mm hmm.

wow, lucky guess...

allegory

i'm back in love

earlier tonight iron and wine showed up at my doorstep with a dozen roses. it said that it misses me terribly and that it's sorry it said those things about my bald spot. i reluctantly accepted and when it forced its way into my house, i was over come with a passive joy to just let it do whatever it wanted to me. it put on a song although i can't remember what it was. it returned from a brief stint in the hallway wearing spandex and gold chains, a tube top, and spikey boots. it danced seductively for me and then we exchanged some awkward dialogue. i was smitten for iron and wine again but i didn't know how to say it. i stupidly ignored it the rest of the evening and when it said it was time to go, i said my goodbyes. but from the tough of its hand, i know it will be back. hopefully, it will come to one of my shows soon. i want to really show it how i get MY groove on. then it will love me.
dvd nearing completion. i work on it tomorrow and think aboutmy rekindled love, hoping it will show its face again soon.

this has been an allegory.
whatever the hell that is.

b

dvd progress

dvd is coming along. we have technically passed our deadline but we're gonna work in chicago a bit longer before we go to dallas for our thursday show. unfortunately, we probably won't have any dvds for the dallas peeps just yet. we're still trying to figure out compression and burning issues. once i get done writing this, i'm going into avid and doing final title, closing and opening credits, some color balancing and general tightening up. the sequence for the dern thing should be done before we leave for dallas later tonight. then we're just about there.
ps - its hilarious.

b

i have become one of those people

i think i just became one of those people who has a website dedicated to their pets and has all the eulogy and crappy gif tombstones all over it. well, i'm not quite there, but i'm about to talk about my dog. in a sad way.

the dog i grew up with is gone. she was put to sleep today by my evil mother. ok, she's not evil. i understand it was time for fluppy to go. i shed a couple of tears for her. the last couple days have been crash course program hell. we've been downloading free trials of dvd authoring programs trying to find the right one. we think we've found it after several upsetting grunts in adobe encore. but my fragile emotional state is i think what put me into cry zone when i heard my dear fluppy had passed. i'm pretty sure we got her when i was 7 or 8 because i remember the dog before her, baby, got run over by a green pickup truck when i was 7. so she was around 17 or so and i think we guessed her birthday back then to be around the middle of march. golly, she was old. almost totally blind and deaf. she used to be so vibrant. she bit my eyelid once. we use to fight and growl playing tug of war with a towel in our mouths. i remember when i was sitting with the tiny puppy version of fluppy on the way home from where we got her in the backseat of the car. she was just laying there all scared and i was petting her. i asked my mom what we should call her and she didn't seem to hesitate saying, "Fluppy. For fluffy puppy." i remember how impressed i was that my mom had come up with that on the spot and how much i instantly liked it. it's a very vivid memory.
ah, she was the brother i never had. she used to pull me around the neighborhood on my rollerblades. then i got too big, so i pulled her around on tiny little one-wheel per foot dog-rollerblades.
i have no digital pictures of her as the digital age dawned after i moved away to college and got my first email address and digi-cam. i could take a picture of a painting i did of her sleeping when i was in high school, one of the few art pieces i've done that has remained in the new abode rotation and always made it on the wall, but i have zero time because of this dvd. i shouldn't even be writing this but i had to take a break to grieve. she made it into a lot of my high school video projects, though. i'll have to dig those out and bray at the full moon tonight for her.
this dvd is going to lead to a coronary event. we may not have it done before we leave for our dallas show. its going to be real close.

we'll miss you, fluppy.

moisty eyed,
b

dvd progress

just finished making the outtake reel for the dvd. still cutting together two more sketches. then we add a bunch of music that the other fellas are working on, build the menus and start aprinting. it's going to come right down the wire.
here's the jacket cover for the outside.

Occupation: Future Guy

b

fun while it lasted

iron and wine and i got into a huge fight yesterday. they said they're just burned out on my cd player and that they need space but i know it's permanent. i can tell.
the dvd is coming along nicely. i've been editing when not sleeping or rehearsing and it serves as a good distraction. i'm kind of addicted to editing this thing. i think it's because i really believe its going to be hilarious. easily the best thing i've ever done on film, and maybe the funniest thing i've ever been a part of. we're all still laughing at the footage five months and several views later. and i'm figuring out avid. i'm at a confidence point with the program that allows me some freedom to screw around and try different stuff.
i haven't bathed in a week.
b

