Dresser -- I don't even know her!

Lately I've had ideological, let's say, problems. I'm at this point where I get to make decisions, like actively choosing to not shop at Wal-Mart or deciding to give money to the local Candler Park Market instead of Kroger -- this is where it gets difficult. But, Katie and I have been blessed (am I being spiritual??) with jobs at CNN that pay well, and we, as consumers, can make these decisions.

But other problems have been coming up, like did we really, absolutely need to get the dresser from Ikea when we could have definitely survived without one and given our money to a charity? And this is a guy who has never donated or volunteered ever. The dresser is great, and it was just a random purchase that got me thinking (I fully support our decision to purchase the dresser). I'm still pondering all of this. I might be losing a few dollars to the local store, but it makes me feel good to buy from there. And I've also decided to really start buying food from organic and health-oriented companies, because that also makes me feel like I'm spending my money while truly thinking about the repercussions, and not just buying some name brand.

Although it really is goddamned expensive.

On a side note, I'm drinking Sam Adams' Scotch Ale, which is very strange and dark, but really great.

I've started reading A Spot of Bother by Mark Haddon, the man who wrote one of the few books I've read in the past five years A Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time. This new books is quite wonderful, his nuance and details make me want to read a lot more. I have put on (perhaps permanent) hiatus M: The Man Who Became Caravaggio by Peter Robb, because, while it's all very interesting, it is purely academic, and there is too much damn information about Rome and hooligans and stuff. It's very detailed, but not in a good way. I get it, Rome was a hell hole. What about the thing where Caravaggio died in a bar fight? Oh wait, that's 500 pages of tiny type down the road.

There's a great show on some cable channel called "Live at Abbey Road" that brings in a wide array of artists to record some of their songs. Their picks are strange, from thoughtless pop to Dave Matthews to Muse to Massive Attack. I downloaded the Massive Attack episode (the only one I could find) and I think I gave them a listen in the past, but not much, and they are really great. They're so focused on creating these grooves, it's fun to watch.

Finally, "Flight of the Conchords" is rocking my world right now. Download all six episodes if you can, they are fantastic. Looks like me and Jules will have to keep our day jobs and hone Big Dick and Concert Pianist until it's different enough.

escalator tensions

First of all, check out how poorly written this AP article is, I mean Jesus! It's bad.

Today, I got off of MARTA at CNN Center and headed towards the escalators. There’s a set of four: the two left running down, the third dead, and the fourth running up.

On the fourth escalator is a group of people, and two of them are walking down the escalator, ala Christopher Walken in the “Weapon of Choice” video, except instead of something fairly entertaining, imagine the most annoying fucking thing you’ve ever seen.

These two kids, they have a friend who is attempting to take their picture. They are completely blocking off the escalator. The people walking in front of me stop at the escalator, allowing them to take their picture.

I figure somebody’s gotta put their foot down. I mean, you fucking idiots, it’s a STILL PICTURE. The camera won’t be able to tell if you’re moving up or down or not at all! Get in the dead escalator!

I walk up to the two kids, still walking against the escalator. They don’t move. I mumble, “Excuse me.” They don’t move. So I push my way past these great arguments for misanthropy and FLASH! The kid finally took the picture.

So now, this gruff asshole, interrupting the playful fun of some dumb tourists, is forever embedded into the same pixels as these guys. I wonder if they deleted the picture.

Blah and Order

Ripped from the headlines!!

On the next episode of Blah and Order, we take an actual news event, put our own little excessive spin on it, and present it to you as entertainment! Like fine wine and steak, we pair real events that were interesting enough in the first place with our own pedestrian brand of drama, and voila! An episode! Why come up with a unique story when USA Today is full of 'em?

Next week's episode: Michael "Pooter" Flibby is given a presidential pardon by, guess who, his bosom buddy, the Commander in Chief! But that's not all. POTUS, it turns out, is the mastermind behind the country's worst attack, 8/11, which is named after the date on which the attacks occurred!

Stay tuned....

My predilection for art films has betrayed me.

I was sitting alone in my place with my dog, whom I will refer to as Baby BarFight until he stops being a toddler. Katie and her friends had gone off into the rainy night, so I sat there, craving cable and wanting munchies. I dashed to the local convenience store, which I love having. Nothing establishes the fact that you are in a neighborhood better than a locally owned mart. And the quality of the mart can only be indicative of your neighborhood; to sum it up, they both kick ass.

Armed with Sweet Maui Onion Kettle Chips (omg), Paul Newman popcorn, Coca Cola, and a giant mom-and-pop cookie, I drove home only to realize that I don't own many good "mindless" movies. The few that I do own I've seen so many times that I hate them. I have over 200 DVDs, and I couldn't figure out what to watch. I settled on The Matrix, which would be embarassing if I actually liked it. And really, it's not that bad. It buys completely into the whole sexy-techno-tech-geek-future-sleek-gothic-punk-cyber-leather-orgy genre. It's really well made, well written, but luckily it's not deep at all. For a high-schooler, perhaps. But really, Alice in Wonderland? Dreams vs. reality? It's perfectly mindless in that its ideas are like rocks skipped across the surface of your brain.

Anyway, I made it about an hour into it, switched it over to Christopher Nolan's remake of Insomnia. I always thought it was a good effort, and some things stood out to me.

Quick tangent: I forgot to mention that things also stuck out for me during The Matrix, such as Neo talking to himself as he's about to climb out the window at the beginning. He's just talking to himself about the possibility of being arrested, thinking about what he could've done. It was interesting, I liked it.

