inherently different

Archive for August, 2004

I have to admit one of my guilty pleasures lately is watching Animal Planet’s King of the Jungle II. Unlike the first season in which naturalists and animal experts competed, in the second season regular joes get an opportunity to compete for the title of King of the Jungle. The idea set forth for this season is that the contestants are all members of a jungle pride, you know, the name a family group of lions is known by.

In the real world, the leadership of a pride is the strongest member of the pride. If a lion cannot contribute to the health, protection and livelyhood of a pride, that lion is usually kicked out or killed.

In the reality tv world though, it is a bit different and it just pisses me off. The contestants get sentimental, forge friendships, develop emotional alliances, and turn a beautiful survival of the fittest competition into a virtual orgy of touchy feely crap.

From the get go, the contestants refuse to get rid of the weakest members of the pride, choosing instead to send the strongest members of the pride into the “Lion Pit,” or the place where they are either retained as members or sent out of the game. One of the most annoyingly weak players, who in the real world would have been eaten in the first few minutes of introduction into the pride, stayed in the game for WAY TOO long.

If I was in the game, the first two people in the lion’s pit would have been the two weakest members, which coincidently, would have removed 90% of the drama.

I watched a few segments of the VMAs tonight. I can now easily see how, forty or fifty years ago, our parents found rock and roll a bit of a mystery. I look at some of the popular music these days and I’m in awe. Not of their talent, because that is suspect, but of their ridiculous attempts to create music. A few random thoughts:

Lil John isn’t really original. In fact, I’d go out on a limb and say that he’s just a weak imitation of Flavor Flav… he should change his name to Flavor Lite.

Rap artists should be counted among the industries that generate the most jobs. I think every rapper who hits it big employs every fucking moron he has ever come in contact with to help him rap. I think I recognized my pizza delivery guy on stage with the Terror Squad.

The VMAs are less about honoring the best, brightest and beautiful among the musicians who capture our eyes, ears and hearts than they were in the beginning.

Alicia Keys takes pretty heavy doses of prescription drugs. At least that is the only conclusion I can come to after seeing her react (or lack thereof) when they announced her name as the winner of the best r&b video. A team of horny high school football players could have gang raped her and she wouldn’t have noticed.

Overall it’s 60 minutes of my life I’ll never get back.

Some of you who visit regularly might be aware that I’m entering a screenplay competition in just a few days. I’ve worked on this particular script for months and have been getting decent feedback from my regular screenwriting group. Over the next few days, I’ll post sections here as the mood strikes me.

It has been said that the success of a screenplay, in this case success being the actual production of a screenplay, depends on two things. One, an engaging title and two, a decent opening. A script’s opening 10-20 pages should draw you, as the reader, so deeply into the story, that you can’t put it down. If you can get a reader, producer or actor to read your script beyond the first 20 pages, you’re doing pretty good. This is because most first time screenwriters make so many mistakes in format and pacing that readers usually round file their work in less time than it takes to write “FADE IN:” on a blank sheet of paper.

So, without further preamble… The first 15 pages of “The Hard Side of Nothing.”

Anyone want a GMAIL account? I’ve got five to give… anyone, anyone?

I was about sixteen the first time I came face to face with my own mortality. Okay, well maybe it happened before that day, but I’ll be damned if I remember that experience half as well as I remember the day we crashed into another car while getting high.
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My new screenplay is about a week away from completion. I work in an odd way in so much as I actually think of dialog first, then find an appropriate character and use for the dialog. Sometimes the dialog has no place in a dramatic setting. These are some snippets from that wandering dialog (in no particular order):

“This is one of those hairy situations you’re always preparing for. Unfortunately, we’re fresh out of razors.”

“I’m not sure I follow you. In fact, I’m not sure you even have legs to carry you from point A to point B.”

“Yeah, I’m stupid. But I’m smart enough to know that stupid is sometimes the smartest thing you can be!”

“We found ‘im like this, honest! We might have roughed ‘em up a little before we knew he was dead, but pretty much the way we found ‘im!”

Years ago, when I was a young man with a pocketful of dreams and not much else, I had a group of friends I would hang out with. We’re talking back in 85-87ish. At the time, I thought that all of these people were normal. I was living in Ocean Beach which is San Diego’s version of Haight-Ashbury. The entire area is sketch but it has possibly the most consistent break in the area… a place called Sunset Cliffs.

My roommate and best friend at the time, Tracy, was really fun, incredibly spontaneous, but an incredible flake. Her friends were the biggest freaks this side of Barnum & Bailey. She worked as a bartender at a bar and they would all hang out and get free drinks. They would get drunk, pile into a car, drive up to the San Diego Presidio with 25 lb. blocks of ice and slide down the hill. Then they’d call me to bail them out of jail.

