Outlook not so good It is June in Arizona (well, it's June everywhere, just because we don't change our clocks doesn't mean we don't follow the same calendar as everyone else) and so it's hot. And dry. Half the state is catching fire, a lot of it very close to homes. This doesn't surprise me at all because of the rate of homes being built out in the middle of BFE and then Starbucks and Walmart getting built right after. In some new developments, there's this "lottery" system going. Apparently you put down a bunch on money on a house being built, and then your name gets put in a drawing to see who gets to move in first. Not first come, first serve. My sister-in-law is in the situation right now, and she's living month-to-month in a rental property at probably 2K a month waiting for her name to get pulled. What's up with that? The average house is on the market 3 days out here. Condition doesn't seem to matter, and neither does price. The value of our house went up nearly 40% since we moved in 2 years ago. So we did the American thing and got a home equity loan to pay off my stupid ass debt from hell. We could have gotten more money, but we didn't need it. So now all of my credit cards and the stupid fucking shit head stupid 2nd mortgage on my old townhouse is on this home equity loan. I feel much better. My only concern is that I have no idea where the deed to my truck is. It got assimilated into the 2nd mortgage but I have no idea who holds the paperwork. After we got married, I went in to the DMV to change my name on my registration, and they told me there was still a lein on my truck. What? I hope that when I start cleaning out the office in order to strip the wallpaper and repaint it that I'll locate all this paperwork. Anyhoo. Gary and I watched "Xanadu" last night and we had fun watching and marvelling over what were special effects in 1980. That and the old art of hand-painting blowups of album covers for record stores, when everything is now digitally printed. Sigh. I was really good at hand-painted blowups back in the day. Give me a tiny photo of a master's painting and I'd have that sucker blown up to a 12'x12' painting in about 3 days. Back in the day, listen to me. The fact is, though, that I was trained in a lot of the old-school scenic painting techniques before everything went to airbrushing. FEV, and all that, darling. (FEV stands for French Enamel Varnish, and it is neither French, enamel, nor varnish. It's shellac with leather dye and alcohol mixed in, and it's a lovely way of tinting wood colors.) My Outlook is totally screwed. I've been trying to start it since 6:55 and it's now 7:35 and it's still trying to figure out which end is up. I'd reboot this damn thing if I knew that I wasn't going to get three phone calls from Johns Hopkins about a new chinchilla in the Mason-Dixon servers. It is now 7:38 and I've just clicked "send". Let's see how long this outgoing message takes. Ha ha! Wow! Less than a minute! What's up with that? Bugger me this, bugger me that, fol-de-rol and fiddle-dee-fuck, fiddle-dee-faddle-dee-fuddle, all wishes and all dreams are poppycock and bullshit. Apologies to Rogers and Hammerstein. I really don't have this attitude today, but I am pretty ticked at my stupid email right now. I keep adding on to this entry because I'm waiting for it to figure out how to work. Oh great, now I've confused it again. I should just wait until 8 before I try to do any work. Hey, that's good for me! So now I'm waiting for the cinematic gem "Snuff" which was supposedly touted as a "real" snuff film. No snuff films actually exist, and this flick is a Manson Family Christmas special type- thing made in Argentina with about 10 minutes tacked on the end that show a model getting disembowled. Whatever. Why the hell do I watch this stuff? Why do I have such a passion for this crap? I was thinking about that. Everyone has a career path, more or less, but then we have our passions, what we really enjoy, what really gives us pleasure and enjoyment in our lives. Why the hell, then, do I get such pleasure out of watching really bad movies and pattering about them as I watch them? Is it some sort of superiority? Some kind of smugness? I have never walked out on a movie or play, no matter how stinky it was, mostly out of respect for the poor bastards who worked as hard as they could to make something. Maybe that's what it is. I know these pieces of celluoid are SOMEONE'S raison d'etre, their j'oie d'vive, even if it's the craft service guy trying to make do with $3 a day and melted M&Ms. Actually, I always cheer craft services at every movie. I don't know why. I think they're the unsung heroes of the movie biz. Keeping recalcitrant actors full of danish, candy, and soda while they wait hours for the best boy to figure out where to put the two fingers and the tweenie. Not THERE, though.
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