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AHHHAHHHHHG let’s not have another weekend like that, okay? Maybe even extend it to another week.

I feel like I was either apologizing or paying for or something my weekend with my lovely wife, as I hit the ground running – okay, in my case, hobbling – and had little time to catch my breath. My normal work hours, sure, but then I was covering for sick co-workers in the evening Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, working the live remotes for the School Board, Planning and Zoning Commission, and City Council. None of these are what you would call back-breaking. In fact, if I had to do extra work, this as just about ideal for my busted body. Outside of set-up, it’s all sitting at a mixing board and making sure a) people who are speaking get heard – not always easy, as “speak into the microphone” might as well be uttered in High Enochian to some people – and b) make sure that when the chamber erupts into spontaneous laughter, you do not blow out the equipment or the speakers of people at home.

I am assured that people actually do watch these things at home.

I had been asked to run similar duties at a Board of Directors meeting here at the college on Thursday. There would have been quite a bit more set-up involved in that. Luckily, our engineer was willing to help me out with that (as if I hadn’t been doing it, he would have been stuck with the whole shebang) and got tot he site only to discover someone else was doing the audio deed; those details had been e-mailed or voice-mailed tot he guy who was sick, so nobody had gotten the message.

That was, however, the best thing that could have happened, far as I was concerned. I’d had more than my quota of bureaucracy in action that week.

Thursday was the first evening off in a while; that had me looking over my shoulder, wondering if I was going to be called in to run audio for the Dog Catcher’s Union or something. Then, of course, the show on Friday and Saturday, and yes, funny that you should ask, I was filling in for an absent actor, and his character gets to stand and walk around for about an hour and 15 minutes. I was moving very, very slowly by the time these shows were over.

In case you're wondering what to get me for my birthday

Naturally, I had a shoot Sunday morning. At the San Jacinto Monument. Meaning a lot of walking was in order. That was the 21st Annual Monumental Bug Bash, which sounds like Cricket Stomping Day, but is actually a gathering of fans of the Volkswagen. Again, I’m not a motorhead by any stretch of the imagination, but I’ve always had a soft spot for the Bug, and it is a very fortunate thing that I don’t have a lot of money, because I have no idea how I would have gotten those cars home, anyway.

The gimping around is bad enough; when you have a 45-minute drive home, that gives those ailing knees an ideal opportunity to lock up. When I finally got home, my cane seemed woefully inadequate to the task; I really wished I had a walker. Maybe with a little horn to honk at young hooligans who get in the way.

This week seems blessedly clear. There is a showing tomorrow of a anti-drunk driving film I did some camera work on, and that’s it until the weekend’s shows. An actual chance to heal? But then what will I bitch about?

May 16, 2011
Categories: Life's Rich Pageant . . Author: drfreex . Comments: Leave a comment

I approach the end of my writing contract, and it is a conflicted feeling. On the one hand, I will have some free time again. On the other hand, I will have some free time again. I think you see where the conflict lies.

Oh, wait, perhaps you don’t. One of those was free time with money coming in and the other was without. There, that should clear things up.

In the usual storm of regular work and picking up the extra duties of the co-worker who had to go on medical leave – extra duties that multiplied as the School Board meetings he worked similarly multiplied due to the ongoing budget crunch and the Superintendent having the audacity to resign just because he got a higher-paying gig at another district – (pause for breath) and the show every weekend and blah blah blah jeez

All of this culminated in last week, when my wife was out of town and I found myself booked solid Wednesday through Saturday. Sunday I took a day off simply because I had to – I was exhausted, frazzled and half-crippled. This week is a short week, with Good Friday providing a day off – just the daytime hours, the night still belongs to Mystery Cafe – and I had to edit together two stories. That’s done, and now I can get ahead on the two stories I need to do for next week, or plan out what is becoming a troublesome section of the contract writing, or I can just sit here and blither into this oft-neglected blog.

