3.14.2024

flea on the iger dog

 Oh heyyyyy

Careful what you wish for, as they say.

Was it me who was a bit (year+) ago admitting I wanted the world to stop so I could get off for awhile?

Enter: multiple industry strikes. Yeah, they're over, and roughly a year from the first batch, there's the possibility of another (couple), so for whatever reasons (I could speculate, and have) there's still almost no work, and that's not really what I meant I wanted, for the record. 


Can't imagine I ought to feel any shame for admitting I've had around six weeks of work since last May, and I'm possibly one of the lucky ones.

It's actually pretty extraordinary to have volumes of free time if (unlike me) you're someone that can manage to use it while in a 24/7 state of panic about how you're going to keep a roof over your head. I could do so many things with it. If.

I did do one Really Cool Thing (I'll get to it, in another post) but otherwise my brain has some holes if you haven't noticed, and when things go awry I can't make much sense of anything (someday maybe I'll get into Small Awry vs Big Awry / recovery times / worldbuilding / contextualizing difficulties in this swiss cheese brain of mine, maybe not – for now just imagine I need sort of a life stability exoskeleton - but also am unskilled at achieving that – or things just swish around and get dizzy) and can end up pretty paralyzed, so there's nothing too fun about this.


[New wish: start the world again; I want to get ON. is that how this works? I don't know how to person, so also I don't know how to achieve goals]


Are there still people reading this? there appear to be. I don't know who you are or why – maybe we're both happier that way – I'm not going to storm in, hit the overhead light and demand you show yourselves. (rude!) It's totally fine, just chill.  Oh! hahah ... remembered recently (won't name him but) someone sent me a "Want to hang out soon? Netflix and chill?" text years ago before I heard that term and I was like "yeah, sure, soon" ..er, possibly disappointing him. welp. Say what you mean, friends! dropping hints here. 


I did need a reminder to write. Someone reminded me to write. Thank Eu. Writing is free. If there are consequences to it, like chat gpt is being trained on my babbling, that's unfortunate, but how helpful would it be to the big fake brain anyway? Sorry buddy, move on to a lawyer or somebody who tells good jokes or whatever, idk.

Possibly AI writing is most easily identified due to its repetitiveness or inability to understand what a joke actually is (that sounds familiar - I mean as is my writing, maybe, so while I imagine I contribute nothing, I could be selling myself short here and I could be a cog in the machine .. a *further* cog in a *new* machine, not just the same old cog in the previous machine, which was/is a tiny flea on the film industry dog that does little things here and there and just demands pay in blood, a parasite to the zaslavs and igers who I refuse to capitalize) << when I put it that way, I'm begging to be a flea again, aren't I?


To sum up here, my hope is this becomes a solid time of reckoning, not out of financial necessity but straight from my heart, that some things unravel that I'm tied down by, and new seeds are planted that create a new structure for my life that'll ultimately be more fulfilling. Do I want to go back to the grind? NO. I've got nothing to show for it. You can never run fast enough on the hamster wheel. It's fixed.

But I've got stories to tell, and instead of begging for scraps on the Hollywood Hamster Wheel, I'm going to tell them.


When I do go back to work, that is just a day job. They can have my labor but they cannot have my life.


5.10.2023

*Not Toronto

sorry I just drop this blog and pick it up at random like (what do people pick up and drop at random?) 

sorry again, only good at metaphors of my own making... er ... yo-yos? post-show flyers some dork's handing to you when you're sweaty and tired and want to go home. hotcakes or whatever. loose change falling out your pants from a hole in your pocket (inspired by Austin's work pants pocket hole and his phone falling down through his pant leg and out onto the floor, over and over). dumb hobbies. ugh, terrible. yeah, also , yeah ,,,, I know it's not a metaphor anyway but a simile. I would rather say metaphor. I prefer the word. AESTHETICALLY. everybody knows what I mean. you know what I mean. if people know what you mean, then the word works. right? and the point of words is for people to know what you mean. so sometimes, it's ok if they're the wrong words. pin that thought ..

so bad though. I'm fired. for the bad SIMILE attempts and also for keeping my (three) readers guessing how long it will be between posts; look though, explore the archive dates and you'll see that's how I've always been. can't say you weren't warned..

