forcedhappiness

I wanted to avoid posting about movies here because, well, they're what I know best. Anyway, I've failed.

There are some places on the internet you just don't go. Dark, twisted, ridiculous places full of stupidity so palpable you'll get gum disease just breathing the air. One of these places is the IMDB forums. But sometimes I want to know things. And sometimes it's good for a laugh, like the guy who started a thread telling everyone we should ban the movie 2012. Because it's going to suck, right? No, that's not why. Because it will make him anxious. Because why are they advertising this everywhere when it's just going to make everyone afraid for 2012? I mean, we've already got so many problems - the economy and climate change and wars and I can't find my car keys. But Hollywood sees it fit to continue reminding us we're probably all going to die in three years. What a bunch of jackasses. Don't they know ignorance is bliss? Don't they know THIS IS STRESSING ME OUT? I'M NOT LIKE JOHN CUSACK! I CAN'T OUTRUN AN EARTHQUAKE! Stop it Hollywood! Stop it! They're just spreading panic. Excuse me, I have to go see Robin Williams now. He's my psychiatrist.

I have a lot of information on my resume. Work history, education, references, all the usual stuff. Anything a potential employer might want to know. I go into a Blockbuster because I’m an idiot and they have a Now Hiring sign out front. (I should have pulled the sign down and taken it inside with me. Why do they always do that in old films? “Here, mister, you left your sign outside. I brought it in for you. Hey, are you looking for any workers?”) So forgetting that I never want to work retail or anything resembling because a little piece of me dies every time I hear the words “up sell”, let me tell you all about how I lost forty-five minutes of my life. Minutes that could have been spent doing something productive like thinking up ways to shoehorn vampires into my edgy feature film adaptation of Richard Scarry's Busiest Firefighters Ever. It’s the only way it will ever get made.

I walk to the Blockbuster with a copy of my resume. I get there and the woman behind the counter says I have to fill out an application form. I spend fifteen minutes copying all the information from my resume on to this application form. The application form does not ask for any new information. Then I hand both the resume and the application form to the woman who says she has to do a “pre-interview“. I’m thinking they’re getting a little carried away here. Then the woman gets a form out of a drawer. She grabs a pen and she begins to copy information from my application form onto a brand new form on her clipboard. Afterward she asks me a whole bunch of questions, the answers to which are already on the resume, the application form and her clipboard. The last thing she tells me is that there is no way I will get full time work at Blockbuster. Then she tells me it was nice to meet me and shakes my hand and I leave the building. Outside I lie down on the sidewalk and roll all the way down Renfrew street until I get home.

And by the time I get home I am not only dizzy, I have also lost my happy writing mood. The positive part of this (because there has to be one) is what I learned: I can clock up to thirty kilometres an hour as long as I avoid rolling into lampposts or that one Asian lady who was waiting for the bus.

It's difficult for me to even pretend I want one of these things. I can keep a straight face and tell a ridiculous lie that people will believe but if I see an employer is looking for 'hardworking, outgoing individuals who truly care about making shopping with us an exciting and fun experience" I just start to bleed internally. Because it's bullshit. There's a difference between lies and bullshit. Bullshit is disingenuous and makes me feel physically ill. Lies are fun and can be used to make people believe you are related to Carl Marx. Just writing about this is making my eye twitch. I bet I could go to a medical doctor and get a note excusing me from the work force.

I had an allergic reaction to the Cobb's Bread employment application form. When I got to the part where it asked me "what do you like most about bread?" I broke out in hives.

I developed a drinking problem working at Petro-Canada. That has nothing to do with the job, it's just that you get free Slurpees, so.

When I was hired at Tim Horton's years ago I went in on my first day and they handed me a uniform and told me to put it on. I said, "but these are not my clothes".

I went into an employment office and told the person working there "I am looking for a job that will allow me to be myself." She had a good laugh and then assigned me a case number. I am now called 087206671.

There is something you should realize. I do not have any clue who is commenting on here if you leave no signature. Even just initials. If you know me, I mean. If you are some random internet person leaving any sort of arcane symbols will just further confuse me. People ask questions. I want to know who to answer. People make comments that are nonsense. I want to know who to WTF at.

