SINCE LEGALIZING MARIJUANA, G.D.P. UP BY 54%, CRIME PLUMMETS 68%

WASHINGTON D.C., April 7 — Since Congress passed the National Legalize Marijuana Act, affectionately dubbed the No Stoned Left Behind Unturned Bill, the national gross domestic product has shot up 54%, mainly due to the sharp increase in food sales such as Chef Boyardee Ravioli, increases in late night 7-11 and Circle K binge sales, increased movie theatre attendance and strangely enough, increases in purchases of articles such as gnomes, lava lamps, and paintings from independent street vendors. Says Mendocino resident Rose Stevenson “Ever since pot was legalized, I just love sitting in a theater watching the Animal Kingdom commercials that come on before the movie. It’s just like home, with a huge ass big screen TV, but with 100 other stoned people. I just can’t stop staring and laughing. It’s so weird!”. ConAgra, Inc. the makers of the ever-popular Chef Boyardee lunch foods, is having a difficult time meeting demands to its unexpected rise in canned sales to adult males. They have historically catered to mothers with pre-teen children. “I wish Chef Boyardee would make man-sized cans of ravioli,” says Massillon, Ohio resident, Don Lontkowski. ” I’ve discovered a renewed love for the ravioli I ate when I was a kid, Since Congress passed the Douchie bill, I can’t stop eating it. It’s a little frustrating that the cans are so small.” Chunky Soup has made a man size can for years, though according to Lontkowski, “it’s still not enough for a satisfying lunch, but hey, at least they’re trying,”

Crime has also plummeted 68% across the nation, since the No Stoned Unturned Act was passed. However, Republicans and the Christian Coalition Consortium have complained about the increased number of citizens dancing nude and the drum circles gathering in the street.

White collar crime in Houston continues its steady growth. A Congressional Task Force has been dispatched to the city to explore a theory that the humidity in those parts of the region has a serious adverse effect on the brain. Another theory: one of the common effects of having a steady dose of THC in one’s diet is diminishing the need for extravagant possessions, and as such, female Houstonians are resistant to the idea of relinquishing their material possessions diligently acquired through the popular technique of marrying rich. “There ain’t no way God wants me to give up my Land Rover and all my other nice things, if my friends aren’t going to do it,” says Laura Lee Davis, attending a rally in the Houston Country Club last week.

P.S.: This is just a parody of an article. My attempt at being “The Onion.”

 

WITHIN YOU WITHOUT YOU

Meeting and connecting with people, all looking for their simple truth. Finding more and more people who believe in me enough to tell the world, so much so I’m letting go of the people I’ve always made so much time and energy to convince. And not letting go in hate or in spite, but for the sake of respect: respect for me for what I bring to your life and respect for yourself to realize when you have someone in your life that gives his life passion in what he does, you must nurture it, because it is a gift from the heavens. If you don’t cherish that gift, you don’t respect or value yourself welll enough. When someone unequivocally believes in you with all their heart, it is a phenomenal feeling to absorb. I’ve met a handful of people this week who’ve radiated that kind of energy to me. It didn’t happen until I accepted the truth in my worth to the world, which I am realizing is humongous.

I feel your pain, and I wanted to share with you that I think it’s all going to be alright the moment you can find the resilience to face your truth. When you face the truth of who you are and what you value within yourself and what you hope to achieve in the long term, it all comes into place, because your effort takes its rightful obligation, the right people come along, and the proper opportunities come in your life.

To help you through the week, I’d like to dedicate to all of us, a song from the Beatles, a track from Sgt. Peppers’ Lonely Hearts Club Band, called “Within You Without You.” Enjoy, and have a great week.

We were talking-about the space between us all
And the people-who hide themselves behind a wall of illusion
Never glimpse the truth
Then it’s far too late-when they pass away.

We were talking-about the love we all could share
When we find it to try our best to hold it there-
With our love, With our love-we could save the world-if they only knew.
Try to realise it’s all within yourself
No-one else can make you change
And to see you’re really only very small,
And life flows ON within you and without you.

