Not in much of a mood to go to work tonight. Nothing new there, right? Right now, I'm not in much of a mood to do much other than stress out over my health and deal with my own rarely acknowledged mortality. Around five this morning, before I went to bed, I happened to discover a lump on the back of my shoulder and -- Christ, I just hate typing that! Lump -- that is the ugliest word in the English language, isn't it? Or at least, right now it is. Right now, I hate that word more than any other word. Anyway, I went to sleep assuming that I'd wake up and the thing would be gone but of course, that never works.

Anyway, you can probably guess what the big worry on my part is right now, particularly considering the amount of cigarettes I go through in one day. Anyway, there's not a whole lot I can do about it other than get it looked at by a doctor on Monday (that'll be my first day off after the weekend) and just take whatever steps may be necessary from that point on.

What's strange about this whole experience is that I know that it's probably not going to turn out to be cancer and I really don't want to spend too much time using this blog to speculate on whether or not it is if just out of respect for those who actually are fighting that disease at that moment. And I certainly don't want to try to start a pity party for myself here on the web over something that hasn't even been close to confirmed (or discounted, have to add that, don't we?) as of yet. What's not bugging me is the slim chance that it could be something serious as much as the fact that this morning, I suddenly woke up and discovered that I'd reached the point in my life where that possibility, however slim, was still a possibility.

Anyway, the more I try not to think about this thing, the more I do. Right now, I sit here envying those who actually have the strength of faith necessary to "leave it in God's hands." I'm jealous of those who could handle this with a prayer because I know that even if I pray all the way 'til Monday, I don't posess the sureness of belief in a benevolent higher power for those prayers too make much difference and, sadly I must admit, I also realize that it's going to take a lot more than just a health scare for me to get that faith. (Deism is a great philosophy to follow if you're trying to justify religious belief logically but, when it comes to fear, isolation, and emotional turmoil, it ain't worth shit.) From a practical point of view, I guess I could hope that from this, I'll finally develop the inner strength and determination to quit smoking before I actually do end up killing myself.

But I'll be honest with you -- as I type this, I'm already looking over at the sliding glass door of my den and planning to step outside for a quick cigarette. Right now, the pleasure I get from smoking is the only thing that I know is going to remain the same regardless of what happens over the next couple of days. That's the appeal of addiction, I suppose. While everything else seems to be constantly in a state of change and uncertainty, our addictions always remain the same.

They're the one thing that you know, no matter what, you'll never lose.  ¶ 6:09 PM (0) comments

  I've actually been avoiding the current Presidential contest this year which is a first for me. My lack of excitement about the whole thing can be evidenced by the fact that I nearly talked myself into not only voting in the Democratic primary but into actually voting for Dennis Kucinich as well! Well, I decided to remedy that problem during my days off from work and I have spent a great deal of time since Sunday browsing every resource I could come across concerning the 2004 election. The end result: I am now so unbelievably bored by the whole thing that I have discovered a new form of exciting entertainment -- discovering just how bored one human being can become before he slips into a state of catatonia. This incoming coma, I hope, will be studied by research scientists for years to come and hopefully will eventually become known as Kerry Paralysis.

Over the past couple of days, I have spent far too much time reading about the various exploits of John F. Kerry and I must admit that I am now feeling just a little bit brain-fried. I was no Al Gore fan but at least there was a discernible mission behind his Presidential campaign. Unfortunately, that mission happened to be Gore's own messiah complex but, and again I am not a fan of the former Vice President, there was no doubt that Gore sincerely believed that it was his destiny to save the world by getting elected President. If at times it seemed like Bush's main reason for running was to redeem his family name, at least that was a mission and not necessarily a pointless one when you consider that redeeming the Bushes also meant repudiating not only the policies of Bill Clinton but the self-destructive style he brought to the practice of American democracy. But Kerry -- has anyone asked this man why he's running for President other than the fact that he apparently doesn't have anything else left to do? Has anyone asked why Democrats are rallying to this man beyond the fact that he's not a Republican or, more specifically, a Bush? There's something disturbing about the fact that the only real reason John Kerry is currently a strong contender to lead the free world is that Howard Dean ended up making an ass out of himself for a few minutes in Iowa.

There's been a lot of speculation, as of late, on just what exactly it is that John Kerry stands for. A wise man would probably say that, if after 30 plus years on the public stage, a leader still doesn't stand for anything than that figure has probably surrendered his right to be a leader. Over the past weekend, after reading about his accident on the ski slopes and his attempts to bond with the common man through shopping for a better jock strap, I've come to the conclusion that just as Dean was the activist candidate, Lieberman the moderate candidate, Kucinich the peace candidate, and Sharpton the black candidate, Kerry is none other then the Muppet Candidate.

He seems real but just quite isn't.

The question I've been avoiding for far too long is who do I really support in 2004. Obviously, for me at least, Kerry is out of the question. It's not that I wouldn't ever vote for someone whose politics might differ from mine. After all, I was nearly a Republican for Kucinich but a vote for Kucinich would have been the equivalent of when, in my teenage years, I would skip study hall and hang out behind the high school, smoking Marlboro Reds and drinking cheap beer. You'd get a funny little buzz and spend the rest of the day feeling like a rebel and the real damage done would be minimal. Researching Kerry, you're left with the impression that the man's never had a funny little buzz in his life. Until recently, I was a very enthusiastic Bush supporter but as of late, I've started to worry that his administration -- like his father's -- has been drifting, randomly going from issue to issue with no real plan or destination in sight. I think that, in the days following 9-11, Bush was perhaps one of the greatest Presidents this nation will ever be lucky enough to know. I also think that a lot of that greatness is currently being squandered in the morass of Iraq (though anyone who says we didn't do the world a favor by toppling Hussein needs to get their head examined) and on pointless crusaders like the current moves against gay marriage.

Well, where do we go from there? Third parties? Well, third parties were all the rage for about eight years there, weren't they? Perot helped to elect Clinton in '92 and Nader certainly elected Bush in 2000. As for '96, the Reform Party was pretty much irrelevant but it was still a lot of fun watching Perot popping up like some sort of demonic little Leprechaun and screwing Richard Lamm, the amazingly annoying former Governor of Colorado, out of that party's Presidential nomination. So, third parties aren't totally irrelevant though anyone who thinks that any independent is going to be elected during our lifetime is truly fooling himself. So, how is the fringe looking for 2004?

Well, Ralph Nader's running again. This time, he's not even running as a Green but as a true independent. In short, he's running as just pure Ralph Nader. Of course, if Kerry is the kid who wouldn't smoke outside the high school, Nader's the kid who snitched on all the smokers and who made sure his hallway monitor sash was crisp and clean every single morning. So, forget about Ralph.

As for the once mighty Reform Party -- well, their relevance can be judged from the fact that there's a large movement in what is left of the party to convince Ralph Nader to come run on their ticket. Jesus Christ, how do you go from worshipping Ross Perot to nearly nominating Dick Lamm to rallying behind Pat Buchanan to courting Ralph Nader in only 12 years time!? The answer reveals why the Reform Party was doomed to fizzle out. It's a party full of frustrated politicians, of former Republicans and Democrats who were too flaky to make it in their original parties and who basically went off and formed their own social club. They're the Chess Club of American politics, linked not by any real ideology but instead by a sort of self-righteous bitterness that finds it's outlet by latching onto various demi-nerds, people who aren't cool enough to screw cheerleaders but have still managed to make it to a point where they can walk down the school hallway without getting their books slapped out of their hands -- the Ross Perots, the Pat Buchanans, and now, the Ralph Naders. In short, the Reform Party is currently a bunch of reformers who have no idea what exactly it is they're trying to reform.

Anyway, recent reports had Nader turning down the Reformers which means they'll probably end up nominating one of their state chairmen -- an 80 year-old guy named Ted Weill who seems well-meaning but is still basically just some 80 year-old guy with a lot of free time on his hands.

As for Nader's former home -- the Green Party! Yeah, everyone just seems to love the Green Party. They're like the kids who go spend their week wearing uniforms and studying catcheisms at an exclusive private school and then spend their weekends dressing in black, coating their eyes with dark mascara, and listening to Marilyn Manson. They're the party for people who want to change the real world without ever having to actually live in it. Anyway, there's a move in that party to draft Nader as well. If they can't convince Nader, they're party will probably end up nominating either David Cobb, a Texan who probably won't make much of a blip beyond giving the rest of America the chance to actually see what a Liberal Texan looks like, or just maybe Peter Camejo, the obscenely rich Marxist who some people noticed when he ran in last year's recall election in California. Camejo will apparently be California's favorite son candidate at the upcoming Green Convention which leads to the unavoidable question -- the Greens have favorite sons!? Anyway, a Camejo Campaign would be handicapped by the fact that he's an obscenely rich Marxist and Americans only vote for obscenely rich Marxists when they're Democrats.

Let's see -- who else is there? The Natural Law Party is a New Age party that appears to be some sort of weird conspiracy designed to unite the world under the rule of the Beatles' former spiritual guru. John Hagelin, the party's leader and perennial candidate, withdrew from the race early on and endorsed none other than Dennis Kucinich. There have been rumors that Kucinich might end up as the Natural Law's Presidential candidate. I don't think it'll happen but if it did -- would I be tempted once again to vote for Kucinich? Uhmmm, probably not. Much like the time I refused to cut (or comb) my hair for two years and spent most of my time locked in my dorm room, smoking pot and listening to Jim Morrison singing The End, Kucinich was a passing fad. Fun while it lasted but definitely over when it was over.

For those of you who think the U.S. constitution was designed to outlaw gay marriage, there's the Constitution Party. Formerly known as U.S. Taxpayers, this is the party that basically makes conservatives like myself cringe. They're everything that the national media claims the Republicans are. Right now, it looks as if the Constitution will be nominating -- notice a theme developing here? -- a state party chair that nobody's ever heard of but there's a chance that the nomination might go to Ray Moore, the former Alabama Supreme Court Justice who refused to take down the Ten Commandments. (Strange how Moore's actions were labeled the work of an ideological extremist yet all the Mayors across the nation performing illegal marriages -- regardless of whether they should be illegal or not -- are not...) I am kind of hoping that Moore does run and that the Constitution Party does become a minor factor this year if just to get the Republicans to back off this whole gay marriage fiasco...

That leaves the Libertarians. I am a dues-paying member of the Libertarian Party and, even though I couldn't give an exact count, I've probably voted for as many Libertarian candidates as I've voted for various Republicans over the years. But only once -- in 1992, the first Presidential campaign I was eligible to vote in -- have I ever voted Libertarian for President. (That, for all you trivia fans out there, candidate was Andre Marrou who, so far, I think is the only Alaskan to ever pop up on a national ballot.) I voted for Dole in '96 and G.W. Bush in 2000. Basically, I love the Libertarian Party. Judging strictly by political belief, the Libertarian Party is my natural home and, of all the "major" minor parties out there, the Libertarians probably have the best potential to actually become a major party at some point in the near future. However, the problem is just that. The Libertarians have had that potential for over thirty years now and they've squandered it on petty in-fighting. Instead of focusing on spreading their message of personal freedom, they're allowed themselves to get caught up on proving that they've read more Ayn Rand than the next guy. (And let me just say, as a Libertarian, that Ayn Rand is -- without a doubt -- one of the worst writers in recent literary history. It is true that Rand's original language was not English and I find that comforting as I'd hate to think anyone could write that badly in their native tongue. There -- I've been waiting four years to find an excuse to use that statement somewhere.) Mark Twain once said that he's be a Christian if it weren't for other Christians and I think the same thing can be said for many potential Libertarians.

Still, for all of my frustrations, the Libertarians might be getting my Presidential vote this year. The three main candidates -- Gary Nolan, Aaron Russo, and Michael Badnarik -- are all nicely inoffensive and I could see myself casting a ballot for either of them. Right now, my inclination is to support Aaron Russo for the nomination. Don't get me wrong -- I know that Aaron Russo will not be our next President but of all the candidates running, he seems like he'd be the strongest messenger. If the Libertarians can't win in 2004, then the real mission of this year's campaign should be to help the party grow, to help lay down the foundation on which the Libertarians can finally start to become the major player they should have become years ago. At the very least, Russo has the money, charisma, and support to at least play the role of spoiler in a close race and hopefully, much as the Greens have pushed the Democrats towards the left, help push the Republicans back towards a more Libertarian direction.

