Dirty Poem Sequence Part 1

I. Alone

My hands, Oh do they work too much!
But my penis is pleased as punch
My fingers are tired
My carpals are on fire
And my testes just threw up their lunch.

II. Good Bad Date

“I eat to stay alive” said he
“I live to eat well” said she
“You may think me a jerk but I fear this might not work,
I think that you’re water and I’m dirt.”

“My loins are not picky.
Though this date is dud,
We can still make some mud
It is time you and I should get sticky.”

Dream On

Inception

There are big budget Hollywood movies that don’t work for me and I half expect them not to and then there are those that let me down completely. Inception falls somewhere in between.

This film didn’t resonate with me at all and I felt like there was a fundamental misstep in creating a film with only one character I cared about who has a mission I couldn’t care less about. Something about stopping a corporation from global monopoly (Hollywood’s current bogeymen) or something is quickly glossed over in the films first twenty minutes and then we’re off on a crazy, twisty, slightly boring at times, journey through everyone’s (and possibly just one’s) dreamscape!

Now look, before any of you super fans get your panties in a bunch let me say this: I get it. I do. I get the larger theme of questioning reality (which isn’t new as I’m sure you know – Existenz, The Matrix, Vanilla Sky, Waking Life have all tread on this territory). Do we make up our own reality? Is everybody we meet just a projection of our own psyche? Sure, in some sense everybody we meet and everything we know is limited to our own perception of some kind of phenomena the reality of which we can never be sure of. I get that. I don’t care. What I do care about is a good film. Inception wasn’t one. It wasn’t a bad one, just one I didn’t particularly find as compelling as the special effects seem to be asking me to.

All of that being said, I am happy to sit through a film that takes some chances and fails, even if only slightly, than sit through another by-the-numbers, Hollywood blockbuster that succeeds on all levels of triteness and cliché and makes a hundred million clams opening weekend. So far this movie seems to be a little bit polarizing. I’ve talked to number of folks who think Inception is the second coming of Christ and I’ve spoken with a marginally smaller number of people who feel exactly as I do. Would I recommend it? Yes - especially if you’re a sci-fi cat. Do I like to ask myself questions? No. In fact I hate it so I’ll try to never do that again. Sorry.

Don't Get Me Started On...

Uncle Harry Housman Says...

“Life aint all bagels and lox, kid. I’ve seen more trim in my life than a gynecologist in a women’s penitentiary and all I got to show for it is these lousy warts. And don’t even get me started on dating! You kids got dating all complicated. I’m too old for that crap. In my day if you made eye contact with a lady creature you were dating and if you so much as spoke to the woman you were married! Talk about a prison! That’s all marriage is, kid. And I would know – I’ve been through quite a few of ‘em. Don’t do it! Women are nothin’ but a pair a legs with a credit card. But it’s nice to have someone to come home to sometimes. Especially if you’re a comic; you know you’re on the road a lot and sure there’s Filipino hookers in every city who’re more flexible than rubber-band, but sometimes you want a dame that speaks your language and doesn’t charge you by the half-hour. And as a writer you want someone to bounce ideas off of not to mention someone to bounce a frying pan off of when you she gets mouthy which is all too often…just kidding, son, I never ever hit a woman in my life…that didn’t throw the first punch!”

- Uncle Harry (as told to me over a couple of gin and tonics at Travis T's Cocktails in the City of Industry at 4:15 pm on May 12, 2002)


*Harold G. Housman or Uncle Harry was a stand-up comedian, actor, singer and all-around entertainer whose career started in the late forties, peaked the week of December 14th, 1961, and went into a steady decline from then until February 1st, 1998, when Uncle Harry suffered a stroke in the middle of his Velveeta cheese routine. He was also my real life uncle and a kind of mentor to me. I’ve amassed quite a few notebooks worth of quotes, routines, stories and life lessons from my Great Uncle Harry. I’m currently working on turning them into a book tentatively titled Hey Numbnuts, Listen To Your Uncle Harry! Now and again I’ll post some excerpts from the work in progress.

