Okay (okay okay), it’s just a little pinprick

A food court in Seattle-Tacoma International Airport: Burger King(TM), Cinnabon(TM), and an anonymous corporate bar. The thought of food is appalling. The Japanese coworkers and I ate at a dim sum place called Noble Court(TM) yesterday. I munched on oil-covered noodles, drank oil-laden soup, and took a massive bite of a chicken leg that was still frozen in the center.

Last night was tough. I woke up at two a.m. swaddled in Seattle Westin’s(TM) so-called Heavenly Bed(TM), lucidly dreaming of skiing at warp speed down a mountain covered with red snow. Freezing, I stumbled out of bed to the thermostat and the temperature of the room instantly rocketed up past four hundred degrees. The walls of the room ceased to be foursquare, and the bed slowly turned on an axis somewhere deep within the guts of the building. As I lay there in bed, awash in alternate waves of heat and cold, my mind began to dissociate from my body, and thus my skin started to separate from my muscles, tearing into loose sheets and folds. It peeled from my body like the skin on an overripe banana. Things became interesting.

I decided that the correct choice of action was to make coffee. In retrospect, I acknowledge that perhaps making coffee was not the optimal course of action, but we are simply documenting the facts here. I got out of bed, hauled my miserable ass to the coffeemaker, filled the carafe with water. I installed it in the coffee maker, put the ground coffee in the filter basket, and waited. Nothing happened. I stood, my legs failing underneath me, for about eight weeks before realizing that I had failed to actually pour the water into the coffee maker.

A delayed flight later, I’m home, sweating under a down comforter. Aspirin and steady love from my wife has my bug under control.

All this time I stayed out of sight, I started wondering why

She lovingly assembled the sandwich: turkey, cheese, fresh spinach, tomato from the vine, and my favorite mustard. She presented it to me with a big glass of water and sat at the far end of the couch. I alternately munched and complained.

“There were so many others auditioning for Starbuck,” I spat, spewing breadcrumbs. “The Rainmaker is one of the great modern roles for men. Dozens of people turned out at the Hillbarn. The other guys were pros. They were so good looking… they had such good reads…”

“I know, dear,” my wife said. “You’ve worked so hard on it.”

“That’s the thing!” I said, waving the glass of water. “I know every line, every moment of the character. I’ve spent months living inside the character’s head. And to see it all burned away in a bad audition…”

“Well, dear,” she said. “You don’t know that you didn’t get the part.”

“They let me go,” I whined miserably. “Don’t you see? There were other actors there reading the part of Starbuck after they said I was done. You don’t let your first choice go. You let your third and fourth choice go, maybe. Not your first choice.”

“Interesting idea,” she said. “But you don’t know what’s going on in their heads.”

I munched the sandwich. “Thank you for the sandwich,” I said.

“Now I guess you just wait,” she said.

So I waited and ate the sandwich. Ten minutes later, the call came. So mark your calendars for Valentine’s Day 2004. I can’t vouch for the quality of Starbuck yet, but I guarantee you that the assistant prop master for the show will be of the highest possible caliber.

Bought a beat up six string in a secondhand store

There is such a thing as talent. Tonality is important. Pitch control, color, breath control, all important.

Or so I thought. If Antares Autotune was trinitrotoluene, then Nashville would be a huge smoking pit right now. This $359 piece of DSP software is now a standard piece of equipment in the country/rock/blues/rap/industrial musical mega-establishment. You can’t write a number-one hit without it.

So here’s my cover of You Tore Me Down, originally by The Flamin’ Groovies, inspired by Krash’s recording, recorded start to finish in sixty minutes. Every single track in the recording is a single take with no rehearsal. You notice I blow the words at several points, but that does not matter. With the awesome power of Antares Autotune, talent is a thing of the past! Coat your mistakes in a comfortable patina of tonal perfection! With human error mitigated, we can work to create the MUSIC OF THE FUTURE!

Dammit.

All these places have their moments

Here’s a story. You are on the cavernous Blue Ship, hurtling through space at eighteen point five miles per second. The nine hundred people who live, work, love, play and die on the Blue Ship are here because their great-grandparents committed their lives and the lives of their offspring to the trip.

The designers of the Blue Ship equipped it with a canonical library of digital books, music, and all other recorded knowledge and art authored by mankind. They also provided the inhabitants with a sports arena, a food preparation area, a medical facility, and a theater.

You have lived your entire life on the Blue Ship. Your great-grandchildren, should you decide to bear them, will deactivate the transit crystal, break the welded seam on the titanium door, and once again breathe the warm air of home.

