Fail blog

This blog has failed. I have failed this blog. Last post is Feb. 2009? That is sad. That is a sad state of blog affairs. There's like, five or six blogless months in there.

Do not worry. This is the first of many failures.

For too long I haven't failed. I have spent most of my childhood and all of my adult life carefully breaking down experiences into the smallest imaginable chunks, and then following through on the least risky. I don't know when I started this bizarre way of living, but it was long, long ago. I remember I was 11 or 12 and talking to my dad, and said I had come up against a wall with something (archery? It was probably archery. Why do we teach kids archery? Archery is practically worthless. "Hey son, I'm going to teach you how to shoot a bow and arrow" "naw that's cool I'll just go to the supermarket like everyone else"). Anyway, there I was, totally sucking at archery, and I was like, "I've hit this wall with archery. I'm not going to get over it, so I'm walking away" and my dad was like "That's up to you. But you cannot do that too much, or you'll be surrounded by walls, and that's it." And I nodded, of course, but in my mind I was like "Yeah, whatever. We'll see how many walls I can walk away from. I can walk away from any challenge. They haven't built a challenge I can't avoid."

It's like 15 years later and I finally feel closed in. Look at me: a day job I am sitting out the recession in, a play I've been writing for years I am content to one day hope might be produced in Pennsylvania, a house I'm moving out of, a degree I don't use, free tuition credits I don't use. Zero failures. Doing a-okay. I am a beacon of routine shining atop a mountain of mediocrity.

This blog - this fail blog, if you will, if the maker's of that other fine blog don't mind - will now begin to chronicle my spectacular failures.

Here's the deal, chumps. Life is big and violent and noisy. It will break your bones, bruise your heart and whack your neck with a bat. With a bat, that is right, a freaking bat! Your instincts will tell you to hunker, your muscles will insist escape. But you cannot do that. It's inexplicable - the only response to such pressures is to reach further, to do more and to fall from greater and greater heights. This is something you already know and I already know, but which I cannot drag myself to do.

So here's the project: a chronicle of tries and fails, and it starts with this blog, which has failed already for a few months, and which will fail again, but that's the hokey pokey, friend - that's what it's all about.

I have been very self-conscious of my weight recently, mostly because last Friday I ate two dinners and recently I have upped how many beers I drink at a time. It's completely irrational and silly, but most things I think about are.

So you can imagine the consternation when today I opened my hotmail account and it began calling me fat.

Future Car!

I am sick. Here is what it is: I have a cold in my head. My nose is running, and I have a headache, and my ears feel larger than usual (?). So why not blog, in this case?

Because it is January and because everything is pretty much nexus-ising in my life (that's a word, look it up, it means when everything coming together to be a nexus but isn't there yet it's in the process of nexusising (the hyphen is optional)), I am thinking of the future.

If you Google image search (or "gis") the word "future" you get the car that is pictured. It's odd that when people think of "future cars" what springs into mind is something ridiculous that you would never want to get into. No one wants to leave the grocery store with two bags of groceries and you don't have a car cause you only went in there for milk and cheese so you just took one of the baskets but then you thought as you were in the aisles that you want to make a good soup and the cat needs food so you came away with two bags of groceries and you walk to your parking spot which was the closest at the time but now there are like 18 spots that are open and closer but whatever you finally get there, and you have to reach down and unlock the pressurized seal of your cockpit to your car. Look at this thing. Good thing you don't have three grocery bags or you're making two trips! After/if you insert yourself into this glorified bobsled, if you are rear ended going out of the parking lot the car is totaled. I am guessing this thing weighs 65 pounds and has the structural support of a coffee cup sleeve. Why are we heading to this design?

Much has happened:

-Meredith is engaged! Read her awesome blogness about putting a wedding together.

-In the future when I'm a better person, I will donate to her wedding. And speaking of people whose lines I steal, Kelsi has a badass job now and also looking to purchase property.

-A whole bunch of people are either drifting together or drifting apart. (The gis for "drifting apart" was completely uninteresting, but "drifting together" yielded an interesting photo of, from what I can tell, a Pacific Northwest couple magically transported through space to a beach, left sitting there contemplating their overencumbered backpacks, their failing relationship and the guy's denim jeans.)

-I am running the board for this company doing Marat/Sade. It is an awesome show that everyone should come see.

-But because I am working for the theater, I have missed many happy hours, a date with Rapunzel, a sushi party, TWO rockband parties, a Steelers postseason victory, and too many other fun times to list or link to. Marat/Sade? More like Matt/Sad!

-I had a reading of the full-length play I'm working on dealing with a casino coming to Pittsburgh. Readings are hard but necessary, as is illustrated by this fun little stat:

A) Time spent alone typing thinking I was writing a work of art: The past 6 months.

B) Time spent listening to actors read the play aloud and finding out the play has deep, chasmic problems regarding character, tone, structure, dialogue and theme: 2.5 hours

-Other people moved and junk. Sorry, it's too much to realize what's happened over the past three months. Because you see that's the past. The last three months is the Toyota Camry. The future is the Toyota Bulletmobile, small enough to be in everyone's blindspot, yet quick enough to totally fly off a country road.

The future is now, but, like the elusive Blue Monkey from the Merrie Melody cartoons, the future is wily, hard to find and impossible to control. Which is why it is necessary every once in a while to take stock, to blow out the mucus of your decision-making paradigms out into the soft 2-ply Kleenex of the past, to snort hard the nasal spray of introspection, and to take the Nyquil of the Promise of Tomorrow. Which is why tomorrow I'll be taking a sick day.