So, for what it is worth, I am endorsing Aaron Russo for the Libertarian Presidential nomination. I do this with the full knowledge that it'll probably make not a damn bit of a difference. I will also be honest enough to admit that I've had a poor track record when it comes to picking nominees. In '92, I cast my primary vote for Pat Buchanan (this was before Pat went nuts and, I should note, this was also during my previously mentioned long-haired, pothead phase so don't judge me to harshly). In '96, my candidate for the Republican nod was Indiana's competent but bland Sen. Richard Lugar who didn't even make it down to Texas. After Lugar dropped out, I switched to Steve Forbes (remember him?). In 2000, my nomination was like a groupie following Led Zeppelin in the '70s in that pretty much got traded from one guy to another for a good couple of months until the whole thing was over with. I started out as a supporter of U.S. Rep. John Kasich who dropped out after being a candidate for about an hour or two. I then went over to former Vice President Dan Quayle who decided he'd rather go hang out with John Kasich. Lamar Alexander, my endorsement shouted, how ya doing? Alexander actually had my vote for a while until he too dropped out a few months later (though I think he might have actually made it all the way to the first primary before giving up). Then, I was supporting Steve Forbes -- yet again -- for a few weeks before he dropped out and I finally ended up voting for Bush in the Republican primary largely because John McCain reminded me of a frustrated Jehovah's Witness, jamming his foot in the doorway and demanding to know why you wouldn't let him save your soul from damnation. And of course this year -- well, the less the whole Kucinich thing is brought up the better.

So, anyway --

Congratulations, Aaron Russo! You've won the highly coveted Jeffrey Paul Ellis Presidential Endorsement for 2004!

To quote Ian McShane in the ludicrously profane new HBO series Deadwood, run for your fucking life.  ¶ 11:20 PM (0) comments

  No sooner do I write that work has been going well than I suddenly find myself trapped in the literal night from Hell. This was yesterday when I had a huge truck to get stocked and myself and my crew ended up staying an hour and ten minutes late! Just like old times. Hopefully, this will be an exception and will not, as in the past, become the norm. It didn't help matters that one of our former cashiers -- we'll call her Joanna because that's her name and I'm not in a charitable enough mood towards this person to be nice and privacy-protective -- is now a crack whore and she spent the entire night calling the store, claiming to be yet another former cashier, and begging us to allow her "son" to get a refund on a carton of cigarettes so she could get gas money for a trip to Oklahoma (or New Mexico or Wyoming or any of the other twenty locations she gave at various times). Eventually, I had to tell my night cashiers to just stop answering the phone all together. Hence, the entire night, as I struggled to remain calm even as I saw the clock ticking closer and closer to 7:00 a.m., the ringing of that phone echoed throughout the otherwise empty store, like some kind of mantra of pure pointless waste. But maybe I needed a night like this just to remind myself why I hate working overnight in the first place.

And the lesson of today's abbreviated entry? If you want me to give you money to buy crack, at least have the common decency to get your pathetic lies straight first!  ¶ 6:16 PM (0) comments

  Work has gone pretty well this week -- I never realized how much certain members of my night crew were making a relatively simple job impossible until I helped to get them fired. Wow, that sounds awful, doesn't it?

Still, even though things are no longer Hellish, I'm still pretty burned out on working nights -- three years is just too long to go without getting to see the sunrise. Turns out I'm not alone in being burned out as last night, when I first arrived at the store, one of my bosses (I have four -- the store director and than three assistant managers) ended up talking to me for about thirty minutes about how much he hates his job, how much coming to work depresses him, and he told me that he was thinking of just quitting. I felt bad for the guy because I knew exactly what he was feeling but at the same time, I didn't know what to say to make him feel better. To be honest, my first (unspoken) response was to point out that even though we both pretty much feel trapped in our current positions, he still managed to move higher up than I did before that trap was sprung. For the most part, he talked about how he felt like -- for all his hard work -- he'd never make it all the way to store manager. Meanwhile, all I could think about, was just how far away I am from even making it up to assistant manager. We also talked about our own individual salaries. I'm paid by the hour, the assistant managers are paid a salary -- a set amount of money regardless of how many hours they work during the pay period. As we talked about this, it quickly became apparent that -- counting in the overtime that I get almost every week -- I make about two dollars more per hour than my boss.

This discovery led to an awkward moment but, at the same time, it ended the conversation before we ended up getting too consumed by self-pity so, in the end, it was for the best. For me, at least. Anyway, I did try to assure the guy that he was a good manager and I encouraged him not to give up and this led to another discovery -- I really suck at being supportive.

Still, it is nice to know that I'm not the only manager at that store who hates having to walk through those sliding glass doors every day.

After that little conversation, I actually had a pretty good night at work. My crew did their job well, I did my job adequately (whatever my job happens to be -- the important thing is that the store is still standing and nobody's suing us), and we got finished early. I sent my night crew home a little bit before six a.m. and that left me with an hour to just sit out on the back loading dock, smoke a few cigarettes, and act cocky whenever any of the day workers asked me where my crew was.

I got home around 7:30 and had to do something that scars the conscience of every pet owner. I had to take my new cat (his name is Hidey and, like almost every animal I've ever owned, he's a former stray who pretty much decided to move in with me) down to the vet for his -- well, for his operation. You know -- the operation. I don't want to say anything else about it though I was a little bit disturbed by the fact that, as I left Hidey sitting there in his carrier, in the back of the vet's office, he didn't seem to be all the upset to see me leaving. Left me feeling just a little bit taken for granted. Anyway, I don't want to think about what's going to be happening in a few hours down at that vet's office. Hidey will be asleep during the operation, of course. Hopefully, when he wakes up and I go back to the vet's to pick him up, he won't notice anything different....  ¶ 8:47 AM (0) comments

  Actress Mercedes McCambridge is dead. Most of the obits that I've seen (very few as I just learned of the actress's death about ten minutes ago when I skimmed by the entertainment news on Yahoo), have centered around her providing the voice of the demon in The Exorcist. And while that was quite possibly the best voice-over performance in the history of American film (Certainly far more Oscar worthy as Robin Williams' supposedly snubbed turn in Aladdin many years later), it has overshadowed two wonderfully eccentric performances given by this woefully underrated actress. First, there's her turn as the moralistic lesbian in Nicholas Ray's beserkly Freudian western Johnny Guitar. Secondly, yet another menacing lesbian (though, and this is a testament to her ability as a performer, the character's aren't menacing because of whatever innuendo might be present about their sexuality but because McCambridge truly created two truly frightening human beings), this time a leather-clad biker in Orson Welles' Touch of Evil.

Much like her work in The Exorcist, these were two characters who could have been smirkingly played for a sleazy laugh or two and who showed up in films that featured plots that could have easily veered into high camp. The fact that you never laugh at any of these characters and the fact that these films rank as the best American film has to offer is largely due to the unique, never really appreciated talents of Mercedes McCambridge. It's hard to think of any mainstream actress working today who could have brought any of these roles to as brilliant a life as McCambridge.

One thing that's never changed in the movies -- we like our leading ladies to be kooky, wacky, or whatever cutesy term you want to use. We want them to be like Drew Barrymore in an early '90s teen movie -- wild but ultimately safe, a bad girl who is a virgin at heart, a free spirit that yearns to conform. When a genuine eccentric like McCambridge comes along, it seems that no one knows what to do with them. Too talented to be ignored yet too unique to be safe, the career of an actress like Mercedes McCambridge reminds us of the dangers of being unconventional while still never letting us forget just how worthwhile the end results of that risk can be.

RIP, Mercedes McCambridge.  ¶ 6:27 PM (0) comments

  As a grocery store night manager, one of the unpleasant things that I have to deal with on a nightly basis are shoplifters. How do I deal with them? To be honest, for the most part, I don't. Don't get me wrong -- I've had to call a few parents to come pick up their kids after someone happens to notice them slipping a pack of cigarettes into their pockets. And there's a few people we know by sight -- mostly toothless white trash types who come into the store half-drunk around three in the morning and just kind of wander around. These guys we've had to deal with enough that I can reasonably sure that they're relatively harmless. When I see them, I just make it a point to always be casually following a step or two behind them and that usually gets rid of them. If following them doesn't work, I just walk up and ask them how they're doing and if I can help them find anything. Most of them are so scared of actually getting into any sort of real trouble that they'll leave as soon as anyone talks to them.

But for the rest of the petty thieves who seem to always find time to stop off at my store, caution usually takes the place of duty. The world's not a safe place -- especially around three in the morning and a lot of late night retail workers have gotten shot over the past couple of years over a pack of cigarettes or six-pack of beer. I vaguely enjoy my job, I do try to do it well, and I appreciate the fact that I'm getting paid way too much money for doing the same work that a trained monkey could probably do for free. I appreciate and I thank the company but I'm still not taking a bullet for the store. In short, if you can get out the front door without paying, congratulations and fuck you.

That being said, the amount of theft at my store is really -- well, it is insane. Right now, we are being plagued by one master criminal in specific. Now, I've never actually seen this guy but I've heard enough about him that I feel like I could identify him in a line-up. Apparently, he is a tall, rather stocky white male in his late '30s/early '40s. He has reddish blonde hair that he wears in a flat-top hair style. As I said, he's a bit overweight and has a large double chin that more or less consumes his entire neck. Most nights, he's usually had a few red shaving nicks across his chin and apparently, he's still trying to master that whole shaving concept as the side of his face is spotted with random splotches of red beard. He usually has his mouth slightly open. As one of the cashiers explained to me, "He just looks really slow and stupid."

He may be stupid but the man apparently is not slow because for the past year or so, once a week, he has come into the store, grabbed a shopping cart, and gone over to aisle seven. Once at aisle seven, he fills up the cart with diapers -- Huggies, size 7. He gets as many diapers as he can into that cart and then he takes off running and, before anyone has barely even noticed him, he rushes through the front doors and pushing the diaper-laden cart in front of him, he disappears down the street. The police have been called on him and have never even been able to find the guy. People -- customers and even a few foolish employees -- have chased him on foot and have never been able to catch up to this overweight, middle-aged man with a diaper-laden shopping cart in front of him. Most disturbingly is the fact that a month ago, one of the store managers -- Rusty -- actually jumped in his pickup truck and chased after the guy and this guy -- get this -- easily managed to outrun the truck.

Well, the guy struck again last night -- a few minutes before I arrived at the store, apparently as when I did arrive at work, everyone was wandering around the store looking for clues and Rusty was cussing up a storm under his breath. But get this -- along with hundreds of diapers, this guy has also been stealing Wal-Mart shopping carts. Well, last night, even as he stole another one, he returned the one he absconded with the previous week. We know this because the cart itself was somewhat infamous in the store because the two front wheels had a nasty habit of freezing up whenever anyone tried to make a left turn. In fact, we were all kinda happy when he stole it last week because there's not an employee at that store who hasn't -- at some point -- tried to push that cart out of the way just to have the damn thing nearly flip over when the wheels suddenly went into lock down.

So, of course, last night, the bastard actually returned it to us, leaving it as a gift out in the parking lot (and yes, it did flip over later in the night when I tried to push it in) and apparently exchanging it for a less defective model.

Now, as annoying as all this melodrama is, I can't help but kinda be happy that this guy has decided to come to my store. After all, everyone needs a nemesis and I think I have found mine. So, enjoy you foul crimes while you may, Diaper Bandit, because your days are numbered. Someday, I will manage to catch you before you get out that door and then, when you're at mercy, that's when you'll have to ask yourself one question. Do you feel lucky?

Well, do you, punk?  ¶ 5:28 PM (0) comments

  Right now, I'm working on an untitled novel about a young woman who, one December weekend in 1987, vanishes from a small Texas town. This disappearance serves as the catalyst for several other stories that all grow out of this one event. The novel, which actually begins with a prologue set a year or so before this girl's possible abduction, spans the years 1986 to 2000 and while the mystery of the disappearance provides the engine to keep the story moving forward, it's less about the crime and more about how one single event, that lasted perhaps less than a minute, can proceed to dominate and alter and shape the next thirteen years of so many different lives. It is a project that I am very excited about but Christ, doing the research for it has been tough. The storyline itself was inspired by an actual incident that happened back in '87 (though not in Texas) and -- as my plans for this book have become more defined -- I've found myself taking incidents from other real life cases of various missing persons and the such. In short, I've been doing a lot of research on the evil that men do. A cliche yes but there really is no other proper phrase to describe some of the true life crimes that I've come across while researching this book. Since last summer, I've been frequenting sites like the Doe Network, that basically detail the cases of literally thousands of missing persons and -- even more disturbingly -- victims who -- though found -- have never been identified.

