Further Evidence that Elijah Wood is my Hero

You think you got dancey dance like Frodo? Think again. Not only can Elijah own you on the dance-floor, but based on his dope-ass-swagger, he could own your ass with his knowledge of crap early 90's horror films. Howzit feel to get played by a hobbit?

Malibu is My Life Role Model

The hair. The "cowabunga", devil-may-care panache. The hair. When I have a son, and I will, I am going to name him Malibu. And from the second his little hands are strong enough to grip, I am going to stick a barbell in them and force him to do reps, holding a printout of this man, this gladiator, aloft. Ben Jr, you have met your template.

Technology At It's Best

Cure for AIDS? Naaah. Motorized limbs for veterans? Fuck THAT. Hand-knife-chop-game
Robot? I think we have our project.

Debuted in Rotterdam we see the knife-hand-chop-game Robot, a little machine that attempts to slice the little webby-skin from between your fingers, a la Bishop from Aliens. It's nice to know with minds like this when the whole world is dying of AIDS and cancer at least we'll have a place to go to have a robot slowly chop between our fingers, at least until they rot off from the plague. I've seen 28 days later...

I GOT GLASS

My car window got smashed when someone smashed it stealing my MP3 player and a bit of pride in the process. I discovered it last week when I went downstairs into the gated garage under my building to find that in the night someone had targeted my purple piece of shit in the maybe 50 down there for some instant ventilation. I was pissed, as if my car wasn’t already enough of a lump this was like adding insult to retardation to deformation to rejection. And then a couple of days later someone stole the registration out of my glove-box. So there you go.

But yesterday I got it replaced and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t driving around with a certain amount of pride in my new window. Now I know having a window doesn’t really constitute pimp, and there’s no real way to show-off a completely translucent pane of glass, but given the slump I’ve been in recently saw being able to role something up and between the world I need a break from as a definite sign that it was ending and well, I got glass. So take that world.

And if anyone reading this is in the market for a purple 95 Nissan 200SX with ALL the windows intact, call or email at your earliest convenience.

I Didn't Kill Travis

Meta dreams are confusing.

Last night I dreamt that in earlier in the year, at my home in Arlington Mass, I accidentally killed and then covered up the killing of my old roommate, Travis “T-Bird” Poston. I dreamt that while taking a Jog down one of the many steep hills in The Heights, the area of Arlington I grew up in, zombie Travis was trying to make me feel better about bringing a rock down on his head in February, and then burying the body in some remote location I couldn’t quite recall in the dream. “Man”, he said to me, in that slow hop-run you do when going down steep-hills, “If anyone was asking to be taken out it was me”, forcing me to recall the whole incident for the first time in a long time.

I remember thinking that maybe his death was the cause of all my bad 2007 karma, which, compared to 2006, has been a shit year. Momentarily shelving the guilt accompanied by this revelation I remember thinking that maybe that’s the reason my luck has been off - It all took a turn for the worse when by some hedges I crushed his skull.

And then I woke up. Feeling guilty as hell about killing my friend at first, but then relieved in the “or COURSE it was a dream” way when after the 48-second haze between sleep and wake, I realized that I hadn’t actually committed murder and had for all intensive purposed saved Travis’s life.

But then realized that very-much-alive Travis still owes me 600 bucks from six years ago, and if I ever want to see it might want begin looking for some large rocks.

Point, Japan.

Cars. DVD Players. And now Gameshows. We are truly in trouble.

In sleep, I am sound.

Sometimes it really is easier just going to sleep. Like a ship crashing on the rocks only to set sail in the morning, it’s not giving up for good, it’s just giving up for now. In sleep I don’t feel a nagging panic about my career, don’t wonder If my ex-girlfriend is in fact a siren (and I think she might be), and most importantly, don’t wish I would go right back to sleep, as I now do.

A slump is a slump is a slump is a slump. I know they’re not supposed to last but hell, what if a short-term slump turns into a long-term problem? While I know sleeping for my entire life isn’t really possible, in fact it sounds like being dead, what other ways would I have of overcoming? Work? Buckling down? If only I could buckle down, work and sleep all at the same time which still sounds like being dead, which, slump or no, I’m not quite ready for just yet.

So awake I plug – popping the balloons of regret in my mind with the unenviable truth that everything that has happened, has happened, and other shit, will continue to happen also. This life isn’t meant to be amazing all the time, if it was we wouldn’t have comedy, the Smiths or Nine Inch Nails albums, all three of which I kinda love.