Back to Insomnia, the whole plot about Internal Affairs was a lot more pronounced this time, maybe because I've already seen it. Also, the fact that Pacino is really a cop who has completely lost his moral footing has never been so clear. Knowing that he planted evidence, that he would withhold information from the other detectives to just kind of gung-ho his way to the murderer, he just comes off like such a stubborn, bad cop more than a truly good cop.

Anyway, while wtching these movies, I realized that I wish I invested more money into even more mindless movies, like Ocean's 11, Die Hard, Die Hard with a Vengeance, and Under Siege 2: Dark Territory. These movies are great, and if they were on TV I would have watched them. But alas I have chosen the higher brow.

A few life things:

I got a job at CNN with the department I interned at. Yay! Yesterday, Ryan, Tera, Katie, and I went bowling, which was awesome, but it seemed really short, even though we were there for three hours. I think free time seems shorter because I have very little of it.

My family and I and Katie are going to Florida in mid-July, which I'm very much looking forward to. I haven't been to the beach in like 7 years, so it should be fun. Plus, I'm looking forward to getting a tan...on my chest. It's very white.

IHNO

I have, and I think we all do at points, the bad habit of having an opinion when I, in fact, have none. I got caught last week when somebody asked me if I kept up with baseball. I couldn’t just say, “No,” which would be completely honest. I tried to fake my way through it, stumbling about liking the Braves when I was younger and such. The truth is I have a really deep love of baseball that exclusively stems from childhood, but if you asked me if Chipper was doing well this season, I honestly couldn’t tell you if he was still on the roster or not. But I overhead that he is.

There’s an internet acronym IMHO: In My Humble/Honest Opinion. I’ve never had any use for this masturbatory, extraneous phrase. Everything I say is my opinion, unless otherwise noted as being someone else’s; I always give credit. Why do I need to say IMHO, … it’s useless. The internet might be a better place if we started using IHNO: I Have No Opinion. And I think people would appreciate my fresh look on opinions (to steal lyrics from Nada Surf) if I just told them that on the topic their discussing, I have no opinion. So that’s that, today there is a new piece of internet lingo, IHNO. Write about it, unless UHNO.

Check out Katie’s blog for a great picture of our place. It looks like she took it out of a magazine, but she didn’t.

I just ordered an 18-month Moleskine planner (how in the hell is that pronounced anyway? I say Mole-Skyne.) . I’m very excited, I have a small notebook of there’s, but its pages are blank. I am meaning to fill them with creative thoughts for certain scripts and television shows. Hopefully, they will be more interesting than the above-the-fold part of this blog.

Also, I’m looking into getting a new Eagle Creek bag from their website. The Local Messenger is really big and badass, and it comes in red. I’ve been looking to get a red bag that’s also manly. The multiple-views pictures shows a man with the bag – a good sign.

My favorite music right now is between Smashing Pumpkins’ Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, any of The Strokes’ albums, and Wolf Parade. Wolf Parade is so incredible, I love that album, what’s it called?

If I could take the fire out from the wire/I’d share a life and you’d share a life.

PS: If there are any mistakes, please catch them and hand them to me, I wrote this in Word quickly.

Agreed.

I've never agreed with a Pitchfork review so much until now (except whatever he says about "Sick, Sick, Sick"), because when he describes missing Nick Oliveri and listening to older albums, that's exactly what I've been doing. Weird.

I will update soon with all the new additions to my life.

iBlog

According to this quiz on the happenin' new "App" on Facebook called iLike, I don't know the difference between the following bands:

My Chemical Romance
The Used
Fall Out Boy
All-American Rejects
Yellowcard
Simple Plan
The Starting Line
Story of the Year

and I don't care.

Also, it's sick that some of the people I know have points in the 7 and 8 thousands. The questions give you 10 points at a time! That's seven-hundred correctly answered answers!

I was standing around at work, what they call "Hosting," trying in vain to give assholes catalogs, when it dawned on me. I was just zoning out, thinking about things for the cartoon Jules and I are working on, and when somebody would come up, it would sap me of every creative juice that I had the moment before. Talking to people, specifically strangers, even more specifically the lower grade of humans known as customers, is quite possibly the most uncreative act. It requires recitation ("Hello, how are you doing?"), recall ("Let's see, that's over in Closet"), and scripted actions ("Let's go over there" waddle waddle waddle).

That's not to say that talking to people itself is uncreative. I love collaborating; in fact, I'm convinced that the best work comes from working directly with somebody. Although, I did try an experiment yesterday. Our pilot episode is set in a mall, so I figured, why not go to the mall for some inspiration? And while it did provide some atmosphere and some non sequitur jokes, it was mostly useful to just go and sit and be alone and be forced to think and work.

It's strange, because writing doesn't come to me naturally (except for here), that I have no real instincts for coming up with something funny or clever, it's an awkward medium. What works written, but what also works visually and when spoken? It truly is a shot in the dark when I write something down, because comedy needs an audience, and if you don't have that partner there to laugh, then what the hell?

Also, as you're building these characters, how do you choose the precise words to define them? There's an infinite number of nuances to write in and directions to go, but I think that at that point, it's just my mind unable to pin the concept of fiction down.

-------------------------
The new Queens of the Stone Age album is out today. Maybe I'll drive and go get it. Also, the Wilco concert is next Tuesday, not today as my lovely fiancee had previously thought. What to do instead?