It's a strangely fascinating subject but not a happy one. Reading these stories of people who have gone missing, one is suddenly struck with the realization that for every one missing person, there are people who spend every day in a limbo, wondering what happened, wondering how a loved one could be so arbitrarily erased from their lives, spending their days in a grief that I can only imagine. It's hard, for me at least, not too feel a certain sense of guilt as I skim through these cases, a tourist in their world of pain. I doubt the fact that they're tragedies have inspired to me write a novel will be of any comfort. God, it's strange. I know that I want to write this book, I know this is something that I can write well, that this book has the potential to be a work of art I can take pride in. And at the same time, I know that after I've written it, I'm probably going to spend the rest of my life apologizing for it.

As I (think) I said earlier in this entry, this isn't happy research. Morbid doesn't even begin to describe it. It's the little details that I find stick in my mind. There's one girl I can't get out of her mind. A few months after she disappeared, somebody mailed her broken glasses back to her family. Jesus Christ, that haunts me. How could anyone have that much evil, that much hate, within him? Even more disturbing than the realization that there truly are people capable of such sadism out there is the realization that whoever mailed those glasses has never been caught and probably never will be caught. In short, he's out there right now. And even if he did die of natural causes or was sent to jail for something else, it doesn't change the fact that an astronomical number of people go missing every year. We all know that there are evil people out there -- if 9-11 taught us nothing, it taught us that. But the reality of that statement, the fact that evil is more than just a word -- it takes the little details to really bring that home. We can look at some guy hijacker crashing a plane into the World Trade Center and somehow we learn to rationalize that reality under a label like "terrorism" or we can find an explanation in the hijacker's religious beliefs. But how do we explain or understand or rationalize away the fact that somewhere, there's a human being who could mail a missing girl's broken glasses back to her family?

Yes, they're both the product of evil, pure and simple but -- until those little details start bombarding you -- it's easy to forget just what exactly that word means. And after reading about things like that, it's difficult to then turn around and look at the world outside your door the exact same way.

That's what I'm hoping the end result of this novel will be. Once the reader turns the final page, the world outside his or her front door should never look the same again.

It'll never look the same to me again and I know that regardless of whatever happens in the future as far as this book is concerned -- even if it is never written -- I will never forget about the men, women, children, and families that I've come across while researching this book. They're stories haunt me and I know, everyday of my life, I'll be silently praying to a God I far too often take for granted, to give them some answers, to give them the peace that's been so cruelly ripped away from them.

I can't end this without doing something that drives me nuts when other bloggers do it but in this case, there's no way I could live with myself if I didn't play site advocate here. Go to the Doe Network or any of the other missing person sites listed in their links. The cases aren't pleasant but they need to be heard and, if by some chance you might unknowingly hold the key to solving these mysteries, could you really live with yourself if you didn't at least try to do something about it? I wish I could do something more substantial to help all of the families out there that are suffering right now but, other than offering my own prayers, is the best I can do.  ¶ 12:52 PM (0) comments

  Now that it is -- let's see here -- 5:08 in the morning down here in Texas, it occurs to me that since I will have to either go to the doctor this afternoon or else to work tonight at 8:00, it would have probably been a good idea for me to have actually been getting some sleep. Unfortunately, I made the mistake of glancing at this week's issue of the Dallas Morning News' TV magazine and discovering that Sid & Nancy, one of the most exhilarating classics of morbid cinema ever filmed, was due to show up on Encore this morning at 3 a.m. Well -- how could I not find the time to catch Gary Oldman wandering around in a heroin-induced stupor while Chloe Webb somehow managed to make you hate her yet still want to cry when her character meets her fate? The film really is about fate to an extent, isn't it? Sid and Nancy were fated to be fucked up and -- at least as far as the film's representation of them are concerned -- you can't really hold it against them. So, anyway, I stayed up and watched it and it's still a great movie (as opposed to other great movies that turn out to be the exact opposite once you actually sit through them) and while I know I should have gotten some sleep, I'm glad I didn't.

However, I think I will now. Encore is currently showing yet another cult film from the past -- Lords of the Flatbush, which has a cult specifically because it stars a pre-Rocky Stallone and a pre-Fonzie Henry Winkler. In short, it's a movie that's probably more fun to talk about ("It's like this movie Stallone made with Fonzie..." followed by fake laughter) than to actually discuss, much less watch.

So, I will now do the right thing and get some sleep. However, before I do that, does anybody remember a pre-Lords of the Flatbush Stallone film called Rebel, where apparently Stallone was some sort of Weatherman type (the film was apparently from the early '70s) who basically did that whole Rambo thing but in the name of social equality as opposed to anticommunism? Some people swear that this film is just an urban legend and it seems to be next to impossible to find a copy of it. (I've read that it was released under several different titles.) However, I swear, I am pretty sure that I actually saw the last five minutes or so of this film one Saturday afternoon back in the early '90s. I seem to remember a very young Stallone, out in the middle of a field, railing against injustice before a very abrupt title crawl told us that he ended up doing some time in prison before being released and hooking up with a girl whose name I cannot remember (This was apparently a very important plot point in the film or else somebody just made that final epilogue up on the spot). I have always kept an eye out for any possibility of that film popping up on another Saturday morning but it hasn't and I haven't been able to find any concrete reference to it anywhere since those five minutes 12 years ago.

(naturally, just as Rebel is amazingly obscure and ignored, Stallone's porno film, A Party at Kitty and Stud's -- which no, I have not seen and no, I have no desire to see -- seems to be the proverbial bit of obscure movie trivia that every idiot on the planet has convinced himself that only he knows about.)

Well, needless to say, catching a full viewing of Rebel has become a bit of a pointless obsession with me and, if so inclined, I could probably use this whole quest as a metaphor for just what exactly is probably wrong with my life. Consider -- I am not a fan of Sylvester Stallone's. It's simplistic to lump all the various factions of '60s liberalism into one category labeled the New Left but then again, that hasn't stopped the majority of Leftist historians from doing just that so I might as well join and say that I do not have much respect for the New Left in general and absolutely no respect for the Weatherman in specific. The five minutes that I saw of the film would have been unwatchable and dull if not for the trivia factor of having Stallone in the film and, since I'm indifferent to the guy and his career, the appeal of that trivia factor was pretty much used up in those five minutes. In short, I am seeking to waste two hours of my life on something that will probably bore me at best and offend me at the worst but yet I have looked for Rebel in the Sunday TV supplement every day since I caught those thuddingly dull five minutes years ago.

Why? The reason goes to the soul of every obsessive-compulsive, self-appointed student of pop culture out there and it's either pathetic or strangely noble depending on how you look at it. I have to see this film not because I have any desire to sit through it but because I know it's out there yet I haven't seen it. It's the same reason why I'll eventually have to read War and Peace. It's there.

Yep, some guys prove their worth by climbing Everest. I track down obscure, bad films starring actors I don't particularly care for -- which I guess is why it was important that I stay up and watch Sid & Nancy tonight. The two hours I spent on that will someday down the road, hopefully, serve to cancel out the two hours I know I'm going to waste on Rebel.

And unfortunately, Lords of the Flatbush is starting to look kinda good. Hell, I can always sleep at the doctor's office....  ¶ 5:00 AM (0) comments

  First off, I apologize for not updating this blog sooner. I've spent the last few days pretty much confined to either lying in bed or lying on the couch in the den. While I was lucky enough to not get killed by any disgruntled former employees at work, I did not take into account my limitless ability to overextend and hurt myself. Anyway, long story short, early Sunday morning -- while making sure that all the dog lovers of Richardson, Texas would be able to find several fifty pound bags of dog food waiting for them on the shelves of my little store -- I managed to do something to my left shoulder muscle. At least, I'm assuming that's when it happened. That's the only time I can think of when I really did any sort of excessively heavy lifting.

(You should understand that I was also talking to a certain cashier at this time and, in an attempt to disguise the fact that I am -- above all -- not in very good physical shape, I tossed about ten of these fifty pound bags up into a shelf several feet above my head in about five minutes time and apparently, you shouldn't try to lift five hundred pounds worth of stuff in five minutes time...)

Anyway, all I know for sure is that I did something stupid at some point Sunday morning and ever since then, I have not been able to move my left arm in the slightest without feeling a great deal of agonizing pain. Which means that when I stand up, I am in pain. When I sit down, I am in pain. When I start to lie down, I am in pain. When I am lying down, I am in pain. In short, every minute that I've been awake over the past few days, it's felt like some invisible little demon was stabbing me in the back. Now, I've always had a bad back and -- in the three years since I first started working overnight -- not a day has gone by when I haven't had some ache to show for my efforts. I've cut myself numerous times while using box cutters -- once succeeding in slashing through my right hand all the way down to the bone and, about a year ago, I managed to somehow tear up my right knee to such an extent that it's still swollen up to about three times the size of the left. Basically, I've spent the past three years transforming myself into a chainsmoking, physical wreck of an insomniac. But I can sincerely say that I have never felt a pain as intense or as just plain nagging as what I'm feeling right now in my left shoulder blade.

So tomorrow, if it doesn't get better, I know I'm going to have to go see a doctor about it. The way things are right now, at the very least, I won't be able to toss any more fifty pound bags of dog food around for quite a while. Y'know, what's strange is this. As much as I don't want to find out that I've managed to do some sort of serious damage to my shoulder, there's also a part of me that knows that -- should it be something more than just an annoying ache -- I'll probably be able to get a night or two off from work that I could devote to writing, reading, or just dreaming. As much as I'm hoping that, should I see a doctor tomorrow, this turns out to be nothing serious, I know I'm going to be disappointed if that's the case.  ¶ 10:25 PM (0) comments

  In case anyone's keeping track, I did not get killed at work last night.

In fact, I had forgotten just how enjoyable being in charge can be when you don't have a guy like Darryl (who I -- more or less -- fired earlier this week) around.

Lesson learned? In a nutshell, whenever work is getting tedious or you're starting to feel burned out on the whole career ladder, all you gotta do to bring back that spice back to employment is get someone fired. If I had understood this three years ago when I first got hired on at my store, I could've avoided a lot of ulcers and thrown a few less temper tantrums.   ¶ 9:31 AM (0) comments

  Hmmm...isn't it sad when you've got a blog going and suddenly, you realize that you really don't have anything to say? That's the state I've been in for the past two days. I guess if I wanted to, I could tell the full gory details about how I got a member of my night crew at work fired (Basically, the guy left for his lunch hour, vanished, finally returned after two and a half hours, and then threatened to kill another coworker if he "snitched"). This is the first time, since I became a manager, that I directly caused someone working under me to loss his job and it's a rather strange feeling -- a mixture of guilt (because I know that this guy really did need this job) and relief (because I also knew that, despite really needing this job, this guy still chose to behave in a way that made it impossible for him to keep the job). Most disturbing is the feeling of power that had come with this act -- the knowledge that this guy basically fucked with me and it cost him his paycheck, that this guy is going to suffer for making my job difficult. I can now honestly say that I truly understand why most managers quickly become dictators. It's fun! As long as you don't think about it too much and unfortunately, I have a tendency to think too much about everything. It doesn't help that I know this guy probably now wants to kill me and that he knows exactly where I'll be for at least forty hours of each week.

On a happier note, have I mentioned that one of my favorite bloggers links to me from her site and that if you're reading my ramblings right now, you owe it to yourself to jump over to her site and give it a read? The blogger in question is a law student by the name of Shannon Black and I must say that I am in awe of her ability to come up with comments and titles that I usually end up kicking myself for not coming up with first. The title of this blog is Yankee From Mississippi, which I so wish I had come up with and copyrighted years ago so I could use it as the title for some brilliantly ironic piece of gothic prose. As well, I recently discovered that Shannon was moved to comment on my rather bizarre flirtation with endorsing Dennis Kucinich in a piece she entitled Republicans for Kucinich, which -- disturbingly enough -- was actually the title I planned to use if I ended up truly going off the deep end and endorsing the former Mayor of Cleveland. Anyway, you go visit that blog. Meanwhile, since I've got to go to work tonight, I'm going to look into ordering a bullet-proof Wal-Mart vest off the net...


  ¶ 9:48 AM (0) comments

  This is it -- in a little less than two hours, I'll be leaving my nice, comfortable, house (My Fortress of Solitude, if I might be permitted to reference one of my short stories from my first book) and going back to work. This is the official end of my vacation and for the record, it really, really sucks. (How's that for eloquence?)

Anyway, for those keeping score, here's how my candidates ended up doing in the two seriously contested races in yesterday's primary. Paul Green rather easily defeated incumbent Steven Wayne Smith and will be the Republican nominee for Smith's seat on the state Supreme Court come November. (This being Texas, that's pretty much the same as being elected.)

