zyrtec doesn’t have pseudoephedrine. What the hell?

Posted by Stan on March 31, 2008 2:22 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (2)

March 26, 2008

Meanest Prank of All Time?

About six months after posting the surprisingly famous R. Kelly rant, I received my first confused/misguided request for R. Kelly’s e-mail address, from someone clearly thinking I was R. Kelly, despite the decidedly anti-Kells sentiment I spewed at the time (I’ve since learned the error of my ways and have come to love and respect the man’s tortured genius). This started an echo-chamber effect that has lasted to this day, with commenters from places as distant as Cameroon and as close Louisville posting their desire to contact R. Kelly. Around October of last year, I decided I’d start pranking them all. Nobody responded to my e-mails, in which I pretended to be R. Kelly by affecting poor spelling and an awful attempt at “street” patois, except for one guy. This is his story.

He left this comment in late September:

hi Kelly this is a fan.i know what people say about u but man,never mind.i personally like u for u have helped me without knowin.i started singing and as a matter of fact even won awards with some R and B tracks all under students entertainment.because of u ihave lot of songs which iwill like to give some out.they are really good and since u put the spirit in me must give them back to u.how do ido that?i need ur email address.mine is [e-mail address omitted despite the fact that you could just go over to the R. Kelly post and find it].ineed ur email.u will not be disappointed when u hear the songs.Thanx for ue help

I responded…

Date: Sunday, October 7, 2007 12:20:21 AM CDT
From: Robert Kelly
To: Samuel Anang
Subject: Kells callin

hey man, Mr. Samuel Anang, i first off got to say i appreciate ur
support more than every at this stone cold time in my life. i been
goin thru this trial n my law-bro twan be juicin galz n tryna get up
in they faces with a gat when he better off chillaxin in the club.

it’s great to my ears that u sing and that i been such a inspiration
to u all thru out ur life. i wold like to hear ur music as soon as
possible, bro. u can hit me back at this email for now until time
stops. i got me a blackberry so i can hear ur shit, even in the club.

~kells~

To my surprise, he got back to me by morning:

Date: Sun, 7 Oct 2007 09:59:40 AM CDT
From: samuel anang
To: Robert Kelly
Subject: Re: Kells callin

wow,is this really u Kells?how do i let u hear the songs?i will like to send just one to u to hear first.u will like what u have helped me put together.should i send it through an EMX or what?plzzzzzzzzz let me know how to get the song to u ,plzzzzzzzzzz.if it is really u,then i am more than willing to give ur songs out.[they are urs cus u helped me.remember?]i will expect ur reply soon.
bye,
Samuel

I didn’t respond to this one. The moment I started sending these prank e-mails, I felt a mixture of guilt and immaturity I hadn’t felt since the time in fifth grade one of my friends and I set fire to a plastic shopping cart behind Kmart. (If you’re thinking that’s impossible to do, here’s how you do it: take a piece of easy-to-ignite cardboard, light it, and toss it in the cart. You can thank me later.) I spent almost a week hemming and hawing, without responding, because this ignorant sap had already bought into something that was clearlyfake.

However, when he responded again, I decided not to feel guilty. He sorta had it coming. Yes, that’s all I need to justify immoral and unethical behavior. Feel free to enlist my help in your next crime spree.

Date: Sat, 13 Oct 2007 10:55:37 AM CDT
From: samuel anang
To: Robert Kelly
Subject: Whatz up?

Yo Kells,
             howz life?i do not know if u got my last message but i know u kinda busy so might not reply that fast.actually this is the guy who said will like to give some tracks out since u helped him do that.i will please like u to give me a contact adress so that i will send the song.i will go to an underground studio and have a recording of one of the songs in order to send it to u.i just want u to know that u really put ur spirit in me and i have got lot of songs to give up.plz give me a contact address to send the CD after the recording .plz do let me have it cus u will not be disappointed.i only want u to have trust in me before i send the other ones.Once again, it is my greatest desire to give my songs out to u cus u helped me write them and as i am not out as a musician ,will give what i have for now up to the one who helped me write them..Hope to hear fromu soon.
Samuel Anang

Because (once my guilt was alleviated) I’m the meanest person in the universe, and pranking was the whole point, I honed in on the sheer desperation and kiss-assiness. I decided to come up with a convoluted, ridiculous method of sending a CD to ensure Kells would get it.

Date: Saturday, October 13, 2007 9:23:30 PM CDT
From: Robert Kelly
To: samuel anang
Subject: Re: Whatz up?

i got to say it make me a little surprize 2 no the impact i have. i mean, i hear all it all tha time be it from a young hunny or a fan on tha street or @ mcdonald’s, “kells, u give me so much spirit.” i feel so happy when i hear those words comin out a persons mouth, & i’m real happy i get 2 connec wit u, Samuel.

u want 2 get yo records out 2 me, hear what u do. it might sound a lil tricky but i tell u, follow tha directions & i’ll get ur stuff. i’ll listen & tell u how i feel wit honesty. i get tha feelin i’ll luv it, tho.

hear how u do it. find 1 of them CD mailing envalopes wit tha bubble rap, a black one. if u can’t find black, get yo self a sharpie & color it black. it GOT 2 b black, ALL black. also get urself 1 of them silver glitter markers. u need it later but i figure it save you some time 2 get it with the sharpie & envalope.

so u got tha black envalope, what u do is put ur CD in there and mebbe drop a note sos i no it u & why u sendin (i get lots of emails, that’s why i never answer before sorry!), seal that fucker up.

then wit tha silver marker, write this address up top 2 send it 2:

Zomba Recording Corporation
Attn: R. Kelly 2389104
137-139 West 25th Street
New York, New York 10001

it b eazy this way. them numbers 2389104 b a sekrit code 4 just me & my special friends 2 send stuff. i will get it this way. i’d send my home address but i b hones: i don’t know u at all.

if u want, u can also email some tracks to me, mp3 tracks, i can get em thru email if u can send em. it b eazier 4 sho, but if u can’t i understand. just send the CD 2 that address, k?

~kells~

—————————————
Sent using BlackBerry

Get Kells on yo ringtone @ http://www.r-kelly.com/mobile.html

I still think the Blackberry joke is funny. I came up with it after receiving a series of e-mails from the Big-Shot Producer with that footer, and since Double Up had recently come out and I found the “Ringtone” song hilarious, I decided to include an ad, as well.

This sent Samuel on an epic quest to do right by Kells. It didn’t end well.

Date: Wed, 24 Oct 2007 09:20:17 AM CDT
From: samuel anang
To: Robert Kelly
Subject: Re: Yo Kells

Hi Kells’
sorry its a long time since u heard from me after ur last reply.i actually had to put some things in place to get about half the amount of money for the recording.also i spent day s trying to find the black CD envelope which i could not find.i actually had to colour another envelope all black but it was also rejected.Finally i had to use a brown envelope and a pen to write the address.please forgive me.i also registered it so it gets to you safely,if not i will hold the post office responsible so i know it will get to you.expect it in a week’s time.i do not have much to say but will wait for ur coment on the song.once again sorry the procedure was altered.
Samuel

It was around this time where I realized the prank had plateau’ed. I had nowhere else to take it except chastise him and end the “relationship” because he disobeyed my procedure. I just kinda sat on it. He sent a few more e-mails, which became increasingly needy and desperate. They made me start to feel guilty again.

Date: Thu, 1 Nov 2007 06:42:28 AM CDT
From: samuel anang
To: Robert Kelly
Subject: Got It?

i know its been long.As i said in my last reply,i sent the CD but not in a black envelope cus we do not have that type here and a coloured envelope is not accepted.that is why i put it in the brown one and wrote the address boldly in pen on it.once again i am sorry for that.but i registerd it ;therfore it must get to u and that should be latest by 3RD of Nov.please let me know immediately you get it.u might like to talk to me too.i should have asked for ur number but for a person like u,u cannot do that.mine is [phone number omitted].i know this will also help us to know each other better.i will be expecting your call too when you have the CD.PLEASE DO NOT GET ANGRY WITH ME cus of the difference in envelope.Once again,i am very SORRY.
hope to here from u soon.
Samuel

In the e-mail above, he at least seems a little excited — he’s so confident in his life-changing songs, he’s handing out phone numbers. A few days later, he gets a little desperate:

Date: Mon, 5 Nov 2007 10:59:56 AM CDT
From: samuel anang
To: Robert Kelly
Subject: I am worried

Hi Kells,
           i have been waiting for your reply to know if you have had the CD.Did u check from the Zomba Recording Corporation?i registered the CD and so i expect it to get to u by now.if it hasn’t,i will have to hold the post office responsible for misplacing it.i have already told you why i could not send thru a black envelope ;we do not have it here and a coloured one is not acceptable.i appologised cus the rules are inevitable.please forgive me if it will give u a hard time trying to have it from the corporation but i have got to know if u have requested for it from the corporation.Please reply cus i am kind of confused now.hope to hear soon.
Samuel

In this next one, he attempts to send one of the songs by attaching one of those .cda shortcut files that you see on Windows if you double-click on an audio CD. Needless to say, it didn’t work.

Date: Thu, 8 Nov 2007 11:55:24 AM CDT
From: samuel anang
To: Robert Kelly
Subject: Track

Yo Kells,
i do not know if you have still got the track but i have finally sent it to you through the mail.Kells i know you will get the CD itself since i have already sent but for now this is the same track.Let me know immediately you get it and do not disappoint me.i wrote the whole song though but was helped by some one with the chorus.i did the rest of the verses and the backing of the last chorus.Kells i trust in you to let me know when you get it that is why i have sent it to you.
Samuel

This time, I contemplated writing him back. Since he was so excited about sending this stuff through e-mail, I decided maybe encouraging him to download iTunes and rip some MP3s would do the trick. At the very least, I could get some mild amusement out of his low-quality songs.

I decided not to reply until he sent two more…

Date: Sat, 10 Nov 2007 02:00:40 PM CDT
From: samuel anang
To: Robert Kelly
Subject: i sent song into mail too

Hi Kells,
            i have sent the song into ur mail cus it might delay to have the CD and i do not know the comment you will have on the track but this is what i got to say supposing you like it.i am adding this before the reply cus i will like you to combine all the reply since it might take a long time before i hear from you again.
  Reasons why i will like to give my tracks to you
1]Anybody i ask to help me come out with my tracks either want me to sell it out to them to sell it to other artistes or will like to take them forcefully from me.[probably its cus of my age]
2]i am a student who will like to further my education and so either i give the songs out or i combine it with formal education but as i said i cannot trust anyone in my country so far to help me.
3]U are the mentor that led to writing the tracks so if i have got to give them out,it must definitely be u.

Reasons why i will like to come to US
1]The only sound engineer i can trust has travelled so cannot have any more recordings here and send to u;moreover i will like you to see me for”seeing is believing” in order to know what i have got in me and if the track is actually from me.
3]i have a track which talks about the problem u are going through and that means ,even if i can trust another engineer here u will have to do it yourself.
Kells i know the reasons i have given is enough to let u know how close i want to be to u just because u are my mentor.plzzzzzz Kells i mean whatever i have said so please do something about it so i get to u in US.I CAN COME BACK AFTER THAT.If you still doubt,u can let me take care of the neccessary documents to come there and if u do not like my songs u can send me back that very day.i must get to you early so u can decide to send me an invite ticket which i can take to no where but u.i will need your telephone number if it will be cool with u.i have sent mine in a previous mail.
Kells i want to make it up to u so please respond to my calling.u might like to see my pic so will send to u.
Your homie,
Samuel

Here’s where I started losing my guilt again: he’s a leech. He’s kissing R. Kelly’s ass for a free trip to join his entourage and be rocketed to superstardom by Kells. What the fuck? But before I could respond, he sent the second one:

Date: Sat, 10 Nov 2007 02:08:25 PM CDT
From: samuel anang
To: Robert Kelly
Subject: Fwd: My pic

in the second pix,i am the one in yellow and receiving the award ;;Best Solo Artiste” in High School

Note: forwarded message attached.
__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around
http://mail.yahoo.com

The following are the headers for this message/rfc822 message.
Date: Mon, 30 Jul 2007 07:27:52 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: My pic
From: Selorm Eckert Lotamey
To: samuel anang

You’ll notice something subtle here: the photos he sent of “himself” were forwarded directly from some other dude’s e-mail, subjected “My pic” — and meanwhile he’s telling Kells not only that it’s him, but that he’s winning an award for music! This eradicated my guilt once and for all: I didn’t know what, other than money and famewhoring, Samuel Anang wanted out of Kells…but he was clearly running some kind of low-level scam attempt. I don’t know if he unraveled the ruse or just really thought R. Kelly wouldn’t see through such a transparent lie, but I decided to throw in the towel and just be as obnoxious as possible, trying to get him to send as much music as possible and generally mindfuck him until I got bored with it.

I wrote him an e-mail, which unfortunately I lost, about iTunes and requesting he rip some tracks for me to take a listen to. It took him over a week to respond with two songs:

Date: Sun, 18 Nov 2007 09:00:22 AM CDT
From: samuel anang
To: Robert Kelly
Subject: I finally sent it//////////

My Man,
         i am happy that a new album will be out soon.And 4 the trial i am with u thru it.Cus of that i have written a track 4 you but does not offend anybody and talks about u and the hatred some people have 4 u.U’ve got to hear it and know how to arrange the verses cus u must do it urself.
Anyway, i know u’ve now heard the song.i actually wrote it looking at how ur wife might feel after all what is being said about u.[especially the second verse of song].It is therefore dedicated to her and my future wife .
Kells,got about 10 tracks to give out but as said and explained in previous mail,cannot have anymore
recordings hear .It will be faster if documents will be made and sent to me or an invitation.I guess u can let some1 cater 4 that since u are damn busy.U can decide to let him come and check if i really can deliver here in my country.I will be expecting ur reply on
1]The song and what u intend to do with it cus u might re-do it or ask me to do it again since it is not a masterpiece.
2]My coming to the states.if yes let me know what to do;if no,let me know why?
3]A comm. number that will make comm faster. Kells got to be there cus’Seeing is Believing’
Samuel

It’s kind of important the he says he has “about 10 tracks to give out.” Trust me.

Once again, I listened to the music, I reveled in the badness, but I…didn’t respond. By that time, it had less to do with stringing him along and more to do with getting busy in my embarrassing social life. I just couldn’t take the time to respond to prank e-mails. He sent me two, spaced almost two months apart.

Date: Fri, 7 Dec 2007 11:59:34 AM CDT
From: samuel anang
To: Robert Kelly
Subject: hope u heard it

Hey Man,
i sent the track on 17 Nov.this time i did it right.but man i think thewre is so much about u on air but i know i will be the last guy to stand by u.i now got so much trax i want to give out.they will only need few re arrangements from the king of R and B himself.i will be very if u can make the arrangements for my coming to the states soon and u can have another album soon.
Samuel

I love the exploitative promise that his songs will lead R. Kelly to another blockbuster album.

Date: January 22, 2008 12:22:54 PM CST
From: samuel anang
To: Robert Kelly
Subject: Ur son Samuel

Hi Kelly,
            its been more than 2 months now.but i know its cus of the tour and all the accusations people put on you all because u evergrow in the music industry.plz pardon me cus i am about to say a lot.i sent u the track in Nov but since i had some 1 sing the chorus u might think it is not mine cus of that,i made another song all cus of the troubled mind u have in recent times and named it ”troubled mind”. i sung as if i am u so everywhere u hear ”I” that is ”U”. but for the intro,that is my message to u.Somewhere in the the middle there is a place starting with ”I said Kells is the man”;that will be whom u will feature.i am jxt saying so even tho you might change a lot of things.Once again i am sorry for the poor recording so u will have to use earpiece.i did it in a friends room not a studio yet he took an extra $200 in addition to $300 that i gave him cus he did not want me to use his room.i had to borrow the extra $200 so even if u will like to see me before u show ur appreciation plz send the $200.All what i ask for is to be a songwriter to u since things dont always go well with me financially.I will be happy if u can also send an invite to me sos i can come and give the remaining 9 tracks in addition to the ”wat u gonna do”.For i wil like u to put the ”troubled mind” on air as an exclusive one because of the problems being put on u.
NB;
1] U can send the money thru Western Union or any other to Ghana and with info given
i will go for it.
2]in case u want to send the invite
[mailing address omitted]
3]my number is [phone number omitted]
4]If this is not Kells plz let him have the track and if u will not link me,i will still work with u sos i can make a living. Hope to hear soon.

He forwarded this same message two weeks later when I didn’t respond, but mainly what I was waiting for (in addition to being too busy/lazy to respond) was more music. When he didn’t send any, I decided to kickstart this prank.

Date: February 8, 2008 11:14:27 AM CDT
From: Robert Kelly
To: samuel anang
Subject: Re: Ur son Samuel

yo samuel, how u be?

i sure’s sorry bout not gettin back 2 u sooner, it just so hard like u said cuz of tha tour & such & my blackberry done broke so i had ta wait until i got near a computer. listen i got tha trax u emailed to me.

i got 2 say, it a little raw, but there somethin there. b4 i go 2 all tha trouble of sendin finances ur way, i just wonder if u can send another track or 2 so i can get a better feel 4 ur styles. if u could do that plz it’d help out a lot.

thx samuel

~kells~

I’m not saying “b4 i go 2 all tha trouble of sendin finances ur way” is an explicit admission that I’d help pay for shit, but I could see how somebody would get the wrong idea. The way I read it (and what I meant when I wrote it) is, “If you send me more songs and they don’t suck, I’ll consider bringing you to America.” Nonetheless, even though this time it nearly took him a month to respond, seeing the phrase “sendin finances” apparently got Samuel salivating:

Date: Mon, 3 Mar 2008 10:08:39 AM CDT
From: samuel anang
To: Robert Kelly
Subject: Done it

Hi Kells,
    i finally did it.i payed$500 for them.i plead with u to send at least the money i borrowed to do this so that u can decide to send something later or let me come there.i ill expect u very soon.and please any bank here ill do.
bye
Samuel

With that, he sent three additional tracks. He also changes his story quite a bit. First, it’s “I paid $300 for 10 tracks but now the dude is demanding an extra $200”; now he’s actually he just recently paid a full $500 for these three “new” tracks he sent me. Did he really pay $1000 to record 13 tracks with bargain-basement technology? Seriously, I need to move to Ghana. I could make a living there.

I listened to the songs, but I felt like the prank had pretty much run its course. The combination of me lying to him, and him lying to me, made me feel like the whole thing was a wash.

Samuel disagreed.

Date: Mon, 17 Mar 2008 08:07:57 AM CDT
From: samuel anang
To: Robert Kelly
Reply-To: Samuel Anang
Subject: Are You Still There?

Hi Kells,
           What is keeping you that long after i sent three tracks on 3rd Feb? i can wait for long but as i told u the money used for the recordings even though rough was borrowed and now the lenders are putting the pressure on me.U can at least check the mails once in two weeks to respond to some of us.If the problem on you is now too much u can link me to someone else to help me if possible cus u have known me for seven months but it seems to me as if we just met.Please if there is too much on u such that things will not work out between us,let me know.At least i can sell some few things i possess to pay those who lent me the money and may look somewhere else for help.i would not blame u ,i will understand.please do reply soon.
Sam

I hope I’m not the only one who notices the not-entirely-subtle shift in tone from friendly/hopeful/desperate to mildly hostile — but not too hostile, so as to avoid pissing “Kells” off. His e-mail made me feel a little uncomfortable, like if I didn’t respond, he’d send his “lenders” to go kidnap Kells — or, worse, he’d expose me and send them in my direction. Nobody wants that, least of all the person I intend to trick them into thinking is the real culprit, so I decided to officially end this prank, not just leave it hanging.

look bro, i wanna beleeve tha best in peeps but i don’t get this attitude. i ain’t promise u nothin but that i’d listen ,n i did. u got somethin, thay ain’t no doubt bout that but i think its real hard 2 beleeve u spend $500 on them trax

i ain’t tryina hurt but u dont know what it like bein kells lately shit b gettin RAW. i got a trial goin on n it cost all kind a $$$ n my new record ain’t b sellin like back in 94…started real good but now it goin down. ran way over tha top on my new trapped chapters. and to top that off, some punk stoled my blackberry. so hear u r, not catchin my pain, jus askin 4 handouts like all tha rest

i think we need to end this. u won’t hear from me again.

~kells~

(Note that I have a continuity error of my own: earlier I said my Blackberry was broken, but now I changed it to stolen. Oops!)

I’m about 98% sure Samuel Anang is full of shit. He may owe some people $500, but I don’t think it’s for those recordings. He’s trying to get R. Kelly to be his sugar daddy, and when he doesn’t get his way, he gets angry and, I don’t know, I sense a little fear in that last e-mail.

But what if he’s telling the truth? If he’s gullible enough to believe I’m R. Kelly, he’s gullible enough to pay $500 for some worthless recordings. That makes me feel guilty for stringing him along, but I can’t get over the real, concrete lies (which make me assume the implicit lies are just as concrete). Am I the only person in the world who could overthink a prank like this? Maybe…

I’m going to give him a few days to send a response. If I don’t hear from him, I’m dismantling my R. Kelly mailbox to ensure Samuel won’t hear from “him” again.

Posted by Stan on March 26, 2008 4:53 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (0)

March 24, 2008

Stupid Bloggers Need the Most Attention

About a month ago, Ken Levine posted a really stupid critique of No Country for Old Men, written by Bob “Back to the Future” Gale. (Some of the nitpicks are reasonable, but the bulk of them are either a side effect of not paying attention or just not understanding what was happening. I don’t understand why people, especially professional writers, found the movie so difficult to follow.) This post isn’t about that.

No, it’s about the comments, many of which fawn over Levine’s incisive and insightful criticism, while failing to realize he didn’t actually write it. From these comments, I found a gem of a blog, somebody who wrote in the comment that she read the screenplay and “didn’t get it.” I thought, “Hmm, that might be interesting.” I clicked on the blog…

…and found pretty much the stupidest analysis of a screenplay I’ve ever seen. I’m not the smartest guy in the world, and I’m often the last person to accuse someone of outright stupidity — hell, even in this case, after examining the full breadth of her posts, I’d chalk it up to a toxic combination of ignorance and naïvete — but her blog post was full of woefully misguided arguments, mainly because she doesn’t understand certain English words. Quite seriously, this was the problem with her post: even though she admits she understood these confusing passages in the context of the next sentence or two, the Coens’ (or Cohens’, as she repeatedly calls them) are at fault.

