Monday, March 31, 2003

I think for right now, this moment, this second, no guarantees for the future, the expression I despise the most is get a life.

In fact I hate it so much I want to slowly dismember whoever says it. Why do they say it? It befuddles me. Clearly if I'm typing something that offends them I must be alive. I say it offends them because nobody says it when they're happy with me; they only say it when I've said something they don't like.

I always liked Danny's answer. I'm breathing. I have a life.

I think get a life means go away and don't make me think. Let me sit and rot in the staleness of my own thoughts. Or lack thereof.

The funniest part of it all is that generally the ones who tell me to get a life don't have even the scent of a clue as to what my life is like. I'm taking bets at 100 to one that they don't know Julianne Moore (who seems to get more luminescent every day) once gave my youngest son, Cameron, a black eye.

People tell me I think too much and then I wonder what does that mean and then I probably spend too much time thinking about what thinking too much means.

Now I'm wondering why my glasses get greasy. My eyes aren't greasy. And even if they were, they don't touch my glasses. So what's the deal?

Saturday, March 29, 2003

I'm really never clear on why I listen and go to the emergency room when my doctor wants me to go. It seems like such a waste of time. Nothing ever really changes.

My PT/INR is too high, my electrolytes are too low, my blood cells are too low. I have no balance in my life. Why don't I just stay home in the future? I can stab myself five times in the hands and antecubital areas, charge myself five dollars for parking, send myself some bills later and curse and say how am I going to pay for these?

I love how technology means exactly the opposite of what it says. For instance you click the Remember me? box and it doesn't remember me at all. Perhaps it remembers me the way you remember someone you didn't really like in kindergarten. Just this vague feeling of discomfort but nothing to attach it to.

And hotmail - it always says hotmail - more useful everyday when it should say more useless everyday.

I got a note from a collection agency that represents Blockbuster - apparently a certain someone checked out 1 wet hot american summer and failed to return it. Now collection agencies are bad enough but to have them pursue you for something like that is too silly for words. I can't decide if a film called 1 wet hot american summer would make the viewer a patriot.

I have to go to the ER because I'm spitting up blood, blah, blah, blah it's all so very Victorian I can't stand it.

She turned away from him; handkerchief to her lips, but not so quickly that he didn't notice the scarlet bloom on the snow white purity of the cloth. The pallor of her cheeks matched the former colour of the now stained materiel. He'd seen the terror in her eyes. There was nothing he could do or say. Good manners prevented him from saying anything to soothe her or even to touch her arm in silent sympathy. They could only stand there, bound together in silent fear and longing, waiting for something to break the spell of the bloody cloth.

Right then, I'm off the hospital. Prediction - someone will decide it's a pulmonary embolism or maybe a broken blood vessel in my lung. They'll run a bunch of expensive tests; VQ scan, X-rays, maybe a CT scan, who knows. I just know I'll be deeper in debt and likely I'll learn nothing more.

I think this is a good time to express my great appreciation and love of Ben Folds (with or without his five). I'm listening to Eddie Walker right now. This guy (I'll admit to total dorkitude if it turns out he doesn't write his own lyrics) walks a wonderful line between funny, poignant and thought provoking. I had Zak and Sara on continuous play the other night when I started Angels in Black Suits.

Speaking of playing the same song over and over while writing I used think I was kind of a freak to do it but I've found some others who do it so I'm happy to know I'm just plain freaky. Hubloodyzah!

Friday, March 28, 2003

Does hotmail make you crazy? It drives me absolutely mad.

Although I do have the writer's tendency to drift into exaggeration mine tends to be wildly extravagant and usually quite apparent. Little things that are incorrect bring out the snarling rabid dog in the back of my brain who wants to know what it's all about and why it's not allowed to do something about it.

This is, I believe, a direct result of being lied to over and over and over and over and over again. And also being subjected to rather painful and humiliating consequences of other people's lies and errors. For instance the accident report for my crash last year said that I was 29 and had been a licensed driver for 20 years. Does that seem likely to any of you? No? Me either. Would the MVA of New Jersey fix things like that? No. Of course not. It's written down. And what's what written in New Jersey is written in stone. Or so it appears to this humble soul.

To get back to hotmail, the source of fascinating spam and annoying LIES, the thing that really bothers me is not the 185 new spams a day I get from them. I don't mind that someone expects me to have bigger breasts and a bigger penis. Whatever. I don't have to live up to their expectations. What bothers me is that hotmail accuses me of being idle! Yes that's right! And we all know that idle hands are the devil's work. Hotmail is trying to send me to Hell! And I pay for this! Yes I got the super duper hotmail so I could store more spam. Not really, it's so I could save my scads of mail Danny and I used to send each other and I'm glad I did.

But the idle thing. Here's a good example. Chris, my oldest son, started a t-shirt company called grafsteez. He makes custom shirts with tags on them. Other things also. He's using the community computer at his house which has an infinite variety of college age men in it. I thought it would be good for him to have his own computer so I bought him a Pentium from eBay for 29.99. Yeah it's from the stone age but it'll give him storage for his work files and by the time he outgrows it he'll be able to afford a better one.

