1) I borrowed a friend’s video camera to capture some footage from our band’s recent tour to California.
2) Our orange boy cat, Mandy, who’d had a year-long fight with chronic renal failure, was having a good enough day that we decided to give him his final rest.
3) I discovered the sneaky “Life In A Day” marketing campaign to sucker people into providing a bunch of footage for an upcoming documentary produced by one of my favorite filmmakers.

I spent my weekend gorging on junk food, choking back tears, and putting together what ended up being this video/slideshow. Most of it probably isn’t usable in the documentary, though all of the live-action parts were indeed shot on July 24, 2010.

This video contains numerous sufficient answers to each of the questions posed by the Life in A Day project.

Ultimately it doesn’t matter to me whether I get a request for the footage to be used. Nor does it matter to me if people think my wife and I care about our animals too much or take them too seriously. Of all the losses I’ve had to endure in my life, this one is no less important to me.

I also cheated and used “This Year” by the Mountain Goats as the music, since I had no time or energy to come up with my own audio, and the song fit my mood perfectly.

Rest in peace, Colonel Mandarin Mango Spock Cecil Harley Best Orange Kitty.

The man skipped into the room. The non-objectified object of his desire sat in practical silence before a multipurpose computational device, directing the unwitting participants of her simulated universe to perform acts that both pleased and frustrated her.

“So, what do you think of my idea?” asked the man with glee, assuming in error that the woman knew what he was talking about.

“What idea?” responded the woman without diverting her attention from her game.

“They’re blowing up the stadium tomorrow morning. We should go watch it.” Generating this synthetic joy at the thought of seeing such destruction had required resurrecting a memory from his youth of watching a smaller building implosion with his family. He had spent so many computational cycles reliving another memory of picking up peppermint chews from the pavement after a parade that he no longer remembered how he had come to know about the demolition at hand.

The woman spun around in her office chair and objected, “That wasn’t your idea. I told you I wanted to go see it.”

“Oh,” said the man, “well it’s a great idea.” He knew this conclusion was sound, but wondered if he had somehow made a wrong turn in his mindful journey toward drawing it. “Doesn’t matter whose idea it was, it’s something that will only happen once, and it would be cool if we were there to see it.”

Her brow wrinkled as the corners of her lips tugged upward a bit. “Of course it matters whose ideas it was, and building implosions happen all the time. Maybe I’ll call my dad and see if he wants to go.”

They both stood confused, but over completely different and equally important concepts.

“I love you,” he said as she turned back to her important concept and he walked across the hall toward his. Before he reached it, he felt an unexplainable urge to mount his motorcycle, which he had originally purchased to impress the woman but now genuinely enjoyed riding despite her near-complete lack of interest in it. He rode to the corner store to buy cigarettes, which both he and the woman genuinely agreed should be eliminated from their diets soon.

The woman, much quicker than the man in every respect but one, had already changed clothes and kissed him goodbye to leave for her hair appointment within the time it had required him to decide and act upon his notion to ride the motorcycle.

Upon returning from the store, the man recalled an exchange in which the woman had mostly dismissed the idea of driving to the crowded spectacle in light of the knowledge that it would be televised. He could not remember whether the exchange had occurred on that day or on a prior one.

Absent from the truthful script of that conversation, but indelible in his fantasized record of it, was a lengthy debate over the practical difference between seeing a historical event directly and watching it on a high-definition display device. No matter how advanced telecommunication equipment gets, electrons carrying reproductions of photons in one place cannot reach any other place in a short enough time to truly call it live. Also, the quality of the reproduction, by and in definition, cannot be high enough to call it anything more than an interpretation of the event. Only those present and not tasked with capturing it with optical preservation devices could say they genuinely saw the genuine event.

The man later wished that the woman had pointed out that the impossibility of those photons reaching remote eyes instantly and the impossibility of completely reproducing a genuine image of a remote event were in fact the same thing. He wanted her to point out that he was being pompous and redundant.

The woman had much earlier lamented her unquenchable desire for intellectual stimulus. The man had dismissed her thirst as myopic. He held onto his naive faith that she would open her eyes and one day appreciate what she had rather than frequently wish for more. He would likely never make the sincere concession that he had the power to provide her with the interaction necessary to fulfill her thirst without sacrificing his own desire not to be charged with actively providing happiness to the object of his desire.

All of those conversations, the real ones and the imagined recollections of them, had long since ended.