I’m not going to link to the blog specifically, but I will post excerpts that will easily trace back to it, because I’m that kind of guy.

The windshield stars.

A quick second round pushes part of the windshield in.

“The windshield stars”? As clever as that may sound, it’s confusing. I had to stop a second and re-read the line because I wasn’t sure what it meant. So I was like, huh? Wha…. oooh.

I don’t understand this at all. Has she never read a novel? She’s really gone through her whole life, gotten a Masters in creative writing, and never seen or heard “stars” used as a verb to indicate the unique way windshields shatter? Even beyond that, the next sentence makes it very clear. It’s a sudden, surprising — dare I say confusing? — moment in both the screenplay and the film.

Later, she writes:

Part of me wants to chalk that up to style points and get over it. But part of me does not like the way I had to constantly pay close attention to understand what the hell was going on in this script. The story should flow like a story, not feel like an assignment for my college English class.

Here are the flaws in that logic:

1. She’s a writer, but she doesn’t like a script that requires you to pay attention to the words on the page?
2. “The story should flow like a story”? Yet the bulk of her criticism revolve around the script being too novelistic in its approach.

Nobody in Hollywood wants to read, so you want to pack as much power into each individual word as you can — that’s where the challenge lies. A screenplay’s a blueprint for something that will appear on the screen, and like a blueprint, everything has to be very carefully planned out — especially for unsold spec writers. For instance, you don’t want to “direct on the page,” so you have to use the power of suggestion — if you write it well enough, the director will take an individual sentence and shoot it in the exact way you want it shot. Those sensitive folks don’t want you doing their job for you, which is why so many scripts loaded with camera jargon go nowhere.

It’s also why reading a shooting draft, especially by a writer-director, isn’t the best study tool for an unsold screenwriter. It’s useful in a lot of ways — you can see what they cut out, you can see how they wrote out a particular sequence, reordering of scenes in the editing room (for instance, the Point Break screenplay opens with the big robbery/backyard chase, then flashes back — horrible for the movie, but what a great way to open a script) — but you have to learn to ignore endless sluglines marking shots and angles, overuse of the dreaded “we see,” etc. When it’s at the shooting draft stage, all bets are off. It’s been sold, greenlit, and it’s on its way to being made. You can be as lazy as you want.

Or you can be as dense and novelistic as you want. I’ve read several Coen scripts, and they all read that way — slugs are rare and vague, action blocks are loaded with purple prose, often with unfilmable character details that one assumes is there for them to remember while directing. You know why? Because they’re a writing/directing/producing team that has made a shitload of successful movies. At this point, even with the stinky recent legacy of Intolerable Cruelty and The Ladykillers, they could shit out pretty much anything and get a greenlight. They’re the Coens.

So if they write “the windshield stars,” do they really care about Joe or Jane Schmoe seeking it out online or buying it from one of those scuzzy guys on Hollywood Boulevard who makes his living selling tattered, fifth-generation Xeroxes to wannabes? They know what it means, one assumes the cast and crew know what it means it if they realize reading comprehension involves stringing many sentences together to form understanding — so who cares?

This blogger does, and that’s the problem. I started reading forward in her blog, but it took awhile for the obsession to set in. The more she wrote, the more ignorant and irritating she seemed. (Especially when she started mocking the writing skills of her students, rather than lamenting the total institutional failure their poor writing represents.) I started to wonder, “Has she always been like this, or is she getting a little too hoity-toity now that she’s directed a short film?” So I went back to the archives…

…long story short, this is not a new thing. And after reading obsessively, it occurred to me what her problem is. It’s not just the ignorance and the naïvete coloring her judgment and causing ill-informed, dumbass opinions. It’s the fact that she blames everything and everyone else for anything bad that happens in her life. Since I’ve already belabored the point with the Coens excerpt, I will use that as the example: she didn’t like the script because she doesn’t understand English words and (apparently) has a problem with putting thought into what she reads. Somehow, this is the Coens’ fault.

The entire blog is littered with examples of this blameless attitude. Sometimes it’s justified; more often, it’s just shrill stupidity. But after reading through the archives, it made me wonder:

Do people think the same thing about this blog?

That implies people read it to begin with, but what if they stumbled on me randomly? What if I started commenting on others’ blogs to generate traffic, and before you knew it people were clicking through, reading posts they find stupid, ill-informed, and offensive, and then they go back through the archives and make judgments about my character that are, quite simply, the unvarnished truth?

It’s the way shit goes when you let it all hang out, but I’d hate for someone to jump the wrong conclusion, like if they read a post where I do something nice for somebody and assume I’m not conniving and hateful. I guess that alone justifies the recent About Stan link on the sidebar.

Posted by Stan on March 24, 2008 11:42 AM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (2)

September 11, 2007

Killer Bees!

Nothing terrifies me more than insects and spiders. Little creepy crawly piles of shit. You hear things like you swallow an average of five spiders a year (in your sleep), or that flies use you as a toilet, and it reduces my comfort level to 0. I know I shouldn’t be afraid of something tiny and mostly harmless, but you know what? I don’t like things touching me that I haven’t specifically asked to touch me. This isn’t limited to insects and spiders, but they seem to be the ones with no regard for other living objects, especially ones with rolled newspapers and fly-swatters. I’m pretty sure it goes deeper than that, though. Dogs jump on me and try to lick my crotch, and it doesn’t bother me. Cats look at me like I murdered their parents and will pay for my crimes, and it doesn’t bother me (P.S.: I no longer eat cats). Animals of all kinds have unusual perceptions of space (including humans — what is up with fuckers crowding you in line at the grocery store?), but most of the time if you do something like gently push a dog away from your penis so you can try licking it yourself, or saying to the guy behind you to take THREE FUCKING STEPS BACK before you stab him, they will take the hint. Not so with insects.

Also, every time I see one — even if it turns out to be a piece of lint, or something — I get a queasy “fight-or-flight” feeling, and my typical instinct is to RUN FOR MY FUCKING LIFE. From something 5000 times smaller than me. I may have had some insect-related trauma in my past, because that kind of instinct doesn’t even kick in when I see a vicious dog, foaming at the mouth, with no owner in sight and no fence to keep us apart. I get into my Mr. Furley karate stance and it’s fucking on.

A few years ago, I got stung by a yellowjacket. Shortly thereafter, I launched a misguided water-based assault while in a Vicodin haze (there would have been a link there, except I apparently forgot to blog it; enjoy this, instead!). This hasn’t improved Stan-insect relationships at all.

At lunch today, I sat in my car reading. Usually I go for a vigorous constitutional and return more in love with my job than ever, but I haven’t been able to do that so far this week. Here’s why (that’s right, you’re getting two blog entries for the price of one — brought to you buy Laziness™):

I work on a street that curves around, sort of like an L but with a reeeeeeeally curvy corner. I usually park on one end of the curve, so I have to clear traffic on both sides, causing quite a bit of head motion. Also, I lack depth perception (seriously!), so I sometimes have a rough time doing things like walking without looking down at my feet to make sure the ground is still there. And, to add insult to injury, the shoddy lawn curves downward, so the curb is a lot higher. These forces of nature, combined with traffic coming in my direction from either side of the curve, led me to trip on the raised curb and tumble into the middle of the street.

I staggered to my feet, waved the cars (both of which had to stop) past while I stared down like the embarrassment that I am, and limped to my car. Did I mention I was wearing a pair of jeans I’ve had since high school, which have become so threadbare they’re basically a loose conglomeration of patches with bits of the original denim in key, load-bearing areas? Yeah, so those broke apart without much difficulty, resulting in me scraping the shit out of my knees. Also, I scraped one elbow as my arms valiantly attempted to protect my valuable, valuable face from the asphalt.

The drive home was a little difficult, with all the vibration and the blood and pain. I bandaged the shit out of myself, but Friday was pretty miserable. I had to limp all over the place. It was good to have the weekend to recuperate, but I’m still not at 100%. The knees, with their annoying flexibility, are not the easiest body parts to heal, considering it’s not easy to keep them from moving around. I’m taking it a little easy on the “power-walking” until I don’t need to, you know, re-dress each wound every day.

So I was reading, and it’s a pretty nice day — cooler than it’s been in months, sunny, with a nice breeze blowing. After awhile, I got a little tired of the turgid prose of what I’m reading, so I got out my iPod and, I’m only partly ashamed to admit, cranked up some of my own disgusting songs, since I can’t very well listen to them during work hours. About halfway through this song, a particularly strong gust blew something into my car. It landed on the door handle. I turned to look at —

A bee. One inch from my arm.

I panicked and began thrashing around like the autistic boy who proved Fermat’s Last Theorem.* I’m pretty sure this is the exact opposite of what you’re supposed to do when faced with a nearby bee, but I can’t help myself. I react, do stupid things, then either apologize or complain about how nobody will accept my insincere apologies.

I rolled into the passenger seat, got all tangled in the headphone cable (with the iPod somehow finding itself behind my back, whipped open the passenger door and rolled out on the grassy knoll next to my car. I whirled around to get a visual on the bee —

— which hadn’t moved a muscle.

“Is it dead?” I wondered, considering the slight (disgusting) coolness factor in having a bee die, fall out of the air, and be pushed by the wind into my car.

Then I saw it move. Nausea rose. I had no idea what to do. I considered trying to shoo it out, but I thought it would either get confused and end up deeper in the car, or worse, turn on me. The first thing I did, to keep up the appearance that I’m not a creepy weirdo, was whip out my cell and dial Lucy, to give the impression I’m just a normal guy making a call, unable to get a signal from inside my car. Yeah, it’s weird, but it’s less weird than standing outside of a car for no apparen reason.

While I yammered, it occurred to me that I felt excruciating pain coming from the general knee area. Oh, that’s right: when I rolled my ass out of the car, I ended up slamming my semi-injured knees all over everything — adrenaline took over, but it was gone now, replaced with pain and a mild oozing sensation. Clearly, the scabs were obliterated. Lucy pretended to be sympathetic, even though I knew she was laughing on the inside, and then announced she had to hang up. I muttered some obscenities as a goodbye.

I went over to the driver’s side and whipped my jacket over the window, in an attempt to thwack the bee and either kill it, drag it out, or set it in motion so it got the fuck out of my car. When I removed the jacket, I peered into the car, and found…nothing.

The fuck? I checked the jacket out and saw neither bee guts nor a carcass fall out. I saw nothing fly away. I opened the door and gave a cursory examination around the area it would have fallen if it had, indeed, died. Nothing there.

Was it, perhaps, a ghost bee?

No, you idiot.

It might have gotten wedged under my seat accidentally. It might have flown away when I was distracted.

I left my windows cracked a little so it could fly or crawl out if it is indeed alive, but I’m dreading the drive home.

*I may have made up the autistic boy. [Back]

UPDATE, later on 9/11/07: Here’s an unusual conclusion. When I decided to crack my windows, I put my jacket and backpack into the trunk so my eggplant-colored 1993 Chrysler Concorde with the missing door panel wouldn’t entice any criminals. I drove home without incident, with the windows open as wide as possible (just in case). When I got home, I popped the trunk, pulled out my jacket — and saw a yellow streak blast off toward an evergreen. The fucking bee was on my jacket and just sat there, on the jacket, for four hours. I’ve been told my sweat has the distinctive odor of brown sugar and cinnamon Pop-Tarts. Could this have lured the bee to my jacket?

Posted by Stan on September 11, 2007 2:14 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (2)

May 1, 2007

My Subconscious Says: Woodland Creatures Want Me Dead

This winter, during the excitement and fun of hibernation season, we discovered a small animal had taken shelter in our attic. It had pulled up insulation to create a nest of sorts and had dragged food and disgusting clumps of leaves and branches (one assumes to make the place more homey, since it didn’t appear that it was part of the nest). It wasn’t there when we discovered it, but it seemed like it had been gone awhile so my dad assumed it was hibernating.

How’d it get there? It chewed through an old vent screen. My dad took off the screen, leaving a gaping hole, thinking, “I have months to replace this.” But he’s lazier than I am, so it goes without saying that there’s still a gaping hole, now that animals have come up from their burrows.

I had forgotten about this, and then about a month ago I had a really weird, vivid dream that an animal had gotten into my room and was on my bed, a la the “gift” Tom Hagen leaves for Jack Woltz. Except alive. It woke me up and was so vivid still that I leaped from my bed, ran out of the bedroom, slammed the door, and I swear I heard it chasing me. After a few seconds of waking up, I realized how stupid and irrational this was, so I went back into my room. No animals, living or dead, anywhere. Big surprise.

The next morning, my mom announced, “I heard an animal crawling around in the attic last night.” Huh. Is it possible that I heard the scratching and clawing, as well, and this is what caused such a vivid dream? I didn’t know…

…until I had a very similar vivid, creepy dream of animals crawling around and had the same involuntary reaction upon waking. This time, at least, I didn’t think I heard anything chasing me. I went back into my room; obviously, nothing there. I didn’t hear any scratching or crawling, though. That’s the weird thing — I’ve never heard it while I’m awake, yet I have these dreams.

The next morning, my mom said the same thing: “That animal’s back. We really need to do something about the screen.”

So since I’ve never had these dreams on any other night in my entire life, is it safe to conclude that the animal crawling around in the attic is causing my subconscious undue agony? It’s a well-known fact that I hate and fear all living creatures, including (especially?) humans, so it’s pretty reasonable to assume my subconscious would interpret the mild scratching of a squirrel or raccoon as a murderous, demonic animal that wants me as dead as possible.

But that sorta sucks, because I like sleeping.

Posted by Stan on May 1, 2007 9:12 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (0)

June 30, 2006

Degas’s Hecklers in Shitter

So my mother has this job now, and she has a coworker who she says loves to hear himself talk about himself. He was late to work today, and the explanation as to why disturbed her:

He recently moved to our little slice of suburbia (although he’s a west-of-53’er, which is why it comes to no surprise that he’s a self-obsessed yuppie) and, last weekend, took his kids to a pool park we have called Rainbow Falls. It was recently rebuilt, which I guess is a detail that isn’t germane to the story, but I feel compelled to share it. I guess it accounts for the lack of any kind of detail or knowledge in the rest of the story; it’s been at least a decade since I went to the old Rainbow Falls, but I’ve never been to (and probably will never go to) the new one.

At any rate, at some point during this little trip to Rainbow Falls, he needed to take a shit. So he goes into the can, he’s by himself, he’s doing his business, and — three junior-high-aged kids rush into the bathroom. They’re making all kinds of noise, screaming, heckling, beating on his stall door. All this culminates in what I’d consider an ultimate act of humiliation: they crawled under the stall walls and doors and basically watched the man finish his shit, all the while heckling him in a Beavis & Butt-Head manner.

Why did something that happened last weekend make him late to work today? Was he trapped in the stall all week with these three depraved boys? No; after the incident, the guy immediately tracked down somebody who works there and had her file a report. But that wasn’t enough to quell his outrage and disgust; he tracked down some “big-wigs” at the Park District to not only explain the situation in more detail, but to politely tell them how to handle it. His scheduled conference call with them was this morning, which made him late to work.

He felt they should post high-school-aged attendants in all the bathrooms. He also apparently felt they should act like bouncers, and that any kids under 16 should be forced to use the “family bathroom.”*

My thought on this? Well, after the initial disbelief regarding certain aspects of the story (the most gaping hole was how he got out of the stall; they’re tiny, so I can barely imagine that many people crammed into it — another flaw of the story — and with these borderline-sociopathic attempts at intimidation, I really don’t see them just lettin gthe dude walk away without a fight), I kind of chuckled at the idea of high school students trying to ward off gangs of bizarre, creepy kids only a few years younger than themselves. Sure, they’ll stand watch, but at Park District wages, you’re gonna have a lot of kids unwilling to get involved in such bizarre situations. They might run and try to get security**, a cop, or some other kind of adult authority figure, but it’s not really a great preventative measure.

My mother, who worked at the Park District for many years, didn’t quite have the heart to tell him that they probably burst out in uncontrollable laughter as soon as he hung up the phone. She also felt like he should be pursuing this with the police rather than telling the Park District how they could prevent further incidents (especially when his idea was fairly half-assed). Kelly, one of my best friends from high school, is a part-time manager at Rainbow Falls, has told me enough disturbing stories that, combined with this incident and with the pedophilia issues, maybe having an actual security guard — not a high school student but possibly, a dude with a gun or a huge, bouncer-like fellow — wouldn’t be the worst idea in the world. They apparently have some kind of security surveillance that was installed after the pederast stuff, but that doesn’t really prevent so much as it helps them catch suspects.

The whole thing seems unfeasible to me, however. How many more people would be creeped out by some armed man or gentle giant just standing there, probably in sunglasses, watching everything that happens? I’m sure it’d prevent a lot of unseemly incidents, but wouldn’t it be perceived as just one big unseemly instance itself?

With the overall disbelief still fresh in my mind, wondering why somebody would not just share the story in general but want to share it with everyone in the office on an individual basis, I turned to Kelly for answers. I wanted to know, before I put too much thought into this, if it had even happened. I know about Park District gossip, and I know Kelly herself as an almost pathological need to spread gossip to every corner of the universe. If something this odd had happened, she would know either from the rumor-mill or just from the bosses over her head telling her and other managers to do something about it.

Conveniently, right as my mom was finishing telling me the story, Kelly IM’ed me, from — even more conveniently — the scene of the crime, Rainbow Falls. I told her the entire story, and after “lol”-ing at a few key moments, she said, “Never happened. There’s no way.” Of course, she also said things like, “Around here, that would actually be a normal thing. It doesn’t even put a dent into the crazy-ass shit I’ve seen over the past 10 years.” This prompted a flood of little nuggets from stories I had, until that moment, blocked from my mind.

So from that point, I realized the story was total bullshit, which led me to the even more disconcerting question of why? Why would this guy make up a story like this, with such elaborate detail, just to explain getting to work late? What happened to “I had a flat tire”?

Did it start with a little granule of truth — maybe some obnoxious junior high kids actually were harassing him, but in a much milder way — and he just rolled with it? Because he has to be the hero of all his stories?

I don’t know. Stuff like this confounds me. Sometimes, when I have no interesting stories to write on this blog, I’m tempted to just make shit up, but that just seems so lame and half-assed. Instead, I go for weeks — possibly months — without a post.

*One of the many things I know almost nothing about, I’m told they installed a “family bathroom” in addition to the men’s and women’s rooms to circumvent reported incidents of pedophilia. Understandable. [Back]

**I don’t even know if they have security guards. It would stand to reason, what with the pedophilia, but I don’t remember them having security when I went there many years ago. [Back]

Posted by Stan on June 30, 2006 3:00 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (1)

March 17, 2006

The Horror of Spandex

I had a discussion earlier today about the horrifying fashion trends of the early ’90s: IOU shirts, Z. Cavaricci pants, the array of HyperColor apparel available (my favorite were the pants/shorts, because if somebody farted, there’d be a quarter-sized discoloration around their ass; that was comedy gold in fifth grade), multicolored “zinc oxide” to shield the nose from harmful UV rays, L.A. Gear “Lights,” Reebok Pumps. The neon-drenched horrors of the early ’90s couldn’t compare to the relatively tame turned-up-collars on polo shirts and tutu-like dresses that preceded it. But nothing — nothing! — was worse than the visual assault of spandex biking shorts.

This was one of the few trends to which I could fall victim. Did I look at spandex biking shorts and say, “I must have them!” No. My friends looked at my jean shorts and snickered because I had not embraced the latest, greatest fashion trend. I was stuck in a past that didn’t want me (fortunately, it would catch up three years later, thanks to grunge). Since all my parents could afford were a pair of Pump knock-offs and a few HyperColor shirts, I couldn’t expect anything exciting like IOUs or Air Jordans, but I could lobby for spandex biking shorts. For one thing, I went biking on almost an hourly basis, so I could argue that they were vital to my survival as an athlete. Also, they were cheaper than regular shorts.

So I got my wish — a single pair of spandex biking shorts, just for me. They were a violent, blinding shade of electric orange, with eye-stabbing fluoescent-green stripes along the sides. The only thing that could burn corneas with more ferocity was our harshest goddess, the sun. But I was thrilled — I had my own pair of spandex biking shorts. I put them on, leaped onto my 10-speed, and raced around our apartment complex to show off both the shorts and my burgeoning, pubescent package, prominently exposed thanks to the extreme tightness of the material.

I was immediately laughed at by older kids. Not for my usual problem of finally catching up with fashion trends just as they’re out the door — no, I came in right in the middle of the spandex phenomenon. I was humiliated for, once again, having “off-brand” spandex. Rather than having ultra-cool shorts that were almost entirely black, with fluorescent racing stripes, I wore a glowing target that may as well have said “I’m a big homo, so kick my ass.” It was initially humiliating, but I remained undaunted — as is the way of big kids, they’d mock anyone who was younger and/or smaller than they were. My friends would respect me.

When my friend Ryan caught his first glimpse of me, his face twisted with disapproval. “Dude,” he said in his reedy voice, “you’re not supposed to wear your underwear with them.”

What?! Who made up that rule? But as I looked down, I started to panic at the sight of my own visible-panty-line. Not only could you see the v-shape where my briefs ended — you could see all the stitching and, most prominently, where the elastic waistband started and ended. Such was the sperm-destroying tightness of the spandex movement.

So in order to fit in, I decided to freeball it for the first time in my entire life. This turned out to be the worst mistake of my entire life. As I had recently hit puberty, I started to notice fur where there was no fur before. And when I put on those brightly colored shorts and walked around unashamed, I noticed all the kids — especially the girls — giggling and whispering. At the time, this wasn’t common practice — I was actually, as a small child, considered reasonably cool. This ended when the grunge movement made me sullen and withdrawn. Then I got a computer and vented my frustrations at the world by writing hilariously bad short stories. Then I got the Internet and found like-minded trolls, and my life was ruined forever.

