ham fisted theatrics

noreply@blogger.com (DC) — Fri, 13 Jun 2003 11:01:00 +0000

IT LIVES.

Please update your links accordingly, all three of you.

noreply@blogger.com (DC) — Thu, 12 Jun 2003 07:55:00 +0000

Moral dillema.

The new site is up and running thanks to Dean Esmay, but don't look at it yet, ain't shit to see. I can't decide whether I should go all-out with a new template, or stick with the old standard. Since it's on MovableType, though, and I don't know anything but the basest of HTML, I don't really know how to do either. Should be interesting.

noreply@blogger.com (DC) — Tue, 10 Jun 2003 10:09:00 +0000

Pretty much everyone’s parents are divorced, it seems like, and like most problems it’s only going to get worse. I imagine my son coming home from his first day of school twenty years from now telling me about how they all had to share an interesting fact about themselves and one kid stood up and said his original parents were still married, and everybody was a shocked sort of quiet, and nobody talked to him for the rest of that all-important day, and I imagine telling his mother about this later that night on a long-distance call to Bermuda, where she’s having her honeymoon with her new husband Ricardo.

Since it’s the future, I will be able to smell how it smells on their honeymoon in Bermuda. Every movie portrays the future as full of holographic video-phones, but the movies’ vision of the future has never, ever come to pass. Which is why there will be smell-o-phones, not holo-phones. The home office where I ply my futuristic trade will suddenly fill with the scent of tanning oil and sea salt while I tell her the story of the outcast in our son’s class.

Halfway through the conversation my son will be on his way to get a glass of water and hear his mother’s voice through my office door, so he’ll knock softly on the door and of course I’ll let him in. She’ll say how much she misses him and he’ll say much the same thing, and she’ll ask how school went today and he’ll say good but he can’t wait for summer, because according to the terms of our divorce she’ll spend summers with him and right now it is very much winter where I live when I’m thirty-five.

Phones will have changed greatly, but guys named Ricardo won’t, he will be taller than me and more rippling with muscularity and vaguely Latino, and I’ll hear him enter the room in Bermuda as soon as my son leaves the room in America. I’ll have met him first at our Christmas party a couple years before this conversation, him being my wife’s personal trainer at the time. At the party, shaking his hand, I won’t have expected our statuses relative to the mother of my child to someday change this much. But maybe I should, it’s the future, and you will have been married to just about everyone by the time you hit the grave.

She will get up to help Ricardo with suitcases, and her head will bob towards the table with the phone receiver as she rises and sensitive futuristic instrument that it is, just for one second in my office a thousand miles away I will smell her hair.

We will exchange pleasant goodbyes, and I will hang up the phone, stand up, and go and clean the house, top to bottom, even at 11:45 at night, which is what forty-year old me does when he can feel his heart rebreaking.

noreply@blogger.com (DC) — Mon, 09 Jun 2003 08:50:00 +0000

It was four AM, and if that Dashboard Confessional guy would've been there, I would've shot him through his goddamn heart. Through his guitar, into his ribcage with the more shotgun pellets the better. But he wasn't there, his music was playing loudly from an upstairs bedroom while I was downstairs on a leather couch trying fitfully to Sleep It Off. At first I'd had a blanket and a pillow, but Alyx and her boyfriend Andrew were curled up on the floor on the other side of the coffee table, and I was feeling benevolent, and warm. So I gave them the blanket first, then minutes later realized that I had the natural pillow of the couch, all they had was new carpet and each other's arms, so I gave them the pillow too, great humanitarian that I am. I tucked my bare feet in the couch cushions and went back to trying to sleep.

Borders are meant to be crossed. Limits exceeded. Records shattered. Toilets clung to. Kierkegaard said having a rule means you automatically have to break it, to prove you're alive. A clever t-shirt at my store today said "My drinking team has a wakeboarding problem." Another shirt said "Old No. 7." I just about wretched.

Matt Welch on blogging:

I was going to make some joke complaining about having to be on the record 24/7, but the truth is I’m glad there is historical evidence -- and lovely, at that -- of joyful days that my leaky brain is almost guaranteed to forget later.

Indeed. I just realized that, going back through my old blog entries, how many little things I would've completely lost if I hadn't written them down. Welch details a funny experience in Prague years ago he almost forgot, I'm talking about things that happened last week.

