Greatest Meal Ever

We married people need to get away from the kids every once in a while. The day before yesterday was our time to have the nannie watch the kids so we could make a run for it. I don’t know how we did it but we managed to cram a whole lot of weekend into just one 24 hour period.

The drive down to San Diego made me slobber with anticipation. I kept looking in my rear-view wondering why our kids were being so quiet on the trip…only they weren’t there! Hooray! Even as I celebrated their absence I naturally missed them. But that’s another story.

My Beloved and I held hands for most of the drive and it gave us time to talk about the big stuff, the kinds of things that make a person operate. Why are we here? What do you want to do next? Are we succeeding at life? We got on this topic because a number of our friends are going through a divorce. That’s the big bad word that comes up all too often among those of us married for seventeen years.

The big D-word scares me because it symbolizes hurt, failure and perhaps the last thing I’d ever want to experience. One of my friends went through a divorce that wasn’t his fault so I don’t automatically ascribe blame to both parties in every divorce. Because one person can just plain quit a marriage, I don’t see how most divorces can be avoided…the day my wife or I choose to end the marriage is the day it will end. I can’t control another person, even if that person matches my values on the day we get married. My Beloved could have left me any time in the last 17 years and I’d be here alone. I could have decided to end the marriage for whatever reason I wanted and it would be over.

I kept thinking about the fragility of marriage as I ran my impressive four and a half miles on Saturday morning. That’s a record…four and a half miles. Another day of marriage is another record because this is the longest I’ve ever been with a woman.

When we got married I was young and stupid. For some reason I thought I could trap her into a life with me by using our mutually held values as glue. I can’t think of a marriage that would have been more miserable than a marriage that just stayed together because of our shared values. It would be like doing anything for 17 years that you only did because you knew you had to. Those values came in handy during some tough times in our relationship, but our goal was always to keep marriage from being a tough time.

I’d like to go back to Friday night for a moment because we went out to this restaurant called Pacifica and it was perhaps the best food I’ve ever put in my mouth. We can’t cook fish very well so we tend to order fish when eating out. This chef knew what he was doing with food because both my plate and my wife’s plate had crazy-wonderful food on it. Not just good, but a bold treat in every bite.

I admire chefs because they have committed their life to the art of food in the same way that I have spent most of my life’s waking hours drawing. These chefs study food, make thousands of dishes all to put something good in your mouth. As with the visual arts, most culinary artists are hacks who have no business charging for the crap they make. But this guy at the Pacifica made me glad I was alive and made me glad I gave him 35 bucks for my plate of food.

That night we just sat in a Del Mar beach condo, taking in the ocean air and each other. My stomach was full and my heart was filled with love for my Beloved. I fell asleep on the couch and woke up to dessert! Angie found FOUR different flavors of Ben and Jerry’s ice cream in the condo freezer and we ate a sampling of the best ice cream in the world.

Anyways, we had 24 hours of power-fun in San Diego cramming days of experiences, feelings of gratitude, deep meaning and love in such a short period of time that I can’t imagine why we don’t do it more often. Just before leaving town, we stopped at a favorite local bead shop and made each other bead bracelets to remember the occasion.

Best meal ever. Best trip ever. Best loving ever. Best relationship ever. Best jog ever…and I thought we were in for just another 24 hours on Earth.

Litany of Humility

Written oh about 100 years ago is this Litany of Humility. I’m not Catholic, but I love reading the great Catholic minds since they seem to have a lock on such rich material. In my field of work it’s hard to fully embrace humility. Our stock and trade is notoriety. Getting the masses to view our stories means publicity, distribution and recognition are part of doing my job right. It requires exposure to a huge audience and doing business with people who are famous often for just looking good.

The Litany of Humility is a regular prayer of mine. It helps keep me in my place. In case you think it’s cute or humble that I would pray this, just know that I am arrogant. There, you’ve got that on me. When you say that all Christians are fakes, arrogant, evil etc. you’ll hear a hearty “Yessah!” from me. You sure nailed me. So any form of good, humility, regular prayer, wisdom or love shouldn’t be accredited to me as if I’m the end all source of this stuff. I don’t know if you know what you’re made of but I know what I’m made of and there’s a good reason why I’m not the author of the Litany of Humility. Mankind wouldn’t need a prayer of humility if we didn’t have such a general problem with pride in the first place.

