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.

I am yours for another cycle. May they continue to be measured in astronomical units neither of us understands rather than solar ones every human can count.

Much like the dumb shows and movies I like to watch, repeated readings of my writings and those of the people I love give me a much better understanding of just how important the scribe is to me.

To the one who knows: Above all else I agree that people have a tendency to throw shit back in your face a lot. I don’t know why that is, and I wish I did. So many people find it too easy to continually argue with you in a manner that reinforces the feeling that your point of view is invalid. I cannot be a part of that anymore. I will always be honest with you, but I will never again continue to bandy the ball around the fire beyond the point at which I realize I’m just squirting gasoline on it. And my visit with the Wizard has given me a shiny new crown to remind me that it’s easy to stand up and roar for something important to you.

We’ve always disagreed on things, even fundamental things, but that’s absolutely no reason for me to keep myself from evolving beyond my inability to understand you and support you in the ways a lover and friend should. That’s my job from this day forth.

I’ve spent at least a year hacking away, in my sleep, at the pedestal I put you on long ago. You fell off a few times, and I just threw you right back up there and picked up my axe again. Instead, I should have been climbing, hoping to get to the top in time, and with enough strength left, to bring you back down where I found you so that we could start building a more appropriate structure to grow on together.

I still don’t know what that structure is, but it’s something far less boring and demeaning than a stone display column. Something more fitting of a woman who can take care of herself, and a girl who doesn’t necessarily always need or want to.

I do know that one thing keeping me from just shitting out all the confusion in my head is that I’ve grown hip to the fact that I’m not at all capable of articulating how I actually feel or think about things. Furthermore, when I try, I end up offending, hurting, and smothering people I care about. The end result is that I don’t get what I want or need anyway. So I’d rather just shut up and watch, and when I feel like the moment is right throw in my own little piece of brain and hope somebody picks it up and eats it.

Because of my own social retardation, I end speaking in generalities a lot. And most times, I’m way wrong about those generalities. So maybe the only way for me to actually write or create anything is for me to try to study my thoughts enough to find the right mix of generalities and specifics. The most important person in the world often tells me to just say what I mean rather than assume and react. But when I say (or do) what I want, I end up pushing that person away. So I’ve kept most of it to myself lately, and as a result it appears that we’ve grown even more disjoint in what we want, and how we think things are growing.

Another reason I don’t write nearly as much, at least publicly, is that there are people reading my garbage that really don’t need to be burdened with the knowledge of just how much garbage there is in my head these days. People I’m responsible for who need to know I’ve got shit together and not that I’m spending every waking hour of my day juggling the stress of my job with the constant fear that I’m going to lose everything I have due to external factors over which I have no control and my inability to express what I want and need without coming across as dictatorial and overbearing.

So there, I kinda said it. I’m miserable. It actually feels good to say it, because, no matter how others read it, I’m not fishing for support or fan letters. I’m admitting something to an audience other than myself rather than continuing to seek advice from people who don’t want me to burden them further one-on-one. Not to say I won’t continue to seek one-on-one advice when I think I need it. This is just one example of me trying to balance the general with the specific. I’m working on it. A lot.

In closing… What am I, a doctor or a moon shuttle conductor?

I still believe I’m an extremely lucky boy. Hell, at this point, I find that I’m probably more lucky than I ever realized I was. Somehow it’s comforting to finally know that fortune really did have more to do with me being as successful and happy as I’ve been for the last several years than any primping or training.

I know that I am loved, and for that I am extremely thankful. I know that we will be fine, and for that I am extremely calm. I know that I am fucking hawt, and for that I am extremely hopeful. And anxious. And patient.

And boring. Move along, I’m over this moment of tard.