We were talking-about the love that’s gone so cold
And the people who gain the world and lose their soul-
They don’t know-they can’t see…Are you one of them?
When you’ve seen beyond yourself
Then you may find, peace of mind is waiting there-
And the time will come when you see
we’re all one, and life flows on within you and without you.

 

SUPREME CONFIDENCE

The culmination of a creative renaissance that officially began in 2000 is finally reaping the flashes of a harvest. A quantum leap of change, and re-direction in perspective. Seeing it all now, the way a major league baseball player sees himself on the field, the way a prodigiously prolific rock band has a singularly pure obessesion. A laser-like focus, not to be deterred (well–as much as I can at least). God was in the room today. A non-believer in me, so full of his own self-importance, finally came to terms that he wasn’t quite what he thought he was yet I had to absorb his negative energy and self-inflated ego. He couldn’t respect that I was a better athlete than he was. But I let him run around in his diapers, bitching and moaning, and finally, when the opportunity presented itself, reality bubbled to the surface. He was wrong. The victory wasn’t that I proved him wrong, but that I had the patience enough to show him that he just wasn’t all that. All in due time.
A mySpace member named “Christ” once commented: “All things being equal, love will remain, love will be all. Faith will no longer be needed.“

When, dammit?

 

LIFE IS A TURNSTYLE.

HOTEL CAFE, June 17 — I wonder much of the day, who is really on your team? Who really wants to see you succeed? Who really has your best interests at heart? Who really wants to take the plunge with you? I often say that it takes me 365 days – one cycle of the earth to travel around the Sun — to really get a sense of someone, their intentions, their outlook on life, their ability to roll with the punches, their grip on reality – not the reality in one’s own head, mind you, but the reality of how people operate in this world.

As such, people come and go. Too much, I often complain, and achingly so. Once, Nancy assured me that “hey, that’s life,” which if you look at it in one way, can seem like it’s a tainted way to see the world. I’ve chosen instead, to be reassured by that comment, because when you can accept that things are just what they are, then the future actually becomes very bright. When you humbly accept that there’s so much room for so many possibilities — good and bad — and you prepare the best you can, it all becomes very sweet. Then again, taking drugs commissioned by your psychiatrist or from your brother’s prescription is the approved way of making it bright anymore, isn’t it? So what happens when the drugs don’t work anymore? Ask The Verve, I guess.

I’m thinking about revising my 365 day criteria to 3,652 days. That’s a whole decade. People just come and go, all the time, right, so is a year really enough? As I look around the room tonight, standing with me are two people who’ve been around for more than a decade and a few people who’ve somehow been dancing in the circle also for more than a decade who are now here tonight. I order a round for everyone present.

Even Tom Morello, strumming his guitar as the Nightwatchman, up on stage, is going in a different direction when just five years ago, he came up with the brilliant idea of being Audioslave with Chris Cornell. Now Tom is reuniting with Zack de la Rocha to rage Against the Machine, after they broke up in 2001.

Some people are right in your life and some aren’t. When do you know? I’m not sure, but at the end of the day, we will all converge again, as we all have tonight in such a random way and the people who want to make the effort to show up and stick around rather than give up and say, “hey, I guess we just don’t get along,” are the people that I think have the true ability to “believe” and “have faith.” Thank the lord for the few friends like that.

We can’t worry about it –who are right in your life or who aren’t. People come and go. They come back or they don’t. All we can consider are the people who fight for wanting to be in your life — the friends who may have a disagreement with you one minute but still kiss you reassuringly when it’s time for bed and still wish you a good night.

The turnstile of life IS a lifestyle. Life is a turnstyle.

Good night from the Hotel Café.

 

HELL-A IN A HANDBASKET

Is it me getting older and more codgety or is the mediocrity finally rising to the surface? Is the mandate these days to be sexy and employ “sexy” people wearing cool clothes and have tats but have little work ethic and a bag of neuroses that a small band of ADs have to sit and take and babysit.  “Hey, I look cool, so it’s okay that I’m a complete asshole or a raving bitch!”  Our leaders thanking the wrong people, spoils going to the person with the loudest mouths, department heads whose pedigree is mainly from modeling (say again?).  Directors who eat their young….

