Brief Notes:

 

IF THERE'S NOTHING GOOD ON GOD'S TV and He is desperate for amusement on a Tuesday afternoon, he'll have you accidentally swallow your gum but make sure it sticks in your throat right where it's (a) too low to cough up but (b) high enough to tickle your gag reflex. Then He'll call all the seraphim and cherubim around Him on the sofa and they'll all have a good long laugh at your expense as they watch you struggle and stagger across the little park in front of the post office, desperately navigating from the trash barrel to the discreet spot behind the elm tree to the drainage gate behind the drinking fountain, gurving at each stop, until you finally make it to the convenience store and manage to keep it together long enough to buy a 1-liter Coke and chug it all down in 87 seconds, letting the bubbles and the acidity of The Drinkable Drain-O work their magic.

Yes, this insight comes from recent personal experience.

The world will seem a lot less cruel if you understand that every now and then, it's simply your turn to be Jerry Lewis. It's nothing personal; it's like being called up for jury duty. Best to just grit your teeth and get through it. If it happens to you today, it means that (statistically-speaking, anyway) next week, when you're up on your roof fixing broken shingles, it's unlikely that a great gust of wind will upset your balance and send you swinging around on the TV aerial like a merry-go-round while your free arm desperately flails about in a panicky and futile attempt to dislodge the big sheet of newspaper that the gust wrapped around your head.

 

THE BEST LINE I HEARD on TV all last week -- hell, all last month -- was on last week's "Battlebots." One of the geeks in the robot competition took the show's host for a spin in his custom car, which was basically a porch swing slung between two giant bicycle wheels eight feet in diameter. "Man, dude," the pretty-boy TV guy said, "your brain is, like, way better than mine!" And it came from the heart.

 

MY AGE. Every time I identify a new sign of my advanced age, I mark it down. I got in the habit when I turned 30, the first entry being "I am now so old that every time I identify a new sign of my advanced age, I am marking it down."

The newest entry, identified last weekend: while I am still young enough to have a comics collection, I am old enough that I am moving all of my comics out of their "longboxes" (weight when full: about 40 pounds) to boxes of half that capacity and weight. That's another one of those milestones you pass as you shuffle onward towards your waiting grave. At least it is if you collect comics. If you don't, the equivalent milestone is, I dunno, maybe the first time you read about a massive government-ordered product recall that'll save thousands of lives, and you bitch about what it'll do to your retirement portfolio. I personally reached the Milestone the day I shifted and manhandled and cantalievered each of those dozen or so yard-long cartons out of the closet to retrieve a book for research. I didn't throw my back out or give birth to a 9-pound 11-ounce hernia or anything. Still, at certain spots during all of the lifting and carrying I felt sensations that seemed to be my body's way of saying "In a few years, this will be the moment during the proceedings in which one of your vertebrae shoots out of your lower back like a clay skeet and embeds itself in the far wall, right there, about where the Tex Avery print is hanging."

It was sort of like a sneak-preview of an effects-heavy film, when all of the sudden the shot cuts to a slate reading "SFX SEQUENCE 17-8A: SENATE PRESIDENT'S HEAD IS TURNED INSIDE OUT BY ALIEN FRAP GUN (DELIVERY DELAYED)." It's a dead-cert; it'll happen, no sweat. My body just wishes me to be patient -- because, it promises me, when my spine does collapse and my upper-intestine pronates, the effect will have been well worth the extra wait.

I applaud its initiative and adherance to the maxim that If It's Worth Doing, It's Worth Doing Well, but frankly, having to spend a couple of years running around in one of those motorized scooters (to say nothing of having to spend two years lying to people about having suffered a cheap shot in a roller-hockey game) doesn't appeal to me at all. So I sighed, I held my hat over my heart in silent tribute to the death of yet another scrap of my self-image as a young and vibrant member of that sociological group known as "the kids today," and then I phoned the comix shop to place an order for thirty shorties.

