Sorry. Didn’t mean to abandon you, there.

Let’s see. Well, I was pretty busy recapping my butt off for Boomtown and Gilmore Girls. I’m also diving back into my new novel, and I’ll allow myself to be sidetracked in a second to stop working on it, so I’ve been forcing myself to go to coffee shops to keep my head in the game.

Now so much has piled up that I haven’t discussed that I’ll have to just line-item them.

The Vet

Some of you have written in to ask how the cats are doing. Well, last week I found out how much fun it can be to take three cats to the vet at once. Yep, three cats on a Thursday morning. If you can avoid taking a cat anywhere on Halloween, I really advise you just stay home.

Y’all, Taylor lost his shit. I’ve never seen anything like this before, but he freaked the hell out when they came near him. Not one person ended up unscathed, blood and fur flying all over the place. They had to bring in another person with a towel who held him down wrestling-style while they gave him his vaccinations. Taylor screamed. I’d never heard such noise come out of him. He was dubbed “angriest cat ever” by the vets, and now they want me to sedate him before he has any future doctors appointments. The other two cats were just hesitant, with a look on their faces that read, “Uh, Taylor sure freaked out, huh? Should I be scared?”

Auditions

I just had my first commercial audition. It is pathetic how old my headshots are. It’s ridiculous that I’ve lived here two years and that was my first audition. I guess it’s time to get on the ball with that and get some headshots made. I need them before we start our show in January, and it’s sad that I just keep finding a reason not to spend the three hundred dollars it’ll cost to get them shot and printed. It just feels like so much money for pictures I give away to people who turn me down.

Movies

I forgot to mention last week how much I enjoyed Bowling for Columbine, and I would encourage you to go and see it if you haven’t. I think its an important exploration into the American way of life, how our value systems differ from other countries. It doesn’t really answer the question of why we’re a country that shoots each other silly, but it does point out just how different we are from everyone else. I think that we’re a fear-based country, and Marilyn Manson says it best in the film when he explains that the more terrified we are, the more we’ll consume. They want us to keep consuming, so they’ll keep telling us that we smell, that we’re ugly and that someone’s trying to break into our homes and kill us.

I saw Comedian, which I also loved, but I imagine it’s only really interesting to other comics. I mean, you’re not really learning what it’s like to create a stand-up routine, it’s just empathy for Seinfeld and Orny Adams, a newcomer who’s filmed to look like a real prick in this movie. Now, what they don’t discuss here is that Seinfeld gets to be humble and aw-shucks about his new stand-up routine because he can afford it. Even when he bombs, he’s still not bombing like Orny would if he went up there and blanked on his routine. And what they really don’t show is how most stand-up comics at the level of Orny’s success are exactly like Orny. They have to be. When you’re still trying to get your name known, you’d better be so confident that everyone thinks you’re a dick, otherwise they’re going to assume you’re not funny. There’s a reason stand-up comedy is a male-dominated field — it sucks to be so alone, to live in that kind of self-created pain every day, and then to tell everyone you’re a bad motherfucker? That’s hard living, right there. Seinfeld and his buddies can talk about the good old days and admire Jerry for flying without a net for six months in these tiny little clubs, but it’s really not as dangerous as what Orny’s doing on Conan or Letterman at night. That’s much scarier. That’s a make-or-break moment, where Seinfeld is just seeing if he can try it again, a different way.

The entire Cosby thing is also a bit misleading. Everybody’s in awe that Cosby can do two-and-a-half hours of new material twice a night (I’ve seen it myself and he’s very funny), but the difference is Cosby’s not doing two to three hours of observational humor. He’s telling long, involved stories. He can take thirty minutes and turn it into three hours with tangents, asides, audience involvement and convoluted mumblings. That’s what’s charming these days about Cosby: you feel honored to hear him talk for two hours. You want him to talk for two hours.

I just thought the movie would have been better if they’d shown someone really just starting out, some guy playing open mics in New Orleans or something, trying hard to figure out if he’s good enough. It would have been smart to show some of Orny’s peers, what they thought of him and how they measured up compared to his act. For a movie that had very little stand-up in it, it also had very little about the business other than the stuff you could assume without having to be there.

Bummed

So last week I was recovering from my baby-touching fiasco, and now just when I’m coming out of that strange hormone flux, I’m entering another sad time. One of my best friends is moving to the other side of the damn country again, and I’m going to miss him so much that it makes me hate. Having moved so much as a kid, then going to college in another city and then moving to Los Angeles, you’d think by now I’d have the whole, “Bye, Friend,” thing down. But it’s still hard every time. Actually, I guess it’s harder, now. As I get older my circle of friends gets smaller, and I become more selective about who gets in and who really knows me. When someone gets that close and then moves away, it’s pretty rough. Most of my closest friends live far away from me, and it can be pretty painful on a Wednesday night when there’s nobody to share a bowl of popcorn with, and I’ve just called four answering machines in a row. Anyway, I’m not trying to get too sappy here, but I’m sure going to miss Dan.