The stuff to fill my suddenly free time has been piling up. Books and movies taunt me from their resting places. I got over 100 pages of Richard Kadrey’s Kill the Dead read during a closed session of the School Board, and that is about it for my non-comics reading this year. (Yet another reason I love comics – the episodic nature of the stories lend themselves to bursts of reading)

Speaking of bursts of reading, there’s the Twitter, and thank God there has been very little of it devoted to outstanding buys I must have lately. It’s thanks to Twitter that I own things I could not otherwise afford, like the slipcased deluxe Don Martin and Gahan Wilson collections, or that wonderful Criterion box set of BBS movies – all gotten for half-price and far below. Thanks, Twitter friends, for tipping me off to those.

There are a couple of other times that Twitter has surprised me, which probably says more about how I use and view it as opposed to how it actually works. I mean, there are people and news sources I follow; I occasionally reply to some of the people, and they reply in turn. Or they don’t, and I’m never sure if they even see my replies – but such has always been the nature of electronic communications betwixt fans and the people they follow, right? Anyway, it’s always seemed like  a fairly closed system to me.

Then comes a Tweet from a fellow I do not follow, nor, I think does he follow me – answering a question I had asked by omission, when I referred to a recurring character in Korean movie posters as “That Guy”. He helpfully provided me with the true identity of That Guy – The Red Falcon. Perhaps he saw it on my Tumblr site, I don’t know.

Then there was an acrimonious exchange I started having with a guy who took exception to my buying DVDs from Warner Archive. I, myself, love the Warner Archive for delivering up discs of movies that wouldn’t have gotten a release otherwise. Pretty, lovely discs, often re-mastered. Allowed me to finally stop trying to subject myself to that ninth-generation VHS dub of Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark I bought on the ‘Net years ago. Gorgeous, ephemeral stuff like jazz shorts from the 30 and 40s, Robert Benchley shorts, those bizarre Dogville fillers. Hanna-Barbera cartoons… for God’s sake, these people are putting out box sets of The Herculoids and Frankenstein Jr. this year. They are, therefore, saints in my book.

Then, a goodly number of saints are also martyr, so of course – because it is the Internet – Warner Archive has their detractors. People that grouse that the discs are over-priced, that they have no extras, that they’re just DVD-Rs, or as Kevin Church so eloquently boils it down, ” Waaah waaah waaah.” WAC discs generally weigh in at $19.95, and I know from experience that I am going to hand a bootlegger at a con – or over the Net – a 20 for a much sketchier version of the same thing. Hell, I paid that much for friggin’ VHS tapes of stuff I wanted to watch back in the day.

The detractors who are also economic wizards state that the discs should “only be $10”. I’d love for these people to be in charge of the pricing on my groceries and utilities also. It could be pointed out to them that if they only wait for WAC’s sales – which I do – the discs average out to $10 a pop. There’s sales tax, but generally there’s also a deal on shipping for larger shipments.

So it’s unusual, again, that a guy I don’t know starts berating me on Twitter for patronizing WAC, citing the above reasons, and he starts hammering on their recent release of a letterboxed, remastered Green Slime, wondering why I spent that money when I could have bought a “perfectly good” pan-and-scan version from a certain vendor for fifteen bucks. I looked at my gorgeous letter-boxed version and considered the “perfectly good” pan-and-scan version, and decided to use the “block” function for the first time in my Twitter life. If you’re willing to buy stuff for me, you get to say where the money goes. Otherwise, shut the fuck up.

The latest version of this was triggered by my offhand statement to a couple of my Twitter friends that the much-vaunted Free Market had apparently weighed in on the movie version of Atlas Shrugged: #14 at the box office, $1.5 million take. Someone hopped in to defend it, pointing out that Rand hated commercialism, and the movie has an 85 at Rotten Tomatoes.

Have I blocked him, also? No, everything he said was true. It has an 85% Audience reaction on RT, but a 7% on the critic side, which impresses me as system-gaming, in much the same way L. Ron Hubbard became a Best-selling Author: lots of Scientologists buying multiple copies. But it must be admitted that 1.5 million dollar take was achieved at less than 300 screens, so that’s not too shabby a showing. Be interesting to see how it does the second week.

