Money Changes Everything

It's really hard to find people who will help you stretch yourself intellectually and artistically but it is really almost impossible to find people that will put you in the moneystream. I don't know how to do it and I don't think I'd recognize those people if I were close to them. I would advise anybody thinking of paying for a class to listen to "producers" talk about how to become successful that the idea of a successful producer stopping what they are doing to go cash in some pesos at the local symposium-holding building by "divulging secrets" is horribly funny. I cry myself to sleep over some of these things. I feel I am a schlub. Have you ever seen the movie Ruben & Ed? I think of myself as Howard Hessman's from that movie, scheming success and not really working for anything. I may have already become that middle-aged loser.

What jarred this into me tonight? I rode the Metro to work and back today. On the train there was a large Mexican man who was very loudly proclaiming the virtues of being an old gangster and being a Christian gangster. He was behind me so I didn't get a good look at him but at some point during his sermon a down-at-the-mouth-seeming 40-something black guy pulled a red clown nose out of his jacket pocket and wore it. He was calling the loud guy a clown but the loud guy didn't see him or comment on him. That guy with the clown nose was a hero in my life for 13 seconds. After I transferred to the bus I ended up in a weird position - the front of the vehicle. A homeless lady with torn pants that showed off quite a bit of skin was near me, the normal old people that ride up in the front of the bus were near me. In the back of the bus there was a skin-head looking white guy that was laid out on the bench at the end of the bus. The bus driver warned him a few times to sit up. I got excited when she stopped the bus to go back and threaten him ("I'll kick you off!"). A fight between a bus driver and a homeless/crazy person is a great way to be entertained. Alas, in spite of her continued antipathy towards him, she let him stay aboard the bus. Which sucks for me because for some reason he ended up sending next to me. He tried to kind of bully me farther into the seat to give himself room. I kind of tensed up and knocked him back towards the aisle a little bit until the people sitting in front of us left and he moved up there. He was wearing a walking boot and kept yelling at the bus driver, "What street is this?" It wasn't great. I hate that guy. That doesn't answer why I got so down about not knowing where to become a beautiful and wealthy butterfly, though, does it? Maybe it does. My head is a swirl.

I will leave this post with this video of a live version of a song from one of my favorite records ever.

Writing Just To Write

If there's one thing that's always interested me in folklore it's the idea of selling your soul to the devil. If there were a devil that offered me a bunch of money or something for my soul I'd have a tough time saying no. It seems like the devil should have a phone bank somewhere staffed with plenty o' operators calling around to poor areas and offering several hundred dollars a pop to buy souls. "Need cash in a jiffy without giving up anything your currently using? Sell your soul to us!!"

It seems like a good deal. I'd have to hold out for seven figures but the devil has so much money that it shouldn't be an object. Basically what I'm doing here is begging for a job as a lobbyist. NORML has lobbyists, I think. Isn't that what they are, a lobbying group? The idea of making weed legal seems like a spiritual calling even though I haven't smoked in years.

When I was a kid I had a nightmare about a picture of a hand. I've probably bloggerized this story before but my archives are so... 116 posts in 7 years is it? Wow, that's not prolific at all. Anyway, I dreamed that we had a picture of a hand on the wall of our TV room. It was gray and hairy and the background was dark, like the hand was reaching up from hell. The hand was balled up in a fist. In my dream, my parents told me and my brothers that the hand could drag you to hell if you stared at it fro too long. Which makes sense. If you've got a portal to damnation, leave it where the kids can see it. Anyway, the dream goes on to me and my brothers playing some sort of game where we are running in circles through the TV room, through the windows, onto the porch and back into the TV room (got it? We were climbing through the window and running for some reason) while our parents sat on the couch watching TV. Of course the hand caught my eye and I got grabbed. I was slowly pulled into the picture while my family watched it slowly happen.

The Devil is one of my favorite icons for some reason. I loved the demon in Legend. I loved any movie that featured a deal with the devil. Lord of lies? Lord of the flies? Great. I remember that passage of the Bible. Also, the part where the Devil tries to tempt Jesus in Gethsemane (I think that's where it happens) and he shows him all the awesome stuff that you can get when you join The Devil Team? Jesus had bigger goals, I guess, but I would've jumped all over that deal. Plus, in some christian book or another there was a picture of the Devil handing Jesus a loaf of bread and ever since I saw that I've tried to find that perfect looking loaf of bread. Fucking, devils, man. There kind of fascinating.

Maybe this offers some kind of insight into my soul. Maybe you are reading this and thinking, "Hmmm, I could use a backup soul in case my current one starts to break down." Maybe you are The Devil. If you are The Devil, I have to admit that in spite of my eagerness to sell my soul to you I have no desire to eat poop. If you are unaware of why I say that, it is because The Devil lures little kids to be bad by telling them to eat poop. Look it up, it's in the Bible.

Offing the Horse

So I've got bad news, kids. It will take another 2 weeks or so before my script gets reviewed by a certified The Black List reviewer (I've had trouble with the spelling on here) so it will be a little bit longer before my low seven figures ship comes in. Take heart, though, Christmas and the end of time will happen on schedule even if there are no presents available for the masses.