Sorry, slight digression. As I walked around, with kids snickering, once again Ryan approached and pointed out the problem: thanks to the magic thinness of spandex, coupled with the obscenely light color of the shorts (which apparently protected the freeballing older kids, with their black shorts), my recent growth of crotch hair was visible for the entire world to see. It not only slightly discolored the orange of the shorts, it tufted out slightly, so every single fiber of hair was visible to the naked eye, as the hot summer sun beamed down on Li’l Stan. I gasped like an idiot and ran back homet to change into normal clothes.

And I never wore spandex again.

Posted by Stan on March 17, 2006 2:27 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (1)

December 12, 2005

Free Gas!

My “low tank” light came on during my lunch break, as I was driving up Meacham Road. Fortunately, there’s a BP right at Golf. I kinda hate BP for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is the fact that it makes my car run assier than usual, but my car doesn’t give me a whole lot of warning before flashing the “low tank” light, so desperate times…

So I’m filling up my tank, and this portly, middle-aged gentleman holding a clipboard walked up to me and exclaimed, “How would you like some free gas?!” The jovial tone in which he said this made me think if I said “yes,” he’d fart in my general direction. Instead, he went into this weird, long pitch session about how if I “took a survey,” he’d give me a free $50 gift card for 93 octane gas (which, with these prices and the premium gas, probably wouldn’t even be enough to fill my tank — but still, paying $0 is better than paying $50).

I said, “Okay,” and was about to add, “But only if it doesn’t take long,” when he started in with the questions.

“Do you live in Illinois?”

“Yes.”

“Are you over the age of 21?”

“Yes.”

“Are you licensed and insured to drive in the state of Illinois?”

“Yes.”

“Okay, that’s it,” he said, slipping me the gift card. Then he whipped out the clipboard and insisted I sign an affadavit saying that he did, in fact, ask me those questions. I gave a fake address, took the card, and drove away. I’m…not actually sure it’s legitimate. It seems a little bit too good to be true, but I dimly remember reading a similar tactic being used in the ’70s — gas prices too high? Well, we’ll just give you some free gas, loyal customers. So I snicker at the fact that I’ll use this gas card next time I fill up my tank, and then I’ll probably never use BP again unless it’s another emergency situation.

Posted by Stan on December 12, 2005 4:04 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (0)

July 1, 2005

The Audition

The first step I planned to take in my revised life roadmap was to find a job or career I can stand for more than nine seconds. So far, the only job I didn’t want to leave was Tully’s, and while my sister offered to have me come and stay with her in Seattle and resume work there, Seattle sucks and $7.85 an hour without benefits won’t pay the pickle-man (I do not know what this expression mean; I assume the explanation involves gigolos).

As it turns out, in another life I was a highly skilled office assistant, and in still another life I’m a really big (if not particularly bright) nerd, so the prospects don’t end with low-paying retail jobs. I’d be decently happy in a job like this if the job pressure is at a minimum; I used to while away the hours at crappy temp jobs thinking about my writing, and then I’d come home and write. Or I’d wake up early the following morning and write for several hours. I tend to write better when I’m not fully awake.

But I need some fun in my life, but I have a complicated conundrum: I’m tired of staying at home, but I invariably dislike almost all people. What the hell can I do, aside from pulling weird office pranks that only I’m aware of, to both be (sort of) social and enjoy myself?

I’ve flirted with the idea of gathering some of my loser screenwriter friends, the ones too afraid or prematurely bitter to go to LA, and having a little support group as we attempt to write, market, and hopefully sell our screenplays from afar. I’m not sure they’d go for it, but it could be fun.

Even better, my L.A. freakout happened to coincide with the departure of the bass player in a local Chicago band I kinda-sorta know. So, I thought, “I play guitar, I kinda learned bass, and I like this band — what could possibly go wrong?” I asked them if I could audition, and they took pity on me and reluctantly agreed.

Their singer/songwriter told me, “Learn these four songs, then come in and audition on Monday.” This was on Friday. It proved to me that they really had no interest in auditioning me; they wanted to do me a solid because I’ve supported the band and tinkered with their website, but they mostly wanted to get it over with so they could get on with their lives. Since I have so little faith in myself, I have a difficult time when others don’t have faith in me, either. Sometimes, I’ll say, “Fuck you, motherfuckers — I’ll show you!” but other times, particularly when I have legitimate reasons to not feel confident (like, for example, the fact that, while I regularly play guitar, I haven’t picked up a bass in about two years), I’m mentally crippled.

“I can’t do this,” I kept saying to myself, despite the fact that I learned the chord structures of all four songs in about an hour and learned most of the fills after a few more hours of practice.

I had some support. My friends, some of whom are fans of the band, thought it was really cool. My dad, who spent most of his teens and early 20s wishing he could be Ozzy Osbourne, gave me a lot of support.

Monday didn’t work out for any of us, so we rescheduled it for Tuesday. Another 24 hours to contemplate not auditioning, but also another 24 hours to get really polished.

“We practice at 16th and Western,” the singer/songwriter told me. My mind skittered toward a mental recollection of the general area. Near the decimated blocks along Roosevelt that were destroyed in riots in the ’60s and never rebuilt, in some weird warehouse district. One of the good things about LA was that, since I didn’t really know much about the area, I’d fearlessly venture pretty much anywhere. I’d usually find dead dogs and people riding in shopping carts.

In Chicago, I kinda-sorta know most areas, which usually scares me away from doing anything at any point in time ever. But now I have valerian root, which relaxes me to the point that my irrational fears slip away. (Perhaps this will lead to me chronicling a hilarious addiction to anti-anxiety medications. Stay tuned!) I didn’t even freak out when I asked for a specific street address and received the response, “There isn’t really one,” followed by a set of instructions to make sure I ended up at the correct unmarked warehouse.

So I drove out, following the instructions to the letter, and found the building. I could hear their music bleeding through the brick wall. Though I was about five minutes early for my supposed 10PM start time, but they had called me while I was driving to inform me they’d need 15-30 minutes to practice for their show on Wednesday night (the farewell show for their current bass player). I called the singer/songwriter to let them know I was there, and she said she’d run down and get me in a second (the front door was locked).

A second later, they started playing again. The hell? That’s kind of rude.

A few seconds after they finished the song, a door popped open and some random, goateed man came out. I wondered if maybe he hung out with the band or something, so I pulled my bass out of the trunk, went up and asked him if he was with the band.

“No,” he said placidly. “I just jam here.” At this point, it finally dawned on me that this warehouse was a multi-room practice building for various musicians. I’m a slow, slow fellow.

“Right,” I said, “well, I can hear them playing. I guess I’ll just wait down here.”

“Oh man, if you can hear them, go on in. Just follow the sound,” he said.

“Right,” I muttered. I walked up the stairs and down a hall, half of which was painted lime green, the other half white. Very narrow, lined with numbered wooden doors, it reminded me of the hallway of every dorm I’ve ever seen.

I found the door from which the sound of the band came, and I stood outside it for a few minutes, listening to them play, wondering whether or not I should knock. I finally decided to use the fact that they were playing songs they had asked me to learn to my advantage — I pulled out the little chord cheat-sheet I had written out and eyeballed it as they played a couple of the songs. For the songs I hadn’t learned, I just tried to get a good feel for what their bass player was doing, so that if they chose me, I’d at least have some idea of what I was doing.

They made me wait for about 40 minutes, all told, and I wished I had brought a book. Instead, I just tried to eavesdrop between songs. They didn’t know I was standing right there, so I paid close attention to the issues the singer/songwriter was having with the rest of the band, to try and figure out what she liked and so on.

At one point, she started complaining to the bass player about somebody they had auditioned the previous night. My ears perked up. “He just stood there, hitting the root notes,” she said. I was worried that I didn’t have the fills down pat, but I felt a little better that I hadn’t just planned to plunk out the top note of each chord. “We played about half of it; then we stopped him and sent him home.” I knew if they didn’t do that to me, at least things would go marginally well.

She went on about somebody else they had auditioned, a girl, and how hard-working she seemed. “Oh fuck,” I thought. “That’ll do me in for sure!”

Eventually, they went back to practicing, and finally they let their bass player pack up and popped open the door to find me standing there like an idiot.

I had been worried that the room would be a huge, cavernous practice space, and that my brain would get swallowed up in the untrustworthy sounds I heard. I’ve always been an auditory learner, so even if I were to do what I was supposed to do, staring at the drummer for dear life to make sure I was in sync, my brain would get distracted by what I was hearing and totally ignore what I was seeing, and I’d fail. But this place was tiny and echo-free — I’d be in the band before they realized I can’t play in an actual musical venue!

I set myself up in the most awkward way possible. Not only has it been a long time since I’ve played with a band — and even then, I’m using a very loose definition of the word “band” — it’s been an even longer time since I’ve even used an amplifier; I took my acoustic guitar with me to California, but I never really thought once I got back that maybe I should refresh myself on basic amp shit. I faked my way through it pretty well, but I got tripped up for a second on “line out” and “line in.”

Then came the tuner. I’m a singing dork, so I’ve made a practice of tuning by blowing an “A” in a pitch pipe, tuning my A string, and then matching the other strings to the perfect “A.” I left my pitch pipe at home, figuring somebody could just hit out an “A” for me… Instead, when it came time to tune, they told me to plug into their pedal tuner, an exciting piece of technology, commonplace in almost every rock band in existence, that I haven’t used in about seven years. I embarrassed myself first by not plugging into it properly, then by taking way too long to tune the bass strings. It felt like way too long, anyway; nobody else seemed to mind.

I ended up tuning the bottom two strings a half-step sharp, because I didn’t see the tiny, tiny light that goes on when it’s tuned sharp. Fucking electric tuners — what the hell, man?!

Finally, I got tuned properly, and we launched into a song. I, ever the professional, missed my first entrance and started thudding out the complete wrong chord structure for the first verse. I knew it was all over. I had already bombed the audition, and I’d be surprised if they went through the whole song. But they didn’t stop me, and gradually, throughout the song, I got my groove thang on, I busted out the fills, and by the end I was pretty solid.

“Holy shit,” I thought, “I might actually be able to do this.”

After I was done, the band congratulated me on not sucking. Their drummer pointed out, “He doesn’t look at the frets,” which seemed to wow them all; I didn’t really think it was anything special, being that I’ve been playing for over a decade at this point, and one of the first things I learned — which is fortunate, considering my lack of depth perception — is to find the frets by feel and look down as infrequently as possible.

We did another song, which started with a mighty bass-driven intro, and this made me very uncomfortable. A friend of mine from high school had taught me various things about bass picking and fingering techniques, but I could barely remember any of it; I was plodding away, holding my guitar pick in a guitar style and approaching the frets like Tony Iommi instead of Geezer Butler. In short, I didn’t know what the fuck I was doing, technique-wise, but nobody fucking cared.

We went through the entire song, which once again surprised me, and the singer-songwriter actually looked over at me and kept nodding with approval every time I matched one of the bass player’s fills.

After this song, she said to me, “That’s really awesome. We’ve seen some other people who just learned the root notes, but it seems like you really made an effort to figure out the little things he does.”

“Yeah,” I responded, my trademark wit hard at work.

We moved on to the last song — because of the time they spent practicing, they only wanted to do three songs — which I actually fucked up quite successfully. I kept hitting a “C” instead of a “G,” and it stuck out like a sore thumb; in the end, I apologized, but nobody even remotely cared, and they apologized for not taking into account that I’d actually be nervous about fucking things up. They felt like my ability to approximate the basslines concocted by their current player overshadowed the few mistakes I had made.

As we broke down the gear, we chatted about a variety of stupid crap; by that point, the root had fully kicked in and I no longer felt I had anything (audition-wise) to worry about, so I actually was legitimately witty. They knew I had a sense of humor, at least, and we discussed the practical side of touring.

The final word from the singer-songwriter was that if — if! — they found somebody who equaled my skill — equaled! they never even implied they’d find somebody better! — who had touring experience, they would go with that person over me. However, they didn’t appear to be holding their breath. She pointed out that everybody who was currently in the band — except her — hadn’t toured at all before they were in the band, so they were much more open to it than other bands would be.

Unfortunately, they haven’t finished all the auditions, and the singer-songwriter is going out of town this week, so I won’t hear back from them for awhile. But still, without getting my hopes up too high, this audition made me think maybe I can actually build a reasonably enjoyable life in a place where I’m comfortable.

If not, there’s a bottle of liquid Drano under the sink.

Posted by Stan on July 1, 2005 4:08 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (3)

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 L.A., 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 overtanned 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  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (1)

January 24, 2005

Bum Stories

For whatever reason, I was inspired to write up the following stories in a post on an Awful Forums thread. I realized I haven’t blogged in awhile, and cursory inspection of the archives leads me to believe I never even blogged these stories, which is a shame, because they are my two favorite bum-interaction stories.

Enjoy.

One day, I was walking up Michigan Avenue by myself, and this bum spotted me and starts talking to me. I’m not usually a big bum target, but this is along a strip of sidewalk between Roosevelt Road and the big Hilton on Balbo. Despite the enormous condos, I rarely see any pedestrian traffic when I walk up this section of sidewalk. So basically, I was the only one around for him to bother.

He said to me, “Buddy, I gotta get down to Aurora. Now, it cost $6.50 to get down there, and I ain’t got no money.”

On the rare occasions that hobos attempt to bum money specifically from me (as opposed to the guys on the corners rattling cups of change and muttering to anybody who will listen), I try to ignore them. It’s easier if I’m in conversation with a person, or if there’s a lot of pedestrian traffic for them to get distracted with, but the circumstances were different. Also, he was following me. I felt I had to respond, so I said, “Uh…I don’t have any money.”

“Oh, come on!” he screamed. “Look, I ain’t gonna lie to you. I just got outta jail.”

My eyes widened.

“Yeah,” he continued, “I killed a guy, I ain’t gonna lie.”

This was bad. I glanced around to see if any pedestrians were around, so if I needed to scream like a woman, somebody might actually help. Then I saw it: a cop! Standing in the intersection at 9th and Michigan. The short, fat old lady will surely save me!

Wait, no need to panic…he just got out of jail. He’s not going to kill me over $6.50, especially in sight of a cop and the heavy automobile traffic on Michigan Avenue. Right?

“Come on, man,” he repeated, “I gotta get down to Aurora. I gotta see my little girl.”

He pulled out his wallet and opened it up to a picture of a toddler girl. I started to feel bad, but I actually legitimately didn’t have $6.50.

“Sorry,” I said.

“You don’t understand!” he said. “I been in jail! My lady, she left me for my best friend! My best friend!”

“That’s horrible,” I said sincerely.

“Yeah, so now I gotta get down to Aurora and kill him,” he said. I’m actually not sure if he said “him” or “‘em,” but I’d like to think the less murdering, the better.

“Here,” I said, fumbling through my pockets for whatever loose change I had. It probably didn’t amount to more than thirty-six cents.

“Thankya,” he said, slowing down and staring down at the small amount of coins in his hands.

I looked back over at the traffic cop and thought, “Should I tell her he just told me he’s planning to murder one, if not more, people?”

As soon as I thought that, the light changed, and I crossed the street and started walking very fast toward the Hilton and sweet, wonderful pedestrian traffic. I didn’t report him because, for one thing, I didn’t know where he had gone by that point, and secondly, I got the impression that this was all an elaborate cover story to intimidate me (note: it worked). However, if he was telling the truth, and he did manage to get the full fare to Aurora, it’s possible that I aided and abetted a murderer. That can’t be a good thing.

–––

The only other good bum story I have is the story of Krazy Kelly, a krackhead who used to bum around the coffee shop I worked at last summer in Seattle. This was my only real encounter with her, since I usually worked closing shifts and (I’m told) she generally only came around in the mornings. I happened to see her one Sunday morning, when I decided to take my break outside. It was extremely warm in the shop, so I thought it’d be nice to get some cool air.

I always found the neighborhood, Pioneer Square, interesting. It’s full of beautifully restored old buildings, and after 11AM or so the streets and the square (which is across the street from our shop) are jam-packed with tourists…but it’s also home to innumerable homeless shelters, so there’s a surprisingly even hodgepodge of ignorant tourists and colorful (by which I mean “scary”) bums. Basically, it’s a shithole that tourists are dumb enough to visit because of the “old Seattle” flavor and the famous underground tour.

At any rate, Krazy Kelly was about my age (22 at the time), which both surprised and frightened me. I know Seattle’s mild weather and hippie locals make it easy for bums and junkies to survive, but man, that’s scary. (And she’s not even the youngest bum I saw…one time at a bus stop, this kid who couldn’t have been older than 12 was running around begging for change.) She approached me that Sunday morning and asked me for a dollar so she could get a cup of coffee. Gently caressing the singles in my pocket, I shrewdly lied and told her I had no money.

She sighed, disappointed, and just as she was about to move on, somebody banged on the window in the shop behind me. I looked inside the shop and saw one of the regulars beating on the window with his cane. When I turned, wondering what the hell he wanted, he pointed at Krazy Kelly and mimed lighting a and smoking a crack-pipe. As if I couldn’t tell…

Somehow, Krazy Kelly noticed his subtle demonstration. She grimaced and said, “That’s really nice, man. What a fucking asshole.” She looked back at me. “You know what?”

I suddenly found the sidewalk so fascinating that I couldn’t take my eyes off of it long enough to answer her. No matter, she pressed on. “Him and all the other evil people on the planet are going to be swallowed by man-eating sharks. I know this, because I read once that a shark ate a little boy. I’ll bet he deserved it, and I went on the ferry and made $50.”

I found it difficult to hold in my laughter. She said that last bit with such innocence, and yet there are very few innocent things I can think of that would net somebody $50 on a ferry.

Kelly started walking down the street, and I was relieved, until she turned around ten feet later and continued. “The sharks will get rid of all the evil people. You know it; I know it. One day the sharks will all end up at the bottom of the ocean and become extinct. That’s okay; Jesus loves them.”

She continued walking. I was about to sigh with relief when she turned around once again and said, “Jesus loves you, too. I know that. He told me.” It was nice to know; I was raised Catholic, so I’ve learned to believe that Jesus hates me.

She walked further, then turned around to talk to me again, but by this time she had made it far enough down the street that I could no longer hear what she was saying. She kept making progress and then turning around to talk to me some more until she finally rounded the corner.

In summary, that was the best summer of my life!

Posted by Stan on January 24, 2005 1:07 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (0)

July 21, 2004

The Old Man

Since coming to Seattle, I’ve been home alone a lot. It’s pleasantly refreshing compared to a house with a mother who refuses to leave the house if/when I’m at home. Still, I’m sometimes worried. See, it gets warm here, but apparently not warm enough for anybody to invest in air-conditioning. It’s not like back home, where we sometimes don’t run the air to save money. People don’t even have air-conditioning here. I don’t really understand it, because while it doesn’t get as hot as Chicago, it gets hot enough that opening doors and windows doesn’t really do the job.

So why am I worried? Do I think I’m going to die of heat stroke and dehydration? Yes, but that’s not really the problem. The problem lies in the continuous opening of the front door. We live in a house on a hill, so the windows are all right, because they’re all way too high for anybody to get into without an inordinate amount of difficulty. The back door? That’s fine, because the screen door is really little more than a gargantuan steel gate with a screen shoved into it.

The front door is different. Stairs lead up to it. A flimsy fiberglass screen is all that protects me and my considerable heft from being bludgeoned to death by a heroin addict looking for a fix or a potential thief who may have noticed Jack’s parade of Microsoft shirts and decided there may be some high-end consumer goods inside the house.

So I open the door because otherwise it’s unbearably hot. We need to air-flow in the house. So far, I haven’t had a problem. The neighbors apparently are as unemployed as I used to be, so they’re often outside on the weekdays working on their yards or whatever. It reached a point where I actually felt somewhat safe despite being relatively unsafe.

Until yesterday evening. (Cue dramatic musical sting.)

I was sitting in the living room, as I often am, typing away at the ol’ laptop. My sister was upstairs, talking to our parents on the phone. Jack wasn’t home yet. I was minding my own business when I heard somebody talking. This is not unusual. With the doors and windows open constantly, I often hear people talking as they walk up and down the street, or I hear the neighbors yelling or the menacing Saint Bernard on the corner howling in anguish that a chainlink fence generally prevents him from making the kill.

This was different, though. This didn’t have the rising-falling cadence of people passing by. It also seemed extremely close. I glanced out through the picture window in the front room. Sometimes when Jack comes home, he’ll sit on the front porch, have a smoke, and talk to one of his creepy Microsoft friends on his cell phone. He wasn’t sitting on the porch, so I glanced at the screen door.

Somebody was leaning on the screening door. Actually, physically, leaning into it, like somehow it would magically open if he pressed on it. He didn’t appear to see me, but maybe that was just because he was so distracted by our shoes, arranged in a row in front of the door.

“Got a lotta shoes,” he muttered.

It was not Jack.

Without really having to deal with anything like this before, I sat in contemplative silence for a moment. Should I leap up, slam the door in his face, and lock it, or should I call the police? Or should I do both?

I decided the first and most obvious action to take was to put a maximum amount of security between myself and the crazy hobo. If I made any sudden movements, like reaching for the phone, he might do something crazier than muttering about our shoes.

“Got some nice boots,” the hobo muttered.

Motherfucker. Nobody talks about my steel-toed boots unless they’re an invited guest. I leaped from the couch, went over to the front door, and the hobo looked me in the eyes. He had the same look in his eyes as the man on Van Buren Street who told me Jesus was going to kill me, so despite the fact that he was an old man, it was possible that he could still be a knife-wielding maniac. And, I don’t care how many hundreds of years you’ve been on the planet, when you’re coming after a fat-ass with a knife, there’s ample opportunity to do the job, what with all the extra carriage.

As the hobo looked me in the eyes, he muttered, “She sell the house? I guess she sold the house.” He sounded disappointed, but still crazy.

I took immediate and decisive action: I said, “I guess so,” and slammed the door in his face, then locked it.

I immediately ran upstairs to alert my sister, who decided we should call the police. We stood up in her bedroom, which is above the front of the house, and we stared down. The hobo ended up going on his merry way, so we decided not to alert the fuzz.

