Jul/101
Heavy Is the Head (That Sells the Kanmuri)
...they painted that handicapped sign after I parked there...
My Toyota Camry is nearing the end of its useful life, and I’m kind of freaking out about it.
It’s not my first car. That honor goes to a 1995 Ford Thunderbird that my dad and I bought in Winter Park, FL in 2000. It’s not even my second car, a 1998 Honda Accord I bought from my sister. Still, this Camry and I go way back, and in some ways losing this one hurts more than the other two.
I’ve got this thing, that I contracted from my late grandmother, about objects. A sane person looks at a Toyota Camry with 209k miles on it and goes, “Okay, you’ve put $4500 into it in four months. There’s no end in sight for potential repairs. It’s time to stop putting money into such an old car.” A Martin, however, looks at that sad jalopy and sees his sixteen-year-old self sitting at the Toyota dealership on a sunny summer afternoon laughing with his brother, convincing his father to get a rear spoiler and a sunroof “because that will make it the sports car you should buy yourself,” all while his young brother-in-law sighs at the wastefulness of wood paneling around air conditioning vents not realizing that this memory, and a thousand others made and not yet made, would forever be taken away from him months later by a tractor-trailer’s unsecured tire careening into his car on the interstate. To this vision a sane person goes “Mur?” but that is just one of the moments that come to me when I look at this car, one of a hundred pictures in time that weren’t developed by Kodak but capture a moment in radiant color. And now it’s coming time to let that car go.
Apr/101
Whiplash
Nowhere is there a more happier crew.
I could seriously change my last name to “McFly” with all the time-traveling I’ve been doing. So far this week I’ve been in the present, nine years in the past, ten years in the past, forty years in the future, and three days from today.
As Marty would say, “This is heavy.”
Jess and I left DC on Friday night and flew to Orlando for the first time since I graduated from film school there in 2001. Our mission? A five-day excursion with her family to Disney World. Criminal as it sounds, I only made it to Disney World one time (for all of 6 hours) when I lived in Orlando. A classmate of mine dated a girl who worked at the park and got us free tickets, and we went to MGM Studios for one of their Star Wars Weekends. Those of you who’ve been there know that six hours at Disney World is like standing in the lobby of the MOMA and saying you’ve done the museum. It doesn’t really count.
We landed in Orlando at 10 PM, and from there we caught “Disney’s Magical Express” which, frankly, is neither magical nor express. The park is 15 miles from the airport, and we got to the hotel at 1:13 AM. We were on the Disney bus as long as we were on the airplane. Something is wrong with this picture.
Feb/100
The Great Pipe Nothing
24 inches of snow fell in 12 hours! Ah!
The entire reason I came to Pittsburgh this weekend was to perform in a theater organ concert with Bryan Wright and the Boilermaker Jazz Band. That was before anyone knew Pittsburgh was about to get 24 inches of snow.
Needless to say, my concert got canceled faster than a Joss Whedon series on FOX.
I was really looking forward to it, too. I was nervous – I’m not a theater organist and was about to pretend to be in front of hundreds of people – but I was also excited, the same kind of excited I get every time a new “Star Wars” project is announced: blind hope that it’s going to be awesome, and stark terror that it’s going to be terrible.
But after the sting of that passed, and the calls were made to family and friends that we wouldn’t be getting together after all, and after a day spent shoveling hundreds of pounds of snow out of Mom’s driveway, not to mention rescuing a few stranded motorists unlucky enough not to have new tires on their car (and who were, I assure you, surprised to see someone with Virginia license plates so deft with a shovel), I was shocked to find myself so energized at 11 PM that I had to go for a walk in the snow-blanketed neighborhood to get myself anywhere near ready to sleep.
Jan/100
Martin and Luke’s Excellent Adventures
This about sums up our process...
One of my oldest and best friends, Luke, has begun chronicling a decade of our hilarious misadventures in Star Wars fan film-making over at his blog, the “Book of Luke.” You should check it out hither.
There are so many stories about our fan film days that, seriously, I could do one each day here for the next year and not run out.
Here’s one of my favorite quotes from Luke’s post:
Martin was in his Neo Maximus outfit. It was a dark grey trench coat with the sleeves and a majority of the lower half cut off. 7-inch-long vertical slits were cut 3 inches apart into what remained of the coat below the waist, creating the appearance of the garment that Maximus wore in the arena in Gladiator. If memory serves me correctly, there were washers dangling from the bottom of every strip, too.
No, he’s not exaggerating.
I realize that I may not have mentioned to anyone that I am a huge Star Wars nerd. If there is any doubt, I invite you to check out the website for my 40-minute Star Wars epic, “Hunt for the Holocron.” Warning: Following this link will filleth your Dorkimus Maximus cups for at least a week.
Dec/090
Goodwill to Men
Well, Christmas has come and gone. No matter how much Christmas music I listen to or shopping I do, it seems like I never am ready for the day when it comes, and then it’s all over like a night in Vegas. It’s like your wedding day only with more reindeer (unless you are, in fact, a reindeer yourself, in which case I suppose you’d have reindeer relatives).
This about sums up my feelings at the moment...
It’s been a very weird Christmas so far. We spent months shopping for people, and we received many nice gifts on Christmas day, and then today we worked to clear out a family member’s house – he’s moved into assisted living and is getting rid of his property – and took truckload after truckload of trinkets and knick-knacks and old Christmas gifts to Goodwill.
It was a surreal contrast. On the one hand we were excited on Christmas to get gifts, to open presents, to watch others open their presents, and then two days later we were besieged by the accumulated detritus of a lifetime, by the weight of possessions and property. It definitely was enough to give me pause and wonder about what is actually valuable.
The things that I think are valuable – our photo albums, for instance – really have no lasting value at all. Jess and I take a lot of pictures – thousands upon thousands, as our Facebook friends can attest – but who is going to give a shit about those when we’re old? No one. They’ll go through and discard them like we went through and discarded things today.
Sep/091
Type “Y” for Yes
So I’ve discovered an awesome website at virtualapple.org. Using a handy Java applet, you can load up any number of old games from the Apple II and have yourself a nostalgia party. We never owned an Apple II, but my school did, and the other night I loaded up “The Oregon Trail,” which was a game I remember distinctly despite the haze of 22 years years since playing it.
If you recognize this screen, you are freaking old.
First, I’d like to point out that I was a gifted child. I must have been, because to navigate the menus in these old games takes a freaking computer science degree.
There is no “yes” button to click, no animated, glowing, shiny thing with arrows pointing at it.
No. We had to type the letter “y” for yes and “n” for no.
This may be one of the first and most shocking pieces of evidence that I am, in fact, older than dirt because what sounds older than “Back in my day, we had to type our commands! None of this mouse-click whizbangery!”
I was shocked also, upon playing Oregon Trail, at how horrific the sound is. At every fort you hear some different American patriotic theme, warbled out in a single line of beeps and boops… literal beeping and booping… rendered with about as much emotion as a napkin. Compared to “Mass Effect,” which is currently eating my life on my XBOX 360, Oregon Trail grinds like a wheel from the stone age.
And yet, there I was the other night, playing it again after two decades, and having fun.
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