Awkwardly Social

Boo.  I recently have become so curmudgeonly that I hate Halloween.  I absolutely despise it.  Louie’s going to the gayest Halloween celebration in the land tonight (it’s actually gay, I’m not using the word ‘gay’ in the pejorative any more) in West Hollywood and while he asked me to go along, I just can’t really imagine how I would have a good time.  When a good time cannot be imagined, it is time to respectfully decline the invitation.  I’ve learned my lesson on that one.  Actually, I’ve learned that lesson several times over, was sent down to the remedial class then finally graduated…

Being chided for not wearing a costume, being jostled when my hormones are this out of wack and being vomited on by frat boys who might be more than a little bi-curious but are afraid to tell their ‘brothers’ is, surprisingly enough, not my idea of a good time.  So all you crazy kids who still have fun playing dress up and getting drunk on a weekday have a great time.  I’ll be at home with the lights out hiding from the trick-or-treaters and thanking the heavens for Thanksgiving being right around the corner. 

My sale turkey lunch meat kind of smelled and tasted like garbage.  My outline continues to not be a complete outline.  My car doesn’t really want much more out of this life and is thinking about retiring to Palm Springs.  I think I missed some sort of life looking glass that I could have fallen through and taken a much easier and more fruitful path.  A path that had "this or that, either one is good" decisions not, "there is no answer and you’ll choose wrong anyway" decisions.

I kind of hate it here right now.  I sort of want to tell LA to go fuck itself.  It’s not like it’s going anywhere.  It’ll forget all this even happened in the morning, it’s so drunk and stoned and coked up all at once at the moment.  LA is totally River Phoenix outside of The Viper Room, except LA doesn’t die at the end of all of this.  LA gets up and walks across the street and starts hitting on a 19 year old who will possibly go down on it if given the right combination of booze and finger banging.  So listen, LA, I don’t need this right now, you fucking whore, let’s act like adults and get through this without any screaming or tears or mention of your stupid penis, ok?

GAH.

First of, I don’t know how to spell anymore.  I’ve given up trying to figure out if that’s because I killed all the ’spelling rules’ brain cells or because I have Alzheimer’s Disease.  I’ve also given up worrying about misspelled words.  Like "misspelled" I should check and see if that extra ’s’ is necessary, but right now I’m a little too interested just getting this on the page and hitting publish before I feel so guilty that I’m not working on the cursed outline that I have a little panic attack and die.  fuck.

Last night as we were driving to dinner Louie mentioned that Rachel McAdams (who I have a big time girl crush on even though she was in the horrid Red Eye) is slated to star in the film adaptation of The Time Traveler’s Wife.  I think it’s pretty well known that The Time Traveler’s Wife is one of my favorite books.  I’ve given copies of it to almost every single person I know.  (Or, I’ve intended to and then spilled coffee on a whole stack of books and had to donate them to the library.)  So hearing she was starring kind of put me on edge.  I love the book, I love her, too much, overload, disk error, blue screen of death.  I think she’s a fine actress, but I see the wife in the book as someone a little more… Kate Winslet.  It’s a battle of my girl crushes in my brain and the only way out of it was to think who could star opposite as the Time Traveler himself.  I first said Jake Gyllenhaal but I think that was just my lusty loins talking, and Louie talked me out of it.  Then I pondered his suggestion of Peter Sarsgaard and I just don’t think he’s got the sexual charisma to pull it off (aw.. poor unsexy Sarsgaard).  I finally came up with Jeremy Sisto, and Louie said he’s not a big enough star.  Oh, he’s big enough in my head… (ew.  gross, sorry, loins again…)  Louie’s probably right, but there is something so dark and brooding about the Time Traveler in the book that I think to cast someone stupid like Zach Braff (who I like well enough, but come on…) or Leo DiCaprio just makes me sad for the movie that plays in my head when I read that book.

Here’s the A List (ish some of these guys aren’t actually A list but are seen as bankable) pool of young men they have to draw from:
Ashton Kutcher (kill me now)
Jude Law (too pretty)
Orlando Bloom (see above, also cannot really act… I think)
Heath Ledger (interesting, gives me pause)
Joaquin Phoenix (too old and possibly irritating)
Josh Hartnett (he’s actually not bankable, so why does he keep getting roles?  why?)
Tobey Maguire (seriously, no)
Matt Damon (I think too old, but actually not a bad fit)

That’s all I have time for, and I know I’m missing some obvious ones, but my guilt has wrapped itself around my fingers and is making me hit publish.

First, happy birthday to the lou.

Second, I must tell you that if there is one more time where someone tells me that someone is irritated about something I wrote on the blog (whether or not it turns out to be true) I might have to slit my wrists from the sheer agony I feel about the thing I might have unintentionally done.  I’m trying to be vague.  No wrists were slit, but I was feeling like such a loser for, yet again, possibly offending someone.  Gah.  The sad thing is, it wasn’t the thing I did, it was the fact that the nice people that I did it to were going to hate me forever and I was going to end up like those old people who don’t understand why they don’t have any friends anymore and why no one comes to visit them in the nursing home that their fool children sold them to so they could get the farm.

Man, speaking of crazy old people, my grandma used to take us to visit this woman who would, instead of enjoying our delightful (read: forced, unhappy, seriously pissed off) kid selves having so generously come to visit her, would rant and rave to my grandma about how one day she would be trapped in a nursing home while her kids stole all her money.  It was… not the way I wanted to spend my summer vacation… but also, still burned in my brain.  If my parents had money, they’d totally be locked up now so I could steal their riches! 