ever have a moment in your life where you're SO SURE about something? like, POSITIVELY SURE. let's say you've made a decision and it is THE PERFECT DECISION 

well fuck that moment - it was a psycho moment - because there are no perfect decisions in life

I knew this. I know this. I know this.

if you think something is above scrutiny in fact you are just not scrutinizing it, which is fine. some things are better left unscrutinized, or .. infrequently scrutinized. I only function to scrutinize, it seems (I did tell a friend recently my brain only has two settings: 1.vegetable, 2.overthinking), so my having been so certain of something is actually quite far out of character, but actually in retrospect I really wasn't so sure because i did warn you, er, warn me, warn myself, out loud, by which I mean here, where anyone could read it, that if I looked too hard I would melt that decision with my laser eyes and in fact, I did

OK, CONSIDER THAT AN APOLOGY to whoever was happy about that wrong decision

 

family, mainly. sorry, family. that's what airplanes are for

 

*sigh*

 

ever read House of Leaves?

I've written on it before. due for a re-read. Join me and we'll have a psychic book club, which I'll never mention (out loud) again.

there's this bit, after you're thoroughly exhausted & confused by the formatting of the book (not a complaint; it's brilliant – this is by design, as you'll see when you read it) where a footnote says something like "if you read too fast or too slow, you understand nothing." I think of it often.

the same could be said for decision making. in any case, I finally just occam's razored the whole situation and made the (imperfect) best decision, the one all roads led to. It has good and bad qualities, (note to self:) because that's how life is. Now stay tuned to see if I manage to pull it off.

this is feeling like a housecleaning post. ew.

if you are cleaning your house, HERE IS A PLAYLIST I MADE FOR THAT

actually it's made for vacuuming, and it comes with this caveat: if it takes you longer than this to vacuum your place, you should give up and hire somebody

 

I'll wait if you need to go vacuum. Go on

 

 


I don't know when I last talked cats in here and it's just that with the aforementioned agonizingly intermittent posting, all the cat updates would be RIP CAT posts. (speaking of agonizing) I have lost four cats in four years (if you know me, you know a chunk of my heart falls out each time so, understatement to just drop that info and move on) and can no longer even really be called a cat lady. RIP CAT LADY IDENTITY. so much furry family loss. I'm down to a conventionally acceptable Three Cats (I did notice about twenty years ago when I had my three first generation cats that three was still a crazy number of cats to most people, but that's no longer the case; multi-catting has now become hip) and I fully and without guilt plan to get one more cat when I Get Where I'm Going™*


what else? OH

the WGA is on strike. why should you care? because I'm unemployed for the foreseeable future, that's why. does that mean I'll post more? NO CLUE.

I wrote this last time the writers went on strike. it's definitely not a novel

I did post A LOT after that though. A LOT. for about two years. that was before social media doomscrolling existed. I can't make any promises. I've forgotten how to write (or talk). what do words mean? I give up

SEND RAMEN.



 

9.28.2022

Scarolina Rob & Sex Fish Story. (retitle)

Nah, I'm not gonna retitle that. That rocks.

So my head's unscrewed & I'm just gonna say the two sides of it aren't working together functionally today (or any day lately, or possibly any day hereafter), like Kim Peek of Rain Man inspiration fame, who had no corpus callosum which is what ties the two brain hemispheres together (did you know?) and but although it took some things from him, like social adroitness (familiar!) it also allowed him to do things like spot count hundreds of dropped toothpicks (oh alright, Dustin Hoffman did that. Probably a fiction) but anyway he definitely could read the two separate pages of an open book simultaneously, and take in the info on each. I cannot do this.

However. I am about to tell two stories that although they come from the same book (my weird life) have zip in common and are a terrible match to tell together, but my deep brain is shoving them both to the surface at once so I know there's a reason, and maybe I'll figure it out later, by the end of this post. It happens.


First things, unfortunately, first.

When I was living in St Paul with Bel, she had a younger friend from her home town come for a visit: Scarolina Rob. Rob from Scarolina. Bel was working a lot and I hung out a lot with the kid. He wasn't a kid though. He was a teenage mad/genius. He gave me a NOFX tape (White Trash, Two Heebs and a Bean) and a red plaid spiked leather bracelet of his, which I once tore the apartment up looking for when it was lost, and worried everyone had stolen it, only to find it again and which I still have, one of my very most prized possessions. There is no better gift than a thing someone takes literally off their person and straight gives to you to put on yourself. Nothing.

