Not much of a reason to post, but since I have $20 riding on the Pats and my asshole friend Anthony didn't tell me that the spread was not in my favor for a straight up $20 if Pats win bet, even though he KNOWS i know nothing about football - anyway, since that's all happening, but I still don't give a shit about football, I figure I'll write something. I was gonna go for a swim but my friend's goggles kinda touch my eyeballs and thus are trying to use, I instead cooked some salmon and shrimp and had some red wine. The whole thing was delicious.
Anyway, since getting back there have been some heavy handed type changes at work. At least the boss told all the piss takers that show up at our US office but do no work, that their jobs were in serious trouble - and he let go of this guy Henry, who was this tall, stooped, elderly, sleazy, utterly clueless sales type person, all after consulting with me and a few mates over much drinking and some great Italian food the night before. That was all quite hard core but really quite cathartic and good, because that place is an awesome place, and it needs a shake up badly. Now Same Suit Sam truly does have to remain anonymous. I intend to as well, I have two readers in Sunnyside only, they are a couple - and only one in western Mass. - that's 3 friends who read this and who know who I am. I have no other readers and I intend to keep it that way.
A friend who makes movies recently told me that I need to write down all my travelogue stories, from all my crazy trips all over this great land of ours. A sort of a Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas meets Leaving Las Vegas meetings On the Road by Kerouak meets sort of Lost in Translation and even a bit of Roger Dodger, only my protagonist you definitely like - if there's any reason to dislike him, it's that he leads a lifestyle that's quite toxic and not because he's a womanizer with little heart/soulfulness/kindness, etc...... actually dodger had a dash of those things, well maybe not too much kindness though but even still a little, towards his nephew anyway. So....
Then I went to a party in Park Slope that my old close friend from California and his girlfriend wanted to set me up with the hostess of, it was her b-day party and a housewarming affair as well. I met my other film maker friend first and saw his MASSIVE new apartment and delightful beautiful 2 and a half year old girl, and also his wife and nephew. We went and had pretty exquisite sushi and then he drove his SWEEET Lexus SUV and us to the bash. As soon as I walked in and met the hostess I knew that I did not fancy her, and so proceeded like a rude bastard to drink and exclusively talk to my friend all night, with not so much as an attempt to converse with another soul there. I find it difficult to talk to strangers in setting where you're sort of supposed to, anyway, but you know if I had liked this girl I'd have at least tried loads to talk to her. That's the awful thing about being set up with somebody, and why I'm sure it's always a disaster area (at least for me) is that what somebody finds pretty is so unique and individual and impossible for someone else to accurately gauge, that being set up with somebody is just silliness, and I wish people would never ever do it (unless they were asked to help, of course, then all bets are off) - I dunno, life's too short, but I'd rather be alone that try a relationship with a woman I'm not attracted to, period. And OF COURSE she has to be cool and smart and funny and positive and great, of course all those things, and I KNOW nobody's perfect least of all me, but still I want to be in love, and part of that is finding someone attractive. So anyway, I totally don't regret spending the entire time speaking with my friend - but I guess in hindsight it was pretty obnoxious, hehehe, I'm such a total dick. Anyway....
He and I also talked about writing - and specifically my writing my travelogues into a zany Fear and Loathing journeyman of a business traveler who's really an artist and not a corporate guy at all, just wearing the uniform. My first friend loved the idea and even gave me the idea after thinking of it himself. He said you know I am a filmmaker and I would read it, so you may as well write it, because there's some great stories there. My other friend that I was at this party with, he thought it wasn't such a hot idea. Not that it was a bad idea, but that I had more of a spice rack, with no meat to cook. A great analogy, even though we carved out sort of a story (Main Guy in England, with a 7 year old long distance relationship coming to an end, and seeing London maybe for the last time for a really really long time, where clearly the Main Guy knows London well - getting back to NYC, totally alienated, isolated, self destructive mess - the 7 year old long distance relationship was terribly lonely, and yet this is even more lonely.... to make something solid and stable happen for himself, Main Guy buys an apartment and walks around it's large cavernous emptyness naked and disoriented smoking pot from a coke can and playing play station - basically a nearly married guy right after a breakup. Realizing the apartment is no consolation, and is in fact a constant reminder that his relationship is fucked, finished. Luckily the guy's a smart guy who makes art and music and both are good - and who also has a good, quite powerful day job - selling an annual cruise ship based even that is very high end and in the HR industry. I mean I'd change a lot of it to make it not so obviously me, but I love the event on the ship angle, that sort of a thing is hard to make up, just so random...... anyway, so the Main Guy cuts to an interview where he's taking a job, and the interviewers are warning him, "you know Jack, this job is pretty much all travel, you're on the road all the time, we have to make certain that you understand that - you'll be home very little ok?" and the main guy's like "Yeah, bring it on", and .....