I'm going to the library tommorrow. What should I get? Please suggest below.

dcpierson.com will be up and running in a matter of days. My little blog-boy's all growns up. You're growns up and you're growns up and you're growns up.

noreply@blogger.com (DC) — Sat, 07 Jun 2003 10:01:00 +0000

There, among all the other colorful produce, is the Angry Grapefruit.

There are other grapefruits, sure, but none of them have quite the same level of personality.

As you walk by, all the other grapefruits remain yellow, round, and respectfully quiet, but the Angry Grapefruit will tell you just what it thinks.

"Hey fatty," it might say, or, "Hey, ugly," or "How 'bout you go die, you fat ugly...uh..."

Occasionally the Angry Grapefruit will lose its train of thought in the middle of a long tirade of insults and swear words.

"Aw crap," it will say, "I can't think today. I need a smoke." It is not only the Angry Grapefruit, it is also the Smoking Grapefruit, on the occasion where it can convince people to buy it cigarettes.

"Come on," the Angry Grapefruit will say, "Just a pack of Camels. That's like $3.69 with tax." Then, as you walk by, inisting to yourself that you have never bought tobacco products for a fruit and you certainly aren't about to start now, the Angry Grapefruit will scream "Where you headed? You can't spare that? Too big a chunk out of the Food Budget, fatty?"

But you'll buy it anyway, even if you don't like grapefruit. Because let's face it, the Angry Grapefruit has personality.

noreply@blogger.com (DC) — Fri, 06 Jun 2003 08:51:00 +0000

Forgive me if this comes out muddled, I can barely see the screen. Was just watching the replay of the MTV Movie Awards, and I think there were two Russian girls screeching an obscenely bad popsong, and I'm fairly certain there were thousands of shameless wannabe actress/dancers dressed as schoolgirls making out, but I honestly couldn't tell you because there was TOO MUCH FUCKING STROBE LIGHT. I was on the ground, thumping and twiching, and I'm not even epileptic. It was bad. It's as if they realized the American public could no longer be shocked, and decided to blind us all instead.

It's true, the American public CAN no longer be shocked. But MTV hasn't gotten the memo yet, which is why this year's Video Music Awards will be broadcast live from one of Christina Aguilera's ovaries. Which one? Call our 800 number now and vote!

Alright, Blogosphere, now we're going to play a little game. It's called "I blather on and on about how you should link my friend Guillermo's blog, and then you link Guillermo's blog. Deal? Deal.

Guillermo lives in what I'll describe here for the sake of you going and looking as a haze of booze and women, although he's trying to cut down on the booze, and fend of the women with whips and chairs. He's like Hemingway with skin pigmentation. Tony Pierce with capitalization. This majestic post features Charles Dickens, drunken old ladies, rancher's daughters, and nostalgia. This one, intoxicated escapades and faded love behind the scenes on a Disney cruise. A good portion of his archives aren't working (thanks, Blogspot) but what is working is worth a read. And if you like what you see, you should link him. I know links are like your special flower: you should only give them away to someone you love, or promises you acting work. But I think you could learn to love Guillermo. Don't you?

While I'm on the begging-for-other-bloggers tip, is Grandma's medication-she-needs-to-live money burning a hole in her pocket? Why not steal it while she's sleeping and give it to Treacher? Like Grandma, he's bone-thin, but his condition is caused by poverty and starvation, as opposed to extremely advanced, logic-defying, downright repulsive old age.

Come on, people. We're all in this Internet together.

noreply@blogger.com (DC) — Wed, 04 Jun 2003 07:37:00 +0000

Blargh.

Tengo que hacer un otro "draft" de mi obra de teatro. Que lastima.

Sorry, we were speaking bad Spanish at dinner (not like this house is bilingual, it was just fajita night) and it sort of stuck with me. If you didn't take four years of high school Spanish to reach the pinnacle of linguistic comprehension that I have, I said I have to do another draft of the play, what a shame. And it is a shame, not that I have to do another one, but that I will probably once again put it off until the deadline, and it will both suffer and be bolstered as a result.

Basically, I've gotten into the habit of doing the real meat of my playwrighting in long, caffeine-powered late night binges, more often than not the day before deadline. It's good, because it forces me to do it, and if I didn't have that gun to my head I'd fart around endlessly and produce less-than-stellar work. It doesn't matter if I don't have it all figured out yet, I have to figure it out, hopefully before sunrise. And I do. Problem is, the frantic pace sometimes makes me sloppy, and while the resulting stuff is at least COMPLETED, it's sometimes a little rough around the edges. So it's two sides of a pretentious writerly coin. It's like if you discovered heroin enhanced your creativity. The good news: for whatever reason, it seems to help. The bad: It's HEROIN, dipass.