I'm sort of desperate for something big and brand new. Money, experience, excitement, something that is different from what I have been doing since I kicked the bucket on top of my scuffling. I liked not having a job but I wasn't very good at it. Maybe movies will never work out for me. That's probably OK. You know what movies I wish I could make? A movie about a bear that works in an office with people. A movie about a school teacher that falls in love (unwittingly) with a serial killer before he gets caught and then she just continues on being his girlfriend while he's in prison. A girl dies and decides to kill God, whether or not she gets accepted into heaven. A girl teaches a guy how to pick up women and then tries to keep him for herself. A movie about a visionary businessman that has an office that is really fun to work at but the other businessmen around him perceive him as a threat and fight to shut him down. Do those sound like star vehicles? Oh, yeah, a movie about a serial killer that drives around hitting people with his car. Blockbusters, every last one of 'em. Yeah, maybe I should figure out some other way to get rich and famous and relaxed.

Never, ever thought I'd have to resort to...

I'm just back from dropping off "lab work" at the hospital. A little something referred to in polite company as "stool samples." Let me tell you something about collecting those suckers: it's really disgusting. I had to poop into a "hat" and then use a little, teeny, jagged spork to break off little chunks of feces and drop them into each of three little pill bottles filled with liquids, stir it up, seal it, shake it up and then bring it to your nearest lab for the studies of fecal phenomena. The shitting in the hat is the worst part. In spite of how much I have always wanted to shit in a hat, ever since my then-girlfriend's cat shat in my hat when I was 18, I'd never considered that the hat might be a white plastic thing that would somehow amplify the smell of shit throughout my bathroom. I lit matches, I burned candles, I still smelled shit even after I had showered. Stool samples aren't for the faint of heart, yo.

Ever since I went to the doctor on Friday and he (not my normal doc) told me that I had to submit stool samples to the lab I've had this little modified snippet of a Cee-Lo rap running through my head: "I never, ever thought I'd have to resort to stool sampling." The actual line says drug smuggling, not sure why it was my reaction but it was immediate and has held serve. The song is one of my all-time favorite raps and, for better and worse, was Cee-Lo's introduction to America. It's at the very end of the first verse of Outkast "Git Up, Git Out" and I would love to post the music video for you but I didn't realize they shuffle the verses and shorten the song for the video. I'll give you this instead (I found a site once that had embeddable sound files but I am bored by this already):



Close enough. If you listen long enough you will hear Big Gipp say "eat my shit..." and maybe that explains why this song makes me thing about playing with dumps. Have fun today. Let your poops live a normal poop life and don't try to extend them by shitting in a hat. I assume anybody reading this site is a coprophiliac. Don't do that, y'all, it's gross.

One Gun

There is only one gun in Square City and whoever owns the gun owns the city. The owner of Square City is The Mayor and The Mayor doesn't usually last more than a few months. You can buy protection up to a point but you can't stay awake forever.

Mike Weis is just some dumb kid that lives in Square City and makes his days kicking bottles down the street before he goes home to eat the gruel that his mother slops down on a plate for him. Gray, orange, green, with toast, with buttered toast - it's the same almost every day. Mike is old enough to have a job and he could probably use the money but he's content in his way to mope and complain more than to actually do stuff.

Mike has a girlfriend. He's a good looking kid even if he looks like he was dressed by a homeless shelter trying to sell "the lifestyle." She's a cute enough girl, Karen Cares. She's got ambitions in the world and she thinks Mike is a higher rung than the other guys in town. Karen is a standard literary trope, she pines for a better world and tries to trick her sad-sack man into growing some vision and determination. She stares out the window at night looking at the moon and clutching things to her chest.

There are jobs to be had in Square City, it's not so run down as you may have heard. The jobs aren't going to make you a millionaire or put your face on the pages of celebrity rags but you can get buy and do well enough to buy an apartment and a car and raise your family. Mike could be happy with a job as a garbage man or a post man. He's not a creative sort, by nature.

Karen and Mike and every kid who lives in now or who has ever lived in Square City knows about the gun. They know when they see a Mayor coming that they should crane their necks and see what kind of opulence he gets to take for granted until he gets what's coming to him in the end and soon. They see the large men who walk around in front of and behind The Mayor and they wonder where does one find these large men so soon after ascendency since there is no obvious supply of these men. Maybe there is a depot on the west side of town.

Most of the time The Mayor makes a display of the gun since it is the symbol of his reign and the only thing keeping him in control. He can have it in a box or glass case or in a velvet bag or a holster, but the only legitimacy to his position is held within the gun. Even police don't have guns. It has been 38 years since there was another one in the city walls. There used to be more than that. The Mayor, the first one, won his position by killing all the other guys fighting for the crown. He rounded them up, twelve in all, shot them and melted down the weaponry to make a bauble. That was how Square City became what it is.