Autobiographical Sketch Part II

...continued

So I was expelled from my high school during my sophomore year. I think I forgot to mention that. It wasn’t because of the drugs – I hadn’t started using yet. I wasn’t particularly bad and I sure as shit wasn’t violent – I hadn’t the strength or endurance to fight my way out of a used condom in those days. Look, here's the deal, it was a private Christian school, you could practically get expelled for farting too loudly. I’m not going to get into it because I’m tired of telling that story but suffice it to say that I was told I “didn’t want to be there” and that my behavior and grade point average proved that. They were right. I ask you, though, what fifteen year old wants to be in school? Especially a school where he can’t wear his pit-stained Bob Marley Legend t-shirt?

So now here I am, three years later, standing in line outside of some warehouse in LA, smoking cigarettes and happily accepting an offering of half a tab of LSD and some ecstasy. And for the first - and certainly one of the last - times in my life I danced like no one was watching. I ran in place. I bounced up and down. I did incomprehensible gestures with my hands. I was free of inhibitions and I now realize how important inhibitions are. I found myself at a number of these ridiculous functions for about a year or so. I think there even may have been a week or two in there wherein I smoked mentholated cigarettes. Oh the follies of youth. Well that was the midday of my drug period. A year and a half later dusk had fallen. Friends went to jail. Others had developed life-ruining addictions and I was becoming bored with being stoned.

I had this job the year I stopped smoking pot. The duties of the job included and were limited to sitting on a golf cart for eight hours. During this time I began to read. I read Hemingway. I read Hunter Thompson. I think I read William Burroughs too. Hold on…

…I’m going to backtrack a little before I finish that paragraph. Allow me to trouble you with a little interlude about jobs. I forgot to mention my various jobs I had during these years. My first job, at sixteen, was, appropriately, at a pharmacy called The Druggist. I was a stock boy and a delivery boy. Not much to tell about this experience except that I was so bored I masturbated in the bathroom and I stole a plush Raiders football from the backroom. I then got hired on at Blockbuster Video in Huntington Beach at the recommendation of a friend. This was right up my alley. Five free rentals a week. My own “employee recommendations” rack which I’m pretty sure included Brazil and Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia. I don’t remember why I left. I think I just didn’t want to work anymore. Next up was a position as a delivery driver for a Chinese fast food joint called Wok Spirit. I burned a hole in my shitty paper Wok Spirit hat when the contents of my marijuana pipe were accidentally emptied on to it. I only worked there for three months. I worked for three days as an elevator attendant for Nordstrom. I thought it would be perfect. Sit and read while listening to my homemade mix-tapes. Not perfect. Nordstrom only had three floors. The elevator was in use every few minutes. I was horribly nauseous. I also worked as a flower delivery boy, a security guard (one day), and I once spent a week at a Christmas tree lot to make just enough money to buy a ticket to a rave, some acid, and Redman’s Muddy Waters record.

…so I had this job where I drove the golf carts. It wasn’t at a golf course but rather at a new and rapidly growing loan company. The offices were located in an industrial area and their employees were too many to fit in the parking lot so they had to park up and down the streets, sometimes many blocks away. My job, along with a friend of mine, was to drive the employees to and from their cars in the morning, at lunch, and at the end of the day. I was specifically ordered not to leave the cart. That left hours and hours of sitting-on-the-cart-and-smoking time. I started to read then.

I didn’t read much and I didn’t read well. I read the usual post-stoner beginner-intellectual stuff like the aforementioned Hunter Thompson and Ernest Hemingway. This eventually gave way to Charles Bukowski, Jack Kerouack and of course Penthouse Letters. I went back to school around this time – I had an on-again off-again relationship with the Orange Coast Community College. I had been attending courses there since I was seventeen. I failed a lot of film and art classes mostly but I seem to remember dropping out of a writing class here and there as well. This is when my reading habit really started to pick up. I would go to the library and stock up on Sommerset Maugham, John Steinbeck as well as various screenplays and other sundry books on film theory. This led me to believe I was some sort of self-made scholar and I got it in my dumb head to drop out of school all together on the grounds that it wasn’t challenging enough and “what good is a degree in film anyway when it’s all about who you know in Hollywood, man!”

