I’m An Idiot

Dear Tech Person from My Previous Employer,

I, apparently, am an unwitting luddite.  it’s not that I don’t like new technology.  It’s not that I don’t adopt it.  Criminy, I do have an iPhone and a laptop and digital cameras and a tiny camcorder, and Lord knows I love gadgets.  Have you seen the amazing things they’re doing out there with prosthetics?  It’s amazing!  But I digress.

You are aware, from my near panic encounters with you at our workplace, that I react to things not working the way I believe they ought to work with a purely emotional response.  We can delve into the psychology of this later.  For now, we take it as a constant.

I tried to reformat a hard drive today.  It resulted in the temporary bricking of said brand spankin’ new hard drive.  And as an unwitting luddite and panic-fiend, I emailed you asking what I had done wrong, more likely than not botching my description of the event.  You see, I was being told to click the hard drive in Disk Utility, open up the Partition pane and partition this thing.

I couldn’t, for the absolute life of me, find the Partition pane.

I clicked.  I searched help.  And yes, smartass, I tried turning it on and off again.*  And then I emailed you and for the love of all that is right and holy, I could not find a goddamned Partition pane.  I couldn’t even see anything that said “partition.”  Not even a “Part.”  I had bricked it.

It was after I had emailed you, ZOMGIBOUGHTANEWDRIVEANDITDOESN’TWORKANDIDON’TKNOWWHATTODOANDI’MAMESS! I sat and looked at the drive.  I sat and pondered it.  I unplugged it and plugged it back in.  And I thought, well, if this is the problem, well, I might as well put it back the way I found it.  Lo and behold, the hard drive was NOT bricked.  It worked again.  Wrong format, but it worked and things were able to be transferred.

So I thought, well, if that worked, what happens when I click on a different button.

And there was Partition.

And so, Tech Person from My Previous Employer, I figured it out and emailed you right away with the email, “Never mind.  I’m an idiot.”  Which I am.  And I apologize for taking up precious Kb in your email inbox.

Sincerely,

Matthias

*Fans of “The IT Crowd” will get that.

How to Make A Pitch Like LOST

LOST just ended and all of us here in the United States loved it so goddamn much that nothing could have been good for the ending (oh, and believe me, if you never saw the ending, it was not good.)  So, being in the entertainment business, as I am, I felt that I was the perfect person to give you tips on how to pitch a show.  Like LOST. And be loved/reviled the world over.

• Step 1:  Get an idea.  This is crucial.  No idea, no show.  Let’s say our show is called “Puppies and Lambs,” about a puppy who travels the world with a lamb friend.
• Step 2:  Write out your whole idea.  EVERYTHING!  every twist turn splosion, everything.
• Step 3: Commit it to memory and then burn it.
• Step 4:  Write an out an outline, leaving out important details, like the fact that you will be introducing major characters every episode for six years but will never actually make them pay off.  This is important.  You need to keep the executives guessing.
• Step 5: Suck up to an executive.  This is the part I have trouble with.
• Step 6:  Hire JJ Abrams to make the pilot.  This too is important.  He will provide you with some credibility, but also he likes to toss you right into the middle of the story.  It’s a trick to get you hooked: if you don’t know what came right before the excitement, you want to know.  And then six years later, you’re stuck in quasi-religious heaven and no real resolution to the story, with no one, as far as the narrative is concerned, earning their deaths.
• Step 7:  Profit.

And that’s all there is to it.  It’s so easy, you’d think almost ANYONE could get a TV show…but that would be ridiculous.

Related:  The Morning News:  Rewrite the last episode of Lost

Unemployment in the Post-Modern World

So here we are.

As you may have gleaned from the title, I’m currently unemployed.  The circumstances surrounding that are inconsequential and, frankly, the sort of thing you read about in the New York Times or every other news outlet.  Folks lose their jobs.  I’m just one of those folks.