You can see my concern.

If Pixar were a woman, I would marry it.

If Pixar were a man, it could probably talk me into things I wouldn't normally be down for.

If the Bible were about Pixar, I would follow it religiously. (HA!)

Because you see, the thing about Pixar, that differentiates it from the opposite sex, or all-powerful deities, or life in general, even, is it never disappoints. Five movies they've made, by my count, and every one of them has ranged in quality from great (A Bug's Life) to obscenely wonderful (Monsters, Inc.) And while not every one of them has been my favorite movie in history, you'd be hard-pressed to find more perfect films, both in the technical and the classical sense. They take us places we've never been, they make us care about the characters, they make us "ooh" and "ahh," they make us laugh, and if you're a girly-man like me, they occasionally make you cry.

They could easily fall back on the milquetoast Disney formula, and trust the stunning visuals to keep the audience subdued (Wachowski Brothers, I'm looking at you.) Disney tried that, in fact. The result was called Dinosaur and it was a piss-poor excuse for a movie. Why? Because it has soul. Pixar's like James Brown: It's nutty, it's eccentric, but dammit, it's got soul. (Pixar has not to my knowledge ever gotten fucked up on PCP and threatened people with a shotgun for using its bathroom, but I'd probably forgive it if it had.)

If I were a modern Hollywood actor, I would loathe Pixar. I'd drive by their offices at night with a Mercedes full of molotov cocktails, because they were threatening my career. They manage to create, with a bundle of pixels and elbow grease, a multitude of believable emotions greater than the combined abilities of all the Freddy Prinze Juniors, Paul Walkers, and recently, Ben Afflecks, all of whom can barely muster one (naked desire for a paycheck.)

Finding Nemo raked in 70.2 million dollars this past weekend, and earned every last damn one of them. Compare that to Disney's last animated effort, Treasure Planet, which opened with 12 million bucks and dropped, fast. People trust Pixar to deliver good family films, ones they won't have to praise by saying "At least I didn't want to claw my eyes out!". People trust Pixar to tell a good story, and Pixar delivers. The same can probably no longer be said about Disney, who, Lilo and Stitch being the exception, stopped being about good stories a long time ago.

So, long story short, see Finding Nemo and remember it is that makes movies wonderful, and what miracles can occur when smart people do work they enjoy.

Also...this just can't come out soon enough.

UPDATED: Spanish at the beginning fixed. "Tengo que." Yea, I knew that.

noreply@blogger.com (DC) — Mon, 02 Jun 2003 10:56:00 +0000

Do you hang with naked dudes and blog-gods? No. Know why? 'Cause you're not my boy Brian is why. Deal with it. (Archives not working, should be the top post.

noreply@blogger.com (DC) — Sun, 01 Jun 2003 22:56:00 +0000

To paraphrase some famous British graffiti: TREACHER IS GOD.

noreply@blogger.com (DC) — Sun, 01 Jun 2003 15:41:00 +0000

This is almost like Freshman year all over again, staying up all night and on into morning for no good reason, except there is a good reason: Finishing a painful rewrite, fueled by Diet Mountain Dew Code Red and a deadline. Then taking JP to hockey practice at 6:10, which my dad would usually do: There's no reason for more Pierson men to be up at this ungoldy hour than is absolutely necessary.

Aliens cruising at low altitude at 6:00 am on a Sunday morning would conclude that the human race consists solely of old people, old people's dogs, spandex-clad cycle enthusiasts, and guys in white trucks taking their little brothers to hockey practice.

That's where I am right now: the hockey rink, writing on a thick stack of "Hockey Summer Camp" flyers because this table is one of those molded plastic ones with all the holes in it, and the book I brought is too small to use for a writing surface.

I was going to write, in that annoying newspaper-feature-writer kind of way, "Taking the kids to hockey practice on a Sunday morning seems to be largely a paternal obligation," because it was just me and a bunch of dads sipping coffee, leafing through newspapers, until two moms showed up. I'll bet my dad knows all these faces by heart. Poor bastard.

Out there on the ice 27 skates back and forth, side to side, backwards, whatever the drill calls for, better at skating at 12 than I am at walking at 18.

I stole the pen I'm writing with from the table where I got the flyers. It was chained to a plastic box full of sweepstakes entries, I liberated it with every intent of bringing it back, but ten bucks and a night of missed sleep says I won't.

