Notes from the Petting Zoo

I just realized something today. I’m damn happy.

Of course, there are things that are just a little dodgy — I don’t like being unemployed and thus with negative cash flow, but aside from that, I’m happy.

I have a great life, and a roof over my head and the food is good. I have a fabulous love life that makes my heart burst with happiness and friends who smile when they see me and people who write me notes saying such things as “I just wanted to say hi — I miss you.” The weather is gorgeous, the moon is full(ish) and the nights are pleasant. I’m editing a new movie that is turning out beautiful and cool and exciting.

So, look around, quick, before it’s gone. Look around and see what’s working with your life. See what’s working perfectly well, almost invisibly. Thank it. Thank the people around you, if for nothing else than just being your friends and for being near you. Spread a little gratitude in the world and recognize — even if for a short time — the gifts that surround you.

Thanks for reading this!

Back to the Master List of Essays

I’ve been reading a lot of H. L. Mencken lately. I like it. Mencken has it right, I think, when he declares that government officials, by and large, are scoundrels.

Surely, there are people of good conscience doing their best to help other people, but they are the local politics, the basic functionaries. These are the people who help you find your as-builts for your house, who help you thread the tricky avenues of the city charter, who drop you a note every once in a while about town meetings. These people are excellent.

But the higher up you go in the tree, the less useful and more of a scoundrel the person is likely to be.

Admittedly, even as a broken clock can twice a day be used to pelt know-it-alls, a high government official can do a good deed or something that is beneficial to Mankind, but is is almost certainly a pure accident, and never the actual intention.

The biggest lie, the biggest deception I think currently foisted upon us these days (and one which ought to make us even more wary of those beasts in suits) is that somehow, the “party” of one of these characters makes a damn bit of difference. It doesn’t. The higher up you go, the more of a scoundrel and a crook you will encounter. It doesn’t matter the name or affiliation or favorite colors of the person — all you need to know is that the only truthful words out of their mouths, and the only truthful actions from the soulless husks they’ve become are sheer accident.

This is not to say that we shouldn’t have government (for those idiots who seem to believe that criticizing a government is somehow akin to requesting anarchy by mail-order), just that we all need to be aware of the inverse relationship between power and our-best-interests and not make the mistake of thinking that any one person way over there in DC is somehow an unfairly tarred saint. A saint he ain’t!

Nor is this to say that one might not be preferable to another (and perhaps therein lies the difference for those chronic self-abusers who feel politics is the safest replacement for pugilism), in much the same way that there is a pecking order and thus a preference among all crooks and thieves and cutpurses and vagrants and hooligans.

But they’re all crooks.

Back to the Master List of Essays

Am I really the only person on Earth to remember Jack-in-the-Box’s hilarious attempt to freshen up their image by blowing the clown up and declaring themselves “Monterey Jack’s”? I remember seeing this commercial many times and thinking “Yay!” because an exploding clown was (I thought) pretty cool.

But time and time again, I have been stared at by people who supposedly had more of a finger than I on popular culture, insisting that I was sniffing glue and no such thing happened.

I’ll be the first to admit I’m nuts about many topics, but this? This I remember clearly. Now if I can just find some sort of authority on it…

Back to the Master List of Essays

Police sift clues…

As part of a birthday gift to my wife, but also part of a long-ago made promise, I took a trailer full of trash and junk out to the dump. This was leftover debris from our last movie, which is a feature-length action/horror film that includes lots of killing and death and mayhem and blood and gore.

Which is a lot of fun, by the way.

The trailer is filled with nasty old mildewed zombie clothes, packed haphazardly into plastic bags. It is also filled with many bags of trash. Much of this oozes fake blood.

Other bonus items in the load — a long table that has been gouged and ripped and shredded and has “FLESH” spray-painted across it. Also, a very versatile tabletop. One side is steel-coated to allow blood to run off. There, is, of course, bloodstains on it. The other side is wooden and black and has catches and ropes so that a human being can be bound to it and held while Horrible Things are done to them. We did Horrible Things. The catches, the rope, and the tabletop are caked with gore and blood.

So, all of this is in a big wad in the dump, now. 360 pounds of blood-spattered, gore-covered, nasty junk.

And I’m waiting for the headlines that are sure to follow the first time the bulldozer hits that pile and one of those flimsy-ass bag rip open and blood-encrusted clothes tumble down.

It’ll be an interesting day.

Back to the Master List of Essays

Damn their eyes, their lies, and their attempt to impose their standards on anyone other than themselves (“Bowdler Machines Get Congressional OK”) and a big extra paddle to our government, who keeps forgetting it isn’t a parent.

Parents already have all the tools they need to keep their kids from watching TV — it’s called not buying a TV. Or not buying cable.

On the plus side, I can still make whatever kind of movie I want and it’s usually fun to do!

I think the DGA is going about this the wrong way. I think they shouldn’t talk about it infringing upon their artistic freedom. I think they should talk about it as if it’s a case of people not willing to take care of their own children, of wanting the television to be a babysitter, of feeling betrayed by their own personal choices if they get an inkling that the rest of the world is having a grand time, thank you very much.

In other words, they’re all jealous.

Back to the Master List of Essays

As one of Oregon’s growing number of people looking for work in a job-hostile political environment, I see a lot of career pages for various business online.

I think — and here I’m only speaking from the point of view of a person who wants this to work — a person should not be allowed to create a webpage for careers, or a search engine or a registration system or anything like that at all, unless they have applied for jobs regularly online.