So I languished in self-made obscurity for the next half dozen years or so. I read a lot. I smoked even more, and I started to dress like a less cool Tom Waits. My interests in the arts hit their pretentious apex when I found myself almost exclusively watching movies from the forties, listening to world music from the thirties, and reading comedy writers from the twenties. Needless to say I had stopped watching television at that point. Not that there wasn’t anything at all good on television – once in a while you could catch an airing of the Threepenny Opera on the Classic Arts Showcase.

I think everyone probably has to go through some kind of phase like that if they fancy themselves an artist of any sort. Hell, some folks are still going through that phase. Some good did come out of it, of course; I would be remiss if I didn’t pay homage to a few of the great writers, musicians, and filmmakers I came across during my…Woody Allen period, let’s call it. It was then that I came across the likes of Preston Sturges, Ben Hecht, Kurt Weill and S.J. Perelman to name a few. The real upshot of all this is that I have more obscure shit to mine for jokes and I sound awful smart in the company of morons. It was also during this period that I secured a job at a coffee shop and that job has been secure for almost a decade now although I have changed coffee shops amidst my tenure.

Uncle Harry

“Uncle” Harry Housman says:

“…and don’t even get me started on microwaves! What am I, a scientist? Have you seen these things lately? There’s more buttons and dials on ‘em than in the cockpit of an An-124 Condor Long-Range Heavy Transport Aircraft from Antonov Aeronautical Scientific Technical Complex! You with me, folks? Sheesh. Tough crowd.”

Check back for more from “Uncle” Harry Housman*

*Harold G. Housman or Uncle Harry was a stand-up comedian, actor, singer and all-around entertainer whose career started in the late forties, peaked the week of December 14th, 1961, and went into a steady decline from then until February 1st, 1998, when Uncle Harry suffered a stroke in the middle of his Velveeta cheese routine. He was also my real life uncle and a kind of mentor to me. I’ve amassed quite a few notebooks worth of quotes, routines, stories and life lessons from my Great Uncle Harry. I’m currently working on turning them into a book tentatively titled Hey Numbnuts, Listen To Your Uncle Harry! Now and again I’ll post some excerpts from the work in progress.

Meditation on This

Although this blog is normally dedicated to my own trifling rambles, I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to let my old friend, super producer and Hollywood big-shot, Harold Heschel Jr., write a guest editorial here when he asked. The two of us have been working on a couple of scripts of mine and he’s been gracious enough to impart some of his wisdom on me, mostly unsolicited but welcomed nonetheless. In his later years Harold has taken to reading many of the ancient philosophers for guidance and comfort. He was detailing his thoughts on some of these works recently when I told him maybe he should write some reviews and post them online somewhere. He asked about my blog. I of course had to accept. He’s a dear friend, a wise council, and he can have me killed if he wants. So, without further ado, here’s Wordsfromawordjockey’s first book review.

MEDITATIONS*

Marcus Aurelius Antoninus Augustus. This guy was emperor of Rome for nearly twenty years. In a hotly contested manuscript, dated December 18th 180 A.D., Aurelius is quoted as saying, in reference to his tenure as Emperor, “It’s not bad work, if you can get it!” Although that manuscript is thought by most historians to be “merely the pathetic, incoherent, and possibly schizophrenic, ramblings of a fraudulent conman and shortsighted opportunist” (Hitchens), Aurelius’ more legitimate and most enduring work, Meditations, is - in this blogger’s humble opinion - not much better.

Take a little peak into the “mind” of this ancient stoic and you’ll find nothing more than the inane musings of a 2nd Century, New Age guru. This guy could give both Tony Robbins and Eckhart Tolle a chariot race for their shekels.

Aurelius begins his enigmatic tome in an impossibly backward fashion by thanking every damned Roman he’s ever come in contact with and the list sounds like a page out of the celebrity child name book. Thanks go out to Verus, Diognetus, Rusticus, Appollonius and even a guy named Fronto. I guess none of those cats taught him anything about literary decorum because, correct me if I’m wrong, but I think you’re supposed to put those thanks in more concise, less wind-baggy, one or two (at the most) pages prior to the preface or the introduction. Whatever. When in Rome, eh?

The rest of this impossibly dreary book is full of such confusing, dime-store philosophical musings as:

“This you must always bear in mind, what is the nature of the whole, and what is my nature, and how this is related to that, and what kind of a part is of what kind of a whole; and that there is no one who hinders you from always doing and saying the things that conform to the nature of which you are a part.”