Humility isn’t just a problem of the famous, if you’ll read this litany with me, you’ll see that even the anonymous loner can have a problem with a lack of humility. Not only do our good qualities transcend us, so do our bad qualities. This is our DNA. It’s a ball of shit that testifies against us– well, against me.

O Jesus, meek and humble of heart, hear me.
From the desire of being esteemed,
deliver me, Jesus.

Here’s the first grouping’s structure. It’s calling out the kinds of things I normally desire. From these desires these groupings begin and end with “deliver me”…

From the desire of being loved,
From the desire of being extolled,
From the desire of being honored,
From the desire of being praised,
From the desire of being preferred to others,
From the desire of being consulted,
From the desire of being approved,
From the fear of being humiliated,
deliver me, Jesus.

Some of these seem kind of reasonable; love, honor, praise, consulted, approval. But like all good things they are twisted by desire. It’s good to be honored but it’s not virtuous to desire it. In fact, we tend not to praise those who desire to be praised. So the person who desires to be praise is actually less praiseworthy.

The more I desire these things, the less likely I will get them. It’s implied that we naturally want these things and cannot deliver ourselves of this desire. That’s why we have to turn to a supernatural source of deliverance–and He’s got a name and it’s probably the last name you’d ever want to say in a time of pride and arrogance.

The poetic structure is beautiful, simple but loaded with meaning. It goes from a deliverance of desires to that last sentence of the group where we go to a deliverance of fear. It also throws down a challenge…that if we do not seek Jesus’ deliverance from these desires that we fear being humiliated. This brings us to the next grouping…the fears:

From the fear of being despised,
From the fear of suffering rebukes,
From the fear of being calumniated,
From the fear of being forgotten,
From the fear of being ridiculed,
From the fear of being wronged,
From the fear of being suspected,
That others may be loved more than I,

Opposite of desire, these are things we fear for ourselves. In fearing these attributes, we might not grasp humility. These are also terms of victimhood where we feel justified to stand proud. Why am I not humble? Because I was forgotten, ridiculed or wronged and standing proud is my just revenge.

Personally, I find these far harder to deal with. I don’t know if this is universal or just me, but I tend to struggle with these fears more than I struggle with the previous desires.

But the last line not only denotes a change of phrasing, it also has a different solution. Notice how in the first grouping to overcome desire we ask Jesus for help. This time, the solution is to value the love of others more than myself. This knocked me on my ass and instead of just reading some guy’s beautiful words I felt like I was peering into a wise man’s blueprint for mankind.

How do I overcome fear? Hope that others may be loved more than me. Actually “hope” is the wrong word because now the poetic irony comes full circle. Here the words turn to focus on others, and we need Jesus to put this new, good desire into us.

Jesus, grant me the grace to desire it.
That others may be esteemed more than I,
That in the opinion of the world,
others may increase, and I may decrease,
That others may be chosen and I set aside,
That others may be praised and I unnoticed,
That others may be preferred to me in everything,
That others may become holier than I,
provided that I may become as holy as I should.

- Rafael Cardinal Merry del Val

This kicks my ass every time I read it and I’ve been over these words hundreds of times. Not that you should be impressed with my humility. My desire is for you to be esteemed more than me. May you increase as you read the Litany of Humility. It’s a kick in my pride’s crotch.

Quiche

I made my first quiche last night. It sounded like a good idea since we had a pie crust and a bunch of eggs to use up.

It’s not bad. It’s quichey, but I cooked up some thin asparagus and it overpowers the flavor of everything else…even the onion which I’d rather taste than asparagus.

But look at me! My first quiche!

Ingredients I used:
pie crust
4 eggs
heavy cream/milk
cream cheese (a little bit…just trying this out)
grated cheddar
salt and lots of course ground pepper
pan-fried asparagus, green onions
bacon

I GOT A TIE TODAY!

