A Rolling Doughnut With Your Name On It
by MFDH, the CheeseburgerBrown of StoryZoo
Maybe this should be in the hole.
Poll?
Hole poll.
Unprintable
This paragraph has been deleted. There's nothing to see here. Please move along. Move along. Move along.
Altogether Misleading Heading
So I mentioned that I live in a village. It is in a narrow band of rurality bounded by protected lands, smudged between two expanding cities -- a megatropolis to the south, and a standard issue bourgeoning moon-sized satellite cityette to the north, pocketed on the east by a lake and the west by a dirty spoke of sprawl.
Right?
So, I've also mentioned that I'm what some call a tele-worker. That is, I work from home. Despite this, I am not fat. I usually send stuff to clients over the blessed Internet (peace and blessings be upon it), who in turn satellite it to America to be shown. Or Japan, as the case might be. (And it is.)
[ CheeseburgerBrown opens another beer. Grolsch. Bless LittleStar, wherever she may be.]
But sometimes I have to drag my sorry ass into the Big Dirty to help waste everyone's time having circular conversations about irrelevant things. We sit in boardrooms and there's usually a projector showing reference art or rough animatics. This is where the producers get to feel important, and the directors run damage control on whatever that wanton importance threatens to touch. Blah-blah-blah.
(Since I'm the outside monk brought in from a foreign monastary the producers have an excuse to rehash all of the least important elements of the project, in order to spend time for everyone to eat their finger sandwiches or cookies or whatever before the director gets to speak.
(Understand: it is largely unnecessary to actually respond to the lion's share of this preamble beyond simple affirmation, so there's no worrying about having to speak with a full mouth. Talking isn't really required until the next phase, when the director ritualistically brings up previously solved problems in order to discuss them successfully while the producer is listening. Yap-yap-yap.))
If the director isn't there to pin things down, things can get out of control fast.
So the director of the videos I'm working on has gone to a family reunion in British Columbia. The telephone rings. It's the Man With The Small Penis from the production company. He wants a face to face meeting to discuss my production designs.
Shit.
LittleStar and Popsicle have taken the Volvo to the cottage, so's they can fix it up for selling. LittleStar's purple Nissan is on the fritz. I look out the window and sigh. It's a toss up: should I drive the yard truck, or the lawn-mower?
Fuck.
Jurassic Truck
The yard truck belongs to Old Oak. He leaves the key in the ignition, because "it vas taking me tventy minutes per time to stick it in, ja!" It jams. It's not supposed to come out. Which is fine, because the doors are never to be locked. They do not unlock. Apparently, the truck dates from before unlocking was a la mode.
It's a pick-up truck. It was once blue. It has a horrifyingly ad hoc wooden cabin built over the back, painted brown in parts. A hole has been cut into it to accomodate having a view in the rearview mirror. It is not altogether secure. It is full of crap from our yard. We were going to drive it to the dump when it was full. That's what the truck is for -- yard shit. We drive it around the school field.
The cabin is full of cigarette ashes and old coffee cups. It smells interesting.
And it's fucking loud.
So there I am in my best going-to-meetin' clothes, my least bent sunglasses, my TiBook on the seat beside me, chortling down Highway 400 like a Galapagos tortoise with serious gastrointestinal issues. (I learned quickly that the engine would only fire properly at speeds below 100 kph, so I settled into a stately, roaring one-man parade to Toronto.) I rolled up my sleeve and put my forearm on the open window, because it seemed appropriate.
Everybody went around me. Even trucks hauling prefabricated concrete building parts. I smiled and waved. The truck farted, my acceleration hitching briefly. Oy.
The city is encased in a solid bath of milky grey smog.
(Listen, don't start bitching on me about switching tense in the middle of a telling. Fuck you. I can't decide. I'm not editing this. I don't even spell-cheque.)
I navigate the trendy Fashion District. The truck roars as the light turns green. A squeegee kid calls me "Farmer John."
The truck shudders to a stop outside of Stupid & Rich Productions, then backfires loudly. When I'm buzzed inside the receptionist asks me if I heard a gunshot, and wonders whether she should call the police. I tell her, "Maybe."
You Suck!
The first thing the people in the boardroom have to tell me is that my production designs have been rejected. Read: they're not looking for modifications, or tweaks -- re-fucking-jected outright.
