the two nap weekend

I know. The title is pretty straight forward. But it's COMPLETELY misleading.

That's right. I didn't take a nap this weekend. I didn't take two naps.

Now, before your head explodes, no. I didn't take three naps this weekend.

I DIDN'T TAKE ANY NAPS THIS WEEKEND.

But good god, I wanted to.

Not having a driver's license sucks. Ok, well, maybe not in this economy. My mom and my sister both drive, both have cars. My sisters husband has a car. Gas has inched up just under $4 a gallon here in Tampa.

Where the hell would I drive to? Driving to the blood bank, I mean, that's stupid. I'd be losing almost half my profits. I'll hitchhike, thank you very much.*

And yes, it's very safe. Jesus, I'm in the hitchhiking capital of the world.**

What did I accomplish this weekend, you ask? A LOT.

A little.

Enough.

Let's see. Saturday was a blur. Oh, but I had a nice pinot noir all to myself. That was yummy.

I went shopping at Walmart, aka The Destruction of Small Businesses in the United States. I hate shopping there, but they make it difficult not to. They have everything that makes middle America... middle America.

When my sister and mom were living in Scranton, Pennsylvania, we went to a Walmart or a reasonable facsimile thereof, and one of the first things they had when you walked in... the two, three times I went there, months apart.

You won't be able to guess. Seriously, guess.

Ok, christ, that doesn't work on the internet.

Deep. Fat. Fryers.

That was the kind of product they were pushing.

I didn't see any of those at the Walmart here. They didn't seem to be pushing any one thing, except depression.

So, I bought t-shirts... some more t-shirts... a button down shirt... new pillows... new sheets... ummm... can't think of anything else. Oh, a big ass thing of...

Ok, this'll stop now.

Got home, cleaned some, finished Firefly and Serenity, all brilliant.

Played some video games. Prepped a new painting that came out like shit, so I'm starting over... and genuinely relaxed.

Sunday was more of the same, except I went to the gym for the first time in god knows when. Felt good about that.

Let's get this back on a humorous track.



Stir Crazy is one of the funniest movies you will ever see.

At the store today and I have a whole bunch of stuff I have to get done. So I'll leave you with this awesome video of my all time favorite band, Oingo Boingo.

The quality isn't great, but the guitars are simply awesome.



Have a good day folks.

* I've never hitchhiked.

** Seriously, don't listen to me.

strength, in two of its numerous forms

I try to keep this blog light. So you'll excuse me for this bit of heavy handedness.

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I cannot remember how in the hell I found this guy's youtube.com page, but I'm glad I did.

His name is Drew and he's got a lot of good things to say.

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Here's another thing I found over at blogcatalog.com. In two parts. One. Two.

I continue to be inspired.

By a smaller and smaller portion of the world population.

But, inspired none-the-less by people who are compelled to do what is right.

I choke on the apathy of the majority.

I talk about having little to no patience for people. If you read some older posts you'll see some of my dislike for customers, politicians, criminals and Florida.

It's important for people to know that when I say 'people', I mean most people. I don't like to say 'most people' because the fact is that I'm probably not perturbed with about 20% of the country. The rest I could do without.

Ok, ok. 22%.

Of course, all my readers... in that 22%.

(eyeroll)

OK! It's not 22%. Christ, it's probably 51%.

That's still most, you know!

I'm BLEEPING quirky

Your Quirk Factor: 74%

You're so quirky, it's hard for you to tell the difference between quirky and normal. No doubt about it, there's little about you that's "normal" or "average."

How Quirky Are You?

No wonder my mom thinks I'm adopted (sorry DM, had to repeat that one...)

Now I know everyone from high school is jealous about me.

Hmm. Let me tell you a bit about my high school experience. I had it good.

I always had good friends. I was never picked on. I met some of my life long best friends there. I met my first girlfriend in HS. I think I turned her into a lesbian. It's so funny. How that was like a harbinger.

Let's see.

I dislocated my knee while I was in high school, although not IN high school.

Did I ever tell that story here?

Oh man. Ok, here's a great story. I wrote it on my myspace page, but I think it's worth re-printing, don't you?














Well, too bad! I'm re-printing it anyway.

Every once in a while, one of my two favorite living authors asks his fans to write him letters. He's done it twice thus far. I've sent him letters and got two wonderful letters back. I treasure them.

