State of the Union (no pun necessary)

Tonight is the State of the Union adress. I'm watching FOX hyperbollically fellate Dubya. I'm usually not that interested in what he says (hey, he's not MY fucking President) but I like to watch him speak, it keeps America's class war fresh in my mind. This is as good a time as any for a similar adress regarding the state of affairs I find myself in...

I just finished paying off a hefty back-taxes penalty. It took three years. Three years! The knucklehead accountant I had been going to took a few liberties on my returns, & in all fairness, I had no objections when I saw my refunds. Well now I have a clean slate. And yes, I'm going to deduct the classes I'm taking. I don't cut & run at the first sign of trouble.

I know I spend an inordinate amount of time on this blog bitching about my job. Well, I'll have to wait a while before I can do that again; I just got an offer from another company that I'll be taking...that is, unless the interview I went on today pans out. Either way, I don't think I'll be seeing the old gang of smug pug-ugly humbugs anymore.

The class I'm taking is all paid up. All I gotta do is get some more hands-on experience so I can eventually get licensed. Then I can see about trying to make back the money I sank into the tuition. And maybe have a little fun along the way. Gotta remember not to be an asshole about it like so many others in this field.

Still have another year (?!) of payments on a truck that is technically obsolete (1995). Still, it drives a hell of a lot better than my old truck, i.e. it can go in reverse & the dome-light turns off when it's supposed to, & once it's paid up, knock on wood, I won't have to deal with car payments for a long time. Gotta remember to keep up maintenance on it, so's I can get the most out of it.

Went on that Consumer Credit Counseling thingamawhatsit. At least I don't have to talk to these jagoff creditors anymore. Hey, they should've known better than to take a chance on me. I loved it when they tried to threaten me with bad marks on my credit report. Ooooooh! We can't have that! People always say well, now you can't get a house for another 7 years. Like I can afford a fucking house around here! By the time my credit report is starting to heal, the housing bubble will either have burst or gotten so big they'll be building projects on the ocean floor. Either way, I'll have a roof over my head.

I started phasing out the death-rocker/'90s grunge look in favor of a SLIGHTLY more conservative image, partly because I was getting too old to pull it off anymore. I think I might be getting a little more respect because of it. Go figure. People would rather talk to a guy in a track jacket & obscenity-free tshirt than a torn flannel & Cannibal Corpse tshirt. A harsh, harsh reality.

Jesus, I'm trying to tune out the fucking Dubya speech but I just caught myself angrily talking back at the tv. Fucking inbred aristocrat. He's having trouble with some of the bigger words.

Speaking of the Commander-in-Chimp, at least there won't be a second term of this bullshit. I don't care who steals office next, it can't be this insulting. Could it be that John McCain will be the first respectable Republican candidate since Thomas Jefferson?

And, looking down the line, Conan O'Brien will replace Jay Leno in a few years. Now THAT'S progress! Us late-night tv watchers finally have a pie in the sky to dream about. Yeah, I'm sure they'll make him tone it down (no more cokehead werewolf) but anything is better than Leno. I'm sure he's a nice guy but his comedy stylings give me sinus headaches.

So! All I gotta do is hang in there. At today's interview at a certain tv channel here in Los Angeles, they asked me, "What's your most admirable trait?" Since they probably wouldn't have appreciated the fact that I know more about Star Wars & The Rockford Files than %98 of the population, I answered with a trait that I actually find admirable in others, & am trying to teach myself:










Patience.

Throw the book at them

When I was younger, I thought I wanted to be a writer when I grew up. What kind of writer, I couldn't tell you. Did I write short stories & poetry? yes. Did I have the common courtesy to promptly destroy them? yes. Technically, I am now officially grown up, & have not yet stumbled on to a way to get paid for typing lurid pulp all day, so it's still off to the salt mines in the morning. But just think of what could have been...think of the company I'd keep!