A certain spouse of mine got me a present from Nordstrom’s. As the title reveals, I got a killer tie. Diagonal stripes of black, green and a little orange this baby is handsome. And Nordstrom’s makes their ties long so a 6′8″ swamp creature like myself finds generous length to tie a nice loose knot.

My first finger’s nail has a snaggle on it today so it scraped the tie and yanked a silk thread up…I couldn’t get that sucker out of the box without leaving an imperfection to prove I was there.

I put on the tie to try it out and I looked good. The universe was starting to collapse around my bitchin’ tie so I had to take it off before Mars done hit me in the face.

This tie is a mystery gift. It’s after Valentine’s Day and it’s not my birthday, we aren’t fighting and we aren’t making up so this was a neat-o freebie. I could tell by the colors and style that she was thinking about me, knowing my tastes after seeing me try to find human clothes that were remotely within my size so I could wear them before the cleaning lady put them in the dryer so the sleeves shrunk up to my elbows and I had to give the shirt up to the Salvation Army again.

Who just gets their husband a tie?! I’m so lucky. This is my lucky, lucky tie.

Doing What I’m Not Good At

I started doing the dishes. I don’t mean every day, because too afraid to commit to the task before I know that I really like it but I do. I’m the anti-dish-washer. Never liked it.

One of my high school jobs was to shuffle dishes into the washer for a 2000 person convalescent home. That’s a lot of dishes caked with bland, mushy food suitable for a mouth full of gums.

My Beloved does the dishes and I’ve always known that the key to a woman’s heart is at the dirty dish filled sink. I really wanted to do the dishes and show her that I love her, that I’m not above this simple chore, and that she was doomed to do every load of dishes for the rest of our lives.

So over the last month I’ve been enjoying a kind of renewal with her. It started with me in the dumps last year and turning a difficult corner this year but now we’re on the other side of that mountain…and I’m having fun doing the dishes.

My favorite part of dishes is strategizing about which part of the pile gets cleaned first. I like the illusion of progress to both motivate me and make my Beloved think I’ve really done a lot so I like to wash the bigger bulky dishes that are easy to clean first. It also frees up space in the sink to move around other dishes.

Some dishes are like a dirty nuke, put em’ in the sink and they will make every other dish hard to clean. Those are greasy pans because grease is evil in the sink (but gooooood in the tummy).

This just gave me a flashback when I washed dishes in that convalescent home. This lady who cooked was named Sharon I’m pretty sure. Frying pans couldn’t go in the dishwasher so we had to fill an industrial sink to wash those by hand. Keeping the water clean by pre-washing dishes was my strategy and as soon as I turned my back on that sink SPLOOP! Sharon would dump a giant dirty pan of scrambled egg shit in my clean water. Sharon. Dirty nuker.

I read this book by J.P. Moreland and one of my favorite quotes goes like this: “You’ll never amount to anything and you’ll never accomplish anything of significance unless you learn habitually to do those things you don’t like to do.”

Since it’s a deep philosophical book it’s implied that the things I don’t like to do include living a life of virtue, discipline and study. But I already like living a life of virtue (uh, sort of), being disciplined in the mind and studying. I didn’t like to do dishes. So this is part of my living a life of significance. I’m starting to like it and amazed that I’m half way through a sink of dishes before I realized I was doing them without even thinking.

She’s Thinking of Me

Angie (my wife) wrote me a note the other day and set it by the phone. It couldn’t have taken much effort but one line of it just floored me. I’ll get to that line after I torture you with the body of this post.

Little things are big things. That’s my theme song this year. I grew accustomed to operating my life through an assortment of lists “Draw two comic pages. Call agent. Design tattoo for Jennifer.” I don’t like lists but my mind has the long term memory of a scorpion so I have to make lists on post-its or on my Palm TREO thingy that never works.

I took Angie to see Cloverfield today and it felt like we were doing something wrong…because it was off the list. She was running errands through her mind and we had to decide to let all of that crap go to enjoy this time together.