Ooh, a comprehensive drill...They line up at the back, behind the net, then one at a time skate down, pass to one coach, get the puck back, pass to another, get it back, then shoot on their goalie.

27 shoots...misses. Better luck next time, buddy.

This place is pretty Zen at 6:45 like it is now. Just muffled inter-dad conversation, the rustling of pages, coughs, the clattering of pucks we're two sheets of plexiglass away from.

Dig this, if you can: My girlfriend's parents are out of town this weekend and I haven't seen her since Friday, when I dismissed myself from a birthday party to go write. She's staying at her friend's house, which is a block away from our houses. I passed by it last night walking to the store to get Diet Mt. Dew and peanut butter, neither of which I needed desperately at 11:15 PM but I just had to get away from THE PLAY. I walked by on the way back, couldn't remember if the only window available for knocking on was her friend's bedroom. Cursed her lack of a cellphone, then my lack of a cellphone, then walked back home and faced down the Behemoth again.

33 is dangerous, fast, aggressive, and about three feet tall. He and my boy 27 make a hell of a team.

A lot of these kids have whole clans attending practice, three little brothers in giant sweaters accosting the switched-off arcade games. Why not leave them at home? Church after this, maybe? If at mass this morning there's a bunch of kids sitting next to you, one of them giving off the none-too-faint odor of sweaty fungal hockey ass, you'll know where they were earlier.

33 just shouldered a kid a little bit into the boards, he hit 'em and crumpled. There are coaches on this side of the rink now, surrounding the wounded. His dad's waddling out there now, birkenstocks on ice.

They're diving across the ice, now, sliding like penguins. Then push-ups. Suddenly I feel I've never exerted myself to do anything.

Practice ends at 7:30, he'll be changing 'till 7:45. Home at 8, screw the last nuts into place on this damn hell ass third draft of a play succintly titled "Skip," send it off saying I need a 2nd set of eyes to tell me if it's any good because after this long continuously with anything it's like a mouth of thoroughly chewed food, rendered flavorless by familiarity. Type this up, post it 'cause if not now, when? Bed by 9. 9:15 at the latest. Awake at 3 ideologically, 5 realistically. Dinner. Promised Dana and Nicole I'd come to game night, well, didn't promise, but said I would, and on my last day of school an embattled near-retirement wizened old Irish english teacher told me out of the blue in the hallway, "Your word has to be gold, because it's all you have."

27 shoots, scores.

noreply@blogger.com (DC) — Sat, 31 May 2003 08:22:00 +0000

Once upon a time,

The End.

noreply@blogger.com (DC) — Thu, 29 May 2003 09:45:00 +0000

I dip my hands in the Pacific Ocean to wash off all the blood. I’m bent over; a little wave laps up, and by the time it rolls out my khakis are soaked but at least my hands are clean. Now if I could find my sandals I’d leave, but I’m not so sure I’d want to go back to the party.

Tom Werring, I just basically reorganized his face outside Lisa Baxter’s house in what started out as a drunken crowdpleaser but turned into assault and battery. Shouting woke up neighbors, neighbors called cops. Blue and red whirling lights pulled me off of Tom and when everybody else bolted for their cars I made a b-line for the beach, which is just down the block because Lisa Baxter is fucking loaded.

I shook teeth loose from his skull and somehow end up feeling like he’s the lucky one. There are liquid parts of him on the pavement, and dribbling down the street, and until recently on my fists and just now in the ocean, making the Pacific one zillionth Tom Werring, a great big diluted blood cocktail. Actual cocktails, and straight rum, and keg beer, make this all make sense. There’s only me in me, and a little bit in Melissa, Tom’s sister.

I think that’s why the fighting, but I’m not sure and it doesn’t really matter. All that matters is that in days an infinitesimal bit of Tom Werring will be washing up on the coastline of the French Riviera and that makes me jealous because I’ve never been to Europe.

noreply@blogger.com (DC) — Wed, 28 May 2003 08:32:00 +0000

All better now.

Pretty girl plus Christopher Guest movie will do that.

Actually, to be honest, I wasn't too terribly fond of the movie. A Mighty Wind, that is. It was no Best in Show, which was no Waiting For Guffman, which was no This Is Spinal Tap. There were just too many damned characters. It seemed like Guest, in a rush to fit in all his (admittedly talented) improv buddies, forgot what made his previous movies so funny, that is, the audience really getting a feel for the people onscreen. Here, we just get caricatures, one or two-joke sketches of these folks before we move on to the next one. Does it have its moments? Sure. Does it have Parker Posey? Yes, but not enough. Is there such a thing as enough Parker Posey? Perhaps only time will tell.