So I’m awake now. You happy life? I’m awake and my bed is right there and I’m not getting in it… I want to, trust me, those sheets seem like one gigantic cuddly vagina, but I'm still not getting in it...

But this chair is kinda comfy.

American Idle

As usual, I woke up at seven in the morning, which happens weather I like it or not these days. I had gone to bed at four, drunk, but jet lag is unaffected by the need for hibernation.

My head groggy, but more pert than I liked, I went into the living room and turned on an episode of Ramsays’s Kitchen nightmares, a European show where Scottish chef Gordon Ramsay berates the kitchen staffs of failing restraints into getting their shit together, which some do and some don’t. His brogue is comforting to me and I wanted this on as I made my breakfast, an over-stuffed burrito in a flour wrap with my unusually good guacamole. (I would have preferred something a little more Parisian, but I only remembered too late that I liked the slice of hard-boiled egg on everything and mayo really doesn’t go well with a burrito). I ate and ate until my stomach was full and reveled in being a glutton, with a yelling Scottish man in the background. Somewhere in the back of my head I remembered I had calls to make and plans to execute but those all seemed to fade into a cloudy haze as I took my first bite.

Since coming back from Europe I can’t seem to be motivated to do anything. Working seems voluntary. I am growing a methadone-clinic style beard, and my commitment to no particular thing is great. I loaf about and drink white wine during the day and eat and eat until my stomach gets big shelving concerns that a life needs maintenance. I want to become ex-patriot in America. I’ll have an admirable work ethic and be on vacation at the same time, all the time. The order isn’t important.

In Europe I saw four cities in just about two weeks and while moving from place to place was lonely and cumbersome my mind was unusually clear during it. I didn’t worry all the time, didn’t sink into a funk if I thought I felt an itch or pain somewhere, didn’t rank my current position in life against all the people living around me, didn’t obsess over if I’d “made-it” yet and if not how long would it be until I did, didn’t sit on a web-browser all-day refreshing innate news pages at regular intervals learning nothing. Because my here-ness is so habitual, my not-here-ness was a breath of fresh air. It was a whole new me. There’s a lot to be said for being a drifter.

Back in the USA, I need to import that lightness of no particular place into my normal everyday life. I don’t need to be in Paris or Spain or the Netherlands (which sounds like a place from the Lord of the Rings if you say it real slow), I just have to extend that mental breathability to the corner of Hollywood and Western. I’ve been back less than a week and what I went on vacation to forget, persists. I’m feeling the pains and comparing myself to my friends and all of a sudden I’m worrying about money because dollars are real and Euros might as well be edible.

So energize me America. Fill me with your infectious need to do, and not just be. I don’t miss the Tesco macaroni, the shitty exchange rate, the lack of any reasonable place to get preparation H, I miss the gentle idleness of it all. I want the hand through the barley at the end of Gladiator forgetting that he had to see his wife and son hung like ducks in a Chinese-food window. When I was on vacation my soul was adequate. My career, or lack of career, caused me as much worry as a touch of food on a shirt. Which might have very well been ketchup because fries come with fucking everything over there.

So I’ll let this wash off me as my internal gyroscope re calibrates itself in the really-not-so-shitty-truth that I live in California again. I can hear Gordon Ramsay in my head saying “find your bollocks and stop taking the piss!” which I’ve already begun doing as I’ve got my bollocks right here. The scraps from the Louvre, Sagura Familia and even the Gay Disco will be filed away as the memories are beginning to be, and I will move on with them as insulation in my attic of the head. I am back in Los Angeles again, the Thai food restaurant across the street has a hot dog on it, the crazy people blather in English, and I have a voice over audition due in about an hour that I will record from my living room.

And it’s those things, I think, that make me proud to be an American.

Thriller, Prision Style...

Child-Molesting inmates at a Phillipino prison "practice" Thriller. One of the funniest, and oddest, things I have ever seen.

The relationship. Is over.

The relationship. Is over.

And it did not end well.

I’d never been in love before her, and I can say that now honestly as in the last week I have shuffled closer to insanity than I ever have, which can only mean love was had, and lost.

She came over to hang out. And we made guacamole. Once it was eaten I thought it was time to do it.

