Personal Yak

I am, with great reluctance, taking a course at our local writers’ workshop in TV writing. The reluctance comes from television production being one of the douchiest activities one might devote time and effort to, maybe a notch above being a club promoter, whatever that is, and a few steps below flipping houses for fun and profit. Writers are supposed to be antisocial, chronically depressed and dysfunctional outside of their imaginary paper worlds of letters and prose, so collaborative writers are the absolute worst. But I do spend an unhealthy amount of time watching, re-watching, and deconstructing television, and I’m not a huge fan of books and reading — join the twenty-first century, Gutenberg! — so here I am, blogging instead of doing my actual classwork.

Finding a foothold in the business, or the “biz” if you’re too lazy to let two syllables fall from your mouth, requires a spec script: a production-quality script for a show that’s already on the air. The spec script is the focus of the class, and there’s a pretty standard process to generating the darn thing. Last week, for our second class, our homework was to choose a television show to spec. This week we need ideas, just one-sentence long but hinting at the desires and obstacles in the storyline. It’s a scatterbrained exercise in awkward wish-fulfillment that’s been haunting me the entire week — and I don’t expect the ghost to disappear after tonight’s class.

I chose Community, mostly because I feel like I know it better than anything else on television. I’m hoping that advantage will outweigh the show’s pitfalls, because I considered for a while writing a generic mystery with fungible one-dimensional characters that could easily be transplanted into CSI or Criminal Minds or NCIS or Body of Proof or any of those other shows where the team sits around a table and profiles the killer. So I picked up my pen and headed on my journey, searching for the mythical Fountain of Ideas, mostly looking on the internet and at Barnes & Noble. I might have found a few idea wells, or underground idea springs, but so far, it’s all been elusive, some drops of condensation barely slaking my parched throat in this desert.

Here’s my first, and best, idea. Try not to open-palm slap your forehead when you read it:

Troy is excited when Dean Pelton replaces Annie’s Boobs with a trained helper monkey.

I just enjoy the words “trained helper monkey,” which I don’t think is necessarily a bad thing in this case.

As an aside, this Wikipedia page contains a photo and caption with the best sentence ever written in the English language: “A United States TSA inspects a service monkey before a flight.”

One place I wandered for some inspiration was fanfiction.net, a repository for unintentionally hilarious fan writing. After spending the appropriate amount of time ironically enjoying pornographic Parks and Recreation fanfics — it’s just the incredible tonal discrepancy between the show’s general indifference to prurience and this accidentally clumsy scene of Leslie stripping in front of Ben. I didn’t have the mental strength to plow through all twenty-four pages of the story index, but there’s a pretty clear pattern which is sort of helpful and sort of not. I’d say that a good ninety-eight percent of what the unwashed masses wrote is slash fiction, tiding them over while they wait for some screen time between Jeff and Annie’s lowercase-boobs. It’s a vicarious thrill, not just fantasizing about sex with Joel McHale or Alison Brie but also sitting in front of a keyboard posting it online. Here are people who want something, something specific, from this show.

Which I don’t. I think there’s some amusing potential with Troy getting a helper monkey or Annie reconnecting with the simpering gay guy she lost her virginity to, but it’s not like emotionally invested in that stuff happening. You probably can’t even do that: puppet-master the characters into the behavior that you’d like to see rather than what comes organically to them. I like these people too much to watch them be disingenuous just to satisfy some shipper’s fantasy.

This leads me back to my original problem, which is what can I get these people to do that they haven’t done before and that they actually would do?

Hard to believe the Discovery Channel is showing a nature documentary — it’s kind of like MTV playing music videos. The hell is this? Where are my mouth-breathing ghost hunters, extreme fishermen or hillbilly motorcycle builders? Fuck you, Discovery Channel: I ain’t watchin’ yer fancypants movin’ pick-chures on the TV fer seein’ the stunnin’ grand glory’a mother Earth. All this planet’s good for is mining gold out of and shoving doomsday bunkers into. You can suck my cock, baby harp seal.

I’m not surprised. We have knuckle-draggers here in America who are still questioning evolution, who think the earth is six-thousand years old and, I assume, flat. And it’s not like everyone else hasn’t sold out yet, but it still saddens me to know that Planet Earth, Life, and now Frozen Planet are anomalies on a station that used to be devoted to science and exploring the natural world.