While Green won, my candidate for Dallas County Sheriff did the exact opposite. In fact, when all the votes were counted, Leonard Bueber not only didn't win the nomination, he came in last with a little over 1% of the total vote. That said, Sheriff Bowles was another incumbent office holder who ended up losing his primary yesterday. He was soundly defeated by one Danny Chandler who will be the Republican nominee come November.

So, final score for me, 1-1. Better than usual, even if Bueber joins such notables as Lawrence Cranberg (my choice for the U.S. Senate in '02) in my collection of primary candidates who -- despite the votes of myself and a handful of others -- not only failed to win the nomination but came in dead last.   ¶ 5:49 PM (0) comments

  With Kerry as the de facto nominee, it doesn't appear that anyone's paying any more attention to all the various primaries that are still popping off like clockwork across the country. Nor, I suppose, is there any reason why they should. Unfortunately, we now have now reached the dreadfully dull part of every Presidential primary season when your vote -- if not already cast -- literally does not matter.

Still, I found time to vote in today's primary down here in Texas. As I said earlier, there was a part of me that was dreadfully tempted to vote -- for the first time -- in the Democratic Primary and to cast my vote for Dennis Kucinich as both a way to protest the shallowness of the leading campaigns and to show just how concerned I am about the current situation in Iraq. Though I disagree with Kucinich on just about everything, the fact of the matter was that he was (and is) the only "major" (though Kucinich -- just on the basis of his success so far and his prospects for the future -- has to be considered a very minor major) candidate with any sort of identifiable platform, the only candidate running for the good of America as opposed to running because he felt he could win. It was an idealistic notion on my part and one that probably didn't make a whole helluva lot of sense if subjected to too much realistic analysis.

Still, I was undecided when, Tuesday afternoon, I arrived at Terrace Elementary to cast my vote. Would I vote in the Republican Primary -- as I've done every election year since 1992 -- or would I go over to the other side? You should understand that I've voted in every single election I've been eligible to cast a ballot in for 12 years now. Out of all those votes cast, probably 60% of them have been cast for Republican candidates, 39.9% for Libertarians, and that last sliver of a percentage point represents the ONE time I have ever voted for a Democrat (John Sharp for Lt. Governor in '02). For me -- if nobody else -- this was an earth shattering choice. And as I thought about it, it became more and more apparent that my main reason for voting for Kucinich would have just been the novelty of it all -- the whole idea of an outspoken Libertarian/Republican not only voting in the Democratic Primary but voting for Kucinich of all people!

So, while I still have a lot more respect for Dennis "The Menace" Kucinich than most of the other people running for President this year, it just didn't feel right. I voted in the Republican Primary. (To be honest, if I had voted in the Democratic Primary, Kucinich probably still wouldn't have gotten my vote. That would have gone to Joe Lieberman who remains on the Texas ballot despite the early end of his campaign.) As for the votes I cast, they were fairly anticlimactic as there weren't that many contested races. Mostly it was just incumbents running unopposed for renomination. There was an uncommitted slate running against President Bush in the Presidential Primary but in the end, I decided to stretch my faith just a little bit further and I voted for Bush while silently praying that he actually does have some sort of overall plan as far as Iraq is concerned and that he actually won't try to make this whole gay marriage mess into a major campaign issue.

There were only two truly competitive, contested primaries and, in both cases, I voted against the incumbent office holder. Dallas County Sheriff Jim Bowles has been plagued with accusations of corruption for a while now and seems liable to get indicted any day now. He was being challenged in his primary by 3 credible challengers and I voted for Leonard Bueber, a 66 year-old deputy who works in the county jail and who is probably the least well-known of all the candidates running. Though I know Bueber's chances of victory are slim (he's raised no money, produced next to no publicity for his effort), he still seems like he'd be a good, no-bullshit type of law enforcer. At the very least, he projects a sort of incorruptible aura about him -- something that is sorely needed after two decades or so of Sheriff Bowles.

The other race was for a seat on the Texas Supreme Court and was between two conservative Judges -- Steven Wayne Smith, the incumbent, and Paul Green, an appeals court judge from San Antonio. I voted for Green as Smith has always seemed kinda wacky to me -- the type of Republican who gives Republicans like me a bad name.

And that, in a nutshell, was my adventure in the Democratic Process for Tuesday. I also voted, for the first time, for my new Congressman -- Pete Sessions. As everyone in the world seems to know, last year the Texas legislature redrew the Congressional maps and, as a result, a whole lot of formerly safe Democratic Congressmen are having to run in overwhelmingly Republican districts. I'd get morally outraged here if not for the fact that the Democrats -- when they controlled the state legislature over the course of a century and a half (give or take a few years) -- did the exact same thing every decade as well. So, sorry -- I will not cry just because District 30 no longer resembles some sort of mutated octopus stretching haphazardly across the Democratic neighborhoods of Dallas while somehow totally missing the Republican homesteads right next door.

However, one consequence of this whole redistricting thing is that several citizens are now in different Congressional districts with different Congressmen than whoever they may have vote for or against just last year. If they're anything like me, they probably didn't realize this until they went to vote in their party primary and discovered that -- hey! -- "I live in District 32 instead of District 4!" and -- hey! -- "My Congressman is Pete Sessions and not Sam Johnson!" Actually, most people probably didn't even notice. In my case, I noticed because I was actually planning on voting for Rep. Johnson's primary opponent just to discover that the effort I'd made to research the candidates was pretty much made worthless by my ignorance as to which Congressional District I actually lived in.

Actually, since the great majority of Texas voters did not vote in either party's primary (and, in fact, turn-out was threatening to hit a record low the last time I checked) it is entirely possible that -- right now -- the majority of Texans don't know who the Hell their Congressman is.

For reasons I can't quite explain, I can't help feel that might be for the best.  ¶ 3:34 AM (0) comments

  After two months of speculation, the body of missing actor/writer Spaulding Gray was found in New York yesterday. It appears that the initial theories of the case (that Gray committed suicide by jumping off a Staten Island Ferry) were correct. I was never a huge fan of Gray's monologues -- they always came across as a bit too much the product of a Manhattan-bred Limosuine Liberal for my tastes but I'd be lying if I said that reading about his depressions, his dissapearance, and finally his discovery hadn't shaken me. From the minute this story first broke, I figured Gray had killed himself but there was a part of me that had this romantic notion that Gray had just decided to leave his life behind and was wandering around the countryside, anonymous and popping up on stage for various community theaters across upstate New York.

Obviously, that notion was just that. A notion. So, Godspeed to you, Spalding Gray, wherever it is you're going.  ¶ 9:52 AM (0) comments

  It's Impossible To Start A Fire is now available off of Amazon! I'll be honest and admit that yes, I actually have spent a bit too much time already staring at the thumbnail of the book's cover on the Amazon web site. Silly, I know but I've dreamed of this for 20 years of my thirty years. (Five years I dreamed of being President and the other five, I dreamed of being a hardboild private detective.)  ¶ 10:02 AM (0) comments

  FREE MARTHA STEWART!

If to be annoying is a crime, then we're all fucked.  ¶ 9:04 AM (0) comments

  Y'know, I've had my new blog up for just a little over a month and in that time, I've made a lot of jokes at the expense of Dennis Kucinich. In fact, early on, I said some extremely negative things about Rep. Kucinich -- comments that, if I don't regret, I would reconsider if I were writing them today. Certainly, it doesn't take a lot of investigation to realize that, with the exception of the current situation of Iraq and the legalization of marijuana, Kucinich and I are polar opposites on the ideological spectrum.

So, here's a confession that might come as a surprise. It certainly took me by surprise when I first realized it Tuesday night as I watched Kerry bloodlessly wrap up the Democratic nomination and started to deal with the prospect of an equally bloodless Presidential contest. But, with each passing day, the truth of this revelation becomes more and more obvious to me.

Anyway, my confession is this. As of this moment, the odds are roughly even than next Tuesday, for the first time since I've been old enough to cast a ballot, I will not only cast my vote in the Democratic primary but I will proudly cast that vote for U.S. Rep. Dennis Kucinich of Ohio.

No, this is not a joke. For the past couple of months, I've gotten into the habit of dropping by Kucinich's campaign web site. At first, it was sort of a private joke (i.e., "Let's see what those whacked-out leftists are doing today!") but as Kerry continued to run his campaign based on the principle of "Screw-the-issues-I-can-win!" and the Republicans seemed to forget that the concept of small government doesn't carry an exclusion for regulating practices that you might find to be personally offensive, I stopped laughing at Kucinich. It's intresting -- everyday, I find something else about which to disagree with Dennis Kucinich. And everyday, I find myself admiring his campaign more and more.

The fact of the matter is, of all the serious major party candidates, Kucinich is the only won whose running his campaign based on a concept other than simply beating the other guy. Dennis Kucinich is the only candidate campaigning for America, as opposed to campaigning for the chance to win. In short, the Kucinich campaign is the only campaign that, right now, seems to understand what's so great about democracy in the first place.

Now, I wouldn't quite call this an endorsement of Dennis Kucinich. The fact of the matter is that even if I did somehow end up voting for him in November, I doubt I'd vote to reelected him in 2008. We simply disagree on too many issues. However, it's also true that Dennis Kucinich is the only candidate that I trust will actually make the effort and take the political risks to get us out of Iraq. Strangely enough, as much as I disagree with a good deal of his stands, Kucinich is the only candidate I trust period.

Am I voting Kucinich? That's the question and no one's less sure of the answer than I am. But right now, as long as the other campaigns seem fueled by little more than cynical partisan posturing and grudges, there's a good chance that this National Review-reading, Libertarian-leaning, lifelong Republican will be proudly casting his ballot for a left-wing, vegan, peacenik come Tuesday.  ¶ 8:01 PM (0) comments

  Finally got to sleep today around 12 noon and I got a full 3 and a half hours -- which, for me, is amazing. When I woke up, it appeared that Texas had somehow found itself in the middle of a monsoon and I spent (or wasted, depending on how you look at it) an hour or so just laying in bed and listening to the storm pounding my house. On the whole, it only rains three or four months out of the year down here and for the rest of the time, the state is so dry that every piece of unpaved land looks like a cemetery without headstones. As a result, for those three stormy months, you learn to savor every single aspect of the rain -- from the smell of storm brewing to the feeling of haphazardly aimed drops of water sharply pricking your skin when you step outside.

The rain has subsided for now but, looking out into my backyard as I type this, everything is a truly beautiful shade of gray, a promise of more chaos to come.

Speaking of chaos to come, I've suddenly become very aware that including today, I've only got two more days of vacation left. Luckily, after I work on Saturday, I'll be off for three more days but still, I have so much left to get accomplished in so little time. I am proud to say that I finally started writing on at least one of my four current literary endeavors. Before I went to bed, I revised two "poems" for Oswald Acted Alone. The proper term for them would probably be "prose poems" but that label has always smacked of a certain self-indulgence to me. When I hear a writer say that he's written a prose poem, that usually means that this writer lacked either the patience of the talent to 1) develop an idea to the point where it could sustain a short story, 2) give enough thought to style and language to actually express an idea through poetry (because if poetry was simply prose with random line breaks, than it wouldn't have ever been necessary to distinguish between poetry and prose in the first place), or 3) both. That sad truth of the matter is that far too much undeveloped prose has been labeled poetry (or "prose poetry") over the past couple of years and far too many readers are willing to indulge this artistic laziness because they've bought into the assumption that poetry isn't supposed to make sense or be all that engaging in the first place.

Speaking from my own personal experience, I can say that -- at least when you're dealing with the small presses and the zines and the whole self-styled underground lit. mag scene -- it's a helluva lot easier to get a bad poem published than it is to get a good short story. Sad to say but, from 1994 to 1997, I got a good deal of bad poetry published under my name and I still cringe whenever I occasionally come across some of it and realize that there's a small handful of people who -- if they do remember my name -- will remember it solely on the basis of a so-called "poem" that, deep down, I knew wasn't worth the paper it was scrawled out on even as I was sending it out to editors I knew would publish it.

Out of two hundred poems that I wrote over that three year period, there are probably twelve that I think actually work as poetry. Quite a few of the rest I ended up rewriting as short stories and I'm proud to say that once translated to their proper form, those mediocre poems produced some of my strongest prose. (A few of these appear in my first book, It's Impossible To Start A Fire If You Have No Desire To Burn with Looking for Armenia being my personal favorite.)