One of the things people have been asking me have been “how are you doing?”  Well, crappy, thanks.  I am unemployed, y’jerk.  But not really.  See, the last time I was fired (“We just don’t have the money to keep you on board.  There’s no room for you here.”  cut to a week later…someone has been hired in my place….AND I INTERVIEWED THAT GUY!  ehhhhhhhhh), it was for several reasons, some more salacious than others.  And I felt like hell.

It was WEEKS before I could find something, ANYTHING that would support, you know, life.  I had a friend get me work at The Insider and Entertainment Tonight and then it just happened that someone else I knew, who is awesome and amazingly successful, knew someone at Next New who told someone else at Next New to hire me.  And now…man, the world is my friggin oyster.

I have a feature script that I can shoot at any time.  I have two shorts that I am shooting in the next three months and a third short that I’m still working details out for.  I have a movie theatre that I need to save.  And best of all?  I have the contacts to do every single one of these things.

And to every single one of you that I know and love and maybe don’t know and don’t love.  If you are in the same position I am in, you lost your gig right now and you’re feeling a little down, here is my promise:  Any one of you that needs anything, I am an email away.  We don’t have much and Lord knows we’d like more, but what we do have is yours.  We have a couch, a kitty, some booze, and always always always good food.  You just email me and I will do what I can to help.  Heck, I might even be asking you for help too.

That’s how we do it.  We get through this bullshit together by helping out and by being better than other less generous people.  We’re the Sesame Street Generation. We share and help and we do what we can.

I know I have people behind me on this.  I want those friends of mine who are in the same position to know they have me behind them as well.

More blogging this week.  I think I might even get around to actually getting What The Pen Said off the ground again.  Good things are coming soon.  Let’s get excited folks.

UPDATE:  Also, I need a new look for this…suggestions?

The Most Dangerous Weapon

I haven’t yet read the books by Tom Brokaw about the Greatest Generation, or the Baby Boomers.  I have enough of a worldview to know that who they are and what they did.  In their own way, they were courageous people who had to stand up against those people who had done wrong.  And all the times that I heard people talking about the Civil Rights Movement or the people who fought the Axis Powers, I always thought, damn, man.  Ours is not a generation that has done any of that.  We don’t do these things.  We don’t have Nazis to fight, or civil rights to save.

Certainly, gay marriage is a civil right, as is health care, and the extremists who are responsible for me having to take my shoes off every time I go to the airport need to be stopped, but these aren’t threats to the world.  Realistically, these “terrorists,” they’re sad little men that simply want attention and have no means of coping with this world we live in today.  They have no frame of reference.

I have followed very carefully, and much to my distraction, the rantings and lunatic ravings of Glenn Beck.  At first I was fascinated by this man, this guy that, in spite of facts, truth and evidence to the contrary, would just up and invent falsehoods and spouted them on TV.  No one did anything about it.  After I was fascinated, I was terrified that he was going to be the undoing of this great experiment.  The Constitution and the Framers never ever anticipated a world like this: internet, television, news and opinion 24 hours a day, phones with mail and a universe of knowledge at your fingertips.  No one, even in the history of science-fiction, ever thought of today.

And then I wasn’t scared of him anymore.  I’m not amused by him, certainly (He’s a dangerous person, strictly because he has too many people believing him.  It’s like Bizarro Jesus.  I honestly expect one of these days that he’s going to call the President a Pharisee and call for him to be stoned), but I’m not afraid of him.  He’s a tragic figure, a sad little boy, who just wants his mommy to hold him.  He’s nothing more than a frightened child.  Once you realize that, you realize that he’s completely harmless.  An uneducated buffoon who reads, but does not understand, a man with no real understanding of the world, who just likes to hear himself talk.  A man who fears the government, and has no real reason to, apart from the fact that he should face up to the fact that he let the government get in this deep.

