Thursday, April 11th 2008

I forego the entire idea of waking up to the alarm this morning. I get out of bed at around 11:45 and go and check my email/surf the net for a while. Sammy sent me a MySpace message saying that she “lmao’d” her ass off at my karaoke songs from yesterday. These kids and their wacky internet slang. I guess I can thank god that she doesn’t actually speak like that in person, because then I’d be inclined to take her out back and snub her out. I spend about an hour mulling around in cyberspace, where I get an email from Jeff G. asking me to email him the photos I took a few months ago on the second day of shooting for his previous short film OPEN HOUSE. The file size of all the pics is just under 40mb, so I go over to www.rapidshare.com and upload a RAR file of all the pics for him to download. We email each other back and forth about what we are working on, he is almost done shooting his new short film TRAINING GOGGLES, and laments the fact that I couldn’t be on set with him (a fellow crew member of his and I had some problems a few months ago, but since then it has been fixed). I tell him not to worry about it, and we chat about the script I’m working on.

I realize that it has been almost 20 hours since I’ve eaten anything, so I mosey out to the kitchen in search of food when I find Joe curled up on the couch playing his GameBoy. He wasn’t feeling good, and had stayed home sick from school. We chat for a few minutes, while I heat up some enchiladas from the night before, and then head off to my room to eat and watch last night’s SOUTH PARK. The episode wasn’t as funny as last week’s, but it was still fun to watch, and it is good to see Mr. Garrison back to his former glory. After lunch, I got dressed and decided to head off into the great unknown of the city for a while before having to go pick up Sammy from school at 2:30 p.m. Mom shows up a few minutes later and says that she’s home from work early (her boss went into the hospital) and that she’d go and get Sam. I tell her ok, and we talk for a few before she changes out of her work clothes and leaves.

Since I still had 4 hours before work, I thought I’d call up Ace and see if he wanted to go over the final act of the script (something I haven’t fully developed yet), so I shoot him a buzz and find out that he’s taking Trish to the airport, so he can’t meet up today. We make plans to meet up tomorrow, and I hang up. So now I had 4 hours to kill, and not a lot to do (that was enticing to say the least). I opted to play ARMY OF TWO, which went from a one hour romp, to a three hour marathon. Mom comes in and says that she’s taking off with Joe for a meeting and that I’m on my own for dinner, I ask her to run to Subway for me after the meeting and bring me dinner at work, she obliges, and I thank her. She leaves, and I go back to playing the game. Before I know it the time is 5:45 p.m., and I have 45 minutes till I’m due at work. I turn off the Xbox, conquer it, get my shit together and head off to work.

Today is payday, so all of my employees showed up to get their checks before I opened. When Will shows up to get his mom’s, sister’s, and even his own check, I usually make him wait until I’m about to open before I dish the checks out. This is just one of the subtle ways I screw with Annette when she can’t fight back. After giving everyone their check, I send Del out to the box office to open up, and I chat with Beth and Jacqueline for a while. Earlier this week, Beth had 2 of her teeth pulled and she was all sorts of in pain from the dental work, so I had to be careful to not make her laugh. That was thrown out the window when she pulled out her iPhone and showed me the news story about the little girl in India who was born with 2 faces and is being hailed as a Hindu Goddess reborn. I make the joke that she can see in Panorama vision, or that she is now able to view “Life: The Director’s Cut”, and we all laugh. I took a good long look at the image of the little girl, and I was blown away by the miracle of life that she represented. Not to mention that she will be hailed a deity in her own county and pretty much treated like…well…a Goddess for the rest of her life. Good for her.