I laid my head in her lap, which she, admittedly received awkwardly and let it all out. “I’m still in love with you, and I think we can make this work”. To which she said nothing. “We had a lot of problems, yes, but since the break-up I’ve looked deep inside of myself and really tried to improve on all of the things you said I should improve on once I looked deep inside myself, and now that I’ve improved, I think It’s time to give us another shot..” Tick. Tick. Tick. “… Cause I’m still in love with you…”

It is in these moments when you understand how loud the sound of nothing can be.

She paused, and said, “I’m going to say something that’s going to hurt you.”

And it is in these moments when you understand how much you preferred the sound of nothing.

“I’ve been seeing someone for the past month… and we’re exclusive.”

Which was, honestly, not something I was expecting to hear.

See we broke up over the phone, and the events post-breakup were so chaotic and confusing that the only logical conclusion, I thought, was to let the dust settle, regroup, and try it again. After all, who falls in love, breaks up over a phone call, and doesn’t give it another go? Seems like such a waste – building a locomotive only to turn it into a museum the first time it falls off the tracks – of course we’d give it another go – I just needed enough time to realize that the net-value of my freedom was less than misery I’d feel without her. (Enough time alone that a complete inability to make yourself cum without a small wink of shame in the mirror has a way of doing that). I know I was taking a little time storming back to her after getting broken up with, but the idea that we’d be able to just shed each other after we had gone through so much drama together (and we did – big stuff) was impossible to me. Yes, I had complained and wavered when I was in the relationship, but I had no perspective outside the relationship to compare - I complain and waver now. I’m a complainer and a waverer. Being in love and maintaining sanity takes practice - you only know you can speak German once you’re in Germany and it takes a good deal of fucking up schnitzel to know what isn’t a sausage. This is how I felt.

And then, In that one sentence, I knew, the relationship, was over. All the refreshing of her MySpace profile, the checking of her IMDB resume had to stop – all these purvish little ways of keeping her retouched image in my head facilitated by an internet intent on snapshots of memories.

Love is like gluing your heart to someone else’s. You share one common goal – to keep this blood flowing, but if one person develops an irregular beat, however small or hidden, it runs the risk of stopping the entire mechanism. To a lesser degree I see myself having done this.

Peeling two glued items apart is a destructive task. And frustrating. The very act of gluing in the first place says I plan on these two things being stuck together for quite some time - but when they separate, or just find themselves separated, things are going to get torn. There simply is no easy way to dizzolve glue, you separate by ripping.

But glue is strong shit, and if those two hearts can manage to not short the other one out with it’s momentary, say, indecision, than continue on it will. This is what I thought would happen.

But happen it didn’t.

So it was with a distinct tearing sound that I received that little bit of information, and had to swallow hard to get that last chunk of humble pie down my little throat before coming to my senses. Before deleting her from my Gmail quick contacts so I know whenever she’s online, before removing the risky pictures of her in my cell phone, before slowly rediscovering the solitary resolution of being single, again.

I remember having a distinct guacamole taste under my tongue as in that one moment this bucket-full of revelations came crashing in on me – the relationship, was over. And short of stealing Doc Brown’s Delorian and going back a year it was unchangeable – what I had done, what she had done, was cast in the carbonite of our memories, and here I was. With my fucking head still in her lap.

I had spent a good deal of time discussing my breakup with Tere, a Mexican woman who owns a comedy club I perform at a lot. She has been my informal coach in all of this, and I have disobeyed most of her advice selfishly thinking that I’d only know if it hurts once I’m hurt.”Joo know” she’d say to me in her gently lilting accent, “If she starts to see someone helse, jour going to go crasee.” And I’d laugh it off thinking “Don’t worry Tere, who builds a locomotive only to turn it into a museam the first time it runs off the tracks?”, but it is in hindsight that I can see the error in my thinking and the honesty in her coaching. I haven’t gone crasee per se, but my already hyperventilating imagination has gone into overdrive dealing with the acceptance of my relationship being over, and even more, with the formation of elaborate fantasies about her and the new guy enjoying themselves and just generally being happy and well laid with myself nowhere in the room. Or house. Maybe he has a house, I dunno, all I know is that’s he’s mid 30’s, successful, and they’re exclusive. That and he probably has a golden dick and can cure the sick. With it.

And with this, phase two begins.

Whatever that is.

And from now on I’m letting them speak first.

Rad

I find myself watching this over and over again. It's just rad. And so his is package.

Barracuda

This is very pretty. Very beautiful animation.