editing and such

i have a strange relationship with editing projects and film projects in general. i actually studied film production in college, well i went to classes and got by all the while honing my improv and acting stuff. i should have been a theatre major but i didn't realize that until it was too late. anyway, editing video is just one of those things that seems like a burden and a ig pain in the ass until i start doing it and then i feel great. do you have something like that? it used to be painting or drawing for me in high school. it felt like a chore when i wasn't doing it but once i started and got close to actually finishing something it felt real nice.
well, i'm having the same feelings about our cupholder dvd. we've set ourselves a deadline to get it done so that we'll have copies of it for our trip to austin. that means alot of work for the next week or so designing the packaging, making graphics like titles and credits, figuring out our DVD authoring software, actually editing the material (about 17 hours into one hour, some of which is already done), phisically printing the DVDs ourselves, and finishing up the music. there's plenty to be done and its kept me from tearing my hair out from boredom or mild depression over the last few days. jon is doing full chunks of work and its nice to see him doing something he loves other than improv. we've had plenty of laughs together watching the footage and trying to determine what goes in and what ends up on the cutting room floor. the stuff with our buddy shannon mccormick as the future guy is unendingly entertaining. real god stuff. we just checked that out for the first time today after not seeing it since december. i even dug up some of his old sketches from the catch 24 days in austin including, "Who, if They Could, Would Eat Everything Prepared by Crazed Dogs," a game show sketch where the ghost of Keith Moon and Jabberjaw, the shark, do just that. I also read, "Murder Mystery Dinner Theatre Summer Camp" and "Suck the Clown." I even dusted off the old "Peanuts, Cracker Jack, Angst" sketch that Mikey wrote in honor of my job as a vendor at Wrigley Field. i know, i know, more nostalgia. i'll be living in the past so long as it keeps getting longer. and you can put that on a bumper sticker and sell it, mr. surgeon general.
i'm really looking forward to getting back to austin again. duh. i miss the family more recently than i have in the past. i'm not sure why that is. maybe it's the nostalgia thing. i'm just really going to enjoy my time in austin which will amount to about a week of doing nothing. i'm also happy to say that i'll be doing a lot of shows including a new one man show that i've actually done once before in austin. but the down time in between, hanging with the fam and the old friends, my childhood dogs, camping, and actually sweating for once will be sweet. it's cold here again. 45 outside right now, i think. it's a crime against humanity.

the dvd will be titled Occupation: Future Guy and here is the model for our cover art, George Carlin's Occupation: Foole. we don't want to rip it off directly but hopefully it will come out like an homage.


b

i am in love

with a band called iron and wine. they are the perfect blend of slow and sad to match my never ending winter blues. it's mostly just two dudes. one on a guitar and one on a banjo or both on a guitar. and the singer just kind of whispers in the mic these really heartfelt sometimes crushingly sad songs. a good friend who is more versed in the ways of music than i recently sent me some of their other stuff after the first taste left me hungry for more. why is it that you pick things to listen to or watch that match your mood? i would think i would want something to pick me up at times like these. times when i miss everything about the past and look optimistically into the future only to realise the present is slow and boring and unproductive and sleepy.
i should be longing for some upbeat positive musical experience to drag me out of the depths but instead it's just elliot smith or loudon wainwright III or some other singer/songwriter who has either killed himself with a knife to the heart or lost both his parents and been very open about that in his music. i should go out and buy that john lithgow kids album from a few years ago. that might lift me up. or ray of light by madonna, or an old weird al tape. or maybe i should just shut up as i clearly don't have the problems that other people have. mine are trivial compared to pestilence and roadside bombs. exploding ambulances. exploding people.
well, at least when my urban cowboy cd drops i'll blow up like lil john.
again with the optimism. only sarcastic and meandering. this is not a cry for help. its just words in my head. and what is the purpose of words in my head. they must have formed into sentences and phrases so that someone could understand them. now i'm explaining myself to my blog.
ok, here's something to talk about. remember back a while ago when i wrote about how i asked a girl to marry over email. a girl i had never talked to. just seen perform improv a couple times. for those not in the know she said no. so, the other day i was doing one of those stupid bar shows in chicago which seem to be growing more and more useless with each one. i was doing a two man thing with my buddy. her group went earlier in the evening and i was excited to see that she stayed through the rest of the acts hoping that she would stick around for us. we were going last. our time came (around 12 midnight) and we took to the stage. my friend announced me by name which i think was the only way she knew me. i started in on some kind of intro about improv and the suggestiona and all that. she leaned over to her friend, speaking on how i was her psychotic non-secret admirer and during the intro they grabbed their things and left. well, its my contention that no girl has any interest in me until they see me perform. some have feigned interest for a free dinner or had mild interest after meeting me. for the most part, no girl shows genuine burning loin kind of interest in me until after a show. so, i was looking forward to some burning loins. alas, she was gone. having rejected my weird advances over the internet now she was sure she couldn't even watch me do improv. the upside of this whole thing is i've recently learned she likes the drinking and the smoking. not that that's a deal breaker by any means but it does set up marriage road blocks for a man of mild imbibetion such as myself.
the question we should all be asking ourselves here is should i have asked her to marry me again from the stage during the intro before she had a chance to leave? absolutely not. should i have asked her to marry over email int eh first place? by all means no. should i have approached in a social setting under low lighting and partial intoxication? yes. would i have ever done that? no. why? not my style. too boring. the rejection is too cut and dry. too familiar. i need something, a gimmick to work my way into a girl's heart. nothing has worked per say (perse?) [whatever] up to now.
i am a pity pie. sup upon this pie. rest thy head on the coldest of pillows and wake me in time for the price is right. be like the girl in the movie that is impossibly witty and smart and not a pain in the ass. i'll be the boy from the movies who is impossibly good looking and successful and funny and not a total dick.