I’ve been away. This is because I have no internet access. This is because I am in a new location. This is because I never tire of running from my problems. This is because it so much easier than actually doing something productive. This is because  - well I don’t know. I blame God, but you can come up with your own fun hot potato like blame game and, like Atlas, shrug the responsibility off. I should contact Milton Bradley right now, shouldn’t I?

Searching for a home is fun. Checking craigslist again and again. Phone conversations that feel like a trip to a foreign country. Except you can’t even compliment your loud slow voice with sign language or wide gestures or confident reassuring smiles. “I am not a part of an invading force, but I am also not the kind of person you can just murder in a back alley and take his wallet and nobody will care.” That is what we want our smiles to say. There is none of that over the phone. There is a lot of that during viewings when you’re standing in the middle of a living room in the ass end of Burnaby and actually considering paying seven hundred dollars for the right to live in this dimly lit four hundred square foot linoleum tiled cubby hole. “The light bulbs are not included,” the small man tells you through his thick accent, which you cannot place because you have not left the province in your entire life, but you‘re pretty sure he‘s some kind of Asian. You racist bastard. But then you think, “wait, what light bulbs?” You realize the room is not actually lit by phosphorescent worms living on the ceiling as you originally thought.

And looking at certain craigslist entries for fully furnished suites in West Van for five hundred a month, feeling quite certain you will be axe murdered if you go to a viewing even though the post assures you the Nigerian Prince who usually lives there is simply stuck over seas for the next year.

And some of the apartments seem very nice except you have a bad feeling about them in a "there's probably something dead hidden in one of the walls and the landlady is strung out on glue sticks" kind of way. The kind of place where you feel like going into the backyard and kicking a few stones, surreptitiously checking to see if any earth has been recently disturbed.

But then it is nice when you finally find a place and it’s pretty nice, even if a herd of children do callisthenics directly above your bed at seven every morning and you realize after signing a one thousand dollar cheque that you will never be able to afford your second month’s rent.

Excuse me, I have to go plan a bank robbery.

There’s a job I wouldn’t want: the job of phoning a hundred people to tell them they did not get a job they applied for. But maybe I’ll be thinking differently in a few weeks when I’m poverty-stricken and starving on the corner of Granville next to Molly with the cardboard sign looking like a squished old person and all my dental work is falling out. Not that it matters. I haven’t been offered a job calling people to tell them they are mediocre, even by the standards of an industry chiefly concerned with playing dress up and eating candy. No, I mention it because I just received such a call from someone else. I have done two interviews with the PNE people for positions in the “haunting industry”. The job was to pay almost ten bucks an hour and involve standing inside a hastily constructed house for seven hours a day wearing latex and makeup and yelling at people. Sounds like fun, right? Sounds like I’d be getting paid to go to a particularly edgy rave or something. Actually, it would be a haunted house in Playland.

A few years back I applied for a position as something at the PNE. Mini Donut maker (the donuts being mini, not I. Also, how did I not get this job with my extensive background in greasy carb manufacturing at Tim Horton‘s?), ticket seller (I could out yell anybody they got. “Win a house! Win a car!” But they never asked me to audition in that way), or prize home guide (I’d come to work prepared with very slick answers to all the unfortunate questions, like “why has this closet been soundproofed?” “Uh, for people with very loud fashion sense?”), etc. The interview involved several dozen tables in a large room where a hundred or so of us sat and did arts and crafts with glitter and pipe cleaners. I did not even get a call from them afterward. In retrospect, I probably should not have eaten all the white glue or pulled that one girl’s hair.

And now, flash forward to modern times. I get a little bit closer to an elusive PNE position. Again, the tables, the large room, the group interviews. This time; Jenga. I am better at pretending to be outgoing. I impress the facilitator with my English accent. And afterwards I spend a few free hours in Playland with some fellow interviewees. We talk and laugh and promise to add each other to Facebook and then, of course, we do not. And by we I mean they. I do not have their last names. I gave them my name tag so they could add me, but I fear the inherent dullness of my outward personality made them forget all about it.