A good friend of mine decided after much soul-searching that she didn't want to have kids. So when she looked into it and realized that her company's health plan was so good that her out-of-pocket expenses for the medical procedure would be roughly the same as a newsstand issue of "Vogue," she went ahead and got herself fixed.

It was a very careful decision and I've never questioned it until this weekend, when I saw a PBS documentary about chickens. One segment featured a woman in Fort Lauderdale with a pet rooster, which she refers to as "her soulmate." Apparently, it fell in love with her and she fell in love with it, she wants us all to know.

She makes baby-talk with it, she sews little "panties" (her word) for it to wear inside the house. She goes swimming with it, she gives it a bath and shampoos its feathers, she lets it watch opera on TV ("Pavarotti is his favorite!" she bubbles). She has a special little elevated car seat for it so that it can look out the window when she takes it out for a drive. She writes and recites poems about the bird and though it's never stated in the documentary, I think we can all be reasonably certain that her Bozo-red hair is dyed in honor of the rooster's comb.

The rooster, for its part, reciprocates this devoted attention by exhibiting some vague, basic awareness that maybe it's day now and not night.

I am filled with the immediate and potent urge to phone this friend of mine and warn her, the same way I'd rush to the phone if I saw a guy on "America's Most Wanted" who sort of looked like the man she's just started dating.

It's obvious that the rooster-lady has been driven insane by the presence of heavy metals in her home's water system. But can I, as a caring friend, make any assumptions? What if the woman's dementia was the direct result of 60 years of childlessness? What if women have some sort of psychic tendril of motherly impulses and instincts, and if by a certain age it doesn't find a baby to attach itself to it flails about wildly until it latches onto the closest available object...like a rooster, a fussy little pekingese, or a tasselled throw pillow, say?

No, no, no. I'm far too good a friend to just hand the entire situation over to luck. I don't care if her health plan charges her as much as the PEOPLE Magazine Princess Di Tribute Special! She's having that procedure reversed before it's too late!!!

 

I've just installed an update to the little app on my iPaq that I use to record my performance during my regular constitutionals...distance, time, any interesting-looking organs that turned up in my vomit along the way, et cetera. Among other things, they've beefed up its Reporting features. For instance, it analyzed the data that I've entered over the past two or three months and (via a graph) informed me that at my present level of fitness I'm capable of completing the Boston Marathon in something under one month, start to finish.

And you know, that feels about right. Rather uncanny, actually. I should probably send in the $20 shareware fee.

 

Have you ever taken one of your boss' little motivational speeches seriously and -- as much to freak the bastard out as for any other reason -- actually Given One-Hundred And Ten Percent?

Worst thing you ever did, wasn't it? Maybe you hoped that s/he'd appreciate that you'd taken a little extra effort, and then maybe they'd cut you a little slack about coming to work in your Klingon costume on Casual Friday. Instead, the only tangible reaction you inspired was a recalibration of their expectations, meaning that in all future performance reviews, your failure to give 110% would be noted as a failure to give 100%, with "110%" now being defined as...lessee...the equivalent of 121% under the old system's units.

One can understand why so many cubicle dwellers spend so much office time working on their "Sims" house, why the metric system failed to catch on here in Freedom-loving America, and why people try not to update their websites overmuch.

Take you people, for example. I updated like a house afire during the early bit of the month. Which meant that people started checking for updates like a house afire on meth, leaving me at a distinct disadvantage. Over the years I have developed a thick armor that protects me from emails that ask me why I haven't posted anything new...

(And yes, this armor also happens to cinch in my enormous gut. But like Ted Kennedy's "back brace," this is mere accident, I stress)

However, this steeled heart softens in reaction to worried emails that take this lack of movement as a troubling sign of a lack of ongoing metabolic processes in the author. Given that my last post mentioned the use of a new piece of software for tracking my performance in my semi-daily constitutionals, and given that my physique and overall fitness level can charitably be compared to that of a youthful George Wendt, that probably wasn't an entirely irrational reaction.

