The Man with a 30 Second Memory

Thought provoking, to say the least:



The whole time all I could think about was how I might try and explain this situation to someone who hadn't watched the video, and I concluded the impact just wouldn't be the same. I love how his wife is sticking with him - you best believe if I were her, I'd have ran for the hills, like, four years ago. Still, it's the perfect romantic touch to keep this story from complete and utter bummer-dom.

Fun Site

I just copy-and-pasted the first four paragraphs of "Smith Experience" into this website, and apparently they're good at telling who you might be trying your hardest to imitate...

I write like
David Foster Wallace

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

Every July 11th for the Rest of my Life...

...will henceforth commemorate the rascally shenanigans of the Barefoot Bandit, the Pacific Northwest's very own - and possibly last all-time great - classic, movie-worthy American criminal.


The ethical dilemma this Colton character presents will surely be the stuff of 100-level Ethics discussion groups for years to come, though my answer will never waver: this kid rocks! Okay, breaking into a store is bad, and everyone knows it, and I'd be the first person to throw the metaphorical stone at such a person in such a situation. But to break into a store... after escaping juvi... and then stealing a series of planes... and crash landing them... and branding both a moniker and a calling card (you heard of the barefoot chalk outlines, yeah?)... and then fleeing to the Bahamas... before one final, high-speed, gun-laden boat chase... now that's the stuff every 14-year-old boy's dreams are made of. I don't care how into "just reading" you are.


Unfortunately, I predict Colton is quickly approaching what will someday equate to the final twenty minutes of his Steven Spielberg-produced biopic, which, as everyone who watches such biopics knows, always drag. Here's hoping the actor who plays him (but - oh, man! - I just realized it's gonna have to be some annoying-as-hell kid actor) opts out of the scraggly prison beard look. It's overdone.

As for me? I'm spending every July 11th, in addition to the line for the midnight showing of Catch That Bandit!, barefoot.

It's Hot as Balls Out

I woke up this morning at 5:33 (or something like that... exact times are just always more dramatic, so I allow some creative leeway if I can't remember it to the minute) unable to breathe. It was just. so. hot. out. I'd already stripped completely naked and removed all the covers from my bed, so there really wasn't anything more I could do in that department. Plus, it was 5:33 (or something), and who the hell would choose actually getting up to try and solve a problem at so early an hour? Now, I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, "you're the kind of person who would do that, AJ. Why would you even ask such a question when it's so obvious you'd respond exactly how you're now suggesting no one ever would." And you aren't incorrect. I hate situations that could easily be fixed but aren't, and yet I still don't usually do anything about them... unless it's 5:33 (or something) and my bedroom is already 80 degrees fahrenheit and I can hardly breath and a fine sheen of sweat has me stuck to my near-bare mattress. That's when I get up and move the fan from its perch beside the window to about two inches from my face.


Summer in Eugene has been miserable and hot and full of busy work that I don't appreciate at all. But I've also had the time to watch some movies!

The Informant: Hilarious. Loved the soundtrack and the funky visuals. Matt Damon's voiceovers are also incredible. Plus, he looks like SUCH a dork with a mustache.

Pee-Wee's Big Adventure: Yeah, that's right, I'd never seen this one before. In retrospect, I actually now count this omission in my favor, because I don't think as a child I would ever have appreciated Tim Burton's early knack for mise-en-scene, nor Pee-Wee's gleeful performance, nor the infectiously juvenile jokes that grow and grow and grow on you throughout the film's running time until it's all just really damn funny. Honestly, Pee-Wee still kind of bothers me, but its an irk that I feel is similar to many other people's dislike of Jerri Blank in that they both run on strange facial tics and an obnoxious laugh, so I'm willing to suppress my reservations in an effort to demonstrate the tolerance we should all practice with Jerri. But I digress.


Hot Tub Time Machine: If I ever talk with you and you start telling me how much you like this movie, we probably won't stay friends. Simple as that. What's happened to mainstream humor in America? Is this really what it takes for a film to go blockbuster on our asses in the twenty-first century? It's inept. I think the main point of contention for me is that people have to be kind of smart to write a movie, so when something this stupid comes along, I just don't understand how an individual can possess enough of a brain to pen a script while ALSO being the kind of person who values this brand of humor. The two just don't go together. Skip!

And that's about it. Tomorrow = Oregon Country Fair. I'm not sure whether to be excited or just plain depressed about spending a day surrounded by 100% Organic hippies.

They've Done it Again!

The latest, craziest (?) OK Go single-take music video, "End Love." Once again, I'm linking so as not to compromise the frame size:

End Love!