personal ad: YOU - short, slim, childlike fun, but not schizo, green eyes, good job, live close to me, intelligent, into music (any kind, just care about your music), ready and willing to get married within a week of first date. ME - moderate height, very small ass, spontaneous but in a slightly anal planning way, wierd zombie job, self-proclaimed genius with poor testing skills, very hairy, too honest, antisocial, bummed out but looking forward to the pay off growing old and wiser with you. oh also, YOU - hot.
all inquiries:
b C/O Available Cupholders
Darkened Shack at the end of Frank Lloyd Wright Way
Des Plaines, IL 60652

cubs win,
b

Letter to my old chums

Here's an email that i sent to my old improv buddies in the well hung jury a few days ago.

May 6, 1998 saw the birth of what would become a bit of a legacy.
Well Hung Jury, under the guise of "Mad Ezekial and the Oedipus Freaks" performed its first ever improv show in a packed Knifton classroom. We managed to squeeze about 80 people in there, the most we were told that had ever been crammed in there. These were before the days of the Westwood Black Box, which further generations would come to know and love. The set was mainly improv games bookended by two sketches. The first a sketch about how El Nino had ruined people's lives. We were so topical. The final sketch was "The Song That Never Ends" which nearly happened and only didn't because I killed everyone in the cast including Jon Davila (now a father and husband), our lighting man.
Farah ran sound for Dance Party which I believe Jon won with his rendition of the lawnmower dance. James did a poem about a naked man, Aaron one about the color puce. Jeff told a priest and a rabbi joke about the red light district. Ben did a hilarious scene with Jon about bowling.
I have a lot of memories from that show and obviously from the subsequent 5 1/2 years of shows that would follow. Every time I do a bad show I think of the Messy Show or the Influence format. And when I do a good show I think about some of those Week In Weird Places shows or the 27 hour show which were amazing in their own right.
I'm just constantly amazed and proud of what we were able to pull off. We really changed the face of improv in Austin and no one can ever deface our legacy. Plus, you got paid for it.

Happy Birthday, Well Hung Jury is 7 tomorrow.

just for archival sakes.
ps - cubs are on a 6 game losing streak and yesterday my car got towed from the street where i had parked it to work the game. i made $70 working the game and spent $210 getting it out of the pound.
b

WORD FUN

today was better. sent away the promo and demo materials for the Del Close Marathon which is happening at the end of July just before our trip to the Dallas Comedy Festival. Hopefully, we'll get into the DCM. i had a good experience there last year and even though i wasn't pleased with my solo showing there i have had a few compliments from strangers who have resurfaced in Chicago. One guy at a bar Monday night recalled one of the scene i did. that was uplifting. it's rare that you remember improv scenes especially if you're a performer as he is. so that was a nice compliment.
-mmmm.

anyway, i sent away with my old solo show, bigly huge, and two cupholder shows; our regular college longform show and our shakespeare show. that shakespeare show is easily one of the best improv shows i've been in. i was so psyched we caught it on a two camera shoot, and the demo looks pretty good. i was deflated when we didn't get that show accepted to the Chicago Improv Festival, considering some competing shows that did, not to mention the application fee. it always cheeses me off when a festival asks for a submission fee. you want me to pay you to allow me the honor of playing your festival for no money, in addition to not getting free passes to any shows? bunk. it's different when the festival is agreeing to pay you from the door, but still a little weird and off-putting to me. it's like the art school thing you send away for in the mail. tell me i'm a good enough artist so that i can pay you to take your classes through the mail. i want to pay you to get rich.
but i've been having chicago conformity fears for about a year now. i missed the boat and didn't properly subjagate myself to the system here and it's turning out to be a spurn tool for the community. if i do move one of these days, i'll put forth the effort to become a nobody for a brief period of time in order to appear as though i'm developing in front of everyone. maybe it's like a making the customer feel like they ripped you off thing. that's the best way to sell something. make them think you're getting ripped off. well, maybe if i make it look like . . . what the hell am i saying?