And I got to thinking about the rest of them, these Tea Partiers, Michelle Bachmann and Sarah Palin, people who aren’t so much sad, but very very vocal.  People who rail against the government, for no real reason.  they don’t understand costs, or debts or anything else, really.  They just know we’re in a bad place and can’t figure out how we got there.  They’re scared and they have every right to be scared.

Then there’s the banks.  The hippies and post-hippies who preached individualism, tune in turn on drop out and explode.  They opened their minds and found untold treasures beyond their wildest imaginings.  Kings among men who currently posess more money than there is any sort of precious metal or gemstone to back up.

And they’re all over 40.

You might say that they worked hard to get there.  Or, you might say that after World War II, they discovered that we had completely and utterly untouched resources for the taking.  No one had bombed our cities.  No one had destroyed out infrastructure.  The War was 3000 miles away in both directions and we were perfectly fine.  We were able to create a solid economy here, because we still had one to begin with.

That, of course, combined with the mentality of the individual, “just be yourself” generation turned into “Me, Me, Me.”  Which turned into the 80s.  And now, here we are.

But then I still think of my generation, and how we haven’t a battle to fight, that we’re given this world to live in and we might as well live in it.  We are a lost generation, buried under mountains of debt because it’s what our parents did.  It’s how you make it.  Follow the American Dream.

And then, apart from a wicked few, it occurred to me:  my generation might not be the Greatest or the Boomers, or Y or X or ZABFR at all.

When Haiti was hit by that earthquake, I found out that a friend of mine had started a charity to help with education.  It’s still running and she was hoping to get down to the devastated country to help in any way she could.  The caterers for my wedding are organic, local, free-range, fair trade and every other descriptor of good.  My fiancee’s best friend works for AmeriCorps.  I’m working to save a classic movie theatre for a town that desperately needs it.  This article. Pittsburgh elected a man in his twenties to be the mayor, and Pittsburgh is now one of the great cities of America again.  And it’s because of these things that I know what my generation is called now.

We’re the Sesame Street Generation.

We grew up believing that every last person, right down the the grouchiest grumps, are worth saving and befriending.  We learned unconditional love.  We learned that it’s not about me.  It’s about all of us, near and far.  We learned that you don’t eat a whole plate of cookies (at least not all the time).  We learned that science is cool and that the numbers, ah-ah-ahhhh, the numbers are miraculous.  We are Ernie and Bert, We are Grover.  We are Gordon and Maria and Mr. Hooper and Bob and Oscar and Snuffy and Big Bird and we are the generation that believes, absolutely and without question, that together we can make something greater than before.  We do not stagnate, because to stagnate is to die.  We move forward and we pull everyone with us, no matter how weak, or how grumpy.  We are full of wonder and cookies and the world is our oyster.

Our war is not fought with guns or bombs or poison gas.  Ours was already won with the most dangerous weapon of all:

A puppet.

The Pen and What It Said

As I sit here waiting for the next four hours for videos to render for a project I’m working on, I’ve been thinking about getting What The Pen Said up and running again. So, I think starting this week, I’ll be posting a new beginning sentence. Hooray, you think! About time, you exclaim!

Yes. Both of those things. Be ready. Wednesday is the return of What The Pen Said.

Ink in the Well

I’m rusty at writing.

It looks like I haven’t written anything significant in over two or three years. I have tried, but I just don’t have time. Now, it seems as though I’ve ruined my writing device. doesn’t work anymore. For instance, I’ve tried writing this blog post seven times, with seven different topics, all of which fell flat by the second paragraph. Interestingly, the only thing I’m capable of writing about for more than three sentences is the fact that I can’t write.

What?

Yup. it looks like I’m only able to lament and wail and gnash my teeth about poor me who can’t write anything. Woe is me, the writer with no ink in his well.

Pfft.

