12/30/01                                                                        Finis This will be my last entry.  If the purpose of this exercise was to get me writing on a weekly basis I suppose it met with marginal success.  However many of the entries, including this one, were written long after the date under which they appeared.  If 90% of what I wrote was crap I suppose that at least 10% was of interest.  And I don’t know how to get to the 10% without going through the 90%.  I will now focus my writing energies (modest though they are) on different mediums—mainly my short stories and essays.  If I’m not going to get published the least I can do is build up a body of work that I feel satisfied with so if anyone ever comes knocking, I’ll have something to greet them with at the door.  Or maybe it will give my family and friends some interesting reading after they put me in the ground.  (You thought I was kidding about the morbidity?)  I’ll still keep my journal on a daily basis (I expect this to be true for the rest of my life) but my writing for public consumption or the writing that I’m trying to craft will no longer be found here.  In 2001 I kept track of all the movies I saw, I took a picture everyday and I wrote these weekly essays.  My new activities won’t necessarily be any less compulsive or neurotic but at least they will be different.  Mainly I want to focus on being a better writer, a more intelligent person and a more gracious human being.  This is a very slow process where it is sometimes not only impossible to detect forward motion but actually appears as if the motion is the opposite of forward.  So, I’ve got a lot of books I need to read and a lot of writing I need to do.  2001 has also turned out to be a year in which I spent long stretches banging my head against the wall.  I’ve had some bad years but 2001 will likely (God I hope so) rank near the top (or the bottom).  Losing my job, walking through the desert that has become my personal life, sending out letter after letter to try to get a more enjoyable job and meeting nothing but silence in return has become pretty discouraging.  Obviously my year paled in comparison to many people in New York so I don’t want to complain too loudly.  But I do feel I am in the middle of a life-shift and I hope that when/if I come out on the other side things will be a little more enjoyable. 12/23/01                                                                          Home Going home for the holidays represents different things to different people.  For some, it is a chance to reconnect with family and friends that their everyday lives prevent them from seeing.  For others it is an opportunity to confront issues of loss and life’s arc.  For me it is an occasion to see a bunch of movies on cable for free that weren’t good enough for me to pay to see when they were in theatres.  I saw fifty-eight movies in 2001 (If it surprises you that I keep track of this kind of thing, you obviously don’t know me all that well) and twelve of those I saw on cable at my parent’s while I was home for Thanksgiving and Christmas.  I have a habit of doing at my parent’s house exactly what I do when I’m at home in L.A.—holing up, reading, eating and watching TV.  The difference is mainly HBO.  This year there was even more of this since both my brothers and their families were gone for Christmas so it was just my parents and myself.  Most of the movies I see are older—my main viewing source being AMC or TCM when I’m at home.  So of the fifty-eight movies, twenty-eight (or 48.2%)were made prior to 1990.  If it seems odd that a guy who lives in L.A. and spent seven years training to be an actor doesn’t go to the movies my guess is that you didn’t read last week’s entry about vegetables and alcohol.  So going home provides me with an opportunity to see some of the movies I’ve heard people talking about and then wonder why the hell they were talking about them.  Don’t they get TCM?  American Pie got glowing reviews and seems as much a part of the culture as O.J. Simpson but when you get right down to it, I don’t think it’s any better—and in some ways less sophisticated—than Porky’s Revenge.  I’ve already written in detail about people’s (specifically my) fascination with old movies and I’ll try not to repeat it here but I am drawn more to older films than current ones.  I think it has something to do with the fact that older movies seem more educational whereas current movies just seem like pop culture ephemera.  The truth is that when those old movies first came out they were nothing more than pop culture ephemera themselves.  Age (rightly or wrongly) confers status.  I’m the type of guy who will watch a 4-hour documentary on Woodrow Wilson on PBS.  So, if I feel like I can get a movie and a history lesson at the same time, I’m all for it.  12/16/01                                                                       Sickness I don’t get sick all that often—maybe once a year or even once every 15 months or so.  I eat fairly well: low-fat, low sodium whenever possible.  My main dietary shortcomings are that I eat too much sugar and not enough vegetables.  (The lack of vegetables confuses my friends only slightly less than my tee totaling.)  I take vitamins regularly, I workout and I don’t smoke.  But I’ve been incredibly sick the past few weeks.  You know, non-stop coughing, wandering around moaning, that kind of thing.  It’s as if I’m in rehearsals for Long Day’s Journey Into Night.  This is not to say that sickness doesn’t have its place.  It serves to remind you what a blessing health is.  It’s much too easy to take that sort of thing for granted.  But after a couple of weeks of feeling like crap, you’re fairly convinced that you’ve learned your lesson and you just want to feel better again.  