What was that, Deadliest Catch? You dropped a little cage in the ocean and some crabs scuttled into it? Here’s a family of ten-ton killing machines hunting and eating weaker animals. Find one thing in that sentence that Middle America won’t cream itself over. If that orca pod ran a kitschy old-fashioned auction house, they’d be Discovery’s biggest hit.

I know I’m being glib, that people who watch American Chopper and Bering Sea Gold are responding to a rapidly-changing, modernizing, urbanizing world that’s left them fallen behind and disenfranchised, that they’re latching onto the most daring or inventive parts of the blue-collar manufacturing or natural resources sectors because they need the comfort of something immediately present against a world where you could lose your home at any moment thanks to a sketchy financial instrument existing only in cyberspace. But I also think documentaries like Frozen Planet do a very good job of making the frightening world outside the suburban red-state bubble seem quite appealing, and it dredges up a conflict between the supposed safety of Home and the temptation of the unknown in Outside.

Look at this clip: it’s something called a brinicle, a current of gradually freezing water under the Antarctic ice shelf that consumes whatever living creatures it touches. I’m sitting in my chair, in New Jersey, and brinicles are forming at this very moment. I’ll never see this in person, but I’d like to. Just take a few extra steps out into the wild.

Because I’m not twelve years old.

All I want to do is watch the latest episode of Cougar Town, and I am sick and tired of this message popping up:

Oh, that’s okay, Hulu, you don’t have to apologize for being unable to present me with some advertising. Don’t feel bad.

I understand how your business model works, that Cougar Town‘s patronage doesn’t come from individuals invested in a sweet, funny, heartfelt twenty-one minute break from the soul-consuming drudgery that is modern life but rather cynical corporate interests betting that my familiarity with Cougar Town will translate into a Chevrolet Cruze purchase. I’ve been watching advertiser-supported television since the day my eyes first opened, and I’m inured to commercials interrupting my narrative.

But then you ask me to disable Adblock Plus, which opens my Facebook pages to ads from semi-legitimate Ukranian online dating start-ups and plops obnoxious high-end fashion designer ads on NYTimes.com and invites those cookie-creeps at DoubleClick to start data mining my web history, all just so the Geico gecko can sell me car insurance? I don’t even have a car.

Embed your advertising in the same video stream as Cougar Town, and then I’ll get back to my usual business of ignoring it. Thanks.

I heard about Stephen Pressfield’s ode to the Muse, The War of Art, on the Nerdist podcast, which is always straddling the line between encouraging aspiring artists and obnoxiously shaming them for not throwing themselves headfirst into what the hosts readily admit is a frustrating, punishing lifestyle with little chance of a payoff. I’m a bit embarrassed to admit this is the second piece of merchandise I’ve purchased after Nerdist approval, although I have nary a complaint about the Tweaked Audio earbuds… yet. I bought The War of Art after another episode where professional comedians Chris Hardwick and Jonah Ray badger their friend and part-time comedian Matt Mira to write more jokes and Ray casually tossed off the book as a cure for the writers’ block. Amazon had a used one for about eight dollars, and I had this gift card I wanted to be rid of, so the stars aligned perfectly.

Pressman gives some serious lip service to the ideas of professionalism in being an artist, for producing art for its own sake, but he clearly sees writer’s block as a kind of spiritual poverty. Your fear leaves you closed off to the Muse, he analyzes. He dips into the well of Jungian psychobabble — procrastination is a disjunction between the Ego, operating in the world of Reality, and the Self, which functions in the realm of Possibility. Whatever, dude. Page after page of locked doors to inspiration isn’t very useful unless there’s a key at the end, which there isn’t — unless God loves you, but then you wouldn’t be reading this book in the first place, would you? Pressman diagnoses, then personifies, writers’ block as capital-R Resistance. It’s fair enough, lumping all the shit that keeps you from achieving your dreams under an umbrella term and whacking you repeatedly with the term, like a manifesto.

But the thing is, Pressman’s constant bludgeoning with this bullying Resistance character is, at least in the short term, a decent prod. The book moves incredibly quickly — 169 pages in a little over an hour for me, which is probably my speed-reading personal best — so every thirty seconds or so, there’s another exhortation to stop dicking around with Resistance and get a move on. Pretend you have cancer, just six months to live — Pressman doesn’t hesitate to dump that weight on the reader and ask the obvious, would you still spend time watching TV, or buying useless crap, or having meaningless, emotionally unfulfilling sex, or would you finally get started on that novel you’re always talking about, geez! More than once, I did consider dropping the book in my hands and getting a move on that screenplay, and that web venture, and that girlfriend, and that better job. But I didn’t. And now I’m writing a blog post. I guess we’ll see what I do next.

