Merry Christmas

 Three minutes after midnight on Christmas, and i just destroyed the only pair of shorts i brought with me for this entire trip to an unseasonably warm Wisconsin.

What's Limp Bizkit

Disclaimer. It's late and i'm tired and i came up with all of this off the top of my head based on my hazy memories of the nu-metal era, nearly two decades ago. It has not been fact checked. That is all. Proceed with caution.

---

One of the young 'uns at work today undermined a threat i made to another coworker by saying, "What's Limp Bizkit?" and i have been thinking about that for hours now. And i finally think i have an interesting metaphor to explain.

Limp Bizkit was a terrible band that we absolutely could not get enough of from about 1999-2003 or so (also known as the exact years i was in high school). They had a bunch of big hits, most notably a song called Nookie. It's honestly not that bad of a song per se, but it was the track that opened the floodgates for rap metal to enter the mainstream and ruin the airwaves for half a decade or more. Limp Bizkit continued to pump out hits of low to middling quality for years after, featuring angsty teenage lyrics perfectly represented by titles like Break Stuff, My Generation, and Eat You Alive.

Only...that's not exactly true. They weren't a terrible band. They were just somehow less than the sum of their parts. If you take the band apart, it turns out they were mostly very good musicians with one glaring weak link.

Wes Borland is one of the greatest guitarists of his generation. Quote me on that, i don't care. He's a little weird and off the wall, and his subsequent projects Big Dumb Face and Black Light Burns are some of the most interesting entries you could possibly find in the nu-metal canon.

John Otto and Sam Rivers are both classically-trained musicians, comprising the group's rhythm section. They're beyond competent and stand out majestically in a field of their peers in the early-00s nu metal scene.

DJ Lethal was already a legend before Limp Bizkit even began, earning notoriety on the turntables for Irish rap sensations House of Pain, of Jump Around fame. How he ended up in Limp Bizkit after that, i'll never know, unless i google it.

And then there's Fred Durst, a cranky white boy from Florida, a state which has an entire stereotype named after their men. Overconfident and undercompetent, he shout-rapped inane verses with lyrics you could only love if you hated your dad.

Here's the metaphor part.

It's like if you were trying to assemble the Avengers, and you started with two very talented, highly skilled masters of their craft, like Black Widow and Hawkeye. You bring in a living legend to increase your public image, and they also happen to be very good at what they do, like Captain America. And you top it off with a bad boy who maybe doesn't follow the rules because he doesn't know them, but can't stop innovating, forging his own path, and spends way too much time cultivating a specific image, like Iron Man.

Then you make Iron Fist their leader. A whiny, cocky white kid who is hilariously outclassed by everyone around him, but the universe constantly proves him right and rewards him for his incomprehensible actions even though no one watching actually wants to see him succeed. Yes. That guy is in charge.

The end. Might rewrite this later, using facts, but probably won't.

The New Schedule

 Almost exactly a year ago, on September 30, 2020, Amanda and i decided we needed a plan. Having spent the majority of the year to that point in quarantine, we were turning into the couch and getting nothing accomplished with our lives. So, we created a daily schedule, to help with productivity. It covered every day of the week and included blocks of time for exercise, meals, housework, and even rest time, with allotted spaces for watching movies and playing games. Most importantly, though, it gave me time to sit down and work on my projects, uninterrupted. Finding project time has been the hardest. There's always something distracting me or keeping me away or Amanda keeps thinking of things she thinks i should be doing.

We failed immediately. As i recall we didn't stick to the schedule for even one single solitary fucking day.

I think we did manage to start getting some things accomplished, though, and i started to work more, so there was that. But lately, i've been feeling trapped in that same rut again, particularly with the projects. I've ended up with a few pretty big gaps in employment again recently and the time has just disappeared on me. This year i've had four-week spans that i haven't been able to account for.

So, a few days ago, i trotted the idea back out in front of Amanda. She readily agreed to it. We went back through the old schedule and made some significant changes, both to accommodate the things that have changed in our lives in the last year, and to add a better sense of realism to it. In bed at midnight and up for a run at 5am? I have had spurts of that kind of ambition many times in the last few years, but (a) it's never sustainable and (b) Amanda absolutely will not.

