Almost Time for Halloween

Lou Reed Has a Posse

Lewis Allan "Lou" Reed
March 2, 1942 – October 27, 2013
Lou Reed has a posse.

Marcia Wallace Has a Posse

Marcia Karen Wallace
November 1, 1942 − October 25, 2013
Marcia "Edna Krabappel" Wallace has a posse.

Happy Hump Day

No television, two weeknights in a row. Such a small window every night to get a spot of writing done. A friend from Fox (Fox & Friends?) called last night and we officially reopened a conversation that will hopefully lead to a new project.

Wednesday. It's only Wednesday. These weeks seem long.

It's getting colder. Night falls earlier. Winter is coming.

I Hate Williamsburg

I'm all ready to recommend this new bar in Williamsburg called CROWN VICTORIA because it's got a crazy backyard space and drinks that aren't too expensive...

... then I try to take the train home at the end of the night.

Around 12:30a. Not terribly late. Just trying to get back into Manhattan with my monthly Metrocard.

I enter the Bedford station and there's a hint of smoke in the air.

One of those yellow sanitation trains is parked on the Manhattan-bound track...

Where it remains...

Unmoving...

For the next hour...

As the crowd swells and no announcements are made!!!

So no fucking Manhattan-bound trains, then.

I get out of the motherfucking station, grab a goddamn FUCKING cab and pay

MOTHERFUCKING $20+ 

just to get back into god damn motherfucking civilization.

That didn't even get me home. That got me to another train station in the city where I was finally able to catch a running train.

So, a royal FUCK YOU, WILLIAMSBURG. Last time I'm hanging out there at night.

This is a Picture of the Shittiest Extras in the World

This is a still image from a movie I was working on a year ago.

What you are looking at is a picture of some of the most loathsome background people ever captured on celluloid.

THIS is the reason I've come to loathe extras in general. I look at the background of television and movies now and feel the prickly heat of hate in my heart for all those mute motherfucking meat-props.

There are people who do extra work full time. These people are unacceptable.

You Can't Go Home

A small trip away from the city this weekend, with friends. To a rundown old camping ground at least 30 years past its prime. Took my first personal day off from work since I started the accounting crew gigs, over a year ago. Three days, two nights. In a cabin in the woods, surrounded by vacant cabins. I thought the small retreat would help stir my creative mind as I attempted to figure out my next project.

Both nights... I dreamed of work.

In this spartan cabin in the woods with no running water, I dreamed of processing fucking invoices.

Two nights in a goddamn row.

Sunday morning, I went on a coffee run with one of my friends. I started telling him about how close we were to where I grew up. I didn't realize just how close until he plugged my middle school into his GPS. We were minutes away from the place where I went to junior high school.

We drove there. To Pomona Junior High School. Gradually, I remembered little landmarks along the way. I remembered the curves of the roads.

There was a cop car parked at the school so we just drove by without stopping, but there it was. Unchanged from the outside.

And I knew if we were that close to my old junior high school, we were absurdly close to my old home.

It took me a second to remember the address where I lived from 5th grade to 12th grade.

This was the corner where I waited for the school bus on all those mornings. I dreaded waiting on that corner. I dreaded the sight, the sound, the stench of that big yellow bus lumbering over the horizon toward me. I hated school with a passion and that fucking bus was doom.  One morning, I slipped on a patch of ice at that corner; fractured my wrist and got a scar that remains today.  You want to talk about bad places?  This corner was a bad place.

This...

This was our house growing up.

Painted a different color now, with a few more trees in the front lawn, but this used to be my home. My original fortress of solitude.

A ferocious flood of bad memories. Which can't be the complete truth. By no means did I have a happy childhood or adolescence — socially awkward and largely friendless — but this home was a sanctuary. My bedroom was my own personal panic room. I adored my summer vacations. I read books, watched movies, played video games, shot little animated videos, wrote my short stories. Wrote a lot of short stories that are largely lost. (Perhaps for the better.)

This house was built for our family. I remember visiting the architect with my parents, gazing at the blueprints, and dreaming of finally getting the dog that they promised I could get once we lived in a house.

I remember us visiting the house while it was still just a skeletal frame. We drove by it and there were some neighborhood kids on bikes out front. They flipped us the bird while we drove away. The Mancuso boys were fucking dick-holes. There were a few dick-hole neighbors.