Anyway, I believe I had a point at one time and it basically boiled down to the fact that I am reluctant to refer to the two pieces I revised yesterday as poetry because to me, poetry is what was produced by Yeats, Ginsberg, Byron, and a select pantheon of others. To me, a good poem is the ultimate communion of language and imagination and those who have mastered this form are the ones who have truly earned the right to immortality. It's not easy for me to believe in God but I know I'll always believe in Yeats. Viewing poetry as I do, I am not comfortable with the whole idea of just casually throwing the label out there and I'm not going to do it with the two pieces I revised earlier today. Instead, I'll use a phrase that one of former creative writing professors, the Dallas poet Joe Stanco, used to describe the literary process -- "language playing with itself." This morning, I sat down at my computer and created two works of language playing with itself for Oswald Acted Alone.

The first was a revision of a piece called Say Goodnight, Icarus that I wrote back in 1995 and which originally appeared in the Spring '96 edition of Parallax, a literary magazine put out by Richland Community College down here in Texas. It's a rather abstract and, to be honest, somewhat cruel take on one of my favorite themes -- the struggle of each generation to convince itself that their are still original ideas to be discovered, to find a piece of existence that isn't covered with the footprints and the graffiti of the previous. The image of Icarus flying too close to the sun is one of those that has been kept alive since the men and women started to make the trouble to tell stories in the first place and it is, indeed, the best allegory for the artistic experience that one could hope for. For me, the point of the story isn't that Icarus got cocky and flew too close to the sun. For me, the point is that once that wax starts to melt even just a little, you're screwed. That's the risk of creation -- your mistakes, once made, will trigger consequences that can never be reversed or even stopped. Putting out your own individual vision for the rest of the world to see -- it's the closest you can get to self-destruction without having to deal with the complications of purgatory.

The other was a much shorter, humorous (in a cynical sort of way) piece called A Relationship, which is an homage of sorts to a few short pieces Irvine Welsh included in his collection The Acid House but, hopefully, enlivened by my own view point. This was something that I originally wrote for It's Impossible To Start A Fire... and it survived every draft until the final when I realized that, regardless of how much I personally liked it, it didn't fit in with the rest of the book. So, I'm glad that I've found a home for it in Oswald Acted Alone.
  ¶ 6:10 PM (0) comments

  Nearly five in the morning and I'm still awake. I've been cleaning around the house, trying to get my life organized. I never realized just how many books I had until this evening when I faced the unfortunate task of trying to find room for them all. Even more than books, I have random pieces of paper. Notes from ex-girlfriends, e-mails from correspondents that I've lost touch with, random story ideas that I jotted down years ago (some of which still sound good today), acceptance slips, rejection slips, and just about every school report I've ever typed up since I was in the sixth grade. I'm a packrat, though I fear my reluctance to throw stuff out is probably far more pathological than just an eccentricity. Basically, it comes down to this --

Yes, it is true that I really don't need to have that little slip of paper that Laura slipped me in Art History Class during my sophomore year at the University of North Texas. I can't even remember Laura's last name so I certainly don't need a torn piece of paper on which she's scrawled, "Come by after class." So, I should throw it out, right? But, consider this -- once I throw it out, it is gone. I'll never see it again. Groundbreaking or not, it is evidence that I, Jeff Ellis, once took an art history class at the University of North Texas with a girl named Laura and that for at least one day, I hung out with her after class. It's proof that I not only existed in the past but that I existed in somebody else's life at one point as well. Once I throw away that slip of paper, that proof will be gone and pretty soon, my past will just be a memory and who trusts memory?

Sick, huh? I am exaggerating just a little but that's the basic thought process that keeps me from throwing out things that I have absolutely no practical use for. That, more or less, is why my life is permanently cluttered. And I'll be honest -- a lot of this comes down to the fact that it always seems that I was much happier in the past than I am in the present or that I could possibly see myself being in the future.

That was a difficult sentence for me to write and sitting here at my computer, looking at it, a part of me wants to delete the whole thing. I decided a long time ago that I wasn't going to be one of those people. You know who I am -- the people who have a trauma for every event, who always want you to do them a favor because they're having "personal" problems, the moody S.O.B.s who seem to embrace their misery as an excuse to make everyone else's life difficult. If there's anything I truly fear in this world, it is becoming one of those people.

But the fact of the matter is that I don't trust happiness and most of the time, if I were to honestly tell you how I felt, happy wouldn't be the answer. Depressed probably wouldn't be the right word either. I can't think of a single instance -- even when I was at my lowest point -- when my thoughts ever turned suicidal or even a time when maybe I fooled myself into feeling suicidal in an attempt to get some attention. The feeling that dominates my life, the feeling that makes me overidealize the past is -- anxiety is the only term I can come up with. Anxiety that comes from the fact that I know every minute I spend doing something other than creating is another minute taken away from however many I'm going to end up getting in my life. My ultimate goal in life -- as terrible and pathological as this is going to sound (and probably is) -- has been to be able to go to bed at night with the secure knowledge that somewhere in the world, at least one person that I don't know, that I'll never know, is either reading my book, talking about me to a friend, or just thinking about me. My entire life has been dominated by my fear of being anonymous and this feeling that the more time I spend away from creating, the more time is running out, the closer I'm getting to just being a guy named Jeff Ellis in a world full of guys named Jeff Ellis. (Don't believe me? Do a google search. Or better -- don't.)

And that's why I cling to the past so desperately because, in my memories at least, I'm not worrying about time slipping away. In my memories, I'm the confident, normal, nonneurotic Jeff that I present to the rest of the world. I'm the Jeff who can actually be happy for at least an hour or so, who doesn't find himself trapped in some stupid, narcissistic pathology. And when I look at those little scraps of paper that I should have thrown away years ago, they remind me of the happiness that I'm so desperate to feel right now. A part of me fears that once I throw them away, I'll be throwing away that happiness as well. I'll forget how to be anything other than the neurotic mess I see reflected in the bedroom mirror right now.

And yes, I know that's all bullshit and I know how irrational and illogical that whole thought process is but it doesn't make a difference. Unproductive as it may be, this is the way I've been for my whole life. After thirty years, it's a little hard to learn how to be anything else. But, I'm going to throw those scraps of paper away, worries be damned. I'm going to go do it right now because I know, until I do, I'll be a prisoner in my own private prison.

And quite frankly, prison food sucks.  ¶ 4:18 AM (0) comments

  Well, as Dan Rather would say, wrap that turkey up and shoot it, Mabel, because this is a done deal.

(Oh c'mon, Dan Rather is always saying weird shit like that!)

Edwards is out of the race, Al Sharpton is apparently on the verge of actually withdrawing (it's sad when even as a fringe candidate, you can't make it all the way to the convention) and, unless Dennis Kucinich has a secret plan he just hasn't bothered to put into motion yet, John F. Kerry is the Democratic nominee for President.

Bush vs. Kerry. Can you hear the crickets chirping already? Are you prepared for one of the dullest elections in recent history? It's old news but it's still worth repeating -- according to polls (which are, of course, never wrong), most Democratic primary voters are casting their ballot for Kerry not because of his stands on any of the issues or because they feel that he's the most qualified man in America to be President. They're voting for him because he's seen as being the most electable.

Which leads to two observations. First off, this is strangely pragmatic thinking for Democratic activists. Usually, if anything, you can at least count on a handful of primary voters to become fanatical followers of at least one thoroughly impractical candidate and you can count on them to help keep the contest going until at least a few weeks before the Democratic convention. I'm thinking, here, of Eugene McCarthy's children's crusade in 1968, George McGovern (who actually got the nomination) in '72, Jerry Brown in '76 (Originally, the impractical card was to be played by Carter but then Carter actually became practical and so wedded to idealistic, if meaningless, gestures were the Democratic activists that they actually went out and recruited Brown to take his place at the last minute), Ted Kennedy in 1980, Gary Hart and Jesse Jackson in '84, Jackson again in '88, and Jerry Brown again in '92. Hell, I think even Bill Bradley -- who flamed out pretty quickly against Al Gore in 2000 -- still had, overall, more people willing to cast ballots for him than all of Kerry's opponents combined. At first, Howard Dean seemed to be carrying on that tradition but, apparently, a lot of his supporters changed their mind when it actually came time to start the business of picking a candidate. So, this is the year of the pragmatic Democrat and it's a little bit depressing if you actually think about it. I may spend a good deal of time ridiculing the idealism and the elitism of the typical Democratic activist but, in a strange way, it was always comforting to know that it existed.

The second conclusion one can draw from Kerry's success is this -- Kerry is irrelevant. He's being given the nomination because he's convinced the party faithful that he'll be a good Democrat who will stay in his place, say the right things, and not do anything quirky, individualistic, or otherwise risky. He's a bit like King Saul from the Old Testament -- he's been chosen to lead because he's relatively inoffensive and nobody really has any major problems with him. No, this election is about one thing -- George W. Bush and a Democratic vote in November will not be a vote for Kerry as much as it will be a vote against Bush. Which means that the results of this election will pretty much hinge on what Bush does over the next couple of months. If there aren't any major disasters, he'll probably be reelected. If the Stock Market crashes or the death toll in Iraq takes a steady jump upward, Kerry will probably be President.

The voters in this year's Democratic primaries have made it clear that they will never vote for Bush and most registered and self-identified Republicans will never vote for Kerry. Even the social conservatives and the Libertarians, like me, who are concerned about the Bush administration's current direction will probably end up compromising our principles are voting for the guy -- Hell, we're used to it. We've been doing it our entire lives and until the Libertarians (and, for the bible thumpers, the Constitution Party) finally get their collective heads out of their collective asses long enough to mount a halfway credible campaign, Bush is probably the best we're going to get. So, once again, the outcome of this year's election will be in the hands of the independents and the undecideds, otherwise known as the idiots who nearly condemned the nation to at least four years under Ross Perot. So, once again folks, the power is in your hands.

Try not to fuck up this time.  ¶ 6:58 PM (0) comments

  It says a lot, I think, about the current state of American political culture that -- now that he's dropped out of the Presidential race he once was destined to win -- Howard Dean finally won a primary today.

(Of course it was his home state of Vermont but point that out takes all the fun out of it, doesn't it?)

A confession: I am not currently watching a new channel or really keeping track of just how much Kerry is winning the rest of the country by tonight. I'm watching Forever Eden, the simple-minded and sleazy reality show that is currently airing where 24 should be. Admitedly, the contestants are all incredibly shallow and unlikeable and yes, watching it does make me feel both hypocritical and dirty but damn, the women are amazingly cute in that-wouldn't-give-any-of-us-a-second-look-sorta way. Does the absence of a brain somehow affect the exterior appearance of a head? It's a question that's never been satisfactorily answered, I'm afraid...

(That said, I must also add that the most physically beautiful woman I've ever had the pleasure to know, much less date, (yeah, I'm trying to make myself look a lot more smooth and worldly than I'll possibly ever be) August Davis, was also probably one of few legitimate geniuses I've ever matched wits face-to-face. So, that stereotype is very much not true and -- oh shit, I'm changing the channel before I lose any more respect for myself. Fox News, here I come!)  ¶ 8:40 PM (0) comments

  Just returned from Barnes and Noble where I picked up a copy of The Chemical Brothers' Singles 93-03. I'm like a lot of writers in that I find I write better if I have music playing in the background -- it helps me get into a rhythm. The only problem is finding the right music. When I was younger, I usually went with Nine Inch Nails but I also find now that I can't stand most of the stuff I wrote when I was younger -- mostly because it reads like an insecure kid whose trying to sound like a Nine Inch Nails song. However, I find techno (or electronica or whatever the proper title -- for a student of pop culture, I am woefully uncool at times) to be a wonderfully productive background noise -- catchy enough to keep me from getting bored but abstract enough to prevent me from accidentally ripping it off into whatever I might happen to be writing at the time.

For this past week, I have been struggling with a proper follow-up to my first collection of short stories, It's Impossible To Start A Fire If You Have No Desire To Burn. I have enough short stories and poems floating around my files (must get organized some day soon -- VERY SOON) to create probably a hundred more collections but my heart belongs to the novel and that is what I want my next book to be. It's a scary thought as it takes a totally different effort and skill to maintain a story for several hundred pages as opposed to just ten. (Though both require a good deal of talent and concentration -- many writers claim short stories are far more difficult to write than novels and I see no reason to disagree too vehemently.)

As of right now, I have four different projects competing for my interest. They are:

1) Oswald Acted Alone, which will be another collection of stories and poems and will be anchored down by one of my favorite short stories -- Oswald Acted Alone (previously published in several different versions under the far less satisfactory title, Interview with a Hitman.) Right now, I'm seeing this collection as not a full book but more of a chapbook of about seventy pages or so -- sort of a pocketbook guide of my world.

