VISION

I received my paycheck today, via direct deposit. I was astounded to see that I received the same amount as I always do.

As you may or may not know, I was recently suspended from work for two days... and I thought it was without pay.

Either someone in payroll messed up, or my suspension was with pay. That amounts to something more like a vacation, really.

Meanwhile, I haven't been to Craig's List since the G______ slayings, and most likely he's still there, accusing other posters of being me.

And, if he's still visiting my blog, he cannot comment. So...

Kiss My Ass, Bitch...

I hope you're having fun editing a catalog of pulp novels from the old days. Such an established writer as yourself no doubt sees it as a great honor to work on other people's material for practically no money. I am green with envy, because a "failed writer" such as myself can only aspire to such an esteemed position as the one you bragged about in my Comments column some weeks back.

As a writer, it's always been my personal vision to carry out someone else's hack work. I bet you feel like you've "arrived", don't you?


*/*


Speaking of writers, the animation guys and I met with this one dude we met through the trades. He is a stand-up comic and an animator, and he is promoting his own animation pilot. He wants to write for us, because he likes what we have on our hands. I want him to write for us because he used to make a living acting as Groucho Marx at Universal Studios years ago.

Groucho Marx is a personal hero of mine. Quick-witted, droll, gleefully anarchic, the Marx Brothers still are as funny now as they were back then. Groucho was the King Of The One-Liners, the kind of guy who you just couldn't fade. He was too sharp, too fast. His insults are grand because of their deadly accuracy, and his quips consistently fill out the pages of Bartlett's year after year.

A guy who likes Groucho can't be bad at all. In fact, I am instantly suspicious of anyone who doesn't like the Marx Brothers. I can think of nothing more unpatriotic and diabolical as someone who doesn't consider Duck Soup one of the finest comedies ever made.

Groucho's Best Line:

"This is so clear a 4 year old can understand it... go get me a 4 year old, I can't make head or tail of it."

It helps that this writer also knows his way around animation/photography programs and can write jokes for us in a visual manner. It helps us to give the sight gags more power. We vibed with him and paid for his lunch over the weekend, and we even brainstormed an idea with him to put in the next script.

Here's to writing jokes and making people laugh...

*/*


When last I spoke of Mary Jane, I'd found a poem that I'd written about her and posted it here.

No, this is not metaphorical Mary Jane, a stand-in for the chronic. Mary Jane is the fake name of a real girl whom I've been pursuing on-and-off for some time now. It's been a year since I last saw her in the flesh. I was still in the band with Holly Golightly; I hadn't run into Eve and I hadn't even begun the animation with Paulie and Peter. I'd just moved into my new pad, and I was feeling optimistic about the year 2004.

Last year turned out to be as good as I expected, given that I was at an all-time low in years previous. I love looking back at the past 365 days every now and then, to see my progress. When you see how far you've come, especially if it is positive progress, then it's a good feeling to have.

And hearing Mary Jane's voice on my voice mail last night made me smile. Man, she is a cutie, and I'm thinking that, this time around, I'm going to do what I should've done a long time ago: I'm going to tell her that she makes me crazy with her smile, her eyes, her laugh...

Maybe I'll write her a poem, like the one I linked above, but not as vague and artsy. Maybe I'll just write her a straight-out romantic love ode. I mean, I haven't seen her in a year, and who knows what she's doing now or if she's seeing anyone or if she's changed for the worse... but if she's still the same old girl that I had lots of fun with, then I guess I'm going to have to put it all on the line and just tell her that I think she's a hot mamma-jamma.

She should know by now how I feel about her. I'm not in love with her. I'm in lust. But it helps that she and I get along very well, and that we are close enough to consider each other "friends" but not so close that she feels like I'm her brother.

This will be very interesting indeed. I hope she calls me back soon.


*/*


I dropped some bass tracks for Elle last Friday night. Yesterday morning I came into the studio, before work, to finish punching in some bass notes here and there.

Elle's former flame, Bart, the guy who I had a falling-out with, turns out to be quite a producer. He knows his shit. He layed down live drum tracks under Elle's songs, which makes a huge difference. As the bassist, the drums are of the most paramount importance. What I do with my patterns and notes depends squarely upon what the drummer is doing. Bart is good at drums, and he and I got along fine.

There was no personal animosity between us. He admired my ability to cut a bass track in no time at all, taking a maximum of two takes per track. He works with Pro Tools, which makes it all easy, but he's from the old-school of engineers-- he knows analog recorders, he knows how to splice two-inch tape seamlessly, he knows what goes into making a song sound professional.

It's good that we could put aside our differences and work on something outside of the both of us. His studio space is enormous and I felt humble in the recording room. But I rose to the occasion, as I always do, and laid it out as quickly and neatly as possible.

It would've all been done Friday night, but for some reason we thought the bass was going out of tune. We discovered, Monday morning, that it wasn't that the bass was out of tune-- the scratch guitar track was out of tune! Luckily, it's a scratch guitar track, so I played my bass parts, in tune, trying to mentally drown out the dissonance between my bass and the flat chords of the guitar track.

I apologize to Anna, who was visiting me over the weekend and who sat in on my Friday night bass session. She was very patient with me despite the technical difficulties, but I feel bad because the night was almost completely wasted thanks to mine and Bart's lack of sleep and our inability to accurately pinpoint the source of our musical dischord.

Oh well, in the future I will remember to consider such things.


*/*


Excuse the randomness of today's posts. I am all over the place right now. I was at my parents' place over the weekend, helping out with a surprise party that we threw for my stepdad. He has been having trouble adjusting to civilian life after being out in Iraq for a year with the Reserves. We all told him we loved him and partied on until it got late. There was a nice turnout of friends and family. He really appreciated it.

I also have been reading William Blake. I never got too into him, but I was introduced to his writing thanks to his profound influence on The Doors' singer Jim Morrison. I was a big Doors fan as a teen, and I ended up knowing of Blake without having really investigated him.

Later on in life, references to Blake in the works of Aldous Huxley (The Doors Of Perception), Jim Jarmusch (Dead Man) and Thomas Harris (Red Dragon, which I finally finished reading) have intrigued me enough to bone up on his poetry and artwork.

The man was a visionary, way ahead of his time.

That's all I want to be. A visionary. Too lofty an aspiration? Well, if you ask me, expecting to live past another day is just as lofty as wanting to be a visionary. Why should we expect our lives to go on definitely? There is no guarantee of this. There is no contract, no binding agreement that any of us alive on this planet should not go before our time.

To expect that these things will continue to happen, that our days will go on and that they are not numbered so tightly, is akin to hubris. Some would say that expecting to live another day or to become a visionary is like taking one's life for granted.

I say, there's nothing wrong with demanding from life the same energy that you put into it.

Therefore, not only do I expect to wake up the next day, and the day after that, and the day after that, but I also expect to live my life as a visionary, and to become a visionary, and to reveal my visions to the world at large.

And I also expect someone to give me the money to do that. And I also expect that some people will find that arrogant and presumptive. And I also expect that there is no way to predict whether any of this will ever occur or not.

I expect a lot of things.

I hope my expectations are met.

BEWARE THE IDES OF MARCH... and have a nice day!