Across the street from our old house was a nearly identical one. Where my younger cousins lived. Like most family, I'd lost touch with them years ago. We watched an older man putter about in his garage.

"Is that your uncle?"

"I don't know. I don't remember if they still live there."

"He looks Filipino!"

"Does he?"

"We should say hi!"

"No... I'm not sure it's them."

I told my friend to drive on. As we left, I was pretty sure that that *had* been my uncle. I'm not sure what good it would have done to say hello. I haven't seen my own dad in over ten years; why should I grace my uncle with my presence?

We drove past the small park where I kissed a girl for the first time. The parking lot was under construction and we couldn't go in, so we drove further down the road... to the church my family used to attend.

It was about 9:30am. All these people were probably attending the 9am mass.

We parked in the lot. I bummed a smoke from my friend and we stood by the car, smoking while I told my friend about going there for CCD, going through confirmation and how I just sort of stopped going to church somewhere during high school.

It felt grim revisiting these old places.  Like going on a ghost tour.  My immediate family's scattered to the wind and, for so many years, these places have only existed in my deeper memories.  Revisiting them superficially — and completely impromptu — left me feeling vaguely haunted.

This was no longer my home.  This hadn't been my home in many years.  If I ran into anyone I knew back in those years, they would not recognize me.  For this brief detour, it was as if I were a ghost, retracing an old familiar pattern in the ground.

Exodus

I've got to step away for a few days to take care of some unfinished business.

Flynn White versus Walter White, Jr.

[SPOILERS]
I've never understood the appeal of naming your child after yourself.

I understand the appeal of fathering a great dynasty.  Being the father that you wish you'd had.  Giving your child opportunities and support that you lacked.

But naming your child after yourself?  What does that even mean?  It makes all paperwork a lot more fucking cumbersome.  And for what?  To what end?

I may be thinking about it incorrectly but it seems to me that it requires a unique brand of ego to proclaim, "I'm so great, my son will want the same name to carry on some manner of tradition."

That is neither here nor there.

Let's jump to the end of "GRANITE STATE".  Walt Sr goes to a bar and gets Walt Jr on the horn.  THIS is what Walt Sr should have started with:

"I know you're upset with me but I need you to listen to me: I didn't kill your Uncle Hank.  A group of Neo-Nazis killed your Uncle Hank.  I gave up everything to try to save him and I failed miserably.  I don't have a lot of time left but I need you to know: I'm going to use the remainder of my life to avenge your Uncle Hank..."

Flynn was a defender of his old man for large part of the series and I just feel like.... he wasn't given enough of a chance to truly hear *some* of his dad's side of The Story.  I feel like if he really understood what his dad had done and tried to do, he might not be so dismissive of him at the end.

Breaking Bad: Felina/Finale

[SPOILERS]
This won't be the last Breaking Bad post here.  There are still a few things I wanna do.  Had a career crisis I had to deal with this past week which fucked my shit up — and I'm not out of the woods with that, either, but I had a good talk with my manager last night and I... well, you don't care about that, do you?

With its finale on Sunday, BREAKING BAD cemented itself as the greatest show in television history!

I feel that very few shows manage to stick the landing.  There are some shows with such awful endings (LOST, DAMAGES, DEXTER) that actually manage to retroactively drag down the entirety of the series.  It's not easy crafting an ending to a long-form drama.

What so peculiar about Breaking Bad is that they made it look easy.  I was thinking the last episode was going to be packed but... it wasn't.  It touched all the bases it needed to touch and it walked home with an unhurried pace.  It did everything it needed to do and better than expected.  For me, it joins THE SHIELD and SIX FEET UNDER as one of the strongest series finales ever.  More than either of them, though, I feel like the show never suffered a dip in quality.  It remained so strong from beginning to end that it's a show I feel you can revisit and TEACH with.  It's a fucking clinic on dramatic writing.  I don't know how they managed to keep it so strong and sure-footed all the way through.  Was it all the guidance of Vince Gilligan?  Was it the specific group of writers he managed to find?  We'll see with their future endeavors...

Breaking Bad tops my all-time favorite list.  And it does that even though I think it took a few missteps.  But that's for another day.