The older I get the more concerned I become with aches and pains.  Now when I get an ache in my side instead of brushing it off as a side effect of the flu as I would have ten years ago, I now start to wonder if it’s a tumor.  This can be blamed on all the articles I’ve been reading lately about cancer.  When people in their thirties get the big Casino, it concerns you.  Everyone always assumes it will happen to someone else and of course it does but sometimes that someone else is actually you.  In retrospect, it’s amusing how being in the throes of an illness brings out your morbid sensibilities.  (Generally I don’t need any extra encouragement when it comes to morbidity.)  What if I don’t recover?  What if this thing kills me?  It doesn’t happen all that often anymore but early in the 20th century influenza wiped out 20 million people.  It can happen.  We are constantly reborn—from sicknesses, broken relationships and lost jobs.  Life is cyclical.  These episodes are useful and instructive—although I may not die from this illness, it doesn’t change the fact that I am going to die at some point.  Gloomy obsession is not healthy but neither is denial.  If we rise from these little deaths with a spurt of energy I think it can only be for the better.  Nothing improves the quality of life quite like having the simple pleasures periodically taken from you.  So I am ready to be healthy again.  As unpleasant as jogging can be sometimes, I miss it when I’m not doing it. 12/9/01                                                                    Screening My answering machine message goes something like this: “Hey, this is Gary.  I might be here, I might not but either way you’re going to have to leave a message.”  This isn’t just me trying to be cute (that comes naturally) but a necessary ploy for anyone owning a phone in the 21st century.  I almost never answer my phone—I let my machine get it and if it’s someone I’ve actually met, I’ll pick up the phone.  More often than not what I get is silence.  I don’t have a lot of friends and family that call me on a regular basis—my brother usually calls me every couple of weeks, my friends call me on occasion and my parents call me when they need to borrow money.  (Mom & Dad, I’m just kidding if you’re bothering to read this.)  So, I’m not one of those guys who spends that much time on the phone—without question my computer talks on my phone line much more often than I do.  But when the ratio of calls from telemarketers to friends/family is 8:1, there’s something seriously wrong with the whole system.  I haven’t run the exact numbers on this but I don’t think my estimate is hyperbolic.  Take yesterday for example.  Beginning at 9:00 a.m. sharp, I received the first call of the day.  The answering machine picked up and then there was silence after the beep.  This happened two more times over the next hour or so.  (This either means that one of my friends has limitless patience and a poorly constructed notion of what a prank call is or telemarketers realizing that their rap doesn’t sound so good when it’s delivered into the void.)  Sometime around 11:00 a.m. I called my brother.  While I was on the phone with him call-waiting beeped.  I switched over and after saying hello two or three times (as soon as you get silence after your second “hello” you can be pretty sure you’re about to be sold something) someone came on the line to mispronounce my name.  I explained that I was on a long distance call and clicked back over to my brother.  Within 15 minutes or so it happened again.  This means that in the course of less than three hours I received five, count ‘em ladies, five telemarketing calls.  The real pain in the ass was the fact that while I was talking to my brother I didn’t have my answering machine to protect me and I had to make excuses to these strangers to get off the phone.  Perhaps this wouldn’t bother me so much if the ratio was more like 4:1, which is to say if I had more friends or fewer friends who liked to talk to me more.  It’s not that I am insensitive to the plight of the telemarketer.  At times I have held this job myself but, in my defense, these calls weren’t cold and if they were cold they weren’t sales calls.  That is to say that when I did sales calls, I called people at work trying to sell them stuff that they used in their businesses.  And while I was in grad school I did cold calls to people’s homes but it was for public health surveys.  This is perhaps a rather fine distinction but at least I never asked people if they had considered switching long distance companies.  So, I don’t hold the telemarketers personally responsible—after all they are minimum wage drones in an economy that is beginning to look like Russia’s.  You can hardly begrudge people doing a job that at least pays them enough for food.  (It’s more than what I’ve got going on at the moment.)  The part I don’t understand is how it is possible to get called as often as I do.  There are 280 million people in this country and even assuming several million calls a day I should only be receiving about one call a month.  It’s more like two calls a day.  And I’m not exactly in the prime demographic—I’m not a homeowner, I’ve never bought anything over the phone and my income bracket is more like an income cellar.  Anyway, that’s why all my friends know to start off their message with, “Are you there?  It’s me, your friend.”    12/2/01                                                                        Kim I’ve recently become involved with Kim Delaney.  If I were to tell you that I had a couple of pictures of Kim hanging up by my bed and I talked to her at night you might imagine that this is a transcription of John Hinckley’s diaries but I don’t think it’s as nutty as it sounds.  (I suppose most nut jobs make this rationalization in their heads just before they start collecting human skin.)  But people talk to their pets, the television and themselves all the time and it seems to be socially acceptable behavior.  Why then do people condemn the love that Kim and I share?  We have something special.  We don’t make undue demands on each other’s time, we support each other in our chosen careers (she has chosen one, I’m still working on it), we don’t manipulate each other’s emotions through guilt, we almost never fight and we’re both great listeners.  Other than our limited sex lives (which after you reach the age of 25 you realize is a lot more trouble than it’s worth anyway) I believe that she and I have an almost perfect relationship.  This is not to say that there aren’t problems.  My parents are constantly asking when they will get to meet “that new woman you’ve been seeing?”  And over Thanksgiving dinner this year my brother who, in my opinion had been heavily favoring the wine portion of the wine and dine equation, blurted out that “She’s some actress he’s never even fucking met.”  This just goes to show how little my sibling understands me or my love for Kim.  He has yet to learn that love is as much in the mind as it is in the physical world.  Until he understands this he will have to seek refuge in his glass and a half of wine, consumed over the shockingly brief period of only a couple of hours.  It’s sad when we realize we can’t save our loved ones from their addictions.  When I first met Kim, she was working as a police detective.  Obviously I was worried that the woman I loved would be putting herself in harm’s way every day.  I didn’t try to stop her from pursuing her career but we did argue at times over her involvement with one co-worker after another.  She has recently become a public defender and although I am thrilled at the comparative safety of her new job my queries of when she had time to study for the bar have gone unanswered.  The demands of a long distance relationship (she lives in Philadelphia, I’m in L.A.) can be trying at times but we feel the effort is worth it.  I am fortunate in that due to some city ordinance, her court cases are televised once a week and I am able to watch these on my cable system.  Unfortunately this is a bit one-sided as she is unable to watch me and she has told me that she feels lonely when she must go too long without seeing me.  My efforts to negotiate a similar situation here in L.A., with a crew filming me in my house once a week have thus far proved fruitless.  I believe that eventually the government will have to respond to my constant faxes.  My parents always taught me that persistence was the key to life.  And of course without this trait, Kim and I may have never gotten together in the first place.  I must confess that there is one other area that we (like many couples I imagine) sometimes have difficulties—her spending habits.  Every week I watch as she wears another outfit to court.  Often she will wear three or four different suits within the course of an hour.  We have discussed this profligacy and she has promised to scale back noting that she was “only trying to look pretty for you.” 11/25/01                                                                       Silicone While I was home at my parent’s over the Thanksgiving holiday my mother turned to me and asked if I had ever considered looking for work in the Bay Area, near where they live.  (In case you don’t know me, I’ve been out of work for a while.)  I explained to her that if anything the economy in that region was even worse than it was in L.A.  After all, Silicone Valley was ground zero for the economic downturn.  She took a moment, pronounced the word to herself and then said, “Just so you don’t embarrass yourself, it’s Silicon Valley.”  I explained patiently that no, it was silicone.  She said, “Silicone is what they use in breast implants.”  I retorted that they used silicone in computer circuits too.  I was fairly sure of myself and trudged over to the computer to support my case. This gap in my knowledge is as comical as it is shocking.  (Although, I must tell you, I don’t find it all that funny myself but I do hope that you, who are reading this, are having a good time.)  I’ve written about intelligence before in these essays and the fact that I continue to write about it tells me I may be a bit neurotic about it.  Although I can be demure, privately I consider myself to be a reasonably intelligent human being.  Most of my reading (if not my television viewing or music consumption) tends to be on the high-minded side, i.e. The New Yorker, Harper’s etc.  I have a Master’s Degree and although it is in the lower caste discipline of acting, it did take me 3 solid years to get.  But the truth of the matter is that the older I get the more I become convinced that I’m a fucking moron.  And I don’t just mean compared to other college-educated people, I mean in general.  I’m a dismal speller, my geographical comprehension is deplorable, my grammar is questionable and my knowledge of pre-nineteenth century history is highly suspect.  But the most depressing thing is this—I’m not just whining about my lack of knowledge and then turning on “Blind Date”—I read all the time, I talk to smart people, I keep up with the news.  At least if I wasn’t trying to fill in those intellectual gaps I could console myself with the belief that it was just a question of effort.  In fact, for me, being a dumb guy is a lot of work.  And truthfully, if I’m going to be an idiot anyway, I’d rather spend the time I devote to reading Harper’s eating chili fries at Hooters.  At least that would provide some blue-collar satisfaction.  