Nick Stevens was the hero of the hour last week, judging by the rave reviews he got after his interview. Joe called Nick "a real character," and said he wanted to meet him. And Joe already has a best friend. Why would he need to meet someone new?
My girlfriend Rachel, who hadn't even read the whole interview at first (but did get to Nick's most risque answers), also called him "a real character," and also said that she wanted to meet him... assuring me multiple times after my jealous rage (since Nick talked an awful lot about sex in the 'view and is by any reasonable standard a very attractive human specimen) that her reasons for wanting to meet him had nothing to do with cheating on me. Which makes sense. I mean, she did merely say the exact same thing Joe did.
Brazos, Liberteaser's most outspoken critic, said the interview reminded him of A Confederacy of Dunces, and that Nick reminded him of Ignatius Riley. Though he didn't remember the book well enough, and so wasn't sure why. Personally, I thought my outraged puritanical diatribes were more reminiscent of Ignatius than Nick's brutal honesty, but everyone is entitled to their opinion. That's what makes us human.
My dad called the interview "hilarious," and Carrie.anne was the only one to leave an actual comment on the entry, praising the interview as Beat Jeremy Coon's first significant foray into smut peddling. Everyone, it appears, was smitten (or at least intrigued) by Nick's coarse language and baudy tales.
You want smut and gore? Fine. I'll give you smut and gore. I won't jump right into it, and it will be on a lesser scale, but, I mean, jeez, come on. Rachel's dad and step-mom read this blog. If I claimed to be involved with something as pornographic as Nick's bus story, they'd know I was lying.
So where was I?
Ah, yes.
Lately I've heard from fiends and famine that I spread myself too thin. Their arguments:
1. I recently worked at Angelica for eight days in a row. After that, I had one day off, then four more days of Angelica. And on all of those days, I spent most of my non-Angelica hours working on the alpaca scripts, or at least thinking about them, making for 14-hour plus working days. Typical as a waiter in Prague, but inhumane if you're American.
2. Originally the alpaca women only wanted 10 hours a week from me, but Mereyl - who is a mad woman - frantically fabricates phony deadlines, demanding script after script for contrived events like a children's book conference in California this weekend. I hadn't heard of no children's book conference in California. And I'm a children's book editor! I bet if I went to Mereyl's apartment right now, she'd be there, practicing her eye bulging and hair frizzing in the mirror while her her spoiled rotten upper east side dogs yipped for blueberries and raw bars. But why would I want to do that?
3. Then, when I wasn't making Soba Sensations or penning weaning tales, I was developing script ideas with Michael, who wants four full story outlines from me by this weekend (actually, he wanted them today, but I explained it was impossible).
4. And Robyn gave me an optional bonus non-alpaca assignment for this weekend, which I eagerly snatched up against all reason: making revisions to Russel Simmons's brother's screenplay about life on the brutal streets. Also this weekend I have to write a theatre review for The New York Sun, as well as keep you internet techies informed through this blog and, theoretically, through Liberteaser. Joe and I are also reviving The World Star Gazette. But that's more of a long term thing.
5. "ooooh, rhys, you're spreading yourself SOOOOOOO thin. It's not good for you. You gotta slow down. Otherwise you'll break." Here's what I think. Maybe I'll break. OR. Maybe I'll have a break-THROUGH.
6. But, it's true. I never have an actual day off. What constitutes a day off for me at this point is when I'm not working at Angelica and I get to work on an alpaca script from my apartment. I'm always really excited about these days, because I get just the slightest taste of freedom.
7. But here's the problem. Every time I have a day like this, I feel physically horrible and the entire day is wasted. I feel sleepy and groggy, can't concentrate, can't think, and don't get any writing done. If you remember, I got so desperate that I almost considered coffee.
8. Last week my grogginess led me to procrastinate on an alpacas script so much that I had barely even started it by the night before it was due. I felt doomed. Then I remembered Miles (my brother and a famous animator who works on Allegra and M&M's commercials) pointing out that the storyline of that particular Alpacas episode was exactly the same as the story in the Pixar short animation Boundin'. I saw my only escape.
9. (at this point I'm just numbering paragraphs) I emailed the expert opinion of Miles to Robyn that night and prayed like a devil with a battlion of pissed off angels after him that it would get me off the hook. Ripping off an idea may be the highest form of flattery. But was the point of this endeavor to flatter Pixar? I sure as hell hoped not.
The next morning I woke up late and had an email from Robyn that simply said, "Are you coming today??"
"She hadn't even told me that I was supposed to come in today," I thought. "How could she be so outraged that I wasn't there yet? Then again, every question she emails ends with two question marks. I hate it. She always seems pissed off. She probably is pissed off. The prayer failed. There is no God. All I was doing was talking into my hands like a medieval fool. How did I ever think that talking into my hands would solve anything? Sure, sometimes it seems to work, but that's just a coincidence. Even when you don't pray, good things happen more often than not. And even if there was a God, he probably wouldn't be so stupid to need someone to pray to keep him informed. 'Oh, look, his hands are clasped and he's talking into them like a complete and utter moron. I better pay attention for once. It must be really important.' And even if he was that dumb, you praying would be an open invitation for him to thwart whatever money or car or wife you were praying for. Prayer has to be the biggest fraud ever foisted on human kind. Why is it called human 'kind,' by the way? Humans are cruel. Like the time Bryan Dawson pushed me into my locker for no reason. At least I kicked back at him from the ground, and he kind of stumbled. Kind of like Napoleon Dynamite in that one scene, actually. Only Napoleon missed entirely. That's what made it funny. And what was the name of that kid who popped my bag of potato chips in the hallway that I was bringing to a class party? I wonder what he's up to now. Maybe I'll become friends with him at our reunion in two years. Does that happen at high school reunions? Do people who were in warring cliques 10 years prior realize that they actually have a lot in common as grown-ups? Wait, can I still call the reunion two years away? Hmm. Probably. It's still the summer, and I don't know the exact date they've set. Anyway. Maybe I'll become best friends with the people who once thought I was the most worthless person on the planet. But would I want to befriend people who formerly thought it would be funny to see me writhe in agony? Perhaps. People do change. Yet do we change fundamentally? I would argue 'not quite'."