So, the second time, he asked 'tell me something about you'.

So here's what I wrote to Chuck Palahniuk:

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When I was a kid, I was in little league. I was a pitcher, and I really hate to say it like this, because I like to think of myself as humble, but I was the best in the league. We won every year, got picked for the all star game... it was awesome.

3 years. Had a lot of fun, friends... my parents were divorced, my dad came to see all the games. It was a lot of fun.

4th year, I get drafted to a different team. I get there, and the coach... I'd like to describe him. Big guy, a guy you'd picture with a cigar. More like a news reporter, one of the slimy crime reporters. 40's style hat, large square glasses, sunken face. I can picture him in my mind even now.

He had the other best pitcher in the league. And he benched me. The entire season. When I did play, and I think there was a rule that every player had to play at least three innings, it was right field, or some shit like that. I remember, clear as day, up for bat and I hit a line drive down the third base line and thought it was foul. Head down, hating everything, the crowd was yelling for me to run because it ended up being fair. That's how much I didn't care.

My old coach went up to my dad and I one day and said something to the affect of "If I had known what was going to happen, I would have put a stop to it."

These things happen, I guess, and it's hard to see the line between the game and the war, you know? I guess it's blurry to these people, I don't know. Probably not blurry to the kids playing.

So, I quit. I think I was thirteen maybe... I'm sure, had I not been picked for that other team, baseball would have been my life. I'm 100% positive.

A couple of years pass. Four, to be precise. I'm in my senior year at high school, I'm deciding that I want to go to art school... I had no idea before my senior year what I wanted to do, and I only ended up applying to one school, SVA in NYC... it hit me hard, wanting to become an artist.

It's Fall of 1990. I'm in Cooperstown, NY, visiting my favorite Uncle and his wife, with my family. Cooperstown, Baseball Hall of Fame... all that. And batting cages.

So, I thought I'd give it a shot, you know? Still loved playing sports. I think it was 10 swings for a dollar or something.

I get up and start swinging. And I'm doing pretty good. A crowd is forming. I can't tell if they're waiting for the machine, or watching me. Maybe both.

I get to swing 9 and I feel something in my right knee. A twinge. Do you know what the definition of 'twinge' is? It means 'to have or feel a sudden, sharp pain.' Well, that's about right... although it really wasn't sharp, it was just sudden and foreign.

Swing 10, the bottom part of my right leg moves to the left, my thigh goes to the right and my knee pops out LOUD. I'm having a hard time even writing this... wow, I'm tensing up! Haha.

I fall on the ground and at first I don't understand what's happened, but there's a lot of pain. And the crowd is laughing. Probably thinking I slipped.

I start screaming. I remember my step-father coming to get me and I'm in a lot of pain, cursing... it was pretty bad.

I get to the hospital and find out I dislocated my knee. I get surgery and find out that it was a birth defect, that there was a muscle that, instead of growing off to the side of the patella, it grew on top of it. Same thing for my left leg, but there's nothing they can do for that leg, until it pops.

This story, this whole situation opened up, clear as day, about two months ago. I was sitting outside, just thinking, people watching, and it popped into my head.

I was going to be a baseball player. I was going to go to college and go pro. It was something I really wanted.

At 13 I had no other interests. Nothing. And I couldn't help but wonder how my life would have worked out had I not been picked for a different team. How I might have made it all the way to college on a baseball scholarship... and then, after time caught up with me, blown my leg out then. How many things would have changed. How I would have had to start all over, from scratch.

This seems more than coincidence. It seems quite planned. I'm a very happy person. I haven't always been, and things have been a bit roller coaster like for many years... but at this point in my life, I'm really enjoying myself.

Isn't that odd?"

------

He wrote this first, in the first paragraph:

"Your baseball/knee story made me a little ill... but it is spooky how life seems to work out for the best."

That is high praise from the man who wrote the short story Guts and had over 100 people faint at his readings!

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Someone, anyone, remind me to tell you the gruesome true story of something that happened to me on a subway in NY. It's hilarious.

Oh, and the time I had a kidney removed. That was ridiculously funny.

Actually, it was more painful and frightening. But in a really funny way.

Have a good evening, folks.

go help

Read this. Victorine Surette (if that is her real name) talks about shaving her head for an awesome cause. Her blog is lordiwanttobewhole.blogspot.com.