The reason I keep reading and writing and talking and listening is because I believe that it will sink in and I’ll be smarter tomorrow than I was today.  But I’m beginning to consider the possibility that my brain is like a five gallon bucket—I can pour in twenty gallons if I want but the bucket will never hold more than five.  After that, it shuts down and waits for me to get in the car and go to Hooters.  Scientists always tell us that the average person uses less than 5% of his or her brain.  But what if that other 95% is only capable of holding the plotlines to old Three’s Company episodes?  Aren’t we better off not utilizing it? 11/18/01                                                                Expiration A few days ago, I received my new California Driver’s License in the mail.  I didn’t have to take a test (written or driving) and I didn’t have to go into the DMV to have my picture taken.  They let me renew for five years and the whole thing only cost me $15.  $3 a year is a surprisingly low cost to operate a motor vehicle.  (I remember when I got my first driver’s license seventeen years ago in New Hampshire.  I think it cost $20 for four years.  NH has to make up for the fact that they don’t charge sales tax somehow.)  All the state of California required of me to get my renewal was to sign my name and drop a check in the mail.  But here’s the catch: they used the same picture that I had taken four years ago when I got my first CA Driver’s License. (Apparently it’s on file somewhere, which I find more than a little disturbing.)  This is no damn good.  Now I’ve got to be reminded of how much I’ve aged.  Thank God I didn’t get my first license in CA—what if they used the same picture that I had taken when I was sixteen years old?  I don’t need to see that haircut above the Dio concert shirt every time I try to get into a club.  (Although, admittedly, I never try to get into any clubs.)  I’m plenty conscious of my own mortality—I don’t need any visual reminders. Having a driver’s license is now a relatively dull affair.  It wasn’t always so.  When you’re in your early teens getting a driver’s license is a little like getting an invitation to the Lewis and Clark expedition.  It is freedom on a grand scale.  Back then getting in the car to do anything, even the most mundane task such as running to the post office or going to the store was a cause for celebration.  I remember getting excited to go anywhere in the car.  Driving for the first time you become hyperaware of speed and the freedom of the road.  It is also a sort of sexual liberation.  After all, when you live at home with your parents your opportunities for sexual congress are maddeningly infrequent but now, suddenly, you’re the captain of a mobile hotel. The first day I got my license I was living in New Hampshire and I remember there was a horrible snowstorm.  I think it snowed about a foot that night.  Much to my surprise, my parents let me take the car out by myself.  In retrospect it may not have been the wisest decision but I was absolutely thrilled at the time.  Somehow I had acquired enough winter driving experience (something that all New Englanders get sooner or later) to keep the car on the road.  But the joy of showing up alone in my little mustard yellow Toyota Tercel hatchback with the heat blasting and getting out of the car alone was a feeling of immense self-empowerment.  I remember a few of the guys from the neighborhood met at the convenience store down the street (a place that only a year or so earlier we had been forced to utilize dirt bikes to reach).  We all had our own cars, which is to say we had liberty.  We felt like the original signers of the Declaration of Independence (A few of those guys were from NH by the way.  One was named Josiah Bartlett and is probably where Aaron Sorkin got the surname for his president on The West Wing.)  So there we all were on that snowy night, the guys from the neighborhood.  I remember that we had decided to meet there in the evening before heading off somewhere else.  I no longer remember where we were going but I know now, at the distance of another lifetime, that I felt I was heading towards freedom. 11/11/01                                                                         Perish Other than a composition course that was required as one of my general education classes for my B.A. and a playwriting course or two, I’ve never taken any writing courses.  And yet, I’ve been writing most of my life.  I made my first diary entry sometime around the 5th grade.  I started keeping that diary for the same reason that I think everyone writes in a diary at that age—I was in love.  Or I was suffering the eleven-year-old equivalent of love.  It was a little blue leather-bound volume with a gold clasp lock.  The lock was useless since you could pick it with just about anything.  I think once I lost the key I just started using my fingernail.  But from the age of eleven onward I’ve been writing intermittently all my life.  Journals, plays, essays, short stories—I even started a murder mystery that I never got around to finishing.  (The butler did it—a pun.)  And yet with all that writing I’ve managed to see anything of mine published.  The closest I’ve come to being published at this point are my articles on the Sports Central website.  It’s a start I suppose.  But the dream is to be published.  I think.  I’m not sure I have the great American novel in me but at the very least I’d like to publish a short story or two, maybe an essay and plays—stage or screen.  It’s only within the past couple of years or so that I’ve gotten around to submitting anything to publishers.  (As I understand it, publishers will only print pieces that you show to them.)  I’ve submitted a couple of short stories and a piece on golf.  