And now here we are, with an updated version of a daily schedule for ourselves to try and adhere to.

We started yesterday and it went pretty well! The schedule for Wednesday has me getting up at 6 for a short solo run. Meanwhile, i make sure Amanda's out of the bed before i go so she can take care of the dogs and prepare herself for our strength workout, which we do together starting at 7. The problem here is that our strength workouts lately have been taking 2+ hours, and we don't even know why. It's 25 minutes of actual workout with a 10 minute burnout at the end. Warmup and stretching shouldn't be taking us more than another 25 minutes over that. Yesterday we did better, but i think it was still an hour and a half. Fortunately, the next scheduled item is an hour for breakfast, which does not require that much time. It's good to have padding.

After breakfast, we spent two hours cleaning the house, and honestly made more of a mess. But an organized mess! Lunch is supposed to begin after that at 11 (i like an early lunch), but i carried on with the item i was working on until almost 11:30 before i broke to fix food. I still managed to be ready for Trevor projects by noon though.

After this, i have a wonderful 6.5 hour stretch of uninterrupted productivity. I chose to use my first project block to wrangle up a list of all the projects i currently have in the hopper. Amanda continued cleaning for a bit and then went to play Diablo online with Drew. In their conversation, Drew asked how i was doing, and i popped over to explain the schedule and the list i was making, and that i had so far identified 68 projects, which meant i need one more. Amanda and Deanna laughed when i said that but Drew panicked, like he couldn't believe i was in the middle of 68 projects. So that conversation became Drew's lovely wife Deanna and i explaining to him how the minds of creative people work, and the constant state of furious innovation and exhaustion that we exist in.

I did end up identifying two more projects, and completing one yesterday, which leaves me at the desired number.

After dinner we watched The Shining and did the dishes before heading to bed. There were still a few rough edges on the routine, but i think we did pretty well. Especially for us.

Today's already gotten a little jankier. First of all, my dentist appointment for next week got moved up to today, at 9:30 am, which would have eaten straight into housecleaning time. The workout this morning was supposed to be a medium run (6 miles for me, 4 for them), which Alyssa joins us for, starting at 7. Alyssa called around 6 and bailed on us, asking to shift the run to tonight. Amanda agreed, and i informed her i was still going to run in the morning. I'd already calculated that if i started the run at 7, i should be back by 8:15ish and able to stretch & shower with plenty of time to leave the house by 9 for my appointment. However, instead of getting up at 6 like i'm supposed to, i used Alyssa's bailout as an excuse to snooze my alarm until 6:30. I got out of bed five or so minutes after that and started prepping for the run, but as soon as i was in motion, my guts had something to add to the conversation.

Guess what i didn't do yesterday, because it wasn't on the schedule?

I thought i'd push it off to after the run, before the shower, since i'd be in the bathroom anyway. But i was becoming increasingly unsure if that was possible, and i ultimately reasoned that there was no need to make myself miserable during the workout when it would end up as the same amount of time taken either way.

I didn't get back from the bathroom until 7:15. I was still theoretically in a good spot for getting my run done and hygiene completed in time to make my appointment, but the margin for error was shrinking rapidly. Amanda was awake by this time. I let her talk me into shifting my run to tonight also, and instead using my pre-dentist time to work on housecleaning projects. The run will have to slot in to 7pm, pushing dinner later, and losing our movie time tonight.

I deemed this acceptable.

Had a terrible time at the dentist, and still got back with a half an hour to work on a home improvement project before lunch.

So i'm in projects time now. Amanda's project for today is working on her Monster Of The Week campaign, since we've got a game scheduled for tomorrow. So far i've written this blog, which i can definitely justify as one of my projects, but after this i think i'm gonna work on either editing the Grand Canyon footage (which was one of the projects i started yesterday), or work on the Poor-Ass Christmas.

I hope we stick with this. I think we'll be happier people. I've had a good day and a half so far.