There are days where Angie’s just had it. The kids have taken her out of the game or I’ve pushed her to the edge of stress by working too much, being a bum, being a narcissist. Ah, but there are other times when the spark hits. It’s this light inside Angie that’s like the glow of molten iron. She’s got fire in her belly, an unstoppable force. When you first meet her you won’t see it but get to know her and the iron will come out of this woman. It says, “Don’t F with me, I’m a goddess who is not self aware of her own power.”…and that’s the kind of power that changes civilizations. The kids know it. I know it. Angie is the world’s most beautiful anchor. Tips for you married guys: don’t compare your spouse to an anchor but indulge me just this one time.

Guys like me can say a lot of things. I can use words. But Angie just is. She isn’t eloquent and when she tells you something you can bet your life on it. I live in a town of bullshit, filled with people of bullshit who work in an industry of bullshit which is why it’s paradise to come home to the real.

Angie gets frustrated because my Christmas and birthday cards are full of little drawings of angels, thoughts etc. I do the same for my children. If you’re a friend and you’ve gotten a note from me then you likely have some of my art stuck inside. She gets frustrated because she isn’t comfortable with eloquence.

But this time she got me. Not because eloquence comes easy but because she’s not the type to romance with flowery words. She tells the truth and her words weigh ten tons around here.

I taped her note to my drawing table and I’m going to remember it forever. I’m opening up the canon of the Bible to allow this new revelation:

“I love thinking about you.” – Angie

A man can take a lot of shit in life and feel on top of the world with that knowledge. Feed me to the lions, tempt me with a pagent of women, flush my career down the toilet…I’m going to be just fine.

Cloverfield is the Most Romantic Movie Ever Made

Okay, Cloverfield is the most romantic movie ever made.

We measure the level of love a man has for a woman by the amount of sacrifice he’s willing to give for her love. Rob sacrificed everything for Beth, to a point that the universe responded with a monster invasion from another galaxy.

Here, I’ll unpack it for you. We already saw Rob love on Beth in the opening of the movie. He interviews her in bed supposedly after a night of intimacy. If I was Beth’s father I might have something to say about that but this isn’t about morality, it’s about romance. By the way, romance is rarely about morality.

Beth makes a comment about Rob’s diminutive manhood and he laughs it off. That’s love. They’re showing their comfort with each other. Ah, but Rob didn’t just nail her and run, he’s going to proverbially cuddle with her by taking Beth to Coney Island for the day. This isn’t just any old place to take a girl, but it’s clear that Beth is a woman of means when we see her gold sequined dress. She’s been in New York but hasn’t been to a trashy, pedestrian place like Coney Island.

So Rob takes “the princess” to an exciting but exotic place to a snooty chick like Beth. Like when Aladdin took Jasmine to the marketplace for the first time and she tastes the life of a peasant for the first time. They have a simple day together and while on an elevator of some kind they admit, “It’s the perfect day.” And that’s just what they had, the most perfect day ever experienced in the universe by two lovers.

Now the universe can’t have a perfect all time day, it has to counterbalance joy with some form of catastrophic event. This is a closed universe after all bound by cause-and-effect, so the most perfect day in the world created the Cloverfield monster which falls from the sky into the ocean at the moment of perfection experienced on Coney Island. The debt to pay for such joy is not satiated until Rob and Beth are blown up at the end. My theory is that when Rob and Beth are nuked, the Cloverfield monster vanishes having brought the universe back into balance.

Please read this post while shaking your head or computer screen back and forth to get the full Cloverfield effect of delivery.

N*gger

It’s MLK day so it always reminds me of the first time I heard that word. You know the word. THAT word. I was six years old and my neighbor Lonnie had crossed the street which was strictly forbidden by his parents.

This is in Norwalk, which is the appendix of Los Angeles. Scientists are pretty sure Norwalk once had a purpose but now it’s just a vestigial appendage in the final throws of existence before natural selection takes it off the map completely.

I don’t know why Lonnie did this, he was my best friend due to proximity, he was my neighbor. The perpetual trickle of yellow-green snot running from his nostril tells me he either had a deviated septum or allergies or both. But the snot ran thick so that he was always good for a few snot bubbles that could actually hold form for a few seconds.