2) The Book of Saints -- This is another short story collection and it'll be sort of an experiment. Basically, I'm going to take the lives of various Saints and do a sort of free association with them, a sort of meditation of whatever the facts or the legend may be. The stories will be the result of wherever these free associations take me. I'm planning on using something like Kerouac's spontaneous prose methods in writing this as the idea is just to type out what comes to my mind, as it comes to my mind, and to leave the end results as they are without going back and massively editing the results (except to make corrections regarding spelling and grammar). The results of this will either be brilliant, disastrous, or, worst of all, neither. To continue with the whole musical theme of this entry, this book will hopefully turn out to be the literary equivalent of Help! but it could all just turn out to be another Magical Mystery Tour, a big to-do about nothing.

3) Love, sex, and all the rest -- These are two novellas dealing with sex, love, attraction, and the way we let our desire and our fear for all of these things turn us into idiots. These are stories dealing with how our most honest desires can inspire the most evil of lies. The first part of the book is Colin Hex, the story of an excessive womanizer and his circle of friends and enemies. When I first wrote this story, I did it in the form of a play and it was produced up in Denton, Texas by the Underground Theatre way back in 1998. It wasn't that good of a production, I'm sorry to say, and as I looked over the wreckage, it became obvious that what I had was an unperformable play that would have made a kickass novel. The other half of this book is something that I have cautiously titled The Girl In The Street and it's more-or-less autobiographical -- a story of an unexpected romance I had on the night of Sept. 11th, 2001. As New York burned and we all wondered if our world would even still exist at the end of the day, I met and fell in "love" with a girl whose name I never learned, whose face and personality and history continues to haunt me to this day. Of course, the "love" was hardly true love but instead a reaction to the events going on up in New York, an attempt to find some sort of refuge from the evil that had just been revealed to the entire nation. Yet, there was something incredibly honest and real about the whole experience -- in the course of three hours, I probably had a more honest and real relationship with this girl than I ever did with people who were part of my life for years. This was one of those amazing moments that art exists to make immortal. The end of It's Impossible To Start A Fire basically tells the beginning of this story and I know that I'll never forgive myself if I don't, at least, attempt to put the whole story down on paper. Still, the fact that this story had such an effect on me makes it all the more difficult to sit down and tell. This is a story that is struggling against my own insecurities and expectations to be told.

4) My current novel-in-planning, an untitled project based on a very real (and very disturbing) kidnapping case that happened in New Mexico back in 1987. Besides saying that it's based on the disappearance of a girl named Tara Calico, I'll refrain from going into too much detail right now. I will say that the Calico case has haunted me ever since it first made the news back in '88 and this is yet another story that -- at the risk of thinking to highly of myself and my own importance -- I feel like I have to tell while I still can.

So, that's where I stand right now. Usually, getting started is the hardest part. Right now, for me, it's choosing.  ¶ 7:58 PM (0) comments

  Welcome to SUPER TUESDAY! If you follow the news reports, then you know that somewhere around sixty-six states are holding Presidential Primaries today. Now, it is true that that amounts to sixteen more states than we actually have in the union but Hell, that's why it's Super Tuesday. It's such a momentous occasion of American democracies that even imaginary states filled with nonexistent voters have been inspired to get in on the act.

Or something like that. Anyway, a lot of delegates are being quasi-selected today and apparently, this is the vote that will tell us whether or not John Kerry has this nomination wrapped up or if John Edwards is still a viable candidate. That's the official spin, of course. That's what you say if you want to pretend like there's any suspense left in this whole thing. The truth of the matter is that Kerry's had this thing wrapped up ever since the week after New Hampshire and Edwards hasn't been anywhere close to viable for nearly a month now.

The conventional wisdom seems to hold that Edwards is still running as an audition of sort for the chance to be Kerry's running mate which is as good an explanation as any. Still, I doubt Edwards will get the nod if just because it seems like the Democratic Party is pretty much giving up on even attempting to win over the South in a national election. Kerry, if he's smart, will go for a running mate who'll give him some leverage out in the west as that seems to be the only part of the country that can still swing back and forth between the two major parties. My own prediction is that Kerry will select Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico while Edwards returns to North Carolina and runs for Governor in the next election cycle. Assuming he's elected, Gov. Edwards will probably be one of the front runners the next time there's an open race for the Democratic Presidential nomination.

Of course, my last attempt to make a far-ranging political prediction had Kerry fading after Iowa and Edwards easily winning the Democratic nomination (and probably the White House, though I conveniently failed to mention that at the time...)

So, anyway, this is Super Tuesday and you'll have to excuse me if it feels like this day just got walloped in the face with a sack full of Kryptonite.

In other Super Tuesday news, I watched movies #3 and #4 of my vacation earlier. The first was a showing of In the Bedroom on Starz which I caught in the early morning hours. This is one of my favorite recent films, a movie which -- back in 2002 -- I felt deserved to win Best Picture even more than the 1st installment of Lord of the Rings. Upon subsequent viewings, the film's flaws have become more apparent to me. Those who complained that the film is 20 minutes or so too long, I hate to admit, we're right. There's a good deal that could have been cut, that would have made the film a little bit less ponderous. There are certain scenes -- the ones concerning Sissy Spacek and her little choir or any of the various old timers who deliver metaphorical speeches about lobsters -- that do verge on the pretentious, as if director/writer Todd Field didn't have faith in the film's simple story to sustain itself. That said, I still think it's a great film, a work of art that has been woefully underrated by many. And I still think it's a superior film to Fellowship of the Ring. The performances are still spot-on perfect. Tom Wilkinson is still the devastated heart and soul of the movie and no matter how many times I see the film, his final silence at the conclusion continues to be both brutally painful and eloquent. Marisa Tomei, Nick Stahl, William Mapother -- all of them bring this melodrama to a brilliant life. Ironically, when I first saw the film, I thought Sissy Spacek's performance was a bit overrated but now, every time I see it, I come to be more and more amazed with the depth of her talent. It really is a searing performance and her line at the film's conclusion -- "Did you do it?" -- Christ, it still puts me on the floor everything I hear it.

After In the Bedroom, I watched Apocalypse Now Redux on DVD. I'm not amongst those who thinks that this second version of Apocalypse Now is a flawless masterpiece. I think it still contains the same flaws that showed up in the first version. As my then-girlfriend August Jordan Fried (later to become the art historian August Davis) said when we saw it many years ago at the University of North Texas: "It's all a bit much, isn't it?" Still, Redux is a definite improvement on what was an impressive -- if heavily flawed -- work of art. Some of the new scenes -- I'm thinking of the morbidly comedic sequence with the playboy bunnies -- do seem like they belong in a different film. Francis Ford Coppola was right to cut them the first time. However, the French Plantation Scene -- though, at times, it seems to verge on self-parody -- does introduce a whole new level of meaning to the film and -- in the end -- it does strengthen the ultimate conclusion of the film. In the original version, the discovery of Marlon Brando's bloated, passive Kurtz is an amazing letdown because we discover him almost immediately after seeing scenes of epic, operatic destruction, after seeing most of the film's characters brutally slaughtered in brilliant technicolor, as if Viet Nam were some sort of Disney World where Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck are trying to kill you. After having our sense overwhelmed like that, the sudden appearance of Kurtz -- looking like "Uncle Fester" to again quote the lovely Ms. Davis -- is a let down. ("All of that for this!?" you wonder). In Redux, you have the sequence of the French Plantation before the appearance of Kurtz. It gives the viewer a chance to come down from the heightened sense of menace and violence that permeates through the film. As well, the French Plantation sequence is shot in such a way as to suggest that it truly is an encounter with a bunch of ghosts, a sudden vision of a glorious-past destroyed by war. It helps to establish, without a doubt, that this is not meant to be a realistic film, that this is meant to be some sort of fever dream of a meditation on war in general, as opposed to Viet Nam in specific. (The closest recent equivalent to this would be Terrance Malick's woefully misunderstood Thin Red Line.) Once you know that nothing is meant to be taken totally literally, it's a lot easier to accept the ultimate conclusion with Kurtz.  ¶ 2:27 PM (0) comments

  What the Hell happened to Monday? I went down to Barnes and Noble around four in the afternoon, nearly bought a book dealing with alleged political crimes in Nebraska until I discovered it was published by the Lyndon LaRouche people, returned home around six, fed the cats, lay down for a quick nap, and now suddenly, it's freaking Tuesday morning!

Right now, I've got a Tombstone pizza cooking in the oven, two angry cats sitting outside the sliding glass door and demanding that I let them in, and I'm trying to decide which DVD to watch as I eat my late-night, early-morning dinner.

Earlier today, I caught movie #3 of my vacation on A&E -- Danny Boyle's unforunate version of The Beach. This was better known as the film Leonardo DiCaprio followed up Titanic with and, to me, this is the film that, even more so than Titanic, showed be used as evidence whenever one has to justify hating Leonardo DiCaprio. In all honesty, it probably wouldn't have been a very good film regardless of who got cast in the lead but having DiCaprio on screen for almost the entire film, continually descending into method theatrics while continually to look alternatively like either a spoiled 12 year-old or a chipmunk, certainly doesn't help matters. The main problem with The Beach, for me, is that every terrible thing that happens in the film is essentially the fault of our hero. He is responsible for every single innocent person killed over the course of the film and he is responsible for "the loss of paradise" that the film's story is meant to represent yet nobody -- at any point -- seems to notice this.

Which, I guess, is the advantage of being the star of the movie as opposed to just a featured player.  ¶ 2:36 AM (0) comments

  Last night, as I do every year, I watched the Oscars. However, this is the first year where I really can't think of much to say about it. With the exception of Return of the King winning for Best Adapted Screenplay, I can't think of a single upset, a single unexpected win. I really can't think of any winners that I disagree with -- except perhaps for Best Song going to Into the West as opposed to A Kiss at the End of the Rainbow from A Mighty Wind (and, in that case, it was just for the chance to see Annette O'Toole again -- whatever happened to her?).

Let's see -- what else can be said about one of the most predictable, quite frankly dull Oscar ceremonies in recent memory? I'm of the minority opinion that Two Towers was the best part of the trilogy, but it was still gratifying to see Return of the King named Best Picture despite, as Peter Jackson said, all of the hobbits, goblins, and trolls. I was somewhat surprised to realize that Return actually managed to win every Oscar it was nominated for and one didn't sense a great deal of enthusiasm coming from those actually at the ceremony as presenter after presenter called out "Return of the King!" and winner after winner thanked the people of New Zealand. I hate to say it but whatever Peter Jackson does next, he better be prepared to deal with a lot of very envious people who will be tempted to say that Jackson doesn't have anything else in him beyond adapting Tolkien.

As was pointed out by the ever-present Oscar announcer, Return of the King managed to tie both Ben-Hur and Titanic for the most Oscars. Along with Titanic, it's also the only film to win every Oscar it was nominated for. The major difference between last night's winner and those two previous films is that Return of the King is actually a good film. Last night's awards might have been predictable but at least the Academy won't be embarrassed by them ten years from now.

Let's see -- what else? Billy Crystal was back as host and pretty much served to remind viewers just why exactly everyone got sick of him in the first place. You got the usual insider ass-kissing that Crystal specializes in (which, I imagine, is probably the reason he keeps getting asked back in the first place) and the insufferable "LOVE ME!" ego tripping. He sang his little song about the Oscars and, in his opening monologue, managed to come across as a combination of every single hack Borscht Belt comedian at their very worst. To understand just how much I actually hate Billy Crystal as Oscar host, you should understand that I'm actually a fan of hack Borscht Belt comedians and, usually, of Billy Crystal in general. Just not when he's being paid by the Academy....

We had the traditional montage of the dead and it was just as ghoulish as usual as the audience insisted on breaking out into applause when certain names popped up on their monitors. I understand that the idea is that they're applauding the life, the legacy, the whatever but it still comes across as "Yea! That guy's dead!" And I did notice a strong round of applause came up for Elia Kazan -- certainly more than he got when he accepted his honorary award a few years back and most of the auditorium sat on their hands rather than acknowledge someone who named names in the '50s. So -- either they were willing to forgive him now that he was dead (in other words, now that it was too late to really make any damn difference) or else they actually were applauding because he was dead. But if they were applauding the death, then why didn't anyone make a sound when they discovered that Leni Riefenstahl had finally made her way down to Hell? Now, there was a name that deserved some hooting and hollering. But honestly, I doubt if anyone in Hollywood knows why they're applauding either. It's a pavlovian thing.