I look around for Producer/Director, but he's in BC. The meeting is being steered by Small Penis Man, and overseen by His Royal Majesty Executive Producer Walrus. Shit! Shit! Shit!
(Shit!)
Now, I've been in this business for more than a few years. I don't have some prima donna artistic ego when it comes to designs. If a client doesn't like it, I can always sell it to somebody else, or use it myself. Design isn't my strong suit, to be completely honest. Anyone out there strong in graphic design whose seen my shit will tell you so. Most of the time I execute other people's designs, which is fine with me. It's commercial work, not art.
On the other hand:
#1. It was a beautiful production design. I think it is some of my strongest design work ever. Seriously. Maybe I was seeing more possibilities than actualities, but I thought it was real pretty.
#2. I worked very hard to create a production design that would work well in stereo, as carefully instructed by Santa Stereographer from LA. I spent days weighing the compromises and coming up with a solution that would satisfy the technical requirements without sacrificing the creative direction.
#3. I was briefed in painful detail before I started work, and the designs I produced are a balanced synthesis of the reference materials provided.
But I can't afford to bat an eye. I smile and ask, "Where do we go from here?"
Blah-blah-blah, yap-yap-yap, wank-wank-wank. Lots of new and altogether different reference material is projected. The reasons why my design has not satisfied Executive Producer Walrus are outlined repeatedly and inarticulately by Small Penis Man.
Small Penis Man specialises in "designing" by combining whole pieces of stock art in Photoshop. He doesn't understand stereo but he pretends to. He's always reminding everybody how he used to work in LA. He's tall and blonde and angular, with dull blue eyes and fingers stained from hand-rolled cigarettes. Small Penis Man puts a lot of energy into making sure that Executive Producer Walrus doesn't ever get the idea that he's useless and contributes nothing. He finds this task especially taxing (and vexing) when I'm around.
He's a fart-sucking wink-brained pickle-fucking egg-licker. And, as I mentioned, his penis is improbably small.
Executive Producer Walrus: "I want to see the simplicity, the cleaness of Japanese design -- sparse, refined, elegant. Like Shoji."
Small Penis Man: "With lots of overlapping semi-translucent panels, flying through space. But not dark space -- not outer space -- just some abstract space. With streams of light and beams of particles."
Executive Producer Walrus: "But really minimal, you know? Almost spartan. Formal. Elegant. Like Sogetsu sculpture. It's all about the beauty of nature."
Small Penis Man: "With images of technology behing projected in onto the complex of panels, separting them into layers of depth with, like, image effects and lens flares and whatever, through the beams and particles."
Executive Producer Walrus: "And we've agreed that everything should be green."
I eat a cookie. Before I leave I put two more in my pocket. Motherfuckers dragged their feet for three days to come up with this shit, while I'm on hold. I get paid by the day, you shit-smurfs! (Granted, I've been busy working for another client to whom I've sold the same time, but Executive Producer Walrus doesn't know that.)
Teenage Uber Alles
So then I park the Jurassic Truck on a sidestreet by the subway station, and call this guy I know who plays a lot of Final Fantasy and deals drugs. Don't judge me, fuckers. Wife and tot are away, and I want more than beer for my relaxation enhancement.
"I just woke up," he tells me. "I was playing the game for like twenty hours straight or something, man."
"Can you meet me?" I tell him where I am.
"One hour," says the drug dealer.
I'm not buying crack or heroin or anything. You can all relax. I just want some marijuana. I have the run of the house, and I can make it smell however I want.
I sit in the truck and read my book. I'm still reading The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers. Now I'm not. I start into A Member of the Wedding by the same author, included in the same volume. I yawn. Outside, people walk their dogs. A lady with a truly delicious little chest-lap of visible cleavage stops and chats with her dog for a while outside the truck, bending over and scratching his little nose. She's ugly but she gives me a boner.
I turn back to reading about depressed people in the American South during the depression, and my boner goes away.
Two and half hours later an Asian teenager wearing a black trenchcoat despite the heat knocks on the windshield and startles me back to present day Canada. "Yo, man, nice Dodge," he says, climbing in.