Meanwhile, my English accent single-handedly lands me a follow up interview, wherein I suppose I did not make a convincing enough werewolf. Or maybe I failed when I admitted I had never seen any of Friday the 13th OR Halloween films.
I could have been a scary guy in a haunted house. I could have had a Fright Nights Scare the Shit Out of People in Playland Job (official title: Customer Pants Shitting Liaison). I could’ve been a contender.
Instead, I am just a bitter blogger.

Today they called to tell me, “I am sorry, but we have decided to move in a more talented direction.”

I am trying hard not to write things that seem sad. It is difficult because I have become so good at it.

There was this guy on the bus once. A white bearded, beer bellied, round faced fifty something who was probably named Richard or Kenneth or Donald. He was jovial and chatting with two women, one of whom was secretly evil (but that's another story). He was also wearing a white t-shirt with some writing on it, some poem about friendship that his friend had written. He was handing out fliers to the women and talking about how limited edition his shirt was and did they want to buy one? I got the sense he had recently been released from prison, but he was okay now as long as the correct condiments were put on his burger. He also claimed to be the star of a YouTube viral sensation that involved him playing guitar and singing a song he had written. 24,000 hits in four months he said. Go check it out, he said. I've got a record deal as well, he said. Children are dancing to my song, he said. Very cute, very small children, he said. Children so cute you could hold them in the palm of your hand, he said. The song is great, he said. So naturally, I checked YouTube when I got home. Guy's got 35 hits and no comments. But actually the song is not bad. It is about happy things, as he said. He sings and plays guitar, as he said. But guy gets on a bus and pulls all kinds of outrageous lies right out of his ass. It's all about selling t-shirts. Everything is about selling t-shirts.

I have previously been operating under the surely misguided notion that I do my best writing when I am miserable. That does not mean I went out of my way to make myself miserable in hopes of finishing a masterpiece. There needn't be any going out of the way. I am just miserable enough without even trying. I mean was. Obviously I am not anymore. Happy is my middle name. Seriously, just check Facebook.

However - and this is quite the however - past misery has definitely been an inspiration for much of my writing. Whole feature screenplays are based on my misery. I am writing whole novels on how much trouble I have just hacking it in life. That's all academic now, of course. I imagine if I had been happy then as I most definitely am now, I would have written about boring things like rainbows and fluffy bunnies. I have a drive to make sure this misery sees the light of day, that all you pretty people have the opportunity to delight in my misery as encapsulated by film and literature.

A lot of it is also comedy.

Meanwhile, there are still obstacles to any of it ever being finished. Are they excuses or genuine reasons? That is for you to shut the fuck up about. I don't care about your uninformed opinion. They're all pretty much genuine reasons that I believe I can overcome. Except for the ones that aren't.

1. Fear of failure.

2. Fear of success.

3. Completely anal perfectionism so well disguised in layers of apparently normal neuroses that I have only just realized it exists. (Only when it comes to writing.)

4. Massive ego.

5. Low self esteem.

6. Ninjas.

7. Sediment.

8. Boredom so palpable you could spread it over noodles and eat it with a fork. But it wouldn't taste very good.

9. Distractions. So many distractions. Like those sixteen movies I'm going to see at the VIFF. That's just crazy. And all the movies I'm watching every day. And Dexter. And the internet. Ouch, ouch, ouch, the internet.

10. The black hole that is my social life. Write what you know, they say. I don't know very much.

11. Wasting time making lists on a blog read infrequently by five people.


Now, in the same numbered order, are the solutions to each problem.

