Finger Eleven just played for the first time on Network Television. There are a boatload of people I wish were in the room with me, watching that. Sadly, none of them could make it.

They were all on some fuckin boat.

But, they nailed it. They really did perform the song, perfectly. I just grinned the whole time. Oddly proud, eerily alone.

Jay Leno shook all their hands. Troy Idaho boot-scooted his ass over there, and shook all their hands too.

I can't believe what's happening. on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno, tonight.

Sylvester Stallone.

TROY- the motherfucking Idaho guy that just got fired from The Apprentice. (who I dug-by the way)

and

Finger Eleven.

If you know me. You know Finger Eleven. You just might not know how big a deal this is. The implications it has.

Six years I've lived and died by their music. Me, a lot of die-hards, and a bunch of Canadians. But not MTV. And not pop radio. Which is why most of America, (most being people without extra-digit children) had never heard the words FINGER and ELEVEN smashed together, until Jay Leno just told millions of people they were a great "NEW" band.

He's going to saunter over there and shake all their hands when they're done.

This is so weird.

If I didn't express some concern for my joblessness this blog would be a sham of false emotions. Well, not false, but certainly biased. People can really break your spirits when they smile big and brush you off their shoulder time and again.

I wish I had a nice pair of titties.

They're like a card out of the Community Chest pile.

Advance Directly to JOB. Do not worry, do not fill out application.

Now that's not to say that women just use their breasts for professional leverage. They can wag that ass a bit too. Bite that lip. Flip that hair.

All I've got is charm and a pen. And I'm running out of ink in my charm.

Today I realized how fucking stupid I am. How decisions I made in the past, have made this whole fiasco more fiascotional.

I left a good job at Roadhouse Grill the week they were training me as a server, to work in a video store. So now, instead of having the prerequisite serving experience it takes to land a gig at a fucking IHOP, I can reccomend a few other Richard Linklater films. But I gotta tell you, they're not like School of Rock.

Dazed and Confused.

Before Sunrise.

SubUrbia.

Tape.

I worked in Pizza delivery for a year and half, and went out of my way, NOT to learn how to slap out a goddam pie. Now the eight thousand mom and pop pizza pits mock me as I drive by. I smelled like pizza for eighteen months and all I can do with it is...

Drive it somewhere.

or Eat it.

My options dwindle. No one is allowed to laugh if I start talking about the people I bag groceries with. The people I construct Nachos BellGrande with.

I've just got to think outside the bun.

Attention People Who Work for the Following Programs:

Candid Camera
The Jamie Kennedy Experiment
Punk'd
Scare Tactics
and any more of the like...

Take Today Off. Don't fuck with anybody today. I hereby deem April Fool's Day a manditory holiday for people who make a living convincing people they're being attacked by Bigfoot. Convincing people they are dating Demi Moore.

Don't do it. We're all expecting it.

I think the best gag for today would be for every news station to knock the Homeland Security Advisory System up to red. Indicating the risk of terrorism is severe. Have all the newcasters mention that the threat alert is at its zenith, but then brush it off their shoulder and give us nothing but updates on the stale Ozzy Osbourne ATV accident.


PS-- I can't believe Wesley Snipes killed himself!

The fact that the new Douglas Preston adventure thriller The Codex, shimmers at me from wherever it lies in this room like some dusty ancient tome, has really got me speeding through Chuck Palahniuk's Diary.

-Christian has observed that whatever the medium, be it movies, books, video games; if there are temples involved, I'll dive in.-

He talkin straight fucking truth ya'll.

Although in reality, The Codex's supernatural shimmer is really just a lightbulb glare off the plastic protective library wrap, the anticipation has really forced me into a book I should in fact, be into.

And now I am.

Thanks The Codex!

And though the foreshadowing and the author makes it quite clear this story is building to the surreal, the meat of Diary thus far has preached inspiration. Inspiration in art. Finding and capitalizing on that inspiration, and being genuine in your passion for it. He says that the paradox of being a professional artist is "how we spend our lives trying to express ourselves well, but we have nothing to tell. We want creativity to be a system of cause and effect. Results. Marketable product. We want dedication and discipline to equal recognition and reward... Nothing pisses us off more than when some strung-out drug addict, a lazy bum , or a slobbering pervert creates a masterpiece. As if by accident. Some idiot who's not afraid to say what they really love."

He quotes Plato, who said, "He who approaches the temple of the Muses without inspiration in the belief that craftsmanship alone suffices, will remain a bunglar, and his presumptuous poetry will be obscured by the songs of the maniacs."

