Category Archives: Non-Fiction

365

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I started this blog seemingly, having just become unemployed and with loads of free time on my hands, out of sheer boredom. I didn’t have any one particular subject I felt strongly enough about nor had enough knowledge on to devote an entire blog to, so I opted to showcase all of the creative works I had come up with in the four hellish years I worked at my last job. (Side note: ACTORS + LAWYERS = BAD.  REALLY BAD.  PEPSI CLEAR BAD.)

But what started out as a simple copy n’ paste sort of hobby quickly became a quest to test my creative abilities, and it was not long after I started this blog that I set forth to create a tiny piece of art everyday.  There was not a single point when I told myself this; no particular moment in time when I decided that I was going to spend an entire year posting.  But after three months of continuous blogging, where else was there to take the idea of The Eternal Loop but to blog everyday for an entire year?

No where, really, since as of this post I have blogged 365 straight days in a row.

No. Stop. The applause is . . . it’s too much.

It’s been fun and awesome and goddamn exhausting.  My friends and family stopped talking to me because my blog would end up being the only topic of conversation (“Your uncle jumped out a window and is in the hospital?  That reminds me of a cartoon I created for my blog last week!”).  At least, I think that’s why they stopped talking to me . . . there may have been other factors.

But now that a year has gone by, it’s time for me to take a little vacation from blogging.  Go to the beach, travel, meet new people, try new things, and rejoin society.

. . .

Actually, I will probably do none of those things.  But I will catch up on reading everyone else’s blogs that I have been ignoring, as well as catch up on all the things in my Netflix cue.

Now don’t fear, dear readers (all three of you, whom I adore)!  This isn’t the end, and I won’t be gone forever; I just need to take a break for a spell.  And when I do come back (in about a month or so), I won’t go back to posting everyday.  It’s too much work, and it’d be nice to have a life away from my computer.  Instead, I want to change gears and put quality over quantity.  This entire year I’ve pretty much pulled every post straight outta my butt, and I’d like to dedicate myself to making longer, more engaging, and better works; specifically with regards to short stories, short films and readings.

Before I go I would like to hand out some bullshit (but not completely meaningless) awards:

INSPIRATION AWARD – Two of my closest friend started their own blogs, A Man Chasin’ His Hat and The Hypermodern.  Without them, I would never have been inspired to start my own.

FIRST COMMENTATOR/BLOG FRIEND AWARD – Hyperactive Inefficiency was the first person to leave a positive comment on one of my posts, and was the first “Blog Friend” I made.

“THANKS FOR AWARDING ME” AWARD – Funny or Tragic gave me one of those Versatile Blog Awards, and thus gets one in return.  And for being awesome.

BECAUSE SHE’S MY GIRLFRIEND AND HAS HAD TO PUT UP WITH ME TALKING ABOUT THIS BLOG THE MOST AWARD – Die Umlaut.  Award self-explanatory.

THE MOST LIKES AWARD – The Nerdybaker has liked more of my posts than anyone else, and as I also enjoy cooking and am a big nerd, I feel a kinship there.

All of these are wonderful, so check them out if you have a chance.

In general, I want to thank everyone who has ever read/liked/shared/commented on this blog.  I hope I have been able to entertain most of you; it’s all I’ve ever really wanted to do.

Toodles!

A Search For An Answer That Isn’t There

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“Nic, what the hell are you doing?”

I stopped spinning in the chair and looked for the source of the question.  My friend was standing in the doorway to her living room, her eyes droopy, still tired.  At least I assume they were, I couldn’t actually tell at the time.  Not only was the room still quite dark (it was 4:30 in the morning), but my head was still reeling from the swivel chair, in which I had been spinning for the past twenty minutes or so, and I could not focus on her face.

“I got up early and decided,” I said, pausing to give my mind some time to come up with a clever answer, “to go for a little spin.”

My friend stared at me (once again, I assume she was) in horror.  “Yes.  But for heaven’s sake, why?”

I stared at her.  I tried to think of an answer, truly.  Even taking into account my dizziness, I still had nothing to offer.  I merely started to spin in the chair again, gently chuckling as I did so.

Sometimes, there are no viable answers to the queries of life.

