Beat Jeremy Coon

A New American New Year's Tradition

Bars and clubs in America, of course, enforce a 21 and over drinking rule, and most won't allow people younger than 21 in. So I think a good New Year's Eve tradition in America would be for the drinking age to be abandoned for a day. Not because minors should especially be drinking on New Year's, but rather, to welcome the New Year's Baby.

How can the New Year's Baby usher in the new year if he's not allowed into the places so many people are celebrating? As long as bars and clubs continue to enforce their anti-baby policy, it will always be 2006 -- the year James Brown died.

A tradition of temporarily relieving the age restriction on alcohol would be like putting milk and cookies out for Santa. Santa won't grace your tree with presents if you don't feed him, and the New Year's Baby won't let the new year come if you don't let him into your bars and clubs... and your hearts.

Let's make 2007 a deathless year.

Online poker, you were fun while you lasted

I just now cashed out my online poker account. After a few tournament wins, and many more losses, I decided that online poker is (for me) entirely a waste of time and money. If I wanted to get good, I  Screenplay writing, one of the hardest fields to break into, is my form of poker. I'll still play with real people, because that at least is social. But what's the point of playing with gnomes and giant boulders named stuff like "Mydikisreallong" and "SurfDOGG69" if they're just going to call your bluffs, and fold to your good hands, and get full houses when you're pot committed with the Ace-High flush?

Your Daily Bread

Here are the vitamins I take the most:

Vitamin B12
SAM-E
Calcium
Acidophilus
and Zinc (if I'm afraid I'm getting a cold)

Those basically take care of everything.

I'm still vegan, but a few weeks ago, I tried weening myself onto fish, since I'm pretty convinced that some of it is healthy. I got some salmon jerky, and some salmon burgers. I know, everyone hates salmon, but I don't care, I'm damning all fish to the bottom of the sea for how gross salmon tastes. Two bites of salmon jerky at one time is all I can take, and one bite of salmon burger made me want to puke. So seaweed is going to have to do. I'm excited about lab-grown meats, though.  You'll be able to eat anything. Platypus. Giraffe. Hippo. Koala. So cool.

I'm almost done writing Act 2 of my script. It's a lot easier to write now that I'm so close to finishing. Act 3 isn't going to be easy, though. It's the Act I outlined the least before I started writing. But a few years ago, I hadn't even thought of the premise for this movie at all. I've made a lot of progress.

Song of the Day: "A Better Son/Daughter" by Rilo Kiley.  I don't know much about Rilo Kiley. I only heard them for the first time yesterday, but I get the sense that a lot of people completely detest them. I don't know why. I could just imagine people saying, "Ugh, Rilo Kiley?! I hate them!" But I keep listening to this song. It's triumphant.

Good-Bye Park Slope Co-Op, Hello Chinatown

The young coconuts are cheaper in Chinatown than at Park Slope Co-Op, and Chinatown is easier to get to. I've finished my work requirement at Park Slope up until June. After June, I quit.

I've been working on my script, and I feel satisfied with the progress I've made, besides the rare worry about it getting too long, or having too much dialog at parts. It's not hard to get myself to work on it when I'm home, but it's kind of slow going. Even though I've got the whole story outlined, I almost never have a day or even an hour where words just spill out of me in passion. Writing mostly gives me a neutral feeling, though looking over stuff I've already written that I like makes me feel pretty okay.

As a writer, though, shouldn't every word I type give me immense pleasure? I kind of remember feeling that while co-writing Who is Jim Holt?, which came pretty easily to me. But now, what gets me excited about writing is that I listen to music and drink caffeine while I write. Also, when I'm not writing, I have visions of moments and scenes that need to be in the script. And I feel antsy when I'm not writing. For some reason, I feel compelled to finish this story, though while I'm working on it, I don't feel utterly amazing.

What did feel amazing was the first day on the set of The Adventures of Arthur Conan Doyle, a script I wrote that my friend Michael Vaingauz directed. I had the worst headache and physically felt like dying, but while watching something I'd written be put on real film for the very first time, I couldn't have felt happier. I think I like directing better than writing. It feels more like something real is being created. But I would feel lame directing something I hadn't written. And I believe I can write good scripts that could be great movies. So I'm going to try to write and direct.

I haven't been writing in this blog so much, because I'm secretly not obsessed with Jeremy Coon or Napoleon Dynamite anymore. I came up with this blog idea over a year and a half ago. I was a totally different person then!  I'm even My Space friends with Jeremy Coon now. He wrote me a very nice message.

I mean, I do want to accomplish something before our re-union. But I don't actually use that as a motivating factor anymore. I just want to finish my script and try to get funding and direct it, as soon as I can. A photo of Jeremy Coon hanging above my computer with darts in it would just be a disturbing distraction right now. I do like having a blog, as long as I don't spend more time writing in it than I do on my script. So I'm just going to write about whatever I feel like in this blog from now on. There will be way more entries than before, but I doubt I will put much effort into any individual one.

Here's a veggie burger recipe I devised. Everyone who has tried it (Just me, Nicole and her sister Natalie, so far) seems to love it.

The ingredients are:

A Spelt English Muffin

An Amy's Texas-Style Veggie Burger

Flax oil

Umeboshi Paste

Avocado

Sauerkraut

Dulse seaweed leaves

Nutritional yeast flakes

Broccoli sprouts

And whatever else you feel like putting on it. I have some leftover hummus, so I put that on last time, and it was still delicious.

I'm reading a book about how to fix your eye-sight naturally. My eyeballs are too long from over-stress. That's why I can see things close, but not far away. I'd like to be able to see both. Coffee, which I like to drink while I'm writing to keep me focused, seems to make my vision slightly worse. But some people rub their eyes. At least I don't normally do that.

My movie recommendation of the day: Stranger Than Fiction.

When I started this entry earlier today, I wrote a long segment about the murder of actress Adrienne Shelly. Then Firefox "unexpectedly shut down," and I lost it. I couldn't force myself to re-write it today, but remind me to do so tomorrow.

Is There A Santa Claus?

It's the age old question. Is there a Santa Claus? I looked on the internet to try to find out.

This photo I found seems to suggest that yes, there is a Santa:

But this cartoon says no, there isn't:

So now I'm even more confused than I was before.  Is there a Santa, or is there not? I don't know, and I don't think we ever can know for sure.

All I can say is that I hope each and every one of you have a Happy New Year.  I, for one, have already come up with my first two resolutions.

My first: I resolve to write at least one entry a day every day in Beat Jeremy Coon.

And my second: to beat Jeremy Coon.

I think I resolved something like that last year, so this resolution would just be to re-affirm that last one.

Are you ready for an entry a day? I hope so! Cause I am pumped!