The older I get the more convinced I am that someone at some point in history has already said what I have to say and probably much more eloquently than I ever could myself.  But at the same time I feel more compelled than ever to try to publish.  I guess that’s the mid-life crisis kicking in.  (Actually it’s been around since I was about 22.)  In the past I kept stuff to myself.  Now I’m on a quest to collect as many rejection slips from publishers as humanly possible.  Well, at least that’s the plan at the moment.  It’s very possible that as soon as I get the first, I’ll curl up in the fetal position and cry like a girl scout.  I’m not sure what value the written word has anymore.  Every time you turn around someone is saying that the public’s attention has been so badly fragmented by Broadcast TV, Cable TV, movies, DVDs, video games and the Internet that nobody gives a damn about reading anymore.  Or if they do, they don’t have the time to do it.  But I know for myself that I’m reading now more than ever.  I’ve already written in great detail about my compulsive periodical reading so I won’t bore you again with it here. Another reason I haven’t sent off very much of my stuff to publishers is because I am a perfectionist about my writing.  This does not mean that I turn out perfect pieces of writing.  It means that I work on them forever, going through dozens of drafts in some cases until I can’t think of any other way to improve the writing.  I’m not sure what I produce is ultimately any better than a writer who does two drafts and is done but it’s a process I have to follow or I just don’t feel good about my work.  The problem is that I work so slowly that I have very few pieces of writing that I feel satisfied with enough to send in to publishers.  So the danger is that if I work on a short story for 100 hours and then it gets rejected I’m not going to be able to console myself by saying, “Well, I didn’t really spend that much time on it.”  There’s no way of escaping that sort of rejection.  But the plan is to keep working until those rejection slips become overwhelmingly depressing.  At that point, I might start work on my painting. 11/4/01                                                                           Viva I'm not sure why Paris is considered the city of lights.  Las Vegas has more electricity running through it than a death row in a Texas state penitentiary.  In addition to the French capital, Vegas has replicas of New York City (now with flowers and cards on the sidewalk to pay tribute to the real city), Venice, New Orleans, and an Egyptian Pyramid.  Vegas makes the real locales that it apes seem superfluous.  After all, why go to Paris when you can travel to the top of an exact replica of the Eiffel tower (1/3 scale) that is only a few blocks down the street from Venetian canals? Now, you might ask, “What is an unemployed guy doing in Vegas in the first place?”  Excellent question.  After all gambling is a sucker’s game—what’s a guy who considers himself in the possession of at least a marginal level of intelligence doing in the city of sin?  I could tell you that I know my limits as a gambler—which is to say that I know what games to play and what bets to place so that I can minimize my loses.  And although I believe this to be true (I don’t think I’ve ever lost more than $50) the truth is a little more complex than that.  I have mixed feelings about Vegas.  On the one hand it is an utterly repulsive city where consumption is not merely conspicuous but downright masturbatory.  You can almost smell the money flowing through the streets.  The comparisons between Vegas and Texas don’t end with electrical consumption. Both places have an affinity for immensity.  In Vegas you see huge buffets, enormous billboards, oversized slot machines, gigantic hotels and vast amounts of water.  Every hotel/casino seems to be surrounded by so much H2O that they resemble medieval castles with moats.  At the Bellagio every evening there is an elaborate water show complete with music, lights and cannons that shoot the water impossibly high into the air.  This certainly must accelerate the process of evaporation.  (By the way, Vegas is a desert and has no business having any water in the first place; yet every day it is wasted by the gallon.)  Vegas is infested by people who want to indulge all of the vices known to man—drugs, sex, gambling and gluttony.  In Vegas you eat until you excrete.  It is an extravagantly profligate city in a country that is one of the most wasteful on the planet.  You can’t justify the reckless squandering of food and energy and money and human emotion.  For all of these reasons, Vegas shows America at its very worst. On the other hand Vegas challenges assumptions and makes you confront your principles head-on.  Perhaps all of this is nothing more than simple liberal guilt but if, like me, you have a vague belief that there should be more economic and social equality in this world then Vegas is the place you’d go first to start balancing the scales.  I don’t believe in Vegas as a way of life (a couple of days a year is plenty to make me feel cloyed by food and visual stimuli) but I’d be lying if I didn’t admit to its allure.  It does serve a purpose—like that of pagan rituals where people who work in the fields 358 days a year say the hell with it and for one week a year come out and eat and have sex until they’re sick.  It serves as a steam valve and allows for a productive rest of the year.  Prior to the carnival week, you work hard because you know you’re about to party.  And after a week of self-indulgence you’re so sated you don’t want anything more than simplicity and work. Vegas is much like a Mardi Gras that goes on year-round, twenty-four hours a day.  But it is up to the individual tourist to go home at some point to his self-imposed Lent.  