The tradeoff, thank god, is that I get to be working for 15 hours a day living the dream and have my little name whizzing down really fast at the bottom of the screen. And as many free cokes and cookies as I want! And I get to work with the actor from JAG! YEA!

Hello God? When do I get to go back to Louisiana? And no, I don’t care about the heat and the bugs. I’ll take that over OCD, ADD, schizophrenia, Oedipus Complex any day. (That’s was just in one person. Seriously.)

 

I CREATE REALITY.

Does Indianapolis really have a thriving social rooftop pool scene where sexy people hang out and raise money for a children’s hospital? Well that’s what I did yesterday, setting 25 sexy extras, all looking hot and sexy, all vying to fill their god shaped hole in Hell-A.

SEXY 24 YEAR OLD BLONDE: “being Ophelia in my little play at Missoula High, then working at State Farm just wasn’t cutting it anymore. I’d rather be an extra, get paid $60 a day and be shown the back of the bus….because it’s worth it to say, “hey mom! you can see me on TV tonight. Right there…right there! Oh! if you freeze it on Tivo you can really make me out crossing in front of Jennifer Garner. Yup, that was me! Tell everyone!”

Hello, sexy 24 year olde blonde: if you look at most of the Oscar winners..mostly it’s not the Velveeta  sexy people winning.  Hint: craft first.  Nose job second.  Blow job in case of emergency.

I also did a post crime scene all by myself and with my special imagination!  “Okay…the police guy goes here, the coroners go here. We’ll take the forensics kit and put it here. And hey, we need a black sexy detective whose pants are painted on. Give her a badge and a feather duster, and she’ll dust for prints on the stereo. Oh shit..we don’t have enough people. Get a couple of guys that we were using from the party scene and dress them up as detectives and crime techs. No one will notice.”

 

HOLLYWOOD SQUARES

HOLLYWOOD, April 17 — Standing in the corner at the Hotel Café, with my back to the walls, listening to Tom Morello singing about the people… Surrounded by friends and associates, old and new, intertwined and interconnected in some way over the last decade or so.

Jessy, who I invited, knows Patrick (who isn’t here) quite well. Patrick went to college with me and so he knows Carlos, who I also invited and is also here tonight — he also went to college with me and also knows Jessy from the trip in Seattle for a documentary that I worked on about the lead singer of a band whose roommate was the lead singer of the band that Tom Morello – the guy on stage — was the guitarist for. But I digress. Back to Carlos, who spent New Years Eve once at Stephanie’s (who isn’t here), who was my ex a long time ago. Jessy and Stephanie are good friends, because Stephanie, Jessy and I went through the Training Program together, and Jessy even went to Stephanie’s wedding, but I didn’t go, well, because a) I’m cynical about weddings, and b) I wasn’t invited.

Nancy, who is here, as well, just met Jessy and Carlos tonight. She knows Jody (who isn’t here) who worked on Ned’s with me and randomly a year later, Nancy and I both worked Boston Legal. Nancy also worked on Ned’s for a short spell thanks to Jody, but I didn’t remember at the time.

Vanessa, who is also here tonight of her own accord, worked on Boston Legal as well. Coincidentally, Jessy, I recall, also worked Boston Legal at some point, too, so she actually is associated with Vanessa, but they just met tonight. About eight years ago, Vanessa used to work at Central with Steve and Franklyn, who I just golfed with earlier in the day. I know Franklyn because we worked on Party of Five together back in the day, a show Jessy worked on as well. Come to find out, Vanessa also worked on Party of Five in her Central Casting days, so we also actually worked directly with each other almost eight years ago, which I didn’t come to know until I formally met her just a couple of months ago, on Boston Legal, the same time I met Nancy. Jessy also knows Franklyn which means she was also associated with Vanessa back then, not just from Boston Legal, but also from Party of Five, a fact she probably didn’t know until tonight because again, they just met. By the way, Nancy and Vanessa just met tonight. (I wonder if Vanessa knows Jodie, another ex who Jessy also knows. Jodie also worked on Boston Legal until she got married and left for Texas.)