The debt crisis bill that President Obama signed on Tuesday made nobody happy. It pissed off progressives like myself because it lets mega-businesses and the obscenely wealthy rape America’s working and middle classes, and it pissed off the Teabaggers because they’re not happy we still have a government impinging on their rights to be skullfucked by the Koch brothers and Americans For Prosperity. But I’ve come up with a solution that will not only make everyone happy, but also reduce our national entitlement expenses, and I’m totally disappointed that nobody from the Administration asked for my advice before screwing us all over.

Here’s the deal: if you’re an unpatriotic, avaricious sack of shit who equates paying your taxes to surrendering to the tyranny of a government that sometimes half-heartedly thinks maybe the mentally insane should have to wait a couple of days before buying a stash of automatic weapons, then I have a new tax rate for you. Zero. That’s right, you can live here in America, in what your buddy Sean Hannity called “the best, greatest, free-est, most awesome, bitching-est, amazing-est country God ever created so all the rest of you nations can suck it,” without paying a dime in taxes. Yes, you can hold onto all of your money, even though we all know that the U.S. dollar is just an Islamo-atheist-socialist conspiracy to take away our God-given rights to barter with sheep.

There’s a catch, of course. If you’re not supporting the country financially, then the country’s not going to reciprocate. I assume since Teabaggers hate the government, this isn’t going to be a dealbreaker for them — like when an ugly woman refuses to sleep with you. Y’all know what I’m talkin’ about, Alabama. So, no taxes, but also no more Social Security checks, no more Medicare. When God gets sick of your anti-climate change bullshit and sends a tornado or hurricane or flood to wipe your trailer park off the map, don’t expect FEMA to show up. The free market can clean up the mess.

I’m still working out some of the details. I know, for example, how frustrated Teabaggers are when airplanes land safely on airport runways instead of falling out of the sky after their wings and engines detach from the fuselage, so maybe the FAA can do something about that. It’s just a matter of figuring how to segregate planes between actual tax payers and rugged individualists. Also, the Teabaggers hate going to their local grocery store WalMart and feeling confident that the FDA and USDA made sure there’s no rat feces or dismembered human body parts in the food they’re about to put into their bodies, so I want to help them out with that, too. And the Postal Service: sending a letter from Maine and receiving home delivery in California a few days later for less than fifty cents? That needs to stop. And banking — how fucking irritating is it when you go to the bank and you know that your money will be there, since it’s FDIC insured?

I’m thinking of a class of Tea Party businesses — also tax-free and federal government free. Businesses that can do whatever the hell they want, with only minor exceptions like enforcing trademark and patent claims, transporting goods via the Interstate Highway System, getting SBA loans or low-interest Federal Reserve loans, getting passports to do business abroad…

See, President Obama, this is what we call “win-win”.

It’s no secret that I’ve been on OKCupid for a couple of years now. It’s certainly no secret now that I’ve written about it on this blog. There’s a lot to recommend about the site — it has a kind of cheeky, encouraging attitude; it’s free; and the creators are really into math, so the site is full of dating tips with some statistical evidence behind them rather than your hapless friends trying to tell you what women are into. It has a feature that lets you upload pics of yourself and it presents them to the community in a Kittenwar-style survey that reports back which photos are most likely to get you noticed by which demographics. It’s all really… well, I can’t say “useful,” so I’ll go with the more nebulous “interesting.”

The psychological process behind the site both fascinates and horrifies me. It was loading slowly today, so on the home page, my browser rendered the snippets of womens’ profiles before it had downloaded the corresponding photos. Maybe ten usernames and half a profile paragraph each, and I started reading, judging and classifying — file this one away for later, ignore that one. And then the photos came in… and this profile blurb that had caught my eye just ten seconds ago suddenly turned into, “What was I thinking?”