Like I said, everything he said was true. It didn’t change my mind about Rand at all, but it was true.

April 20, 2011
Categories: Life's Rich Pageant . . Author: drfreex . Comments: Leave a comment

Neil Gaiman. He figures into this, eventually.

Been a while. Been busy. You know the drill by now.

My writing contract work  proceeds apace, and pretty much on schedule. The sad part being, we are now approaching the part of the schedule where I should start work on Part Three, and there is no plan for Part Three. This is, apparently, where the Creative Department comes in, which becomes a bit irksome when I’m writing educational fiction for a field with which I have very little parlance. I suppose when our hero starts fending off zombies with a chainsaw, I’ll be informed I am in the wrong.

One bright spot, if it can be called such, is that freed from a page count for the next week or so, I actually have what I’ve been craving for a while: free time. This started yesterday evening, and I’m embarrassed to say I have no idea what to do with it. Or, rather, I have too many ideas. So instead I just read, and went to bed at, for me, an early hour. I was dead tired. Rough couple of weeks. Car troubles, deaths in the family, you know: all the stuff that makes life so thrilling.

Actually getting a decent amount of sleep is an extraordinary circumstance for me, so I can count last night extraordinary. It was filled with hideous nightmares – my subconscious needed to take out a lot of trash, apparently – but surprisingly consistent nightmares. I did awake at approximately 3:30AM, as usual, for a nocturnal visit to the bathroom, but went back to sleep and back to the same nightmare. Since I’ve been reflecting that it’s time to return to fiction writing for myself, I’m going to take this as my brain serving up the raw fuel for what I need to write. We’ll see.

(Homer Simpson Gurgling Noise)

I cannot, in good conscience, blame my reading material for the nightmares. A lesser person might, as I have been consuming Gahan Wilson: 50 Years of Playboy Cartoons, a typically gorgeous Fantagraphics piece of publishing pulchritude, a three-volume slipcased monster. It is one of those editions I looked at, then looked at the $125 price tag, sighed, and put on the “After Winning The Lottery” list.

I had not, however, counted on Twitter, or the irrepressible and fantastic Neil Gaiman. One night last week, Gaiman tweeted that Amazon had the aforementioned huge tome for sale at $29. I squashed several photons that got in my way as I clicked the link, and my poor UPS driver grunted the hefty package to my door two days later. Say what you will about Neil Gaiman (I tend to prefer his earlier work, but he is never less than entertaining), I officially pronounce a gesund on him, may his tribe proper and increase. He is the gift that keeps on giving.

Because I looooooves me some Gahan Wilson.

If you’re one of the three people reading this blog, you know Gahan Wilson. If not: his heavily cross-hatched cartoons epitomize bizarre, black humor. Or to put it another way, he’s the one who’s not Charles Addams. In Hugh Hefner’s intro to the first volume, he talks about looking for a Charles Addams-type for his fledgling Playboy (Addams being under exclusive contract to The New Yorker), and finding Wilson in Colliers. Thus begins the legend.

Okay, I looked at my father’s Playboys quite a bit when I was a kid. I don’t remember the nekkid women doing that much for me at that early age (that would come later), but I really loved the cartoons, especially Wilson’s. I have a few of Wilson’s smaller collections, but revisiting these in volume one, from 1957-1968 (that’s from memory, I may be correcting this later) was like talking all evening to an old friend I hadn’t seen in ages. Cartoons I had forgotten and suddenly recalled in a splash of memory.

The best part is, I have two more volumes to go through, which promise equal joy. The only bad part is, now I’m hungry for the collection of Nuts from National Lampoon, and that’s not coming out until July. But I do note that there is a hardcover edition of the Classic Illustrated Poe he did the art for, and The Devil’s Dictionary. Both of which I own in their “floppy” incarnations, and both buried in a longbox somewhere. Hm….

February 25, 2011
Categories: Life's Rich Pageant . . Author: drfreex . Comments: Leave a comment

I guess it’s nice to know I can still handle weeks like that.

MONDAY: Story meeting with group I alluded to last week. Results, not terrible. Hope to have finished module by, um, yesterday the 17th. (That almost happened.)

