in school they taught us the secret to writing a good story
introduce a totally lovable character, then fuck their lives over and see what happens. if they pull it off, great. if they die, then thats a tragedy. either is fine.
either is fine.
so here they make us fall in love with this totally unique person. he happens to be a mountain climber.
and the thing he loves to do the most is climb without ropes.
one false move and he dies.
at the academy you will meet some people who are obsessed with watching movies. one of those people worked on the same floor as me.
and i noticed that he was going to see this movie again because he loved it
and he was seeing it in IMAX, because it’s made by National Geographic
because mountain climbing is beautiful, apparently
and even though i think this movie would be emotional and beautiful and terrifying no matter where you see it
im so glad i saw it on imax.
for 2018 movies theres two movies ive given an A+ to:
sometimes i get these random flashbacks. not memory. vibe.
it will race me back decades to when i was sharing a bedroom, imagine that, with a guy when i was in junior college.
and in one sense it reminds me how far ive come (i now share a room with a girl, imagine that) but how almost exactly the same i am.
back then he had this drawer full of cassettes that he had made of dozens of albums. every doors record. every stones record. all the classics. all right in that drawer.
somehow i started dating a girl who wore red lipstick and used perfume. she was 21. i was 19. she made a big deal about our age gap.
one day we were making out to frank sinatra on the couch. the roommate was out. later in my diary i would rate it the second best make out session of my life. after a while we stopped and she said she had to drive back down to signal hill where she lived with her parents.
it’s a long drive so i said ok, later.
the next day she called and said she wanted to break up with me. i was all, but but
she was like, you are such a child.
i was all, i had frank sinatra on!
she said, you didn’t ask me to make love to you.
as stated, i was 18. untouched if you catch the drift. but my midwest upbringing had made that option… unthinkable. i literally hadnt thought it would be possible. this girl was amazing. i was happy to kiss her.
she said, i cant have a boyfriend i cant have sex with. and hung up.
i wore that diary out that night, i’ll tell ya.
it started
the first time we kissed was at a stop light at wilshire and bundy. i was driving us in my cadillac and out of the corner of my eye i could see her applying her lipstick
some i had seen before some i hadnt. in just the last seven days ive seen
the big lebowski greenberg confessions of a dangerous mind devil in a blue dress 500 days of summer and a doc on jerry lewis, who i learned bought his first big house in pacific palisades
so many are so fearless about so much but it sure seems like writers are so afraid, but why
is it because our imaginations run and run and can think about all the possibilities – with special emphasis on the negative outcomes.
but they dont happen.
for years before i worked at the Times i wondered, what if they read this and think im insane and dont hire me? but not only didn’t “they” read it, they couldnta cared less. they barely read LAist which was 100x more popular
and wild. and fun. and at times embarrassing.
all the things you should be afraid of showing a prospective employer. but that was the thing we talked about the most.
finally got some sleep last night. the issue with this secret project is you can do it all day and all night and one thing just leads to another
some say it’s the largest home in all of beverly hills. some say it has 54 rooms.
i say, thats a lot of rooms for a single family with five kids in the late 1920s.
it was super cool. we were on a special visit. the people gave us an amazing tour that included the secret bowling alley and hidden bar.
the grounds are used for weddings a lot.
amber does this funny thing where she says i dont want to get married but if i did i would want to do it… and invite…. and honeymoon in….
so yesterday i told her the story of mick and jerry and how happy they were when they were not married and how they broke up almost as soon as they got hitched and i showed her pictures and i thought i had convinced her
until we visited the largest home in beverly hills and the gardens where even famous people have been married in. with its sweeping views of LA.
what a game that was. what a beautiful and terrible game.
nobody will tell you this because nobody is like your uncle tony. but heres the secret about being a bears fan, that’s different than being a cub fan.
and i can say this because ive been a huge fan of both teams for a very long time. how long? let me just say: i watched bears game on a NEW black & white tv that your grandma bought.
i bet youve never even seen a black n white tv. and for that alone you should be happy.
anyways heres the secret about the bears: they are going to break your heart more often and more painfully than the Cubs ever will.
the thing about the Cubs is they’re the lovable losers. even this season they lost and we loved them. but the Bears, for some reason, always gets our hopes up. they always have players who are so outstanding that you think, oh shit they can and SHOULD win this game.
and they get you right up to the end and they stab you in the heart.
then they get your heart and put it in a pie and put the pie in a box of money, the biggest box youve ever seen, and they give that box of money to jackasses like jay cutler or kickers named cody.
so heres what you need to do. you need to use that feeling inside of you and put it to good use.
i dont know about you, but heres how im feeling: like fucking shit.
but fret not, because shit is in this world for a good reason. you think im kidding but im not. ask your grandma. shit is extremely valuable for growing the most beautiful things in the world. green grass and pretty flowers. in fact the best shit cost money and people seek it out because the better the shit the bigger and more colorful the beauty.
and this is why wrigley field is the most gorgeous place in the world.
so use that shittiness that you feel. use it to make beauty. get your dads keyboards and hook up your headphones to it and play. so many beautiful songs have been based on sadness. i would never lie to you.
either the songs were made from the shittiness of the pianist’s life, or that crappy feeling drove that person to learn to play as a means for escape or a way for them to express themselves other than doing what they really wanted to do like take a giant torch to the entire city and start over.