I know we all do that, even though we were taught not to judge a book by its cover and that an ugly duckling might become a beautiful swan, we’re all fundamentally superficial assholes. But my issue is that I’m very much aware that I’m no Abercrombie model, or Abercrombie store employee, or Abercrombie customer. In euphemisms, I have a great personality. Okay, maybe not a great personality. But I do have a personality. Anyway, I guess I’m figuring my personality doesn’t get much of a chance to grow on you — yes, like a fungus — when my physical appearance has to compete with the guy next to me. The good news is that an overwhelming proportion of OKCupid’s male population is pretty fucking hideous. I’m talking scales and lizard tongues and extra nipples on their foreheads, plus a lot of us look like Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons. Yeah, people who look like Don Draper or Robert Pattinson or whoever the beefcake of the zeitgeist is generally don’t need to post headshots on a free dating service and complete the sentence, “When I masturbate, I think about…”

Point is, it sucks being rejected just because your nose is too big or your hairline’s too high or you’re only five-foot-six, which I am not. I’m five-foot-six and a half. And there’s the Golden Rule, do unto others, which makes me feel like a dick when I reject someone I could be really compatible with just because their photo doesn’t conform to our cultural “standards” of “beauty” that the “media” forces on “society”. Or they have tattoos. Sorry, body art’s a big turn off for me.

But that doesn’t mean we can’t be friends. …No, really, I said that rejecting someone on their picture makes me feel like a dick, but it should make me feel like a dick because it’s a total dick thing to do. I don’t care if everyone does it, if it’s a by-product of our six-million years of evolution, trying to keep the species flourishing — as an adult, you’re supposed to be able to find value in things besides ogling someone till you fuck them. The strange thing I’ve found is that as you come to know someone, come to like them, they magically grow more physically attractive and all that biological imperative stuff flies out the window, as if God’s rewarding you for not being a totally superficial, horrible asshole.

Since OKCupid is so study-minded, I’d be very curious to see what would happen if they turned the user photos off for a couple of days, if people contact the same kinds of people they do when they’ve got a thousand words they can jump to a conclusion from. I wonder if the domain name “blinddate.com” is available — I’m fairly confident someone’s scooped it up by now — but I’d like to do the world a favor and build a match.com where you only get to see someone’s picture after you’ve sent them a message. OKCupid had a similar feature — it’s gone now, so I’m assuming it didn’t do all that well. Because people are shallow twits.

Um… date me?

My friend Erica and I were making our fall travel plans when we got some disturbing news out of the fractured remnants of the Hapsburg Empire and forcing us on an emergency detour. The far-right Dutch government, tired of tourists getting giggly at the Anne Frank house and being just plain old prickly far-right buzzkill douchebags, is closing all of the country’s famous coffeehouses to foreign tourists. This is the problem with Dutch koffiehuis patrons — they tend to be preoccupied on election day.

The strange thing is that I was never in all that big of a hurry to sample Dutch “coffee” in the first place. Amsterdam — Holland — has been on my bucket list for a while, but I fantasized about the Rijksmuseum and bringing home duty-free Delftware. I figured I’d check out the red light district, more out of anthropological curiosity than anything prurient, since here in America at least, red light districts are about as erotic as a gas station bathroom and covered with a slithering, slimy film of venereal disease. It could be different abroad: the red light district in San Jose, Costa Rica is a strip of downtown full of Vegas-style Atlantic City-style casinos, tiny women with huge freak tits swarming the blackjack tables, keeping the turnover high save for the one glazed-eyed guy robotically hitting and standing. The red light district in Prague — well, the whole city is more or less a red light district — but it has a wonderfully Bauhaus post-expressionism, like the city, well over-saturated in smut, grew totally jaded.

And I figured I’d check out Amsterdam’s “coffee” culture, to dip a toe into the laid-back, anti-establishment peer group I aspire to. Just cause you can over there. I’ve been offered “coffee” twice in my life, and both times I’ve turned it down out of general pussitude, the irrational fear that the TV propaganda from the Partnership for a Drug-Free America might be onto something. My first offer was my junior year of college — I had some friends who had this friend who was a walking pharmacopeia, who’d rattle off crazy drug slang like “pikachu” or “greenies” and who’d patiently explain to us the difference between Afghani hashish and Pakistani hashish. The conversation would invariably end with bewilderment, “How do you… know this?” I mean, I have trouble getting medicine for an inner ear infection. Anyway, this guy knew a guy who knew a dealer, and anyway, the second guy was in a sharing mood with his “coffee.” We lit and passed around a “mug” of it, but by the time it got to me, I thought, “Gee, that is not sanitary at all.”

I suppose it’s telling; swapping germs probably isn’t something “coffee” aficionados spend much time worrying about. Or anything else.

The other time I was fixing this dude’s computer, quite the libertine, and he just offered me some “coffee” right when I was there upgrading his Windows XP. A friendly gesture, really, since he also offered me booze and girls (or boys), but it seemed like a rather meretricious way to lose one’s “coffee” virginity. Goddamn dignity!