So to you two people I say: thank you for your concern. It's good to know that should I drop dead one day, no more than two weeks would go by before anyone would start to ask questions. Perhaps in light of this I should move from my house into an apartment building, where the smell would eventually provoke a call to the super and retrieval of the body in time for an open-casket funeral.

The constitutionals, which I've been undertaking since early June, are working out well. In July, for instance, I found a dollar in the street. But I'm not in it for mere material rewards, as lucrative as they have proven to be. I'm not as yet entirely convinced that I can evade a massive coronary, but through this means I figure I can increase the odds that when it does come, the EMTs will find me in the middle of a sidewalk with a Spiritualized or Joe Jackson CD still spinning through my headphones. Having a massive coronary would be bad enough of course, but I think when I woke up in the ICU with wires and tubes running in and out of me it'd sting even worse to realize that I had been found on my sofa with a bag of Cheetos in my lap and a 6-hour tape of MTV's "Jackass" playing on the VCR.

I had briefly considered cycling instead. As a mode of exercise it seemed like a nice compromise between running and driving. Running gives you a good, hard workout, but if you drive the five miles instead, you're done with it so much faster, you understand. I consulted with my good friend Jim, an avid cyclist who has several transcontinental bike runs (across several continents) as well a small pile of really neat X-rays to prove it. He told me that a good starter bike would run me about $400, and there the dream died.

Why do people hang laundry on their disused exercise equipment instead of chucking them in the trash or otherwise jettisoning them? For the same reason why Medieval kings used to keep the heads of their political enemies suspended on pikes after the two of them had worked out their philosophical differences. Subconsciously, every purchaser of a treadmill or a NordicTrac or a Timmy WalkenGlide-Fit-Man keeps these expensive follies on display as a warning to others who, like them, are close to mistaking Desire To Shop For Exercise Equipment for Desire To Actually Exercise.

Instead, I chose Constitutionals, and only acquiring gear as needed. So I took my Constitutionals for a month, and then I ditched my two-year-old hiking shoes and bought a pair of New Balances that -- in accordance with advice found online -- flex at the ball of the foot when squeezed and (unlike the old hikers) do not resemble the inside of a bombed-out building. I took my Constitutionals for another month, and then I paid the registration fee for a really neat PocketPC app that reduces my roadwork to numbers and charts and data.

After keeping it up for a third month, I've gone and bought a heart monitor and the DVD of The Who's "Thirty Years of Maximum R&B." The DVD was, admittedly, a stretch; to be honest, at this stage I've only started working on the rationalization and it's not nearly sturdy enough to be published yet.

The monitor is completely different. Wonderful invention and quickly acknowledged as worth whatever you paid for it. You wear a strap around your ribcage and it transmits your pulse to a watch which does fun things with the data, once it knows your heart's normal parameters.

(These can be determined by either going through a pre-set fitness test directed by the watch, or by going online and looking up a formula developed by the American Heart Association and inputting the numbers manually. The former method involves ten minutes of vigorous exercise, culminating in running for two minutes at peak exertion. The latter could be accomplished by sitting on the sofa with my PowerBook and a pocket calculator. From what I know of human nature, I'm guessing that the "OwnFitnessTest" mode on this monitor is actually just a titanic bluff, and that anyone who actually engages it will instead be shown a phone number to call for an apology and an as-yet-unclaimed $10,000 cash prize.)