The Inevitable Reboot

Idris Elba as Benjamin Sisko
Brie Larson as Kira Nerys
Ruby Rose as Jadzia Dax
    Ana de Armas as Ezri Dax
Danny Pudi as Julian Bashir
Daniel Craig as Odo
Norman Reedus as Miles O'Brien
Benicio del Toro as Quark
Vin Diesel as Worf

Charlie Day as Rom
Jake Gyllenhaal as Garak
Method Man as Martok
Lizzo as Vic Fontaine
Danny DeVito as Zek
Susan Sarandon as Ishka (Moogie)

Michael Keaton as Dukat
Viola Davis as Winn Adami
Tilda Swinton as Changeling Leader

Leeta
Damar
Eddington
Kasidy Yates
Weyoun
Brunt
Keiko O'Brien

Keep Busy

I've spent too much time alone with my thoughts today.

I've been on set there's just nothing to do.

High

 Incredibly generic title, yes. I wish i could come up with something more interesting. Given the state i find myself in [again] you'd think i'd have an improved idea. And yet.

The travesty of my title leads into the subject i wish to discuss at this time anyway. I got high tonight just for fun, a twist from my usual [excuses/reasons] to alter my mind. Generally this follows bad news about Amanda's medical condition and/or treatment thereof. But tonight i said i've been meaning [wanting] to try getting high and writing something. See if i could use substance to extract some sort of creative spark from my ever-withering brain. 

And yet. Here i am. Writing a blog.

Time is not traveling for me.

All i can think to think about is that i can not think. I've been intoxicated for at least half an hour, perhaps an entire hour, and all i've done is scroll through Facebook for [28 or 56] minutes and update a few spreadsheets for [2 or 4]. And then i 

    -following a post i read on Glumshoe's tumblr this morning [what's the worst writing advice you've ever received? // "just start!"]

 thought i should just start, just put a blank document in front of myself and start typing. No preconceptions, no rules, no train of thought apparently. I just lost 20 minutes and i don't know where. Seems i am relating differently to the chronology then. I just got it. I just figured out why Dr. Dre called it the chronic.

Wow

Where

Were

my

t h o u g h t s

all right i am way higher than i was when i started typing this

than i was one minute ago

fuck

Okay here we go

Probably

I'm going to keep typing normal things until the rollercoaster descends. Like. I'm at the top of a roller coaster and i know the plunge is coming and then the rad stuff. But for now i hang in that moment, when things are still pretty normal, i'm just 

Things are pretty normal.

So anyway the spark i was chasing (this is me still typing normal things btw) the creativity, that spark. Fuck. No. I did already talk about this. About how i scrolled Facebook for an oddly specific number of minutes before i turned to the blank page.

And i started a new document on Google Drive, and then made a new folder on Google Drive (called High)(naturally), and thought to put all my stoned thoughts in that one folder, to keep them neat, keep them together, put dates on them. But then i was like, nah, just put it in your blog. And i went back and forth for a while in my head, choosing one or the other, then overanalyzing it, but in the end. Why not just put it in my blog? It's gonna end up there anyway.

Yeah i'm living alternate timelines again.

Not as extremely as i have in the past. Or at least not yet.

The editing on this movie is a little looser than i've ever noticed. Also, it's been thirty years, an actual three decades, and it took all that time plus a little hippie lettuce to finally notice. Federation President Red Foreman's office on Earth is just the Ten-Forward set from Next Generation with some curtains.

I don't know why i never noticed it before. I mean it's not a thing i'd have noticed the first 700 times i saw this movie as a kid, but i'm 10 years out of film school now and the way the dialog scenes are edited just seems like it has a strange flow. Maybe it's due to my perception of [linear time / time] being decelerated/altered/scrambled. But i'm not catching L or J cuts. And when it cuts to another character for their line, before they start talking, there's a second or two (!!!!) of them sitting there before they say the line. It's just...loose editing. Not bad, just strange. Also there are lots of close ups where the characters aaaaalmost break the fourth wall. Just staring out, barely off camera. Kirk and Martia's kiss is still gross.

God damn

The trouble with these shifting realities [timelines] is that when i'll be off living a different life in Inception-time to my left or my right, when i return to [this] the center timeline, the regular-speed one, i'll have not written anything down that happened there because i wasn't sure which reality my laptop was in. Like i swear to god. I just wrote a whole screenplay/directed a whole feature/actually completed a fucking [movie or creative project] and it all happened in the wrong realm. And now i can't remember it because it's been 20 years since i finished it. Time slows exponentially for each level you go down.

