briantology

From "How To Be Popular: You're Never Too Young or Too Old," a pamphlet by Abigail Van Buren:

"I don't recommend bars and cocktail lounges as places for respectable men and women to find a lasting relationship."

This, then, leads immediately to the question, "Am I really looking for a respectable man or woman?"

Clearly, the answer is no.

Sometimes I think if I could spend eternity playing a neverending version of "Eurotrash Girl" by Cracker with some house band, in some Cain's Ballroom-sized venue, with a bunch of sweaty people kind of swaying, tired and happy, but rocking out still, forever and ever with the languid quiet parts back-to-back with the loud parts, and the reverb really thick the whole goddamn time ... if that lasted forever, I think it might be some kind of heaven of some sort. At least I'd be happy with it.

Sometimes I don't want much out of life. For example, if I had a really solid cover band, and I could make a decent living off it, I think I might just forget to do anything else for the rest of my life. Because being in a band is really, really fun. Sometimes all I want to do is sing and play my dumb guitar in front of people all night, even if I've only got about a dozen presentable cover songs and nine of them are Johnny Cash songs and the other fifteen are Tom Petty.

Sometimes all I want to do is drink whiskey and sit at home and listen to "Eurotrash Girl" and write dumb confessional stuff that I'll regret posting tomorrow. Sometimes all I want to do is explain myself in the last paragraph. Or the next-to-last sentence.

Who's stoked? Run's stoked. Who's Run in this case? I'm Run. RUNNIN' OFF ON VACATION!

- cough. -

Anyway. Darleece and I are off to the magical land of Portland. I'm not saying whether we're going to Portland, Oregon or Portland, Maine, because I'm pretty fucking certain there's no reason for me to go to Portland, Maine, now or ever. (If you have positive, gushing testimony about what a magical place Portland, Maine is, feel free to comment and tell me how wrong I am.) And every time I mention that I'm going to Portland, somebody asks, "Oregon or Maine?" And I think they're just trying to be funny. But come to think of it, maybe they've actually been to Portland, Maine, and were so enamored of it that they're shocked anybody would want to visit lousy old Portland, Oregon when its twin sister glitters like a jewel on the far Northeast coast.

We'll see, I guess.

Finally, a concrete explanation as to why I'm constantly tuning up my car and ignoring my wife.

If there's one thing more helpful to relationships worldwide, it's pigeonholing both sexes into lists of easily categorized traits. Okay, okay, I know it's good for people who walk around with their eyes glued shut and stopped thinking at around age 13 to have some guidelines to actual human behavior, other than "Friends" reruns.

Seriously though, maybe it's just the guys I hang out with, but Greg is the only one of my friends I've ever seen even attempt to change his own oil. And I think Bush senior was in office the last time that happened.

Of course there are actual grains of truth in the story. I don't generally feel like talking when I get home from work at the end of the day. Fortunately Darleece and I have developed a way around this. I ask her how her day was; she answers in a sentence or less. Then we either watch TV together for a while, not saying anything, or she goes off and does something, during which time we don't say much of anything. After a while, we resume saying things to each other.

Occasionally, when there's stuff we have to talk about (whether we need groceries for dinner, whether we're just having booze for dinner again, whether we need to go get booze to have for dinner again, etc.), we talk about it. In other words, we do a small amount of work at our marriage, and it pays off by working. I've found it to be remarkably un-hard.

I guess it's unsympathetic of me, but sometimes I'm baffled by how many people complain about how hard marriage is, about how much work it is. I mean, yes, if you just sit there with your thumb up your ass when your wife wants to talk about something, then omigosh! you'll probably wind up getting a divorce eventually. But basically, if you make an effort to be something other than an irredeemable fuckhead to your spouse, I tend to think your chances of staying together improve.

Of course if it's that much of an effort for you to not be an irredeemable fuckhead in the first place, that may be indicative of a larger problem. Which brings me to part to of "Megalodon's formula for successful marriage," a little tenet I like to call, "Don't Marry a Horrible Person."

So far it's worked for me pretty well.

Okay, these guys are my new heroes. For today, anyway. Two of my favorite things about this page: 1) Viewing the rogue's gallery of all twelve heavily bearded, kind of confused-looking men, and 2) the logo for the World Beard and Mustache Championships.

Super extra-special thanks to Agent Foxxy Boxing of the New York Bureau for sending this link my way. Good work, special agent. Remember to give Very Special Agent Corky his bath tonight. Once a week, whether he needs it or not.

As I sporadically show up for screenwriting class, two things become increasingly clear to me: 1) There are countless simple little ways in which filmmakers can enrich the moviegoer's experience, and 2) 99 filmmakers out of 100 aren't doing any of them.