 

Long Lost Love

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18 years ago my mother brought it home – a wedge of some sort of confectionery, light and resembling brown marble, that she kept in her sock draw.  She told me the name of it but I was only nine years old and spent whatever free memory I had in my head dedicated to memorizing every line of the Power Rangers.  But I remember that taste; chalky, sweet without being over imposing, and a distinct flavor that I have never been able to accurately describe.  I use this taste to describe other ones . . . although the fact that I could not remember the name of the confectionery made that difficult.  “This tastes like that thing I had that one time when I was a kid,” does not a useful description make.

Years later, I tried to get my mother to remember what it was, all to no avail.  It was not her fault since all the information I could give her was –

  • You brought it home.
  • It was like cheesecake, except not cold, or creamy, or made with milk.  It was nothing like cheesecake, but that’s as close as I can come.
  • You kept it in your sock drawer.

Alas, she said she had no idea what I was talking about, and went on to discuss something or other that I paid no attention to because I was researching this candy online.  And thus my life went, with an urge to taste this mystery food that had entered my life, and urge that I would never be able to sate.  I would lie in my bed and lament over my plight, to curse the gods for making me want something I had no name for.

Scoff if you must, but you can not imagine the true despair that would envelop me when this yearning began.  I lived to deal with it, a day at a time, until that lust was just a tickle at the back of my mind.  But I was never rid of it either, for that tickle was always there, reminding me that there was a candy out there that had stolen my heart.

Years later, again, and in the present, I was walking out of a deli late at night.  Whether I was on a diet or no, I had wanted pastrami and thus the pastrami had been gotten.  While at the cash register, I saw little candy bars in white and red wrappers, saying Halvah on the front.  I had seen these many time at this deli, and this time I felt a sort of pull towards –

Look, I’m not going to draw this out.  You know what it was, you can read the writing on the wall.  Or the web page.  Was it the candy I had been searching for?  Yes.  Was I elated to be reunited with it?  Of course.  Did my girlfriend like?  No, she spit it out immediately, after which I smacked her for disrespecting my soulmate-candy in such a manner.  Was it exactly how I remembered it, exactly what I had always wanted?

You’re darn-fucking-tootin’.

My lover.

A Short Word About My Mother

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My mother got a bachelor’s degree in psychology.  After that, she passed the bar and became a lawyer in California.  After that, she went into army intelligence and became an interrogator, which she now trains up and coming soldiers to do.  It was a very, very, very long time before I was able to argue with my mother.

That is not quite true, as we have always argued in the way parents do with children (e.g. “Yes you will.”  “No I won’t.” sorta thing).  However, it was a very long time before I could win an argument with my mother.  She could walk up to me, tell me that she was wrong and that I was right, and then we would argue and I would still lose.  Later, as I was sitting in the corner or banished to my room, I would wonder how I could have ended up in trouble when she admitted her wrongdoing at the very beginning.  I just chocked it up to her being some sort of witch (I searched endlessly for a cauldron), but I have come to realize it was simply her training.

We don’t really argue anymore, and I have gotten better at keeping my ground, but I still think back to those times with a sort of reverence.  Even when she was forcing me to do the dishes or take out the trash and my young and selfish mind would focus on the “unfairness” of it all, I would still have to stand back in awe with her abilities.  My mother has never ceased to amaze me.On a separate note, to get back at her for twisting my words into weapons, I would rearrange all the furniture and stack all of her shoes in a big pile at the front door.  This battle still goes on today.

And Now You Always Will, Too

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I was helping to hide Easter eggs for my nieces and nephews (technically they are my second cousins, but everyone in the family gets really confused with the different ranks of cousins, so I’m an uncle) when I remembered a little bunny that briefly lived in my apartment a year or two ago.

My roommate, despite it being stated in the lease that we were not allowed pets, had bought a bunny from some street corner in the fashion district of Los Angeles.  It was white and light gray and could fit in the palm of your hand.  Very cute and very tiny, Rosie (which is what my roommate named the bunny) grew on the entire apartment.