Wearing this rig then makes it easy to take advantage of some Big Ideas that the medical and sports communities have hit upon in the past twenty-odd years of physiological research, such as:

1) Increasing the intensity of a workout until your heart explodes is a distinctly ungood thing. So if I start to over-do it, the watch will start beeping, but then again I always wear headphones during my Constitutionals so tough luck, there, but I suppose that after I'm resuscitated I can always ask the EMTs if my watch was beeping or not;

2) If I'm just going to stroll limply along like the plot of a bored 19th-century housewife's novella, I might as well just stay home and look for elf porn on the Internet. So if my heart is pumping too slowly to make for any sort of health benefit, the watch will again beep at me, which again I won't hear because of the headphones, but for the money I spent for this thing I'm sure not going to turn any of its special features off;

Yet for all this,

3) In between there's a range where your level of exertion is Just Right. That is, keeping under it is a waste of time, going over it is a waste of energy because the increased benefit isn't in proportion to the increased effort. Apparently, a lot of longtime research went into figuring out what that Zone is, specified as a percentage of your maximum heart rate and factoring in age and weight...which is why I had to spend so much time on the sofa with my PowerBook and my calculator.

The Official-ish thing to say is that the monitor acts as sort of an automatic transmission. In a car, the tranny observes how much the engine is slacking or straining and gears up or down as needed; it doesn't care about speed so much as RPMs. Similarly, when taking a Constitutional with the monitor on I only care about BPMs. If I start to tucker out going up another damned hill, the watch tells me I have every right to slow down until my heart rate is back to the desired average.

But the more technically-accurate thing is that it's another geeky device, it's tax-deductible because I'll probably write about it, and best of all it gives me lots of little buttons and beepers to interact with and more numbers to plug into my PDA at the end of the outing. Scrolling through the watch's analysis, I learn how much time I spent inside my Zone, my average heart rate, my min/max, how many calories I burned...and how many of those were burned from fat. Which seems like rather a personal thing for it to bring up, frankly, but it does so in a kind and inoffensive way so I'm willing to overlook that.

I've only been out with it twice thus far, and yet it's had immediate and positive effects. The American Heart Association and this watch have told me that by spending that much time in my Zone, I've gotten about as good a workout as can be gotten by anyone who doesn't have a shoe contract, so: good for me. Before, I used my times to judge how hard I worked, which led to a lot of dumb, macho sprinting at the end...which was particularly unfortunate, as my house is at the top of a hill. A couple of weeks ago I passed the "Finish" mark of my route and lay sprawled on the lawn next to my mailbox, sweaty and heaving. Mrs. Pocatelli passed by, walking her dog, and after noting my posture and general appearance commented that "Saturday morning seems to be coming earlier and earlier these days." And then she made a big comical show of shaking her watch and holding it up to her ear.

Well, up yours, Mrs. Pocatelli. I now end my Constitutionals weary but not exhausted, and feeling as though I'm up for more, which is a good thing because I figure I gotta keep this up at least another month or so to justify the dough I spent on this monitor. And for the record, it wasn't the Linderman's kid who left that flaming bag of poo on your front porch last Halloween! Hahaha!

After just two outings with it, though, I'm still not used to wearing the strap. It's very well designed: a curvy thingy of flat firm rubber with two electrodes and a transmitter molded into it, held on with a thick band of elastic. But while it is euphemistically referred to as "a strap worn across the chest," it's more accurately described as something akin to an underwire bra.

Which means -- for me, at least -- that at some point in the first few minutes of any Constitutional I will note that it feels like I'm wearing an underwire bra.

After that, reciting the scene from "Bull Durham" (the one in which the young and inexperienced pitcher is advised to wear a lady's garter belt under his uniform to keep him from focusing too hard during his windup) is mandatory:

"This thing feels kinda sexy. Hey, that don't make me queer, does it? Nah...Naah, it don't..."

 

Odds and Ends:

In response to two questions posited by a reader this morning: (1) The heart monitor I got is a Polar M52. Though if I weren't a Beloved Industry Pundit I probably would have saved myself forty bucks and gotten the A5 instead; I chose the M52 because it was middle-of-the-road, feature-wise, and would let me write about the category well without having the spend $400 for the ones with the realtime satellite linkup to your insurance company to have your rates adjusted upward dynamically as you continue to exert yourself.