and so the Main Guy is always taking limos to laguardia with all his suits and materials for his meeting, but also his hipster clothes because he wants to find the nightlife in every city he visits, which he always does, on foot, half stoned and happily listening to his iPod - but never ends up speaking with anybody - that's the truth but is quite sad and lame, of me, and definitely not a part of my screenplay that ends up being very my life like - that's in fact the one detail that fucking well has to GO - if this thing is to be any good. If my spice rack actually has any meat or not. And that's what both my friends maintained - my first friend that I have to embellish all my stories to have not just great imagery but also have stuff happen, that maybe definitely did not really happen to me. I mean real situations.
And my other friend just sad that I have a lot of homework to do before I try and do a thing like that, the first lesson to read a book called Save The Cat, about how to need certain things to happen in certain parts of your script, in fact very specific pages even, in order for a thing to be credible as a movie and have any hope of making any money. He said what I was describing sounded a lot like Lost In Translation, which I had also very much linked my idea to - only he HATED that movie, where as I enjoyed it, and so did my first film friend. The first film friend is an indie film maker and the second friend, that I went to the party with, is more of a commercial film writer. Anyway, it was GREAT AS HELL to have these two guys, total professionals, give me advise about writing and actually take me seriously as someone who could potentially, theoretically, make something that was good. First friend also said his girlfriend who I consider a friend even though I've only met her like 4 times, is also a pretty flippin successful writer in her own right and would also read something like that if I wrote something like that. So I think I will. Or it would be pretty daft if I didn't, way I figure it.
And so anyway, my Main Guy - he goes all over like all over FLORIDA by car, a place he all his life vowed to never go to, because movies like Bully just seemed so accurately to paint that as a REALLY BAD place. Sorry to any of my Floridian readers. Lucky that none of my three readers are from that dreadful place. Granted I did not go to Miami which I have a feeling I would really love, but the places I did see, Orlando - possibly the shittiest town in America, Tampa (eh!), Gainsville (this actually had a shaggy, lush, mysterious Tom Petty hippy type charm, college town usually do) and Jacksonville - which I actually quite liked, but only because I ended up having zero meetings there and stayed in incredibly posh digs with an amazing view from my window, and copious amounts of solitary sushi eaten and sake drank, and I was reading The Corrections, and everything was just lovely - but if I had to live there I am certain I would go bonkers relatively quickly) and then all over NC (Asheville, a truly hippy college town, only so high in the mountains that people are literally walking in and out of clouds, hence the monicker Smoky Mountains - then Winston Salem, Raleigh, and then Durham. In Raleigh there was an almost encounter with this lovely blonde older lady that I nicely chatted at the bar with, she lived near by or something - anyway, in my story I get a couple final Coors Lights to take up to my room with me, she gives me a strange smile like why are you going up alone with two beers, and having a little kiss goodnight that was ambiguously not quite on the cheek not quite on the lips, and then me having a shower and getting ready for my next mornings meetings (I had 3! no one else at my company even bothers traveling on business at all, so my trips are pretty mental!) and drinking my final two Coors Lights drunkenly, and vaguely wondering why the hell I didn't invite her to come up and drink them with me. That if life's a journey, I am living mine strictly as an observer, almost never as a participant), and then back to my apartment where I can hear the neighbors and I have no time to readjust to the whole NYC vibe, before flying out to San Diego for a big conference, meeting a couple of total dumb ass co workers there, then driving up to LA, then flying to SF and seeing best friend and sister - then flying to Minneapolis, already delirious from loneliness and missing ex fiancee - but being met there by a very close friend who stays in hotel with Main Guy and the two of them go to a Twins game together, buy sweet tickets, and end up sitting in a section full of the players WIFES and GIRLFRIENDS! Then another trip to Atlanta, Dallas, Houston, back to LA. A trip to Seattle and many trips to Chicago, where good friends are seen and many drinks are had. See, this guy's not like Nick Cage in Leaving Las Vegas, he does not want to die - but between the typically hard drinking of a traveling sales man, plus the artist's typical propensity to dig the cannabis, plus this particular protagonist's penchant to pop an ambien and drink a ton of wine, and enjoy his memory disappearing and happily surfing the internet and the cable t.v. in this totally messy state, he's more like Hunter S Thomson, or a more charming Bukowski. Anyway....