“He was probably looking for the previous owner,” Tracey said, trying to downplay the fact that a crazy person was just at our doorstep. It was heartily ineffective for two reasons: (1) they’ve been living in this house for over a year, and while the previous owner has occupied it since 1957, that doesn’t make it cool for random people to show up without really knowing who was going to be there, and (2) what the fuck happened to knocking? Or ringing the doorbell? I mean, I know the door was hanging wide open, but that’s still not an invitation to, for example, lean into the screen door and describe all the pretty shoes you see.

That is fucked up.

Posted by Stan on July 21, 2004 4:11 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (0)

June 14, 2004

New Names, or: What Ever Happened to Gina?

“So who is this girl?” my sister’s boyfriend, Jack, asked after my sister and I had an extended conversation about Lucy during dinner.

“Just Lucy,” I said.

“No, no, no,” he said. “This whole name thing isn’t working for me — I’m never gonna remember who they are. I need descriptions.”

“Well, she’s my best friend,” I responded.

“Are you retarded?” Jack asked.

I thought of answering with a truthful “yes,” but said nothing instead.

“What I want is a sentence-long description of this person so I know who the hell you’re talking about,” Jack said and turned toward Tracey, my sister, who is more used to this type of thing than I am.

“Let’s see,” Tracey began. “Girl who my parents think he’s bagging but he’s not bagging her at all because she’s in Iowa and —”

“Okay,” Jack said. “Unbaggable Chick. Done.”

Hrm.

“What about that Australian girl?” Tracey asked. “I mean, the one Mom said you were going to go to Australia with because you really wanted to get into her pants.” She was referring to Gina, and apparently I never blogged about our plans to disappear off to Australia and find jobs in the film industry there, because it’s much more pleasant than Hollywood.

“That’s not true,” I said.

“What ever happened to her?” she asked.

“I don’t really want to talk about it that much,” I said.

“You didn’t declare your love to her, did you?” Tracey asked.

Jeez. I haven’t done much love-declaring since my more optimistic high school days. (Note: It didn’t work.)

As I tried to formulate all the ways in which Tracey’s ancient assessment of me was totally wrong, she added, “You did, didn’t you? Jesus.”

“No, I didn’t,” I explained. “Quite the opposite, in fact. Althought it was more a declaration of lust than love.”

“What happened?” she asked.

“We got way too close, I spent more time with her than anybody else on the planet, and I insist there was some transference going on there, because she’d always talk about how much I reminded her of her boyfriend,” I explained. “We spent some time apart for awhile, then met up again, and I guess whatever was there came back, and bad things started to happen. I said, ‘But you have a boyfriend’ —”

“NO!” Jack screamed. “Wrong fucking answer.”

“— and she said, ‘I know,’ and I said, ‘That’s really not a problem for me’ &mdash”

“Good,” Jack amended.

“— ‘However, I think we’ll both regretting this.’”

“Goddammit,” Jack said. “I think she’s the one you need to be going after.”

“Well,” I said, “aside from the infidelity, she was arguably the most normal girl who’s admitted to wanting to have sex with me.” This is true, and I’m still sort of frustrated with my brain always assuming control of me whenever my penis (as portrayed by Burt Reynolds) should be at the helm. I still believe she would’ve regretted it and we never would’ve spoken to each other again, but now we have brief, awkward conversations when we run into each other at school, as if something had happened. Would it be better to not talk to her at all but still have had sex with her? Yes. Yes, it would.

“You gotta toss your eggs back in the Australia Girl’s basket. You gotta call her every day. Invite her out here,” Jack said.

“She doesn’t return my calls anymore,” I said. “Sometimes she’ll pick up and say she’s been really busy and she’s sorry, but after awhile you sorta start to think that’s a crock of shit.”

“Call her from here. She won’t know the number, and when she finds out it’s you, she’ll be intrigued,” Jack said. It was the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard, but maybe he’s right.

“What about Coffee-Pizza Girl?” Tracey interrupted.

She was referring to this decently cute girl who hit on me when I was getting coffee at this pizzeria at Pike Place. I was wearing a Rilo Kiley t-shirt, and she started asking me all about the other bands Jenny Lewis sings for. I really am not all that knowledgeable, but I whipped out, “Oh, I think she sings on the Postal Service album,” and she was like, “That’s such a great album,” and we sort of grinned awkwardly at each other. It’s a moment. A moment! Man, the women in Seattle must be hard up if somebody that attractive could create a moment with someone like me.

But it’s totally weird asking some random barista out, or trying to get a phone number, in the middle of the most crowded shopping center in the history of the universe with 95 people breathing down your neck. It’s also totally weird that my sister would bring her up out of nowhere, although it’s not like I hadn’t been casually thinking about it myself.

I said as much, but Tracey suggested things I’d been thinking about myself, “Catch her near the end of her shift, get her to talk to you, then ask if she wants to go somewhere afterward.”

“That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard,” Jack, who suggested I intrigue somebody who won’t talk to me by calling from a different area code, muttered.

Would I do that? I dunno. Part of the purpose of this summer was to have one of those Saved by the Bell-esque flings with the daughter of the fat bald guy who owns the beach resort I’m working at with my friends Screech and Slater.

I suppose we’ll see.

Posted by Stan on June 14, 2004 11:22 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (0)

April 9, 2004

Closet Cosplayer

On the train, on my way home yesterday, I was sitting behind these three girls who would not shut up. And I have the irritating quality, bred by every single writing teacher I’ve ever had, to eavesdrop as much as humanly possible. It’s reached a point where I have no control: whenever a conversation is in earshot, I listen. It distracts me.

So these girls were right in front of me and were physically incapable of shutting the fuck up. One of them had a digital camera, so she was scrolling through her little library of photos, showing her friends all sorts of embarrassing or amusing pictures. She had a little anecdote attached to each of them. I wanted to punch her in the back of the neck.

The girl sitting right next to Camera Girl looked familiar from behind, which was the only view I got from her. For some reason, her hair reminded me really strongly of someone, but I couldn’t place who. I didn’t think she was actually someone I knew (I hoped not, anyway); she just had a similar hairstyle with similar odd highlights.

Camera Girl switched to a new picture, and all three of them started giggling. Familiar Hair Girl said, “Oh my God, I didn’t know you had these pictures here.”

Camera Girl responded, “Oh, yeah, this is my cosplay camera.”

The instant I heard that, I started laughing. And I could. Not. Stop.

Seriously. All three girls looked at me, which made me laugh harder, and I, unable to speak or breathe, pointed vaguely at my book, implying that I read a particularly funny passage. Something in their faces led me to believe they didn’t buy it.

I continued to laugh for the majority of the train ride home (about twenty minutes). Sure, I didn’t laugh for the entire time, but as they continued to talk about anime conventions and people dressed as various characters and that whole bizarre community, I started thinking about the whole idea of it and would start laughing again.

Camera Girl had one anecdote that I remember almost verbatim. “do u rmbr tha <3 spike spiegel <3 guy too? he had a buqouet of rozez & when he saw me, he came right up 2 me & gave me a roze & smiled :-)”

“OMG THATS SO SWEET!!!!!!!!!!!!” her friends responded fawningly.

I learned three things at that moment: (1) If I want to get dumpy girls dressed up like anime characters to talk to me, I need to invest in a buqouet of rozez and get to work on my crotchless Spike Spiegel costume. (2) The reason why I recognized Familiar Hair Girl was because her hair was styled exactly like Faye Valentine. (3) The fact that I knew what they were talking about, the fact that I own 26 episodes and one feature film of Cowboy Bebop, the fact that as recently as Wednesday I was seriously considering investing in a manga collection that would even rival Owen’s (and decided against it only because I didn’t have the money for it just now) — all of it added up to the worst thing of all: I’m as bad as they are. And possibly worse, since I try to hide it instead of embracing the enjoyment and, um, dressing up like the characters.

And as I realized that, I started laughing even harder.

Posted by Stan on April 9, 2004 7:21 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (0)

March 18, 2004

The Ambassador of Funk

One of the more amusing albums I’ve downloaded in recent months is one called Super Mario Compact Disco. It’s pretty simple to figure out the concept of this album: various well-known Mario tunes, remixed and full of overly cheerful rap lyrics extolling the excellence of Mario and his friends. It’s arguably the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard in my life, but much like Rhapsody, it’s grown on me like moss.

For those of you out of the loop, my longtime traveling companion died after eight loyal years of service. After burial proceedings and a subsequent memorial service, I started looking into a replacement model. I know it seems a little fast, but I feel like you have to move on quickly or you never will. Know what I mean?

So I finally decided on one of those RioVolt MP3 CD players. I’ve got a couple of CD-RWs, and I’ve just been burning rips of the albums I’ve been listening to lately so I can enjoy them on the road instead of paying attention to the driving task and the IPDE process. One of these albums, needless to say, is Super Mario Compact Disco, which I tend to blast. I find it singularly amusing (and by “singularly,” I mean I’m the only person who finds it funny) that, when I play it, I become one of those people I make fun of who has the bass turned up really loud so you can hardly hear it, but yet it’s just crappy Mario songs with hip-hop backbeats.

Which brings me (finally) to the actual story. Last night was Saint Patrick’s day, as I’m sure you all blearily recall. As such, when I was driving home from my class around 10:30, there was a not-all-that-surprising-but-still-unusual amount of traffic. Most of them were swerving to and fro, driving ten under, and braking about 500 feet too soon. I wonder what that was about.

Anyway, I got to the intersection at Higgins and Mannheim*, and I was sitting at the red light (the first car in the left lane), waiting for it to change, when a car pulls up beside me. It, too, had bass blaring at extraordinary volume. I ignored it.

Then, I heard the engine revving. I turned my head toward their car, giving the driver my best bad-ass look (it’s not very good). It was four guys — two in the front, two in the back — all looking very gang-bangery and faux-tough (seriously, their bad-ass looks were about as good as mine). They seemed pretty intent on racing me, so I knew what I had to do.

I lowered the bass slightly so the chromatic tones of the Super Mario Land theme could be distinctly heard over the bass.

I rolled down the passenger window.

I said, “What, you wanna race?” in my best deep bad-ass voice, and all the while, remember, I still have my stone face (not to be confused with my stoned face) on.

And they started laughing. Really, really hard. And then they sort of shrugged me off, like I was either not worth their time or too amusing to want to harass.

I would have been offended, except it was exactly what I had planned.

It’s nice, I think, that I’ve finally managed to thrust into the public eye the things that make me privately titter and find that they amuse others as well.

Although I’m still not sure whether they were laughing with me or just at me.

*I apologize if my sad, lifelong obsession with maps is ruining the flow of the blog. I just feel the need to supply a photographic frame of reference whenever I mention specific locations like Adult World. [Back]

Posted by Stan on March 18, 2004 8:41 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (1)

January 30, 2004

Teeth

I had a dental appointment yesterday. It wasn’t a big deal, except I apparently have a tooth with two cavities. My dentist said it wasn’t a big deal, because it was a “non-fuctioning tooth.” I didn’t specifically like the sound of that, but he reassured me that the tooth, when I bite down, doesn’t connect with any of the other teeth in my head. It merely exists, partially submerged in gum tissue. He said, “I’m going to treat this as a wisdom tooth and recommend an oral surgeon.”

He paused for a second, then said, “Unless you maybe want to go to an orthodontist and get your teeth fixed right.”

This was a sort of minor vindication for me. See, when I had braces, I went to the Sears Family Dental Center, which was not well known for quality. Still, my parents wanted my teeth fixed, and it was all they could afford, so that’s where we went. And then, as my dentist says, my teeth “relapsed.” And, apparently, one of my teeth sank into a quagmire of gum tissue, so I can’t brush it, and really nothing can be done with it short of removing it. Or, as he said, getting braces and possibly fixing it.

But my mom’s always blamed me for the teeth relapsing. She claims — and we actually got into yet another fight about it when I got home from my appointment — that I didn’t use my retainer enough. Which, okay, that wasn’t necessarily accurate. I was disobeying the medical advice and taking my mother’s advice, so maybe I didn’t use it enough, but it was only because she insisted it wouldn’t be a big deal.

See, he told me to wear it all the time, but it’s kinda difficult to talk with a retainer in your mouth, so my mother said, “When I had braces, my doctor only made me wear it at night,” and she told me I shouldn’t worry about it. So, I only wore it at night. Then, after a year or two (my orthodontist said I needed to wear the retainer for life), my mother said, “My doctor told me I only needed to wear the retainer for a year, so I think you’ll be okay.” So I stopped wearing it, and my teeth began to relapse fairly quickly, and I tried the retainer again, but it kept falling out because it no longer fit.

That was the end of the retainer.

My mother remembers the whole thing differently. She says that I absolutely refused to wear it, even at night, and she’d often sneak into my room at night (do you see why I’m not a big fan of my mom?) and find it sitting on my bed bookshelf. This is partially accurate, but that only happened when I started wearing the retainer for the second time and it didn’t fit; I’d wake up in the middle of the night and have sticky, disgusting retainer parts suctioned to my body, so I’d put it on the shelf.

She also insists that she never told me I could stop wearing it; she just said, at one point, that I only needed to wear it at night. Which, yes, she did, but she did that maybe two weeks after I got the retainer, and then told me I could stop a year or two later.*

Should I have been made to wear a retainer 24 hours a day for the rest of my life? I don’t know. Like I said, I’m not an orthodontist, but it just doesn’t seem right. It seems like the braces were botched, and the only way to solve that problem was to wear a retainer constantly. Then again, I had a pretty bad overbite (worse than my sister’s and my mom’s; I attribute it to the hillbilly DNA inherited from my father, who had no overbite because obviously it skips a generation), so maybe it was just necessary because of the nature of my case.

Still, my dentist kept saying that my orthodontic work was not done correctly, and that he’d recommend an orthodontist who would “do it right.” I’d like to think — although my mother insists this is impossible — that a skilled, trained dentist can look at somebody’s mouth and judge whether or not their orthodontic relapse was caused by not wearing a retainer or by botched work. It’s like a guitar player listening to somebody else play and knowing the guitar is just a hair out of tune, while people who have no idea can’t hear it and think it sounds fine.

I dunno, that seems logical to me. He’s probably looked inside thousands of mouths in his career, and I think he’s able to judge things based on tell-tale signs, such as — he explained to me — a tooth falling downward into gum tissue instead of pushing up and back against it.

But, gosh, what do I know?

At any rate, my mom has been talking quite frequently of late about springing for that Invisalign deal, so that getting braces again won’t be completely humiliating. At the same time, all she does is bitch about how we’re broke. So, obviously, we can’t really afford Invisalign, which is more expensive than normal braces. I feel like I’ll end up like Lisa Simpson, with the rusting headgear (“Dental plan!”).

Plus, the thing is, I don’t really want braces again. Granted, I’m no ladies’ man, but an easily hidden overbite is the least of my concerns. I thought I’d just get the tooth removed and be done with it, even though my mother — the one with the money — still insists that Invisalign is the answer.

So, as I always do when I get stressed out and need to feel worse, I called Lucy, who immediately told me that if I didn’t get braces again, more of my teeth would probably sink and need to be removed until I have none left. She’s no orthodontist, but neither am I, and she may have a solid point. I’d rather do the braces thing again than end up losing all my teeth or worse.

I think, if nothing else, I should go and see an orthodontist and see what he recommends. Or just talk to my dentist and see what he thinks is the best idea, and whether the whole losing-all-your-teeth thing is even a rational concern (knowing me, it’s probably very far-fetched).

*When she was a kid, she only had to wear her retainer for a year and decided, what with her medical doctorate in orthodontic care, that I should only have to wear it for a year, as well.

Posted by Stan on January 30, 2004 2:51 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (0)

January 24, 2004

South Side, or: The Culture of Fear, or: I’m a Big Wuss

Longtime readers of this blog have, I’m sure, drawn many strange and accurate conclusions about me. Chief among them: I’m sort of paranoid. I like to think of myself as “cautious,” but I’m apparently not a very good judge of character. So, when I learned two weeks ago that my fiction writing professor was having a going-away party today (she’s moving to Maine) at a house on 77th Street, I decided to cautiously not go.

Then, my friend Anne said, “I think I’m going to go to that party.”

I said, “Yeah, me too.”

I didn’t do this because I’m trying to impress her with my faux world weariness, even though I am. I did it because sometimes my sense of machismo gets in the way of common sense. If this had been anyone else, I would’ve said, “Are you fucking crazy?” But I, as sworn protector of any female polite enough to not openly disdain my physical appearance, decided I had a duty to her. I wasn’t going to allow her to go to an unfamiliar neighborhood on the south side by herself.

So I trudged downtown in the snow, met her at the Van Buren Street Metra station, and we took a train down to the stop at and 75th Street and Exchange Avenue, approximately 62 blocks away from the farthest south I’ve ever gone in the city of Chicago. As a result of many years being bred to fear everything by both my parents and the news media, I was terrified.

The train station, according to a very misleading map, was about three blocks away from where we needed to be. According to reality, it’s more like six. This may not seem like a lot, but it is when you’re terrified beyond the capacity for rational thought (™ Egon).

The platform and station house looked abandoned, which fit well with the overall aesthetic of the neighborhood. In the station house itself, I swear to God there was a large, rusting sign that said “Attention: Purse Snatchers,” with a little blurb and a large picture of a purse with a big red circle and slash. A positive sign, I’m sure.

I led Anne west onto 75th, as I had spent many long hours consulting the misleading map, and I knew Marquette Avenue was a block away.

I was wrong. As a matter of fact, there was no street a block away. Just one run-down, closed-up-and-barred-shut business after another. And the few businesses that were — gasp! — open after noon on a Saturday were similarly barred or at least had steel shutters blocking the windows and doors. Not really a good sign. Plus, the addresses were in the 2500’s and going down as we headed west.

“I think we went the wrong way,” I said quietly. The street was empty, almost to the point of being desolate (there was one guy standing on the corner who looked like he was waiting for a ride, but he was balanced out by the cop car parked right in front of him), but I still figured I should be as quiet as possible. In case some random person was hiding in the shadows somewhere, it seemed like a bad idea to let slip that I was lost.

I just turned around, and we walked back to Exchange Avenue and started going southwest. I knew that, at some point, Exchange intersected with 77th, and all would be well.

A little sidestreet called Saginaw diagonaled off of Exchange a little ways south, and in the little triangle of land between the two was a blandly nondescript restaurant (like the businesses lining 75th, it was all steel shutters and very little visible glass), out of which an old black man literally stumbled out onto the snow-littered sidewalk. He held a paper bag in his right hand, out of which the neck of a green bottle protruded. Subtle.

So, he was an old drunk. I’m not afraid of old drunks; hell, we have old drunks in the suburbs. They ride bicycles to Walgreens and ramble incoherently, just the same as city drunks. Okay, except I’m afraid of old suburban drunks, too, so this was not good.

He shambled slowly ahead of us, toward 76th Street, and I slowed down a little bit, so we wouldn’t catch up to him very quickly (if at all). I had mixed feelings about this decision, because as much as I wanted to avoid a strange encounter with an old drunk, I thought it best to get to where we’re going as soon as humanly fucking possible, and fortunately, he didn’t seem to notice us trailing him about a quarter of a block away.

At this point, Anne piped up, “See, this place is a lot different from the suburbs.”

“Aw, Jesus,” I thought, but the old drunk still didn’t seem to notice us. And he was slowing down even more. I decided that, fine, if he was either going to not notice or pretend to not notice us, I may as well follow my initial plan of going extremely fast. So, I sped up and wedged my fat ass past him, grabbing Anne’s hand and pulling her as close to me as possible. This was half an attempt to make sure she was safe, half a conscious effort to cop a feel. I succeeded in both respects.

We passed a small apartment on the corner of 76th and Exchange, which, I swear to God, had many, many busted-out windows and a door that was being propped open by what looked like a long abandoned stroller.

As we kept moving past 76th, we passed two enormous but not particularly intimidating black men walking in the opposite direction. Still, I was on my guard. When I was in high school, we had this weird seminar with a retired CPD detective, and one of the nuggets of advice he gave us was to carry a decoy wallet at all times. Fill it with slips of paper to create the impression of bulk, even put in outdated (or outright fake) IDs for an air of realism. If you get mugged, throw it into the street. They want the money; they don’t want you. When they run for the money, you high-tail it in the opposite direction.

A good concept, but when you’re in the middle of the south side of Chicago, and your only access to transportation is a train that won’t be arriving for half an hour, it’s troublesome. Of course, I didn’t think of that beforehand. I did make a decoy wallet from my old, worn-out wallet, and I decided while I was at it to make it into a sort of practical joke, for my own amusement. Instead of money, I put in old Wendy’s coupons, good for a free Biggie Frosty. They were expired, which I thought was hilarious. Not only does the guy get nothing but Frosty coupons — they’re expired. Mugger comedy gold.

At any rate, we passed these guys without incident. Like I said, they didn’t look particularly intimidating, but better safe than sorry. Or better paranoid than oblivious.

Okay, so we passed 76th. The next street would be 77th, and we’d be home free, right?

Wrong. As we approached the next street, I squinted to see the sign. “76th,” it said.

“What the fuck?” Anne asked. She noticed it, too.

“I think we slipped into an infinite loop,” I said. Instead of being irritatingly cheerful and utterly without fear, for the first time Anne seemed sort of pissed and — gasp! — a little afraid. It only lasted a second, and in retrospect I think she was more pissed off about my stupid joke than anything else.

As we got closer, I noted it was 76th Place, which, according to the misleading map, starts east of Exchange. I thought maybe we were on the wrong side of the street, but we couldn’t be. We pressed on.

Seriously, for a neighborhood as desolate (very few cars passed by, and there were almost no pedestrians), they sure had their share of people designed solely to creep the hell out of me. The next guy we passed was walking literally in the middle of the street — possibly to avoid the snow that lay unshoveled on the sidewalk, but it’s not like he was next to the curb or anything — and he started randomly shouted incoherent things.

Another drunk? Maybe. A crazy person? Maybe. Somebody I never, ever wanted to communicate with any way? Yes. Oh, God, yes.

“That’s great,” Anne said. “I always wanted to be a person who just randomly screamed things to nobody.”

“Shhh,” I whisper-shouted. I am a wuss.

