out of the red and into a new look

although i doubt there is any correlation between the two events, i received a professional haircut today - my first in almost two years - and i got word that i'll be making somewhere in the neighborhood of 5 grand next month. much fucking needed, i say. of course it will probably get cancelled, like the rest of the paying gigs i was booked on this year.

still stuck in tahoe. in my mind. also can read the future. in my mind.

the haircut is an entirely new style for me, the closest to this cut i've ever had was probably when i was about 12. so, i look HOT.

i'm at the edit joint tonight, making a little cash. they're the ones who will be hiring me for this june luck-fest. hopefully i won't just go on a vacation when it's over and spend it all like i usually do. i do miss snowboarding though... ooo, and michelle's gonna be in portland. she's almost a doctor.

my impending shark-death looms dark and oppressive, yet i flutter towards it, mothy (sp?).

my girl roommate thinks my new look will help me get action. i think it won't change anything if i still never leave the apartment except for work and bottled water.

NBA PLAYOFFS UPDATE:

i hate shaquille o'neal, manu ginobli, tim duncan, bill walton, the entire city of san antonio, and myself (for feeling like i have to watch every minute of this nonsense). i don't even like any of the teams very much, just really, really hate the other ones. just like when the nets played the lakers for the title, i vow that if it's san antone/miami beach i won't watch a second.

PITCHING:

VH1 tomorrow. still at it. haven't given up yet. probably should.

going out with henry in the morning to shoot some spec stuff on The Grey Pointed Archer. Selling The Rat. spec. sweet.

run-on to the future

i was just in tahoe last week and i loved it so much that now i wanna just live there again, ungraduate from college, never work in tv, get in shape, snowboard every day, marry the most cutest, mellowest, stoniest mountain girl i can find, have some kids and buy a house with a hot tub, then sell a novel and a screenplay adaptation of the same and then start directing, get a divorce, move to malibu, start dating starlets, and then die, eaten by a shark off the coast of oahu while filming some underwater scenes for a (groundbreaking) dog-food commercial that i have to make because i owe my lawyers a truckload of cash for the defense of a trumped up charge stemming from a beach party i held where this fucking kid named, ironically, henry, claims to have been injured by "casually reckless placement of a lawn ornament resulting in the loss of his eyesight," so my brilliant defense team comes up with the argument that he must've been blind already if he walked into a two-ton african porcupine sculpture and i settle out of court for 2.5, owe my lawyers 7, then the shark gets me so my poor ex-wife is saddled with my debt so she sells the malibu place and then, on the verge of selling our youngest, bonnie, now 1 and a half, to an elderly couple in dallas, she creates a reality series (based on an idea i had originally told her in Reno, at a blackjack table) where the contestants all commit a real crime, the same crime, each in their own style and we watch their trials to see who gets off, and she cashes in huge, which is, i guess, fair, then buys the malibu place back, gets a two-hour special on fox - the climax of which is she blows it up, my house, and i'm still dead from that fucking dog-food spot because of that conniving kid.

jesus please us

so i'm kind of faking quitting smoking. so what?

there's maybe a russian girl in my future, and so many original reality series i can't even comprehend the potential.

my main hope though, is that i do enough work to reasonably bill for enough days to make rent...

pathetic.

oh

and i'm quitting smoking.

bully for me.

i'm the luckiest guy on the where i live.

except all those other guys. they're luckier.

sleep.

good deed

so, yeah it's obvious i styed out too late tonight but let me explain...

i had to move my car at 3am (see here).

that's excuse #1.

then there's how i saved my poor friend from his drug dealer and gave him a place to sleep. his dealer though, he warned me to watch my shit around junkies. NEWS FLASH!

so anyway, i gave a friend a place to sleep, even after he told me he had "no positive prospects for the forseable future" and i told him that he was smart and could certainly make things work out.