And while I'm in a criticizing mood: Was anyone else left kind of cold by Matrix: Reloaded? It just-- (WOOT WOOT!) What's that sound? Why, the analogy train is comin' round the bend! Let's all hop aboard and see where it takes us!

We had to do this project in Creative Writing last semester, writing the first five pages of a screenplay, as well as an outline for the rest of the film. People got really excited by that prospect, the fact that they only had to actually write the beginning of something. The kids in my writing group would turn in these five densely packed pages, full of car chases and disguises and mysterious phone calls, flashbacks to god-knows-what, plane crashes, that sort of thing. Set-ups that would get the audience wondering what the hell's going on.

And naturally, I asked. Who's calling? Who's conspiring against her? Why a monkey?

Uhmm...I haven't really figured it out yet.

The Wachowski brothers seem to be having the same problem. They've set up this fascinating universe, and it worked, for the first film. They got it and so did we. But now they have to hang around, and they've realized they never set any ground rules. What Neo can do, what he can't, that kind of thing. So now, his ability, the crux of the whole film, is being dictated by whatever cool stuff they want to show us and whatever's convinient for the script. Instead of the character shaping the narrative, the narrative, and the desire to pack that narrative with Escalades and Superman-style flying and specteral albino Rasta-men, are shaping the character, and the world he inhabits. Who's the French guy? Why the keymaker? Why won't Morpheus just shut the hell up for one goddamned second? They haven't really figured it out yet.

The car chase scene was bitchin', don't get me wrong. The problem is that, a week after seeing the movie, I couldn't even begin to tell you why it happened.

Lileks says it better than I do. Of course.

They're going to do a staged reading of the play I wrote first semester at the ASU summer student-productions festival, Moondance. I met tonight with my playwrighting mentor and ex-girlfriend's current boyfriend AJ, who's directing it. At my ex-girlfriend's family's house. Surreal? Yes. Helpful? Completely. Fun? Surprisingly so. He's a good guy, and I'm proud to have him at the helm. I've never collaborated on producing something I've written, and I think it'll be good for the script, and, in turn, for me.

The upshot: I have to retool and restructure the whole 113 pages in four days. Hopefully it will be closer to 90 when I'm done.

If you were to say to me right now that life was a strange and yet strangely wonderful thing, I'd probably agree with you.

noreply@blogger.com (DC) — Tue, 27 May 2003 08:03:00 +0000

Sorry for the pause in blogging, I was in California for Chuck's mom's wedding. That was fun.

I'm no longer in high school, as of last Thursday night. The last five days have been full of interesting stories but for some reason I can't muster the energy to talk about them. I think I might be sad about graduating, because I've been in a strange mood the past couple days, but I haven't thought a lick about that particularly. It's sad that my emotions are so strange and stilted even I don't know what I'm on about half the time. I have to poke and prod at my melancholy, looking for symptoms, probing for cause, like it's the flu or something.

I don't think I'm depressed, don't like being depressed, try to avoid it. I think it's a silly, self-indulgent thing to be, especially when you have it as good as I do.

Growing up: What the heck is the deal.

You should probably, no, definitely, be reading Guillermo's blog religiously, assuming you're not already.

NOTE upon reading this entry just after I posted it: Some people turn to the bottle when they're feeling down. Apparently I turn to commas. Sheeesh, look at 'em all.

noreply@blogger.com (DC) — Thu, 22 May 2003 08:14:00 +0000

Things were better back then, they always say, the people who were around back then, and you’ve always been afraid to admit you believe them.

You hear these stories. Men coming over to the new world, getting a job doing something hot or dangerous or both, sending his meager checks back to his family, dreaming of bringing them over too, but not ‘till he can guarantee they won’t be coming over just to do the hot or dangerous stuff. And then he does. And maybe later he owns the place. And one of those kids that comes over, years later he takes another boat, but not back to the home country, to some foreign land to fight for the only somewhat less foreign land that he just left, and he does it with bravery, grit, and determination, concepts such as irony and adolescent cynicism shaken out of him by seasickness and later by mortar fire. Because anything less than steel nerves and blind faith would get him killed, his buddy killed, his unit killed. He makes it. He comes back, he has a kid. Years later, that kid has a kid, and years after that, that kid has you.