Okay it's been a while since my last paragraph and i've just been watching the movie and eating popcorn and this CERTAINLY is not what i had intended to write about when i started this but

but

there are a NUMBER of logical inconsistencies in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. My favorite of all Star Treks. For 30 years. I am just noticing many of these things for the first time.

Experiencing time in nonlinear fashion makes me focus in on the finer details of movies, i guess. I've definitely been noticing, actually, positively, proactively NOTICING the cinematography. Lot more point-of-view shots in this movie than i remember.

But really nobody's plan is going to work when Kirk and Spock try to ferret out the Among Us after the Rura Penthe Rescue. I was going to say "Valeris's plan" but then i realized that Kirk/Spock's plan also does not make sense, and for the same reason. Spock and Kirk's announcement summons the court reporter to sickbay immediately, to take statements from Burke and Samno. Their plan is apparently to panic the traitor into making a rash move. This plan would only work if it was anyone BUT VALERIS, as Valeris is a VULCAN and therefore GOVERNED BY LOGIC. She would not panic and run in guns blazing. But she does; she picks up her phaser and heads down to sickbay, weapon drawn, intent on killing her assassins before they can talk. But, logically, if the court reporter has been summoned to sickbay to take statements from these men, then they should be conscious and the medical staff should be there with them, waiting for the court reporter, who will also probably get there before she does. And likely, since these are violent people now under arrest, there should be a security detail there as well. Valeris would have NO CHANCE of reaching and killing those men without immediately exposing herself. Logically, she would have figured this out. In actuality, the sickbay is dark, with no one on duty or conscious in the room at all, and just two bodies covered in blankets lying on some beds. If Valeris were illogical enough to try this at all, if she opened the sickbay doors and saw a dark empty room, she should know instantly that it's a trap. There simply is not time for either of these plans to work.

Vax Thoughts

 I got vaccinated for Covid-19 today and i've been trying to write an outline for a script and the side effects were kicking in and so Amanda brought me a cannabis gummy and that seems to have helped but i'm suddenly feeling very high and

i can't think of anything to write 

but

if i think of something later i will write it.

Coefficient

 Higher than the pilot light of a hot air balloon in both temperature and geographical y-axis i allowed a friend to sweet-talk me into live streaming a continuous static shot of Amanda and i consuming a pizza. The pizza was ordered from a high-profile slop shop with a point-and-click button menu on the web site. Amanda had suggested LA Lasagna but their online order form doesn't work, i always have to call them, and in my post-articulate post-cognizant post-post-post human current countenance i did not think i could successfully complete the task. So to dredge again to the deep deep depths of surrender required to acquiesce to the flimflam deck of dreck that is this chain pizza parlor. We've sworn to cease our our association with this association this station of low motivation this house of ill repute, and pizza. But when you can't speak human. They have buttons.

I thought that introduction that dramatic lead up was very important to the story before i typed it and while i was typing it but as it turns out i've forgotten the connective tissue, the step that leads to the step that leads us from there to where i really want to go, to the story, to the story i want to tell.

As the pizza waned and Amanda started fading from consciousness the dogs started becoming insistent that they needed to get out, to get some fresh air, to tarnish that fresh air with their scents. Their excrements. And it seemed pretty early for their Last Run (tm) of the night but i took them out anyway. And Zuul came out of the portal through the hedge surrounding our patio, and down the paving stones, until they end, just one stone shy of where the path would reach the street. And she pees in that vacant premises, the hole in the pattern, the grassy foot where a flat rock should be. Every night. And when she finishes, she proceeds away to the right, near another hedge, near the electrical boxes. And she sniffs around, investigates, really feels the place out. Meanwhile Copper is free, unconstrained by a leash, allowed to roam the strip of green which is our lawn, a lawn we share with the community. This may. not be recommended etiquette with a dog, but Copper's a good boy, and we only do this with him when it's dark out and unlikely other dogs or people or humans will pass by. I don't even wear my mask most of the time on Last Run (tm). Despite the, you know, the global health pandemic that we live right in one of the hottest hot spots on Earth of. Covid-19. I'm talking about Covid-19.