Then my mind went on a tangent. I won't bore you with that.
I went to alpacas an hour late, and luckily - thanks to divine intervention (turns out there is a God who cares despite all the blood-shed and flaws and we're not alone in the universe) - the ploy worked. Robyn agreed that the storylines between Boundin' and the alpacas shearing episode were too similar, making that particular story unsalvageable.
"It just broke my heart reading your email," Robyn said. "It's crazy how Mereyl channels these things. But they got to the idea first. They won."
I'd gone above in beyond just by thinking about writing it. And, honestly, it wasn't a mere ploy. The Boundin' parallel paralyzed me. How could I justify writing something that had already been written? Especially in the state I was in. When I'm that groggy, I don't care about my own survival, much less whether alpacas have better singing acoustics with or without their fleece.
Mereyl, on the other hand, was not convinced. First Robyn had to apologetically explain that "channeling" was a good thing.
"I'm not saying you stole the idea at all," Robyn clarified. "You had the idea first. But then it got into the global consciousness, and someone more established acted on the idea before you could. It's a shame, but it's really amazing how you tap into that."
Somewhat placated, Mereyl bounded on me. "So, you're saying that in this Bounting movie, there are four alpaca girls that get sheared and then become dancing rockettes at the end?"
"No," I sighed, all too familiar with Mereyl's desperate defenses to script flaws. "It's a boy sheep who gets sheared and can bounce more freely at the end. But the story that he's ashamed at first, and then realizes that there are advantages to being sheared is exactly the same, and the message that he should just be himself is the same."
"Well, I don't see what has to do with four alpaca girls being sheared," she insisted, her eyes bulging out of her sockets. "Being sheared is a universal story. All animals go through it. Where is this Bounting movie? I want to see it."
She then pounded "Bounnting" into AOL search, despite my very clearly spelling it "B-o-u-n-d-i-n'" numerous times. Not that it mattered, since she had a new script idea and raced out of the room in a panic before she could hit enter.
This is the strict literalist who looks over my revisions to her alpacas scripts and says things like:
"Here it says that the mother alpacas are sad. They're not... teary-eyed?"
"Okay," I oblige, "You're right. They should be teary-eyed."
"And what about here? You say that Taloma is a brown alpaca child. But isn't she mahogany, and a baby?"
"Okay. She's a mahogany baby."
"And shouldn't we say her mother is 'deeply mahogany'?"
"Sure," I shrug.
Later Mereyl complains that it's confusing for Taloma's mother to be "deeply mahogany."
"I think she's more of a... walnut," she revolutionizes.
I nod and write down "walnut." Then Mereyl gets annoyed and suspicious that I am so easily persuaded.
Robyn's role in all this - constantly changing the tone and intended demographic of the stories - is similarly frustrating. On Tuesday she asked me what I thought about making the alpaca stories a vehicle for obscure Bible stories. Then she lovingly quoted one of her Hollywood connections explaining why the alpaca tales needed to be more like Southpark.
What makes these conversations all the more dreadful is that I'm nodding off the whole time, even when they're directly addressing me. This drowiness hounds me regularly. And predictably.
I know the source of it. It isn't lack of sleep, though that doesn't help. And it isn't that I'm pushing myself beyond the limit, which I'm not... yet. The source... is masturbation.
Yep, the horror stories your bishop or your elder or your prophet or your missionary told you are right. Blindness and insanity are just the tip of the iceberg. For me at least. Every time I masturbate right before I go to sleep, I have a hangover for the entire next day. EVERY TIME. And, of course, I always think, "The other times were just a fluke. This is the time I can masturbate and not have a hangover tomorrow." But I do. Like a friggin' clockwork orange.
There is one advantage to talking into your hands at night - you know they're not getting you into trouble.
And yet I always insist on masturbating the night before one of my alleged days off. Guaranteeing that I will wake up late, do nothing but lay around the apartment all day, staring at my computer screen, completely bereft of alpaca inspiration, wishing I had the moral laxity to stoop to soliciting a hot Cup o' Joe.
"I knew I shouldn't have masturbated," I'll think over and over. "Why the hell did I have to masturbate? I wasn't even in the mood. I knew this would happen. This doesn't even count as a quasi day off anymore. I wish I were working at Angelica. I'd at least be doing something."
The main way I justify the life-ruining curse of masturbation is to avoid the foul mess of wet dreams, but this last time, I masturbated on Wednesday night, and then I woke up to the horror of a wet dream the very next morning! How do you like them Snapples? As if my energy weren't already going to be drained enough by my intentional sin. Good-bye trace minerals and omega-3's, it was nice knowing you!
At least the masturbation/wet dream double whammy has destroyed my final delusion regarding that self-destructive, senseless indulgement.
Then again, those other times were probably just a fluke, and....
Good-night, everyone!
PS to my visiting friend, Elisabeth: Here you are, sitting in my room, reading about Oprah trying to get Brad and Jen back together, thinking all along that I'm working on the alpaca's latest innocent adventures. You are going to freak the hell out when you see the indefensible depravity I was actually writing. Especially since my deadline for Mereyl and Robyn is tomorrow afternoon, and I've got so much more to write. Oh my god. Magic hands, don't fail me now.
Was there ever a more pleasant image to awaken to?
