2/12/03 Midnight PST: A couple of things popped up -- not enough to start an all new page, but enough to note.

I agreed, a little more than a year ago, to work on a site called Panns.com for this restaurant Pann's, here in LA. The owner's kids were being taught by my wife, I really liked the guy and his family ... but I suppose it's another case of the 285th Rule of Acquisition (look it up, it'll do you some good -- while you're there, marinate on the 21st Rule as well).

Gave him a sweetheart deal, a literal steal, and he warned me the project could take months on end, which I accepted. It did -- it was a nightmare from start to eventual finish, with items coming late if at all, and every possible cliche of the crappy client relationship.

So today he fires me, and I couldn't be happier. This sort of thing is why I stopped looking for design clients because I did a number of "favor contracts" for people who knew people I knew, and so on. Nothing good every comes of it, and it makes me hate people I previously had no specific reason to hate.

No telling how much i'll get out of this with, but I find myself more and more quoting the bit if dialogue between Ving Rhames and Kurt Russell in the commercials for Dark Blue.

"How ugly do you think it's gonna get?"

Ving, without ever looking at Kurt, pauses for a few seconds. Finally, he says calmly ...

"Ugly."

Blah. So I did the paper, I reluctantly had to miss out on my friend Elliot's new karaoke CDs (he moved down the street from a karaoke supply store), and so on, et cetera, ad nauseum. I also helped lug some kind of large table away from Sav-on, for reasons I'll never understand.

It's raining, and appears to plan on continuing for some time. Rain helps me sleep, even though I'm not very fond of it (a strange conundrum for a guy named after storms). It makes everybody around me very weird -- Californians for the most part have no real resistance to anything resembling weather. People from other parts of the world are amazed that drizzle can be the lead story on the news for days at a time. People never believe me when I say this stuff, but it's all true, you can check for yourself. Some days I have a hard time believing in reality, as it's all pretty ridiculous when you look at it from an objective standpoint, or even at a slight angle, for a second.

I can't stop singing "Unforgiven" by Metallica or that Guns & Roses song where he goes, really low, "where do we go, where do we go, where do we go now?"

I've gotten a good deal of writing done, and I'm finally starting to get into a groove with the whole "working at home" thing. I have to remember to get a CD ready for my ex-boss' birthday, get my comics, and continue my constant plans for both world domination and "getting into some mess," whatever that means at the moment.

Oh, the weird animation? I found it online, and it scared and fascinated me. I've been looking for an excuse to stick it on something ever since. Whadda ya gonna do?

Carry on.

2/8/03 7:30 PM PST: I always approach writing the Soapbox blog pieces with a strange sense of dichotomy.

On one hand, I have my sad and unusual desires for attention and self-aggrandizement, my desire to communicate with a world I actively loathe. I seek attention in strange ways -- bold lightning bolts on my shirts, an anachronistic fedora on my brow -- but never know what to do when positive attention actually flows my way. I'm much more accustomed to being hated or ignored.

On the other hand, I am a dangerously private person. People who I would like to think or believe certain things can easily come to this website and find the truth, despite my carefully crafted narratives. I often sit in the back, refusing to join the conversation, because I view it as futile and because very little good has come from more than two years of conversations I've tried to have.

In any case, I have been wanting to get back to this all week, but have had some ... distractions which kept me from it. In any case, here's some of the things I can peel off the inside of my skull and show to you.

Michael Jackson is dangerously, seriously, personally insane:
I had plans to go see my favorite karaoke jock Michelle (see front page of the personal site for a look at her) and her band play somewhere in the godless wastelands of the Valley, also using the time to kick it with my cyclopic homeboy Elliot, as it was his birthday. Alas, I forgot that the freakshow of Michael Jackson's all-out expose was on ABC. When I found out Michelle's show was $10, that cinched it -- drive to the Valley or pay, not both. I sat down in front of the tube in the bedroom and watched. In horror.