Lonnie had crossed the street and pulled his pants down in victory and was yelling, “NIGGER! NIGGER! NIGGER!” repeatedly. It didn’t make any sense. But I new the use of that word had some serious concequences when Lonnie’s mother, Judy ran across the street, beat his ass, pulled up his pants and dragged him back home.

I didn’t understand the big deal, it was just a word. Judy was a Polock so maybe there was a cultural sensitivy to racism I wasn’t aware of in our neighborhood. That same house that Lonnie stood in front of across the street became pretty infamous to Lonnie, my brother and I over another incident.

The teen who lived at that house built a cardboard tunnel in his garage. He was half Puerto Rican…maybe Lonnie thought he was half black. Anyways, Lonnie and my brother and I would take turns with the half Puerto Rican teen crawling through the dark tunnel. It was scary enough but when we got half way through the teen told us to pull down our pants and show him our butts.

In my own mind this made perfect sense, when you’re in a dark cardboard tunnel you pull down your pants. I was fumbling with the snap on my jeans when my big brother whispered in my ear, “Doug, we have to leave. Now.” My brother and I spent most of our lives hating each other’s guts but that move he made back then probably changed the course of my life in a pretty important way. My brother and I crawled out of the cardboard tube and ran out of the garage. I turned to look back and didn’t see or hear Lonnie.

I always look back on that day and wonder if Lonnie got Mystic Rivered. I didn’t know how to process the information back then. The word “nigger” had about the same meaning as some teen trying to keep me in his cardboard garage maze.

Since that day I’ve tried to break the tie between the word “nigger” and what Lonnie went through. I can’t. That’s some deep wiring we’re jacking with and cabling that’s been set for 35 years isn’t so quickly re-routed. You tell a nigger joke and I’m thinking of Lonnie in the garage. In that garage, I was a spectator. No, wait. A coward.

But I swear, I have my own reasons for wanting that word stricken from the English language. It has nothing to do with MLK, but it sure is a word that stirs the dark waters.

Dressing Up For My Beloved

I noticed after 17 years of blissful marriage that I dressed like a complete hobo at home. I wasn’t taking good care of my body, smoking, eating all kinds of fast food, some days I didn’t wear deoderant or even brush my teeth. Scum!

Well, as a statement of love and adoration for my beloved I decided to take better care of myself around the house. That includes wearing button down shirts around the house, shaving regularly and even putting on cologn from time to time. I like treating my Beloved more like a lover than a roommate.

What’s weird is that a lot has changed around the house. Now she is dolling up her hair a little more, she’s dressing pretty damn snappy herself, wearing earrings etc.

This may not sound like a big deal but we have four kids ages 6 and under and it’s a miracle just to get their lunches packed.

Why the WGA has Done Exactly Shit for me

I’m against unions, so I’m generally against striking. I’m also against producers and against the way story and content has been drifting into sewage over the last thirty years so I’m having a hard time finding anyone to root for in this fight.

So here I am selling my first big project in 2001 and before I can make my 500k the studio says I have to join a communist, mafia-like guild before they can do the deal. I want to work, make a living on my craft and some people in this town charge a toll for that honor so I joined the Writer’s Guild. I instantly had to cut them a percentage of my check…I was in the guild after all and that’s sort of how it works. They forget about me, I give them some money and they remind me of how much I need them to tell stories in this town.

I remember my orientation meeting at the WGA where everyone around the table was asking how they can become a full member to qualify for insurance and I was asking how to get out. The leader of the orientation didn’t enjoy my lack of respect for the Hollywood Vatican and just shook his head at me in disgust. He told us new members that we might be interested in joining the many WGA writer’s groups: The Latina Writers, the Gay Lesbian Alliance of Writers, the African American Writers (I kind of wanted to join that one). I asked if there was a Republican Writing group and he said with a straight face, “You’re not going to fucking last around here.”