So I was taken aback by my reaction to the news of the Netherlands transitioning their coffeehouses to a members-only network, that something I have no real interest in participating in back at home is suddenly (a little more) off-limits on the other side of the world. It’s a sign of where the world’s going, that same crusty old white-man shock that hits when some racist mouth-breathers down in Arizona demand to see Hispanics’ papers at a traffic stop or when fundie psycho-Christians try to ban abortions in South Dakota. The world is slowly slipping back to its status quo from the days when President Obama said he’d close Guantanamo Bay and Conan O’Brien was still on network television. It’s probably unfair to compare the masterpieces at the Van Gogh Museum or the Sloten Windmill, built during the Industrial Revolution and still draining the dikes, to the Administration’s failure to pass single-payer healthcare or the Catskill-quality comedy stylings of Jay Leno but I want to see the world before it all falls apart.

That was my impetus behind visiting the lesser Europe in the first place. I still have a lot of the more prosperous, non-former Iron Curtain Europe on my list: Spain, Switzerland, Amsterdam, but I’ve got to believe that they’re all whitewashed by globalization. One of my tour leader’s warnings about Great Britain was that things on this continent might be different — not quite as civilized, let’s say — than on your home continent, whether that home continent is North America, or Australia, or North America. I assume it’s boilerplate tour guide spiel, standardized for Los Angeles or Tokyo or Mali, but the first world is the first world and the biggest difference between New York and Paris, or Zurich, or Berlin is the language. That, and of course the free health care and the name of the local big-box discount store, but I’m talking culturally. Croatia, of all places, has opened itself up not to just to adventurers looking to explore the Dalmatians but also to shit-beer swilling, fanny-packed, sunblock-slathered tourists, the same idiots clogging up the sidewalk in front of Rockefeller Center. And someday, they’ll overrun Romania, Bulgaria, Albania — I even found “Let’s Go: Kosovo” on the shelf in Idlewild Books, and I still thought, “Let’s not.”

This could’ve been a teachable moment, but of course it turned into a circus with the puritanical Republicans faking umbrage and the spineless weasels running the Democratic party calling for Weiner to resign. Weiner himself, who’s generally not a total pussy carrying his tail between his legs, was a disappointment too. I don’t care what the hell he does in his free time, who he tweets or how many photos of his cock he has — if the man can get me affordable health coverage, I want him in Congress. This would have been perfect too: Weiner is not a moralizing family-values Republican, he was never flipping out about the kids these days sexting, plus he never even met the women he was communicating with, let alone fucked them Vitter-style. I wanted to his press conference be a two-sentence smackdown of our country’s lazy, embarrassing news media and its journalists who can’t tell the difference between relevant stories and fodder for late-night comedians. “It’s none of your goddamn business. Fuck off.”

Now Weiner’s off to rehab, which is where white people go when they fuck up publicly. Not fuck up publicly like starting an illegal war in Iraq that the media’s not covering because their journalist contingents are too busy looking at dick photos or following Sarah Palin around and broadcasting whatever idiocy comes out of her mouth. And not fuck up publicly like by failing to close a loophole in our nation’s gun laws that a crazy guy could exploit and then shoot Gabby Giffords. But, you know, if it’s drugs or sex, prurient crimes that let us titter behind our imagined moral superiority, then it’s rehab.

I walked on past. It was a grotesque failure of coordination, but what exactly could I do for him? Besides, the guy who just belly-flopped face first on the sidewalk already had a companion for leaning on, someone to ask him the egregious, obnoxious question, “You okay?” There was a man coming the other way, on his cell phone. There were only four of us on the block, and we all must have seen each other. He ended his conversation, hung up his phone. We passed each other. I didn’t turn back. I hope the cell phone guy didn’t stop, bend down, ask, “You okay?” That shit would just make me look the a-hole.

Not to be phlegmatic, but there’s nothing I could do, no magical healing touch hands or time machine, heading back to warn this poor guy that the sidewalk’s uneven. I still felt guilty — rationalizations aside, no, I still looked guilty, and felt resentful at this moral point. Next time I klutz out and wipe out, I’d actually hope that the useless innocent bystanders would have the common courtesy to pretend like nothing happened, that I didn’t just make an ass and a spectacle of myself in front of total strangers.

The obvious solution would be to replace all of our sidewalks with spongy foam blocks, turning our lovely city into a grown-up Gymboree.