And so as we trot back the other direction, i realize perhaps too late that i've neglected to keep track of the spot where Zuul urinated earlier. I may have already walked through it. But i wanted to find out if i had or not. So i tried to figure out, relatively, where i remembered the pee squat occurring, taking place, happening. And the relative zone where my own foot falls had previously tracked. And as i tried to make sense of these two data points, the perfect number of points of data to create a beautiful line, i contemplated how to determine what this meant. As in if i had trod the spot. Where the pee was. With my shoes. My sandals. My not-shoes. Which i was wearing with socks. You know, like that meme-y fashion faux pas everyone talks about. But it was dark and it was Last Run (tm) so i didn't think anyone would notice my fashion foul. 

They didn't. It's not a red herring, it's just poor writing.

It's not foreshadowing either but you already figured that out.

The Zapruder film has a 74% on Rotten Tomatoes.

So i knew i'd need to use math to figure out if i had walked in piss. And as my brain tried to parse the entire concept of math, the only thing it came up with was

coefficient

as if coefficients are math, all math, they are the only math that maths. Coefficient is math.

as if that.

All i could think was coefficients. And i kept walking the dog around the yard, trying to remember how a coefficient is supposed to help keep me pee free. And i thought about writing that down. Writing my musings on using math, using coefficients, to locate pee that was four, six hours old by now.

Oh yeah time is moving very slowly today. Can you tell if i'm moving at a normal speed for a human? I need to record this so i can see later if i'm moving at normal speed because i keep trying to move faster and i can't. Everything is in either slow motion or super slow motion.

And in my mind as i walked the dog, i wrote this entire blog. I wrote out my musings on the pee math and on the celebration of this holiday that we've never partaken of even though it's been on Amanda's birthday ever. single. year. as if it was planned that way. Or as if dates were fixed points in time which occurred annually. As if calendars existed only because dates happen at prearranged and preconceived points the same time every single year. Dates do not move. They're in the same order every single year. Except that rascal February 29th.

And in my mind i forgot this entire blog. So this is not at all what i had pre-planned to type once i got inside. In fact i'm pretty sure the original blog, which i wrote, in my mind, and then apparently deleted accidentally because it's not there anymore. Once i sat down at the Blogger interface, i had to start from scratch, to write something entirely new. And i've been writing for three hours now and yet it's only twenty-eight minutes later. Wow, 28 minutes? How has this actually taken so long? My slow-speed time is speeding up because i do not understand how it could have possibly taken 28 minutes to come up with the stupid useless bullshit words that i've vomited carelessly upon this page, this virtual page, these pixels which represent a page. That's too many minutes. Probably because i keep bopping off to alternate universes to live entire lives, birth school work death, and then return to this earth to find it's only fifteen seconds later. Like The Inner Light. A Star Trek episode i would recommend to non-Star Trek fans to find out if they like Star Trek.

I feel like this is going really well. 

Anyway my original blog post, in my mind, was only two paragraphs long anyway so this probably turned out better.

I'm not entirely sure that was my intended ending for this story but i'm going to stop typing now. There was a rhythm, a flow, a meter to the first paragraph or two of this post that i just dropped as i got further down. I was thinking about recording a video of me reading it in an old-timey detective voice but i don't think the whole post is doable like that anymore.

It's lost to me like that bridge from the setup to the story itself.

Punchline.

I Think Amanda Enjoyed Her Birthday

 I think Amanda enjoyed her birthday today. I took her shopping for hammock stands, we got some really great sushi (The Lion King roll from O Sushi is incredible), and then shopping for new running shoes. After that, we went home and set up the hammock stand. I got a bunch of friends to sing Happy Birthday to her via video call, and we spent some time talking to Zia afterward. I made a little video of her enjoying her hammock, finally set up.

Now we are celebrating the actual national holiday for the first time in our lives. Amanda's on the phone with Anna right now, she missed the singing. I think we'll finish the night playing a board game.

I'm really high right now. I'm approaching the part where i travel through time. I always want to write things when i'm high but i haven't done it yet.

This doesn't seem coherent.