My boss is a subhuman monster who should be tortured and killed in the most gruesome ways imaginable. Flaying, fire, iron maiden– pruning shears nipping piecemeal at the genitals. Acid. Wild dogs. Ants– fire ants, molasses. Death by a canoe full of flies, like they had in ancient Greece. Maybe psychologically broken first. Call him fat or something. Then physically tortured. Then killed in a slow agonizing manner. Then the corpse defiled, slashed almost but not quite beyond what is recognizable, and paraded in front of his family and whatever true friends he has, if any. Then the family should also be killed. Anyone sharing any genetic connection to this cruel and petty demon should be purged from the earth, maybe three or four generations back. Incinerate the corpses, crush the bones, launch the remnants in small packets into deep space lest they reform into this thing again. This thing that looks like a person but knows only hurt and selfishness. This weird being, animate, but without a soul. Without empathy. Torture and kill him and play his screams over the PA system in schools, as a warning. This is what happens when you are like this man. Continue reading →
Anyway, I’m feeling pretty god damn motherfucking good at work today, except for, you know, I fucked some little things up. Who cares. I hate that menial part of my job, I hate it I hate it I hate it- it’s over. It’s over. God damn, it’s fucking over, thank you Jesus. Thank you Lord.
Now all I gotta do is figure out how to get some god damn motherfucking money. Cobble a living together. Cover scripts for money. Get some bullshit job. Work for (REDACTED), doing some real estate scam. Something.
I will make it. It will be OK. I came to California with no money. Or, my grandmother had given me a $500 savings bond and I used it to buy a bicycle, a mattress, and pay the rent on a room. I got a job out of the newspaper the next day. Cold calling places. The job was telemarketing. I was good at it, but it killed me. Jobs kill me. I wasn’t built to work. Continue reading →
The hammer has fallen and I am finally losing my job. To celebrate, I am digging through my journals and reminding myself how much it sucked:
August 2012:
Work did not turn out as badly as I expected today. This is another way of saying it is one of the top ten work days in my career history. I expected for months and months worth of tiny fuckups and general laziness to be exposed today, and that I would be rightly castigated. But my boss is too busy.
I always think: he’s an asshole, but it’s also true that I fucking suck at my job and I don’t give a fuck about it. I do not give a fuck about movies and TV shows and the various processes and means of support necessary to make these things. The whole enterprise is too much motherfucking work for very little return. There are too many hustlers and opportunists and salesmen cluttering up the phone lines and making it impossible to actually see material that is good. There are too many people trying to be screenwriters. It is too easy for them to get agents and managers, and too easy for these agents and managers to call me with these shitty screenwriters’ projects and waste my time and exhaust me and it’s because I’m afraid of saying no to them. And in some corner of my soul I find it offensive because I think I’m a better writer than these people. Which is not the case. Three paragraphs a day about jerking off does not compare to writing a fully realized screenplay, no matter how stupid or unfunny it might be. Continue reading →
How come you haven’t posted in so long– did you die?
No, I just took a week off.
It was just such a weird week that I didn’t even beat off. Or I did, but less than usual. I have beat off just about every day for the past 26 years, but this week– the car was dead; I would have to take the bus home. The 218 half an hour over Laurel Canyon, drop off at Sunset and Crescent Heights, wait half an hour for the 2– not the 302, which Google Maps had assured me in its public transit directions would pick me up and take me home toute fucking suite— the 2. Because the 302, which is the bus that comes by two minutes after the 218 reaches Sunset and Crescent Heights, that one will just blow right by you as you stand hanging half off the sidewalk holding your briefcase like a jerkoff in a whirlwind of leaves and wrappers stirred up by the 302 and you’ll swear that the driver had a malicious gleam in his eye. Black guy. I assume he’s thinking “Haha! Fuck you, cracker!” as he deliberately ignores my stop. In reality, he’s thinking “Haha! Fuck you cracker!” As he goes about his prescribed route which does not include my stop. Go ahead and think “fuck you, cracker,” by the way, black people. None of us care. Continue reading →
I’m getting fired. I know it, but my boss hasn’t told me yet. But I know it. I can’t say how, because the way I found out was (REDACTED), and people who know me through work read this web site. You people will soon not know me through work. Maybe you will know me as a human being.
Anyway, I’m getting fired. I got tipped off when the H.R. lady for the large corporation– fuck it, I’ll just say it, who cares now. I work for a production company that has what’s called a “term deal” at (REDACTED), the studio, not the network that you’ve actually heard of and is what any sane person would assume you mean when you say “(REDACTED)”– this is why I fucking hate show business, having to explain this god damn shit to people at parties– anyway, my boss gets a chunk of money to have an office at (REDACTED) and in return all the TV shows we make have to get underwritten by (REDACTED), the studio.
