Daily Distraction

The Need for Distraction

Those of you who know me will know why the need for distraction has never been greater right now.  I've had my head fully rammed up my own ass for about a month and have found the internet and action/sci-fi/dumb comedy films and the easiest of crossword puzzles to be the only things that keep me from freaking out.

This blog is my friend's latest regarding the movie business - he runs an amazing summer movie box office competition and his take on the film industry is pretty sharp.  Check it out:

www.Rant-Rave-JP.blogspot.com

Desperate Actress

Because I Can't Stop Watching

Advance Forgiveness

Just forgive this little outburst, okay?

I know we'll be finding out very very soon why Paris Hilton can't seem to tolerate the LA hoosegow like she said she was gonna. Chances are she'll have some kind of 'medical condition' that will be better monitored at home. Sore Vagina Syndrome. Rectal Leakage. Chronic Penile-Induced Uvula Bruising.

My suspicion - based on years of medical training and a close observation of the subject - is much simpler.

I think she's mentally retarded.

And not just a little.

I'm pretty sure she's got the full-blown retardation.

God, I hope she'll be okay.

Me and AB

More than anything, I'm posting right now to bump down the frightening photo of Sanjaya Malakar that I put up with my rant against his mediocrity in a fit of misguided rage.

But on the subject of rage, I'd like to note that I've retreated to my laptop to calm my nerves after an hour and a half trying to re-hang curtains in our living room.

It seems like a simple enough task: screw in brackets to wall, thread rod through curtain rings, hang rod. And yet, during my adult life - moving from home to home - this task has always proven frustrating enough for me to wonder if I should be institutionalized as well as medicated.

This is what happened: the curtains were part of a large order from a custom catalog window treatment business. We ordered something for every window in the house, and then ordered their installation service. It took a long time for the order to arrive and then when it did, everything was the wrong size (we ordered their custom measuring service, too). So we had to wait longer for the right curtains to arrive and then set a date for the installation guys to return.

When they finally did return, everything got hung nicely and looked great for a few months. Then the blinds in the kitchen and our bedrooms started to fail. The tension in the rolling mechanisms in the kitchen disappeared. The accordian blinds in the bedrooms wouldn't retract straight.

But the kicker for me was the curtains in the living room over the french doors. The brackets they sent us weren't strong enough to hold the weight of the curtains so over time, they've just been bending downward and are curtains have been dragging on the floor like a 14 year-old's pair of crazy hip-hoppy jeans.

In spite of my intense history with curtain hanging, I decided to attack this problem on my own after the window treatment company sent me a new set of the same brackets when I complained.

"Fuck it," I said to my wife in the most graceful British accent I could muster. "I'll do it my self with those old Pottery Barn mounts we saved from the condo."

That was four months ago.

Today, for some reason, I decided to take care of it while my wife was out. She'd come home and be proud of her fix-it husband and I'd be rid of that nagging feeling that we got taken by the catalog company's myriad of failures.

I took down the old brackets. I positioned the new bracket, screw and screw gun and pulled the trigger.

It turns out some of the wall material in this house isn't Drywall; it's cement board. When you run a drywall screw into cement board without drilling a pilot hole, the wall just crumbles apart. That was lesson number one and it happened immediately.

My reaction was less than calm. I kind of panicked and said "Goddammit" over and over and over as I continued to try to will the screw into place. The screw eventually pushed through the wall, but the hole around it looked like a little bit of Iraq in our living room. Crumbly and dusty and destroyed.

The lessons kept coming (the screw gun needed an extender in order to get a good purchase around the bracket, my dirty hands were marking up the wall in a way that would require repainting, stuff like that). But eventually, I got the fucker hung.

And it's crooked. One end is clearly higher than the other. I didn't measure. I just used the former bracket positions as my guide.

As I stood back to admire my work and realized how I'd screwed it up, I thought of Alec Baldwin and his recent voicemail message to his 11 year old (or 12 year old) daughter. He said "Goddamn" a lot. He seemed unable to contain his rage - which also seemed unrelated to the child - a rage that had a life of its own.