TUESDAY: Live broadcast of joint City Council/Planning & Zoning meeting. Call @ 5:00. I am not put on camera, which I suppose is for the best – I’m a mediocre cameraman at best. I’m taking care of technical details, PowerPoint presentations on a projector, the microphone for public outcry. Everything I am told is wrong, but I am used to that, so I actually manage to do most everything right. except for the microphone, which is not occupying the exact geometry needed, so I must suck.

This is the first of these I’ve been involved in that actually had citizens come forward to address the pols. Usually, when the Mayor calls for public input, we cut to a camera set up to capture anyone at the mike and get a wonderful shot of empty seats. As if to intimidate anyone daring to speak out against the “controversial” new planning ordinance, the meeting goes on for nearly two hours before public input is called for. This gambit does not work. Things are repeated over and over. Finally, at 11PM, there is a bathroom break.

Someone once likened watching the wheels of government grind to the process of sausage making, but this is totally unfair to sausage makers. There was a whole lot of sausage made that night, and its contents were composed of dead horse, beaten to a runny pulp. After the bathroom break, the citizenry was gone, so it was time for some gratuitous in-fighting.

I get home after 1:00AM.

WEDNESDAY: Rehearsal for re-mounted Mystery Cafe show. Me, the new guy, and two others are all that make it. This is going to sound egotistical, but I’m not the one that needs the rehearsal, folks. I’ve been doing this gig for 15 years now. AND THAT REALIZATION CAUSES MY SOUL TO SHRIEK IN HORROR.

THURSDAY: Writing, writing, writing. Trying to finish by Monday, remember? Writing passages with genuine emotional impact (I hope). Oddly, this sort of thing takes longer.

FRIDAY: Second story meeting of week. Emotional stuff passes muster. I am gratified. I also have to leave the meeting early to make my call for the Friday show. It’s a typical Friday audience: too tired from the work week to be really responsive, though by the end of the second act they are really into it.

SATURDAY: I am up at 7:00AM, stupid Circadian rhythm. Fall into coma-like sleep about Noon. Family has a meltdown while I sleep the sleep of the dead. The clichéd Teenager Abuse of Trust has finally happened, and must be dealt with. That’s bad enough, but while dealing with the trauma from that, my wife finds out one of her friends has advanced cancer. I hate it when the Universe gives you perspective – it usually seems to give somebody cancer to achieve that end.

Then there is The Saturday Show. I am more depressed than anything, and not certain I will be funny at all that night. As you might predict, I fucking killed that night.

SUNDAY: Up at 7:00AM to perform at Church. This is hilarious on many different levels. I’m not a Christian, but my wife is; I generally don’t mind when they ask me to do these things, because, you know, we’re the resident actors. This one, though? Anybody could have done it. But they hadn’t asked in a long time, so I agreed.

Of course, the capper to an exhausting week is a suddenly-booked private show Sunday night. At this point, you shrug and soldier on. Besides, the clichéd Teenage Abuse of Trust had a serious financial hit attached to it, and the extra money was needful, especially since I had requested a portion of my  writing paycheck Friday, and instead of letting me pick it up at the Friday meeting, it was mailed to me. No mail delivery Monday, Martin Luther King Jr. Day. You do the math.

MONDAY: Never received an e-mail about the next story meeting. Really, should have written the few bits remaining on current module. Fuck it. I need some me time.

Instead, I crunch numbers. Mortgage and checks still outstanding. The way the Day Job pay is structured, I had one week’s pay on Friday, plus the three-show weekend, carry the three… I have about $50 to go buy groceries on. I can do that. I’ve dealt with worse. I can get enough to tide us over until the writing check finally arrives.

Then we get word that the estranged husband of one of my wife’s friends has committed suicide.

I THINK MY PERSPECTIVE WAS PRETTY OKAY THEN, UNIVERSE. IT REALLY DIDN’T NEED ADJUSTING.