I mention this because it seems straightforward to me — the job title, the job description, and an e-mail link and/or an online resume-submission file widget. This is really quite simple.

However, there are more sites out there that force you to do crazier and weirder things. Like setting up an account. I used to think it was stupid that I would set up some kind of account on a website just so I can submit a resume.

I had no idea.

More commonly now are these entire online applications that LOOK as if you are just submitting a resume, but then parse it out (stupidly, usually) and force you to reformat your data into their special boxes, threatening you on every screen that if you bail NOW, your application won’t be processed.

My current hobby is one particular site: the site for OHSU, which is the Oregon Health Sciences University. I have never encountered a more horrid crapplication in my life — and I’ve seen some real stinkers! Not only does it threaten you in lots of different ways, but it insists you use it’s special database front-end, which is heinous-as-hell, plus it’s fraught (and by fraught, I mean “chock full of”) server errors and bugs and mysteriously vanishing data widgets.

Check this out — it took me TWO HOURS to enter my degrees. Much of that was repeatedly attempting to use the “pop-up” menus, which rarely worked right the first four or five times (they are required — if you just hand-enter data, it vanishes as soon as you leave the text box). Most of it, though, was a combination of waiting for some inexplicable server validation, combined with discovering all new and unexpected data dependencies that eradicated previous data. I’m not an idiot by most definitions, but if it’s going to take me two hours (I did other things, too) to just enter that much data, then clearly, there must be some other route to getting work, because this can’t be the only route!

It’s simple: Job title, job description, e-mail link.

Everything else is a waste of everybody’s time.

Back to the Master List of Essays

Why can’t we have Harmless Cranks anymore? Why can’t we have Nutjobs anymore? Why is it that no matter how farfetched, no matter how bizarre or weird or smack-headed the complaint, authorities have decided that people just can’t be Harmless Cranks anymore. No, now everyone takes everything so damn seriously, as if each person could possibly be 100% correct and right and true.

Look, some people are cranks. They’re nutjobs. They’re cuckoo. I don’t mind using these terms because historically, they have a long pedigree and — more importantly — most of the time they’re accurate.

My current favorite example: Nearly every single complaint to the FCC post Janet-Jackson-not-entirely-baring-her-breast-dammit originated from one single organization and basically, from one single individual. And get this: they’re actually paying attention to that nutjob!

Now, in my Universe, that person is what we would call “a crank”. He’s nutty. Sure, he might hold down a job. Sure, he might be able to spell out “you” instead of using “u”, but still, he’s a crank. He’s no less a nutjob and no more worthy of attention than those other cranks that used to write impassioned pleas to the President to “abolish Wednesdays in the name of sweet baby Jesus!”

If this were a horror movie (arguably), we would eventually discover that the nutjob who keeps calling in about the Mole People in his basement was correct and he provides us with the valuable key that Light Destroys Them, so we thank him and save the world and get on with our lives. This doesn’t make him any less of a nutjob. And furthermore, this isn’t (again, arguably) a horror movie. The guy’s a crank and this time we just got lucky enough and listened to the right crank at the right time (see “clock, broken”).

I’m not saying we need more cranks and nutjobs in the world. What I’m trying to say is that we need to recognize them as such more often and sooner than we are doing right now, ’cause, all things considered, we are sorely lacking in the Crank Discrimination Circuitry, if you know what I mean.

This is what I intend to do, and I recommend you do it as well: the next time my local news show spends any time on a crank (without clearly acknowledging “Wow — what a nutjob!”), I’m going to call them up and tell them “Hey, that guy was a total nutjob! What the hell are you doing giving him airtime — can’t you find a dog show or a chess tournament or something even remotely news-flavored? If I want to watch cranks and nutjobs, I’ll watch Jerry Springer.”

We have a lot of things we have to worry about these days, as we have since the beginning of time, and we don’t have lots of bonus time for cranks and nutjobs. But we should at least identify them and keep an eye on them and know where they are.

After all, we have to feed someone to the Mole People.

Back to the Master List of Essays

I love the title. So threatening!

You get any group of four or more people together for any period of time and they’re going to start forming their own social group. They have their own metaphors, their own shared experiences, their own methods of communicating. They have their own language.

Usually, the words are English (or whatever the prevailing tongue in that area might be), but there are perceptual patches that most outsiders, have to skate across, hoping for more familiar territory on the other side.

I’ve seen this in other groups. I’ve seen this in my own social circle. I think it just happens. When it does, it erects a sort of isolationist screen around the group. Sometimes that screen becomes a defensive screen, sometimes an offensive screen, but it’s always there, just a metaphorical haze that you — as an outsider — cannot quite penetrate.

But I think there’s a cure. I do.

I think the cure is, simply, to spread the hell out! To not sit in clumps, to not be in clumps, to make it a point at parties and other social occasions to split the hell up. You could say “divide and conquer”. You could say “divided we fall”. I prefer to say “Look, is this hot sauce really hot, or just tangy, ’cause I’m tired of Hot Sauce Betrayal.” But when I can’t say that, I’ll settle for “divide up and experience as much as you can, and give everyone else a chance to experience each part of the whole alone and as a unique functioning person — who just happens to be a part of a group.”

Back to the Master List of Essays

I have a blog. This stuns me. I got it for free. I never wanted a blog, yet I have one. For free. And it’s interesting to think about. Abstractly.

Like an STD.

Other people have blogs. Not me. Weird.

Back to the Master List of Essays