This is no surprise to anybody who's been to a Hollywood movie in the past, oh, 30 years. But it baffles me that, for example, whoever the fuck made "Eraser" couldn't have taken forty-five seconds of film to just barely sketch out the character a little bit. Yeah yeah yeah, you say, it's just an action-adventure movie. Nobody comes to those for character development. They come to those to see burly celebs set things on fire.

My answer to this is twofold. 1) Remember "The Professional." It's perhaps the best action movie I've ever seen, because it's about a goddamn person, is in fact about more than one goddamn person, and not about cardboard cutouts. Sure, fleshing characters out won't automatically make your movie good. But it'll sure as fuck make it less bad. 2) I don't give a rat's ass if people don't come to action movies for character development. Give it to them anyway, over and over, and before too long they'll come to (gasp!) expect the movies they see to be about people, instead of cardboard cutouts.

This, though, might raise the bar for Hollywood, and if there's one thing we can't have, it's a set of standards on a notch anywhere above "Ernest Goes to Jail."

Hell, we even knew what Ernest wanted.

Some Things, Selected in no Particular Order, That I Will Miss About Agent Foxxy Boxing, Known Legally as Sarah E. Brown:

• Lunch Dates. Lunch is one of my favorite meals of the day, second only to breakfast and dinner, with which it shares a three-way tie. I respect how it's able to mean so many different things in so many different situations, chief among them an hour-long escape from work. One that involves food.

Sarahbrown is a damn fine lunch partner. Employed or otherwise, she was almost always available when I felt like having Citibank buy me lunch. In all cases, she is excellent company.

• Scaryoke Night. It turned out very fitting to hold final hurrah night for Sarah at Lennie's last night. Our hostess, the other half of Lennie's crack entertainment committee, was a far more genial talent(?) wrangler than the usual host, a guy whose name I won't mention here, but who let's just say is less than friendly when you stagger up there and sign up for twelve songs in a row, rather than patiently explaining that it's good to have a variety of singers, and thus she's gonna break up the set list a little, as our Lennie's lady did last night. Kudos, Lorri. (P.S. -- Your voice is way better too.)

Oh yeah, and Sarah, I honestly don't know if we're gonna be able to carry off karaoke night when you've gone. You were the drunken, slurring, and not infrequently brilliant (see your duet with LBK on "Kiss Me Deadly") heart of our karaoke experience.

Though in the future, Jimmy Jam may somehow expand to fill that role. I don't know if it'll be a positive thing, but it certainly should be fun to watch.

• The O.C. Of course we'll still watch it, and god knows we'll still love the fuck out of it. But I'll miss our occasional O.C./Pinot Gringo slurfests, and your constant berating of Chino and The Spazz to shut up and get it on. Though modern technology has advanced considerably, and as since it'll be on at 9 Eastern/8 Central, I foresee commercial break teleconferences aplenty.

• The Back Row. It was during one semester of either my second or third senior year in college that Sarahbrown and I became friends, and this came due in no small part to one creative writing course we took together. I don't think I'm exaggerating too much when I say that this class included some of the worst writers ever to drop, slimy and covered in dirt, much like Sauron's horrid warriors in the first "Lord of the Rings" movie, onto the face of this planet. This class included a particularly infuriating frat guy, who I'm pretty sure thought he was the sensitive one; this basically meant he'd memorized four lines of Shakespeare that the drunk chicks he tried to use it on probably didn't catch anyway.

Though the bad fiction moments of that semester were frequent and glorious, from Michael Ruffin's pet ferrets to the Innnne atte theieye Ouldydye Croussee Rhouwuwdessee, I think by far the finest was the love story, scribed by said "sensitive" frat guy (he was a total smarmy asshole, that was the other thing, who looked in the mirror and saw Ferris Bueller instead of the Parker Lewis that leered back), that every single person in the class just assumed was about a forbidden gay love affair, but that he insisted was just written about a girl. It is impossible for your bond with another person not to strengthen when faced with such gut-busting unintentional homoeroticism.

It all underlies an important point about friendship, something I heard Jimmy Jam say to someone during the first months of his and my friendship: "I basically just stand there and make fun of people, and whoever laughs, I hang around with."

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I could go on and on. I might, in the future, if I stay maudlin about Sarahbrown leaving town. But at any rate, I'll just paraphrase Bryan Adams' anthemic anthem, "Summer of '69":

Me and some guys from school
had a band and we tried real hard
Jimmy quit / Jody got married
Should have known we'd never get far

I'll miss the living fuck out of you, Sarahbrown. I know you'll do splendidly, and that you'll meet some truly excellent people and go to some truly excellent, if mostrously overpriced, bars. But no matter where you go, always remember: Those New York fucks got nothin' on me. NOTHING!

Sorry. I mean, always remember to brush at least once every other day. And that we love you very, very much.