I do have a pile of ideas for things. It’s a matter of actually sitting down and forcing myself through multiple drafts of things. I’ve never been good at that. So, I suppose that it’s time to get good at it. Patience is a virtue I said and I’m looking to be virtuous. (SEE? I can’t even write anything profound there! I left that in just to show you)

The next few things I’ll be working on are going to be pretty cool. The first thing is the wedding invitation. It will be a short film and I’ll be posting some pictures of the process and screen caps of that. In April, I’ll be directing my first music video for Bern Kelly (www.bernkelly.com). We haven’t made a 100% decision on the song yet (it’s down to two) or what the video will look like…but we do know it will be shot in one or two days in New York and we have to make it awesome. And so we will.

I’m also working on rewriting a short film script called “The Time Traveler at the Bar.” I’m working on making it longer and more interesting than the single page thing that I’d written a couple months ago. I have a three season dramatic/action web series that I think could be made on the cheap…I’d just need to figure out how to get it out there and financed.

And that’s what I have to write about today. My blogging has gotten sloppy and sad, in a droopy lettuce sort of way. Not in a weep in the closet to hide from the world sort of way. But sad in a droopy lettuce way.

This was a droopy lettuce post.

Come Closer and Know Me, Man…

Christmas trees line the streets, like cadavers after a plague.  “Bring out your dead,” the cryer calls and out the dead come, symbols of the spirit of the holiday.  We pass them by, our only thought for them being “Poor bastards.  Never had a chance.”

Some said the Holiday spirit died again this year.  Some said it never came.  It was mired in economic disaster, fringe lunatics lighting fires that they couldn’t put out again, television specials that played to the season but somehow were different.  The holiday spirit was stuck in transit, having taken it’s shoes and coat off, removed its laptop from the bag and discarded all of its liquids before the checkpoint.

And it won’t be back until Halloween, and even then it will be forced, manufactured and failed and once again folks will wonder where the meaning of the season went. False cries of a War against a single holiday will rise up, cacophonous in it’s fury, while others solemnly review the past year and the year to come. Some will call out, “Help! I’m being repressed!” while others, repressed by the repressed, take note of tradition and family and a history larger than the present.

There it is, on the street, surrounded by a halo of dry needles and brightly colored paper, the Holiday Spirit. The dreams and hopes of a year past reduced to waste and normalcy. Trash on the street, discarded spirit.

The Holiday Spirit died this year they said.

I think perhaps it just got here a little later.

(Help the Holiday Spirit get out to those to need It, if you haven’t already.)

Resolve

This is the first year I’ve done New Year’s Resolutions that I have any real intention of sticking to.  In fact, I haven’t actually made resolutions for the past several years, strictly because I didn’t think I needed to make any.  This year, being my Thirtieth on the planet (a cosmic sneeze, a galactic thought, but a milestone for human beings.  If I lived in the 1600s, I’d be a senior citizen.), I suppose I should try to better myself, in some way or another.

As with all other things in this day and age, I am posting these resolutions on a blog.  This way, I can tick them off as I go.  Some are achievable goals, others are strictly personal growth things.

• Write more.  Specifically, a full feature-length script, a short script, three quality short stories and the entirety of the “Terrortown” series (don’t know what that is?  ask and I’ll share the GoogleDoc with you)
• Make short films.  Any that come to mind.  Write them down and make them.
• Maintain at least one blog.  Idiots do it.  You should be able to.
• Stop fussing and butting nose into things.  This goes for running and other things you don’t want to do.
• Be more understanding….work on short temper (yeah, I have one)
• Try to stay on top of money stuff.  Get another job if need be.  (I have no head for figures.)
• Work on being more social.  Learn the art of the conversation.
• Floss because lets be real here.
• Run.

This will probably be the blog I work on.  I have every intention of also starting up “What The Pen Said” again.  So keep an eye out for that.

Any other things you think I should work on?  Leave me a comment and I’ll probably leave a snarky response or I’ll ignore you.  Unless I’ve forgotten to put it on my list for real.  Then it’s really just going to go on the list.