Eventually Main Guy - sort of towards the end of the film really - doesn't find it as jarring and alienating to return to NY where he's from, and to spend him in his apartment, and eventually the trips (one interesting one to Toronto and Pittsburgh, two very cool places - after a huge extended family vacation in SF, LA and Palm Desert, and the INCREDIBLE Joshua Tree National Park, and then back to SF) start to feel like there aren't gonna be too many more. Because suddenly and yet gradually Main Guy is no longer unhappy, like he's over his breakup, and he actually meets somebody in New York, a girl he really likes (this was the suggestion of my friend who makes more commercial movies that non artsy non indie minded people have heard of), and the movie ends with him maybe quitting that job, or telling them that he wants a desk job in NYC and they give it to him just to keep him, or whatever. I dunno. It has to have an ending, the main character has to change throughout the movie, and I'll have to have a B story and even a C story that unravels parallel with my main story - all these things that movies all have (the only one that had no structure, no story at all really, was Slacker, which I despised), so it's true, I do have a lot of work and a lot of research to do. But I ordered Save The Cat from Amazon, and I know that I can write, and I know that my oil painting career isn't exactly setting the world on fire, and nor is my rock n roll career (though there is the brand new band Bags that I have a feeling will be pretty good and rock), and my day job, while it's absolutely wonderful and the most brilliant place to work because the President LIVES by the credo that he would never create a horrible work place where people are micro managed, or even really managed at all, he gives us almost total autonomy, and just asks that we show up every day and work - my day job still does not change the fact that I am an artist who needs to create, so now I have this new idea, and I'm pretty excited to sink my proverbial teeth into it.
Anyway, since getting back there have been some heavy handed type changes at work. At least the boss told all the piss takers that show up at our US office but do no work, that their jobs were in serious trouble - and he let go of this guy Henry, who was this tall, stooped, elderly, sleazy, utterly clueless sales type person, all after consulting with me and a few mates over much drinking and some great Italian food the night before. That was all quite hard core but really quite cathartic and good, because that place is an awesome place, and it needs a shake up badly. Now Same Suit Sam truly does have to remain anonymous. I intend to as well, I have two readers in Sunnyside only, they are a couple - and only one in western Mass. - that's 3 friends who read this and who know who I am. I have no other readers and I intend to keep it that way.
A friend who makes movies recently told me that I need to write down all my travelogue stories, from all my crazy trips all over this great land of ours. A sort of a Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas meets Leaving Las Vegas meetings On the Road by Kerouak meets sort of Lost in Translation and even a bit of Roger Dodger, only my protagonist you definitely like - if there's any reason to dislike him, it's that he leads a lifestyle that's quite toxic and not because he's a womanizer with little heart/soulfulness/kindness, etc...... actually dodger had a dash of those things, well maybe not too much kindness though but even still a little, towards his nephew anyway. So....