What do you do when you're out of ideas? When the casino opus needs to be fixed with a chainsaw, not a scalpel? When you have no money for a wedding? When the housing market is surprisingly competitive? When a three-day weekend is nigh, and all your plans involve watching Season 6 of West Wing and running board for the theater?

Ladies and gentleman, I suggest we take this Nyquil, and in the morning, we start building a car. It can be blue. It can be shiny. But goddamn, it needs to have room for groceries.

Journalism - Not all that awesome

From this column about what it takes to be a good reporter:

"Good reporters are committed to telling the story. Associated Press reporter Terry Anderson ignored his boss's advice to leave war-torn Lebanon; he felt that he had to stay. He was kidnapped in 1985 and spent 6 1/2 years in brutal captivity."

Yeah...I guess I don't got what it takes.

What up? It's been a while since we rapped. Maybe that's because I've been spending all my online time at this awesome Saved by the Bell site! I read this entire blog way faster than I should admit. It is the "Catcher in the Rye" of blogs. Uh...if Catcher was about making sarcastic comments about an early '90s show.*

The great thing about Saved by the Bell, besides the fact that they learn Driver's Ed using a golf cart in the gymnasium, is that I loved the show to the point where, if no one was at home after school and it came on, I would dance on the coffee table and play air guitar to the opening theme music. I thought these people were the coolest and the funniest, and it was pretty much what high school was like. High school was cool not because of popularity, but because everyone did really rad things, like, all the time! The show couldn't depict popularity, because there were only like seven extras at the most at any point. But I attribute this sense more to the set: it always seemed like Zack and the gang were hanging out in one tiny little corner of the school. You know, the stairs were in the background, leading down, and that was where the cohort was. And they had a crappy corner of the school too, since it was right next to the principal's office. I always had the sense that in all the other corners of the school, other rad stuff was happening, and we the viewer were only exposed to the radness of this one section.

So the real joy of SBTB to me was this cohesive unit that stayed together...er...except when the cast changed without explanation. But they went and got summer jobs together, they went to college together, they hung out at the Max all the time, they were there for each other when Jessie got hooked on caffeine pills.

I really thought there was some brilliant way to tie all that in to the nostalgia I've been feeling lately, but I don't think I'm clever enough. Point is, lately I've been really wanting everyone I know to live in the same city. I know we all have our own lives and grad schools and jobs and children (!) and dreams to attend to, but it really is inconvenient that the world is so large and so many of the people I know and love are attending to its different corners.

Right now, I am "Seattle Matt" and when I want to go visit friends in Ballard, I am Seattle Matt, and when I go to Rainier Valley, I am Seattle Matt, and when I go to Capitol Hill, I am Seattle Matt...With A Little Bit Of Gay. When I'm back in Indiana, I can be High School Matt. When I am in Pittsburgh, I can be College Matt. There are so many Matts out there, but I have to drastically change my geography in order to be any of them!

But really what I want, rather than just a manual transmission to shift to any Matt I feel like, is to touch different points of time in life as much as possible. My friend Roselyn recently visited, and there was a moment when we and some others were walking through Discovery Park in the drizzly evening, when, just like that, we could have been at Ox Bow or Shanklin back in Indiana. There are so many bitter and sweet moments in the history of our friendship, and I cannot stand to be so far from them. I wish I could group us all up and put us in a city...I don't care which one. Even Tacoma.

So, I guess my point is, no one should be allowed to move and all the cities should have walls around them.


*Which it sort of is? I mean, "Catcher in the Rye" is basically a guy making sarcastic comments about all those goddamn phonies out there. Substitute "goddamn phonies" for zany plot contrivances and you pretty much have the sbtb blog.

Kites and Kowboys

Everyone will be happy to know that at this year's International Kite Festival on the Washington coast, there will be prizes. And these prizes are presented at a banquet. And the banquet has a cowboy theme.

"To add some more fun to this year’s World Kite Museum WSIKF Award’s Banquet and auction, there will be a theme. We’ll all get to be even sillier!

Starting at the door, you’ll be welcomed by the sheriff. Unless you want a fine, you need to wear some piece of Wild West gear. Nothing fancy – could be a bandana around your neck, a cowboy hat or boots or big buckled belt, a sheriff’s badge, handcuffs, fake snake, sunbonnet, Minnie Pearl hat, etc., etc. There will be prizes, so get as elaborate as you want. A jail will be available in case you break the law (not on purpose of course!). So have a friend with funds to get you out of jail.

One of the best parts of the auction is to see someone excited and thrilled about a kite item you donated that they won. The other best thing is getting an item that you had your eye on – and all of this helps support the World Kite Museum.

Watch the web page for pony express online updates. If you have ideas that inexpensively and easily can be incorporated, let us know. No shootouts, no, no, no!"

The saddest part of this event is that after a shooting at the Folklife Festival, the expressed prohibition of firearms at a Kite Festival is completely justified.

Estelle Getty died today, causing this obituary to happen.

"In similar vein of take-no-prisoners elder, Getty played Sylvester Stallone's domineering mother, Tutti Bomowski, in "Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot." Generically, it was a battling-buddy movie whose comic thrust was the diminutive Getty's bossing around her L.A. lawman son."

How necessary is it, on a 1-10 scale, to sum up what the Stallone movie was about?