January 18, 2011
Categories: Life's Rich Pageant . . Author: drfreex . Comments: 1 Comment

In the rather long list of Things I Wish I’d Said, is a quote whose attribution I’ve shamefully forgotten. Possibly it’s Stephen King. But it is: “No writer has ever been able to convince his spouse that when he is looking out a window, he is working.”

That right there is a prime aphorism. Witty and true. Of course, you can expand it to family, children, in-laws, etc., but why complicate such elegance?

I had a corollary to that aphorism bite me on the butt yesterday.

I’m engaged in a writing contract right now – I think I alluded to that earlier. Can’t say much about it, of course, but it amounts to another writing-by-committee venture, in which I bring my work to the table and I am informed of every aspect in which I am wrong, wrong, wrong, and my lively and likable main characters are ground down to bland, inoffensive placeholders. It’s not fun or necessarily rewarding, but it is a paycheck, and after a couple of years of scraping by on a part-time job and half, the money is more than welcome.

Anyway, said part-time and a half jobs, after shutting down completely for two and three weeks for the holidays (without pay, which makes the income from the writing gig even more welcome), suddenly gearing back up and demanding more of my time than usual, I am finding myself working hard on my time management, at which I’ve never been that adept. Setting aside blocks of time for writing. I’m told this is how honest-to-God writers operate, they keep office hours. Mine tend to fall in the evenings, from 4 to 8. It’s just the way it worked out – that’s when I have a block of free time, with an option of expanding into the 8-10 range, as necessary.

This scheduling is complicated by the fact that I generally prepare dinner in the evenings, as I’m the one who has – or had – the time to do that.

So yesterday afternoon, I am a couple of hours into my writing – I had started an hour early, yay Sundays – when I realize I am very hungry. I’d had a late breakfast, and had powered my way through without lunch. So I left my sanctum and called down the stairs, “Has anyone considered dinner yet?”

“What were you thinking?”

There was some pre-fab chicken parmigiana, pasta and garlic bread I had picked up the week before, so my family would have something to heat up and eat when I was in town for meetings to puree my writing. They never used it, though, and I suggested it.

“No, I don’t want that. I think you should go get us some fried chicken.”

“Um, I’m writing to a deadline, here.”

“Well, we’re watching Dispicable Me.”

“I fail to see the equivalence there.”

But, there are some things it is useless to argue about. I wound up dressing more warmly, leaving, stopping by the bank (which admittedly I needed to, anyway), getting the chicken, returning, and eating.

Net sum: about an hour of writing time lost.

It did give me a little time to consider, and construct a list of things I needed definitive answers about from the clients, to avoid the “wrong, wrong, wrong”s. That limited what I actually could write about, and I finished that in good time, and e-mailed it out to the various recipients. Was feeling pretty good and full of chicken, until I got an e-mail, saying it was all great as usual, but would it be possible to have three more pages done by tomorrow?

Sure, I sigh, Why not. I’ve still got the 8-10 slot.

January 10, 2011
Categories: Life's Rich Pageant . . Author: drfreex . Comments: 1 Comment

I was going to take Friday off, but due to a shuffling of responsibilities at work, I took Thursday off instead. I had a nicely productive day at home – well, except int he realm of blogging – so no problems.

Well, except for the problems. Sick wife and child, whom I had to check in on regularly, while trying very hard not to get infected. I felt like I should have been wearing one of the condom suits from Andromeda Strain. I got to be huffy and adult when I made my wife turn off her phone because the teachers and parents from the schools she administers kept calling her every ten minutes, not allowing her any rest. The best was the mother who called because her son had a sore throat, and she wanted to know if it was strep.

The money I could have saved all these years had I just realized I had married a psychic doctor!

This morning, bereft of voice, she was going in because there’s a big field trip today, and apparently she is the only one who can drive a van. My asking, “Didn’t you hire adults?” wouldn’t have helped, so I didn’t. But good grief.

Of course, she moans, she can’t afford to get sick. And neither can I, I have an incredibly busy Saturday ahead of me. Shoot in the morning, show in the evening, just like last week, and fate seems to be conspiring to do the same thing next week. So having a wife that would be allowed to get well would be a very, very good thing, if only in the area of increasing the odds of my NOT getting sick.