I get the message in hotmail that I won the auction. I click the pay now link. A new window opens. I attempt to pay for the computer using my credit union account. Paypal wants a credit card. Paypal isn't getting a credit card. Paypal and I have a big argument. I win. Eventually and after much bloodshed on each side.

Then I go back to hotmail and I click the auction link to show Cul what the computer looks like and the damn thing tells me I've been too idle! I haven't been idle at all! I've been fighting for my life, my credit card and my son's livelihood. Idle my eye!

The most annoying thing is that the more I curse at it the less it seems to care. I could call it every name under the sun and it wouldn't turn a hair. I think all that porn has made it immune. DAG NAB IT!

And yes! I was right. There is indeed something there. It turns out to be prose of some sort. I think a short story but who knows. Could be a novella. Could even be a novel. If so, hold onto your monkeys because they'll be tearing down the curtains when they hear the cursing as I work my through the hundred thousand words involved.

Here is the beginning. There's more written today but I'm getting goofy and it's time for me to head off to bed since I'm starting to think the cats are secretly ghosts.

Angels In Black Suits
by Georgiana Lee

I saw the first one the first day of first grade. It was the first time I walked myself to school. It was only one block but I was very proud of myself. A day of firsts for me; the third daughter of a family that would turn out to be a family of eleven or twelve depending on how you counted.

I hardly ever counted. I mostly hid. There was something that ran through my family that frightened me deeply. It was more than the screaming, the fighting, the hitting, the broken bones, the hospital stays and the sudden silences. It was something terrible and grim that slid off my brain like blood slides down a cheek.

My first day of first grade my father was asleep in his room. We had to keep quiet during the day. He worked nights. Doing what nobody really knew. He wore a strange costume to work. He called it a uniform but I knew better. A uniform was what the guy who worked at the gas station or the fire station wore. The thing my father wore had hoses and hooks and spikes and when he came home it had dull red stuff all over it and he had this special smile on his face.

Thursday, March 27, 2003

Since you're going to read this thing there are a few things you should know about me. I'm obsessive. Probably not in any kind of healthy way. That's for the dull and inarticulate. I'm neither.

I'm passionate about what I am and what I want and where I'm going and who I'm dragging with me.

I'm a writer. Fantasy, romance, horror, screenplays, shorts, children's books, poetry, stuff. Whatever. I choose to refuse to be shoved into a cookie cutter. Unless there's something really interesting in there. But I won't stay.

I'm an actor. I've worked on my share of feature films and TV shows but it's all been extra work. Except for plays, I've done a lot of plays. I'm not your classic actor type. I'm fat. But I'm funny. I've always thought I'd make it in film through my comedy. Now I plan to make my own films.

See, I've got this double responsibility. I have to make it not just for me, but also for Daniel Fogg, writer and all around great guy, who died May of last year. We were meant to be filming his script, Age of Experience, this summer but we can't for obvious reasons. So I'm compelled to carry on for him. You'll probably hear me talk about him a lot. I call him Danny. I miss him like he was ripped out of my chest.

He died at the hospital following an accident. I was driving. He was ejected from the vehicle. Sounds so clinical doesn't it? It really wasn't. There was blood and tears and so much pain. He had SMA. His anterior horn cells were screwed up. As a result his motor nerves were impaired but not his sensory nerves. He was in a motorized wheelchair. I was told his chest strap that allowed him to sit up and his very heavy chair would keep him safe in an accident.

If any of you ever drive someone in a motorized chair for God's sake make sure they are as restrained as possible.

I was participating in a mourning ritual that lasts a year and a day. I write to him every day at my private office at zoetrope and I have to stop a few days before the end of the year and a day. And then on the last day I have to go out into the woods and burn something that represents him and let him go. I'm not sure how to do that. Or if I can. Stay tuned for further details.

So what else, I have three kids, Chris, Cullen, Cameron. Yeah they all start with C. Too bad if you don't like it. I had another one I call Torquin Anias who died in utero. Bad, bad times.

When you hear me talk about Neil that would be Neil Gaiman. He's my writing idol. I love how he can write anything and even better he can publish anything. Too many versatile writers are pigeonholed.

Adam Duritz - another writer I love and find amazing. One time I was talking to Danny because I was stuck on something. One of the many reasons I love this guy past all reason is that we were great at bouncing ideas off each other and he understood me right down to my mitochondria. I was trying to come up with a good description. I used to have a lot of trouble with description. My dialogue leaps off the page but my description, eh, not so much. I was listening to Adam singing and I said Danny, Adam took all the good lines. Danny says no he didn't. There are plenty more. You just have to go and find them.

And he's right. He's pretty much always right. Today I was writing to stranger and I was telling her about how a bunch of us went to Disneyland last April and how one of those angels who dress in black suits walked up to me and said something that tickled my brain and went on through and then gave me a free ticket and walked away. After I wrote that I wondered what I meant by that. What angels who dress in black suits? I don't know.

I think I'm going to start finding out right now. I'm going to go and write something. A poem, a story, a short, an enemy to Bishop, my bad guy in my Devil May Care series, I really don't know yet.

You'll notice that I tend to have about a hundred and fifty projects up in the air all at once. We'll see how many are completed and how many fall and are squashed under the careless feet of the masses.