It was a home improvement project that led me to anti-depressants. I threw around some tools while trying to install a doorknob and decided it was time to chill the fuck out. Now, here I was in the living room, ready to rip my work - and probably a good portion of the wall - down and hire someone to humiliate me with their handy skills and patience and ability to measure. I imagined my wife coming home and asking if I needed some help and me saying "Help is the last Goddamned thing I need right now. I'm gonna straighten you out," and then I imagined her crying and running upstairs - or better, I imagined her yelling at me and telling me to calm down. Then I'd tell her that I'd calm down when I was good and Goddamn ready and I was gonna straighten her out. Then she'd run upstairs crying.

You try to do a good thing and it turns to shit. You try to be a 'man' and it leads to tears.

Alec, let's not ruin our homes. Let's fill them with love and light.

Let's hire people to take care of this shit.

The End of the World As We Know It.

I have to say something. I mean, I'm trying to embrace my inner shallowness: that part of me deep, deep down inside where actually nothing is much different than what's on the outside. So, as a part of that embrace, let me just admit that I've been having passionate discussions about this walking abomination on "American Idol" named Sanjaya Malakar.

And this is what I have to say. Something that no one else seems to be saying.

Not that he's so awful, or about the fucking hair, or about how gay he is. No, this is just one question I'd like to ask:

Why don't you make a fucking effort, you douchebag? You don't even look like you care about TRYING. That's all I care about on that show: Seeing people TRY. You are not doing that, young sir.

And to you, I say: STOP WASTING MY TIME.

Grief or Guilt?

Maybe it's just me, but I don't think it was Anna Nicole's beauty for which she was renowned at any time - even her Guess Jeans days. After all, there are a lot of beautiful women in the world. (as a friend of mine once said, "Show me a supermodel and I'll show you a guy who's sick of fucking her). The truth of the matter is, Anna Nicole Smith was forever on the brink of disaster and THAT'S what she was known for. Slurring, heavy-lidded interviews or careening red carpet moments made up the public life of this woman and for better or worse that's what keeps all of us glued to the tv and computer screen.

Today's LA Times has a blurb about the last film she made and what a difficult time the film maker is having getting the project distributed. This is no surprise. No self-respecting business person would touch this film because it made the mistake of featuring Anna Nicole as its star.

Now that she's gone, there's this weird collective guilt everyone seems to be expressing through elevating her to iconic status. But what we're all afraid to admit to ourselves is that we needed Anna Nicole's train wreck of a life so we could all feel a little bit better about ourselves. It's a shameful fact of our celebrity-obsessed culture: We raise 'em up just so we can watch 'em fall.

Bitches

I don’t jump into the pop-culture fray often, but I feel compelled today after a recent incident that’s boiled my blood.

My wife and I had the good fortune to attend a celebrity ‘gift suite’ in advance of the Golden Globe Awards. An annual part of Hollywood Culture, gift suites often occur in Beverly Hills mansions where all kinds of retailers give away their overpriced makeup, jewelry, handbags and logo-ed clothing. There was even a ‘sex-toy’ merchant giving away vibrators and dildos at the one we attended. A classy affair all around.

After filling our bags with jewelry and dildos, we left the house through the front door. A narrow landscaped walkway wound to the driveway, where a shiny Escalade waited to bring us down the hill to the valet. At the end of the walkway stood two women. We noticed them tangentially while discussing which of our friends could use a brand new phallus.

As we got closer, it was clear we were facing Paris and Nicky Hilton. Paris and Nicky both had enormous sunglasses that covered half their slack, bored faces. My wife was within five feet of the heiresses when she politely said, ‘Excuse me’ so she could get through to the driveway. At two feet, the sisters still hadn’t moved, so my wife said again, very politely (and respectfully, if I’m being completely honest), “Excuse me.” No one budged. So my wife very carefully squeezed through the tiny opening between Nicky and Paris. It wasn’t a tense moment at all, just a little awkward, but my wife managed to slide through ahead of me without even touching the Hiltons.

Then Nicky snorted.

It was a disgusted snort, as though she couldn’t believe these ‘people’ would dare cross her path. Paris responded with a similar snort almost immediately. The two of them went back and forth with their snorts probably a total of three times. It was their own private snort language – a way of communicating between each other that required no words and a limited amount of energy or thought.