That one, the first Mayor, actually lasted a long time. He was The Mayor for 16 years and only lost it because he had a heart attack. One of his bodyguards saw he was dying and realized that if he called for help somebody else might become The Mayor and bring in his own new bodyguards. So the large man reached down and let his sunglasses fall off his head onto the ground as he picked up the gun and the bauble and walked out of the room to announce that he, erstwhile bodyguard of The Mayor, was now The Mayor himself.

Square City has been in flux ever since but it hasn't really slipped in fortune. If anything, the place was more down at the mouth under the first guy than any of the others. When he died it opened up a new set of possibilities where, with a good sense of timing and a little bit of luck, every kid that grows up in Square City can have his own day with the gun and live the glorious but terminal life of The Mayor.

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Sports! Sports! Sports!

Well, it's really time to start serious work on my next script but it is a dark and terrible place that I am choosing to explore. I don't want to do the due diligence I need to do to understand human trafficking if I'm going to actually figure it out. It's really a movie about Jerry Sandusky but it's going to be a horror movie about an old guy who kills people and drains there blood. So, football.

I missed the Alabama-Georgia game but I was really hoping to sink into some football oblivion tonight while my fiancee is out of town and it's just me and the doggie sitting on the couch. Then the madness happened at Arrowhead this morning (for future reference, this is the madness of whence I speak) and I've been feeling in a funk all day. I'm still feeling a little bit sick and it's possible that's not helping but the Jovan Belcher story makes me feel a little bit nauseous. It's just a disgusting story. And it's the kind of story that I've sort of drafted myself to if I'm going to really make a life of writing horror stories.

This post isn't really going to be about anything, per se. I missed posting yesterday and I feel compelled to make up for it by posting now. Maybe I'll write a little story later on and post that to freshen myself up a bit. At least I'm not facing any major illness from my stomach and my legal problems are pushed back a few months. If you've got stomach pains and diarrhea, good news! It's probably viral! Bad news! It's going to take about 10 days to leave you the hell alone.

Oh yeah, I did want to write something about the script I'm trying to turn into money, the werewolf-western one. I've had it up on The Black List for 2 days now and I'm getting antsy. I have no idea how long it takes to get reviewed but I feel like my self-esteem is counting on something nice just a little bit too much. If it gets shredded for some reason (unlikely, I suppose, on a site that is dependent on people paying monthly storage to feel like they might become a piece of Hollywood machinery) I will feel like I've wasted 2 years chasing a story that can't get made. This is silly. There are literally hundreds of companies that will make a movie just because they have a script. Even if it isn't worth money to me I should still give it a chance to become something more tangible. But this is where I am, waiting for my metrics on the website to show that somebody, anybody has downloaded and read my script.


Don Henley - Last Worthless Evening by jpdc11

Stomach Ailment

OK, so this script that is clearly destined to make me millions upon millions of dollars is now in the cycle and ready to start spinning around for me. I think you can sign up to read stuff on the site even if you don't post stuff on there but I could be wrong. It's here if you are so inclined: https://blcklst.com/members/script/5302

Enough about that. It's in the universe now and I can't save it. Or, fuck, I don't know. I paid to get it read by somebody and I was of course imagining that whatever staff there is for that site would just be sitting around waiting for a script to post and then they would devour it. Or, better yet, the reader would see my irresistible logline and shred their computer trying to pull out morsels of the amazing script. If you're willing, tell me if this shit is confusing or even stupid:  

A young lawyer who has been attacked by a werewolf sets out, with the help of an old cowboy, to avenge his family's deaths and reclaim his true love in the budding Los Angeles of 1895 but must first learn to control the monster that he has become.

That's what's up there right now as an ad/beacon for whoever it is that reads scripts from blcklst.com for pleasure and sport. Would you read that? I've been kicking at and fighting this story for 2 years now and I still don't even know if that's it. Is that the story I just wrote? Is that how you sell the story I just wrote? Guess we'll find out. Honestly, if this is one plank on a road to just getting repped I'll be happy. It's kind of gross to be as old as I am with no agent or manager ever considering that all I really want is to be a cog in the studio machinery.

Tonight would be a great night for a bunch of drinks on the couch in the dark while eating microwaveable hamburgers and cheap potato chips. I'm not going to do that for one big reason: the fiancee does not look kindly on frozen White Castle. It would be hard to enjoy my awfulness and rejoice in the seediness with a judgmental set of eyes and a bunch of lights turned on and trained on me.

But I have another reason, too: I've been having stomach cramps and diarrhea for the last week. It feels like something is eating me. It doesn't hurt all the time but every time I go from sitting to standing there is some level of discomfort. Maybe I was poisoned at Thanksgiving? Or maybe I have an ulcer? I've got to go into the court tomorrow for a conference call that I wouldn't have to deal with if I just shelled out a little for a lawyer. Maybe that's what's got my stomach clenched. I'll find out tomorrow. Hopefully I'll walk out and the pain will go away or maybe I'll actually get the doctor's appointment that I meant to inquire about today and I'll get some answers that way.



Sorry, there's no video for that song and I forget where I go to get audio files. You should probably have started playing it when you opened this post and then it could play while you read or doze off. Oh, well.