This is a crucial step—if you don’t depart on your own, no one will make you leave.  (At least not until the casinos have all your money.) The casino I usually frequent on the strip is a place called Casino Royale.  It’s a little slice of working-class real estate wedged between the upscale monstrosities of new Las Vegas.  (Any place on the Strip that has a "Subway" shop in the casino is not making any bones about the clientele it is targeting.) The stakes are low there—they have a $1 craps table (where I spend most of my time).  No one seems to be betting a lot of money and the patrons seem more like locals at a neighborhood bar than high stakes gamblers who have their financial destinies on the line.  These are blue-collar citizens who are not easily rattled and who understand that the house is probably going to win sooner or later but the drinks are free, the company isn’t bad and they can take their sweet time losing their money. I first became attracted to gambling in grad school when, for my thesis role, I played a compulsive gambler.  Craps was his game and since I had never played before, I visited a riverboat outside Chicago to get a feel for the game.  I had a fairly large learning curve, as the betting in craps can be incredibly intricate.  To my knowledge no other casino game allows you to bet in so many different ways—all on the outcome of two plastic cubes.  Around this time I also read and did an essay for my Russian history class on Dostoyevsky’s The Gambler. (Now here’s a guy who had some gambling problems—he once pawned his wedding ring in order to fund his habit.)  The role and Dostoyevsky’s novella sparked my interest in the emotional and metaphoric aspects of gambling.  We are drawn to movies about professional conmen and gamblers.  We love to live this lifestyle vicariously from the comfort of our couch.  Gamblers know the beauty and terror that Life can bring. 10/28/01                                                                 Compensation I’ve been conscious of the Cosmic Joke ever since I was old enough to start seeing women naked.  The CJ and I are on a first name basis.  A common mistake made by people who aren’t familiar with the CJ is to think that they know all the punch lines.  There are far more than our puny minds can comprehend.  This week, I want to ignore the other innumerable punch lines (women, sex, health, lotteries, Hollywood, etc.) and focus on just one that I am labeling “Compensation”.  I’m currently looking for a job and I’m reminded how few occupations there are out there that I want to do.  The CJ comes into play when you realize that the jobs you do want are marred by one of three factors: A) The job is impossible to get.  B) If you do get the job it pays almost nothing.  C) If the first two conditions do not apply then you can be sure that the job doesn’t exist.  A) Jobs that are impossible to get I’d love to be the editor of Harper’s magazine.  They’re a bunch of hyper-educated communists over there and I think we would all get along wonderfully.  Of course when you compare the IQ of the current editor, Lewis H. Lapham, to mine it looks like the score from a Harlem Globetrotters/Wizards game.  I wouldn’t mind being Woody Allen.  (Minus the incestuous pedophilia of course.)  He gets to write, direct and act in his films.  Where do I sign up for that?  And as far as I can determine there is low turnover in the position of wardrobe assistant to Salma Hayek. B) Jobs that pay almost nothing I currently write baseball articles for a website called Sports Central.  This is a great gig for a number of reasons—baseball is something I enjoy watching, I’m free to write about any topic within the baseball world that I choose and when I throw in obscure references to Shakespearean plays or Bogart films, the editor doesn’t complain but instead dutifully posts my articles.  This would have to be classified without reservation as a “good job.”  Total remuneration from said job: $0. C) Jobs that don’t exist Then there are the jobs that I would like to do and believe myself to be uniquely qualified for but—as far as I can tell—don’t even exist.  To my knowledge no one is getting paid to lie on their bedroom floor and read the New Yorker for six hours a day.  There’s also not much money in hanging out with your friends and making wiseass comments.  I belong to a couple of softball leagues and love playing but it costs me money. In grad school I had a couple of part-time jobs.  One of them was working as a cashier at a gas station.  Now you might think that this would be a job that would make me want to kill myself via Old Milwaukee but I happened to love it.  First of all it was a small station (only 4 pumps) and it did not have a mini-store attached to it.  This meant that no customers ever came into the store and one person could handle the job easily.  When it was my shift I had the place entirely to myself.  There was no full-service so I stayed in the store 95% of the time.  This was great.  Inside there was a radio/CD player on which I could listen to NPR or U2—my choice.  There were many times when it was very slow and during those times I was free to read or do homework.  This was in Illinois so during the winter it could get pretty damn cold.  But holed up in the store with music playing and the little heater running full blast and watching the snow fall was incredibly peaceful.  I got a lot of reading done.  Best of all there was no boss man looking over my shoulder.  It was great.  The pay?  As I remember it was somewhere in the neighborhood of $5.15.  But in some ways it was the greatest job in the world. I know there are a large number of people out there who spend forty hours a week doing a job they don’t like doing.  