Again, I’m not interested in adding to the endless diarrhea of ‘pop-culture commentary’ – mostly because I don’t have anything original to say about any of it – but permit me to make this comment:

I think it’s admirable that Paris Hilton has been able to cross over from the world of pornography to more mainstream celebrity. But these two women have been taking up too much space for far too long. Our run-in in Beverly Hills is a perfect example: Paris and Nicky Hilton are living fire-hazards. What would they have done if there was an emergency and ‘normal people’ had to get past them in a hurry?

Here’s my suggestion to Paris. Go back to doing what you’re best at: sucking cock.

And to Nicky: Actually, I have nothing to say to Nicky, because she has yet to distinguish herself beyond the living fire-hazard thing.

Oh, and I have an idea of what happened to Paris’s little dog, Tinkerbell. The chihuahua hasn’t been seen in public with Paris since shortly after a book was penned in the dog’s name giving us all a glimpse into Paris’s life.

I think the dog is dead. Because Paris forgot to feed it.

That’s the rumor I’m starting right now, anyway. Please pass it on.

Dirty fucking whores.

Bitch

Roscoe and Mabel were being so good this morning, we decided to give them each a nice rawhide bone to chew on. Mabel settled in with hers on the kitchen floor, working it with her razor-sharp baby teeth while Roscoe just stared at her with his bone hanging out of his mouth like an old cigar. This went on for a good half hour - Mabel workin' it and Roscoe staring.

It's not normal for Roscoe to leave a chew-toy unchewed, especially one that's in his mouth (like most bulldog breeds, he's basically a powerful jaw on four stubby legs), so I decided to break him from his trance and give him a little encouragement to get busy with that thing. I picked him up and set him on my lap and held his bone like a lolly-pop. Immediately, he started in on it. There's great comfort in knowing your dog is pre-occupied with a quiet chewing activity while you read the paper or go to the bathroom or obsess about your own 'bone' for the day, so I was relieved to get Roscoe back into the spirit of things after seeing him stare Mabel down.

After about 15 minutes of quiet, I set Roscoe on the floor with his bone. He went under the kitchen table, cautiously keeping an eye out for Mabel. Mabel heard Roscoe on the floor, came into the kitchen to seek him out for some playtime, went under the kitchen table and Roscoe became a SAVAGE, SCREACHING BEAST, like the kind of panicky, bulge-eyed Chihuahau's you see on 'The Dog Whisperer' and shake your head over because clearly they should be put in the microwave these animals that only a psycho could love.

Setting aside the fact that Roscoe learned this behavior from a friend's Chihuahua that is EXACTLY that kind of dog, I'm coming to the conclusion that I may not have the patience or time or whatever it's gonna take to make these animals work together. I'm willing to surrender my ego and manly pride to the reality that I just don't wanna fuckin' deal with it. Why did we get this puppy in the first place? Did we go through this when we got Roscoe as a pup? What kind of father will I be? I don't mean 'dog-father', I mean 'father-father'. Of a human baby. How the hell am I gonna handle that?

And now, they're playing like dogs on a greeting card after having napped quietly in the office while I've been writing this.

Merry Friggin' Christmas.

Good Christ

Sure, it's Christmas-time, so why wouldn't we get a new dog?

Well, for one thing, we just put Chauncy, our 14 year old Aussie mix, down just a week after Thanksgiving. We were starting to become a one-dog house, which, aside from Roscoe the Frenchie's mopiness, was a lot easier than being a one-dog with an elderly dog house.

Memorial to follow.

But we went to Hawaii last week and got bored in the balm

Finger Gecko

Then we returned and made the mistake of visiting the North Central Animal Shelter two days later and, well, Mabel is the result.

Hour One, Day One

We spent last night mourning the loss of our two weeks of dog-freedom and wondering how we could unload Mabel on a rescue or lonely friend - Roscoe's out-of-the-box easy. Mabel's a new model that needs breaking in. You get it.

Then we woke up and she was cute and playful and obedient and the sun was shining after a lovely evening rainstorm.

So we don't know what the hell we're gonna do. But they play like playing was gonna be banned any minute.

Also, I've moved "Hollywood Residential" here. Which is also hollywoodresidential.net