I was a peripheral member of the group, my only allegiance was to Tracy. She would often call me to bail her out of one predicament or another. She was my best friend afterall.

She and I were close for about three years, until she decided that we should be more than just friends. I liked her, just not in the way she wanted me to. Which is really interesting because it seems more than a few of my relationships end that way.

We eventually got kicked out of our apartment because how sketchy our guests were. I was ok with losing the apartment because I was tired of having to kick homeless people out of my car every few days.

Tracy and I remained friends for another year or two, but we slowly drifted apart. She got married a few years after that, had a kid, etc. Of all the people who have wandered in and out of my life, I think she’s the only one I regret losing touch with.

“How Deep Is Your Love?” – The Bee Gees

There comes a time in every new relationship when you take stock. For women, it’s usually after the first or second date. They talk to their buffalo-assed girlfriends and use a complicated math formula similar to the one used by physicists to measure the atomic weight of a black hole.

Before you think me a misogynist, I should say I have a great respect for the intellect of women. The thing is, a group of women together tends to bring out the worst in them as individuals. Unfortunately for me, Dana’s friends were a group of women with the collective IQ of a box of Krispy Kremes. That was bad enough, and bode ill for any relationship I could have with Dana, but lest you think I was under the misconception that my friends were rocket scientist, and in an effort to offer full disclosure, my friends are considered by many to be a compelling argument for extinction of the species.

My buddies are good guys, don’t get me wrong. The thing of it is that they aren’t really known for deep thoughts, at least not publically. They have priorities and those priorities tend to influence their interest in any given subject.

“So, was she good in the sack?”

That’s the guys main criteria. I’d be lying if that was the worst part. The worst part is that most guys would still take a bad lay from an attractive woman than a great lay from an ugly one. The reason can be found in the figurative reality. You can easily make your friends believe an attractive woman is a good lay, but there is no way you can convince them that a woman who isn’t attractive was capable of making you blow your baby batter across the room like Peter North getting his prostate milked.

The motivation to enter mutually exclusive relationships are quite different for men than they are for women. For women it is the first step toward a safe, happy, nest to raise young and waddle happily toward the golden years. For men the allure of a mutually exclusive relationship is getting laid in the next 20 minutes and anything beyond that is too complicated to bother thinking about. The fact that the two goals are diametrically opposed tends to get lost on both parties. I mean, women give it up to catch a husband for long term happiness and men try to get women to give it up for short term relief.

If I said sex with Dana was unsatisfying, none of my friends would believe me. She had the kind of physical attributes that clouded a man’s mind, not completely unlike the the 40s radio serial hero, The Shadow. I once spent an afternoon at a pub listening to her ex-boyfriend explain why he sold his grandmother’s priceless engagement ring to pay for two tickets for Dana to see The Boss in New Jersey. The fact that Dana took her best friend instead of the guy who just sold the family jewels for the tickets was not lost on me. Personally, I wouldn’t sell my grandmother’s used underwear to see Springsteen, but that’s me. Clearly this guy had issues, but would I be able to resist whatever full-court press she’d throw at me when the time came?

I recall spending a month’s salary on a trip to Fiji and any legs I had to stand on in this argument are broken like the promises i constantly made to my bookie. If getting what she wanted was relatively within reason, all it took was three minutes of her trying on bikinis at Wet Seal for me to realize I couldn’t fight someone sporting 44 caliber tits. The problem was in that figurative reality I was talking about. I didn’t much care that she was possibly the worse lay I’d had since I figured out what to do with a penis. What mattered was all my friends were envious of me and they believed the sex was as awe inspiring as her tits.

Of course, truth be told, Dana wasn’t the first human accessory I invested in. Looking back at the car wreck that was my romantic life brought to mind one mistake after another. The idea that women could cause one man so much misery might explain why some men begin finding other men attractive. Of course, switching teams isn’t a remedy for male stupidity. I have gay friends who explain that the same issues that permeate heterosexual relationships plague homosexual ones as well. The only difference is that you can beat the shit out of your gay male lover and have amazing makeup sex, where attempting the same thing with the opposite sex will yield an indictment for battery and rape. Solving male/female relationship problems requires a more deft hand… one that apparently socially crippled people such as myself don’t possess.

The question is how to change? Finding better partners is one way of having better relationships. Are these women in bars? Libraries? Churches? Hell, one of my friends met the love of his life in a laundromat. Of course, that particular relationship is more rinse cycle than fluff and fold, but I digress.

At this point in my reverie, just minutes after watching another girlfriend abscond to greener pastures, I made a commitment to change my luck with the opposite sex and to do that I would need to take drastic action.

