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Friday, June 20, 2003

“What would Joe do? He’d shoot everyone and then smoke some cigarettes...”
-The Last Boy Scout


what up? unemployeeeed again. feels good. getting some writing done and my sleep schedule instantly flips back to what it should be. dreaming by 5ish, up by crack of 1. if this happens naturally without alarm clocks then this must be how the human body wants it. it’s not like i’m trying to stay awake all night, it’s not like i’m trying to sleep in. it’s still around seven hours of sleep, the sleep just wants to be during those hours. there must be thousands of years of evolution behind this and i can’t monkey around with evolution. just look what happened to the dude in Altered States when he fucked around with his sleep schedule. freaky amoebae-man stumbling and bashing his fists down the hallway. that’s a cautionary tale. don’t ever force yourself to go to bed early. or stay up late. or use a sensory-deprivation chamber. or make your friends watch Altered States. all of the above are very dangerous.

so i quit my job since i’m moving out of town and they moved up my last day so i wouldn’t be there one extra morning by myself. think i told too many people that i was going to take a shit in the bubblegum machine? could be. the key to that machine wasn’t where i remembered seeing it, and i ended up having to turn all my keys in earlier. and i think i probably bragged to about 3 people too many that i was going to do something nasty. i told myself that by telling enough people that i was going to drop a log in the bubblegum machine, i would have to do it or else it would mean i’m all talk no action. or maybe i was i just trying to sabotage my own plan to stop myself from actually doing that. well, at least i made the sign: “hey kids! the winning gumball color today is brown!!! depending on what i ate!!!”

truth is, i just talked about it so i could get some good fiction out of the conversations. mission accomplished. i'll post the story it inspired tommorrow or saturday.

and no more video store jobs. it starts to make me impatient with movies from dealing with movies all day. and without movies, i have to fall back on my shitty taste in music. and Billy Squier can’t carry me over the rough spots. sniff. actually, speaking of music, anyone get the new Marilyn Manson? i thought it was great until a friend played me her copy of Faith No More Angel Dust and it turns out that the creepy cheerleader chorus (chanting “be! obscene! be! be! obscene!”) i loved so much from the the second (or 3rd?) song was a rip from that Faith No More album. oh well. i guess my favorite song with a creepy girl chorus will have to remain Nick Cave’s "Hallelujah" from No More Shall We Part. i can’t get enough of the girls carrying the buckets of tears and singing: “twenty pretty girls to carry them down, twenty deep holes to bury them in.” fucking haunting as hell and utterly beautiful.

hey, for anyone who wondered how many cigarettes Bruce Willis actually smokes in “The Last Boy Scout” the answer is eleven. and for anyone who wondered how many people he kills in that movie...the answer is about twenty. there’s some debate about how many goons were in a couple of the cars he runs off the cliff, and of course there is the question of the bomb that looks like it takes out three city blocks (and causes the entire cast to crack up laughing) but those numbers are pretty close. special thanks to Blue “tothemotherfuckinclues” Derkin for thinking to whip out the pencil and paper and giving that movie the respect and attention it deserves but seldom gets. “Surfs up, pal!”

trivia note. the guy who wrote that movie, Shane Black, is also the guy who throws Jack Nicholson out of the diner in As Good As It Gets. weird. anyone ever notice the similarities between As Good As It Gets and The Accidental Tourist? Both have neurotic writers who waste their skills writing airport/toilet lit, both have quirky/earthy females with very sickly children who teach the neurotic writer how to live and love again. both have a small dog that is essential to getting the neurotic writer out into the world with his cute fucking antics. both have the kids from the Scream movies as a gay hustlers who beat the shit out of the writer’s neighbor. wait, that’s just the one movie. but you see my point though don’t ya? why weren’t they in court over that shit??? maybe it’s because this argument could be made with ANY two movies. let’s try it. uhhh, i’ll see what’s on TV.......okay. "Wet Hot American Summer" (sweeeet!) and "Thunderheart." hmm. wait, it's true! both have the line, “i need to go hump the fridge.” except in "Thunderheart" a Sioux Indian says it and sometimes they don’t translate every word across the bottom. and he said “cactus” instead of “fridge.”

fuck the Hulk. yep, he looks like fucking Shrek. maybe even a little more fake than Shrek. when does the CGI backlash finally happen? for fuckssake, somebody tell these kids that, just because you recognize it as a computer image, it does NOT mean you are looking at state-of-the-art effects. people seem to shrug and say, well, that’s what effects look like now. this must have been expensive! WRONG. it’s a fucking shortcut and people are blindly gobbling it up like a shit sandwich. or a brown gumball.

so fuck Hulk. the last movie i’ll be seeing in this town is going to be “28 Days Later.” i know it sounds like a sequel to the weepy Sandra Bullock rehab movie but it ain’t. did you know my mom hates her because “she doesn’t have any nostrils!”? that’s all i see when i look at her now. no nostrils. tragic. anyway, not 28 Days, but 28 Days LATER. it’s zombies back on the big screen and it looks like it’s aaaaall business. none of that smarmy horror-slash-satire for the teenagers. this movie looks like straight horror, the real deal, a nasty apocalypic little flick, the kind of movie that true fans of the genre (like me) rarely get anymore. i’m sure there will be some catchy little brit/techno songs strewn throughout since it’s by the guy who did Trainspotting but that’s a small price to pay for an adult horror film.

i can’t wait to finally drive away from this apartment. i’ll miss my view of this factory and the sirens every night every time they try to fire up that hand-chopping machine. seriously. i think they have a hand-chopping machine. if not, what the fuck is going on over there? they’re supposed to be making car parts and at least twice a week there’s an ambulance screaming into the parking lot. are they experimental car parts? i should count the cars on the next shift change to see if it’s like a roach motel over there or something. okay, there’s a shift change at 6am. i’m going to force myself to say up and count cars. i know i said that you shouldn’t force yourself to go to sleep or to say awake but all bets are off when there’s lives at stake. a wise old indian once said to me, "life ain’t Altered States, White Eye!"

p.s. these hyper-link things are freakin great. why didn't someone tell me about this before? i'm going to try one more of these dogs before i log off this beast for good.

::: david - 2:41 AM [+] :::
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