Fuck you you fucking commie clown. I didn’t crawl out of the mud drawing and writing every damned day of my life to get permission from you to tell a fucking story on the bigscreen. So go snort more coke off the small of your receptionist’s back. ‘For the people’ my hairy, lazy, unemployed ass.

That said, the WGA had the moral upper hand on this strike. They/we/whatever were in the right. Writers should get paid for work we do and money generated from our stories be it on DVD the internet, in animation etc. But I knew from the beginning that the guild would be broken by the producers, because though we had the moral upper hand we never had the power, and that’s because we actually stand for nothing and the producers knew it.

I even knew as I voted against accepting the deal, that a majority of my friends were rushing to vote for the settlement and to quickly go back to work. Remember, this is the same town that wants out of Iraq even though we’re winning. It’s not that we hate winning, it’s that we have a short attention span for any fight be it in Iraq or picketing on Lankershim…we don’t have the stomach to fight any more.

Early on in the strike my more naive writing friends would excitedly announce with spittle frothing out the corners of their mouth, “The Directors will come in after us and strike too! They’re threatening to strike and they’ll be on our team!” Clearly, these writers have never met a director or have never been on a set. There’s just one enemy of every director when he’s shooting, and there’s a reason why in general there’s only one person they heavily police and limit access to the set…it’s the writer. Every time the director tells HIS story he can hear a pair of vodka-lubed eyes rolling from across town and they belong to the writer. The DGA would take a bullet for the WGA the day that the WGA would take a bullet for animators.

There is nothing quite as pathetic as we animators. We actually think we’re on the bottom wrung of this town’s ladder! News to animators: we don’t even have a ladder. We’re sitting at the kiddie table while the adults are having Thanksgiving Dinner in the other room drinking alcohol on the ladder. Why animators ever thought the WGA would hold out to bring animation writing into the guild was always built on fantasy…cartoonish fantasy. The WGA kicked animation out of the deal like the French put Jews on trains bound to Germany…before they were even asked.

The WGA shut this town down and got exactly dick. My royalty checks from internet distribution of my work will amount to pennies. I don’t know who will benefit from the billions of dollars lost on the shut down in Hollywood but the craft services trucks operated by homeless Mexicans will never get their money back. Maybe the writers of The Office should cut them a check when they get paid for their webisodes.

The LOST writers announced that they’ll likely never make back in online distribution what they lost from the strike. Well, that’s great to know that not only will those of us at the kiddie table get zip from this settlement but even the most successful writers in Hollywood will testify that it was all for nothing. Hundreds of lost jobs, writers have less negotiating power than ever and some call this a victory? This is masturbation. Hooray! Let’s strike! Stick. It. To. The. Man.

It’s fun to pretend to have a moral center. Picketers were seen as mini-Jesus Christs, martyrs for a cause and instead of giving money to the homeless, Jay Leno brought us donuts on the picket line and producers bought us Frappacinos to steel our will. Because even producers and actors like to pretend to have a moral center.

If I was a producer I’d laugh at the thought of the WGA ever wanting me to give them anything else. I mean, what are we gonna do strike again?! This is why guilds and unions are bad for making entertainment, telling stories and producing anything but donations to lefty politicians. It’s price-fixing and book-cooking for the Prius crowd and we’re all a little more anemic for the ride.

Thank you, WGA for dropping my family’s insurance just before we had our fourth baby. Thank you, WGA for always being there to push every political agenda I stand against. Thank you WGA for weakening the craft of writing by throwing a wet blanket on competition. Thank your for striking when we really didn’t have the resolve, power, wisdom or integrity to pull it off and any drunken 3rd grader could read the lay of a poker table better than you.

But thanks for the free copies of DVDs nobody would ever watch as they all underperform at the box office compared to what people actually pay to see. There’s a reason why television and movie viewing is shrinking as the tried and true audience finds better entertainment surfing the web and playing video games. Hint…it’s the writing.

P.S. Please don’t keep me from working in this town and please don’t kill my family. If you’re thinking of keeping me from working just know that this is all a writing exercise. I don’t believe any of this. It shows I’m an effective writer. Okay, I wasn’t joking when I called that guy a fucking commie clown.