What the fuck are you talking about, Marc? I think it would make some sense if you meant hole rather than whole.

And here’s some advice for anybody who doesn’t want to make it anywhere in this world:

“Never value anything as profitable that compels you to break your promise, to lose your self-respect, to hate any man, to suspect, to curse, to act the hypocrite…”

Easy for a guy to say after he’s already been emperor for a decade. Look, if I had taken that advice twenty years ago, sure, maybe some tears would have been saved and some careers would still be intact and, okay, in all honesty a couple of lives would have been saved but I’d be penniless and writing this review in a (shutter) public library while I wait for the soup kitchen lines to dwindle.

Now we all know that even a broken clock is right twice a day – so even this sun dial was right a few times.

“Return to your sober senses and call yourself back; and when you have roused yourself from sleep and perceived that they were only dreams that troubled you, now in your waking hours look at these (the things about you) as you did look at those (the dreams).”

This little passage has helped me immeasurably considering my affliction of chronic night terrors.

And then there’s this one, which I’ve found myself chanting, mantra-like, whenever I happen to be briefly imprisoned in the proletariat hell that is airports or gas stations. And it goes thusly,

“Are you angry with him whose armpits stink? Are you angry with him whose mouth smells foul? What good will anger do you? He has such a mouth, ha has armpits: it is necessary that such an emanation must come from such things – but the man has reason, it will be said, and he is able, if he takes pains, to discover wherein he offends. Well then, and you, too, have reason: by your rational faculty stir up his rational faculty; show him his error, admonish him. For if he listens, you will cure him, and there is no need of anger, the stuff of tragic actors and whores.”

Good stuff, although in my experience, tragic actors and whores are the same thing.

Like I said, Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations, although flawed beyond toleration, is not without its moments of wisdom, and I’d like to end this review with a quote from the end of Book IX that I hope those of you closest to me will take to heart,

“When you are offended with any man’s shameless conduct, immediately ask yourself. Is it possible then, that shameless men should not be in the world? It is not possible. Do not, then, require what is impossible. For this man also is one of those shameless men who must of necessity be in the world.”

- Harold Heschel Jr.


* This review is of the Dover Thrift Edition of Meditations by Marcus Aurelius; the George Long translation. If you don't like it you can fuck off.

Autobiographical Sketch Part I

I was born in Newport Beach, California, on July 15th 1977. The details are hazy as are the next two or three years. However, I seem to remember, a couple of years later, running down Moore street, in Santa Ana. I made a break for it I guess. I was caught by the neighborhood New Wave kid. He looked like a member of Duran Duran or something – not that I knew that at the time – it’s just a detail.

I spent most of my formative years on this same street. 2506 Moore Street. This was Santa Ana but not like the real Santa Ana. This wasn’t the gritty, carneceria, give-me-your-wallet-ese, Santa Ana. No, this Santa Ana was just on the border of Costa Mesa. We lived in a relatively quiet, suburban neighborhood. The house wasn’t too bad either. I mean you don’t expect much on a carpenter’s salary anyway but I think my parents did a pretty good job with what they had. My mother taught pre-school for some years until the requirements and regulations became too exacting and my father was a ten hour a day carpenter for a good fifteen or twenty years until he became a full time estimator for his brother’s framing company – Darrow the Framing Corporation. After the pre-school gig my mom began work at a private Christian school – Maranatha Christian Academy – which helped pay for me and my brother’s tuition. I guess I forgot to mention that before – I have a brother. He was born some four years before I was. He must’ve been at school already when I was found by the New Wave kid.

So my brother and I attended this school from kindergarten through high school with our mom working there in the cafeteria. This school was part of a church that was founded in the seventies by pastor Chuck Smith. In an effort to reach the counter-culture youth of that era, the church was conceived as a real hippy-dippy, Jesus Freak haven. The sad conclusion of this free-from-conventions, we-don’t-need-any-of-your-old rituals-let’s-just-love-God-and-each-other was that I was raised in an overly conservative, fear and guilt inducing environment in which empty platitudes and soft spoken catch phrases dripping with judgmental undertones, were heard more often than the words of Christ.