enjoy some word fun. it took me a lot of friggin work and is mainly designed to give my mother something to do while she Tivos Ellen so she can watch Oprah. maybe i'll get her three more TVs for mother's day so she can watch all the network's crappy daytime programming all at once, Elvis style.

i've insulted my mother. i'm in a saucy mood.
i need to sleep now.

b

last night

last night the cupholders stumbled onto something so obvious it nearly ate us.
we did a show at a local bar for very few people, most of whom seemed very depressed to be there. most of whom were also fellow improvisers unwilling to be moved to laughs by their contemporaries. anyway, we did a musical type show with bill acting as somewhat of a greek chorus dropping into song evey once in a while, helping with story and just going off in his usual bill singing bad rock lyrics way. we rehearsed it twice and it was hilarious. both times pretty good stories with really funny songs from bill. did it at the bar to a tepid reaction. i'm beginning to think these bar gigs are no more helpful than a few hours of rehearsing. it's mostly just other PROVers with something to prove. and that thing is, i am funnier than you.
bottom line, we came up with a good format that adds color to our repertoire. and that makes me less than clinically depressed. (smily face made from punctuation)

b

austin wood bats

nbdl team for austin

national basketball development league has announced a new team for austin. who even knew there was such a thing as the nbdl. apparently it's like the AAA of basketball. they haven't announced a name but i hope it's something really lame like ice bats and wranglers. the austin elite ballers would be really sweet. maybe the coolest part about this would be if a major star is in rehab and plays a few nbdl games in austin.
that's it. just found that interesting.

b

ebb

it's important to remember that things change. i keep having to remind myself of that it seems. people come in and out of your life, of course that's an ego-centric position, but who's perspective do i know best but my own. i don't know if that sentence should end in a period or a question mark. it wasn't a very good sentence. you probably had to slow down your reading speed as you went through it. sorry about that. i'm just pouring things out. people die, people are born, dogs learn to jump higher, flowers appear randomly on your street.
so things change. and i'm told change is a good thing. and physically it would be impossible fro nothing to change. then we'd all just be frozen into postion in our cars or at the office or on the beach. nothing could change. not even time. our phone bills would pile up. flights would be inevitably delayed, a shitty way to travel. some things have to change. earlier we ahd a meeting with the cupholders and we discussed our restlessness. we had a great spring semester of touring and we tripled our business. in less than a year we have reached a break even point and are able to pay ourselves and eat away at our debts. but the more i live here in chicago, the more i want to be somewhere else. austin, obviously would be the best place for me to be. you got the fam there, a huge audience following, and just everything i'm familiar with. it wins in so many categories except career. and that;s where i need to be right now. working on the ole career. i've sworn off girlfriends, have backed myself into a wimpering corner socially only hanging out with the holders save a few renegade sweet people who have appeared by other means. i brought myself and my chums to chicago to pursue an acting career and to carve a niche in the touring improv scene. i'm doing both but it's somehow unsatisfying. i need to go somewhere else where i can not feel like i'm banging my head on a ceiling. and it occurred to me earlier in the meeting that even if the touring company was lights out insanely successful and i was making plenty of money to live real nice and be comfortable, i still wouldn't be satisfied. i have to go for it all. i have to go somewhere warm. the weather has got me depressed. i went to play basketball today and it was 48 degrees. it's MAY. ridiculous. maybe it's just the day because i didn't feel this way last month. i'd be a fool to follow every whim i've ever had although some of them have steered me well. in as close as a year i will be moving to los angeles. thus, change will have occurred. a huge change. i proposed to the fellas of the cupholders that it might be cool to have a group tour from LA and one from Chicago. sort of like an available cupholders franchise. it's a pipe dream but we are a business and i'm not above operating in debt for a while.
so those are my feelings right now. the weather is supposed to warm up this week and i'm sure i'll back off this whole thing and not want to leave as soon as a year, but damn me if i'm here any longer than two.

btw (that's" by the way" btw) - i found a journal on the street walking back from working the cubs game last week. i've been going through it and reading some very interesting things. i may post some of it once i get a handle on what's going on in this girl's life. it's strange and i think it's a dream journal but i can't be too sure just yet.

alright, sleepytime tea
b

Himself
Himself
Himself
Well, he was very personable.