I’ve been worrying lately.  Just a general worry, here and there.  Then good people like Schmutzie get scary (but also non-specific) news and all my friends are just kind of sick and tired of trying all the time.  (Dear god, I am sick of ‘trying’.  Just let me sit here and not try.  Amen.)  and it’s all just getting to be too much.  I’m exhausted.

Oh, and to keep things exciting, I’m training for the marathon again.  Go ahead.  Laugh.  But if a very slow zombie tries to chase you for 26.2 miles, you’ll wish you had trained just like I did. 

I don’t know, I started training again.  I’m on track to do the LA Marathon again next year.  It makes me really tired to think about, but it also gives me something productive to do, and that’s important to me.

It’s getting hard for me to come to this space and be intelligent and amusing, two things I’m always striving for.  Hopefully the outline will be done soon and I can come back here and get back into the swing of things.

Via Universal Donor.

They put a fucking shrimp on a fucking treadmill, and I might never eat again.

(They make you watch a lame History Channel promo before.  Just wait.  Just fucking wait and behold the grossocity.)

I can’t remember which Grandpa used to call Tavia and me squirrelly when we started acting up.  I kind of hope it wasn’t Grandpa Blaich.  He would trap the squirrels in the back yard with a live trap then drown them in the work sink in the basement.  The work sink we washed our hair in.  I don’t know why the squirrels bothered him so much.  They were just living.

I’ve been feeling squirrelly lately, dashing here, darting there, staring at things for a little too long, then running up a tree and hiding while chattering down at the dog below.  (I guess I don’t have to tell you I’m being metaphorical.  Or do I?  I haven’t literally been up in any trees.  Or chattered at dogs.  Lately.)  Usually I get squirrelly when there’s a deadline or a change coming up or nothing of quality has escaped my brain and made it to the page and I just end up crawling deeper into my brain and canceling plans, staying inside so as to avoid running into anyone and it becomes kind of a vicious hermitty cycle. 

Last night as I was trying to picture each of the grandpas calling us squirrelly and how each one would have phrased it (I still can’t figure it out… it’s lost) I bumped into something in my brain that might be an actual real and true break through with a script that I’ve been kicking around for 6 years.  It’s a page one re-write, but it kind of was anyway so this is really no skin off my back.

I’m imposing some rules upon myself for the next couple of weeks in the hopes that it will help me finish this new outline, so I might be here less.  Just to warn you, I’m hoping all the good stuff goes into the screenplay.  Get ready for the suck! 

It’s not you, it’s me.  I just need to accomplish something this year.  Something that isn’t instantly read and judged and commented on.  That’s the hardest part, I think.

I think the dead brother and the mysterious woman that Wilhelmina is plotting with are one and the same. 

When I was a kid, before our subdivision got built up with fences and houses and paved roads, there was a herd of free range cattle that would hang out on our front lawn, shit on our front step and occasionally put their head in my window.  Being an enthusiatic lover of animals (that sounds dirty…) I was always thrilled to come home and see some beast on the front stoop chilling like it belonged there.  I think the cows were strangely soothed by the presence of a structure amongst all the scrub brush and barbed wire that they were used to.  Either that or they really wanted to piss us off by shitting on our fresh slab of concrete.  One can never tell with animals.

Louie posted a story this morning with his daily photo about being awakened by someone screaming outside.  I, too, managed to encorporate the crazed shouting of a drunken lunatic into my already perplexing dream about sounds I had stored in my ProTools session.  Finally I woke up and listened more closely, and indeed we did have a person who decided that being dumped off on our street was an indignity he would not bear, an indignity that he would share with the entire neighborhood, an indignity that ended in him wondering where he was in relation to his (fucking) car.  My sincere hope was that, while I really wanted him to shout on a street more suited to shouting like Hyperion or say, Riverside, he was really quite far from his car, and that he wouldn’t be driving anywhere anytime soon.  Drunk, full of rage and yelly make for a bad combination when getting behind the wheel.

Thankfully we live on the second floor so there was no possibility of him popping his head into my window, and I am equally thankful that he didn’t take a shit on our front porch.  I do have a sneaking suspicion that there might have been an angry urination in our front yard.  I’m only guessing that because there was a peculiarly long pause (where I imagine he was concentrating on not pissing on himself) before he started the caterwauling up again.

I stayed home from work today.  I was sick all night last night and had to sleep on the couch.  Louie didn’t ask me to sleep on the couch, I did it voluntarily.  Sometimes it’s just too much to have someone laying next to me in bed, blissfully unaware that I cannot sleep.  It makes me angry that they can just lay there and breath.  Next to me.  It’s not like I can ask him to wake up and stop breathing, because, while I am crazier than you thought, I do understand how the human body works.  Breathing is required, sometimes I just hate hearing it.

I know I’m really deep in the weeds of crazytown when I can hear Louie chewing and he’s clanking his spoon against his teeth and slurping and smacking it in the bowl and he can still somehow hear the television when all I can hear is the throbbing in my brain from the anger that his chewing is causing me.  I sometimes have to leave the room until he finishes eating.  Yeah, I get that stirred up inside, I can’t think it makes me so mad.  (Punch myself in the leg mad, cut my eyes out with scissors mad.)  I think this is why some people need to be institutionalized, because the humans around them are completely unaware of the sounds they are making that are making the rare individuals that have to live with them want to scrape their faces off with sandpaper so that they can’t hear the spoon.  clank.  against. their.  god. forsaken. teeth.

Also I haven’t left the house today or showered, so the crazy is full blown.  I’m not in remission at the moment, I’ve relapsed.  someone send ear plugs.