now uncle tony wasn’t very good at the piano, or the saxaphone or the drums, but when i was in high school we had a dog who died. Chumbi. old Chumbi wasn’t crazy about me and i wasn’t nuts about him neither but when he died i was super sad. so i went down in the basement and i beat the crap out of those drums. for an hour i was the greatest drummer in the world.
and when it was over i learned a valuable lesson. that i should stick to writing.
which is my final bit of unasked for advice. turn that shitty feeling inside into words. if you dont wanna show anyone, fine. fuck em. just write. write and write and write. write truthfully, write a bunch of lies, write a cool combo of the two, but get the poison out. turn it into something that never existed before. use that shit to grow something excellent.
you might suck at first but keep going. everyone sucks at first.
cody the kicker should have practiced more too.
dont grow up and be like him.
practice.
i love you very much. next year they’ll break our hearts in new ways. so we got that going for us.
people can say well why not delete your blog too? and i would say mind your own beeswax.
amber is snoring next to me and its so comforting.
googlestalked my first girlfriend ever because i havent done that in a super long time and i just wanted to see a picture of her and make sure she was alive. found the pic. she looks different than i expected. brown hair instead of blonde. also younger. last time we talked she told me that she had caught her husband cheating. that was such a long time ago. found her new last name. which means she musta met another man and got hitched which i approve of. she was so nice to me. i would write her letters every day.
maybe i still do.
and thats the difference between twitter and blogging, people, these are love letters to the ether of the otherlands
tweets are just darts at an invisible water balloon thats being thrown at your face. will you get wet? will you miss?
there was a car chase today where they did the pit manuever to a dude literally four times and each time he was able to get away after being spun around. it was remarkable.
then they just let him drive south down to oceanside. which is why i was thinking about her. cuz she lives down there.
i have had such a blessed life. so above average compared to what it could have been. i dont have movie star looks. i wasnt at the top of my class in shit and i wouldnt be if i went back in time. my family wasnt rolling in dough. i went to community college, alone, no friends in a new city. while working at mcdonalds. even the girls at mcdonalds wouldnt go out with me.
but i persisted.
cuz what else you gonna do? give up at 18? no. i wrote her love letters and she basically said thank you next, which was good. out with the old. and the new life was good. you meet friends after a while. one thing leads to another.
thank god i had a car though. i drove alllll over LA back then. all these streets and towns i had heard about in records or tv shows. id even fill up at a gas station and id think, did Kareem ever come to this gas station? did Elton John? LA was this magical place. the one city where dreams could come true to you and you and you.
and come true they did. over and over again. did i think i would be 52 with a 32 year old gf snoozing next to me writing notes to the superdooper in infinity land? no and thats why life is grand. all the stupid shit you think will happen when youre a teen is weirder and better and a hundred percent different than your dumb head could imagine.
it started simply. i was in 3-4 Howard Stern groups and I noticed that they were hateful and mean and stupid and they all seemed to despise Howard – and especially his wife.
they’d complain that the show wasn’t funny anymore, that things were so much better in the old days, that the Sirius app didn’t work a lot (valid). They’d complain about the guest, the bits, the musical acts, the Wrap Up Show, Howard 101, and each other.
and when politics entered the discussion it was all out war.
so i started this Howard Stern group with a long name and i said there are two rules: no politics, and be nice.
the rules have since grown to six:
No Politics
No pics of poop
No disparaging of Howard, Robin or Beth
No fuck-marry-kill (because it’s only interesting when it’s a famous person being asked)
No disparaging of each other
No comments that ask women “how’s the slot?”
with over 10,000 members, not everyone liked the rules, but I told them that there are plenty of places (including other Howard groups) that allowed you to do those things, but in my opinion nothing good comes from those things.
turned out i was right.
when someone signs up to be in the group they are asked a few questions, namely
Do you understand this is a Howard group of Howard fans, so no negative posts about Howard, Robin, or the Show, ok?
Likewise, do you understand that there are no politics allowed in here? There are endless amounts of other groups for that.
And finally no berating other members about their questions, insights or pieces of vinyl, right?
The vast majority of the new members are a-ok with this and say so. This also prepares them for the rules and the tone of the group. If people complain or seem wishy washy when answering those questions: they are out.
Existing members who break the rules are dealt with publicly, swiftly, and politely. Usually they will be Muted for a week on their first offense (they can’t comment or post). And banned on the second offense. If the first offense is nuts, they’re gone immediately.
So far I have either had to deny access to the group or ban 152 people.
If someone messages me with a valid excuse, I’ll bring them back to the fold but most people understand what they did and go on with their lives.
What has helped is there are about 4-5 super fans of the group who message me any time something is going wrong. Also, anyone can flag a comment or a post so if someone goes nuts it’s immediately brought to my attention and I can snuff it out.
The most active posts get between 5,000 to 8,000 eyeballs. Which is pretty great for Facebook which notoriously makes it hard for fans of something to see the thing that they signed up for.
My guess is the people who join this group really truly love Howard and check out the group every day or several times a week. They seem to have also not signed up for a lot of other groups that attract their attention. I also think that because they have to really go out of their way to get into the group (it’s not as easy as clicking a Like button), they’re invested in it.
And once they are in, and they see that all the jokers and asswipes get booted immediately (and this appears to be the only Howard group that does that) the discussions are better.
Anyway, it is the thing I am most proud of from 2018.