All you can do is read books about their time, the sooty-faced man in the hellish factory, his mud-drenched son crouched in a hole in distant Europe. The great men of their times, the Abe Lincolns, the Churchills, and the no less brave but certainly less renowned legions at their command, they knew what time it was. They knew right from wrong. Light from dark. And if there was ever a question, they’d go to a wise old man from an era where the clarity of good and evil was even crisper, and he’d point the way. They’d look down it, see it was perilous and rough, but they wouldn’t deliberate. They’d pack a knapsack, breathe in, breathe out, and start walking.

You know where your car is. Where your school is. Where your girlfriend is. The locations of all the things that are supposed to matter, you have a pretty good grasp of. But what you really want to know is where, over the years, where they hid the really important stuff. Where they hid Truth. Where they put Sincerity so you couldn’t find it. If Trust sank with the Titanic, if Loyalty was hidden under a canvas tarp in the tiny cargo hold on the Hindenberg. Why we let someone paint everything shades of grey while we were asleep. Why we let our grandparents die and take all the wisdom with them before we can take it all down and put it someplace safe.

You want to have somebody point the way but even then you’re not sure you’d follow the wrinkly, trembling finger off into the woods.

noreply@blogger.com (DC) — Wed, 21 May 2003 08:47:00 +0000

I think a good epitaph for my grave, well, not like I'm considering dying, hells no, this not-having-school thing is way too much fun, but in case the unthinkable happens I want the following carved on my tombstone:

He always had some sort of crumbs on his face but he seemed nice enough.

I think that'd be appropriate.

I read a whole book today. Cover to cover. Stephen King's "On Writing." Not bad. His advice? Read a lot, write a lot. And don't use adverbs. I've already read two of the eleven books I picked up at the library yesterday. I wish this summer would never end, even though it's barely started.

noreply@blogger.com (DC) — Tue, 20 May 2003 09:09:00 +0000

I'm this week's Madpony of the week and you're not so sit on it, G.

Happy housewarming, Kristin.

noreply@blogger.com (DC) — Tue, 20 May 2003 09:05:00 +0000

Well, it's over.

Let's wrap this up front page USA Today color-graph style. Now presenting:

DC's HIGH SCHOOL CAREER by the numbers

Pounds weighed, Freshman year: 180
Pounds weighed, end of Senior year: 157
Months waited after legally able to get drivers license to actually get driver's license: 8
Stop signs run resulting in T-boning by Acura weeks after receiving license: 1
Number of times favorite band changed: 3 (KMFDM freshman year, Radiohead sophomore, Creeper Lagoon Junior, realized having a "favorite band" was kind of a waste Senior)
Plays acted in, mainstage: 12
Plays acted in, one-act: 12
Hairstyles rocked: 3
Years of Spanish taken: 4
Spanish words retained: 24
Obscenely hot English teachers had: 2
Crushes had on redheads Freshman year: 1
Internet answer-sharing scandals avoided by cheating old fashioned way (girlfriend's study guide): 1
Plays written, one-act and mainstage: 5
Freestyle competitions won: 1
Friends named Chelsea had: 5
Friends who play guitar had: 6
Friends named Chelsea who play guitar had: 2
Years spent in Marching Band playing sax: 1/2
Times awkwardly shot out of the saddle in front of some girl's locker: 1
Times girl didn't even realize she was being asked out, subject changed: 1
Years Prom attended: 4
Girls kissed: 5
Virginities lost: 1
Times I wondered why people thought high school was so bad: innumerable
People I wish I had gotten to know better: see above
Years I wouldn't trade for anything: 4

noreply@blogger.com (DC) — Tue, 20 May 2003 03:04:00 +0000

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!

noreply@blogger.com (DC) — Thu, 15 May 2003 07:52:00 +0000

This is what a nerd I am: I get songs stuck in my head like everyone else. But I also get words stuck in my head. And we're talkin' SAT words here.

Tonight I can't seem to get rid of panoply or panopticon, neither of which I had any idea as to what they meant, until I looked them up to link them just now. Although "panopticon" is pretty sweet: A prison so contructed that the inspector can see each of the prisoners at all times, without being seen.

Words are sexy. I don't care what anyone says.

noreply@blogger.com (DC) — Thu, 15 May 2003 07:32:00 +0000

Night 2 of recycling a creative writing assignment as a blog entry. If I was really smart I wouldn't tell you. But that wouldn't be very honest.

Regular posting will resume once finals are finito.