I knew when the lady from (REDACTED) corporate H.R. was calling for my boss. And he didn’t want to take the call when I was there. A couple times she called, meaning, he had called her back. There is no other call he would ever make himself, when I wasn’t around. It means he’s firing me. He shut his door and was talking to her. He is an idiot, which means, he does not know that everyone in the entire building can hear every word of every call he’s on when both doors of his office are closed. It causes maybe a ten per cent reduction in the noise he’s making, closing these hollow-core doors that resonate like tympanis. I would have brought it up to him but then he would have made me get into a long involved struggle to get the doors replaced with soundproof vault doors but without him paying for it; I would have had to convince people whose entire jobs are to ensure that (REDACTED) Corporation does not spend money, to spend a ton of money replacing the doors in the building so that he wouldn’t need to speak slightly more softly, and bringing it up would have made him forever vigilant about the acoustics of the free doors and etc., so fuck it. There is no winning. Bringing up a problem means it is yours to solve, and it is ultimately unsolvable, and any problem with the solution is going to be blamed on you. So fuck it. Anyway, obviously, I am going to eavesdrop on this call. I can’t not eavesdrop in any of his calls; I constantly have to hear his voice. When I go to hell it will be piped in. But this is the one time I desperately wanted to. I had to know. Continue reading →
I hate Hollywood. I hate movies. Or rather, I love movies, but god damn do I hate making movies. Or I hate failing to make movies, which is what a job in Hollywood really is. Get up every day, go in to work early, leave late, and completely fail to make movies. Or fail to make a good movie, fail to make a movie that makes any money, fail to get a script where it needs to be, fail to get a director attached that would make the good version of this one in a thousand good script that you by some miracle managed to find and whip into shape, fail to get an actor attached who could do a role in this script with this director justice and who simultaneously “means enough at the box office” both in America and in certain oversees markets where we will need to presell foreign distribution rights to cover the anticipated cost of publicity and advertising or prints and advertising, whateverthefuck “P & A” stands for, or fail to get that actor interested at the exact time when he is available and the director is also available and a similar movie idea has just made enough money that people with financing, that it’s fresh enough in their memory that making this movie seems like a good idea to them, failing to get this fucking perfect syzygy aligned at the exact right moment so that this package can get together and stay together even though every single element of it, without any one of which you are completely fucked, and every one of which is completely flighty and mercurial and scared and constantly second-guessing themselves and being told do leave your movie and go do another movie by some other hustler who is way better at convincing these people to do things than you; who absolutely needs this person to do some other thing so they will make more money and have a nicer car and get laid more, and this person has no compunction whatsoever about lying, unlike you, which, let it be said, this Hollywood world has not completely stripped you of your humanity; you are still basically an honest person. Which is just another way of saying you are not completely committed to this job in a world where absolutely everyone else is and you really just don’t give a shit. This person got up five minutes earlier and got to the actor or director or financier you need five minutes before you and lied five per cent more convincingly so next time you better get up ten minutes earlier and lie ten I per cent more convincingly and be ten per cent less of a decent human being and suddenly we’re all working some mathematically impossible amount of hours in the day, all of which we spend hustling and lying and setting the best and most human parts of ourselves on fire and chasing some hot comic book that is exactly like another hot comic book that got made into a movie that was, while terrible, a movie that will help absolutely no one and be exactly no one’s favorite movie from childhood in ten years. But something made money last week so now we have to make a movie exactly the same as that one. Even if it’s fucking Kirk Cameron converting the Jews to bring about the apocalypse. Whatever it is. We just gotta get a movie made. Continue reading →
If I did all the work I was supposed to do, there would still be more work. If I read all the things I was supposed to read– which would be a fucking superhuman feat, let me tell you. Reading twenty scripts and two full novels every week, if you had nothing else to do, would be pretty sustainable, but factor in that it’s the part of your job meant to be done in the off hours, nights and weekends, above and beyond the eleven hours per day that you are sitting on a desk concentrating on work related tasks– and then factor in that the vast majority of this shit just sucks. It would actually be a pleasure to read twenty good scripts and two smart, interesting novels per week — twenty scripts that were cool thrillers you couldn’t put down, or comedies that made you laugh; two novels that actually inspired you and taught you something new about the human condition. Or even a giant mass of hackish works that were nonetheless suitable for moving up the chain in this crass market-driven Hollywood world. But they always all suck, they are always not viable; it all turns out to have been for nothing. Destroying your scant leisure hours with crap, it all turns out to have been for nothing. Continue reading →
Jury duty. I have fucking jury duty. Which I would LOVE, I would LOVE to be on a jury, if I didn’t actually have responsibilities at work. Go in, see a slice of life, you know, a cross section of all of Los Angeles. Watch a video about our founding fathers. Jury of your peers, because the British practiced Roman law where you were guilty until proven innocent and your fate was decided by some aristocratic judge, some fifth cousin of a baronet with a powdered wig on who always sided with whoever owned property. I would love to be on a jury– because whoever walked in, whoever was accused, there is no WAY I am sending that motherfucker to jail. No matter what the crime, no matter how strong the evidence. Sorry. We throw too many people in jail over too much bullshit and some nineteen year old black kid who did something stupid is neither going to be deterred nor rehabilitated by getting thrown in a piss-smelling concrete warehouse with a bunch of dudes covered in tattoos made with sharpened paper clips. You are walking, sir. I don’t give a fuck if it’s the trial of the guy who robbed me. Continue reading →
delicioustacos 