A Series of Verdicts

We Live in Public: This 15-year-spanning documentary chronicles the gripping prophecies of Joe Harris, the "most famous internet mogul you've never heard of." In 1999, on the brink of the new millennium, Joe, in a fit of experimental genius, converted four New York lofts into a bunker of sorts. Participants who volunteered to live in this bunker were rigorously screened - frighteningly so. They weren't allowed to leave. They slept in cubicles, showered in transparent glass domes, ate together, partied together, shot off rifles at the provided shooting range together. Oh, and everything they did was monitored, close range, by cameras that never strayed. In effect, what Joe created was a real-life Facebook, in which one's actions only counted if they were recorded, viewed, and commented on. The effects, as the film shows, were devastating.


And then Joe begins another project, the likes of which actual technology is only just catching up to, so I won't spoil it here. Let's just say that by documentary's end, we as the audience leave Mr. Harris both awed and horrified - and with his own thought process now three steps ahead of mankind's technological evolution, it's kind of a wonder he's okay living with himself. Everyone should view this film; it's provocative in every sense of the term.


I also couldn't help but make comparisons between Joe's real-life happenings and the events of my own "Smith Experience," in which a remarkably similar situation plays out. I'll admit that I'd heard about this film last fall, but I forbid myself from seeing it until my own creative project was completed out of a fear that I'd inadvertently copy his story. Well... good thing I did! The one plot element of this man's real life experiments that I really hadn't counted on for my own characters was the intoxicating sense of daring and freedom that initially follows the realization one's actions are being broadcast to a mass of unidentified viewers. The men and women of his bunker first lived it up before tearing each other apart. Go figure.

Toy Story 3: I mean, obviously it was genius. I'd also like to add that I think "Day & Night" - the short that maintains Pixar tradition by warming up the audience prior to the film proper - is the best of them I've seen. Can't believe I stood in line for the original Toy Story with my family fifteen years ago at the Mountain View Mall.

[French accent]: Ze time, how she flies.


The Mysteries of Pittsburgh: When I finished Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay - and not before failing to surpass its first 100 pages on two separate occasions - the experience of profound loss I felt was quickly attributed to it being my first week in New Zealand, and that it was rainy and cold out and I had no friends and was so, so, so far away from a Bend summer. In short, I thought the book was excellent, but that the accompanying emotions were more a product of my own circumstances than of Chabon's writing skills.

Well, this one's done gone and proven me wrong. It's also inspired the shit out of me. Apparently Chabon cranked this thing out between 21 and 24 years of age, submitted it for his MFA, thesis project, and then catapulted the puppy right into a publishing house. I really think it's Chabon's quiet insightfulness and accompanying humor that does it for me. He navigates conversations with the best of them, and I just love how real it all sounds. That's not to say, though, that there aren't a few weak areas - and the fact that I'm now able to legitimately SPOT them has me excited. Still, a highly recommended read.


Also, this one brought about the formulation of a new goal: I will have something substantial written and on its way to a prospective agent by the time I turn 24. Just see if I don't.

Don't They Have Someone For That?

That was also the day Luis, the pool guy – who, I’m sure, had a more descript title, though at the time his title wasn’t any of my concern and is still of no real relevance to this account – found the baby floating, face down, in the pool. It was morning (obviously), the sky only a few shades brighter than the ocean it crowned and under which Luis performed his customary – and, most likely, included-in-the-job-description – rotating of the recliner cushions before even the surliest elderly resorters, hot-dog tans and trashy dime novels in tow, came creeping from their master suites to lay claim, with an unhurried flourishing of mint and forest-green striped pool towels, over the chairs sporting the most shade/least shade/closest proximity to the swim-up bar/washrooms/etc. I know what the sun looked like so early because, although I was not yet awake, my brother was standing in line later that afternoon to exchange US currency for its equivalent in the then-floundering peso, and the lobby’s teller window, it so happened, was conspicuously close to the little back room wherein sat Luis, accompanied by a resort bigwig and one or two of Mazatlan’s finest – though, to be accurate here, said policemen probably weren’t the finest, because all the finest had been/were in the process of being machine-gunned down, Rambo-style, by the local drug cartel. I know because the night before we’d seen it happen; “We” being my family and I. It was Spring Break Week 2010, I’d graduated from college just under a year previous, and this was the afternoon in which I’d finally shed my insecurities, renounce Catholicism, and join my mom for a game of Blackjack under the billowing shade of the ominously stark Activities Tent I’d steadfastly avoided for the previous ten years’ worth of Spring Break trips to the exact same poolside under the exact same sun toiled under by the exact same pool guy, Luis.