The cab driver was mumbling to himself in Arabic. Actually, I shouldn’t say it was Arabic because I don’t know for sure. It could very well have been Persian, or Pashtun, or Indian, even, for all I know. He was a brown guy speaking a different language than me, and not to me. To himself, under his breath, in the front seat of the cab at 2 am in New York City.

They call it the city that never sleeps but at this hour it could’ve fooled me. All the stores were shuttered, the only other traffic was the occasional garbage truck. If I would’ve rolled down the window and shouted out my accusation I’m sure the city would have jumped up with a start and insisted it was just resting its eyes. But I’m pretty sure cab windows don’t roll down.

At the club, the comedian had mocked me as I left the room with Melanie’s cell phone.

“Going to call mom and dad and ask for a curfew extension?” he said.

“No,” I shouted back, “I’m calling my grandma.” And I wasn’t kidding.

“I’ll be back a little late,” I said in the hallway outside. “Probably like two.” She insisted I take a cab back uptown, she’d reimburse me tomorrow. I didn’t argue, wasn’t in much of an arguing mood. After all, I was in a comedy club with a model I used to go to high school with. If her psuedo-boyfriend hadn’t been there, too, I probably would’ve asked for that curfew extension.

Then I realized he wasn’t talking to himself. He had one of those hands-free earpieces, he was mumbling into a cellular phone just like I had been doing in the hall of the Comedy Cellar. Maybe it was the dispatcher on the other end, but it didn’t sound like it. Someone was keeping him company. I imagined it was a woman, his girlfriend, maybe, his wife, maybe, waiting up for him. She’d be flopping around their terrible apartment in the Bronx, watching late-night TV, trying to stay awake ‘till he got home. And he was saying, in this unidentifiable undecipherable language, just one more fare, I just have to take this bourgeois brat uptown to the Waldorf Astoria and then I’ll go park my cab and count my tips and I’ll be home by two-thirty.

Or maybe she wasn’t in the Bronx, maybe he didn’t bring her with him when he came to the New World. Her family hadn’t let her come, or they didn’t have enough money for the both of them to make it, so he’s over here saving up so at this time of night she’d be ten miles away instead of ten hundred thousand. Maybe the meter running up my fare is being mirrored by the long distance charges, but on a night like this he just had to hear her voice.

We pulled up to the hotel. I don’t remember what the meter said but I gave him a twenty and told him to keep the change.

And I was thinking, if speculating on things like that and writing them down is what I want to do for a living, maybe here’s the place to learn how to do it.

Five months later, I was in another vehicle, mine. In my home state, in the parking lot of my high school. It was seven thirty or so at night, and I’d just left a dress rehearsal. There was no Arabic spoken in that vehicle. There was one word, in English. It had four letters and it shook my windows when I screamed it after realizing the reason my truck wouldn’t start is that I had left the lights on that morning, coming in at six thirty AM for rehearsal for another play.

Greg gave me a ride home, and told me how proud he was of me applying for schools besides ASU and actually intending to go to them if I got in. I explained the concept of Early Decision: whereby I’d have a better chance of being admitted to NYU if I applied, and probably get more money, but if they accepted me, I’d have to go. When he dropped me off, my dad and I went back to school to jump my truck. When I got home the second time, I finished my online application and sent it off. Yes, the dramatic writing program is great, and yes, the city is an education in itself, but that night I think the primary reason I wanted to go is that I wouldn’t have to drive in New York and if I wouldn’t have to drive I’d have no stupid trucks in which to leave the stupid lights on.

I hadn’t kissed a girl in six months and I had slept probably ten hours in the last week. People have done stranger things than applying Early Decision to their out of state dream schools under those kinds of circumstances.

noreply@blogger.com (DC) — Wed, 14 May 2003 06:44:00 +0000

At the beginning of the school year we had to write letters to our future selves in Creative Writing. We opened ours today. Here's mine.

Sweet Donny P-

Whatup homes. Not much, I hope. Or lots. Good things. I wonder what has happened in between today and the day you're reading this. Hard to predict, considering you're such a loose-cannon-pimp-daddy-2002. 2003, now, I guess. How are the ladies treating you? Are you going to NYU? I hope you are. Don't fuck it up for all of us, ya bastard.

Right now, if it interests you, "Favorite Things" is playing on the stereo and I have Advanced Acting after this, and my whole Senior year is ahead of me and it will only be a matter of moments before I'm reading this again, in the cosmic scheme of things, anyway. And in the way it will seem by the time you get to it. I hope this class is fun, and this year.