I should be back here tomorrow.

What’s Happening?

There’s a tree behind our apartment.  It’s been dead for at least a year and probably longer than that.  Everytime there’s a storm, I fear that the tree will crash down on one of the apartment buildings in our neighborhood, then banish the ridiculously happy thought that perhaps it will be on the apartment building housing the burglars that stole our stuff last year.  I shouldn’t still be harboring nasty thoughts, but there are days when I want them to go to the special hell.

Where was I?

Oh.

Today, we were watching Make ‘Em Laugh, a PBS documentary about comedy in America, hosted by Billy Crystal and narrated by Amy Sedaris, when we heard a tremendous CRASH!  We rushed to the kitchen window to find that the top half of the tree had come crashing down into the back yard of our neighbors.

“There’s some dead chickens,” Hannah said.  I laughed, in spite of the apparent chicken holocaust.  Then we heard a woman from across the way, who was leaning out of her apartment, looking at the scene, her fat folds creating three and four news sets of breasts.  She rubber necked her head in the direction of what I can only call Urban Lumberjacks and screamed, “Que paso!?”

I don’t know why, but that was even funnier than a chicken holocaust.

Breakfast With Zeke

“Put a candle in the window, ’cause I feel I’ve got to move.  Though I’m going, going, going, but I’ll be comin’ back soon, long as I can see the light.”

It was the third of fuck knows when, that I woke up and saw the gray sky again.  The sun was barely crawling up out of the east.  I was sleeping in a cornfield.  There is something to be said for that.  Not a lot, but there’s something to be said, for sure.

I sat up, coaxing my bones into their youth, though they felt like they’re ninety.  I’m not sure, but I think I got into the fight with the field and the field won.  I needed to get moving.  I hurt like hell.  Isn’t that just the perfect metaphor for life?  Gotta keep moving, but you hurt.  I think that’s how most things have happened to me.  I just ignored the hurt.  Might have made things worse.  Who knows?  You never do until you get too tired and too hurt to keep moving.

I trudged along the row of corn, noticing the sky, lightening, ever so slightly.  It went from morning gray to morning blue and if you’ve never seen that, then you need to wake up early one morning and watch.  It’s beautiful.  I always say a little prayer when I see it.  It’s my own prayer and you don’t get to see it.  It’s mine.  But that day was no different.  I said my prayer, spit on the ground and kicked at a rock.  The dust imitated smoke behind the rock.

Breakfast was required.  After a few miles of walking, I saw a diner in the middle of nowhere, neon sign halfways burned out.  The parking lot was occupied by a single pickup truck from sometime in the early eighties.  I hoisted my pack and my guitar on my shoulder again, reached into my pocket and looked at the money I had.  It was a lump of cash I’d stolen from a motel room three states back.  The guy was a drug dealer who sold drugs to children and hooked pre-teens on heroin and sex for money.  I didn’t and don’t feel a single ounce of regret for stealing his money.

I probably still had about a thousand dollars on me at the time, a pair of Levis, a pair of cowboy boots, a light jacket and two shirts (one T and one button down).  My pack held a sliver of soap, the shirt I wasn’t wearing, my lucky lighter, three cigarettes I bummed off a guy on the back of a train, and a piece of rock salt to put under my arms, keep me smelling nice.

This all made me terribly interesting, I thought.  I was a ramblin’ man, the mad genius with the devil on his tail and in his heart.  The poet, the creator with one hand on the book of God’s manual.  Turns out, I wasn’t any of those things.  But it helps when you’re traveling alone to make up a legend about yourself.  Gives you some more confidence when you might not have it otherwise.

I weighed my options.  Eat there, at that moment, or get a move on, eat later.  A breakfast of banana cream pie with a cherry on top and a cup of coffee was appealing, so I decided on it.  I happily jogged up the three stairs, and through the glass door; a sad little bell announced me.

