who dat? contest:



"i know!"


previous results:



the onion's jim anchower

first correct answer:

benjamin pung

screw you carolyn chute

The following can always be said: If Only. And it is poison. It’s venomous. But sometimes it’s fucking true.

I read this in the Times today (cool, learned people can just say "the Times" and people know what they’re talking about) and proceeded to take out the smallest violin in the world and played a laconic and mournful tarantella for the author, poor Ms. Chute.

In case the link has gone or you can’t get in because you don’t have a password for the site – this is a brief Op-Ed piece called How Can You Create Fiction When Reality Comes To Call by a novelist who details her typical day at home with the purpose of showing humorously why she rarely has time to write. And by the way, she has no kids, no horrible infirmities. And let me say that again: "her day at home."

Her awful terrible no good very bad day begins with birds singing outside her window and some good ol’ morning fucking with her husband, "X-rated stuff happens. (Delete details.)"

Oh Carolyn, you saucy wench, you!

Her day is then consumed by her pack of dogs, various friends stopping by, bills to pay, unwashed dishes – and all the while her typewriter (yes, she’s so totally edgy and hip that she uses a typewriter, which in my mind is sort of like years ago people shunning the invention of ink by continuing to write with a lump of coal) is "screaming and moaning". Maybe it’s screaming and moaning because it wishes it were a computer.

OK, let me detail my typical day:

Wake up – not to birds chirping – but to homeless crushing cans outside my window before dropping them in their shopping carts and talking very loudly in Spanish.

Go to work, where I drink my sad little cup of coffee from home because the coffee here literally tastes like ass, and do mind-numbingly dull computer shit for 8 or 9 hours, broken up only by occasionally having to jump in my car to go audition for a one liner on Jesse or a commercial for Funyons. Cigarettes and Diet Coke make the afternoon at least theoretically possible.

Drive an hour to Santa Monica for rehearsal.

Drive another hour back to Hollywood during which I make calls on my cell phone to catch up with the friends I don’t have time to talk to the rest of the day – including my lady.

Go to the editing room until 1:30am.

Park 7.4 miles away from my apartment because at 2am there is not a lick of parking to be found.

Repeat.

OK. So when do I have time to write? The odd night off. The stolen moment or two at work. And so maybe I don’t have a cavalcade of exciting guests such as "political activists" and "friends showing off their babies" or a bunch of dogs wanting to play or a house to clean to interrupt me, but I wish I did. I live in an apartment with no backyard and I can’t keep a dog because my puppy died so I feel really really bad for you with your husband running off to support you but I can’t even land a husband because I’m a lousy cook and I’m not gay. So there.

Damn, I’m getting madder and madder as I go on, but check this shit: "I finish hanging the laundry and go up to the typewriter and sit there, holding my head trying to quiet my head. You see, I can't just switch from life mode to writer mode. Usually it takes three days to get into the writer mode. Three days of quiet non-life mode, lots of coffee and no interruptions."

All together now: B – O – O – H – O – O.

People write in locked prison cells with their own blood. People write on cave walls with rotting teeth and mammoths hunting them. And yes, people write late at night so tired they cannot keep their eyes open because they’ve been up for 18 hours and have to get up again in 5 to go to work.

Shit, I’d like an agent, a publisher, and assignments to write pithy and thoughtless little word-sketches for the New York Times.

Now I know one day I’ll not have to work a jobby-job and I’ll probably find myself complaining, but when that day comes – bitchslap me with a quickness, OK?

Elsewhere…

…funniest moment from the SNL thing last night: Christopher Walken questioning how much of the show is improvised, "…how much is scripted and how much are just crazy make-em-ups?"

Meanwhile…

Having grown up in the 80’s, I was trained that most films contain at least one breast shot. Sadly, and I bemoan this often, the Puritan 90’s has seen a prodigious lack of breasts in film. Well, that trend is perhaps starting to change. The last two films I’ve seen, American Beauty and Double Jeopardy, and supposedly the next film I’m seeing, Mumford, feature bare breasts. Are we entering a new golden age for cinematic titty-shots?

Back at the Hall of Justice...

...a bunch of wonderful journal-type people took my stupid little survey. God love 'em:
pamie
douglas
kymm
beth
al
ms. e
columbine

Finally…

…heard a joke up in Berkeley that I can’t believe I’ve never heard before, it’s so true:

Q: How many Bay Area residents does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
A: Hella.

The Larry King Happy Song Corner

The tide is high and I’m holding on. I wanna be your number one. I’m not the kind of girl… speaking of which. One day in the 8^th grade I had a brand new pair of Hush Puppies and I was down at Coney Island wearing a black beret and the wind took that chapeau and it landed in the water. Get my Hush Puppies wet, or lose my beret? Hmmm. Let’s just say that sad little French fancy-boy hat is probably half-way to Belize by now.

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