We'll call him Ralph. Ralph was born in China and moved to Toronto shortly afterward. His biological father is a man he calls by his given name in a refusal to acknowlege the familial relationship. Ralph and his father quarrelled. His father usually won the arguments, because beating the shit out of little kids is pretty easy. One day when his father was giving his mother a hard time, Ralph pulled out a steak knife and attempted to redirect his father's attention. The authorities were called, and Ralph was charged as a minor with wielding a deadly weapon. He was taken from his mother and put in a concrete cubicle with an overflowing toilet. It was cold. No one told him what was going on. No one spoke to him for twenty-four hours.
He was eight years old.
Ralph went to live in a group home. There he was introduced to ritual beatings to establish the pecking order, and he was also invited to smoke marjiuana, eat ecstasy and drink alcohol (Ralph didn't like ecstasy or alcohol). The conditions were crowded, and the food was rotten. One of the social workers was always pestering Ralph to let him stick his finger in Ralph's anus.
Later, Ralph lived with various foster families, bounced from one to another as he grew into a teenager. When he was sixteen he applied for government help to live on his own, and won it.
When he turned eighteen and the government assistance dwindled he turned to trafficking marijuana to pay his bills. He applied to various educational institutions and eventually found a programme that would take him, so he could finish off his secondary school credits. He bought a PlayStation 2. He took up martial arts, and works out fiendishly. "I will never be defenseless, I will never lose a fight. I want to be a human weapon -- naked," says Ralph.
Ralph is a friend of my little sister's. I met him at one of her parties.
He doesn't read well. LittleStar has been lending him comic books to help get him interested in the printed word. He's working his way through Neil Gaiman's The Sandman now. He's not very talkative about how it's going, though. LittleStar gave the comics to him ages ago.
We chat for a while, and then he sells me a little bag of bushy marijuana. "Sorry about the delay, man," he says.
"We all do what we can, Ralph," I tell him.
I drive him to his next stop: a family function. He smoked a cigarette with tissue wrapped around his fingers, so his hand won't smell. Then I turn my ponderous whale of a farting pick-up truck around and chug back up the parkway to the 407.
I'm excited as I chortle him. Teenage fun ahead -- depression, beer and a hydroponic stone!
I've Lost Interest
Okay, I've lost interest in this diary now. Who cares? So I drove home and grabbed a cheeseburger but felt too wound up to eat it so I gave it to the dog. The one with the lampshade on his head. I took off the lampshade so he could eat it, but then I forgot to put it back on so he started to eat his foot again. Idiot. Now I have to change the fucking dressing.
I don't enjoy playing M*A*S*H. My wife does, but I don't. Idiot dog.
So, how's Internet porn cracking up these days? It's been ages since I've looked. Let's see here...
H'm.
Meh.
What is that up her...? -- oh my.
Ah, more video these days. Teh cybar-futar!
H'm.
Meh.
Jesus.
Now that's just sad.
That, on the other hand...
H'm.
Porno sucks. Where's my wife? None of these girls look like my wife. I'm only interested in LittleStar porno. Let's try good old Autopr0n. H'm. None of these categories seem to describe LittleStar well. Okay, blonde. Should I say European? What does a European classification signify in terms of genre? And I'm gonna say Chubby, because I don't want no stick porn. Okay, submit.
H'm.
Meh.
The blessed Internet sucks (peace and blessings be upon it). I'm angry at the world. I'm going to the garden to eat worms. I'm going to crash a jetliner into a landmark. I'm going to get stoned and drink beer.
Relaxation Enhancement
My relaxation is now enhanced, and this is now officially my sloppiest diary ever. Look at this shit. Musing aloud about web porn? Jesus Murphy Brown. I'm this close to becoming Hide Teh Hamster.
(And then I would wield a red light-sabre.)
When's the new Harry Potter book coming out?
I need a vacation. Wait -- I'm stoned and drunk and awake in the small hours...I guess this is a vacation. Except I've got a crushing load of work tomorrow, for two clients. Yippie!
I think Kurt Vonnegut said it best when he typed: "Why don't you go take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut? Why don't you take a flying fuck at the Moo-o-o-o-on?"
Yes, I think I will.
It's a warm night. I'm going outside for a bit, to have a wander. I promise to play safe.
Cut! -- and...post it.
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Posted originally on CheeseburgerBrown at Hulver, 22 July 2004