We passed the drunk-crazy guy without incident, and as we approached the next street, I noticed the buildings — actual houses, as we were entering a genuine residential area — were creeping closer to Exchange. This pleased me, because the wide gulfs of empty, snow-covered parking lots only added to the horrible feeling of desolation. Which is weird, considering it was creating open spaces.

“Why does the next street start with a ‘B’?” Anne asked. I squinted to see the street sign and wondered the same thing.

“Where the fuck are we?” I asked, and my confidence in my ability to read a map waned slightly.

The street was called Burnham, and it isn’t on any map I own (and I own quite a few, because — I swear to God — I used to really want to be a cartographer and have always had an unhealthy fascination with maps). MapQuest lists a “Burnham” Street way far south, and it’s a north-south road, not east-west. What the fuck, dude?

So, were we lost? I was starting to think we were, and I was about to piss my pants when I saw the next street sign. Seventy-fucking-seventh Street.

“Thank God,” I thought, and as we rounded the corner, I heard what sounded like a loud pop, followed by glass breaking and a woman’s scream.

“Ignore it,” I told myself and started eyeballing the addresses on the houses, which looked surprisingly swanky considering the shit apartments and run-down businesses we had seen previously. They were in the 2700’s and going down, which was a happy sign, although I still swear that they should have been gradually going up. What do I know?

As we reached the right house, we walked up the porch. It was beautiful, all wood and stained a really nice dark burnt-sienna color. I rang the doorbell and looked across the street. An enormous, unbelievably beautiful elementary school loomed over a playground near the street. In the playground, a couple of young boys were playing and squealing with joy.

Yes, that’s right. The mysterious sounds of guns, glass, and women were actually small children scraping on slides and jumping up and down. I will officially call myself “paranoid.”

We were invited into the house by one of the faculty members. I vaguely recognized him, but I didn’t know his name. He introduced himself and showed us in.

The house was, quite honestly, the most beautiful home I’ve ever personally been inside. What the fuck?

The whole neighborhood, as I took a second look, seemed mysteriously quaint. Was Exchange Avenue as disturbing as I thought it was, or had I misjudged because I was terrified? Or is it possible that my dad was right when he said that it seemed to have pockets of good neighborhoods mingled equally with bad? Who knows?

We put our coats down and started to mingle. It turned out to be a small affair; Anne and I were the only students in attendance, and there were five faculty members aside from our professor. One of them was my fiction writing I professor, which was fun. She and my fiction II professor compared notes about my writing, and they were far more complimentary of it than anyone in the film department.

And my professor let slip that she actually submitted both mine and Anne’s work to be reviewed for the department’s annual publication. Granted, that doesn’t mean it will be published, but it’s nice that she liked anything I’ve written enough to send it onward.

I loosened up quite a bit as we all talked about random bullshit and I started to ignore the stigma of the south side. Still, I had an itty-bitty ball of fear in the pit of my stomach, but it was becoming less and less of a big deal as time passed. Every time I said something self-deprecating, Anne threw small chunks of strawberry at me. It’s sort of a good system, because I got so annoyed I stopped pretty quickly.

After a few hours, it started to get dark, and my fear increased again. I was scared enough walking down Exchange in broad, blinding post-snow daylight. I assumed I’d have about five heart-attacks walking back up it in the dark, but I was willing to put on a brave face for my newly beloved. It makes me feel like a big man to walk around bad neighborhoods in the dark. Maybe I would pick a fight with some huge guy just to prove how tough I —

“You’re gonna walk to a train in this neighborhood?” one of the faculty members asked as we were getting ready to leave. “Are you fucking nuts? I’ll drive you downtown.”

Oh, thank the fucking Lord. Anne and I wedged into the woman’s two-seater pick-up, and she drove us back up to the north side. She was babysitting or something, so we were actually on the way.

One of the things I noticed as we approached the thankfully familiar North-Damen-Milwaukee intersection was that the north side is approximately two million watts brighter than 79th Street, which we drove for a long while to the expressway. And it was more heavily populated. I never really relax, and I never stop being cauti — er, paranoid, but I at least felt sorta safe, what with the brightly lit signs and the glass and the distinct lack of steel bars covering doors.

All’s well that ends well, as they say. I’m not dead, and I wasn’t even harassed. Was I unnecessarily paranoid in the face of nonexistent danger? I dunno. The other face of the coin is that I was exactly as cautious as I should be going into an unfamiliar neighborhood in what is generally regarded as an unsafe urban area.

SLIGHT UPDATE: Upon further, obsessive map consultation, I found that the north-south Burnham Avenue does snake its way up and, essentially, ends (or begins, depending on how optimistic you are) by jutting south off of Exchange Avenue, which runs northwest-southeast.

Posted by Stan on January 24, 2004 11:59 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (1)

October 25, 2003

Social Stan, or: How I Managed to Hit on a Transvestite and a Lesbian All in One Night While Being Embroiled in My Own Personal Problems

Here’s the thing: I don’t like being around people. It’s not because I’m antisocial, although I am. It’s not because I’m claustrophobic, although I am. It’s not because I think listening to people who love the sound of their own voices — people who are abundant in social situation — is a fate worse than death, although I do.

No, the problem is that, like all other humans, I am a social animal. When I am around people, I feed off of their energy. I start to loosen up. And I’m a tight-ass, and I like it that way, so this becomes a major problem for me. When I loosen up, I start to act like myself. I hate acting like myself — I’m such a jackass.

Which brings me to last night.

Usually, I avoid social functions in and around the college, because as I said, I don’t like being around people, and people tend to gravitate toward social functions. If I feel obligated to go to a social function, I either sit in a corner sulking, or I sit in a corner reading. People come up to me and talk, and I say incendiary things and they go away. Then, the next day, I call them and apologize for my behavior, implying there was some sort of distracting family crisis.

Believe it or not, this, much like Billy Dee Williams and Colt 45, works every time.

Last night started out much like that. A professor and friend of mine was screening his thesis film at long last (he’s been hyping it for about a year and a half), so I was obliged to go and see it. I was also obliged to recruit people to go, but nobody had any actual interest. They couldn’t even humor me. Bastards. I need to hire a new set of friends. From my long experience with prostitutes, I find that people will be nice to you if you pay them enough.

Prior to the movie, I had some time to kill, so I called Lucy. Talk about murdering time.

She said, “I can’t really talk now.”

“Oh, okay,” I said.

“Yeah, I’m going out to dinner with one of my friends and her parents,” she said.

“Oh.”

“But I can call you in, like, an hour, and we can talk,” she muttered.

“No, I’m going to a screening in an hour, and there’s this reception afterward, so —”

“Oh. Well, um, I can call you tomorrow night, around eight or so,” she said.

“Okay,” I said.

“I think my boyfriend’s gonna dump me,” she said.

“What?” Suddenly, I was stunned. The last time I’d talk to her, which admittedly was over a week ago, things were fine.

“Yeah,” she said. “So, you know, he might, or he might not.”

“Jesus,” I said, “do you wanna talk about it or something?”

“I can’t,” she said. “I have to go.”

“Yeah, all right,” I said.

We hung up. What the fuck is wrong with her? You can’t just drop something like that on someone, with absolutely no elaboration or explanation, and then hang up like it’s nothing. It is unacceptable and sort of disturbing. It sort of put a damper on the whole night, and I was pretty worried about Lucy. I thought I should call her back, but, even though it was bringing me down, I also thought I didn’t want to have to deal with it.

So, I saw the movie and ran into a couple of old friends from classes, and a couple of professors, so that was kinda neat. Mostly, though, it was hundreds of people I didn’t know. I’m kinda glad none of my friends decided to show up, because the place was packed. They brought in 20 chairs (and the standard capacity of the screening room is 100 people), and it was still standing-room-only.

Afterward, a reception was held downstairs in the li’l cafeteria that I hang out in every day. Two women in strange white uniforms were handing out glasses of what I’m told is really good wine. And the hor d’oeurves spread was quite high-class. You can tell it’s high-class because I didn’t actually know what any of the food was. It was all malodorous cheeses and strange vegetable constructions and so on.

I was one of the first people down to the reception, so I sort of stood in a corner and watched as everyone started coming downstairs. I didn’t recognize anybody, but I saw a really attractive woman, so I decided to get into the food line behind her and be hilarious at her.

“How do you know the professor?” I asked. Seemed like a good opening line at the time.

“Oh, he’s an old friend,” she said.

“Nice,” I said. “You enjoyed the film, I’m sure.”

“It was great,” she said.

“Yeah, I thought it was very funny,” I said.

“Me too,” she said and started chewing on something that I think had salmon in it.

“And it was interesting the way —”

Oh, dear God.

She swallowed, which drew attention to her general throat area, whereupon I saw what I had to believe was an Adam’s apple.

An Adam’s apple?

An ADAM’S APPLE!

“I have to go now,” I noted and tried to engulf myself in a throng of people I casually pretended to know.

Suddenly, this party was making me extremely uncomfortable. My professor is openly gay, which is not a big deal to me, and I would say roughly 60% of the crowd last night were gay, as well, which again, is not a big deal. But it still makes me extremely uncomfortable when I am trying very honestly to flirt with a woman who is not a woman. Usually I can tell, but s/he was good.

It turned out, in that crowd of people, I actually did know someone — one of my current professors.

“I want to introduce you to a friend of mine,” she said. “Stan, this is Kelly.”

Kelly, a not-unpleasant woman around my age. I did standard transvestite checks — she was clean. It was time to return to flirt mode.

“Hi, Kelly,” I said, shaking her hand. “You go here?”

“Yeah,” she said, smiling as if I had hit some sort of cerebral erogynous zone.

“Damn,” I thought, “I’m good.”

“What’s your major?” I said.

“Film,” she said. She had this sort of lackadaisical about her that usually I find extremely grating, but it was sort of cute. Or possibly I’m just desperate.

“Yeah, me too,” I said. “Screenwriting concentration.”

“Oh,” she said, looking me up and down in exactly the same way I did when I saw this hobo passed out on the sidewalk earlier that day on Diversey. I’m actually used to getting this look when I tell people I’m in the screenwriting program, so it didn’t really bother me. “I’m editing.”

“Ah, right,” I said. “A very important field.” Wow, that was lame.

“I guess,” she muttered.

She was losing interest. I had to get her back. “Have you seen the trailer for that new Tom Cruise movie?”

“Yeah,” she said. This wasn’t helping, but I was building it up. I’d been pitching the concept I blogged about yesterday all day, trying to see if anyone else found it funny. I don’t know why everyone in my class hated it, because everyone I’ve pitched it to since has practically rolled on the floor laughing. Kelly was no exception.

“You’re a riot,” she assessed after hearing the full concept.

I grinned like an idiot. I never have any idea what to say to people when they compliment me. It doesn’t happen often.

“What are you doing later?” she wondered when I decided to stop talking.

“Um,” I said. Should I be honest and say I’m going home, or I should I make up something really glamorous and interesting, or should I say something funny?

I decided to go with funny, since it seemed to be working. “I told a friend of mine I’d help him out with this film shoot,” I said, “so I have to stop at this 24-hour shop on Belmont and pick up some K-Y and about eight dildos.”

“Oh,” she said, tittering with amusement, “sounds…interesting.”

“Yes, he’s like the pornographic David Blaine,” I said.

“Maybe someone should stick him in a box for a couple months,” she zinged. It was a good one, I thought. “Well, listen, my girl is coming by later, and we were gonna go out for coffee. Would you want to go?”

“You…you have a daughter?” I was puzzled. She looked like she was about my age, and if she had a daughter who was old enough to be going out for coffee at —

“No,” she laughed, assuming I was still being hilarious, “my girlfriend.”

Strike. Fucking. Two.

“Well,” I said, “we’ll see.” Although my dreams of romantic conquest were dashed, I didn’t want to rule out coffee. She was a nice girl, so even if she didn’t dig on the Stanbeef (and, really, who does?), I’d hang out with her and her girlfriend. Especially if “coffee” is lesbian code for “able-bodied man willing to partake in hawt threesome axxxion.”

So, I was sorta dejected, but I literally bumped into this really nice guy who was in my screenwriting class in the spring. He wrote this hilarious script that I admired and worshipped, and at the same time, he felt that way about my script. He kept talking it up to the friends he brought with, all of whom were also extremely pleasant. So we sat in a corner together and hung out. We felt sort of ostracized, since we were the only people who weren’t in any way affiliated with the production.

After maybe half an hour, we decided to go and congratulate the professor and leave. But I saw the pretty blonde from my screenwriting class. This cafeteria area is divided into two sections: the cafeteria proper, and then the “Interent café,” which consists of lots o’ computers and several non-computer tables for people to study. That way, when there’s an event like last night’s reception taking up the cafeteria, students can still be in there and have a place to work.

The blonde was working, and she saw me, but I am extremely near-sighted, so I didn’t really recognize her at first. I tried to check her out, because the blurry image I saw was still a pretty blonde, but then suddenly she was waving at me, very excitedly. At that point, I knew who it was, so I waved back dumbly and then was whisked off by my friend to go talk to the professor, which we did.

Was the wave enough? I kept wondering about this. My skills with the opposite sex are not exactly honed at this point, which is why I keep dating friends and ruining everything, but this was a girl with whom I really felt a connection, and who for once seemed to feel something herself. She was often way too excited about my existence for this to be a normal thang.

I decided to go off with my friend and his friends, who were pretty cool. We were gonna go back and hang out at the dorms, but as we hit the door, I realized that probably the best thing to do was not go back with them, but go back and talk to the blonde for awhile. I told my friend about her, and he wished me luck, and we parted ways. I went back into the café and sat down with the blonde.

See, somebody left a random, anonymous comment on this blog the other day saying that it would not be a bad thing to compliment her writing and her screenplay ideas, so that’s immediately what I started in with. I mean, it’s the main thing we’ve bonded about, so it makes sense that I’d ask. As it turned out, she was actually sitting there working on her script. She had her character — her problem was, she didn’t know what to do with him. She was struggling.

Fortunately, I’d been thinking about her script for two weeks. See, I’ve become such a procrastinator that I’ve got to the length of mentally doing other people’s homework, just so I don’t have to do my own. Plus, she’s really hot, so I wanted to help her out if I could.

She was very receptive to my help, and the ideas I came up with actually seemed pretty solid. We talked about it for about half an hour before her brother showed up, and suddenly she had to go immediately. I was sorta bummed, but what are you gonna do? The fortunate thing was that she was insanely excited about talking with me, so we’re gonna meet up again on Tuesday.

I think this might be the start of something. Of course, every time I think that, it explodes in my face like so many trick cigars.

Still, though, I think I have a chance. I was charming and witty and full of good ideas. To paraphrase Rilo Kiley — sometimes when you’re on, you’re really fucking on. Aside from not being physically appealing in any way, I’m everything a woman could want.

After I parted ways with the blonde, I decided to call Lucy back. It was only about 9 o’clock, believe it or not. The thesis film, which screened at 7, was only about 30 minutes long (I thought it was feature length).

“Hey,” she said when she picked up, “he dumped me.”

“Oh my God,” I said. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah, I’ve been expecting it,” she said. “I’m not really upset, but I want to go get a blade.”

“Um,” I said, my disturbed mind starting to crack, “is that some sort of penis euphemism, or are you talking about an actual knife?”

“No,” she said, “a knife. I want to stab him, that fucking bastard. It’s been a really long time since I’ve been dumped.” I hate it when she says shit like that — it makes her sound so arrogant. But it is, technically, true. She usually is the dumper.

“What happened?” I asked, and she told me the whole story, which I didn’t fully understand. She did it in that typical Lucy way, wherein she assumes that we’ve been much more in touch than we actually have, so I know all these little personal snippets that she can gloss over. From what I can gather, it seems like he just got sick of her bullshit and realized that the sex probably wasn’t worth the aggravation.

“So,” she said, “I’m not really upset, so don’t worry, but the girls and I are gonna go get loaded.”

“Great,” I said with obvious faux sincerity, although it was nice to know she wasn’t absolutely crushed by this break-up.

After that, she decided to get going. Apparently it was a race to get to the bars, on the off-chance that Iowa City might run out of alcohol. Of course, having been to Iowa City, maybe that isn’t such an off-chance.

Posted by Stan on October 25, 2003 12:46 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (4)

October 20, 2003

Good Deed

I’d just finished breakfast and started reading when this guy who looked like a lankier version of Jeff Conaway, from the sitcom Taxi, approached me. “Hey, man,” he said in a far-out voice that indicated he was a real artiste, “you wanna help me out on this project for image design?”

“Um,” I responded.

“I have two pictures left on this roll, so all I need to do is just snap off two shots,” he said, “and then I’ll be done. You’ll really save my ass.”

“Sure,” I said. I had about an hour to kill before work started at 11.

“Okay,” Conaway said. “I’ll be back in five minutes. Sit tight, buddy.”

“Hrm,” I thought and continued reading until he returned with a guy named Tim who was in my public speaking class a few semesters ago. All I remembered about him was his confusingly high-pitched voice, his mutton-chop sideburns, and the fact that he was a “straight-edge” who lived in Schaumburg. He was the one who first introduced me to the term “hate-edge,” which I have mocked mercilessly ever since.

As per instructions from Conaway, we went to a little mini-park across the street and took the two shots. The whole thing took about a minute. Tim was wandering off to a class up the street, but I was headed back to the film building, as was Conaway. On the way, we discussed the difficulty of taking a 16-credit-hour course-load when you’re a perfectionist. We agreed that you can take 16 and do everything half-assed, or you can do 12 and get it right.

It made me feel better about not graduating until 2017.

After thanking me profusely, Conaway wandered away, and I went back to my reading. I felt good, having helped out one of my peers in a time of need. This would be a good thing, karmically. So I won’t feel too bad asking people for help in the future.

I also won’t feel bad about telling people who need help to fuck off.

Posted by Stan on October 20, 2003 7:28 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (1)

October 5, 2003

My First Time

My salivating fans know that I’m somewhat of a geek. They also know that I am a master of understatement. With that in mind, over the past several years, I’ve met a lot of people online. I’ve entrenched myself in a virtual world that is very separate from the real world (except for the infamous Jive connection), but at the same time is equally important.

There are some people I know online, people I’ve never met in real life, who I trust more than many of the people I know in real life. Maybe the distance thing is helpful — they aren’t a part of my “real” life, so I can be sure that if I tell them something in confidence, they won’t blab it to everybody. Mostly because there is no “everybody” to whom they can blab.

It’s all strange, though, because at the same time that this personal trust exists, I would desperately fear becoming “real” friends with them. I wouldn’t particularly want to meet them outside of the virtual world, not because I don’t like them, but because of a strange fear that it would ruin everything. Perhaps that’s more of my paranoia getting the better of me, but I just don’t feel comfortable meeting people I know online.

Unless they’re women.

And, see, that’s the trick. I am, by and large, desperate and lonely. When I encounter a woman on the Internet, one I don’t know in real life, I instantly create a fantasy image of who they are — obviously, they become my ideal woman, the one I’ve been waiting to meet and seduce all my life.

Which brings me to a few months ago, shortly before the summer break, when I actually met an online person in real life for the very first time (see, from the title, you probably thought it would be a different first time, huh?).

I’d been subscribed to a particular Internet forum devoted to creative expression. See, I pretend to be a writer, but instead of actually writing stuff, I mostly just troll web forums and newsgroups critiquing others’ work. And strangely, shortly after I subscribed to this forum, a thread popped up suggesting the idea of a creative writing club in the Chicago area.

It was suggested, as it happens, by a woman.

I immediately leaped on the bandwagon, indicating that this was a terrific idea. In fact, it was. Possible romantic liaisons aside, I have a hard time getting legitimate independent criticism of my work, mostly because I have no truly “independent” outlet. Everybody who reads my stuff are friends, and if not friends, well-wishers who are constantly encouraging. While I do want encouragement, I also want harsh, blunt criticism.

I used to have a girl who edited my work. We weren’t really friends — acquaintances, mainly, and she was good at what she did. She understood story structure, character, conflict, et cetera, and she was good for springboarding ideas and developing my various projects.

Then, some really weird shit happened (which is a whole other entry — remind me to write it), and now we don’t acknowledge one another’s existence. And, trust me, it’s better that way. But since then, I’ve never really had anybody who could read, understand, and criticize my work as thoroughly and as engagingly as she did.

Sigh.

So, I thought this would be good for my writing. And possibly good for me, because, OMG, hawt chix0r dead ahead!

We agreed to meet. We actually tried to get several people to join up, but it turned out we were the only two interested. We set a date, time, and place, and I printed out my best example of recent work prior to the meeting.

We met in the early evening, after I got out of class and she got off of work, at a little sandwich shop in the Loop. As a restaurant, the place sucked. Terrible food, terrible coffee. But, because of that, it was virtually empty most of the time. That’s why I suggested we meet there.

For some reason, the upper level (where the seating is) was extremely hot. Like, hot enough that I was sweating as soon as I got up there. This made things uncomfortable at first. Then, things got more uncomfortable: the only person there was a hefty blond girl chugging away at one of the shitty sandwiches.

Was this the girl? She was not the woman of my dreams. Not physically, anyway. I don’t want to sound like one of these asshole men who perpetuates the idea that every woman has to be a stick figure, except with a slight bulge at the waist and an excessive bulge in the general mammary area. Really, that’s not me. As someone who has been thoroughly unattractive for approximately 18 years (I was cute when I was a kid), I know the value of looking for the inner beauty of a person.

So, I didn’t dismiss her completely. Sure, she was Rush Limbaughian in girth, did not wearing particularly flattering clothes for her elephantine physique, and was not really pretty in the face — but maybe she had a personality and intellect that would make all that melt away.

“Are you Stan?” she enquired, just as I was beginning to hope/think that maybe this was the wrong person after all. Her voice was remiscent of fried eggs on a chalkboard.

“Uh, yeah,” I said softly. Possibly, I shouldn’t have said that.

“I’m Emily,” she said. I don’t really remember what her name is, but Emily strikes a chord with me, so let’s go with it.

“I’m Stan,” I said, sitting down across from her.

“Shall we get started?” Seriously, “shall.”