“You got to let love rule!” Lenny Kravitz
In a short story, I’d be hit with an epiphany and admit all my mistakes while watching Dana’s taxi fight the traffic on the way out of my life. Unfortunately, man is imperfect and it takes time — sometimes weeks, sometimes months — before we’re ready to admit we’ve done anything wrong. Philosophers have written tomes exploring the nature of man and his inability to get it right no matter how many times he repeats his mistakes. I’d like to go on record as saying that I am not a great philosopher. I’m more like Forrest Gump. When I’m hungry, I eat. When I’m sleepy, I sleep. When faced with incontrovertible proof that I’m a jackass, I point fingers at everyone and everything within a zip code of the problem. If I had more friends, I’d borrow their fingers and point them too. Of course, I’ve known for years why I am the way I am.

When I was born, my mother was still reasonably interested in being a mother. Until I was five, she did all the necessary things mothers do in the pursuit of raising a child. I was changed, fed, and protected from strangers. At five years old, you don’t have the gift of experience and I believed my mother was among the best at what she did. Of course, as time progressed and my younger brother was born, I was relegated to the back burner and my reign as the undisputed favorite was over. I was a hasbeen at the tender age of 5.
Love is the oldest motivator in existence. Seriously. Who can possibly say with any real certainty that a shortage of females wasn’t what pushed the first creature up from the depths of the sea onto land. Love is an instinct that cannot be denied. It rules all of us whether we’re willing to admit it or not. Everything we do is done in the name of love or in the pursuit of it. If not for this primordial instinct to love, the species would die off. Simply put, without a piece of ass dangling seductively before our eyes like a carrot before a donkey, humans would have little motivation to succeed.

I am human. I know this because the moment I discovered girls I realized that unlike many of my other hobbies, this one required some considerable investment. I got a job to pay for my pursuit of excellence. After I realized that my earnings were falling miserably short of the necessary funds required to pursue the bombshells that most often caught my eye, I decided that college was in my immediate future. With a college degree in hand better salaries were guaranteed and conversely, better women. I blame this error in judgement on inexperience and raging hormones, the combination that is the bane of youth. My father, much later in life, once said, “The cheaper the woman, the higher the price!” What I wouldn’t give to have learned that much sooner.

Women, for their part, have high expectations and push their suitors to considerable lengths to prove their worth and commitment. This is the modern equivalent to natural selection. Women choose the man most likely to provide for them and their offspring. While prehistoric man was expected to drop a mammoth with a blow gun, modern man is asked to support a wife, three kids, a house, two cars, any number of pets, after school programs, sports teams and still have enough energy to bang his wife like a six inch spike through a two by four. Millions of men do this everyday! Is it any wonder that males live seven years less than females? Women may own original sin, but men are still paying the bill.
There is a group of women I like to call The Cellulite Militia and their queen, Oprah Winfrey, once suggested, “You’ve got to have a J-O-B, if you wanna be with me!” Somehow that became the rallying cry for these women to expect their prospective mates to shower them with more than an occasional dinner at the Golden Arches. While some women chose paths of education and professional careers in order to do for themselves, the Cellulite Militia said, “Let a man do it!”

Lest you think once again that I’m a bitter, spitefull man, let me say that I am not without fault here. I was raised by a man who believed women should be placed on pedestals at least as high as your head. The fact that this is the perfect height from which to kick us in the teeth when the mood strikes is a happy accident women have taken advantage of for years. I have placed more than my fair share of women in places of high regard. I’ve wined, dined and accepted behavior from them that would make sailors blush. I freely changed my initials to ATM in order to keep them happy.

Dana was the latest in a long line of women who benefitted from my upbringing. As far as Dana was concerned, our regular pizza guy and I were the same since “who” we were and “what” we stood for were less important than what we could deliver and how quickly we could do it. The real sad part of this arrangement is that unlike the pizza delivery guy, I wasn’t getting tips.

As Dana’s taxi disappeared over the hill, I wasn’t too upset since I knew that she was also disappearing from my life.

TO BE CONTINUED…

I’m thinking of selling out. Putting ads on my site might be a quick and easy way of making the site pay for itself. Not that I’m in a position where it is mandatory that I do so, but having it and not needing it is always preferable to needing it and not having it.

So, ads. There are choices out there when you make the decision to put ads on your site I am discovering. Aside from the big three, there are also others (who probably point people to their site which in turn probably points to one of the big three. It is all about keywords and click through I’m discovering.

Pennies a day. That’s what I can look forward to but, say .50 a day is $3.50 per week. Over 52 weeks, thats $182 a year. My hosting fees are only $69 a year. I’ve just pocketed $113 without really doing anything at all.

Of course, if traffic increases and click throughs on my ads increases, then the possibility of making more also increases. The question is, how to generate the additional traffic?