The dead girl likely had no major impact on the day’s proceedings, though she makes for a real slam-bang of an opener. Plus, seeing as the rest of the story isn’t anywhere near as exciting as the discovery of a waterlogged corpse at dawn, I always use it as a hook. If I’m feeling particularly ambitious, I’ll also point out the striking coincidental nature of the timing of this dead body popping up a mere eight-ish hours after my own personal witnessing of the massacre of the three police taken out the night before directly in front of the Oxxo we sped by on the return journey from dinner at The Purple Onion to Emerald Bay Mazatlan, a less-than-humble resort destination we frequented once a year, called our own, littered with wet towels, and then sped away from just in time for another family to pull up, repeat the process with probably only one or two significant variations from our own take on the word vacation, and then desert in due process.

The whole endeavor was enough to make one feel like shit – if you could manage to extract yourself from the pool volleyball tournaments and the exotic drinks for long enough to actually take a removed look at the situation and assess the squalor of the surrounding beaches/peoples/waterlogged corpses that only kinda served, at least in the eyes of my family and I (until, of course, a certain age) as a literal striking contrast to the luxury of vacation both my mother and father had “worked so hard to be able to afford.” I (again, only until a certain age) at that shit up, man.

At any rate, our pulmonia gunned past the scene of the crime to the bounce of MJ’s finest, “Beat It,” and my mother sat hunched behind her camera. It was brand new and shiny – she’d lost her older one somewhere between Christmas and PDX, and though she’d pulled it out intending to snap a picture of my brother and I – coifs slightly bent against the warm, pungent Mexico breeze – the Canon PowerShot A570 IS’s ultra-fast shutter speed actually captured brains. Lots of brains, traveling Southwest along Calle Maxipista parallel to the trajectory of our pulmonia. My father would later remark that the freeze-framed sinewy blobs more closely resembled jellyfish than anything, but “pink ones… with shit all over them.”


And our driver didn’t slow. Maybe in Mexico it’s customary to flee a crime scene ASAFP. Or maybe he didn’t want his pinkie finger’s tricked-out nail to attract attention to the Eight Ball of coke that no doubt sat just between his thighs. Whatever the case, all we had time to process were shots, pinging like popcorn in a too-big kettle – only about a hundred thousand times louder. And men falling. And other men running. And my mother’s trembling grasp on the PowerShot, her mouth slackening into an “O” so saggy if she’d seen it the eventual facelift would’ve happened several birthdays sooner. The rest was supplied by the local news in our hotel room that evening. My father forbid us from telling anyone there what we’d seen. My brother and I had to drink our way into a stupor just to fall asleep we were so adrenalized – this after he’d failed to score a dime bag from the housekeeping staff.

So at any rate the next morning dawned, and there was eventually some screaming, and for a while I was really jazzed about the potential “whodunit”-type afternoon I might be in store for, but it was quickly deduced by the policía – with no little help from Luis, I can assure you – that the girl had simply crawled from her ground-floor patio and fallen into the water. At least this is what my brother heard from his perch in the lobby, during which point he also hypothesized that the guilty-as-fuck look on the parents’ faces as they sat on a marble bench just to the left of the teller window that everything that morning seemed to be happening either in, behind, or around was the direct result of them having been boning so early and so loudly in the morning as to have awoken their daughter, who obviously wanted nothing to do with whatever was causing such a ruckus and instead decided on a swim – or, at least, came as close to a decision as a twenty-month-old can.

“But she didn’t bring her water wings.”

I didn’t laugh when he cracked that one, so it’s okay if you don’t, either. Rather, I rolled away from facing him on my lounge chair beside the pool – which they’d reopened (and on schedule!) after a thorough chlorine filtering – for another sip of my Salty Dog. The activities woman – one Elena Big Tits, as the elderly gentleman who routinely sat to the left of our collection of chairs had taken to calling her after she’d personally awarded him a drink coupon for his Bingo win two days previous – announced over the speaker system an imminent game of Blackjack in the Activities Tent. She made it sound like “Black Yak.” Both of us chuckled.

“But seriously, though,” he continued, “how can something like that happen, you know? Where’s God when some little girl’s crawling her way to the deep end?” This was the closest I can ever recall my brother getting to all that existence-type stuff. He’s never been a real heavy thinker.

I stood, mapped out my path of travel around the pool’s perimeter so as to come as close to Elena Big Tits as possible, hiked up my board shorts, and started walking. “Maybe he’s dead. God, I mean.” Which he – God – really must not have appreciated, considering how the ten years since have gone.