November 5, 2010
Categories: Life's Rich Pageant . . Author: drfreex . Comments: Leave a comment

I was in an unaccountably foul mood Saturday night before the show. Call it a cumulative effect, because it wasn’t due to any one disastrous event or another. A series of small disappointments (I suppose mainly due to reality’s dogged refusal to live up to my expectations) led to an unrepentantly ugly cloud hanging over me. No sound guy, so I was running both decks by myself. Done it before, not a big deal… until I find out we’re stuffed into one of the smaller rooms again, denying me the larger piece of real estate that makes such a setup easier.

There was an audience costume contest that night. I wasn’t expecting much to come of it. So I labored at getting the more complicated setup work, tried to prep myself as best I could, and sat stewing in my place as the doors were opened to a crowd of folk who had gotten there way too early. Stormcloud over my head.

Then Princess Leia walked into the room.

This was the New Hope Leia, in the form-fitting floor-length white number, and a damned good job of it, too, right down to the pastry-bun hair on the sides. And then a very credible Wonder Woman came in.

And I took it all back. Life was good, all of a sudden.

It really doesn’t take that much to make me happy, it seems. It was a fairly good show, I only bungled a couple of cues (which is, to me, unacceptable, but what the hell), everybody had a good time.

And the winner of the contest (as voted upon by the non-costume-wearing patrons) was Princess Leia. Hope that made up for Alderaan, Princess.

November 1, 2010
Categories: Life's Rich Pageant . . Author: drfreex . Comments: Leave a comment

Wow, yesterday was a day. Unfortunately, it wasn’t the type of full day that leads to interesting writing or fascinating ruminations. It was just a day full of tedious chores. Yawn.

I mean, I could complain about minor-ass stuff that happened. Getting to work only to get a text from the wife that her sugars are wacky again and she’s run out of test strips, requiring me to leave work, drop by the house, then drop off the strips at her school, which is at the edge of a construction zone, then rushing back to the station to floor manage the news stand-ups.

But what would be the point? This is neither world-ending, deal-breaking, or even particularly annoying. It is just something that happened. I complain bitterly over the notion that it has been my turn to be the worrisome one for quite some time, but she refuses to listen to me.

Anyway.

Nice weather has made another appearance locally, cool temperatures, low humidity. I am hoping it sticks around at least another day, as tomorrow morning I’m covering a local charity 5K run, and I could use something a bit comfortable. I would enjoy having to roll my sleeves down for a change. Then, home to rest for the Saturday night show.

Incredibly, this will be the first Sunday in a while where no demands are placed upon me (yet). I am torn between becoming a complete vegetable at home or becoming a complete vegetable at Dave’s house. Either way, vegetation is in my future, and I welcome it.

October 29, 2010
Categories: Life's Rich Pageant . . Author: drfreex . Comments: Leave a comment

I knew something more than allergies were up when my beloved Wal-Phed did not staunch the flow of water from my sinuses last night.

I am hoping this is nothing more than a cold coming on. That was a pretty rough weekend for a poor, out-of-shape old man (and rapidly getting older). I accompanied the wife to target last night, just to get out of the house, and I ached abominably as I walked across its sterile expanse.

As I finished up my story on the Houston Comic Con, the sniffling turned into full-fledged sneezing and coughing.  Good timining, I guess, but I think the damned thing could have used a little more tweaking, but I decided it was best to get my ass out of there and away from innocent people. And into bed. Definitely into bed.

So. Here I am. Wastebasket of wadded-up Kleenex by my side (and it is Kleenex, dammit. Brand lawyers, stuff your letters), a brain made almost entirely out of mucus. And guess what? My new computer came today! At least I have something to do instead of poring over quaint old Batman comics.

As I pistol whip Windows 7 onto admitting who’s boss, I’m imagining the bloatware I’m deleting is actually the germs in my head. That’s satisfying.

*SNORT sniff moan*

October 20, 2010
Categories: Life's Rich Pageant . . Author: drfreex . Comments: Leave a comment