[side bar: when I was working at First Avenue in, eh, maybe 1998, I was working the door and Grant Hart came in wearing a plaid clip on bow tie. I barely knew him. "Nice tie, Grant!" I said. He took it off and gave it to me. Needless to say this lives in a small "most special shit" box.]

So Rob gave me a few things, told me some stories, we traipsed around. Friends for a week, but fast friends. One of his stories was about dropping acid around town (somewhere in S.carolina) and to tell me the story he punctuated the "took acid" bit by tearing a tiny piece of paper and putting it on his tongue as he talked. (mind blown)

The next year, Rob took his life. 

We were living back in the dorms. A mutual friend (of mine/Bel's) found me in the elevator en route to dinner and said "I was looking for you. You have to come console Bel. Rob blew his brains out and–" everything went fucking black.

Hey, whoever you are, reading this: if it ever befalls you that you're tasked with breaking the news of someone's suicide to a person you think didn't know that person very well so what the heck, might as well blurt it out however? DO NOT.

wow.

Nobody slept that night. I had quit smoking and started smoking again, very much. A lot. Bel had a ferret in her dorm room and I remember it had gotten into some yeast infection cream. What the fuck. We all went mad. Crying, laughing. Silent, in shock.

A week later I sat in the dining hall with a few people I reaaallly liked, but didn't know well, and just started crying. Some hip hop characters, who I thought were kinda out of my league (years later I would go out with one of them, and when a friend was driving us home, at his place he lured me in by saying "Kate, I think you left your Holly Hobby lunchbox at my place earlier" which is – sorry, I know this story is busy being a tragedy, but that's when humor is the most important tbh – the BEST PICKUP LINE EVER UTTERED. I once got a guy to go out with me by answering his "no, I don't want a soda. I'm watching my figure" with the ridiculous "I'll watch it for ya" but this, this puts every person's best most ridiculous date story TO THE SHAMEST OF SHAMES)

Wow. Where was I?

Somewhere in the short time that transpired between these two main events (Rob sticking paper in his mouth to tell the acid story and his death) I had moved from Bel's apartment into an apartment in the identical building next door (although it was further down the hall, and OF COURRRRSE almost immediately I walked downstairs to get the mail and then let myself into the wrong apartment, OOPS,,, back out quietly...) where so many of us lived there in a two room apartment (among us, two couples: myself + Matt Sawicki, who famously once said to me on the phone "Dennis got knifed! oh wait, there's a call on the other line" and Eric + Heather) that we all had an arrangement to go out "shopping" when the others needed privacy. So one day Matt, Terry, and myself had gone to I dunno where, shopping. We came home and from the back room heard the most raucous, RIDICULOUS orgasm noises we could even conceive (ding!) – "oh, god, oh god, OH MY GOD OH MY GOD OH MY GOD" we just, we cracked up so hard & all thought the same thing at once: it's fake. They're doing it for our amusement, and TOUCHÉ, this is the best fucking joke any of us have ever heard. Dying.

Then it got quiet, and Heather came out of the room, surprised to see us, and died of embarrassment. Eric followed, sweaty. Matt said "wait, that was real?? We all thought it was fake, like, a sex fish story." then pointedly, to Eric:

"WE DIDN'T BELIEVE YOU UNTIL WE SAW THE FISH."

 

 

Now look. It's nearly inconceivable that all these things have happened, right? That I bore witness to all of this magic? This chaos?

I promise you. There is this much intensity in the world around you, around everyone. There's just a whole other art in the remembering and the retelling. The love of the story is (also) the story.

You. YOU. Are part of somebody else's story. You can tell it yourself however you want. But meanwhile someone else is bearing witness. And they might TELL IT FUNNIER THAN YOU.

Anyway, you've changed them; you are part of their story now.

This is how to live forever. This is how.

Ok, here we are, the monsters at the end of this book. What's the conclusion, Kate?

WHAT'S THE FREQUENCY, KENNETH??

I feel a little put on the spot now, like I'm trying to wrap up a Hannah Gadsby standup routine. I promised you some tragedy, I promised you some comedy, and I promised you they would tie together in a crazed little knot at the end.

Imagine if I had told the Rob story in a vacuum. Right? The other stories cushion it so it doesn't sink you.

Everything in its right place.

Grant's tie.