And as for (2), "How do you know that wearing the strap with the electrodes feels like wearing an underwire bra?" Well, sir, I know that wearing the strap with the electrodes feels like wearing an underwire bra because I am secure and confident in my masculinity, and free of all of the hang-ups that a restrictive and backwards society has placed upon my gender.

The aforementioned notwithstanding, I wish to stress that I dig chicks.

I've also had some Viewer Mail from people I've written about. That Lady Who Dresses As A Bride And Stands In Harvard Square As A Living Statue has a name, if you can believe such a thing: Amanda Palmer. Her site has some articles about her that give you an appreciation for what she does.

I was glad to read them. It's an interesting art when practiced well. "Living Statues" have been sort of a low-level irk of mine for the past couple of years because for every Amanda Palmer (who creates a Character, and an Experience) there's some art-school dropout who thinks that all he has to do is grab some clothes from the Goodwill box, spray-paint them silver, and then sit on a milk crate on a street corner and wait for the cash to come rolling in. But Amanda is always a welcome sight. Every time I pass by her, I'm immediately filled with visions of the sweetheart of a New Bedford whaling captain, who, promised that the two would be wed as soon as he returned from the sea, is maintaining through eternity the vigil that she began when she first saw his ship pass over the horizon and continued even after her betrothed's body was finally washed ashore amid the splintered wreckage of his brigantine.

If that's not worth a buck or two, I don't know what is.

And I heard from Gabe Koerner. He's the Trekker who acts as the most visible concierge to the world of Star Trek fandom in the really very spiffy documentary "Trekkies." I reviewed the DVD for another site & he wanted to let me know what he was up to.

If you're a friend of mine and you haven't seen "Trekkies," you will, because I'll insist upon it soon after I find out. In my review (as in those borderline-annoying insistances) I hold up Gabe as an example of the image that most "Trek" fans would like to project: someone for whom fandom acts as an enhancement of, not a replacement for, life and ambition. Yes, the film does spotlight one or two people who probably should have tied a safety line around themselves before they plunged into Trekkiedom and got themselves hopelessly lost. But before you deride trekkies and people like Gabe, ask yourself this question: when you were 14, had you written a feature-length screenplay and made some professionally-choreographed films of starfleet armada battles?

Judging from his website he's moving right along, working in the computer game industry and co-producing webfilms. Good for him.

 

Cool; I'm now part of the Entertainment Industry. And all I had to do was spend the night inside a brewery in central Massachusetts.

The brewery was doubling as a coroner's examining room, the brewery's owner was doubling as a fresh subject for examination (at least his feet were), and I was doubling as Dr. Frank Osirin, Medical Examiner. The jar of beef kidneys was very real, though I insisted on referring to them on-camera as a liver because it amused me to do so.

Welcome to the world of indy filmmaking, in which you can only afford the Genuine Article if it's dead and in a jar and thus not a member of the Union. I got to know Eric Bickernicks (the filmmaker) a few months ago when he was included in a Boston Globe Sunday Magazine article on the local filmmaking scene and I started reading his (eminently diggable) weblog, which begins with his initial determination to add something to his obituary besides "Director and producer of industrial videos" and traces the development of his film all the way through the screenwriting, casting, rehearsals, shooting, editing, and post-production.

His weblogged complaint of the bare trickle of new traffic that the article had brought to his blog led to my emailing him, which led to a reply of "Wow! The Andy Ihnatko?!?" (which I cannot hear without worrying that I've unknowingly bumped into one of my student-loan officers). This led to lunch, which led to an offer to appear in one of the few scenes left to be shot. See, at one point in the flick, all of the characters gather and watch a "Faces Of Death"-type video; I shall appear in that video as the host. Last night we shot the intro.

Eric emailed me the actual dialogue that the actual host of the actual "Faces Of Death" used. He wanted to invoke the same air of pompous overblown self-importance -- so all I had to do was put a fresh set of NiCads in my primary ego subsystem, turn off the complex machinery that filters my natural overblown self-importance out of my outbut buffers, and then write myself about a page or two of monologue which met with my Director's approval. Then what-ho for Shrewsbury, Mass. where I slipped into the most pretentious clothes I own, donned the bloody post-autopsy robe provided by Wardrobe, checked my fly, and went at it.