For about three weeks during the beginning of summer, all of my roommates were away and I was left with taking care of the bunny.  Feeling wrong to keep it locked up in a cage in a hot apartment all day, I would let her roam free to find a nice cool shady spot under the couch.  This worked fine, except I started to find piles of her droppings in every nook and cranny of the house.  Small, dark and hard, they were easily swept up or vacuumed.

What surprised me was that the piles of tiny pellets were so large.  How could such a tiny creature create so much waste?  It was barely big enough to finish a sprig of lettuce, but by the looks of her droppings you could have sworn she had the “Moon Over My Hammy” special at Denny’s, with extra bacon on the side.

This image suddenly popped into my head as I was hiding some chocolate eggs in the bushes next to my grandparents’ house, where we were all gathering for an Easter lunch.  No matter how hard I tried, I could not get the idea that these chocolate eggs were really just the droppings of the Easter Bunny, who purposefully does his “business” with delicious results in the bushes so no one would find it.

My gift for Easter this year was that I would never be able to look at a chocolate Easter egg without thinking that a large bunny had just defecated on my property.

I Have No Idea Where I’m Going With This

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When I was a child, I was under the impression that clouds were solid objects.  This was before science class taught me that just because my eyes saw something as solid and tangible didn’t make it so.  In fact, science taught me that most of what we see is a simplified version of what actually is; that the human brain can not perceive the world in real time and must filter and process things together so everything makes sense and we all don’t go utterly insane and starting shrieking manically at the realization that we are no more than cosmic vapor clinging to what is essentially a pebble being hurtled through space around a small (really really small) insanely hot furnace.  It was my first understanding of the duality of human existence: Our brains are incredibly smart, able to devise ways to destroy anything larger than us and create marvels such as an Etch-A-Sketch and, I don’t know, the Parthenon or whatever, but they were also incredibly dumb when it came to things as truly imagining the size of the universe.  We can create words (like infinity) to describe a loose concept of the size, but the truth is simply too big for the human brain.

This understanding wasn’t so bad for me, as the wonder that my imagination created had been replaced by an even bigger wonder of all the crazy crap we live through everyday.  And yet there was some magic lost when I grasped that if one were to try to step on a cloud they would plummet to their deaths.  It’s the same magic that will make a kid run down the street with a garden hose in their hands, trying to chase and catch the rainbow that has suddenly appeared out of thin air (and a fine spray of water and a sun positioned behind you, as I later came to know).  I did not mourn for the actual idea of walking on clouds, but rather for the childlike sense of unending possibilities.

The first true instance of the separation of fantasy and the real-world is jarring because it’s not just drawing lines in the sands of our contemplation.  As a child, everything is sand, a desert where what is and what could be imagined have no distinction.

It’s like Schrödinger’s cat (sorry, I’m about to use and twist this famous intellectual experiment in an utterly incorrect way, but fuck it, it’s my blog), except the cat is the child’s reality and the box is the kid’s perception.  As a child, the reality and the fantasies are the same thing, existing both at the same time, which would explain imaginary friends.  It’s not that the children are unknowingly conducting their first thought experiment, they are thought experiments.  And when school/parents/the world comes in and starts to show them the difference between make believe and reality, it’s not simply saying, “This doesn’t exist,” or, “This doesn’t happen.”  To the kid, it’s the end of the experiment; it’s opening the box and finding out that, yes, the cat is dead.

It is a horribly unfair, and yet completely needed, alteration of how they perceive their world.  As they grow, they will have that done many more times, and hopefully they will start to do it on their own accord.  But that first time is the hardest, because with the understanding that the fantastic is different, separate, and only in our heads, comes the realization that we can never go back.  We can not trick ourselves into being in that dark box again, where both reality and fantasy collide and mesh.  We can visit it through movies and books and other such things, but we can never live there again.  It’s a hard lesson, no matter what age it happens, because if you were aware enough, you would actually be able to feel yourself grow.

I also thought that if you were on a street named Colorado Street in New Hampshire, it was the same Colorado Street you would find in Utah.  This wasn’t out of childlike wonder, I was just stupid kid.

6 Down, 6 To Go

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To the day, it has been six months since I started this blog.  Give me a moment while I light a candle in celebration.

yaaaaaaaaaay.