My real interest in the show was to hear what Mike would say about his rapidly eroding face. I don't know why it fascinates me so, but the idea of somebody taking what amounts to maybe three or four pounds of flesh from their face (there's an eBay auction waiting to happen) in this fashion is too bizarre not to examine. I'm watching this madness, horrified, cringing at the public relations nightmares he creates with every offhanded comment, every Anna-Nicole-esque dreamy babble (I'm not on his staff, but I can understand the pain of those who are charged with his public image), like watching a horror movie. The creepy amusement park. The fawning teenaged devotee. The clearly white kids (I'm sorry, unless "vitilago" affects the genetic structure of sperm, or Debbie Rowe and his surrogate have literally the strongest concentrations of melanin-defusing chemicals known to man, them kids ain't Mike's). The harrowed and nervous looking phalanx of staffers (who was the Black woman who shadowed them everywhere?) I was unable to look away. I haven't been that creeped out since I saw an episode of inside Schwartz.

For years now, I've been trying to give Mike the benefit of the doubt. I mean, he does spend a lot of money doing nice things for other people. When I heard "Another Part of Me" and saw the "Remember The Time" videos, I somehow suspected a secret spark of Afrakan pride and consciousness dwelled within that hacked up head. When he joined with Sharpton and attacked the music industry, for all the hilarity of it, I felt more encouraged. Now? Those were flukes, dawg. Mike's crazier than a horse with no neck.

So that's dominated discussion the latter part of this week (as well as, I understand, gotten a lot of law enforcement professionals watching tapes of the interview for a reason to shut his wacky ass down).

My comic book got kicked back to me:
As I've mentioned in previous Soapboxes and at various points on my site, I'm trying (sort of) to be a comic book writer. I sent my very first comic book proposal in, via my pal who works there, and thought I was halfway on the road. He then kicks it back to me, saying that the pages are "disjointed" and needed some work. He didn't say that when I asked him to look at the script, before the drawing happened, months ago. No, at the 11th hour he says. So I go back to my team, artist Eric Battle and letterer Marshall Dillon, and let them know. I decide some captions, explaining (for the US comic buying populace is not much smarter than the regular populace, who made Joe Millionaire a success) everything more clearly. It was a frustrating and demeaning exercise, but god knows I've done worse things for money. We'll see how that goes, and once the proposal is approved/disapproved, i'll post the first five pages for all the world to see, right here on the Operative Network.

That notwithstanding, my cautious bubble of hope and optimism sank back down into my normal bogs of rage and frustration. I know it's taken decades for some people to even get as far as I have in two years, but that's cold comfort for me, now, working on this. Plus le change, plus le meme chose, as they say in "gay Par-ee." Sometimes cold comforts, if they're enough, are all you can get.

Black film and white preconceptions:
I just posted a feature article I did for the paper about the movie Biker Boyz (which I did after talking to my dear friend, super publicist Ava DuVernay). I'm always amused by how easy and excusable it is, even in the supposed objective world of art and criticism, for some people (mainly white people) to wear their prejudices like a badge of honor, when others (mainly people of color) are considered parochial or even naive to think of things from their own way first. The piece discusses one instance of how it goes wrong.

My personal life:

"If you feel good, about feeling bad, about doing the wrong thing, it's all right."
       -- Inpu Ka Mut

I would love to do nothing more than rant on about my issues with the people in my personal life, some of which are really great and some of which are really, really not. The reasons why I don't is because some of the issues in question are of such a delicate nature that it would be considered damaging to air them, and in some cases the reasons why are because it could be a legal liability to me to have such firm evidence of my activity at a later date. I'll let you figure that one out for yourself.

"If you love somebody, you've gotta be willing to break their spirit."
       -- Dr. Christopher Turk, Scrubs

In any case, some days I feel like the guy who just saw Monica Lewinsky walking out in the blue dress and mentioned the stain -- so much I'd love to say, and so little ability to do so. At heart, I'm an honest person (more because lying requires precious thought and memory I'd rather devote to Transformers specs and comic book storylines than any real moral adherance to concepts of truth and its ilk), but I've had to learn, more and more, to say less and less as I advance along the horrible conveyer belt through time. If it's any help, the two quotes above keep time, line dancing in my cerebral cortex.

I feel like I had more to say, but that may just be what I won't say, so let's end it on this.