Dawn, who I just met tonight, is Vanessa’s friend. She works at Rich King, a company with which I was directly associated because they were our extras casting company on “Ned’s Declassified,” a show I worked on a year ago with Dan Coffie (who wasn’t there). Dan asked me to be his 2nd AD, after I was introduced to him a couple of years ago by Jessy when she asked me to work on “Phil of the Future.” Jessy worked with Dan on “Bloodhead,” a movie in which her husband Scot was the 2nd Unit director, who I also know because I worked with him on the doc I mentioned before. So of course, Carlos knows Scot also because of the aforementioned trip to Seattle.

There was Caroline, who is here tonight floating around the place, doing her thing, figuring stuff out. She just met everyone tonight, except Carlos and I. We actually met her a couple months back at another Hotel Café show. Her brother works at Paramount, where Carlos works as well and also where I started my film career and whose softball team I also played for, where I met Andrew and Brian a few years ago. They are here tonight as well. They also know Carlos, of course, but just met everyone else tonight.

Hey, I forgot something — Caroline also knows Patrick (remember, Patrick knows Jessy and Carlos; Caroline also knows Carlos) because we had drinks when Patrick flew in from London a couple of months ago. Patrick and I have a mutual friend, Matt, who Caroline was introduced to from that night of drinks and then beyond and Matt knows Allan from their work with DC Comics. Jessy and I know Allan, who was a writer on Party of Five.

I mean, hell, even on stage, Tom Morello, who is oblivious of me, save the picture he took with me that is on my mySpace page, is connected in the circle by way of Chris Cornell, who I mentioned above was the lead singer for Audioslave, the band with which Tom was the guitarist. As the tale of the web goes — Scot, Jessy’s husband, spent a few years waiting to complete his doc about Andrew Wood until Chris Cornell was available to do an interview, who was the key piece because he was Andrew’s roommate.

Is your head spinning yet? This is the freak show in which I live in…”the city I live in / the City of Angels /Lonely as I am / Together we cry.” That’s how small this town actually is and that’s how delicate the balance is in Hell-A. If we all sat down and mapped it out, I bet we’d come up with a mySpace network that would uncover even more uncanny associations.

So as all this was transpiring in my brain – which annoyingly never stops — over the period I was nursing my Jameson’s, I wondered about all the other people we all might have had common associations with but in our individual lives may have fallen through the cracks. Within our gumbo of collected history, in a town of millions of people, here was this little collective that very randomly are all one degree away from screwing each other over.

 

THE NEW CLARITY WILL BE TELEVISED.

Turned on the TV… and voila, there’s Boston Legal. It was the episode I had worked on before heading for the drive to New Orleans. A surreal moment of sorts, watching something on TV that symbolized where my head was only forty-some days earlier,like a reality check. As I watched specific scenes I recalled the specific thoughts I was thinking at the time that I was watching take after take after take on the set– the heavy things weighing on my mind: anticipating a long drive and the unknown of a journey I was compelled to take, what I was leaving behind, Mardi Gras and not really having a plan except to finish my script, but needing to get away, to heal, to find, to discover, to renew. So to sit here tonight, with my new set of eyes, watching the episode, it became more than watching it the way I guess the millions of people all over America were watching tonight. Some observations:

1) 75 is the new 60. William Shatner is 75 fecking years old, ladies and gentlemen. A few twelve hour working days for him on the episode and he was always a fecking pro. He is a machine. Kudos to you, sir.

2) The surreality of creating reality. In the episode, there is a SWAT situation in which a domestic terrorist takes the firm hostage. I choreographed most of the SWAT action. On TV, looked pretty real to me. BUT IT’S NOT! I made that shit up out of my head, out of my own educated guessing, most probably from watching other movies. And to think, millions of people watch, and what they see convinces them it’s real, “cause mah eyes ain’t failed me yet, mistah!” 