And so since we are on this subject. (Because I have expertly guided us here.) I feel I need to commend two people. Two ar-teests that I know, who aren't just chillin, but are in fact currently fucking, in the temple of the Muses. Not each other, of course. But in fact, all nine of them voluptuous Muses.

Ryan, your song Need You rips my head apart. When the time comes that I am inspired, stand scrawling that inspiration where it hits me, dwell on it, hone it, and put it together as something that comes even close to rivaling this song... you let me know. Then I'll feel as proud as you should sir.

And ya'll peoples got to know about my man Christian, and the multi-layered flesh and soul world he is delicately juggling in his head. He has single-headedly shelved any thoughts I might have of penning such a tale. I'm just not there. His grasp on the structure of a novel is baffling. When in time, a copy finally reaches your hands, "you better take off your shoes, cuz if you don't your socks are gonna get blown right through them."

So Kudos my good friends. I hope to be inspired by your endless inspiration, for I too, long to enter the temple of the Muses.

Of course not for art's sake.

And certainly not for fuck's sake.

But because, as was stated previously,

I'm a sucker for temples.

Michael Clarke Duncan and Isaac C. Singleton, Jr., were both in Tim Burton's Planet of the Apes.

imdb, the worlds you uncover.

Oh shit, my pears are getting warm.

Remember when Ving Rhames came to light? The big bad-ass black guy. I first loved him in the classic thriller Entrapment. Then Michael Clarke Duncan stomped down the Green Mile and we was like, "Whoa, dat nigga's big!"--Well, we was also like "dat nigga's a damn fine actor." When I first saw him walk by on the oil rig in Armageddon I thought he was a special effect.

Isaac C. Singleton, the air marshall trying to calm down Adam Sandler on the plane in Anger Management is the biggest black actor yet! He's like when they keep finding dinosaurs that are bigger than the other biggest dinosaurs.

Brachiosaur

Seismosaur

Ultrasaur

Hugeosaur

Enormousasaurus.

I can't stop yawning. Someone told me once, or I read somewhere, that a yawn is your body's involuntary response to the sudden need for oxygen.

I'm in a yawn version of a sneezing fit. Remember the one kid in your class who would have sneezing fits daily? And it was always that poor kid who didn't have a commonplace sneeze. Something would get him going, a fleck of dust, a spore of powder from an eraser and BAM- Out came the abnormal Achoo!s

"AHhhhh...Beew! Beew! Beew! Beew! Beew!.."

And then mean kids would start to count, a chorus of them.

"Six... seven... eight...nine... ten..."

"Beew, beew, beew, beew, beew!"

And when it was over the kid looked like sloppy snot. All watery and recovering. His nose all red like Rudolph, all red-faced and humiliated.

That's me today, right now. With yawns. At least a sneeze is fast. A yawn is this protracted bodily event that starts with a keen awareness that it is happening. I imagine --all theorhetical pain aside-- that that quick sense of knowing before a yawn, a sneeze, an orgasm, will be similar to the sudden certainty that you are about to die. Right before the cut to black.

Your eyes pinch shut and water, your mouth gapes and stretches. --This is the yawn, not death-- Your face purses up, all the skin heads for the crow's feet at the corners of your eyes. Oxygen rushes in, saturates your mouth and floods your windpipe. It fills your lungs like water in a glass and then sits there a second before it comes back out as poison.

A yawn is a pause in the day. I've been on pause all day. Yawning, and then scowering my eyes dry. The bags under them are raw and pink.

I wish all of you could see me yawn, because then you would yawn too. The power of suggestion. An evolutionary theory is that animals yawn to show their teeth. And other animals yawn back saying, "I got those too fucker."

Maybe we yawn because we need to expel that stagnant air that sits at the bottom of our lungs during bouts of shallow breathing. Shallow breathing occuring when you're tired, or quiet, or bored.

Bored like when you read this whole post on yawns.

On how it's not the yawn, it's the cleanup. That's what drives me nuts. The scrubbing and rubbing so I can see. So that no one thinks I'm crying.

Of course now they just think I've been crying.

Back up off me guys, I had a yawn fit.

I've decided that the least- admittedly the least -thing I can do to further my career in the film business is watch. more. films.

I think to watch them and understand more why a good film works, why a shit film shits. Get more of a handle on pacing. And just watch people act.

I've resolved to watch the best of whatever's on.

Last night I watched Edward Burns' She's the One. And the John Travolta military drama Basic.

I'm fixing to watch Playing God.