Julia Roberts -- didn't she used to be an attractive, likeable movie star at some point in the past? It was hard to tell as she mugged her way through the Katharine Hepburn tribute, stopping after every salty anecdote to sigh, "Yeah." I found myself wishing for Hepburn's ghost to suddenly materialize there on stage and basically just slap the Hell out of America's former pretty woman.

As for the acceptance speeches, Tim Robbins showed an amount of restraint that I wouldn't have thought him capable of as he refrained from the political statement that we all know a part of him wanted to make and instead used his moment in the spotlight to offer comfort of victims of abuse. Good for him. Renee Zellweger was adorable. Sean Penn's speech was surprisingly gracious, and if he did have to make a political comment, at least he made it in the form of a joke. The only piece of real politicking came from documentary winner Errol Morris and he delivered it with a good deal more restraint than Michael Moore did with his little tantrum last year. Still, I found myself snickering when Morris commented that maybe his film could do some "damn good after all." I felt bad about it because Morris was obviously being quite sincere and meant well but seriously -- not only Morris with his salty, Ed Asner-as-Lou Grant self-righteousness but that unsmiling lady who made the short film about Chernobyl and, even when she was standing out on stage at the show's end with all the other winners, still could not make the effort to stop glowering just a little bit, has there ever been a documentarian who hasn't come across as a total pain in the ass to live with?   ¶ 11:38 AM (0) comments

  Well, I just watched the second film of my vacation. Once again using the wonderful technology of DVD, I watched the criminally underrated The Long Riders, a Western from 1980 that retells the familiar story of the James/Younger gang. It was directed by Walter Hill, a brilliant director who, for some reason, has never had an exactly brilliant career. Hill makes genre pictures -- mostly action -- that feature deceptively simple plots and male-dominated casts; actors who, at first, seems to be playing typical action archetypes but, as the film progresses, slowly and subtly are revealed to be a neurotic, vulnerable mess. A typical Walter Hill hero no longer looks like a hero by the end of the film which is probably why Hill has never built up the type of following that the makers and stars of less exciting films have developed. Admittedly, Hill's career has been spotty. On the whole, any Walter Hill film featuring a box office star is bound to be disappointing -- Last Man Standing, starring Bruce Willis, being a prime example. For whatever reason, a movie star simply does not make the same type of existential warrior that a character actor does. Luckily, The Long Riders is filled with character actors.

In fact, the film's cast is what most people know about the film, if they know anything. The James/Younger gang robbed banks in the years after the Civil War and their bond came not from crime but from the fact that they were family -- Jesse and Frank James and their cousins, the Youngers. In the film, all of the various brothers are played by actual brothers. Stacy and James Keach are Frank and Jesse James, David, Keith, and Robert Carradine are the Youngers, and two other gang members (Clell and Ed Miller) are played by Randy and Dennis Quaid. As gimmicky as this sounds, it actually works on film and it doesn't hurt that all of these siblings happen to be excellent actors who effortlessly create a brilliant ensemble. Indeed, one of the unexpected pleasures of the film is the chance to see Randy Quaid and Robert Carradine -- two talented and versatile actors who have recently become trapped by stereotypical comedic roles -- give full-blooded, naturalistic performances. (Quaid is surprisingly intimidating if you only know him as Cousin Eddie from the Vacation movies.)

Along with the cast, The Long Riders features what -- along with Heat -- must be one of the greatest bank robbery sequences ever to appear in celluloid. This is a recreation of the climatic (and unsuccessful) attempt to rob the Northfield National Bank in Minnesota and, as the gang desperately rides their horses in circles in a vain attempt to escape the ambush that has been waiting for them, it is impossible not to feel that same combination of fear, dread, and exhilaration that probably fueled men like Jesse James in the first place. One should be warned, this is a remarkably violent film and this is real violence -- i.e., when somebody dies, nobody has the time or the wit necessary to come up with a one-liner to commemorate the occasion. When people get hurt in this film (and other Hill films), they don't shrug it off once the scene ends. While, on occasion, Hill's habit of filming every bullet wound in slow motion may seem like a rather obvious homage (or rip-off) from Sam Peckinpah, Hill creates a sense of empathy for his quirky, not-always sympathetic protagonists that Peckinpah rarely bothered with.

In the end, all of this makes The Long Riders one of the best films to ever be forgotten. I'm glad I took the time to remember it.  ¶ 4:23 PM (0) comments

  Well, I am now officially into the second day of my vacation. Yes, that's right, it turns out that at some point in late December, I scheduled my second paid vacation (I have one left for future use) for the last week in February/first week of March of 2004. It was something I did on a whim (as the Christmas season is probably the most stressful time to be working in retail and, that night, I didn't know how to manage my store after 12 midnight but I sure as Hell knew that I needed a vacation) and it was something I ended up forgetting I had done a week later. So, apparently, did my bosses and we were all quite shocked when, on Thursday, we were doing a routine check on payroll (to see how much overtime had been clocked up the previous work week) and we discovered that I was scheduled to be on vacation during the upcoming week.

As the old mystic once said, sometimes life is good and sometimes life just kicks ass!

Even better, on Sunday morning (with only seconds left before I would clock out and begin my week of compensated slacking), Rusty called all the department leads, assistant managers, and night managers (myself and a 300 lbs. guy who we'll just refer to as Sloth) into his office for a conference call with the evil Trent, our district manager. (Perhaps Trent isn't literally evil but then again, he could very well be.) Our new store manager will be coming in on Monday. That was the entire announcement -- Trent hung up before anyone could ask any questions so we don't know this person's name, their experience, or even their sex! In short, any jerk that walks into the store on Monday could be the new store manager. Never will so many anonymous asses be kissed and fawned over than will be in Wal-Mart Store #2974 on Monday! And the great part of it is, I'm on vacation so I won't have to be there while everyone else has a nervous break down and even better, when this new manager is making his or her first examples in order to establish his or her fearful wrath or authority -- I won't be there! Everyone agrees that this new manager is going to make heads roll (if just because the evil Trent apparently told Charlie -- right after firing him -- that "I'm going to have to replace you with someone who knows how to make heads roll.") and luckily, my head will be nowhere near the guillotine for at least a week!

So, what have I done so far with my vacation? I slept through most of Saturday though I did wake up long enough to watch 28 Days Later on DVD (this was a Christmas present -- one of many presents that I hope to find time to watch this week). It was only my second time to see the film and I was somewhat shocked to find that it was just as disturbing on repeat viewings (though a lot of the film's humor -- missed in the original barrage of shocks -- was much more apparent and appreciated the second time around). I also grew more convinced that, for the first two thirds for the movie's running time, this was indeed one of the best, most intelligent horror films ever made. For me, the film falls apart once our band of survivors reach Manchester and the random, senseless hatred of the Infected is replaced by the much more conventional, almost comic book villainy of Maj. West and his soldiers. Though Chris Eccleston's performance as West was a truly brilliant one, it was also one that belonged in a totally different movie. Still, even if I didn't care that whole section of the film, it was still brilliantly shot and acted and, if it diluted from the effectiveness of the film as a whole, it still did nothing to diminish the power of the first half.

After I watched the film, I caught the infamous alternate ending that came with certain prints of the movie. This ending is a bit more bleaker than the ambiguously positive ending that completes the final film and actually, it's a bit more realistic as well and certainly it better fits into the whole theme of survival at any cost. So, from an artistic point of view, the bleaker ending was a better ending but, shit, I still prefer the "official" ending -- even if it does have a similar feel to the infamous green hills tacked onto the end of Blade Runner. Sometimes, aesthetics be damned, the boy just need to get the girl as it were! Besides, the bleak ending worked largely because it made so much logical sense, it was the "only" way the film could have ended. The ambiguously positive ending took a leap of faith to accept when compared to what had preceded it but honestly, the characters were all so appealing and well-played and their story so well told that I think most viewers would have been willing to make that leap. Indeed, bleak endings work the best when you just don't give a shit about any of the characters. (Would Seven have been as acclaimed if, say, it had been Sandra Bullock's head in that box instead of Gwynneth Paltrow's?) Bleak endings tend to reward logic while happy endings reward the emotions and, on the whole, I think logic is a bit overrated. Certainly, in a world ruled by logic, there'd be no art, no films, no books, nothing at all that could be cherished simply for existing.

Right now, I'm cherishing my vacation and the fact that it is raining and the fact that the Oscars are going to be on later tonight. I'm cherishing that yesterday, I got a package from my publisher and I opened it and looked down upon several author copies of my first book. I'm cherishing that it's being read somewhere, I'm cherishing that I have more books to write (perhaps over the course of this very week), and I'm cherishing the fact that I'm alive and I'm me.

Why would I need anything else?  ¶ 10:44 AM (0) comments

  For all the bitching I do about it, I have actually grown to enjoy my job. In fact, it's kind of strange for me to realize that less than a month ago, I was seriously planning on just walking out of the store one night and never returning. Now -- with Charlie getting fired and everyone of us "managers" currently either scheming to get our rivals fired while holding onto our own possitions or running around in a blind panic like Roberto Begnini with a Texas Drawl or somehow doing both at the same time, I honestly couldn't imagine voluntarily turning my back on all this melodrama. When I enter that store and clock in, it's like being immediately transported into the world of some overheated work of post-World War II pulp fiction. I've noticed that most of the managers even tend to talk in forced, hardboiled cliches -- as if Sam Spade suddenly found himself managing a Wal-Mart and, just as suddenly, found out that Dashiell Hammett wouldn't be providing him his dialogue any more; that now it would be up to Sam Spade to sound like Sam Spade based just on what he thought Sam Spade should sound like. To use an expression of my youth, it's a trip.

And I'm going to be very, very honest and open myself to a lot of potential humiliation here by admitting that there's another reason why I love those first few hours right after I first clock in. Ever since I broke up with my fiancee back in 2001, I've been cynical about the whole idea of romance and attraction and flirtation and love, sex, and all the rest. While I have never believed that love doesn't exist and that there are lots of happy and lucky couples out there, I also came to the conclusion that I was probably destined to never know that type of commitment. After all, I was truly in love with my fiancee, I was sincere when I asked her to marry me, and a few months later, I broke up with her because -- love and happiness be damned -- the idea of seeing the same person's face every morning for the rest of my life just seemed so damn monotonous. In short, I figured that I was too much of a narcissist, that I treasured my own indpendence and free will too much, that I was too much of an artist (Right now, somebody reading this blog is muttering, "Maybe you're just too much of an asshole.") to ever maintain a real relationship. So, I gave up on the idea of real relationships and, if I ever did find myself in a relationship with a female, I made sure it was dominated by the physical aspects, that I never one made the mistake of saying something the real me would have actually said, and -- most importantly -- I made sure these relationships never lasted more than a night, a week at most. A superficial experience but I'd decided that's what I was destined for.

And what a crock of shit all of that is turning out to be. There's a new cashier at work, about two years older than me. She's a single mother who has got one of the most beautifully sincere smiles I've ever seen. She's a brunette, 5'5, slim but still remarkably athletic for someone heading towards her mid-thirties whose already had two children. Anyway, can you tell that -- for all my attempts to be tough and self-loathing and cynical and tragic (yes, always tragic. Bullshit artists always want to be Hamlet and Romeo rolled up into one super tragic hero), I have basically somehow developed what can only be called a crush (and I mean that with all of its unrealistic, downright immature connontations) on this cashier, to the point that I've started to resemble Michael Caine, earnestly yet paheticly lusting after Barbara Heshey in Hannah and Her Sisters. Honestly, when I'm flirting with this cashier (or Hell, even just saying hi to her when I first get to work), I feel like I'm back in junior high, sitting the school cafeteria and feeling my heart beating in my chest at just the thought that my favortie girl might walk by, look at me, and say something that would make me feel like someone other than myself.

And strangely enough, it's a damn good feeling regardless of the outcome.  ¶ 10:24 AM (0) comments

  Okay, now seems as good a time as any to waste a few words on this whole constitutional definition of marriage thing. This is something I'd been avoiding going into but I don't have any choice now as 1) the Republicans, apparently looking to prove that Howard Dean ain't the only self-destructive guy in American politics, seem to be intent on making an issue out of this and 2) I noticed that several other blogs have tossed in their two cents and my competitive side demands I respond by tossing in a quarter.