Then go here and see what you can do.

Worth your time to read and at least show support for Jordan Corkum.

how to overcome boredom

That's not really a title to this story as much as it's a question.

I was at our retail store for just over 7 hours today. I had two walk ins. That's it.

Not customers. Not lookie-loos. Walk ins.

These people look, sniff, and walk out, and the only thing they accomplish is letting cold air leave my nice and comfy store.

I've moved on to the short lived television series Firefly. It's amazing how some of these studio executives actually never watch the shows they cancel, because it's obvious that if these guys ever gave Firefly a shot, it would have taken off.

I mean, people who make movies, right, the ones who make these films for low budget and then end up making ridiculous amounts of money... these guys are set for life. As long as they don't make stinker after stinker, they will always find backing for a film.

You'd think it was the same for television. Buffy had to be one of the most profitable television shows. It spawned a spin-off, a board game, probably something loosely comparable to civil war re-enactments...

I was lucky, I watched Serenity, the feature film, first. Then I went straight out and bought the Firefly series. This will be my third time watching it. It's brilliant. And I cannot, for the life of me, understand why it was canceled.

But I digress.

It's just one of the ways I overcome boredom.

Recently, I've become a reddit junkie. Though try as I might, I can't get my articles to post on the damn thing. Something about karma and my lack of it.

Got turned on to it by Robert Stevenson, who has a very funny blog, check it out.

There are other sites, but I need more. Here are the sites I visit every day. I mean, hourly.

Joblo.com - not porn. A movie news and rumor site. Love these guys.

HSX - not porn. Boy I might have to say that a lot. HSX is the Hollywood Stock Exchange. Been doing this for years. You join, you get an account and you buy and sell movie stocks, star bonds... it's awesome. You start at $2 million. I just passed the $450 million mark.

Don't look at me like that. If you didn't know I was a geek, you must be new.

Ebay - ok, this site you should check out. It's online auctions, and they have EVERYTHING. Not too many people know about it, so go there now and go often, you'll find crazy stuff like healthy white babies and indentured servants.

Apple Movie Trailers - I love trailers. They get some great ones. Sometimes they're slow, you can find most any trailer earlier than what Apple puts them out... like Yahoo and IGN, but the quality at Apple is superb.

CAF - IT'S NOT PORN for god sake. ComicArtFans.com - this place is amazing. Bill Cox created this site for people who enjoy collecting comic book artwork, and that's me all over.

You can see my gallery here.

There are some NSFW images there, a lot of them I painted, so be prepared. It's not lewd stuff, but I was trained painting nudes at school, and it's classical subject matter. Sometimes not, sometimes it's cartoon stuff, sometimes light erotica stuff. Sorry, but it's a big market.

Huh. I never touched on my schooling here.

Well, I went to School of Visual Arts in NYC. I wanted to be a comic book artist. I learned watercolor painting from the great Irwin Greenberg, a genius. He taught me a lot.

I re-began watercolor painting about two, three years ago, after a long stint of writing screenplays and running a screenwriters website, wordsfromhere.com. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to take many classes, but at the Art Students League in NYC, I found that Greenberg was teaching again, so for a few months before I moved from the city, I took his class again. It was fantastic, and I learned a lot.

You can see my class pieces here.

So, the thing is... I can't really hire a model, and so I had to work from online photos.

Here in Florida, I'm sure if I had some crack, or maybe just some peanut butter, I could hire a model to sit for 6 hours, so I could paint him/her. But it's not worth the hassle.

So that's me. Painting is what I want to do for a living. I'll get to it full time once I destroy leave Florida.

I'm tired today. Not too tired, but my body feels sluggish. I'm not getting enough exercise.

Perhaps that's because it's been over 90 degrees the last three days. The thought of doing something to sweat additionally seems counter productive to the laziness gene I inherited from my father.

I've worked hard to live up to the standards that gene requires. Very hard.

Ok, actually, I haven't worked hard at all.

You see how that works?

Hmmm... yeah, nothing else really rocked my world today. Karen, my girl who still lives in NYC, had jury duty today. Poor Karen. She got to see the worst of the worst white collar criminals today. Maybe a flasher, too. She sounded excited earlier, I must get details.