The woman returned from her appointment and they discussed haircare products and haircare professionalism. She asked him to make her a sandwich. His genuine desire to do so was momentarily replaced with regret when she, much hungrier than he had realized, began to make her own sandwich. Determined, he snatched the knife from her and finished the job, telling himself he could make a much better sandwich for her, but knowing that she was far more capable of making it just the way she wanted. He squeaked out a genuine laugh at the obvious joke as he sliced the cheddar.

The woman probably would not have sprinkled cinnamon and sugar on the top of the sandwich as the man had, but neither would ever know if she genuinely preferred it with or without the added garnish.

The next morning, the non-subjected subject of the woman’s desire skipped into the room, kissed her forehead, and asked her what she would like for breakfast. She wondered if he would have commented on her haircut even if she hadn’t asked him to. She wondered if he had genuinely let go of correcting her grammar. She wondered if he noticed that she was not playing a game.

She was pouring genuine interest into a personal publishing project. A smile slapped them both in the face, and before she could punish herself with the realization that he probably didn’t know she hadn’t played the game for weeks, three small animals ran into the room. The two cats and one dog gave their respective opinions on what the humans should eat for breakfast.

They did not eat breakfast, but they had a genuine Sunday. On this Sunday, and for the first time since it was wrongly theorized to be universal truth, matter was neither created nor destroyed.

Our dog ate it.

Yesterday was not fun. When the worst was over I poured two glasses of wine, and we toasted both of our sweet little rats, as Grace likes to call them. B had to remind me to clink the glasses, which is further proof that I usually just like to hear myself talk. We had to have a little fun, of course, and that’s what cheesecake and movies are for.

Sometimes it feels like all I can make are messes, noises, and eye-water. But all three have to come from somwhere, and if that somewhere is me, then at least I’m not the only one.

Today we’ve had eggs, sandwiches and naps. For dinner, we’re having our favorites. I’d rather be at the beach, or at least some place where it’s OK to make those noises and messes as long as there’s a blender involved.

If I don’t steal my wife’s jokes occasionally, people will miss all the really good ones. When we agreed today that we don’t ever want fish as pets again, her wisdom shone through the black clouds in our living room: “Because fish death is just, whatever.”

Those glasses of wine from last night are still sitting on the coffee table, minus about 4 sips. And we’re having tilapia for dinner. With Coke and pina coladas. I’m not sure what she’ll be drinking, but I’ll be you a Dr Pepper it’ll have real sugar in it.

I have vague memories of my Dad admiring Cronkite, and there’s very little Papa Goldstein likes that isn’t mostly good. That’s not hero worship. My Dad saves lives almost daily, and I’m certain Walter saved a decent number over the course of his career. Who’s the hero? My answer is obvious, but I don’t worship anyone.

It’s getting immensely easier to enjoy living as I stop trying to prove a point to anyone and just do what’s good. Now, let me go ahead and violate that progress a tiny bit to illustrate what I’m trying to say. Please don’t slime me.

Les Lye died. Today. Yesterday. Whatever you want to call it. To me, it’s happening right now. I am more deeply affected by Lye’s passing than Old Iron Pants. Why is it that I found out about Lye, whose name I’m sure is not nearly as recognizable as Cronkite, so quickly? Because my dear friend Enos tweeted it.

So, thanks to Enos and Twitter, I’m spending these wee, weekend-inaugurating hours watching You Can’t Do That On Television episodes, Turkey TV clips, reading interviews and smiling a lot. Beats the hell out of spending a Friday night doing invoicing and then finding out a month or more later that one of the adults who raised me had died without my knowing or getting a chance to acknowledge it in a timely manner.

If you grew up watching Les and the shows he worked, really absorbed them, and enjoyed them for yourself rather than because your parents “let you” watch Nickelodeon just like all the other kids, then I think you’re pretty much incapable of true malice. You truly can’t do what he did on television anymore, and that’s a little sad.

It amazes me that this stuff was censored at all. It amazes me even more that you can’t find as many genuine, ageless laughs in a month’s worth of today’s “edgy” live-action television for kids as YCDTOT was able to dish out in every episode. Put that right next to Mr. Wizard’s World, and basic cable was really all a happy little nerd needed to make it out of the eighties alive. Oh, and a caring, loving family. Preferably one that won’t beat you too much for wanting to tell a good fart joke every now and then.

Now, what am I going to do with all these pies? Maybe I’ll just try a bite.

P.S. Please slime me.