I get the second set of movies on the screen, and close up the snack bar. I tell Del that if no more customers come by 11:30 to just go ahead and close up. I count the snack bar totals, and pick up where I left off in Kevin Smith’s “My Boring-Ass Life”. It was reading one entry in his diary that sent my mind into a flutter. He wrote about how his Dad died a couple years earlier, and he posts the eulogy that he wrote for the funeral. I read this, and it made me think about my own Dad, and what I will say at his funeral (which will be many many many years from now). Being the eldest son, it is my duty to talk about what I learned and experienced from my father. But given our past, I would probably give that duty over to my younger brother Ryan. My Dad and I haven’t always had the greatest relationship over the years. We are both stubborn and bullheaded, and often clash over the way we see things. This has led to times when we didn’t speak for years. Since he and my Mom got divorced when I was a wee lad (less than 2 years old I think), he has never lived close by to me. So when I was kid and I went to go “see” my Dad, it was an actual trek. The current count now is that I am 5 hours away via airplane and bus, but 37 hours away if I take the train. I digress… I was raised by my Mom, and I usually would go see my Dad at least once or twice a year. These trips would be a couple weeks at a time so we could get some “he and I” time. But because he worked nights (gee, I wonder where I get that from?) to support Debbie, Stephanie, Rachel, Ryan and Kevin, this left little time for him and I to go and do anything as father and son. I may hold some anger there from being a kid and being forced to go spend time with a person who wasn’t there. But as an adult, I can see that he had to do what he had to do, and he paid a greater price than I did in the situation. Now that I’m older we have more in common and can talk on a more open ground, and because of this we are getting closer as father and son. But I’m not going to lie, the 1200 mile difference between us, and the fact that I’m usually pretty busy, doesn’t make things any fucking easier.

With all those thoughts about what I would say at my Dad’s eventual funeral, I started to think about my own mortality. I was thinking about the fact that I’m 26, single, living with my parents, and working as an assistant manager of a drive-in movie theater. I know that I am working to get myself out on my own, and have enough money to back it up, but you just have those days where you start to doubt yourself. I started to go down that path, but I was able to switch gears in the old noggin and start thinking about other things.

So I went back to thinking about my Dad again, and what things would be left unsaid if he died tomorrow. Then I started thinking about who else in my life had things that I hadn’t said to them yet, and probably should. It came down to the two most prominent people in my mind. These were Marky and Emma. Marky would be easy, I would (and I should do this too) tell him that he’s my brother and I’ll love him for whoever he hooks up with, but I’m tired of constantly looking out for him, and pushing him to better his life when he does nothing on his own. Also, I’d tell him that his current girlfriend is a cunt, and should be thrown in a bag of scorpions, and thrown off of a large cliff. Emma would be a different story. What I want and need to tell her would require a little bit more tact than I’m willing to allow at this moment in time. Being that she is an English major, I would want to take the time to prepare what I wanted to say, and make it as eloquent as possible. But I would make one thing clear to her, I miss her friendship.

The ending of DRILLBIT TAYLOR caused me to jump out of the mind funk I was currently in, so I changed up movies, had Del bring me the money, quickly counted said money, and threaded up LEATHERHEADS. I had heard good and bad things about the movie, so I decided that now would be as good of a time as any to sit down and watch it. With the money already counted, I had a couple hours of downtime, so I hopped in my car and watched the flick. I can see why some people didn’t like it, but god damn, it was better than NIM’S ISLAND! George Clooney knows his comedy, and that Rene Zellwegger….yeah…I’d do her.

After the movie was over, I quickly finished up all my work, and got out of there. While I was on my way to the bank, my bodily functions kicked and I realized that I really needed to take a crap. But I really needed gas more. On the way home I stopped at the nearest Arco, and found out that their network had crashed, and I couldn’t pay with my Debit or Credit card. And since I only had $1 dollar in my wallet, I wasn’t getting any gas from this station tonight. I toyed with the idea of going to the ATM and paying with cash, but my body said otherwise. So I sucked up the turtle head, and raced home.

Right as I walked in my front door, my cell phone rang. It was Marshall telling me to get online for some Call Of Duty action. I tell him that I’ll be on in a few minutes, and I just need to drop some kids off at the pool. After I do the deed, I jump online, and find out that he wasn’t fucking there. Instead of calling him and bitching at him for not holding his fucking horses, I decide to check my email and work on today’s diary entry.

I got a MySpace message from my friend Christina from Long Beach, I hadn’t heard anything from her in months, so I respond in kind by saying something along the lines of “Holy shit! You’re alive!” I fill her on what I’ve been doing with my days, and tell her to expect a text message from me tomorrow. After that, I finish writing the blog, decide that I’m too tired to conquer it, and pass out at 4 a.m.