1. Stop being such a whiny baby.

2. Stop being irrational you whiny baby.

3. Drugs.

4. Validation of massive ego, so it morphs into real confidence.

5. Motivational name calling. (eg. have some faith in yourself you whiny baby)

6. Pirates!

7. As Morgan Freeman would say "Either get busy livin' or get busy dying."

8. Get a job you freeloader.

9. Buy a typewriter and move to an isolated cabin in the wilderness for the winter.

10. Pretend to be an outgoing, well adjusted individual who smiles regularly and hope that people notice. Talk to said people in a friendly, nonthreatening tone about things like the weather, reality television, pop music and sports. Participate in a variety of activities with same people. Substitute people for trees and bears if I live in the wilderness for the winter.

11. Stop it.

I have recently begun watching a show called Dexter. It's about a serial killer who only kills other killers. My request is that a show be made where Dexter instead dispatches all those individuals who are simply too stupid to live. He would have his work cut out for him.

The pilot episode could involve the girl who was behind me on the bus today. She was standing and her complaint was that there should seriously be two different types of buses because they are all too full. The first kind would be exclusively for individuals under 20 years of age and the second type would be for those who are over 20, you know, the people who should already have the education to get a good job and buy a fucking car. Because come the fuck on, why are all you old people not out in your own separate vehicles? Why are you riding the goddamn bus? She was seriously serious. She was downright adamant.

I do not even know where to begin with this. Screaming might be a good place to go with it, but that doesn't really illustrate my counter arguments very well, does it? My initial reaction was to simply explode, but then I thought of my blog and realized I would not be able to continue it if I was in tiny little splattery bits. And then what would you do on the internet? Nothing, right? It would simply close down and everyone would go outside and start a million rec leagues and the sports fields would be totally booked and where would I play Ultimate Frisbee then?

I don't think I even need to make a statement, actually. Pick any of a thousand ways in which this particular individual has missed every single point. If you can't figure it out for yourself I'm sorry and I promise to take the stage to accept a Darwin Award on your behalf, whenever it is in the future that you inevitably win, as I am sure you will not personally be able to attend.

This girl went on to say that once she gets her driver's license she will not be caught dead on a bus. And the plot of the pilot episode is right there. Dexter overhears her speaking. He spends several minutes just sitting there flabbergasted, drooling on the seat in front of him until the bus jolts to a stop and he snaps out of his stupid induced stupor. Then he trails the girl to her home. He notes where she lives. He finds her on Facebook, reads her profile and knows everything there is to know. He waits until her status update announces she has gotten her driver's license and then, just to piss her off, he kills her and tosses her body onto public transit. Then he takes a picture and posts it on his MySpace.

Roll credits.

I feel like a grade schooler when I'm trying to write my resume. I feel like a total head case. I can't handle those things and I get pissed off and throw my blocks at the other children and have to sit in a corner for a few minutes to calm down. That doesn't work, though, and I'm still subconsciously crushing my graham crackers into a fine powder at snack time.

And then there are the application forms. I'm trying to shove all kinds of relevant information into miniscule boxes like a woman trying to fit her whole shoe collection into a suitcase and get the heck out of the apartment before her soon to be ex-boyfriend wakes up from his hang over. But unlike that woman, I'm thinking "what the fuck do I need all these goddamn shoes for? I already packed all my shoes in my resume and I'll probably pack many of them again into a cover letter. And besides, these shoes can't possibly begin to define me as a person or even as an employee, but then what will? Dresses? Shit, that reminds me I have to pack all my dresses. Oh God, I'm glad Chad is a heavy sleeper. I should draw something inappropriate on his forehead with a felt marker. That'll teach him to flirt with cocktail waitresses. And right in front of me, too. What a bastard. I'm going to come back with a big garbage bag after I've saved all my shoes and take his entire beer can collection to the recycling depot."

I guess if I'm being honest in the box marked "what skills do you feel you could improve on?" I'll write "metaphors have a tendency to get away from me." But man, that last one. Somebody get a net. Somebody get a tranquilizer gun.

It does not help that I have the printing of a heavily caffeinated 5 year old war amp scratching words into clay with the torn fingernails of his left hand while being constantly and angrily pummelled with a limited edition plastic McDonald's hockey stick by his younger brother who really really wants to go outside and play GI Joes before it gets dark because he needs to blow off some steam by pretending to shoot the crap out of the neighbour's cat and then chase after passing cars with a fallen branch because they're really enemy tanks.