“Okay,” I said, already wanting to turn around and run away. Instead, I handed her my story, and she tossed hers at me.

I started reading silently, wanting to take in what I could on the surface. She immediately whipped out a blue pen and started scrawling all over mine. Hrm.

Her story was pretty painful. Not badly written, but the story — oh, the story! It was a point-of-view exercise on the story of Tristan and Isolde. For those who don’t know the story (or, like me, only know the Wagner opera that takes an assload of liberties), it’s all about a wacky love potion causing somebody to fall in love with the wrong person. So, he gets married but is in love with someone else. So, he goes off and screws around with her, and in the end everybody dies. That’s as brief as I can get.

At any rate, she took it from the point-of-view of Tristan’s wife. It was a somewhat amusing feminist take on the story, but it reeked of cheesiness. I, already knowing that this whole thing was a terrible mistake, decided it would be in my best interest to simply be complimentary, run away, and never come back. It would be pointless to waste my time debating the merits of the story when I didn’t actually care and would most likely never see her again.

But, then, she finished my piece, which was basically a character-sketch of Lucy. Not a very flattering one, but then again, Lucy will never read it. I thought that, while it wasn’t the greatest thing in the history of the universe, it was a pretty decent exercise in writing through a character.

“Your female character is weak,” she said flatly.

Huh. There are only two characters — the girl and then a random guy. The entire thing is from the girl’s point-of-view and, all things considered, I thought she was pretty well-developed, or, if nothing else, was a spot-on study of Lucy. Then again, I’m not a woman. Or, for that matter, a feminist. But it /was Lucy, and Lucy is a pretty strange and unique person. I couldn’t be accused of creating a weak character, because the only thing that’s fictional is the situation I put her in. She couldn’t accuse me of falling back on generalizations or stereotypes.

“I think you spend a lot of time falling back on generalizations and stereotypes,” she elaborated.

Oh.

“Well,” I tried to explain, but she stared at me with a frumpy sort of apathy that bugged me, “it’s a character-study that’s sort of based on a friend of mine.”

“Really?” she asked pointedly, as if, based on this piece, she couldn’t imagine me knowing any actual women on the planet. “How well do you know her?”

“I hate to use the term ‘best friend,’ but…” (Of course, at this point in time, Lucy and I weren’t really entirely on a speaking basis, but she didn’t need to know that. Plus, prior to our lapse in conversation, we were very close.)

Emily said, “Well, she’s just not a very strong character. I mean, she’s completely stereotypical, unless she’s supposed to have really low self-esteem or something…”

Which is funny, because that’s really the whole point of the piece. It’s all about a woman with extremely low self-esteem and the, shall we say, foolhearty things she does as a result. While it’s not explicitly stated because it’s from the point-of-view of the easily duped woman, one can infer that the male character in the story is dishonest and manipulative. He wants to get her into bed, and he knows exactly what to say to accomplish the task (SPOILER: It works).

(Funnily enough, I wrote a “sequel” to it, from the guy’s post-coital point-of-view. My fiction writing professor, for whom I wrote it, has been bugging me to get it to her for nearly a year now. I just ran into her last week, and the first words out of her mouth were, “Stan, I was looking forward to you dropping that story in my box months ago. I’m still waiting.” It’s good I remembered, because now I can print it out and get it to her.)

I thought very condescendingly to myself that I should discount Emily’s entire evaluation of the story because she didn’t “get” it. Usually, it’s very hard for people not to “get” the things I write. The only people who don’t understand them are people who have no sense of humor. Much like this blog, I write in a very frank and turgid style, light on symbol, heavy on scatalogical humor. It’s not hard to follow the story or understand the characters; the only thing somebody might not get are the jokes, but this particular piece was pretty light on humor.

I grimly assessed Emily, my independent critic: she was an idiot.

Still, I threw her a bone and tried to defend my work. “Well, I myself am not a woman, contrary to popular opinion. I can’t say I know exactly what’s going through a woman’s head at any given moment, or ever. But I know this girl pretty well, and I think if nothing else, I understand her.”

“It was a noble effort,” she said patronizingly. I wanted to punch her in the neck, but I have a strict policy of not punching specific body parts if I can’t distinguish them from other parts. “Your male character, on the other hand, was really well thought out.”

This surprised me even more than her saying my female character was stereotypical. The male character was completely undeveloped. He just sort of existed to drive along the barebones plot, so we could get to know more about the female character.

Maybe, I thought, she understood men about as well as I understood women. It was a personality stalemate.

“Well, I’ll definitely keep what you say in mind,” I said, glancing at my watch. We had agreed to meet, and had met, at 5:45. It was now…5:55. “But I have to run.”

“Already?” she asked.

“Uh…yeah,” I replied.

“Well, are we going to meet again?” Emily wondered.

Oh, Jesus. What the hell was I supposed to say to that? Of course we weren’t going to meet again, but I can’t just say that.

Or can I?

“Well,” I said, “I’m not sure if I —”

“How about in two weeks?”

“Yeah, okay.”

Two weeks would give me enough time to move to Peru and manufacture a new identity.

She wrote down the date and time in some sort of day planner, and I was about to leave when she asked, “Where’d you say you live again?”

“Uh…Oak Brook.”

“Oh, okay,” she said. “I live in Antioch.”

Was she trying to start another conversation so I wouldn’t leave?

Instinctively, and rather stupidly, I said, “Antioch? Jesus, that’s a haul.”

“Tell me about it,” she said and forced out a laugh. “I’m actually from Iowa, but I moved here awhile ago.”

She had mental powers. She was playing me, just like the male character in my story, but my stupid conversational skills were jamming the “OH SHIT RUN” signal in my brain.

“Yeah? I went to school in Iowa for a little while.”

And, so, with that, we started an actual conversation. It turns out I wasn’t really giving her enough of a chance. So she didn’t like my writing — so what? As it turned out, after talking to her for awhile, I realized she had possibly the most cloying personality of any human being who ever existed in the universe.

Needless to say, after hearing a hell of a lot about her childhood and her current living situation, politely chuckling at her jokes (which weren’t funny), and also sharing my own brief reminiscences that matched her own, I decided that I must never see this woman again. Ever.

I found that another 20 minutes had gone by, so it was more than enough time — especially since we weren’t even discussing writing anymore — for me to gracefully run the fuck away.

“Okay, I really gotta go,” I said, grabbing my bag and heading for the stairs.

“All right, see you in two weeks,” she said.

I muttered something indistinguishable so I wouldn’t have to lie. An unnecessary gesture, since I had already lied and said I would go. But, come on, lying once is okay, but lying twice about the same thing is just mean.

After that, I just ran away. And I never saw Internet girl again, although I noticed she did post several more times in her thread about the creative writing club.

The gooey moral center of today’s entry is as follows: never, ever meet women you’ve met on the Internet. EVER.

Unless they’re hot.

Posted by Stan on October 5, 2003 3:05 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (2)

August 30, 2003

My Day at Cingular, or: A Confederacy of Dunces

My dad’s corporate cell phone has been taken away because the company got sick of those damn employees using their phones to, you know, talk to people and stuff. Since that happened, my mother has been talking almost daily about switching to Cingular’s family plan. I leaped on that bandwagon, because $10 a month for a phone I’ve actually started using semi-regularly is a lot better than paying $40 a month for a phone I almost never use.

Since we have a Cingular shop in what passes for “downtown” in our li’l suburb, the family decided to trek up there today so we could join my account with my mother’s and then add our dad. It seemed simple enough, until one realizes that we’re dealing with Cingular here. At Cingular, nothing is simple.

I will admit, though, that the clerk who helped us was extremely helpful, thorough, and patient. And hot, although she had a long-term boyfriend, so I decided to not try to move in on that territory. Well, that and the fact that I had absolutely no chance with her to begin with.

Our first caveat: in order to switch to the family plan, we need to have GSM-compatible phones. This means my mother’s ancient phone and my slightly less ancient phone needed to be replaced. “What kind of phones would you want?” the clerk asked.

“What’s cheapest?” my dad asked.

“These Siemens are $10,” she said.

“We’ll take them.”

“But,” she said, soft-selling, “these Motorolas are only $30 after a $50 rebate.”

The Motorolas were nice, and I am a Motorola kinda guy. I insisted on getting the $80 - $50 = $30 phone for myself. I’m glad I did, because the Siemens phones are sort of shitty.

Next, my mother and I had to “conjoin” accounts. Here was the part that still makes no sense to me: the only way to conjoin was to call up Cingular’s customer service. But…wait…I thought this was Cingular’s customer service.

“No,” the clerk said, offering no further explanation.

So, I called up customer service, waited on hold for ten minutes while we all stood around with our thumbs up our asses, only to be told that my mother and I have to go to a store in order to conjoin our accounts.

Hey, wait a second —

“Give me the phone,” the clerk insisted.

I gave her the phone. She bitched at the customer service representative, got as confused as I was, figured things out, and then bitched some more. Then, she hung up and explained the only way for us to conjoin would take at least two billing cycles. Efficiency: Cingular’s number-one priority. Ironically, the company is so inefficient they haven’t gotten around to making themselves efficient. Zing!

I gave up. The only reason we were doing any of that was so I could keep my same, crappy phone number, but how hard would it really be to call up both of my friends and tell them I have a new phone? I told her to just start from scratch, and I’d cancel my current account. She seemed please with this and got started setting me up.

Several decades later, I was out the door with a neat-o, brand-new phone and a lengthy explanation of the benefits of GSM over digital.

This story kind of petered out, didn’t it?

Posted by Stan on August 30, 2003 9:57 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (2)

August 6, 2003

Adult World

The story of my film, for those who didn’t know, is that an insane guy falls in love with a light switch. I decided to incorporate in this film an idea I had in Production I that I was going to do for my two-minute film but decided just to abandon. The story of that film is that a guy is getting ready to go on a date with a girl, so he gets himself off on a blow-up doll…and then gets stuck in it. The reason I never shot that story was that I could never think of a convincing motivation for the guy to not just jerk off. There’s no sense in trundling out an inflatable doll to do the job of a malodorous fist.

That said, I thought it would be amusing if the reason for the main character being sent to an insane asylum had to do with him getting caught with a blow-up doll hanging from his cockadoo. That way, no motivation is really required; he’s just crazy. When I couldn’t think of an ending, Gina one-upped that so that the happy ending involves the light switch transforming into a blow-up doll.

That meant I had to get two blow-up dolls. Which meant I had to go to a porn shop. Which I’ve never done before. And will never do again.

There’s a porn shop near my house. I live basically in a suburb that’s chunked into three sections: the West Side, which is full of newer houses and receives the spillage from the Schaumburgites who can’t quite afford Schaumburg but want to be close to Woodfield Mall; the East Side, which is more blue-collar, with older houses; and the industrial park, which was at the one time and might still be the largest business park in North America.

I live on the east side of the East Side, near the industrial park. The porn shop, Adult World, is actually in the Des Plaines industrial park, which pretty much butts up against ours. It’s about a ten-minute drive from my house. The reason Adult World exists is based solely on coincidence: the city of Chicago, for whatever reason, happens to own that piece of land. Around O’Hare, the city of Chicago has sort of snaky tendrils of ownership all over the place, so for four seconds you’re in, say, Mount Prospect, then suddenly you’re on Chicago property, then you’re back in Mount Prospect. It’s an odd thing.

Nobody in Des Plaines wants Adult World, except for the people who live in the trailer park across the street and probably most of the employees of the industrial park. The city of Chicago doesn’t give enough of a shit to close it down because li’l ol’ Des Plaines whines. I think Chicago has bigger problems, such as fighting with my town’s mayor about O’Hare expansion.

So, there’s Adult World, a blighted zone on Touhy Avenue., with an enormous blue-and-white sign announcing its presence to the world. I’ve passed it every day for the past two years, driving to school, so when I realized I needed to go to a porn shop, Adult World was the first place that popped in my head. It’s open 24 hours, one could make the assumption that it would have two distinctly different blow-up dolls, and it’s right by my house.

Like I said, I’ve never specifically been to a porn shop. I have, however, paid people to go for me. I know a lot of people with very little dignity. I dabbled briefly with the idea of responding to one of the thousands of ads up in the Fiction office to write erotic short stories, and while one could assume my imagination on this particular subject would be more than sufficient, I thought I should at least sample what was out there.

For those who are really wondering, most pornographic literature — not accompanied by photographs — attempts grandiose, bizarre storytelling that mostly consists of really unattractive, oafish guys arbitrarily finding themselves having their cock sucked by two women at the same time. This essentially matches my own personal imaginings of what erotic literature would offer; I didn’t, however, anticipate such a dry, drab non-style. It’s almost Hemingway bad. There aren’t even really any descriptions, except for awkward similes and occasionally confusing sexual imagery. It’s mostly like this:

“Johnny walked down Plymouth Street with an armful of groceries. That’s when Susan approached in her dominatrix outfit. They went back to her place, and she whipped him like a snake in October.”

Drab, boring, and puzzling. I figured I could do it, but I’ve worked myself into a rut of a style, and I don’t think I could match the anti-style even if I tried. So, I gave up and threw out the three novels and two magazines I had made someone buy.

This morning, around 7:30, I drove on over to Adult World. I figured, yeah, it’s the morning, there wouldn’t be (m)any customers, nobody I knew would happen to see me as they drove down Touhy, etc.

I had never actually paid attention to the place before, aside from seeing the sign on a daily basis. It’s a squat, one-story building built on a sort of artificial hill, above the street, most likely so passersby can’t see any of the customers. Also, the windows are all entirely blacked out. The final notable thing was that, even at 7:30 in the morning, most of the parking lot was full.

The first thing I noticed about the place was the smell. It smelled of the seemingly logical combination of rubber, vinegar, Vaseline, and celluloid. It was also cleaner than I would have assumed such a seamy place would be. Clean and brightly lit. Too brightly lit. If I’m in a porn shop, I want stark shadows to dwell in. I don’t want floodlights following my every movement. Of course, it makes sense, because as we all know from True Porn Clerk Stories, places like these get more than a few rogue masturbators. Shadows are bad.

The layout was essentially like this: directly to the right of the door was an extensive, high-walled counter behind which several clerks leered at the women (yes, there were actual, honest-to-god women in the place at 7:30 in the morning). Sprinkled beneath the counter were, seriously, pornographic impulse purchases. You know, small stuff: lube, butt-plugs, mini-dildoes (apparently women do crave the tiny cock; my Ex lied to me about that one), and digest-sized magazines full of women with enormous, fake breasts.

The main part of the store consisted mostly of magazine racks and shelves on which sex toys, articles of clothing, and novelty items were hodge-podged together, seemingly based on the amount of space they took up. They had dildoes in every color of the rainbow, and also in some colors that I don’t think I’ve actually seen in a rainbow. Every size, shape, and function. One of my friends, the Pothead, told me she went to some sex party (that aroused me more than it probably should have) that predominantly featured a specific type of vibrator that, when turned on, spun around like a helicopter. I have no idea how practical that could be to a non-tranny, but she said she bought it because it amused her.

In the back of the store, rows upon rows upon rows of VHS and DVD porno films stretched onward into infinity. Seriously, they seemed to have a library of every single porno movie ever made, and as the cheapness and efficiency of video shooting can attest, there are a lot.

I really wish I had paid more attention to all that was offered. I was mostly trying to get out of the store as quickly as humanly possible while making as little eye contact with anybody as I possibly could. I found the blow-up dolls fairly quickly, on a high shelf that lined the far wall, but they were all over $200. I was not going to spend $200 on a blow-up doll that I’m not even going to have fake sex with.

I couldn’t find any, ahem, less costly dolls, but I knew they had to have them somewhere. Lord knows they had everything else. This meant I had to — shudder — speak with a clerk.

There were three of them. One, the one who helped me, was a soft-spoken Puerto Rican. The other two were average slobs who seemed to enjoy standing behind the Puerto Rican and giggling. I wondered if they were new to the job, or if the novelty of porn shop customers simply never got old (although Ali seems to think it gets pretty old).

I approached the counter and stood in silence. I had absolutely no idea what to say.

The clerk asked me, “Can I help you with something?” Snorting and chuckles from the others.

“Yeah, uh,” I said confidently, “I need, um, an…” I trailed off for a moment, wondering if “blow-up doll” would be offensive to a porn clerk. I immediately came up with a more politically correct term. “I need an artificial companion.”

This term baffled the clerk. “Huh?” he asked politely.

“Blow-up doll,” I corrected myself.

“Oh,” the clerk said with the glee of recognition. “Over in the back, top shelf.”

“Those are too much,” I said. “You don’t have any cheaper ones? Novelty ones, or whatever?”

“Oh, yeah, we got those. You just have to look at the prices on all of them. The cheaper ones are, uh, cheaper.”

“Thanks,” I muttered, frustrated at the prospect of manually examining every single blow-up doll on the long shelf until I found two that were under $30.

On my way back to the shelf, I saw a man at a magazine rack. He was my typical view of a guy who frequents a porn shop. His beady eyes looked glazed and shifty as he examined the stacks, stooped, shoulders hunch. He had a wide, terrifying grin on his face, like he got his sole jollies every day at 7 o’clock when he went to browse the thousands of magazine titles at the porn store. As I passed him, I heard him muttering something in a strange voice that sounded like a Mel Blanc character.

I looked for a few more minutes for blow-up dolls, pulling down ones that were smaller, which I assumed accurately would be cheaper. They can’t fit realistic parts in the smaller boxes. I did end up finding two different dolls, and as it turned out, one was a blond and one was a brunette. They look essentially like the inflatable “auto-pilot” from Airplane!, except with three orifices through which one derives sexual pleasure.

The boxes of both looked suspiciously different from the inflated beauty it contained. Both had women with enormous, silicone breasts that looked almost painful to house on their tiny frames. One actually advertised — and delivered — a promise of “BIG BOOBS!” That one was $10 more than the one that had apparently normal-sized breasts. The cheaper one also didn’t have nipples. Nor did it have an enormous, gaping, pink-red anus. It did, however, have an anal orifice; it was simply a skin-toned hole. A no-frills doll, I guess.

My favorite thing about the blow-up dolls were the use instructions. One had step-by-step instructions on how to insert one’s male genitals into its apparently cumbersome rubber orifices of pleasure. Step one: NO SCISSORS. They also both came with lube. I thought it was ironic; now that I’ve actually seen a cheap blow-up doll in the, ahem, flesh, I realized how easy it probably would be for someone to get his penis stuck in one of those things. If you didn’t lube up, the tight hole would probably trap somebody.

As I was browsing for blow-up dolls, I distinctly heard one of the clerks say, “Hi, Mom!” to a middle-aged, female customer. That almost made me laugh out loud, because it wasn’t a mother politely visiting her son at a horrible job — she was actually an honest, paying customer.

Finally, I found the two dolls that were cheap enough for me. I took them up to the counter and paid the Puerto Rican. As he rang me up, I noticed several overexposed Polaroids of female customers in the store, all of whom had their shirts up around their neck, exposing their small breasts and doughy midsections. I recognized one of the girls from high school, and I wondered if she lived in the trailer park across the street.

When I was finished, and I had my receipt, I ran as quickly as I could to my car, breathing a sigh of relief to be out of there. Honestly, the entire place made me nervous. The atmosphere, the merchandise, the disturbing amount of early-morning customers, and most of all, the smell.

Afterward, I drove home and inflated the dolls. In my car. I have an electric air pump, but it doesn’t have standard A/C adapter — just a car cigarette lighter adapter. So I had to pump them up in the backseat of my car, and then make a mad lineman dash into my garage before any of the neighbors could see me with my new friends.

Then, I shot my film. Jeff was a sport, and assuming everything comes out fine, it should be the first film I’ve made at Columbia that (1) I’m actually genuinely proud of and (2) reflects my personality (some would say “insanity”) and the general tone I like to set in my writing and possibly my films, if I decide to keep making films after I finish school.

Then, I fucked around for several hours, while intermittently trying to get this entry done. And now I finally have. Enjoy, suckers.

Posted by Stan on August 6, 2003 7:03 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (0)

July 26, 2003

Kenosha Kickers

Last night was some major fun! There’s nothing more exciting than Kenosha on a Friday night! Also, I am lying. Sitting around in my underwear, watching While You Were Out, is a more exciting way to spend my Friday night.

I met Gina around 9:30, and we spent about 20 minutes trying to figure out the directions MapQuest gave us before we hit the road. Aside from the 75-cent toll, the drive was pretty smooth. The club we were headed to is in this little downtown promenade area that looks really nice and is fairly well-lit and full of exciting bars, clubs, and cafes. It’s also right on the lake, which would most likely be more exciting if it didn’t look like a black abyss of doom at night.

Gina’s not 21, so she had to introduce herself to the owner so that he’d know not to serve her any liquor. Of course, we were all business, so the rollicking party would have had to wait, anyway.

After the brief, semi-formal introduction to the terrifying Aryan bar owner, we went back to her car to load the camera and then bring all the equipment into the bar and get set up as the band got set up. This is when we ran into our first major caveat: her camera didn’t have a take-up spool.

“Fuck” became the word of the night pretty quickly, as Gina dumped 100 feet of unused film onto her backseat so she could use its spool. So, with that done, we loaded the camera with her other roll of film and started lugging equipment into the bar.

Gina’s original goal, for the express purpose of being very speedy, was to set up a single light, set up the camera, take her shots, and then leave. Unfortunately, she was using ASA 200 film instead of 500. This was a mistake, but our professor apparently told her that 200 film looks better, and it would be “fine” for indoor use. He is a failure.

MAGICAL FILM STUDENT PROTIP: The American Standards Association (ASA, later renamed the American National Standards Institute, or ANSI) film speed measures a film stock’s sensitivity to light. I never really figured out what “speed” refers to, but I think it has something to do with the rate at which emulsion particles bounce around when light is refracted onto their surface. Either that, or it has to do with shutter speed. I really don’t know. As the speed number increases, so does its sensitivity to light. So, for example, a film stock of ASA 500 would be more sensitive to light than a film stock of ASA 40. There’s some sort of logarithmic equation used to figure out the ASA based on aperture settings or something like that, which is why the numbers increase exponentially (i.e., the stocks move up like 100, 125, 160, etc., but there’s no ASA 102 film or ASA 128).

