Friday Bliss

Friday, I love you. Let me count the ways.

To start off, at 8 a.m. on FM 949, there is the Friday Morning Blues Set. You'd think that this being the blues and all it should go on Monday, but the music is just too good to give up to the worst day of the week. This was today's set

August 28, 2009
Johnny Winter - "Mean Mistreater" (1969)
Taj Mahal - "She Caught the Katy" (1968)
Robert Johnson - "Hell Hound On My Trail" (1937)

Next, I walk into work, where there is an assortment of free donuts and bagels just waiting for me to eat. And you know, I'm a whore for a free meal.

Then I get to my desk, open up my computer, and log on to be reminded that, oh yeah, today was pay day. Now I have something in my account that I can watch leak out slowly until the next week.

By 1:30 p.m. I'm at the Renaissance Shopping Complex, in front of Rubios, eating sack lunch with my great friend, Jen Bantleman. We talk about being art thieves, how to test if women are pregnant with alcohol and cigarettes, and proper church etiquette.

The rest of the work day drags, as if it were any other day, but then I come home, cook a great dinner, and chill with my girlfriend in front of the television.

Now, if that damn heat would go away...

Summer Oh Shit! List

5) The Black Eyed Peas song "I Gotta Feeling"

Dear BEPs, your record is called: The E.N.D. and that is something I'd like you to take into consideration with your careers. Sincerely, Every Morning Commuter Stuck Listening To Your Pop Trash Three Time Per Hour At 7:30 In The Morning.

4) Anything that has to do with Avatar

James Cameron. Air bending. All of it -- I don't care. Unless you're Felicia Day and offering me a date. Then I'm craving to emote with you.



3) Wolverine

I can this (__) close to falling asleep. I should have. I want my money and my life back.

2) The Real World Cancun

For someone who had not watched an entire season of RW in his life until his girlfriend made him, I have to say that I actually kind of liked the Brooklyn edition earlier this year. Granted it had all the "that's not really what life in New York is like" bullshit, but the Cancun people are just downright terrible. And now I go back to pretending that The Real World doesn't exist.

1) Justin Bieber

This music video...which plays forever...all the time...and just makes me want to never have kids.

Rat Eating Plant

The most unique product this season to come out of the Philippines. And the creepiest part: silent, but deadly.



Can I have it for my birthday?

Next Page

As I run past first, round second, curve my way through third, and head on home in my current writing projects, I'm at my favorite crossroad of life. Namely, it involves the question of what do I write next. I used to write all the ideas down and then go back to them to figure out which ones I really take the time and effort to produce.

So far, here's what's waiting on deck to step up to the plate:

1) Nick Garlands Last Night In Town

This is a screenplay that I've already started, based upon (and hopefully starring) my friend, Nick Garland. Just to clarify: he's not leaving town, this is a fictional story, but it is hopefully going to be a showcase of San Diego talent and creative individuals who are associated with So Say We All. That's the underlying hope. But on a story level, it is about a guy who has lived in San Diego all his life and is following his long-time girlfriend out to Chicago, where he hopes to make it big on the comedy circuit. During his last night in town, he finds out his girlfriend actually left Chicago and came back to SD, leaving him with the major dramatic question of should he still leave? (Answer: hell yeah...)

2) SexBot 2400

As of last week, I've been a nerd gamer for sixty days. Rejoice! And while I've not fully acquired all the skills of Everquest to be a joystick fiend, I have learned a few things. This play would be about a quality assurance game tester who is given the task of testing a new, interactive game called SexBot 2400. It is a robotic woman who is incredibly lifelike and the objective is to find a way to have sex with her. With most of the gaming community not knowing quite how to interact on a social level, it is meant to boost their face-to-face skills and give a middle management megalomaniac the power she needs to take over the company. The only catch: it is impossible to have sex with the SexBot 2400.

3) The Draftsman

Came up with this last night while watching B.D. Wong in the good (if uneven) Herringbone. Is it a play or a movie? You tell me. A man checks into the South Point Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas. He applies for a job on a clean up crew and during his first week, finds a dead body of an independently wealthy man in one of the rooms and decides to use the man's identity to stay at the hotel indefinitely. He eats scraps from the buffet, works out in the hotel's pool, and never leaves the hotel. When he's not cleaning up other rooms, he's designing a building. One day, one of the front desk staff finds out that he is living off the dead man's credit cards and wants to know who he really is. He's a draftsman who lost his job, felt like he had disgraced his family, and decided to leave until he could come back with some sense of how to save them. Pretty twisted plan, no? The idea was to design a building that would get him rehired at his old firm, with an apartment on the top floor that would be his family's new home. Finally, the front desk person forces the draftsman to leave, after a year of solitude, to return to his family.