Merl Haggard appropriately played on the rickety radio behind the counter.  It was being wiped down by a woman who could only have a name like “Del” or “Pearl” or “Flo,” perhaps.  There was only one other person in the diner, a tall thin man in a plaid shirt, a pair of old jeans and a pair of shit-kicker shoes.  He was a real sort of fella, the kind that you think of when you think of the Midwest, the kind of man who stands leaning on his fencepost, chewing on a length of straw, and watching the world go by.  The legend of the American Farmer.

I bellied up to the counter, putting my stuff down on the floor, next to me.  The farmer gave me a crossways glance and a nod.  I gave him the same.  I nodded to Flo and ordered the pie and coffee for breakfast.  She gave me a look, smiled and shook her head, judging me, counting on diabetes to claim my body and soul.

“What’re you supposed to be?” the farmer’d asked me.  I shrugged, without really an answer at all.  He scoffed and went back to his coffee.  “You know, boy I knew what I was s’posed to be from the day I was born, seventy-four years ago.  It’s all that city life showin’ up on the TV that’s confusing people.”  I shrugged again.

My coffee and pie came and I dug right in, eating a third of the pie in one bite, slurping at my coffee like I hadn’t eaten in days, which I hadn’t.  My stomach started to fill up and growl, creaking from the sudden expansion, ready to burst at the seams.  I slowed my pace to a crawl.

The farmer watched me with intense distaste.  “You are the sorriest excuse of a man I ever saw,” he said.  “Lord in Heaven, help this child.”  I glared at him.

“What, man?  What is your deal?”  My youthful impetuousness leapt from my throat.  “You’ve been ridin’ my ass since I walked in here, and I ain’t done nothin’ but walk in.”  The farmer narrowed his eyes and turned to face me.

“I’ll tell you son, I see you and I see the future and I’ll be goddamned that this is the future of my country.  I went to Korea and fought for my country.  I came back and I grew food for the people in my country.  I raised four kids with the greatest woman God ever put on this earth and now, I look out and I see you.  I see what my sacrifice was for, and,” he spit on his plate.  Flo sneered at him, but took the plate anyway.  “I don’t think it was worth a good goddamn.”

My response was cut short.  I had something in mind about if you knew what you were meant to do and you did it and you should be happy that you did it.  Something about it’s all about our choices.  Something about how we need to look ahead to a free-er time.  He stood up and leaned in at me, making me lean back, and said, “Some people fought for this country.  Some people still are.  And some of you are just wandering around, forgetting that there used to be honor and duty.”  He stormed out and kicked the tire of his truck, got in and drove off.  I thought I saw tears in his eyes.

“What the hell was that?” I asked the waitress.  She leaned in, her ample grandmotherly bosom resting on the counter.

“He went to Korea.  He had a two sons in Vietnam and only one of them came back.  And now, he’s got a granddaughter in Afghanistan.  His father was in World War One, and his great grandfather was in the Civil War,” she  said.  She smiled and took my plate.  “I wouldn’t be surprised if he had kin in the Revolution.”  She filled up my cup of coffee.  “There’s nothin’ wrong with what you’re doing.  You’re doing right by you.  That’s just not Zeke’s way.  Gotta do somethin’ right by someone else.  By everyone else.”  She shrugged and went into the back.

I sat for a few moments, listening to the country music swirl around the room.  My hand reached into my pocket and fingered the thousand dollars that I’d stolen from that drug dealer and pimp back a ways in Omaha.

I paid for my breakfast, and as I did, I saw a Colt revolver in the reflection of the dessert case.  When the waitress went back to the back I reached around and took it, leaving five hundred dollars in its place.  I picked up my guitar and meager possessions, stowing the loaded gun in my belt beneath my jacket, and walked out into the Middle of America.  The promise of a new day.  I headed away from the sun, into the West and chased the Horizon.  I was going to do right by Zeke.

Now, about that pimp in Omaha.