First off, you should understand that the only thing I oppose more than homosexual marriage is heterosexual marriage. And no, I'm not just being glib here. I do not like the idea of any human relationship being "legally" defined by any sort of regualatory body. I do not like the idea that the complexities of individual relationships can be haphazardly straight-jacketed into terms like "alimony," "divorce," or "community property." To me, marriage is like any other relationship between consenting adults -- whether it be a friendship, an affair, or a mutual dislike, the rules and boundaries of that relationship are determined by the individuals involved and when that relationship is over, it's over. Marriage, like anything else, is the result of individual human efforts and individual human desires and bringing a lot of legality into it only serves to deny the fact that human instinct cannot be regulated.

(Just in case anyone was doubting whether or not I was actually a Libertarian...)

Anyway, from the above, you can probably guess that I am not a supporter of this current constitutional admenment defining just what exactly a marriage is. As self-appointed pundits never tire of repeating, the U.S. Constitution has been the governing document of this nation for over 200 years and, in that time, it has required very few changes or additions. The genius of the Constitution is that it is, essentially, an outline. It gives the principles that are meant to govern a democracy like the U.S.A. and sets up the necessary guidelines necessary to keep an ever-changing government from jumping the tracks and reeling out of control. That said, it's also a broad-enough document that it allows room for the people of this country to pass whatever laws that their current situation may warrant -- the only requirement being, of course, that those laws stay within the confines of the outline. It's no coincidence that the majority of admenments added to the constitution have dealt with broadening the rights of the people governed under it to make their voice heard in the democratic process.

In fact, the only consitutional admenment that has proved to be a complete and total failure was one, that like the current possibility before us, designed to not increase the power of the individual but instead to increase the power of the government. That, of course, was prohibition and it was designed to force citizens to accept a certain morality, a certain way of living regardless of what that citizen's own opinions may have been. Prohibition was, of course, a disaster and it was repealed after a decade of, essentially, helping to tear this country apart and essentially, that's the same thing the Defense of Marriage Admenment appears destined to do. It is not the place of the Constitution to declare what is right or wrong. Instead, the Constitution serves to preserve a nation where, whatever jerk might currently be in charge, the individual has the right to decide for himself what is right or wrong and act accordingly and Hell, maybe even change his mind a few days later.

So, in short, I think this current proposed admenment is a terrible idea that not only stands against everything the U.S. Constitution is supposed to signify but I also have to say that I think basing a campaign platform on it will lead only to at least four years of first lady Theresa Heinz Kerry correcting White House visitors on the proper pronunciation of her name.

It's a terrible idea and hopefully, somebody in the White House will be smart enough to discreetly stuff it back into whatever foolish suggestion box it first fell out of.  ¶ 2:59 PM (0) comments

  Jesus Christ, my friends, you would not believe the night I just survived at work! All of the managers -- both the salaried ones and the hourly henchmen types (of which I am one, I guess) -- are kinda paranoid right now because two weeks ago, our store manager -- Charlie -- got fired. Charlie got fired because our store is currently making the least amount of profit of any Wal-Mart store on the entire planet. Yes, this means that the Wal-Mart sitting in the middle of the Siberian Tundra in the former Soviet Union is currently showing more of a profit than Wal-Mart store #2974 in Richardson, Texas. So, anyway, Charlie got fired and right now, Rusty -- the personnel manager who always manages to fuck up everyone's schedule regardless of how much effort he puts into not fucking in -- is our Temporary Manager until the new manager transfers over. Now, we don't know who this new manager will be and there's been a lot of rumors and a lot of supposed candidates but the one thing we all know is that this new manager is probably going to be a hardass whose going to come into this store looking to make a few examples out of the most expendable managers and to put the fear of God (or Sam Walton) into whoever he or she might deem worthy to live.

So, basically, all of us managers know that once our new boss shows up, there's a 50-50 chance that we're going to end up getting fired and everyone's pretty scared and worried. Everyone except for me because, quite frankly, I'm beyond the point of taking anything that happens at that store seriously anymore. The fact of the matter is that nobody -- and I mean NOBODY -- at the least profitable store in the company is going to have any realistic chance of ever moving up into higher management. In short, we're all pretty much stuck where we are because no matter what type of job we may do, we're always going to be tainted with a scarlett 2974. For me, the only point to even going after my current position was to use it as a springboard to move up to something that paid more money for less work. If I can't move up, than my job really is kind of pointless and, therefore, I refuse to view anything going on in this current melodrama as little more than an excuse to light up another joint, toss back a few shots of Jack, and laugh at how stupid it all really is.

Or at least, that's what I keep telling myself but I must admit that I did let all the pressure get to me this morning. Basically, Rusty and Mercedes (my immediate superior) walked into the store at 7 a.m. and both of them had a near conniption over the fact that the back storeroom was a bit of a mess. When they confronted me about this, I replied that the storeroom was in no worse a state than the state they left it in when I came to work 12 hours earlier. Strangely enough, they didn't really seem to appreciate my ingenious strategy of blaming the problem on them and they basically told me they didn't want me to go home until the backroom was organized and, to quote Mercedes, "pristine."

At which point I smirked and said, "Y'know you're full of shit, don't you?"

To be honest, I didn't even realize I had said it until I saw the look of pure rage on her face. Even then, I wasn't quite sure. Usually, I'm alert enough to prevent myself from saying outloud the insults I'm thinking whenever I talk to my bosses. But this morning, I was sick and I was also dealing with the effects of having been awake for something like 55-hours straight. In short, my defenses were down and I just said the first thing that popped into my mind.

Which led to me being given a twenty minute lecture about my "attitude" in the manager's office by both Mercedes and Rusty. Mercedes told me that I was one of the strongest middle manager/henchmen types that they had at the weakest store in the Wal-Mart chain but that I was never going to move up from working nights unless I learned "to cut the crap, stop acting like a spoiled child, and be a team player."

And, genius that I am, I again had to open my mouth and say, "I don't think I'd call myself spoiled."

Oh Christ -- Mercedes possessed one truly terrifying power and that is the ability to glare at you for an hour straight, without saying a word, while all the time narrowing her eyes until she literally looks like a serpent about to strike and poision another foolish victim.

For a very long time in that office this morning, I was that other foolish victim. Anyway, long story short, I ended up getting written up for my "bad attitude." No big deal as this happens to me about every three months or so though this time, I refused to help Rusty spell out any of the big words he may have been unsure of, regardless of how many times he asked for my help. Nor did I bother to correct him when he spelled my full name with one F and three llls. Anyway, it took nearly an hour for them to just fill in the one-page form used in write-ups and, by that point, I was fairly pissed off over the amount of my time that had been wasted with this shit and I let them know this by refusing to sign the form and telling them that if it was put into my file, I was going to call and complain to Trent, our district manager (and the same guy who fired Charlie).

So, right now, at least two of my bosses, aren't too happy with me and I'm sure they'll find some way to make me suffer for my "attitude" over the next few days. But fuck it -- in the end, I'll survive and, most importantly, I'll end up laughing. Because, Hell, when all is said and done --

IT'S JUST A WAL-MART!

And not even a profitable one at that.  ¶ 9:18 AM (0) comments

  Well, it finally stopped raining for an hour or so and I stopped wheezing long enough to run down to the Barnes and Noble that, mercifully, sits a block or so away from my house.

While there, I looked through the latest copy of Film Comment and I was very happy to discover that it contained the last interview given by Tim Carey, one of the classic B-movie character actors. Carey was one of those New York-trained method actors who first started appearing in films in the 1950s -- back when Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift, and James Dean were helping to make New York-trained character actors the "In" thing. Unfortunately, Carey suffered from the same handicap as a lot of idealistic method actors -- he could project the same explosive neurotic energy as Brando, Clift, and Dean but he didn't look anywhere near as good as they did while doing it. So, Carey spent most of his career playing giggling, backwoods sociopaths and -- even by the tame standards of the '50s -- managing to bring a rather disturbing intensity to those roles. Carey is probably best known for two Stanley Kubrick films -- The Killing (in which he shoots a horse with palpable joy) and Paths of Glory in which he plays an unfairly condemned soldier in World War I and whose final breakdown on the way to his execution carries so much power precisely because you're aware that this is Tim Carey, cinema's favorite heartless psychopath, having such a raw, emotionally vulnerable, realistically human reaction to the crimes being committed (for once) against him. However, Carey managed to pop up in hundreds of films up until his death in 1994 and, for the most part, came across as some sort of Deliverance version of Lee Marvin.

Anyway, it was always exciting to see Carey pop up because you never quite knew what little bit of crazed degregation he was going to bring to the screen with him. As such, B-movie fans, like myself, always kind of assumed that Carey was in on the joke, that in real life he was probably a post-ironic sorta guy who knew that his films were flawed and hence, gave winkingly extreme performances as both his way of commenting on those flaws and as a way of giving the filmgoers who forgave those flaws something interesting as a reward for their understanding. In short, we all somewhat niavely assumed that Tim Carey was exactly the way we liked to believe we would be if we were Tim Carey.

Sad to say, the interview proves that we were wrong and for the most part, Tim Carey was just as much of a spaced-out nut as he came across in most of his films. Why this should matter is difficult to explain, mostly because it shouldn't. Carey's performances are still unique and entertaining, regardless of whether he was doing some sort of subversive performance art or rather he was just playing himself. I guess it really gets down to what is at the heart of so many self-appointed, self-taught "film" historians as myself. In the countless hours we spent hiding away in the fantasy worlds that all of the world's movies provided us with, we eventually convinced ourselves that we weren't hiding from the world but instead, we were simply enjoying a private joke that the rest of the world couldn't understand. Hence, it became important to believe that all of the otherwise obscure, otherwise unsuccesful filmmakers whose work we continually escaped into -- the Sam Fullers, the Ed Woods, the Lee Marvins, the Victor Matures, and the Tim Careys -- were also in on the joke. It made us feel a little less alone and, even though I like to think that I've outgrown the self-exile stage of existence, it's still somewhat disheartening to discover that, in at least one case, I was the only one laughing.

That said, the interview did have one interesting tidbit and that was Tim Carey's offhand comment that he was nearly cast in The Godfather as Luca Brasi, the feared Mafia henchman who -- in the film's first truly graphic murder (excluding the whole bit with the horse's head) -- gets garrotted from behind while his eyes literally pop out of his head. At first, this possibility struck me as bizarre -- afterall, The Godfather is one of the greatest movies ever made and, his work with Kubrick aside, Tim Carey simply did not make great films. Add to that, just about every actor who was working in 1971 has claimed, at least once, to have been cast in a supporting role in the Godfather before being forced to withdraw by 1) scheduling conflicts, 2) studio conflicts, 3) integrity conflicts, or 4) conflicts with Marlon Brando (that was Burt Reynolds' excuse for why he didn't end up playing Sonny Corleone).

Still, I'm inclined to believe Carey's story if just on the basis of the fact that, back when he directed The Godfather, Francis Ford Coppola was just another film geek who had spent way too much time watching the type of B-movies that always featured Tim Carey in roles like that of Luca Brasi. As well, even if Carey didn't end up with the role (he goes for the 2nd excuse -- studio conflicts), Coppola did fill the film's supporting cast with character actors from the B-movies of the '50s and '60s (Richard Conte as Barzini, Sterling Hayden, John Marley, Rudy Bond, and others). I have to admit that one of my more useless hobbies is Godfather trivia, especially where the casting is concerned. I had never before heard about Carey being considered for the Brasi role but, just imagining it, I can honestly say that Carey probably would have done a better job with the role than Lenny Montana, the prowrestler who eventually got the job. Montana is certainly physically menacing but he never quite projects the cunning one would expect from a mafia Don's main enforcer. Carey might have lacked Montana's bulk but still, from the moment he would have appeared on screen, you'd have no doubt that this guy was not only a professional killer but he was also one of the best guys at his job. And, as such, his rather easy elimination by the Don's enemies would have carried even more impact, it would have been much more of a oh-shit-the-Family's-in-real-trouble feeling that the actual scene eventually ended up with.

For the most part, the Godfather is probably one of the best cast films of all time. When you look over the hundreds of names suggested for various roles, you come across a lot of intriguing possibilities (Dean Stockwell as Michael, Martin Sheen as Tom, De Niro as Sonny, Orson Welles as the Don, amongst others) but very rarely do you ever feel that any of these possibilities -- regardless of their own individual talents -- could have done a better job or created a better film than the actors eventually cast.

Tim Carey proves to be the exception to that rule and I know it will be impossible for me, the next time I watch the Godfather, to not find myself wishing I was watching Tim Carey awkwardly giving the Don a gift on the "day of your daughter's wedding" and wishing that Connie's firstborn "be a masculine one."  ¶ 4:19 PM (0) comments