also, i started organizing my newly arrived shipments of stuff from tahoe. i love tahoe. i love my stuff. kelly tried to take me home with her tonight and i outright refused. that's my best move of the day.

second best move is making my business contacts. gotta diversify. start throwing parties for money. i weep for the future. but i quoted Raising Arizona in my adoption treatment for showtime, so something's looking at least funny, if not good or profitable...

hating, procrastinating

yeah, both. and for some unknown reason i burpuked about an hour and a half ago. it's ok though, i just swallowed it right back down. i think maybe it happened because i can't fucking handle writing about adoption or dying people any more, especially when i've had a recent taste for the mountain life - so this new taste of responsibility leads directly to the burpuking (there must be a better word for this) incident.

i owe two revised treatments in the morning - adoption and burger eating, the latter i'm saving for desert because it'll be fun, while the former is just work. and i technically don't owe anyone anything, but if i want anyone to owe me money, than i better give them a reason to pay me.

ugh. at least i have all of my recently-retrieved-from-tahoe cds to keep me company. maybe i'll just become a fucking cdj or something. does anyone know any places where people want to hear a bunch of depressing music all night?

ok, back to work.

back in business

getting paid 25 dollars an hour to watch the NBA playoffs.

leather sofa.

plasma screen.

HD.

digitizing UFO and martian videos for the scifi channel. i've taken a very hands-off approach to it, though a hands-on approach to the receptionist is looming.

gave her a rose yesterday. what a gentleman.

what a what? who knows.

skipped a pitch meeting today - feeling thrashed from travel, lack of sleep, some kind of infection maybe... it went well anyway, well enough that i'll have more work to do than i already did which was already too much and none of it is about martians.

i want to go bowling. who's in?

money for nothing

that's what this is supposed to be. i'm back at the edit gig, up-resing (digitizing at a higher resolution) the project that i trained the girl to do a few weeks back. and guess what? someone fucked up. it's either the tape names or the timecode, but somewhere along the line, things went wrong and now i'm pissed because it makes me have to do something for my money. not what this job is all about.

the other job, trying to sell tv shows and movies, that takes work. expected.

we had a meeting this afternoon with the burger wizards from tennessee. they came in thinking there was a 20% chance of going forward with the project, and after meeting with us they were calling it 50/50 and admitting a tendancy towards pessimism. not bad. and now i have to do some work on the proposal. this is fair and reasonable, but having to do work now is not.

oh people, why didn't you just pay me to do the job right in the first place?

there and back

tahoe. again.

and exactly 366 days since i last rode a shredstick (a snowboard), i ride again, in a foot of fresh with a knee of steel, or at least with a knee that has little surgical steel screws in it. i have a knee with steel!

anyway, it worked, as you can probably tell from my exhuberant expression.

i also managed to get most of my shit packed and shipped and it was expensive. i left behind two computers, a vcr, and a stereo system. gifts.

and let's talk about doctors for a second, because i love them. my knee, they say, is a good and strong knee, though not without problems. there's a pop upon full extension, a grinding upon weighted flexion, and a general unattractive hairiness.

and you caught that i said A FOOT OF FRESH SNOW, right? because there was, on may tenth.

i sang some beatles at lakeside karaoke. all the usual suspects were there. from the bedraggled old KJ, to ed, the ladies' man, and JD my erstwhile doorman and driver of the cadillac after i threw up in bushes, the crowd was a tsunami of shock at my reemergence onto the scene, crutchless and long in the hair.

i don't want to single any of my friends out for particular feats of greatness, but ryan did hit me in the shin with a horseshoe.

let's be honest-part 1 (addendum)

i've decided to add a category to these HONEST posts - it's music. like what music is most representative of the job, or what music the job reminds me of, or what music i want to write down when i'm writing about the job even if it has nothing at all to do with the job, like maybe i'm just listening to it and so i write it down/type it up. it might be a song or an album or a band or a genre or any combination of these. we'll just have to see.