This is the only life you will ever know. This is the only life your shipmates will ever know.

You may live your life by delving into the various prepared entertainments that the ship’s designers have provided for you: an endless catalog of books, movies, and artistic recordings, and creative and academic works of every imaginable type.

Or you can exit your rest cell, tap on the doors of your neighbor’s cells, and try to interest them in a game of cribbage. Or distract them by telling knock-knock jokes. Or you can make fun of them, or hate them, or love them. Or talk existential philosophy with them. You can even try to get a volleyball league together.

Or ignore them, all as you please, and draw concentric patterns uninterrupted in your rest cell. You are stranded on the Blue Ship, screaming at eighteen point five miles per second, and you can never, ever leave this place.

Also, there are nine hundred people here who can never, ever leave this place either.

Do what you will.

I tell you one and one and one makes three

I drank two cups of coffee before rehearsal for Aaron’s play. Rehearsal was in a two-story townhouse on South Van Ness in the Mission. The townhouse is shared between four twentysomething dot-com escapees. In the kitchen there is a glass-walled cupboard, circa 1950. The cabinet contains sippy cups, white dot-com mugs, clear glasses stolen from a nearby restaurant, and Ball jars. No two glasses in the cabinet are the same.

Aaron’s writing and directing. “Okay, this time on the Corporate Head speech, can we try it in your voice?”

I nod. “Alternative culture,” I say. “Holds no threat!” I’m channelling Adolf Hitler. “We sell it back to them! As if! It were! By them!” Zieg heil!

Aaron beams. “Great! Five minute break!”

I find the bathroom. Someone’s taking a shower in there. A roommate gabbles on a cordless phone next to the bathroom. “Mom!” she says. “What? What?”

“Excuse me,” I ask her.

“Wait a second,” she asides to me. “Mom? Did he say that? I can’t believe he said that!”

“Is there another bathroom around here?” I ask.

She raises a finger to me in a don’t-interrupt-me warning. “Mom? That is so completely out of line! I totally can’t believe he said that!”

The sound of someone splashing in the shower, humming tunelessly.

I waited. “Yeah,” she said. “Yeah? No! That’s so totally not right! I just can’t believe it! Are you sure that he said that?”

At this point I went back to the kitchen, took a piss in one of the mugs, and placed the full mug neatly back into the cupboard. Actually, that didn’t happen, but it’s a funnier ending than “I waited twenty minutes and gave up.”

Thanks in no small part to Marin, I successfully bullshitted my way into the writing team for Stand Up, It’s Thursday Night. Shows are in production now for the next season, starting January. Here are some new bite-sized scripts for you: Interrogating Einstein 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.

Suddenly I’m this punk rock star of stage and screen

Apparently I’ll be playing the part of Devon in a staged reading of The Pocket Pal on November 16 at 111 Minna. The author is trying to get financiers and assorted rich people to show. Come by if there is absolutely nothing else going on in your life.

There’s a television show airing on UPN 44 next January. It’s called Stand Up, It’s Thursday Night! They’re bringing me in for a “second interview” based on my comedy sketches: Amazing Dudes, Security Officers #1, and Security Officers #2. Wish me luck, friends and neighbors.

And you remember the jingles used to go

The lights had been on in the stuffy bedroom for about an hour, and the temperature was way past ninety degrees. Phane (pronounced Fan-ny) and Yoga (pronounced Yo-ga) fiddled with the 16mm camera, readjusted the lighting, pulled a tape measure to my nose, fiddled with the camera again, put a yellow gel on one fresnel lamp, and tweaked the lighting again.

Sweat poured off my nose as I lay crumpled in the bedsheets. Marin, playing my love interest, said, “Can we get a tissue for John?” Marin swabbed off my forehead and powdered my nose with a compact.

“Okay, we’re ready,” said Phane. “Action.”

Grope-kiss-grab-roll- “And cut. That was very good.”

“Are you sure?” I asked. “That was two seconds of film. You don’t need a second take?”

“No,” said Phane. “Let’s move on.”

Yoga readjusted the cels and spun some knobs on the camera. He removed the gel from another fresnel and checked light levels again. I took off my socks.

“Look ashamed,” said Phane. “Look down and look ashamed.”

I looked down and looked ashamed. “Cut,” said Phane. “Perfect. Let’s move on.”

“Wait a minute,” I said. “I didn’t feel very ashamed there.”

“No, it was perfect,” said Phane. “Would you like some pizza?”

The actors ate pizza and talked. “My first time doing a love scene,” said Marin.

I toasted her. “I’m honored.”

“How do you think the film will turn out?”

I looked down and looked ashamed.