Did I act? I acted the holy crap out of that scene. You never know how you're going to react to a new experience, which is natcherly why you should try to have one every now and then. When I agreed over lunch to take the role, I imagined that I'd use some sort of prop and funny accent to get me through it; on the drive home, I experimented with a "Robert 'Unsolved Mysteries' Stack doing his Jack 'Believe It...Or Not' Palance impression" voice that held ample promise. But you know, as the reality approached I remembered everything that Jack Lemmon ever said in all of his interviews, including his assertion that affecting accents and fiddling with props are both just substitutes for actually going in and acting. "Don't make an ass of yourself" may indeed be one of my most persistent and valuable mottoes (those of you who bought my $10 commemorative coin from QVC will find that very legend embossed on the obverse, under the engraving of me in the toga contemplating a spray of laurel and a 20-ounce Coke) but what the hell. If I stunk, I stunk. in the end I decided that I'd probably never act in another film...so why not take the scenic route?

Boy, what an interesting experience. I had it easy (it was just me and the camera and the brewery guy's feet poking out from under a sheet) but I learned a lot. To the consternation of my editors I long ago came to understand that the next rewrite is always a better one, but it doesn't work the same way for Acting. I ran through it three or four times while Eric and crew got themselves set up and coordinated, and became comfortable with the lines. Then I ran through it four or five more times, and each time I defined and refined the physical bits of the performance. The rubber gloves were giving me problems, so I ditched them. I should finish towelling my hands at this line, not that one. Feel the rim of the bowl of organs as I speak about them. Drop the serious facade here but recover it here. Et cetera.

Then we started rolling camera, and after one or two bad ones, I did three takes in a row that felt just great: one, two, three. And then I kept screwing things up, such as stumbling when trying to remember whether I had written "One of the many facets of Death's myriad faces" or "One of the myriad facets of Death's many faces." What's the difference? Precious bloody little. But when the procedure starts to become too familiar, the brain suddenly has extra duty-cycles left over and fills the time with second-guesswork.

It took another half-dozen takes before I got back on track, and finally the tenth take was as good as the third. And then it was on to scene coverage, repeating bits and pieces for close-ups and medium shots. Somehow my performance managed to be of such consistently high quality that the laws of physics begrudgingly permitted the photons bouncing off of me to slosh through the camera and stick to the medium. I watched all of the takes and actually enjoyed what I saw...miraculous, because I usually hate watching video of myself.

It was all a great deal of fun. The scene will only last about half a minute and who knows how prominent it'll be in the actual film. I'll find out next week at a screening party when Eric debuts the first complete rough cut to the rest of the production. (Interesting technical stuff: he shoots on film, but the lab sends him digital video along with the negative. He can then edit the whole thing digitally on his Macintosh and have the lab cut the actual film for him only when he's happy with the video version...which of course can be tweaked and re-cut ad infinitum for free).

I got an evening of adventure out of the deal. I also got a screen credit, and if the movie gets distributed I can probably force Eric into Writer's Guild arbitration for a screenplay credit and commensurate profit participation. But I'd never never do that, unless it got picked up by Miramax or something.

I also got Eric and the body on the slab to sign my script page, which I also signed just in case I get invited to appear on the Rosie O'Donnell show at some point in the future and need to come up with some sort of phoney-baloney thing to be auctioned off on eBay for her charity.

Best of all, I came home with this year's Christmas Card photo. I don't know how I'm going to work the Christmas theme into this shot of me as a post-autopsy coroner standing smugly over a body and holding a jar of entrails...but look, waste not, want not.

 

Catch up on the many heroic banalities that I posted earlier this month.

This page and its contents copyright © 2001 Andy Ihnatko.