Very few people in this world get to do what they want and make a living from it.  But it keeps me awake at night when I realize that there are a few people out there who do.  In other words, if no one made a living from a job they enjoyed, I could give up the dream and resign myself to pointless meetings and soul-draining tasks.  But I see people doing things I want to do and getting paid for it and I have to admit that it distracts me from becoming a soulless automaton.  Man was cursed with a brain large enough to see the absurdity of his existence.  It’s a funny joke, don’t you think? 10/21/01                                                                      Etymology I’ve always had a thing for words.  It’s actually more of a fetish.  Although there are many people out there who know more words and more about those words than I do and although I’m a long way from being an etymologist, I still spend my fair share of time thinking about words.  (As a side note here, I think it is no coincidence that “etymologist” and “entomologist” share similar spellings.  They seem to have a lot in common.  Both study somewhat arcane subjects, spend a lot of time indoors and neither have sex with models.)  I can remember my first encounter with certain words.  For instance, I originally discovered the word “euphemism” while reading an interview with Bono in Rolling Stone.  I came across “nihilism” for the first time while reading an essay about the play “Sergeant Musgrave’s Dance” by John Arden.  I have pet words too.  I happen to have a fondness for “bifurcated.”  “Onanism” is so graphically specific that it’s hard not to love.  And when I am trying to determine if a dictionary is comprehensive I look and see if it contains the word “gorp.” I read or heard somewhere that by the time you reach a certain age (15?  25?) your vocabulary stops expanding.  I don’t know if this is true or not.  It may have just been a marketing ploy in an attempt to sell a Word Power course but I take the warning seriously nonetheless.  I’ve made a habit of looking up every word I don’t know.  Since I read the New Yorker and Harper’s on a consistent basis, this means I spend a lot of time leafing through my decomposing dictionary.  It’s a little disturbing to me how many words there are that I don’t know.  And these are mainly—with the exception of a few Latin and French phrases thrown in—English words.  How can I learn Italian or any other Romance language if I can’t even master English?  Being monolingual is something I find shameful.  Many Europeans speak two or three languages fluently and are able to oscillate back and forth with ease.  Samuel Beckett provides a good example.  Here’s a guy who wrote most of his plays in French despite the fact that English was his first language.  Somehow he managed to master English (he once used the word “fillip” (again, my first exposure to the word) in the stage directions of one of his plays) before he moved on to French. The problem with trying to expand your vocabulary via solitary reading is that many of the words you learn do not have verbal applications.  For instance, I can learn the meaning of the word “chiaroscuro” and could perhaps even use it in its written form if I was Pauline Kael but if I bust it out at a party in L.A., I’m likely to go home alone.  (Truth be told, I’m probably going home alone no matter what I say.)  In addition, knowing the definition of a word and being able to pronounce it correctly are two very different problems.  Since I have mastered the art of reading without moving my lips, I’m rarely certain how new words are pronounced.  I might mouth it silently to myself as I glance at the phonetic spelling in the dictionary but that is not the same as using it with assurance out loud.  And there’s no real incentive to learn the proper pronunciation since, chances are, you’re not going to get to use it in conversation anyway.  Hell, I have difficulty with disyllabic words.  I’m too embarrassed to tell you how long I’ve mispronounced words like “mirror” (I used to say “mere”, eliding fifty percent of the syllables) or “poem” (I would say “pome”). Sometimes I’ll come across a word that seems tailor-made for me.  I look it up, love the specificity of the definition only to lose it a few hours later.  If I don’t have the opportunity to use the word several times immediately after learning it, it’s gone.  I once found a word that meant, “activity or work done during the late night hours.”  I loved it because I’m a night person, find myself to be most productive at night and thought I might be able to put it to good use.  But since I didn’t get the chance to employ it right away, it vanished.  To this day I don’t know what that word is and I mourn its loss. 10/14/01                                                                       Thyme Fourteen centuries ago the spice trade was in full swing.  The West (Rome et al.) wanted what the East (India, China, etc.) had.  Considerable resources were spent in trying to secure passage for vegetable products from one part of the world to the other.  Did people die so that someone could have better tasting food?  That seems absurd.  What a waste.  How primitive.  Thank God, we can now go to Ralph’s and buy them in little plastic containers with our credit cards.  No more of that bloodshed nonsense with kingdoms rising and falling so that someone can have a tasty piece of mutton.  We have finally entered an era where the quest for trifles does not dictate geopolitical events.  You’d think so but what I am beginning to learn about history is that it is a zero sum gain.  It’s all a shell game. The desire for precious metals and stones was replaced by the desire for spices.  Spices are then replaced by textiles.  Textiles are replaced by oil.  