so, for those that i've neglected:

paperboy music: appetite for destruction. this is the first cd i own. i have i discman. i listen to it and have little comprehension of w. axle's lyrics. i mean i hear them and i understand the words, but really, mr. brownstone, i'm 8 years old here.

intern at my dad's place music: pop-fucking-punk, and i'm not proud. this is the summer right before i'm in my first band and we are being heavily influenced by the likes of op ivy, bad religion, nofx, and other such acts. in the fall though, and this is what actually makes us make the band for puffy, the bouncing souls release the good the bad and the argyle. they are from new jersey. we are from new jersey. we will cover "i like your mom."

intern at boneau/bryan-brown music: the cast album of rent. these are sorry times.

barista at nova music: ambient shit from somewhere in the southern hemisphere. my boss calls the shots on this one. my choice would be more along the lines of pop-fucking-punk, slightly refined by a couple of years adrift in the world of breakbeats and jungle and deep house and other terrible shit like that.

clerk at video maniacs music: "the toilet song" and "holiday cocktail lounge" off the bouncing souls' self-titled lp. i haven't grown much, musically, in these few years, but the souls begin diversifying a little and my enjoyment of this bodes well for my future. a future that includes drinking at the very cocktail lounge they sing of.

that's that, and now 1998 is bearing down on me hard and fast. expect more coffee jobs and for me to attend college.

at LGA

and guess what, i've got an exit row seat all the way to tahoe.

if i haven't told you already, exit row is like free first class.
second first class.
whatever the fuck, i can cross my legs.

and so i'm on my way to tahoe, all pilled up and drunk for the 5 de mayo, but on time nonetheless.

i've payed the $6.95 for internet access, noted my parking location on my ticket, and but i'm still nearly certain i'll never see my jeep again.

i met a couple of new girls tonight. and then i ended up kissing one i already know and know i shouldn't kiss. i move beyond that though, because mexico is independent and i will soon fly. like a pigeon.

also, i am broke.

with this picture

i've been watching loads of NBA playoffs. my roommates hate me.

they keep running the athlete's foot spot i worked on in october, and every time i see it, i think to myself, "hey, i bought that basketball."

magic johnson is doing these law and order promos where he talks about how no one loves the NBA action as much as he does, "but," he says, "sometimes i miss the dead bodies." the whole thing seems in strangely poor taste to me. maybe it's because of my recent writing work on dying, or maybe it's because he's got the HIV and lots of people die from that shit. i don't know.

also, i can't bring myself to rewrite the dying thing "funny." we need to have a story conference on this one.

so what i'm getting at, in general, is that there's something wrong with this picture. the whole thing.

got drunk last night

it was kind of to celebrate that i'd finished the first draft of the dead people film, but mostly because i could and this cute bartendress was offering up a fine dark rum that, rumor has it, was kept in the bacardi family's private stock for a while. i got home at like 4 something and then henry, my boss, called me at 9 and asked if it was too early and i said yes and he told me to make the dead people thing funnier and i told him to write me an email.

i went back to sleep and then at 9:40 henry called again and said something about one of our comedy shows. i have no idea what it is that he said but i wrote it down, told him to write me an email and turned off my phone. back to sleep. alarm went off at one, turned on phone and went back to sleep. phone again at 2:30 and it was jena from tahoe. i got excited enough to remove my "quack off, i'm sleeping" sleep mask and get out of bed because, in three days... i'm going to tahoe!

IN OTHER NEWS

tax refund checks came in. no other cash in sight.

can't decide what kind of car to rent in tahoe - a town car or a ford escort.

ex-girlfriend kissed me last night while her date was in the bathroom.

maybe a navigator with dvd and playstation?

ABC news says we're running out of soldiers.

i'm a soldier.

"spanking is god's will" according to these people.

i need an intern.

the CHP is in some heavy shit with these freeway shootings, "a fixture of life."

my doctor will be disappointed with my relaxed approach to rehabbing my knee.