3) Neutral gear is still moving forward. I was going through a bit of a heartache at the time of the shoot and not feeling confident about getting through it, but as I watched the Boston Legal episode, recalling how I was struggling back then, I know from my experiences on the forty day journey away from Hell-A, that things will always work out somehow…and keeping still and quiet is so critical while things sort themselves so the answer becomes clearer. Not quite at 100% clarity, but I’m starting to feel more assured about the direction I’m headed and with whom I’m heading there. It’s nice to have met and shared with people along the way to know that at any moment I choose, life can become grand again.

“TIMSHEL…thou mayest.”  More and more, I’m experiencing the sublime feeling that occurs when one honors him/herself—doing so, you attract the people who believe in you, who fight for you, who want to experience life with you, Logically, that is where my energy shall go, yet still too much time wasted trying to rally the wrong people…including those closest to me on paper. Always been blessed with the eccentricity of vision and outside the box thinking and for a long time I campaigned to the wrong people—more than a few of them bottom feeders—dumbing myself down, stickin’ a hankie in my mouth. The result was a lot of lost opportunities and a diminished harvest. I relied on the wrong people to tell me if I was on the right track, and it seems that I am now watching some of those same people, some, really good friends, dog-paddling in their lack of foresight…and for a few, a bit too late. I feel sorrow for them. God help them. So many exceptional people around, why bother with the mediocrity and the people who share little faith in you? I should feel bad for them, but then again…shame on them. They had no right whatsoever to make the call.

 

LES BON TEMPS

LES BON TEMPS

Here on the Banks of the mighty Miss
They took a beatin’ and a thrashin’
And they just seems to keep it comin’
A people of resilience and renewal
No choice but give ‘em hell and to stand tall

Shut up for a minute about your short end of the deal
And you can feel we ALL just tryin’ to heal
Lookin’ for something to fill our god-shaped hole
Lookin’ for to resole our soul

From Hell-A to the streets in the Quarter
A lifetime of people with Faith they show when life is whole
Finally finding people with faith when life takes its toll
‘Specially those times where you just don’t know

People with confidence to be the fools they want to be
Knockin down the levee that holds ‘em back
Flooding out the doubts that have fallen in the cracks
Down in the depths that even you can’t see

Ground crumbles off his back heel
As a man goes left to right
Down a path he aint never been

Blowin’ on the dice of faith and love
C’mon- baby needs a new set of eyes
On the roll, resoled his soul
Revival. Rebirth. Renewal.

Last call to get on the train
To get on his fun car
No more selling, shouting, or beggin’
Already drinkin’ at the Carousel Bar

I always do what I say I’m gonna do
Just takin’ a while longer than I’m used to

 

SNOWMAN

Things were going so great. Feeling so good. Staying within myself, staying quiet. Not trying so hard, not overextending myself. Thanks to the patience of an expert to help me through these kinds of situations, I’ve been doing very well lately. Money well spent, I gotta say.

He told me I needed to stop being an engineer so much and approach things more as an artist. Playful, free. Staying in the moment and not worrying about the outcome. Then I turned the corner. I got anxious. Slipped into an old habit I’ve been working incredibly hard to minimize. I got in trouble. I couldn’t get out of the rut and in the blink of an eye, it all unraveled. I lost it. Spiraling in the infinite shape of a figure eight. A snowman.

But the difference these days, I quickly adjusted and found my way again. When you enjoy something that much, you do what it takes to work at it. You fight for the clarity. It is never easy. Ever. Sometimes it gets away from you and you just have to wait till it comes back. More often than not, it does. Just showing up is half the battle. It will always be fecking frustrating. That’s why God gave it a four-letter word.

Golf.

In golf, getting an eight on a par four is quadruple bogey. A snowman.

All you can do is adjust and keep your swing thoughts: Stay. Show up. Two holes later, I made birdie. And so it goes, in golf, in love, in life, even after a snowman, you always have it in you to make birdie.