I thought Gina should have been using 500 film, because bars are generally dank and sparsely lit. Granted, the band was on a little stage surrounded by some PAR-8’s, but they barely cast enough light even if you aren’t filming it. Of course, Gina’s no idiot — she’s much smarter than me, which may not be a compliment seeing as balls of lint are usually smarter than me — and she agreed with me, but she took the wholly inaccurate advice of our professor and immediately regretted it when she took light readings.

Essentially, with no light, we got no reading. With one light, it barely hit f1.4. With two lights, it hovered around f2.8, which was slightly more acceptable (because of the nature of the stock, we’re generally shooting for f5.6), so we went with it. Of course, in our effort to not block patrons from watching the band rock out, we stupidly set our lights up next to both of the speakers. I still have a mild ringing in my right ear.

Once we actually started shooting, things went quickly. In fact, very quickly. Gina shot off her entire roll in about six minutes, which seemed to make sense since 100 feet is about three minutes of film. So, we broke everything down and put it back into her car. As I was breaking down the tripod, I accidentally slammed one of the legs into my left ring finger. Since it was a big piece of semi-rusted shit, the leg did not open nearly as easily as it closed, so my finger was trapped for about 30 seconds.

Fortunately, I had work gloves on. If I hadn’t, I think it probably would have at least broken the bone, assuming there was more left than a bloody stump. Right now, my finger is swollen to the size of a small, freakish sausage, and there are tiny cuts all over the tip of my finger from the jagged corrosion on the tripod leg. Fiddle-dee-dee, that will require a tetanus shot.

Here’s the point: SAFETY MUTHAFUCKIN’ FIRST. Always wear work gloves. For serious.

We got all of Gina’s shit back to the car, and then she unloaded the camera…and realized that she was looking at the wrong counter. Instead of looking at the foot counter, she was looking at the frame counter.

“I was wondering,” she said as she severed the film with a razor, “why it was going way past 100.”

“Yeah,” I said, thinking that maybe she is as dumb as I am. Nah, couldn’t be. She just hasn’t used the camera in awhile.

She saved what was left of her roll so she can use it later. Then, she drove back to the mall to pick up my car. On the way, we had a somewhat lengthy discussion that involved all of the following subjects:

• why our professor is an idiot but at the same time smart
• why Rasta gets on my nerves
• how I’m going to fail this class because I am incompetent
• how I’m unnecessarily neurotic
• the various porn shops in the greater Kenosha area (seriously, there are a lot, and Gina has been to all of them and made purchases at most of them)
• the advantages of digital video over actual film
• why cinematographers should probably know how to load the camera, but why it’s unnecessary for a humble, failed screenwriter to know such trivial things (hey, she said it, not me)

Overall, despite our technical bufoonery and occasional outright incompetence, fun times were had by all. Except Gina. And possibly me.

Posted by Stan on July 26, 2003 2:15 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (4)

July 12, 2003

Dunkin’ Donuts — of Terror!

Today, I wandered out to Chicago to help Average on his two-minute film. It was pretty exciting: I stood around holding an old piece of ceiling tile that reflected the light, an integral part of any film shoot. However, I was about an hour late for the following reasons:

1. I stopped at a stop sign near my house, and my rearview mirror fell off. Oops! I’m a bad driver as it is, so the absence of the rearview mirror made things very, very bad, so I went home and pestered my parents to drive me to the train station.
2. The train was fifteen minutes late, and there was a family of Cubs fans (there were roughly 850,000 families of Cubs fans on the train, but I’m noting this one specifically) in my car who had a child who, when any sort of negative response was uttered by his parents, shrieked like the murder victim in a really awful horror movie. And it wasn’t a brief scream — he screamed until he ran out of breath, then he took an amazing gulp of air and screamed some more. It was downright ghoulish.
3. I have no idea how long it takes to get anywhere on the Brown Line, since I hardly ever take it.
4. His apartment is very inconvenient to the train, so I had to walk eight or so blocks once I got off.

I decided that the best way to alleviate these minor inconveniences was to stop at Dunkin’ Donuts and get some coffee.

People who know me well — both of them — know that one of my many weaknesses is Dunkin’ Donuts. Forget Krispy Kreme — Dunkin’ Donuts is where it’s at. Whenever I see that pink and orange, the beacon of hope in an otherwise dreary world, I drop to my knees and thank whatever god was kind enough to invent the donut. This is especially awkward while driving.

Since I took the Metra into the city instead of the CTA, I decided to walk all the way down to the Brown Line station at Adams and Wabash. I am a fat tub of shit, and getting fatter as I gain fifteen pounds every time I enter a Dunkin’ Donuts, so I figured I could use the exercise. Plus, I owe $2.40 to the Dunkin’ Donuts on Jackson, near Franklin, and I’m not going to pay it, so I figured it’d be smart to avoid that particular establishment for awhile.

There is a Dunkin’ Donuts right at Adams and Wabash, which is convenient even though I realize that, at this point in the story, I am sounding like a Dunkin Travelogue. But seriously, it will get good. Or at least I think it will.

After following a trio of extremely wide women who were walking so slowly I think they may have actually been going backwards, I arrived at the Dunkin’ Donuts. I went through the revolving door — and then I realized they were most likely closed, even though the doors were unlocked. The place was empty, the lights were off, and sixty feet away hovered tray upon tray of donuts, their coats of glaze gleaming in the dull gray light of the outdoors.

Jaw agape, wondering if I could possibly get away with hoarding away such a stash of goodies, a heavily accented female voice said, “Hello, sir.”

I looked for the source of the voice and saw a short, plump, Indian woman. She was all frowns, a cigarette perched on her lips, blue-gray smoke curling toward the ceiling. I don’t think she was actually allowed to smoke inside the restaurant, but now was not the time to debate the validity city ordinances. Now was the time for — well, I didn’t actually know what. It seemed like I had stumbled into a palm reader’s hut that just happened to have hundreds of donuts in the back.

The woman wore a Dunkin’ Donuts uniform, so I assumed that she was an employee of some sort. I guess she was on her break but was too lazy to walk the extra four feet to get outside (I can empathize).

“Are you, uh, open?” I asked, somewhat confused by the distinct lack of electricity and personnel.

“What you want?” she asked. I thought at first that she didn’t understand my question, so I repeated it, though I realized almost immediately after that she was asking for my order, not for an explanation of why I was there.

“Uh,” I stammered (I do that when I’m uncomfortable, and I’m uncomfortable a lot), “medium coffee, cr —”

She cut me off shrilly. “Cream and sugar?” she bellowed. It sounded more like “keena zooga.”

“Yes, cream and sugar,” I enthused. Who in his right mind would want black coffee? It tastes even more like monkey ass than coffee with cream and sugar.

She looked to her right, toward the donut cases, and bellowed an incomprehensible name, followed by, “Meebia keena zooga.”

I stared at her, baffled, motionless. Was I supposed to go back there? Did she have some sort of android assistant who understood her puzzling accent? Was she using the powers of telekinesis to pour the coffee and possibly make my head explode?

“I…” I explained.

“You go back now,” she said tersely. “He will finish.”

Who? What the hell was she talking about?

I sauntered toward the counter in the back of the restaurant, somewhat frightened by the rapidly diminishing light. A tall, rail-thin, Indian man was pouring the coffee while staring hostilely at me. I decided that I probably interrupted some sort of hot lovemaking session. Or possibly a fight. I looked around for evidence, possibly some recently snubbed-out candles or a special lovin’ blanket unfurled on the floor behind the counter, but found none.

I didn’t get a good look at the man until he approached the counter with the coffee. It was at that point that I realized he had a shabby, unrealistic glass eye in place of what once was his left eye. Having my own horrible ophthalmological problems, I decided it would be impolite to stare at him, so I instead stared at my feet, which I shuffled quietly as I handed him a five-dollar bill.

The man lifted the unpowered register with such force and bravado, he gave me the impression that he was planning on throwing it at me. I’ve had a lot of things thrown at me in my time, most of them sharp, hard, or in many ways unpleasant, but this would be the first cash register. I wondered if I would get to keep the money it vomited out.

Instead of throwing the cash register, he shoved my five under it and produced the change very rapidly. Apparently he adjusted to cyclopean vision quite nicely.

“Thanks,” I said as he handed me the cup and the change.

He grunted at me and stared me down, single eye blazing with unfettered and unnecessary hatred. I ran away.

As I passed the woman at the front of the restaurant I thanked her, as well. She cracked a small, spat out some tobacco smoke, and said something I didn’t quite understand. I continued to run away.

I got on the train and went to do my duty as a Production II student, holding up light-refracting ceiling tiles for no payment. I get the feeling I’ll be doing an unpaid duty for a lot of people for a long, long time. Maybe I should tone up and get a facelift so I have a chance of selling my body on Lake Street.

Actually, if I went down to 37th and Ashland (note: as far as I know, there is no Dunkin’ Donuts location here), I could probably sell my body as-is. It’s a bright day for my future career as a gigolo. I can’t wait!

Posted by Stan on July 12, 2003 6:59 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (1)

May 14, 2003

Anonymous Letter

The Cheat handed me a CD-R. No case, nothing. Just a cheap, semi-translucent CD with something scrawled on it in black magic marker. He said, “This CD really sucks. You can have it.”

“What is it?” I asked. I thought, considering his taste in music, that maybe I’d actually like it.

“It’s some Indian music,” he responded. “It’s really bad.”

“Indian music? Like Ravi Shankar?”

“No,” he said. “This is much worse.”

Man, The Cheat is pissing me off. After class, he said to me, “Hey, maybe we can hang this weekend.”

“NEVER!” I thought. Instead, I said, “Oh, gee, my sister’s coming into town this weekend.” This is actually true; my sister is coming to town tomorrow, and even though she’s leaving Friday evening to go to Galena or something fucking retarded like that, it’s a good excuse to use.

“Oh,” The Cheat responded, clearly disappointed. “Well, then, we have to next weekend.”

“We’ll see,” I said noncommittally.

“Yeah, it’ll be fun,” he explained with disturbing enthusiasm. “I’ll hook you up, and you can…you know…” He glanced at The Girlfriend and then smiled at me.

“I have to go now,” I said calmly and left the room.

“See you on Monday!” he called after me. I didn’t respond.

Instead of going to politics (which The Cheat was going to miss, too), I went with The Crush and The Workhorse to one of the residence halls. She needed to register for the fall, I needed to straighten out a minor problem, and The Workhorse was bored so he decided he’d go with us and wait around until we were done.

We had lunch afterward, and The Crush and I discussed nightmares that mostly involved sex and violence (or sexual violence). The Workhorse, meanwhile, ate uncomfortably. The Crush’s flirting has increased substantially, and I really wish I could properly read her. She flirts with me like I’m the last man on Earth (and, trust me, I’d have to be), but then she’ll suddenly start talking about her boyfriend and how wonderful he is, or she’ll talk about The Cheat and what a piece of shit he is.

When she started talking about The Cheat today, she devised what was actually a viable solution to our mutual guilt over the Things We Know. See, as I’ve mentioned on several occasions, We Know Things. I hate Knowing Things, so I immediately spread them around so I am not alone in my Knowing Things. But, because of this whole almost-cheating thing, we all feel guilty but don’t really know how to solve our problems satisfactorily.

And then The Crush hit on the perfect plan.

“I should write an anonymous letter,” she suggested. “To The Girlfriend. I could say something like, ‘Hey, I’ve seen you around with The Cheat, and I don’t know if you guys are dating or how serious you are or anything, but I just wanted you to know that I’ve seen him at a lot of parties, hitting on girls. He even hit on me and tried to get my number. I thought you should know.’”

“Holy shit,” I said, “that’s a good idea.” And then we hit on our fundamental logistical problem: it’d be far too obvious if we slipped it into her bag during class, but none of us knew The Girlfriend’s address or had any other contact information. During the project, The Workhorse mainly worked through The Cheat, who passed along all the information to The Girlfriend.

“Well, we could always find out,” The Crush said. “Plus, there are other ways.” This was true. It wasn’t like we were the only people going to the school. We might be able to use our resources, limited though they may be, to find The Girlfriend in a more isolated capacity and then slip her the note.

“I think we should do it,” I said. I really didn’t think we should do it, but The Crush was mildly obsessed with the idea that The Girlfriend should know all. While I sort of agreed, I didn’t really give a shit. Plus, based on what I knew of them and their relationship, I was of the opinion that she already knew and didn’t give a shit. Moreover, I don’t particularly like either of them enough to separate them; they sort of deserve each other.

“Yeah,” The Crush said. She smiled at me awkwardly. I have no idea what the awkward smile meant.

Afterward, The Workhorse departed to make his trek to Union Station. I made up an excuse of something I had to do at the film building, so I could walk The Crush to her class. On the way, we talked about England for some reason. Then, she told me about a girl she saw pulled over yesterday who was apparently so attractive that The Crush herself wanted to get this person’s number.

It’s official: women exist to befuddle me and ruin my life.

Posted by Stan on May 14, 2003 4:46 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (0)

May 8, 2003

In the Words of Ice Cube…

Today was a good day.

Or, more accurately (and surprisingly), it wasn’t a bad day. I wasn’t feeling particularly well, so I thought maybe I’d skip my screenwriting class. After a night that mainly involved me not being able to fall asleep until I figured out my game plan from here until graduation (which is likely to happen sometime before 2017), I assumed that screenwriting would be rotten. I was certainly well enough to go; I just didn’t want to. But I did, and I guess I’m glad I did.

I got off the train, got all coffeed up, and then I decided maybe I would skip class after all. I’d drop my homework in his box and skedaddle before he ever knew I was there. Naturally, as I walked up the pleasant and noisy stretch of Wabash Avenue between Dunkin’ Donuts and the film building, my screenwriting professor emerged from the building, almost as if he had been standing there, waiting for me.

He walked toward me, and I expected an exchange of pleasantries followed by me disappearing. Instead, he rushed toward me looking like he had something to say. I assumed, then, that he was going to bitch at me, half-jokingly, for (1) leaving early last week and then (2) forgetting to e-mail him for the assignment until Wednesday night. He didn’t do that, either. Instead, he shook my hand and said, “Congratulations.”

I accepted this graciously by intoning, “Uh…”

Sometimes, weird things happen to me that make little to no sense. I assumed this sudden and seemingly inappropriate congratulations had something to do with one of those things. Perhaps word was traveling around that, somehow, some of the stuff I’ve been writing leaked out and I was being hailed as an underrated genius by the higher-ups, who were also planning on presenting me with an honorary doctorate and a harem of 30 16-year-old virgins, and I’d no longer have to attend classes.

Or maybe my five-minute Production I film was making the rounds, and the poor match cuts, bad lighting, and high-iris-induced granularity (as a result of using a bad stock for outdoor shooting) had taken the entire college by storm. My distinctive style of rushed incompetence was now being imitated by all of the best and brightest students, and critical analysis students were writing their theses on what can only be called “Stanteurism.”

If that were the case, I decided to think of the ways I could exploit my newfound popularity and success to acquire a harem of 30 16-year-old virgins.

Of course, my rich and generally perverse fantasy life had little to do with the actual reality of the situation, as my screenwriting professor explained.

He said, “You wrote one of the best second drafts I have ever fucking read.”

“Oh,” I said glumly. My dreams of an enormous, penis-shaped bed (complete with full-length ceiling mirror) filled with squirming, nubile women were dashed, but I appreciated the compliment. “Thanks.”

The professor continued, as he attempted in vain to light a cigarette, “I’d like a copy of it.”

“I already gave you a copy,” I said dumbly.

His face screwed up; suddenly, he was as confused as I generally am. Then, he figured it out. “Oh, no,” he said. “I meant a fresh copy, for me to keep. One that doesn’t have my notes written all over it.”

“Oh, right,” I said, and he could tell from my tone that I had absolutely no idea why the hell he wanted a permanent copy. I think he thought that I thought he wanted to steal my idea or something, because he explained himself promptly. Mainly, though, I just thought the script kinda sucked and wondered why he wanted it so badly.

He told me that, eventually (and this seemed far-fetched), he wanted to compile a book of short screenplays from students that would be published, like the Fiction Writing department’s annual book of shitty short stories and poems. Failing that, though, it would always be nice to have spare scripts lying around to use as teaching supplements.

My thoughts on this could be summed up as follows: “Hmm.” Instead of expressing that complex assessment and analysis of the situation verbally, I just said, “I’ll bring you a copy next week.”

“Any time before the end of the semester would be fine,” he said and grinned inhumanly. I sipped my coffee and he blew smoke in my face. Then he introduced me to some other grad student/faculty member he knew. Apparently, my script was good enough for me to be privied to formal introductions to the elite inner circle of decade-long film students.

I guess that makes sense, considering I’m basically on the track toward becoming one of them.

Okay, I’m kidding. Assuming everything goes exactly the way I have planned it on paper*, I should be able to graduate next summer. Or possibly the following fall. If bad comes to worse, however, I probably won’t graduate until the spring of 2005. And if worse comes to worst, I will never get a degree and end up living in the cardboard box of failure.

*It won’t. [Back]

Posted by Stan on May 8, 2003 8:52 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (0)

May 5, 2003

Album

I got out of humanities around 11:50 today, and since my politics class is an arduous 13-foot trek down the hall, I had 40 minutes to kill before it started, and I was far too lazy to do anything kooky like leave the building. Instead, I sat outside my politics classroom and attempted to read. And failed, not because of illiteracy, but because of The Cheat.

As usual, I was reading and attempting to ignore The Cheat and The Girlfriend as they attempted to paw and rub each other as if they had just regained their sense of touch. As they attempted to reenact some sort of fascinating barnyard animal interaction, which basically involved a lot of licking and writhing, The Cheat decided it’d also be fun to engage me in conversation. Fun for him, maybe.*

He said to me, “You know, I should take you out and get you laid this weekend.” It’s sad that I am perceived as a sexual chairty case by somebody who is nearly three years younger than me. Still, since I am at the moment a sexual charity case, maybe I should take what I can get.

The Girlfriend responded, “No, we’re going out to dinner at (insert name of unpronounceable fancy restaurant here) on Saturday.”

“Right,” said The Cheat, and then turned back to me. “How about I take you out and get you laid next weekend.”

“No, no,” The Girlfriend responded. “Why can’t you do it this weekend?”

“Because I’m taking you out Saturday night,” The Cheat responded, as if this was the most obvious thing in the world. “We’ll just have to do it next Saturday, when you’re out of town.” Back to me: “I’ll get ya laid next weekend, huh?”

This was getting steadily worse, so I decided it was time to put down the book and actually step into the conversation. “I really don’t think that’s necessary.”

“Oh,” he said with a noticeable sting od disappointment. His wish to live vicariously through me was being dashed by my stubborn unwillingness to get any number of venereal disease. “Oh, okay, then.”

Suddenly, he was struck with a monstrously important epiphany, one that would forever change the way in which Americans look at their country. “You have to listen to my album,” he explained.

The album, of which The Cheat has spoken quite frequently since the beginning of the semester, was currently being mastered. Supposedly, the mastered EP and the many hundreds of copies they ordered to sell at gigs would be arriving on Wednesday. What he had with him were an LP’s worth of premasters, which he gladly shared with me. He shoved a pair of headphones on my head and hit “play” before I could say, “Kitten rapist.”

To my surprise and disdain, I actually liked what he played for me. I listened to three of the tracks, all instrumental, all pretty fucking good. Sort of like Tool or Korn or System of a Down — you know, that shitty metal that thinks innovation is changing the time signature every two and a half measures? And yet, despite my general loathing of the genre (although I admit I liked Tool’s Undertow album quite a bit), I liked the songs quite a bit.

Perhaps the key to being a shitty metal band who think they play jazz because they occasionally play in 7/8 is to just not sing. I didn’t realize the barking and screaming had such an adverse effect on me, but since there was a noticeable lack of vocals on the tracks I was played, and I liked them a hell of a lot, I think my reasoning is almost logical. But whenever I think that, people usually ask me to turn over my crack pipe to the DEA.

As I listened to the tracks, which were pretty loud but not loud enough, I heard The Cheat and The Girlfriend continue the conversation. Or, more accurately, I listened to The Cheat soliloquize while The Girlfriend stared off into space (possibly thinking about how much better her life would be if she had never met The Cheat). Basically, he talked me into going out with him and getting laid without actually directly addressing me or anyone who isn’t a voice in his head.

“He’s gotta get laid,” The Cheat offered. “It’ll loosen him up a bit. I think he’s hit a dry spell or something. When did he say his last date was? October 30th?** God, he’s gotta get out. Gotta get drunk. Gotta get laid.”

I admired the Budweiser commercial approach to solving my problems. And it’s not that I didn’t want to get laid — though I certainly didn’t want to get drunk — it’s more that I didn’t want to go out carousing with him. Honestly, I don’t like him. On top of not liking him, I see right through his apparent gesture of kindness (and most likely pity), right to the ulterior motive, which is: if he won’t cheat on The Girlfriend, he’ll do the next best thing by enjoying all the grisly details of my sexual encounter with a frizzy-haired girl whose blood-alcohol level is 1.2.

The Cheat seemed determined, and who am I to argue with someone when I am not even a participant in the conversation (except for the fact that I was the subject)? I didn’t argue because I was too busy pretending I couldn’t hear him, but if he tries to make a bigger issue out of it, I will have to lay the verbal smackdown. And he does not want that.

He just doesn’t realize that yet.

*Note that this is a not a denouncement of heavy petting, licking, or any other heat-producing physical contact that is actually quite fun. It’s more a denouncement of doing this in public, two feet away from somebody who is very uncomfortable and possibly waiting for an invitation to join. [Back]

**Yeah, if you can believe it, I actually did reveal this information, while we were working on our project. The Cheat and The Girlfriend insisted on “hooking me up” with several of their homely and possibly lesbian friends. I don’t usually talk about my personal life with people I barely know, but I also don’t lie if I am directly asked, and I was directly asked. I’m just surprised he remembered. [Back]

Posted by Stan on May 5, 2003 11:08 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (1)

May 1, 2003

What a Week I’m Having!

It’s been about a week since my last legitimate update, and many exciting things have happened in the interim. Please note that “exciting” is used here in its false, or ven-faced lie, connotation. What I’m saying is that nothing interesting happened.