But I digress. I had a pretty happy childhood for the most part. It wasn’t until I reached fourth and fifth grade when I became aware that I didn’t look the same in a tank top as other kids that things got at all sour. Not that I was tormented or anything but any fat kid will tell you the same stories. P.E. was a dreadful experience. And it was made all the more dreadful for having been raised in sunny, Southern California, where, as it stood, a sizable portion of the population couldn’t be bothered to wear what little fabric made up their faded Quicksilver t-shirt anyway, leading to the option of “shirts” versus “skins” when needing to distinguish between two newly formed teams. Often I would employ the pathetic tactic of taking just my arms out of the sleeves of the shirt but leaving the rest of the garment dangling around my fat neck, hoping that there was enough fabric to cover my nubile boy tits. This never worked. Eventually some skinny, piece-of-shit, friend would make a comment and I would be bummed out for the rest of the period. Thank god for the TV-formatted attention span I had in those days so that by the next class period I’d be on to worrying about how to do the least amount of work to get me through the class and leave time for my artistic endeavors which included the drawing of Looney Tunes characters and sports cars.

Early on I developed a serious love affair with the arts. I was obsessed with the Warner Brothers cartoons and would sketch them incessantly for hours on end. And, like most boys of the eighties, I was endlessly entertained by the film comedies of Robin Williams, Eddie Murphy, Bill Murray. I watched hours of ALF, Growing Pains, Cheers and Moonlighting. I read Mad Magazine and the Farside. By the end of the eighties I would stay up late to catch a few minutes of David Letterman or Saturday Night Live. These are the things that would shape me in so many ways. I wasn’t into sports and I certainly wasn’t studious. I was lost in a world of film and television. I would run around with my other smart-ass friends and try to make a joke out of everything. I’d say eighty-five or ninety percent of my jokes were stolen from something I saw on TV. I imagine the same goes for those smart-ass friends.

Everybody has a few ill-dressed skeletons in their closet, I gather. The thing is mine are wearing Cross Colors and Malcolm X jackets. In the sixth grade I discovered hip-hop. In Junior High I discovered reggae. The combination made my little sensibilities become way too afro-centric. I was a fat suburban white kid with a relatively privileged life. I pretended to be a skinny black kid from Queens, New York. Now I stayed up to watch Yo! MTV Raps. This lasted well into my sophomore year in High School until such time as my friends and I discovered pot.

In my grandparents days there were like three different things you could be as a teen: a jock, a preppy or a greaser and they all wore tight clothing. In my parents days one more thing was added: a hippie. Now somewhere in between my parents’ days and mine were added a couple more: a nerd and a punk. My generation saw a minor explosion of new “things you could be.” You could still be a jock but that was forming new branch called “bro” that in turn would form more branches of “bro” sub-species. You could be a punk and that too would splinter into new categories like “straight edge” or “neo-Nazi” to name two. You could still be a “preppy” but you had to do coke now. I think there are still greasers but they’re all weirdly nostalgic and pretend they’re in the fifties and they have to go to great pains to find a place to live that has an “olde towne.” Nerd went from social outcast to chic to social outcast again and hippies went from long, dirty hair and thrift shop clothes to long, dirty hair and thrift shop clothes.

So here I am, in the early nineties, I’m into hip-hop and reggae and I dress like it. Now I’m confronted with marijuana and the hippie life-style. How do I choose between the two? I don’t. I start to mix styles for a bit and begin to make a more embarrassing mess of sartorial selections than a fat kid with low self-esteem should be allowed to make. To make matters worse one of the latest “things you can be” to appear during my formative years revolved around electronic music and a ghastly little function known as a “rave.” Turns out these “raves” and “ravers” are exactly a mix of the hip-hop, reggae and hippie cultures and for a (thankfully) very short time I fit right in there.