Then I went to a party in Park Slope that my old close friend from California and his girlfriend wanted to set me up with the hostess of, it was her b-day party and a housewarming affair as well. I met my other film maker friend first and saw his MASSIVE new apartment and delightful beautiful 2 and a half year old girl, and also his wife and nephew. We went and had pretty exquisite sushi and then he drove his SWEEET Lexus SUV and us to the bash. As soon as I walked in and met the hostess I knew that I did not fancy her, and so proceeded like a rude bastard to drink and exclusively talk to my friend all night, with not so much as an attempt to converse with another soul there. I find it difficult to talk to strangers in setting where you're sort of supposed to, anyway, but you know if I had liked this girl I'd have at least tried loads to talk to her. That's the awful thing about being set up with somebody, and why I'm sure it's always a disaster area (at least for me) is that what somebody finds pretty is so unique and individual and impossible for someone else to accurately gauge, that being set up with somebody is just silliness, and I wish people would never ever do it (unless they were asked to help, of course, then all bets are off) - I dunno, life's too short, but I'd rather be alone that try a relationship with a woman I'm not attracted to, period. And OF COURSE she has to be cool and smart and funny and positive and great, of course all those things, and I KNOW nobody's perfect least of all me, but still I want to be in love, and part of that is finding someone attractive. So anyway, I totally don't regret spending the entire time speaking with my friend - but I guess in hindsight it was pretty obnoxious, hehehe, I'm such a total dick. Anyway....
He and I also talked about writing - and specifically my writing my travelogues into a zany Fear and Loathing journeyman of a business traveler who's really an artist and not a corporate guy at all, just wearing the uniform. My first friend loved the idea and even gave me the idea after thinking of it himself. He said you know I am a filmmaker and I would read it, so you may as well write it, because there's some great stories there. My other friend that I was at this party with, he thought it wasn't such a hot idea. Not that it was a bad idea, but that I had more of a spice rack, with no meat to cook. A great analogy, even though we carved out sort of a story (Main Guy in England, with a 7 year old long distance relationship coming to an end, and seeing London maybe for the last time for a really really long time, where clearly the Main Guy knows London well - getting back to NYC, totally alienated, isolated, self destructive mess - the 7 year old long distance relationship was terribly lonely, and yet this is even more lonely.... to make something solid and stable happen for himself, Main Guy buys an apartment and walks around it's large cavernous emptyness naked and disoriented smoking pot from a coke can and playing play station - basically a nearly married guy right after a breakup. Realizing the apartment is no consolation, and is in fact a constant reminder that his relationship is fucked, finished. Luckily the guy's a smart guy who makes art and music and both are good - and who also has a good, quite powerful day job - selling an annual cruise ship based even that is very high end and in the HR industry. I mean I'd change a lot of it to make it not so obviously me, but I love the event on the ship angle, that sort of a thing is hard to make up, just so random...... anyway, so the Main Guy cuts to an interview where he's taking a job, and the interviewers are warning him, "you know Jack, this job is pretty much all travel, you're on the road all the time, we have to make certain that you understand that - you'll be home very little ok?" and the main guy's like "Yeah, bring it on", and .....
and so the Main Guy is always taking limos to laguardia with all his suits and materials for his meeting, but also his hipster clothes because he wants to find the nightlife in every city he visits, which he always does, on foot, half stoned and happily listening to his iPod - but never ends up speaking with anybody - that's the truth but is quite sad and lame, of me, and definitely not a part of my screenplay that ends up being very my life like - that's in fact the one detail that fucking well has to GO - if this thing is to be any good. If my spice rack actually has any meat or not. And that's what both my friends maintained - my first friend that I have to embellish all my stories to have not just great imagery but also have stuff happen, that maybe definitely did not really happen to me. I mean real situations.
And my other friend just sad that I have a lot of homework to do before I try and do a thing like that, the first lesson to read a book called Save The Cat, about how to need certain things to happen in certain parts of your script, in fact very specific pages even, in order for a thing to be credible as a movie and have any hope of making any money. He said what I was describing sounded a lot like Lost In Translation, which I had also very much linked my idea to - only he HATED that movie, where as I enjoyed it, and so did my first film friend. The first film friend is an indie film maker and the second friend, that I went to the party with, is more of a commercial film writer. Anyway, it was GREAT AS HELL to have these two guys, total professionals, give me advise about writing and actually take me seriously as someone who could potentially, theoretically, make something that was good. First friend also said his girlfriend who I consider a friend even though I've only met her like 4 times, is also a pretty flippin successful writer in her own right and would also read something like that if I wrote something like that. So I think I will. Or it would be pretty daft if I didn't, way I figure it.