Movin' A Little Up

So I'm all moved in and Koreatown is a room in my head with a closed and quiet door.

I haven't lived anywhere socially desirable since my parents paid what I was too young to know was an ungodly sum to cram me into a small apartment in the East Village during college. We'd drink in one of the local bars who didn't ask how old we were or didn't give a shit and then stumble the couple of blocks back to our apartment where the doin' it up large would continue until it needed to stop. The place was tiny - my room was what was sliced out of an already small living room, and our kitchen area was technically a kitchenette, or female kitchen, but it was close to everything and convenient as hell and friends never need much convincing to come and detach with us. Because the rent was being paid I didn't have to grasp that it kinda takes a lot of money to maintain in the East Village and that once that thing with the planes and the buildings was over, I was soon going to be an L train and 30 minutes of frustration away from everything.

And this trend continued on and on deep in the Puerto Rico area of Brooklyn for four years until I decided that leaving was the best plan and I packed what I could into a car and left.

Arriving in Los Angeles I accepted a quick sublet with a friend of a friend whose parents bought her a condo they clearly wanted for themselves in a comically planned-out housing complex in Culver City, hardly a place anyone without a handicap either golf or physical would want to be in. It had machine-controlled brooks that would stop their babbling promptly at eight, which was surreal.

The sublet didn't work out very well, and after a dispute where she informed me that I wasn't allowed to have girls over because "That's like my mom's bed and that's just graosss", so I bit my tounge, hopped on Craigslist, and called the first place I saw. An out-of-it guy picked up and seemed just stoned enough that I knew I could live with him. Half an hour later I was in the living room of 136 N. Edgemont Street and only because I had cash and could move in immediately he stopped strumming his guitar long enough to say "Uh then yeah."

And it was right back to the outskirts of the ethnic neighborhood for me. The place was good-enough, but the bathroom was anemic and for whatever reason had a tub with a separate shower area and while this would have been fine for a bath-loved the boiler was too weak to heat an appropriate amount of water and at about your balls it began to get very cold.

I stuck it out though, and when my cousin Jesse moved down from Seattle God love him he stuck it through too - and with the smaller room. We didn't have any options, the lease I had signed expired in June which meant at least another half a year of the sno-cone man and screaming Mexican children playing all day and night right outside my bedroom window, an actuality that always made me extra guilty when masturbating.

And when it was time to look for a place Jesse and I decided to only target the areas we actually wanted to live in - basically the Hollywood / Loz Feliz area. After a suitable amount of searching we settled on the place we currently live - a great 2 bedroom 2 bathroom a couple of blocks away from lounges, Thai Food, and places people actually want to be rather than having relegated themselves to.

We got briefly sidetracked by a chance Saturday look at an apartment in a building called The Chateau, which my cousin still calls Le Chateau, a complex that looked like it housed the casts of this years NBC pilots. The landlord was young and strict and every window in the apartment opened on to a granite hallway but I'd be lying if my cousin and I weren't ready to sign on the dotted line when we saw the sheer number of Little Girles walking around. Vagina, or the false promise of Vagina, will make a man make some real hasty decisions. Our application was denied though as the party looking at it after us was able to get money orders into the landlord five minutes before Jesse and I and thats only becuase Rockin' Ralph's money order machine was under the weather.

And so it was with a proud amazement that last night, the first night spent in my new apartment, I walked outside I was almost hit by an attractive female hipster who was riding her bicycle for enjoyment and not because someone was pursuing her. And around the corner people were having drinks at a hip lounge and not the pool room in the back of the questionable bodega. I had finally situated myself in a place I'd be happy to talk about without an addendum of disclaimers explaining why I didn't really mind the constant screaming and Gay Guy and his loud motorcycle. This is where I am, and here, is where I want to be. It feels odd, like life is shaking me saying "Seriously man, try being an adult? Just try it." And maybe the adult in me is going, "I can live with a dishwasher... I can uh yeah that's just fine."

I'd like to continue this trend of upgrading the components in my life-computer. And in my real computer, but lets not get ahead of myself. I think situation plays a large role in definition and now my definition includes a cold jacuzzi and lots of Armenian people. Which is just fine with semi-adult me... who is letting a machine wash his dishes as he posts this.

-Ben

Baaaaa. Boooo.

I am this sheep.

Imogen Heap, Ableton, and one Amazing Incredible Song

I am so floored by this.