I have to backtrack, though, before I get to this week. There’s a lot of stuff I never wrote about because I just didn’t have time, and because my frame of mind last week was entirely different from my frame of mind this week (funny how that happens).

Last Monday – April 21st

Part of my pitiful Monday that I never wrote about was this: a member of my humanities group, who is also in my politics class right after, offered to buy me lunch. He did this because I forgot my wallet, and he was pretty lonely because his girlfriend was out of town. For reasons I am about to explain, I’m going to nickname him The Cheat.

Now, The Cheat is an ADD case who is obsessed with his music-store salesman job, despite the fact that he’s not very good at it, and even more obsessed with women. Now, because I roughly resemble the Elephant Man in appearance and do not regularly shower, I am pretty unscrupulous when it comes to women. I have to be. But even I have a certain set of invisible moral lines that I will not cross, and I immediately lose respect for people who do cross said lines.

The Cheat was in the midst of crossing those lines. Like I said, his girlfriend (I guess I’ll call her The Girlfriend, for lack of a better alias), who is also in our humanities project group, went out of town for about a week. So over the previous weekend, he went to some shitty-sounding party, and he got a girl’s number. He was pretty proud, so I imagine that in his private universe of horror, this was quite an accomplishment.

After pointing out a woman wearing a purple thong and a few other attractive women, he settled on an extremely good-looking blonde who was sitting near us, talking to somebody on a cell phone. After loudly admiring her various and impressive physical attributes, The Cheat decided it was time for me to go and talk to her.

I decided this was a terrible idea. For one thing, The Crush (you know the one) and I were at that point making moon eyes at one another (despite recent developments, we still are; more on that in a bit), and I didn’t want to possibly jeopardize that in favor of randomly wandering up to some stranger who was more than likely talking to her muscular, terrifying boyfriend on that cell phone. For another, I just don’t go up and try to pick up women. Despite my many, many, many, many flaws, I think guys who do stuff like that are embarrassing and sad. I think most of the women they try to pick up, on the off-chance they’re sober enough, think the same thing.

When I explained the latter reason (I was keeping the former mostly to myself), The Cheat decided that it was time for a pep talk. He pulled out a small, mangled piece of paper with a phone number written on it in bubbly, girlish handwriting. He said, “Do you know how I got this phone number?” I didn’t respond, figuring the question was rhetorical; also, I had no interest in continuing the conversation.

The Cheat, who apparently had taken his ritalin that morning, elaborated. “You know I’d never do anything about this. If it weren’t for The Girlfriend, I wouldn’t be who I am today*. But I still had to get this girl’s phone number. To show myself that I still could.” You have to admire the pureness of such backwards logic.

I said, “I don’t really need to show myself anything.” Of course, immediately thereafter I second-guessed that statement, which led to a series of circumstances that, when combined with the rest of the day, led to the worst Monday in recent memory. Maybe I’ll blog the rest of that story another time; it’s irrelevant right now.

The important part is that The Cheat basically spent his weekend trying to pick up women. Whether or not he was serious in such an endeavor doesn’t matter. I don’t really mind a testosterone-soaked evening of carousing in search of the lady who is just drunk enough to talk to me. But it’s different when you in a serious, theoretically committed relationship like theirs. It crosses one of my deadly moral lines and goes straight into Wrongville.

At any rate, that little lunch was followed by the lunch I had on Wednesday with The Crush, in which she went off on what a scumbag The Cheat seemed to be, without even knowing any of the information I had learned during my lunch with him. So, being the gossip and shit-talker that I am, and attempting to impress her with my moral code and hypothetical commitment to an even more hypothetical relationship, I told her everything that I learned.

The Crush was aghast, and suddenly her seemingly unwarranted contempt became vengeful rage.

This Monday – April 28th (finally!)

So on Monday morning (that’s the Monday of this week — wow, back on track!), we began presentations in my humanities class. Our group didn’t present until Wednesday, which was the one day our professor could get the VCR, but we had to suffer through two oral reports. One was done by a pleasant, portly girl who discussed the differences in Renaissance paintings with as little detail or insight as she could possibly muster. The other was done by this piece of shit who loves hearing the sound of his voice, despite the fact that he never has anything worth saying. He droned on for approximately six decades, discussing the wildly uninteresting ways Christianity has been grafted onto other beliefs over the centuries. Wow!

Meanwhile, The Cheat kept going on in his ADD world, cracking terrible jokes that I politely laughed at because he has an irritating habit of repeating his terribly jokes more loudly if nobody laughs. Every time I laughed politely, The Crush would lean over and whisper to me, “He got another girl’s number!” Granted, I agree this is bad, but it was easier to laugh politely than to hear the joke again. But I felt bad about it.

After class, our group ironed out plans to meet and finish our project on Tuesday night. One member, let’s call him the Workhorse since he did pretty much all the work, was pretty down about the whole project, frustrated that it was turning out like shit and he was putting way too much time into it and he hated one of the other members of the group. He was pretty pissed that we even had to meet on Tuesday, but he made all the arrangements. More on that in a little while.

The Cheat invited me out to lunch after class. Our first lunch, last Monday, was pretty irritating in itself, but the fact was, I owed him money and I didn’t have any cash, so he said I could buy him lunch and we’d call it even. In retrospect, I should have hunted down an ATM.

One of the first things he said to me after we sat down was this: “Remember how I told you I got that girl’s number?” How could I forgot? “Yeah, I did it again.” How proud you must be. “Yeah, and I met up with the first girl last Friday.”

Uh-oh. He just crossed another line. Getting two girls’ numbers behind your girlfriend’s back is bad enough; meeting with one of them is on the border of cheating. Maybe it can be considered cheating; just because you don’t actually touch a girl doesn’t mean that meeting them behind your girlfriend’s back with plainly nefarious intentions is hunky-dory. I don’t really know the finer points of cheating, since it’s hard enough for me to get one girl interested in me at one time.

Realizing that we still had another horrible evening to spend together, I decided not to rock the boat. I said as little as possible, and what I did say was humoring his statements and actions.

Then, he started talking to me about The Workhorse. “I think The Workhouse has a thing for my Girlfriend.” Oh God. I am not getting in the middle of this. I had noticed The Workhorse flirting with The Girlfriend, but it didn’t seem particularly serious. Even if it was, I am not getting in the middle of it.

“He hasn’t said anything to me,” I said.

“Yeah, I didn’t think he would. Eh, it doesn’t really matter if he has a thing for her or not, but if he touches her, I’ll kill him.” Good to know. I guess it’s perfectly acceptable for him to go to parties and try to pick up women, but if anybody tries to make a move on his Girlfriend, they deserve death. Seems fair.

“I don’t think he would,” I said.

“Me either. He’s smarter than that.”

One thing you have to realize about The Cheat is that he is painfully unthreatening. He is short, scrawny, and dopey. When he makes statements like these, I find it difficult not to laugh.

After trying to sell me a new soundcard (for retail!), the lunch was over.

Tuesday

I showed up nearly twenty minutes later on Tuesday night. I decided to take a shorter route that, while still shorter, was not short enough. When I arrived at the studio where The Workhouse works (and where we did most of the work on the project), The Workhouse was in a rage. He could not separate The Cheat from The Girlfriend, and because they were together, no work had been done. The Cheat rambled on and on about the poor quality of the audio; The Workhouse didn’t give a shit, because it’s a five-minute video for a gen ed. The audio was good enough. Meanwhile, The Girlfriend stumbled incompetently through her lines. Mostly, though, they just screwed around.

Meanwhile, I’m the in-the-middle guy, whether I want to be or not. The Girlfriend instinctively trusts me for reasons I cannot explain; The Workhorse and I get along pretty well, especially after spending Friday and Saturday nights without The Cheat or The Girlfriend, and we actually got most of the project done in a few hours; and The Cheat takes me into his confidence because I Know Things. I hate Knowing Things.

But when I got there, they pretty much swung into action. I got fairly unpleasant last week when I wanted to just get the goddamn thing done, so they’re kind of afraid of me now. This is a good thing. For lack of anything better, The Workhorse and I decided to write The Girlfriend’s lines onto a roll of paper towels, which The Workhorse would roll up like a TelePrompTer.

Meanwhile, I sat in the control room with The Cheat. He started whispering things to me, such as, “See what a good mood he’s in now that he’s alone with her.” I saw that he was, indeed, in a better mood, but the mood was invariably soured — whether he was alone with her or not — when people started screwing around. He just wanted to get the damn thing done, and I was with him on that.

When The Cheat couldn’t get the audio to work properly, he went out to adjust the boom mic (which for some reason he insisted on using instead of a clip mic), and The Workhorse came into the control room to adjust the audio level. It is difficult to imagine the barrage of obscenities that flowed from his mouth when he realized The Cheat had been trying to control the wrong mic, hence the poor audio quality. It was pretty bad, though.

Things were disintegrating. I hoped the project would at least get nearly finished before things completely dissolved.

We finally shot the stuff with The Girlfriend, did a brief shot with myself and The Cheat, and then we went back to The Workhorse’s house to finish up the video. The Cheat decided it would be in his best interest to play Unreal Tournament on The Workhorse’s laptop, with the sound cranked up, while The Workhorse tried to edit the video. That led to an irritating and nonsensical argument that eventually resulted in many pairs of headphones.

Meanwhile, The Girlfriend decided it was her duty to flirt with me. Great, she’s flirting with me with her boyfriend right there. While The Cheat may not be even remotely threatening or intimidating, I’m usually pretty passive when I feel like the group needs to get along. I didn’t want this to turn out badly. Fortunately, it didn’t (as far as I know).

Later, The Cheat and The Girlfriend got into a fight that led to a lot of tension and awkwardness that, really, The Workhorse and I should not have been privied to. The Cheat mused over how wonderful it would be if The Girlfriend’s dad was beaten to death with a broom. This did not go over well. The Workhorse decided to step up the pace, so we finished shortly thereafter, and I drove home as fast as I possibly could.

Wednesday

The video went over well. Our professor liked it, despite the notable lack of any intellectual content. Fortunately, we followed a really, really awful video that put Oedipus Rex into a Jerry Springer context. The Workhorse said he talked to the people who made it, and they said they shot the whole thing Monday night and edited it Tuesday night, and they were mostly drunk in both cases. It showed.

Because I spent such an enormous amount of time on that fucking project, I only wrote about half of my politics paper. I decided it would be beneficial to cut that class and have lunch with The Crush and The Workhorse. The Workhorse and I got to have an extra-long bitch session without the irritation of getting caught. I was also able to share all the information I had gathered from my lunch with The Cheat on Monday. This further enraged The Crush; The Workhorse just thought it was moronic.

Afterward, I walked The Crush to the film building. We talked about the fun and excitement of academic advisors, early registration, and the school’s leap into the late 20th century by finally embracing online registration. The cool thing about my beautiful school is that it’s so full of shit, it’s obscenely easy to complain about everything, and you can use this as a way to pretend like you have things in common with women. “Gosh, I had that professor. He is such a dick.” It rarely backfires if you know who is who around campus.

I’m slowly digging my way into her life. Next week’s challenge is to get to hang out with me during non-after-class hours (i.e., over the weekend). Since I don’t have this rapely project hanging over my head anymore, I should be able to keep both of my readers updated on my progress with shorter, less boring entries.

Thursday

I decided I wasn’t going to go to screenwriting today because I was extremely afraid of reading my partner’s script. His screenplay details the life of a bug chaser. For those of you who are unaware, bug chasing is a bizarre and terrifying phenomenon in which people (mostly gay men, if I’m not mistaken) seek out HIV+ men so they can get the disease. The HIV+ men who are willing to pass the virus along are known as gift givers.

Needless to say, this script was not wholesome. Not only was it pretty graphic, it was also so melodramatic and terrible that it became unintentionally hilarious. The first time I read it, I almost pissed myself. I uploaded it for my friends at 8-bits, and they all found it equally hilarious.

My job, in reading the script to the class, was to read all the body copy. So I was afraid that I would either laugh uncontrollably and inappropriately while reading it, or I would start vomiting during some of the more gruesome descriptions. So I decided the easiest way to avoid either of these would be to not go to class at all.

But I still had to go downtown. My advisor meeting for registration was today at 4:20, so I figured I’d get there around the same time I usually go to class, pick up a class listing for the fall, and plot out my semester. However, I couldn’t find any class listings, and after awhile I got bored and paranoid, so I just went to class, about half an hour late.

For those of you keeping track, that means I read the script. It went over surprisingly well: nobody laughed. In fact, there was so much tension from the disturbed students that even I couldn’t laugh while reading it. I just sat there with a dopey grin on my face and tried to hide it. I actually did crack up at the “Prepare to kiss your negative status goodbye,” but I was the only one, and I played it off as a nervous titter.

Afterward, when we went around the room giving constructive feedback about the script, the overwhelming majority of the people prefaced it with, “I really liked the story.” This has been fairly uncommon so far in the class. We’re not really allowed to say “I liked it” or “Wow, that sucked.” So that was strange. Also, The Filmmaker said that it was a “harrowing portrait of human depravity.” Yeah, he really talks like that. All the time.

I left almost immediately after that for my brief and surprisingly non-irritating advisor meeting. And then I went home. Which brings us up to now, so I’ll stop talking.

Thanks for putting up with me. Next time, I’ll add MS Paint illustrations to make it more bearable.

*No big loss. [Back]

Posted by Stan on May 1, 2003 7:32 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (1)

February 27, 2003

The Evils of Evilness

Today I got out of class early, and so I sat around Union Station for awhile waiting for a train. That was fun, except for it not being fun at all.

Ever the multitasker, I was able to read about half of Slaughterhouse-Five while I thought about what a shithole my life is. That was almost as much fun as sitting around a train station hoping that fearsome hobos did not attempt to steal my coffee.

I kept hearing station announcements for a train that slithers along the general southwestern part of the country. It passes through Deming, New Mexico, which is where a friend of mine from high school lives now. I wonder how much it’d cost to go out there.

When I got on the train finally, some frightening woman got on with a large black dog. I have an unnatural fear of dogs, especially large ones that aren’t adorable beagles. Also, I am allergic to anything that lives but is incapable of rational thought. So I moved to a different car (and despite the two minutes I was in the same car as the dog, my allergies are still bugging me right now), and then contemplated existence for a little while.

Also, never take an online course. As irritating as I find the 90-minute commute twice daily, the terrible server errors that prevent me from doing homework and the lame-ass forum discussions are about a million times worse. For the record, online courses = bad.

There was something else I thought about rambling about, but I forgot it now, so I’ll take this opportunity to explain how bad people on the train smell. Most of them either smell like McDonald’s french fries, or like Ruffles potato chips, or like some sort of spiced meat-like substance (balogna, or pastrami maybe). Sometimes I wonder if I smell that foul. I wonder if the people next to me are thinking, “Jeez, doesn’t this guy ever take a shower?” (author’s note: I do) while I am thinking the exact same thing about them. That’d be weird.

I need to discuss stuff involving my long-awaited feature film project with Jeff, but I seem to keep missing him. He’s busy this week/month/decade, I guess, because of pledging for his fraternity. I guess I should just e-mail him. Or slit my wrists. Or something.

I started re-reading the last draft of this script I decided I should rewrite. It’s really, really terrible. It has absolutely no focus, the plot meanders, and the bookend “future” sequences make no sense in terms of the meat of the plot. When I finished it two years ago, I thought it was the greatest thing I’d ever written. It’s interesting how time provides clarity.

The final thing: I went to Borders and picked up copies of all the major religious works I could find that would be useful for my novel. This weekend, I’m beginning an exegesis of the King James Bible. I’m still not sure if this is a good thing to do or not. But, hey, it’s something I want to do, so I may as well.

Posted by Stan on February 27, 2003 7:22 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (0)

January 16, 2003

The Protest

So, okay, I was gonna go to Washington this weekend to protest what’s apparently been dubbed the “war on Iraq.” I’m not exactly sure I agree with the chosen preposition, but that wasn’t why I was protesting. At any rate, we had a couple of meetings about it, and everything was going well…until Tuesday night. Teh horrar.

Honestly, my feelings about the war really had little to do with wanting to protest. I am indeed against the potential war, but not really enough to protest it. Mainly, I did it to meet girls. I am a sad, sad man.

Things didn’t work out, though. As it turns out, I’m not likable or charming in any way. I, of course, knew this in advance. I was hoping I’d be able to trick some of the ladies into believing otherwise. I think when I punched the leader of this youth rally team spirit rah-rah organization in the mouth, they officially turned their backs on my sweet lovin’.

The problem: I’m indifferent but opinionated. This is a somewhat deadly combination. Add to it the fact that I’m tactless, loud, and sarcastic — it’s like social life poison. Also, it apparently causes fistfights among political circles.

So we have this meeting. I missed the first one on Sunday because of the Joe Don Baker movie, so the ladies were very insistent that I be at the meeting last night. If I didn’t show, I didn’t go. I love threats that rhyme.

Apparently, very few people showed up to the meeting on Sunday. I think it was because of the short notice (I was e-mailed about it Saturday night, and while I could have gone, I imagine quite a few people had other things already planned). So, as an incentive for people to get all fired up about their apathy, they created the rhyming threat. It was effective, as it got me to go to the meeting.

I had some time to kill. I had a farewell drink with one of my professors and a few of the students at some dive (trust me, Coke tastes better when served in spit-washed glasses), I had dinner, then I sort of wandered around for an hour before the meeting started.

We met in a little pseudo-cafeteria, and the place was brimming with automatous ideology. There was this strange politically charged fervor that I have never before witnessed in the flesh. Honestly, I hate to be a spoil-sport because I know a lot of people in this country get off on things like this, but I thought it was more than a little creepy. I spent most of my time standing in a corner, despite waving, noisy whispering, and occasional nudging to join the few friends I had in this group.

Then this guy starts speaking, and suddenly we turn into the cast of Les Misérables. He’s leading us to some form of revolution. George W. Bush is the new great dictator (thoughts of Charlie Chaplin bouncing a globe off the ceiling immediately entered my mind…) who must be stopped before he destroys peace for the entire world. Though based on his complete incompetence I see Bush as a pawn of his cabinet, I think that point is still somewhat valid.

But he continues: we, in our efforts to save the world, need to protest this war to preserve the freedom of Iraqis.

Huh?! What freedom? Okay, sure, Bush is a horrible, menacing dictator who is destroying our country. But what the hell is Saddam Hussein? He’s not exactly Abe Lincoln. Mainly, my thoughts on the war is that, yeah, Saddam Hussein and his little regime should be probably be dismantled one way or another. My problems with the war — and the reason I am willing to honestly protest it, even if it is just to meet girls — involve the improper motivation for the war and the government using false scare tactics to create support.

They want to fight this war, and they want to win it, because they want oil. Oil is good. Dismantling Saddam’s government is good, because then his people might not try to make us — and others — explode for a few decades. Also, he’s kinda evil. But when they say things like that, it’s all a load of crap. The bottom line: if we seize control of the country, we get all the oil. And oil is good. Or so the oil lobbyists tell the Congressmen as they slip massive wads of cash into their suit pockets.

Ranting aside, I’m still wondering what freedom he’s referring to. And I expressed this sentiment in a statement identical to that. This caused some sort of bizarre, icy silence. I’m not sure if the silence was because I dared to interrupt Jean Valjean up at the podium, or if it was because they secretly knew I was right, but they got so swept up in being complete idiots that they all kinda forgot.

He said, “The freedom to make their own choices. The freedom of democracy.” Again, that gets a big “Huh?” from me. Has he ever heard of this country before? Is he maybe confusing it with Indiana? Sure, they held a free election that was a joke, but they don’t have a whole lot of freedom over there. Also, they get killed a lot by their government for no particular reason.

Most of the people in the room must have been thinking the same thing because the murmuring started. And Jean Valjean knew he was losing them, so he elaborated: “If we go in there and start bombing Iraq, we will take more lives than we’ll save.”

This was a baffling continuation of what he had just said, but it got the audience back on his side. I was the enemy again. So I said loudly, “How do you know that those same lives won’t be taken by the Iraqi government? Just as much death with none of the democracy.”

That’s when the fistfight started. He sashayed toward me in a huff, and everybody started yelling random and incoherent things (I swear I caught something about a rubber duckie and pickle brine). I don’t really know what he planned to do to me, because I was too busy punching him in the mouth. I’m not really strong, and I’ve never really been in a fistfight (unless you count the time in fifth grade when I dropped a guy with an unexpected hit to the gut after pretending to be nice and friendly-like — I stole that one from Cagney), but this guy was a bigger pansy than I am, and my lack of depth perception managed to come in handy: I aimed for the eye, but I got him square in the jaw. It was a nice hit, and my entire arm fucking hurt for an hour. I’m such a wuss.

My memory of the actual physical confrontation is fuzzy and bizarre, like an Oliver Stone movie without the overacting. It’s basically just a haze of people shouting, a guy moving toward me, and me reacting without actually using my brain (which was the damn thing that got me in the trouble in the first place), and then I was outside.

I got one good hit in the mouth, and then I was grabbed from behind by some Middle Eastern-looking dude and a black guy who I think was in my U.S. history class a few semesters ago. Anyway, I basically got booted out of the meeting and out of the cafeteria. I gather they probably won’t welcome me with open arms in the event that I show up on Columbus Drive on Friday.

Hrm, in retrospect, I guess I still haven’t been in a fistfight, per se. Yeah, I hit a guy with my fist (and it was fun, too, until the throbbing set in), but he didn’t hit me back. He was too busy trying to maintain some sort of authority by screaming “GET HIM OUT OF HERE” and pointing furiously at the door while his cronies ejected me.

Lessons learned:

• When invited to cheesy political rallies, DO NOT CONTRADICT THE HEAD SPEAKER
• When attempting to meet women, DO NOT PUNCH THEIR LEADER IN THE MOUTH UNLESS YOU PLAN ON USURPING CONTROL OF HIS HAREM
• Never leave the house under any circumstances.

Overall, it was a productive evening.

Anyway, I guess I should probably throw away the phone numbers I got…

Posted by Stan on January 16, 2003 12:04 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (4)