And so anyway, my Main Guy - he goes all over like all over FLORIDA by car, a place he all his life vowed to never go to, because movies like Bully just seemed so accurately to paint that as a REALLY BAD place. Sorry to any of my Floridian readers. Lucky that none of my three readers are from that dreadful place. Granted I did not go to Miami which I have a feeling I would really love, but the places I did see, Orlando - possibly the shittiest town in America, Tampa (eh!), Gainsville (this actually had a shaggy, lush, mysterious Tom Petty hippy type charm, college town usually do) and Jacksonville - which I actually quite liked, but only because I ended up having zero meetings there and stayed in incredibly posh digs with an amazing view from my window, and copious amounts of solitary sushi eaten and sake drank, and I was reading The Corrections, and everything was just lovely - but if I had to live there I am certain I would go bonkers relatively quickly) and then all over NC (Asheville, a truly hippy college town, only so high in the mountains that people are literally walking in and out of clouds, hence the monicker Smoky Mountains - then Winston Salem, Raleigh, and then Durham. In Raleigh there was an almost encounter with this lovely blonde older lady that I nicely chatted at the bar with, she lived near by or something - anyway, in my story I get a couple final Coors Lights to take up to my room with me, she gives me a strange smile like why are you going up alone with two beers, and having a little kiss goodnight that was ambiguously not quite on the cheek not quite on the lips, and then me having a shower and getting ready for my next mornings meetings (I had 3! no one else at my company even bothers traveling on business at all, so my trips are pretty mental!) and drinking my final two Coors Lights drunkenly, and vaguely wondering why the hell I didn't invite her to come up and drink them with me. That if life's a journey, I am living mine strictly as an observer, almost never as a participant), and then back to my apartment where I can hear the neighbors and I have no time to readjust to the whole NYC vibe, before flying out to San Diego for a big conference, meeting a couple of total dumb ass co workers there, then driving up to LA, then flying to SF and seeing best friend and sister - then flying to Minneapolis, already delirious from loneliness and missing ex fiancee - but being met there by a very close friend who stays in hotel with Main Guy and the two of them go to a Twins game together, buy sweet tickets, and end up sitting in a section full of the players WIFES and GIRLFRIENDS! Then another trip to Atlanta, Dallas, Houston, back to LA. A trip to Seattle and many trips to Chicago, where good friends are seen and many drinks are had. See, this guy's not like Nick Cage in Leaving Las Vegas, he does not want to die - but between the typically hard drinking of a traveling sales man, plus the artist's typical propensity to dig the cannabis, plus this particular protagonist's penchant to pop an ambien and drink a ton of wine, and enjoy his memory disappearing and happily surfing the internet and the cable t.v. in this totally messy state, he's more like Hunter S Thomson, or a more charming Bukowski. Anyway....
Eventually Main Guy - sort of towards the end of the film really - doesn't find it as jarring and alienating to return to NY where he's from, and to spend him in his apartment, and eventually the trips (one interesting one to Toronto and Pittsburgh, two very cool places - after a huge extended family vacation in SF, LA and Palm Desert, and the INCREDIBLE Joshua Tree National Park, and then back to SF) start to feel like there aren't gonna be too many more. Because suddenly and yet gradually Main Guy is no longer unhappy, like he's over his breakup, and he actually meets somebody in New York, a girl he really likes (this was the suggestion of my friend who makes more commercial movies that non artsy non indie minded people have heard of), and the movie ends with him maybe quitting that job, or telling them that he wants a desk job in NYC and they give it to him just to keep him, or whatever. I dunno. It has to have an ending, the main character has to change throughout the movie, and I'll have to have a B story and even a C story that unravels parallel with my main story - all these things that movies all have (the only one that had no structure, no story at all really, was Slacker, which I despised), so it's true, I do have a lot of work and a lot of research to do. But I ordered Save The Cat from Amazon, and I know that I can write, and I know that my oil painting career isn't exactly setting the world on fire, and nor is my rock n roll career (though there is the brand new band Bags that I have a feeling will be pretty good and rock), and my day job, while it's absolutely wonderful and the most brilliant place to work because the President LIVES by the credo that he would never create a horrible work place where people are micro managed, or even really managed at all, he gives us almost total autonomy, and just asks that we show up every day and work - my day job still does not change the fact that I am an artist who needs to create, so now I have this new idea, and I'm pretty excited to sink my proverbial teeth into it.
posted by Same Suit Sam | 6:00 PM
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