...to be continued

Not For Discerning Readers

Recently I was talking of sexual aids - that is to say, products designed to enhance or otherwise make easier the sex act betwixt two consenting adults, not that horrible disease that Larry Clark gave everybody - I was talking of their convoluted nature and the amount of, in my opinion, unwarranted effort that goes into the purchase and application of these products. Well, in an effort to relay a related anecdote, the other conversationalist with whom I was in discourse says to me "So I went to a sex shop recently with a friend of mine. He used to date the girl who works there. She makes custom dildos. You know, like if you want to get your girlfriend a dildo that's a replica of your d*#k. Isn't that weird? Anyway, blah blah blah..." It is not often that one is faced with such a loaded non-sequitur. "Wait a minute," I said, interrupting the rest of her story which apparently was not about the custom dildos, "Correct me if I'm wrong but doesn't that mean this loving boyfriend would have to go to said sex shop, presumably walk into a back room somewhere, proceed to make himself erect in the presence of this woman who would then have to apply some kind of mold to this erection? That's not a gift. That's called cheating."

But for realies though - what kind of world is this?

News

Weird news lately. Boner died. Shamu killed a trainer. A huge earthquake in Chile caused tsunami warnings everywhere and earlier in the year a huge earthquake in Haiti caused Wycleff Jean warnings everywhere. The future is much weirder than Cormac McCarthy could have imagined. And none of us has a dad that looks as good naked as Viggo Mortenson to guide us through these rough seas. Oh what a world.

...but

At least we got ten Best Picture nominees to root for! And two of them are cartoons!

My Mount Everest! My Niagara Falls! Please Be Kind To Me!

Apparently it's called glossophobia: the fear of public speaking. Some would also call it performance anxiety but I don't really cotton to that term for obvious reasons.

The thing is, I have typically been an acute sufferer of glossophobia. I mean I get it in spades I tell you. Some of you who know me, however, probably find that hard to believe. I can be a bit of a ham. I like to deflect all serious inquiries with humorous asides and wacky nonsequitors. I have at one time or another, and occasionally still, held the desire to try my hand at stand-up comedy, improv and acting. It is all true. Embarrassing though it is. And yet this fear has plagued me all my life. Why even as a lad in elementary school I was so riddled with stage fright that I bowed out of my scheduled performance as one of the three wise men in a nativity play, leaving poor baby Jesus without any myrrh.

Since then I have avoided any situation that would require me to perform in a public setting. In fact, if you want to get deeper, I'm sure this all stems from some deep-seeded, all-pervasive, root fear - a general fear of failure the likes of which has caused me to quit everything before I've had the chance to succeed or fail...but that is neither here nor there.*

The reason I bring any of this up is to tell you, kind readers, that I have begun a three part program to cure myself of this ailment. And it goes thusly:

Part One: Sing at a karaoke bar. Part one has been accomplished...twice. Feeling a little bit more comfortable up there. Thanks to Billy Kernkamp, whose gig hosting a karaoke night at Harvey's opened the door for me, and the support of various friends and acquaintances who made me feel like comfortable up on that stage: Justin Deckert, Mary Bell, Steve Carson and of course my lovely girlfriend, Krystal Flevotomos.

Part Two: Sign up for an acting class. Part two has been partially accomplished. I am currently enrolled in a beginning acting class. I've only finished one class thus far but I will have you know that I did have to descend to the floor, move about on "all fours" as they say, and pretend to be, variously, a puppy, a kitten, a chimp and a lion.**

Part Three: Perform stand-up comedy at an open mic night. Now this is my Mount Everest to climb. However, it may just prove to be my Niagara Falls to go over in a barrel. We shall see.


* It is somewhere though. Probably in my frontal lobe.
** I was also paired up with a forty-six year old, ex-gang member, Compton bred, self-proclaimed "hustler" and recent stroke victim, named Paul, for an "open scene" project. I may conquer my fear of public performance but I believe my fear of shady black people may prove to be life-long.

Fate Is Pulling At Our Coat Sleeves

Okay, so I got a bit of a late start here on the New Year but dagnabit, I'm doing it! What is "it" you say? "It" is yet another feeble attempt to keep the creative sauces boiling by starting, and more importantly, maintaining a blog. So I need you, dear reader, to leave comments, send emails and make personal phone calls, reminding me I need to post something at least once a week. Yeah, that's right, I'm asking you to get involved. This isn't gonna be easy, folks. We're all going to have to make a lot of sacrifices. We may even develop a mutual hatred for each other but slamdunkit, we're going to make something out of this blog! So let's put on our boots, pull up our sleeves, and get to work!