All so that plutocracies around the world can live a lifestyle that are not afforded third world countries.  Let’s be honest here—none of these things were necessary to sustain life.  You certainly don’t need ten pounds of gold around your neck to live a happy life.  Nor do you need nutmeg in your food for sustenance.  And you certainly don’t need silk sheets on your bed.  Perhaps the argument could be made that oil is a commodity used by all classes of people in industrialized nations.  It powers vehicles for personal transportation, planes and trucks for the hauling of goods.  God knows without oil, the American economy would shut down overnight.  But a portion of this oil (a fairly large portion I would guess without the numbers to back it up) is still consumed by the plutocracy for plutocratic means.  There is no reason on earth we need vehicles on the streets of this country the size of tanks sucking the amount of gas that they do.  The advertising industry has successful convinced the upper middle classes that the safety features and ground clearance of SUVs are needed to meet the challenges that are faced everyday on the roads of suburbia.  Who knows when you’ll run across a herd of bongos on Main street and be forced to go off road.  There is an ad running on television for Land Rover (a vehicle that starts at about 55k I believe) where a beautiful couple is on their way to the opera.  He is in a tux, she in a beautiful satin dress.  The opera tickets rest in the handy ticket console (standard on all models). It is pouring rain but they are safe inside, shielded by the noise reductive roof (optional on the S class).  Suddenly on the side of the road they see a stray dog.  He looks cold and confused.  (How else do stray dogs look?  They have the acting range of Stallone.)  The woman turns to the man with her dewdrop eyes.  He hesitates, glancing towards the tickets.  She places her finely manicured hand with the 400-karat diamond ring on his arm.  He purses his lips and pulls to the side of the road.  He scoops up the dog—with absolutely no regard for his tux—and carries the mutt to the back of the vehicle while she swings open the titanium steel gate (optional on the A class) and the voice-over tag line intones, “If you do one thing, you’ve done something.”  Are you fucking kidding me?  The upper middle class can assuage their guilt through picking up stray dogs?  Their noblesse oblige is best sated not through driving a car that is less damaging to the environment, or combating hunger in third world countries but by feeding hungry dogs?  Is it just me?  Tell me. 10/7/01                                                                         Lies Most of what you read here are lies.  If you want the truth, you need to read my journal.  In my journal I’m truthful.  I try to record everything—warts and all.  But you can’t read it because I’m not going to show it to you.  I’m not going to show it to you because people don’t like the truth all that much.  I hold few things higher than truth telling.  I think it’s important.  I’m not sure why, I just feel this to be the case.  When women ask me what kind of car I drive, I tell them the truth.  (This is an excellent way to end conversations with attractive, young, available women by the way.)  As I mentioned in a previous entry, I didn’t lie about the fact that I wasn’t wearing my seatbelt when I was pulled over earlier this summer.  But by my estimate, I probably lie four or five times a day.  If I don’t see anyone all day (a common situation lately) you could probably reduce that number to two or three.  But still—lying is a part of my everyday life.  And I lie about stupid shit.  I tell people who call and wake me up that they didn’t wake me up.  I’m not sure if this is because I’m guilty about sleeping at whatever hour they call me or if I’m trying to protect them from feeling bad for disturbing my sleep.  Either way, I lie about it.  I lie to friends and family about physical appearance.  How often in the history of mankind has the question, “How do I look?” been answered truthfully?  And there are countless other ways, so ingrained that I don’t even register them anymore, that I lie almost every single day of my life.  In my journal, however, I tell the truth.  But even there I sometimes have to remind myself that I am writing this with the intention that no one I know will ever read it.  If I thought people close to me were going to see what I had to say, I’d start editing myself and there would be no point in keeping the journal.  It seems silly that we can’t tell the truth all the time.  I know smarter people than me have done studies and written books about this topic.  The little, white lies that hold the fabric of society together.  I’m not so sure I want to hear the truth either.  I feel bad enough about myself without people being truthful.  But I find it disturbing that my constitution is so delicate that I have to bathe myself in the warm waters of false praise and expurgated feedback.  I always find it shocking when someone is honestly critical of me.  It throws me.  I’m a lousy liar.  Combine this with a dearth of social graces and I find myself spending a lot of time alone.  Since I can’t hold up my end of small talk and I lack the ability to feign interest, I know that I will eventually be discovered so I hightail it for home.  I realize that if everyone were like me, this entire country would fall apart.  No business deals would be consummated; there would be very little sex and virtually no dinner parties.  And then where would we be?  The entire human race would die out in a generation or two.  I don’t want that on my shoulders.  So, get out there and spread some lies.  And if you want to know what I really think, you should read my journal.  But I’m not going to show it to you.