We're trying to wrangle up some tickets to Vegas for our birthdays. I haven't been to Vegas since... god, it's been a while. And I really enjoyed it. I hope those people remember my name. I mean, I was a good tipper, you know, six years ago.

They have to remember me, right? Maybe throw a few free drinks my way while I'm at the tables?

Maybe if I'm a snappy dresser.

I hope you all had a good day that revolved around sex, money, food and going to the bathroom.

In that order.

J

the diner

this isn't about a diner. It's about a DINER.

Not a customer. A place you go to eat.

So, my mom, my sister and I went to eat at this restaurant across the street from us, for our weekly business meeting.

We've got there a handful of times. The french toast is quite good.

Last Saturday, I went there by myself, to get out of the house and not have cereal for 108 consecutive days. And the french toast was awful. I actually had to send it back, and I hate doing that. So they gave me a waffle and everything was right with the world.

This morning, had same thing... but I asked if they could make sure it's really cooked. Perhaps that was the problem. So the waitress goes in the back and says "Listen, really cook the french toast, cause the guy was here Saturday and said it wasn't good."

I'm like, christ... there's no way this food is not going to contain any of a hundred really nasty, awful things.

So I get the food, and lo-and-behold, really bad french toast. And so I asked the waitress. "Umm, listen, this isn't very good. I'm really sorry. But did you change cooks or something? Maybe the bread?"

"No. Remy's been here 12 years. I've been here 12 years."

"Oh. Well, I was here Saturday and it was the same thing, just not right. I'm really sorry."

"It's no problem, we need to know these things."

So she takes it. And I think it's the end. And it's not.

She turns around and says, in front of about fifteen other patrons. "He says it's no good Remy. Just like Saturday's."

Remy is this 50 year old battle ax of a woman, wearing a hairnet with a broad sword over one shoulder, a missile launcher over the other.

My mouth falls open.

"Was something different?" she says. "Because he said something's wrong with it."

Remy says something. "Oh, the batter?"

She says something else. "Oh, you didn't make the batter?"

My mom goes "Oh my god, your face is so red!" to me.

I'm mortified.

"You didn't make the batter?" my sister practically yells to Remy. I turn and say "Shut up!" to her.

I can't even look over, because I know Remy is taking down my stats just in case I ever show my face in there. The waitress comes by and says "I'll take it off the check. Do you want anything?"

"Just some wheat toast," I say, not able to look at her.

She says "Want some more coffee?"

I groan. I do. I nod.

What a freakin' nightmare.

This is basically what I thought was gonna happen.



Next week, Perkins, where I will be dealing with another animal, all together.

(everyone) Next week, Perkins, where I will be dealing with...

Ah, forget it.

regression

I'm sitting in a chair. I'm seven years old. I tell my mom that her food tastes like dog crap and she better take me to McDonalds before I start walking around the house naked, with my bits tucked under me, acting like a girl. I tell her I'll start wearing makeup and that I'll tell all of her friends that I'm a big Barbara Streisand fan.

My dad comes into the room, rolls his eyes and gets a bowl of cocoa krispies, fills it with orange juice, puts it in front of me and says 'shut up and eat.'

I lay here and I can't help but think that this would have been a daily occurrence, had I grown up in Florida.

This place... I can feel it changing my soul.

My childhood was actually nothing like that. It was awesome. And my mom is one of the best cooks around. I relish the holidays because she makes these awesome dinners. And I know that meatballs sound like a pretty easy thing to make... hers are to die for.

So, I finished Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The entire series. In one month and two days. Beat that!

Seriously, if you do beat that, I probably don't want to know you, so... don't bother beating that. Just, move on.

Ever have one of those days where you accomplish nothing? Where you take two naps, because you're so bored with what you're doing, or you have no energy? Well that was today. I didn't take two naps, I haven't done that since my mom lived in the other black hole of fun, Scranton, Pennsylvania.

No, today I combined the two naps into one 3 hour sleep fest. Yeah. It rocked pretty hard.

My upstairs neighbor is having sex right now. It's 12:49am.

Check earlier posts about this guy and his...

Jesus, that was quick.

Sigh. The curse of the 40-50 year old man.

Wow, you have to hear this. The Viagra kicked in, I think. This guy must have been a drummer or something when he was younger. He's keeping a very steady beat.

Oh well.

Have a good night, all. A better night than I'm having.

J