Remember this always:

"History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it."
-Winston Churchill

People without the open diaries and all the trappings of self-record, how do they know what they thought a year ago? Half this stuff we must completely erase because it gets to start sounding so stupid, how do they remember it? They are disadvantaged by their inability to look back and go, "Wow, I was an asshole!" Poor guys.

You, you will always be recorded, charted, and checked for further review later.

Peace.
-DC
8/12/02

noreply@blogger.com (DC) — Tue, 13 May 2003 17:02:00 +0000

I haven't blogged from the school library in a long-ass time and I figured now's as good as any, since I have simply become immune to schoolwork. Well, immune's not the right word. Physically incapable works better, I think. I tried to work on that stupid play this hour, and it's like my fingers just knew I was writing something for school. They were afflicted with temporary carpal tunnel, they hesitated and stumbled over the keys like a punch-drunk prizefighter past his prime. Kind of like me. I've been in the circuit too long, now I just have to take these last few punches, wait for the ref to hold the other guy's hand up in the air, spit out my teeth and duck the hell out of this ring.

All the library shelves are taped off, with handwritten Xeroxed signs reading "DO NOT ENTER: IF YOU NEED A BOOK-ASK FOR IT AT THE CIRCULATION DESK. THANKS!!" like they always are towards the end of the year. The other day we were in the computer lab in sixth hour and Trevor and I saw one of the more anal-retentive librarians actually measuring the distance between the shelf and the chair she was going to put the tape on, to make sure no one would even come close to their precious books in this late autumn of the scholastic season. The turnstiles full of young-adult novels isn't taped off. Neither is the reference section. Maybe I'll cop me a thesaurus and a crappy novel about dragons. Figure I've earned it.

Every time they hear the sound of the printer they swoop in from the so-called "Circulation Desk" to paw through the output. Probably because Drew in my sixth hour wrote something about the librarians being cunts or douchebags in Word and then set it to print 600 times. This was a while back. I see they still haven't gotten over it.

I think I'll go duck in to second hour Economics and see if they're eating. What better way to celebrate my last Tuesday of high school?

noreply@blogger.com (DC) — Mon, 12 May 2003 06:26:00 +0000

I've been flopping around in front of the computer for what's coming up on two hours because this semester I was supposed to write two one-act plays for my Advanced Studies class and I've so far only written one and there's only a week left in this semester.

Yes, I'll have the Procrastination Special with an extra helping of Procrastination and a cup of Procrastination on the side for dipping, please.

The problem is, I've had numerous ideas for this thing I'm supposed to write, and I get ankle-deep in them, decide they suck, and run screaming to the kitchen or the TV or bed and put it off for another day, tonight being no exception. Repeat until Wednesday when this is due.

My last play at MPHS was this last week, and now the Theatre Co. belongs to a new set of kids. It's sad, but freeing, in a way. Now I'm not working for the benefit or glory of some overarching entity. Now it's just me and the big, indifferent world.

Hello, big indifferent world.

And you are?

There are stabbing pangs of sadness where my heart would be if I hadn't traded my heart for cigarettes when I spent that month in the slammer. Now I'm going to finish out my last week of school and get a crappy-yet-better-paying-job, probably in telemarketing, and then go to New York. People will kill for lives like the one I have (and people kill for the sums I'm shouldering to furnish it, but I'm trying not to think about that so much.)

Does everybody feel like their blog is the most boring thing since white bread, or is it just me? Actually, I think white bread kind of shows me up. Wonder Bread has that retro-style rainbow packaging, Iron Kids has those fresh-faced uber-adolescents acheiving athletic glory, and white bread as a whole has a kind of secret-identity thing going on, since you know it was bleached to its unnatural palor but the question, dear friends, is WHY? White bread doesn't write blog entries that start out whiny and self-pitying then scold themselves in that same blog entry for being whiny and self-pitying only to return to complain about how dull that whole cycle just was. Come to think of it, white bread kicks pretty significant ass compared to me.

But that said, I still won't eat it unless it's the only kind of bread in the house. Wheat for life, suckas.

noreply@blogger.com (DC) — Thu, 08 May 2003 17:07:00 +0000

My eyes feel like ashtrays.

That make any sense? I'll bet it doesn't. Was up 'till 3 last night finishing this damnable synthesis project, but glory be, we did it.

Shoulda seen my first hour humanities class (the class the project was due in.) Like zombies, only less cheerful.

I'm going to nap my ass off this afternoon. Then I'll wake up, well-rested but assless, and ready to party. Or be in a play. You know, whateva.