I'm sure I'll get the hang of this soon enough, but if I don't have a job in the next two weeks I'm going to resort to criminal acts.

You - that strong, pockmarked face and  perpetual scowl, just going gray in the hair. You were with a skinny Asian woman.
Me - dressed all in black I got on the escalator behind you. Then I got in line behind you to buy tickets. You went to see Extract and I went to see Paper Heart. I lingered near the concession to get another glimpse of you. Then, we saw each other again briefly in the washroom. I wanted to say hi, but I was too intimidated. I mean, you're Ray fucking Liotta. Crazy cop in Narc. Gangster in Goodfellas.  Security Guard in Muppets From Space. And maybe you didn't want some strange guy interrupting your matinee just to say hi. But, on the off chance that you read this, I just wanted to ask - how was Extract? Any good? I think I'll probably just rent it. I don't know. The trailers aren't really doing it for me.

So yeah, I saw Ray Liotta at Cinemark, which was weird. He's a real person you know. A real person who likes Mike Judge movies. And who almost always looks like he's scowling. I might make that face too, if I were famous and out about and wanted to warn fans not to bug me.

This reminds me of the time I saw Bill Pullman on a bus once in PoCo. Also, I saw Ian Tracey at a Franz Ferdinand concert and Jason Statham filming a bad action movie on the streets of Gastown (my favourite of his is Snatch - how do you even make a clever porn version of that title? Add anything dirty to it and nobody's going to get the reference. It'll just sound like a regular porn title. If you have any ideas, let me know). Not to mention I've done scenes with Jensen Ackles and Andy Samberg. So yeah, I'm a pretty big deal knowing all those famous people. Biiiig deal. That's me.

Though not a big enough deal that a corporate videography company would ever want to hire me. Failed interview number two billion. Thank you very much, as Elvis would say. (which reminds me of an email I got from this film group today talking about indie movies at the Toronto Film Fest and they mentioned Leslie, My Name Is Evil, which is some weird court room film about the Manson murders, but some idiot misnamed it in the email, called it Leslie, My Name Is Elvis. You finished that off fast, would you like seconds of fail?)

Silly, silly me. I'm out of school for a few years and I figure I'm never going to have to do homework again. Now that home is nowhere but where my heart is, everything I do is homework. And I suppose, odds being in favor of it statistically speaking, one day when I am a grossly obese individual with a heart problem and I need invasive heart surgery - well that will be real homework, won't it? "I'm renovating my home," I'll say. "So I'll be in the hospital a while." I just hope I don't have to do the renovations myself. I'm not a DIY kind of guy when it comes to triple bypasses. However, the good news is the government is giving all kinds of tax breaks to home renovators this year. Time to get fat.

This is all a terrible lead up to announcing that I sort of feel like a douchebag, which is nothing new or scary. I finally got a response from Raincoast Books. Turns out they no longer publish. They're just distributors and wholesalers now.

That's what I'm talking about. Homework. Sorry, teach, I didn't have time. Poor Bev from Raincoast didn't even have the energy to use capitals in her reply. Meanwhile, I have done a make up assignment that involves going to the library and I have some answers.

When I grow up I want to be Woody Allen’s stunt double. I want to do the really dangerous scenes, the ones where the required amount of babbling and quivering is just too much. The man is a master, but he’s getting old. Like Jackie Chan. He’s not always going to be able to just toss around all the big words he puts in his dialogue. He won’t always be able to handle the constant strain of all those Freud jokes. At some point the accumulated wear and tear of countless um’s and ah’s and stutters will cause the slow sad breakdown of his lips. The production will no longer be able to insure them. That is where I will step in, with my young and vital stunt lips, expertly trained. Otherwise Woody Allen is going to have to do what Jackie Chan has done and replace half of his performance with computer generated effects. I just don’t think that kind of thing is in the budget of a Woody Allen movie. I hope Woody is man enough to admit it, that he is aging gracefully. I mean in his mind, of course. We all know he hasn’t been aging gracefully in a physical sense for decades now. In fact, I think I read an article in a magazine that said he was born with thick black glasses, wispy thin hair and skin like the Sahara desert, all lined with long dunes and pitted with the occasional ancient wreckage of a propeller plane crash.