So, which pitch should I swing at?

Summer Oh Yeah! List

My Summer 2009 Oh Yeah! List

10) 21st Century Breakdown -- Green Day

The album that grows on you like a bad mole. It is no Dookie or American Idiot and a far cry from Nimrod. However, once you listen to it again and again in a hot car, you finally get it -- we're all musically doomed, so party now.

9) Bruno

Wazzup? It's boner flopped at the box office, true, but it was also a step above Borat. That's because it is easy to get on board with a guy who could be a terrorist from another country, but it is hard and ballsy (sorry) to throw America's worst fear back in their face and make people laugh. Performance art hardly does it justice. This was a defying leap into comedic social commentary.

8) Rescue Me

Let's see: more details about 9/11, substantial character development Sean's battle with cancer, and the women taking control over Denis Leary's tortured and confused fireman? Oh, and everyone is drinking again, including the ghosts. Yeah, it is a kick ass season.

7) City Of Glass Graphic Novel -- By David Mazzucchelli and Paul Karasik, based on the novel by Paul Auster

Forget the original and go with the adaptation that's original, eye opening, and haunting in a way the source material was never able to quite cook up. Not only are the illustrations entrancing and hypnotic, they push the story to new depths. A great summer graphic novel.

6) The Hangover and Up

The best double-feature you can get for one ticket price. Sneak into it with someone you love and is willing to hold your hair back (extra bonus: stay for both movies' credits)

5) "Paranoid" music video by Kanye West

R&B rap meets werewolf Tarantino movie. It's B-horror style with imagination and energy that elevates a mediocre song to a new level of awesomeness. And I suppose Rhianna is pretty dashing as the possessed damsel going to the top of the mountain in her tricked out convertible. You worry about the wrong things...

4) Weeds

Still funny. Still creative. Mary-Louise Parker and Justin Kirk have the best chemistry on television. It wouldn't be summer without green growing in Mrs. Botwin's backyard. And speaking of chemistry...

3) Away We Go

Dear Dave Eggers, I apologize for calling you a hack writer who does not fully understand complex and intriguing human beings. Perhaps Maya Rudolph and John Kransinski just did everything perfectly, but you and Vendela Vida gave them the set up. Write more movies, less books.

2) "Like A Boss" music video by The Lonely Island

Stay off the boat and go to work where you can micromanage, hit on Debra, find a fish, fuck its brains out, and have an interview with Seth Rogen. I am a believer in the Lonely Island guys and think that once again, they are genius in what they make.

1) Cage The Elephant -- Cage The Elephant

Ain't no rest for the wicked. Same goes for this album on your radio. Make sure you go crazy.

Oh yeah...

Quick Sample

Last night, in a hot, cramped, sweltering apartment in Ocean Beach, I finally got to do the reading of Salt Water Cajuns (formerly, Our Mother, Staten Island), with a group of fantastic actors.

I now have a new direction to go with it and TJ and the cast gave me some interesting ideas to chew on. At first it felt like another shot in the dark at making the story work, stretching for emotion, plot, and character all at once. But a lot of the actors really liked it, many saying that when it goes up they want to audition for it.

They have hope that it will go up -- better than I do at the moment.

Speaking of actors and this play, there was a man who went by the title of Bowser back in New York and who would occasionally read and act in pieces in the dramatic writing department. In fact, he was one of the first people to read the part of "Sean" in my play.

Where is he now? Wait until about 45 seconds into this clip to find out. I've never seen him do anything like this before.

If you want to see more -- and god knows, I wasn't expecting to -- the whole episode is on Hulu. At least one of us is making it big.

Revamp 2.5

90210 has done it. Melrose Place is about to do it. And So Say We All has just completed it: a makeover and updating of an old show.

"Old," you say. "You've only been around since February! Of this year"

You are both right and wrong, sir and/or madam. We, So Say We All and the newly re-did SSWA website, have recently started to expand into the world of...wait for it...wait for it...art.

So Say We All is still storytelling and themes, but the different outlets and genres of creative expression will all have a chance to perform and get their voice heard. We are not a production company, we are just a producing entity.

Music videos are in the works, with a performance on every second Monday of the month at South Park's Whistle Stop bar. The story slams are getting bigger and better. Look out for this month's "When Poverty Strikes" show on July 31st, just in time for California to go broke during Fiscal Armageddon and August, when So Say We All changes venues, we are staying up to do our "3 A.M." show.

Plus, be on the look out Prop 8-er Haters, we are doing a main stage show with the LGBT community called: "That's So Gay." with a date that is TBA.

Basically, we are growing, we are moving, and we want you on board.

Shameless self-promotion done!