What I Did On My Summer Vacation

It will horrify some gourmands to read this, but I still think my favorite meal in the world involves rifling around in the fridge and eating whatever I feel like eating in whatever strange combinations of bread and sauce and meat and cheese and veg I come up with. I just had a late lunch/early dinner of cranberry-walnut bread and seafood sauce and some of those lime tortilla chips and some cranberry juice and ponderossa cake and leftover lamb.

While standing at the counter filling in some of the remaining clues in the crossword I've been working on for three days.

The best place to do this is my parents' fridge. I could write poems to their cheese drawer, for starters: asiago and havarti and goat and feta and cheddar and brie, oh my! And they have lots of sauces, which, as the wisest know, is the reason other foods exist: to be conduits for sauce!

Boom=Bust

My parents live on a cul-de-sac (or, en anglais, a bag-end) and several years ago a developer bought this treed chunk of land behind the houses across the street. Dude paved a bridge over the creek and a road down there and then parceled the land up into tiny little plots and asked a whole bunch of money for them, which, unsurprisingly, has lead this little extra cul-de-sac off the cul-de-sac hidden in a happy little copse of trees to remain totally uninhabited.

Uninhabited except for the kids from the high school next door who go down there to smoke and the drug dealers who go down there sell fruit. Man, drug dealers, can't you lay low a little? Do you have to be so obvious about being drug dealers in every ounce of your being? No wonder you keep getting busted; speeding up a cul-de-sac to a deserted lane in a giant black shiny SUV with tinted windows at 11:30 at night. Hmmm, what's that about?

A couple days ago, someone put a big ol' metal gate across the entrance to the extra, uninhabited cul-de-sac. It's made of grey, galvanized metal and has a few small sections of yellowish tape on it. In short, very hard to see. Especially if you are going a good 60 clicks and taking the sharp, blind, right hand turn at an equivilantly high speed.

So I sit at my desk in my room across the street, waiting for the inevitable crash of black shiny dealer SUV on metal gate as the coke folk realise that their office in Sinclair Court may now be closed.

Whither Pimple?

Yesterday I was in North Van coffee shop and a guy that looked like John Denver (wedge, wire-rimmed glasses) walked in with a big, bulky, boxy thing in his arms. He walked along to the hallway to the bathrooms, lay the boxy thing on the floor, took the plastic off to reveal it to be a microwave, plugged it in and lay on his side beside it as he heated up his meal.

Also in this coffee shop was the most beautiful gaggle of teenagers I think I've ever seen. They all had insane hair and tiny asses and weird but hot outfits and a clarity of skin that I really don't remember from my own teenage years. Where was the kid with the forehead so shiny and bumpy and red? Where were the brace-faces? Nowhere to be seen. I know I always had at least one volcanic zit on the go. Has modern science made the old kind of teenager obsolete? Possibly.

Actually, I take it back. A lot of the folks we've been auditioning have been teenagers, and even though they are super-cute, they still obviously have a lot anxiety and body issues. Glad to know that this still endures, however free from zits they are.

Leaving The Cave

All I can say is those freaks with bombs picked the wrong damn city to hit if they were hoping for their intimidation to result in social or political change. Haven't they been to London and seen the giant pockmarks in the Victoria and Albert Museum? This city survived the Blitz, yo, if you think it's going to fold under some bombs, you have another thing coming.

I read almost the entire front section of the Globe and Mail today and there were many worthwhile articles, one of which pointed out something very useful to think about:

TO ANY COMPLEX PROBLEM, THERE IS A SIMPLE ANSWER THAT IS WRONG.

Because the world is a complex place. Just like democracy is a complex system. There are exceptions, there are anomolies, things change. There is nothing so administratively simple as a dictatorship

(or, as Shel Silverstein put it: "I've discovered a way to stay friends forever/There's really nothing to it/I simply tell you what to do/And you do it")

but strength is in plurality, diversity, difference and adaptation. The challenge is to manage to be wise enough to accept complexity.

Casting (About)

Right. So I'm working as an assistant to a casting director this summer. It's a great way to learn the minutae of one aspect of the world of film and the--what--maximi? (Sarah?) of the central idea that anyone who works in film is crazy, including me.

I have three stories, and we'll go in reverse chronological order, building up to the final and most exciting story. Think of each paragraph as an Act and each blank space as a Turning Point, kay?

In auditions yesterday afternoon for a indy feature, I got to be adminstrative with several vagely familiar faces and some quite familiar faces, including two people who are sorry the X-Files are over, namely Agent Alex Krychek and one of the Lone Gunmen (the one with the beard). I have a former roommate who probably scream aloud if I told her that I got to exchange words with Krychek as she was rather fanatically in love with him back in 1999 (see first paragraph). I also got to chat briefly with Dean Paul Gibson, a very good actor and director whose two plays, Hamlet and Rosencratz and Guildenstern Are Dead are opening at Bard on the Beach this week.

In auditions yesterday afternoon for an indy feature, one of roles was for this, like Indian Chief-type character. It was only when my office (ie: the waiting room) had several First Nations guys in it that I had time to read the sides, which included mentions of peace pipes and the Great Spirit. All I can say is, if it were me going into that audition, I'd be wearing freaking grease paint stripes on my face and I'd stick my hand up and say "how" and offer to sell my own head for a jar of beads. It's so good to know we've come such a long way since John Wayne. I was so embarrassed I actually blushed what I'm sure was bright red and had to sit behind my desk and try to stay cool.

In auditions last week for a TV pilot, we were looking for two actors to play a skanky couple who get caught making out in front of the door to the hot tub. They react to the protagonist who catches them by saying a couple lines and then running off. So my boss reads the protagonist lines but guess who gets to stand in as the other half of the skanky couple! Yes! So completely uncomfortable-making! My boss is like, "don't be kissing, you can just hold hands", but it's still mortifying. Especially for this one audition, in which this woman comes in to read, so I have to be the guy, and the boss is like, "hands" but no, she slings both her arms around my neck and makes kissy faces. Nnnnnnnnnnnnno! But it was only the next day when I saw her picture in the paper that I realised that, gosh, I had had a somewhat notorious view. Cause she was none other than the mysterious (or not so ~, especially after the National Inquirer interview) stripper from Brandy's who Ben Affleck got all Ben Afflecky (ie: nasty) with, thereby irking JLo, thereby crashing that relationship into a wall, thereby causing Ben Affleck to Ben Affleck all over Jennifer Garner and JLo to JLo up Marc Anthony thereby causing considerable fodder for celebrity magazines in North American markets, thereby giving me lots to read in the grocery store line-up. History is what I am talking about my friends. History and celebrity bullshit. It's a wonderful thing. Just not hanging about my neck.