Each day has been an interesting challenge.  Not only is it difficult to remember to post something every single day, but it has also been a challenge to find material to blog about.  In the beginning things were easy as I had a tremendous backlog of material to go through, so posting was more about finding the picture, song, video or Word document on my computer.  But I discovered that you can go through material quite quickly when you post every single day, and it was not long before I had to start creating material to keep you, my beautiful and most fabulous and highly intelligent reader (who says you can’t win friends with an abundance of compliments?), entertained.  And since my goal is to post every single day for at least one year, the next six months are going to call for me to create a lot more than in the first half of my blog life.  So as a sort of “State of the Union”, I’m going to go through each one of my categories and detail what I am planning for the next six months on this blog.

"And there will be more funny animal pictures! For the people! For your children! AND FOR THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA!!!"

Sunday Articles
This has ended up being the most difficult day for me, partly because the category is so open.  I am not as confident in my writing capabilities as I am with my other talents, so my original plan of posting a story every single week kind of petered out.  For the next six months, however, I hope to write more fiction than I have in the past, with a focus on creating a few serials.  One, The Judo Brothers, will be about the story of three estranged brothers coming together to save the world.  The second serial, The Many Deaths of Wallace Stone, will chronicle the unfortunate demises of a single man who might (or might not) happen to be some sort of amnesiac immortal.  I would also say I plan to do more “listy” sort of articles, but I haven’t been able to come up with any ideas for them so y’all might have to wait a while for those.

Monday Animal Thoughts
I am reaching the end of my cache of these pictures, but I have a few hundred more pictures of animals in a file just waiting to have human thoughts put to them, so I don’t worry too much about these.  But in general the format will remain pretty much the same, however I will be accepting “entries” for this category.  If you see a picture of an animal while roaming the internet that you would like to see me apply my talents to, send it along and I will do my best to post it in the following week.

Tuesday Food
I am going to continue with my current trend of posting weight-loss articles.  I am almost finished with the nutrition portion of weight-loss, after which I will move on to exercise and practice portions.  But I understand that a chunk of you started following me for the recipes and alcoholic concoctions I was posting, and I have been working on a few recipes so as not to alienate some of my audience.  These recipes include a Wasabe-Ginger-Sake cocktail, a drink I have entitled The Hanging Rose, and a noodle dish comprised mainly of breakfast foods.

Wednesday Audio
This day ended being the one I spent the most time on, and the one that has called for me to create more original material than all the other categories.  I have a few songs that I would like to record, but I hope to read more short stories in the next six months, along with some radio plays.

Thursday Video
I have already run out of material from college, so I am delving deeper into my past to bring you some things I made in high school.  One, which I have already started posting, is a forty-minute film I made entitled Air, which will take up the next month or so.  I also have a few performances that I will post, along with some bloopers and behind the scenes material from AirSWAT.  After that, I will start filming a new short every week.  Some of these will be simple exercises in filming; non-scripted shorts pertaining to one subject (the color red, or things that hang off of walls).  Others will short music videos set to some abstract/cliché 80’s music. But most of them will end up being short comedic skits.  The first will be “The Life and Times of Wilbur, The God of Weather”.  I have no idea what it will be about, but I came up with the title and figured I would just make it up as I go along.  Which is, you know, some how different than everything else I do on this blog.

Friday Cartoons
Much like the Animal Thoughts, these aren’t going to change anytime soon.  I might have to create a few more towards the end, but my backlog of cartoons is still pretty full.

Saturday Scripts
More and more of these will pertain to Phil & Rosco, and I might even begin to pen out a screenplay in front of your very eyes.

So that’s what you’re going to get in the next six months, or at least that’s the plan.  After a single year of posting every single day, I might go on a hiatus of sorts to allow myself some time to come up with new ideas.  I also will probably stop posting every single day, as it really is a pain in my ass sometimes.  Until then, I hope you have enjoyed the ride thus far and will stick with me for another six months.  I can’t promise everything will be good as even I feel I cop out sometimes just to be able to post something.  But when it isn’t good I will try to compensate you somehow.  Not with cash, but maybe with cupcakes.

And in my favorite flavor: Virtual. Nothing like a virtual cupcake.