Perhaps a lot like the ugly baby from that episode of Seinfeld.

So if you're Woody Allen and you're reading this, or heck, even if you're not reading this, I say Mr. Allen, having trouble with that wry witty monologue on the relations between men and women and how that relates to the fact that we're all meaningless lumps of flesh riding a ball of rock at excessive speeds through a vast cold nothingness, somehow working in references to Kafka, Casablanca and your own personal deviant sexual habits? Just give it to me. I can take it. With my stunt services at your service audiences will even believe you're vital enough to attract the teenaged girls who costar with you.

I'm a guy with three (3!) novels in the works. And those are just the ones I'm serious about. Recently I went through my annual masochistic, "hey, I should do research on publishers and send queries" phase which is accompanied by all kinds of other naive ideas. Go to just about any website of a substantial book house in the world and you will discover none of them are accepting manuscripts, ever again. Maybe they`ve decided that the current block of hacks is enough to satisfy the market for the next hundred years. I wouldn`t blame them, there are so many books on shelves. But there is a point at which quantity and quality diverge. This divergence happens separate from the divergence of quality and actual popularity, ie. the success of a book. It`s like anything else. The general population enjoys ingesting complete and utter trash. 

So in my positively charged state I decided to send an earnest, questioning email to the kind folks at Raincoast Books. They publish Harry Potter, so they must be geniuses, right? Anyway, here it is:

I was looking over your site and saw on the Contact Us page the same line I have seen on every Publisher's website: "We are no longer accepting manuscripts". My questions are simple: Why is this? How is a new writer supposed to get anyone to look at his work? How do you expect to discover new talent? What if I physically brought an excerpt of my manuscript and a query to your offices in Vancouver? What if I also brought a small gift of tasteful jewelry and a box of expensive Belgian chocolates with a little bow on top and a gift certificate to Chapters? What if I was charming and witty with the receptionist? (That's a purely hypothetical question, a sort "what if in a bizzaro universe I could be" type deal.) Is it better for me to have a completed manuscript or will a first chapter and a lot of notes do? What if I also have boundless enthusiasm and a lot of really wild ideas? What if I could come even this close to convincing you that my novel is as ambitious and revelatory as it actually is? What if all I really need is some time to concentrate on it and a little direction from professional, intelligent, good looking young folks like yourselves? What if I knew it could be a really fun, thoughtful and engaging novel reminiscent of the best stories of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr and that a lot of people would really enjoy paying nineteen dollars and ninety-five cents to read it? But what if nobody ever got to read a word of it, except my mother and those few individuals I know who have a lot of spare time, and the world went on spinning, never knowing what it had missed? Wouldn't you be sad about that? I know I would. Best regards,

-- etc etc etc and so on

I have yet to receive a response.

How hard can it be to just decide to be happy and then be happy? Is it possible, through sheer force of will, to make my own happiness, even when every instinct I have is telling me to retreat into negative emotion? I don't know. Let's find out.

Do you have to be a total insane-o-path to do something like this? Doesn't matter. If you do, I fit the bill. I'm an undiagnosed paranoid delusional schizophrenic. Paranoid, because I'm certain I have all kinds of mental illnesses, delusional because I believe they are actually anything substantially beyond the usual neuroses of the average human being, schizophrenic because I keep arguing with myself over whether the paranoia is just a delusion, or if I don't actually have any delusions and I'm only being paranoid.

I am the originator of thousands of tangent universes. Little digressions in history where certain events that never actually happened play out, where conversations that ended days ago continue on though the other person has long since left them, where a million different futures that never will be reel out and eventually fade away. As far as I know they only exist within my mind. In this way I have been writing a journal of thoughts and ideas and hopes and dreams and fears for years now. I just never recorded any of it. Now I will begin to do so with what I hope will be alarming frequency.