What in the blue blazes am I talking about, you may ask?Well...Nicole Ritchie, you know, Lionel Ritchie's stepdaughter, star of The Simple Life, & occupant of bed # 27 at Sparkling Hills rehab clinic, has churned out a literary masterpiece, based loosely on her own experiences. On her own fucking experiences! It even has her goddammed photo on the cover. Not the book jacket...the fucking cover. I leafed through it during a trip to the bookstore & had to put it down for fear of barfing all over it & then having to pay for the damn thing. How did it read? Imagine yourself at a boring party, trapped in a corner by the blabbermouthed daughter of an 80's popstar, on hiatus from her reality show, rambling on & on about herself between sips of her apple-tini about how tough she's had it all these 19 years. It's sad that this is an all too conceivable scenario in this town. Yes, life imitates art, but in a terrifying, dismal way.
And then there's this blithering idiot, James Frey, who's controversial memoirs are riding a roller-coaster of popluarity, thanks to Oprah's Book Club endorsement & the revelation that his book is in fact a work of fiction. "A Million Little Pieces" of bullshit. No, he never did time, & no, he didn't cause a car crash that killed his best friend. Did he wake up on a plane, teeth smashed out, addicted to crack? Not bloodly likely. Maybe that part was metaphorical. Metaphorical for what, I don't know. I wouldn't watch Oprah if you threatened me with castration (after all, watching Oprah is just another kind of castration), but I would've liked to have seen the rise & fall of this spineless wahoo over his absurd "book", which he had originally shopped to publishers as a fucking novel.

But hey, if he can do it, I can do it...I'm releasing my own, slightly embellished memoir: "Modern-Day Adonis: Confessions of a man with no beer belly, a full head of hair & perfect skin." So anyways, I went to Border's to pick up a book that my girlfriend is going to use at her office's white-elephant-type party. I got Yann Martel's "Life of Pi" because a) this one guy at work recommended it to me right after a gushing, unsolicited review of "The Kite Runner" (another book now permanently defaced in my mind just by the stigma of that recommendation) so I figure that's what people are reading these days when they're not , and b) apparently that M. Night Shamalamadingdong fellow, the one what made "Signs", is gonna adapt it for the silver screen, & it if it's gonna be made into a movie, that means it obviously must be an irreproachable masterpiece that will ultimately take it's rightful place in history alongside the works of the French Impressionists.

Still, "Signs" was the one movie that made me do a room-by-room of my apartment with a Louisville Slugger when I got home from the theater. It really appealed to my paranoid, cynical side. But I digress, for the nth time...The last piece of popular culture I'm going to shit on today is "Capote", the big-screen adaptation of the sorry story of Truman Capote researching the tragic news story that he re-wrote as the story "In Cold Blood". Jesus. All we need now is a behind-the-scenes, so we can enjoy the making of of the making of of the making of of the goddamed movie. Is that where we're at, now?! Every book known to man, from Pride & Prejudice to Curious George to The Scarlet Letter to The Fantastic fucking Four, has been made into a movie & then RE-made as a CG-fueled action-thriller, so now we're making movies about writing the books that we make into movies & re-make as CG-fueled action-thrillers? God's wounds! It's like we're unraveling a giant sweater, & someone keeps on knitting, & knitting, & knitting, & knitting, & knitting!

Someone asked me if I had gotten a chance to see "Capote", & I wish I had a photo of the expression on their face when I said, " I don't know if I can handle hearing that voice for an hour & a half." Imagine nonplussed combined with perplexed.

Nonplexed?

News from the front

I have blogger's block.
i.e.
The muse is not upon me.


Reason being? I might also have finally passed through the barriers of sanity, like Hamlet's father walking through a castle wall, but knowing me, it's probably just Pollonius hiding behind a tapestry. Then again it may just be the weather. Some weather we're having!
i.e.
Potential abuse of axioms founding expanding universe theory. Next level of ionic winter no longer fettered by molecular structure.


Also of note: next level of ionic consciousness escaping confines of molecular structure.
i.e.
Saner, more detailed entries to follow.