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2:51 am
i saw the new pepsi-starwars-cross-promotional-whatever ad the other day where the pizza hut girl takes a swan dive off of a freeway overpass and lands safely into colonel sanders' speeding convertible. and in tiny letters on the bottom of the screen it says, "do not attempt." why is pepsi interfering with the natural selection of the human species? i say go for it. hey, you might fly, you never know. if the fine print instead just read "attempt", the rest of us could have a nice little picnic on the side of the freeway and watch the stunning beauty of mother nature take her course. i think i discovered something moving around in my neck last night. when you poke a certain part of my throat something sort of squirms around in there. it doesn't emit a high pitched shriek and scramble under my skin for safety or anything, but there is definitely something loose in there. i have decided to quit poking at it. ooh it just did it again plus i got a bad hair cut the other day, it's way too short. walking around with a bad haircut is like walking around with a curse because there's nothing you can do about it. other than look really angry. actually i guess that only barely has anything to do with curses. but did you ever notice how the most mean and angry people in the world also happen to have really bad haircuts? that's no coincidence. mostly you just have to make eye contact with people on the street, point at your hair and shake your head sadly. sometimes i just stand outside of the barber shop pointing at my head with tears running down my cheeks. i was trying to look all shiny and sassy in time for cannes and now i look like a lopsided 12 year old. rrrrrr. if you see me on the independent film channel or anything, please no comments. off to france. vouz le vouz wave bye don
12:03 am
thank you to aimee for the article about the wonder chicken that lived for four years with its head cut off, thriving only with an intact brain stem and its caretaker's dutiful feedings with an eye dropper down the neck. so i was driving back from another meeting in los angeles last week, wooshing down the 101, when a squirrel darts right into my lane. one does not expect to see such wildlife on the los angeles freeway and i swerve onto the left shoulder as the happy little squirrel leaps RIGHT UNDER MY TIRES anyway. i narrowly miss smashing into the center divider and somehow careen back into the left lane, all in the frame of two seconds. there was that moment of confusion - "did i hit squirrel??" - as i wasn't sure if the crunchy noises i heard under the car were simply the tires digging into the shoulder gravel or if they were squirrel crunchy noises, and a quick check into the rear view mirror revealed, as if in slow motion, a little bouncing squirrel ball hurtling through the air after the car, end over end. i'm not sure why squirrel decided that an industrial stretch of highway 101 was a nice place to gather his nuts and twigs but now i feel guilty even though i'm not sure if i actually ran him down or just gave him something to work out through years of woodland therapy. i should probably talk about the production, shouldn't i? still working on the "big dance number". not a fun sequence to do. it wasn't until i had planned to animate six separate dances that i realized that i really hate animating dancing things. whoops... at least it will be very strange. you know you're working on an interesting movie when the caveat is, "at least it will be very strange". but i've been really flighty lately and easily distracted and i'm not quite the pressurized work-horse that i used to be. which is always frustrating but at least i'm enjoying the process a little more than when i was dealing with school at the same time. moreover, somebody needs to take my ridiculous nintendo time-sucking unit and throw it out the window. you could probably shoot me in the foot and i wouldn't get as angry as when they cheat me out of getting through the moonraker level on 00 mode. video games are bad, bad, bad. the problem is i have way too much time on my hands right now which is used horribly rather than productively. and besides that, i'm busy going over all of the things than can possibly go wrong in france next week as my brain is wont to do. so i seem to wind up forced to get all actual work done at 4 in the morning when there are less things buzzing around and no other alternatives. i share with you now a lovely story i read once about a nile river explorer who, while camping, noticed a huge beetle struggling its way into his ear. when he moved to pluck it out, it crawled deeper inside of his head, and his attempts of prying it out with a knife blade only shoved it in further. he tried flushing it out with melted butter and finally attempted stabbing it out with his pen knife, succeeding only in killing it in there and further damaging his ear. things grew messy and infected and his face grew distorted with boils. the infection ate a hole through his sinuses so that when he blew his nose his ear whistled. after seven or so months, little pieces of the dead insect gradually emerged and fell from his ear... a little leg, pieces of the shell, a little wing.. sleep tight kids! did you know that the ideal weight for a 20 foot 4 inch woman is 1,814 pounds? i sure didn't. may 3, 1999 wow it's not often that i update this section so... often. what a stupid sentence i just wrote. it's 3:28 am so i'm going to write this but probably not get it online for a little while. well that's not true. look at don talk at himself all rhetorically. sometimes the voices control the typing, too. I'M RUNNING OUT OF BLOOD# $#$ there's this really big and weird spooky looking cloud hanging over my building tonight. it's the only cloud in the sky, and is sort of long and oval shaped and dark gray and is just one of those scary clouds that just seems really ANGRY at you personally, you know? it's really windy tonight so i hope it goes away because i was planning on going outside tomorrow
may 1, 1999
i think my trip next month for cannes is finally set and everything has been pretty much taken care of. i am dreading the 11 or so hour flight to paris because i really hate flying. i'm not so much afraid of flying per se and that whole fiery death crashing thing as much as i'm afraid of FALLING OUT OF THE PLANE. i always feel like my chair is going to get ripped out of the floor, or i'll get sucked out of a window or something at any given moment. i would really hate to get sucked out of the window. because then it's like a minute or so free-falling before you smack the ground and during that time you have nothing to do but think to yourself, "i totally can't believe i just got sucked out of a window". and i bet there would be a lot of screaming involved and scary wooooshing noises. not a good way to die. that and drowning. i wouldn't like to drown. or get eaten by big angry wild animals. that would be pretty bad too i guess. or the whole burning alive thing. awful, that would be awful. so anyway don doesn't like to fly too much. in dallas there were strange people with metal detectors at dealey plaza still looking for spent bullet casings. did you know that when bees die they give off a phermone that all the other bees detect, so they go and grab his dead body and toss it from the honeycomb? but if you take a living bee and douse him with the same chemical, all the other bees will still react as though he were dead, despite his kicking and screaming, and throw him out of the honeycomb just the same? do you ever feel like you're covered with death phermones and nobody understands? g'night! don april 27, 1999 finally back from being on the film festival jury in dallas. started unpacking but all of my suitcase clothes smell like airplane. why do people on flights feel obligated to talk to you about nothing in particular just because you're there? do i look like i'm interested in nascar? i can only grunt and nod with spaced eyes so much for three hours. and you never know what to do when the plane lands and you're getting your things and you find yourself in that whole sudden awkward goodbye with a complete stranger. do we hug or something now? anyway the jury job was a more difficult undertaking than i had thought it'd be. i wasn't prepared for 10 hours of screening these things every day and still remaining conscious enough for debate. my throat is really sore and i'm feeling itchy. i'll be back soon, perhaps to talk about this whole cannes thing. don april 13, 1999 hi everyone. sorry for taking so long in updating. in the future, if i haven't written anything for a little while, this means things are either going really really well and i'm too busy to write, like now: don working on new project, don traveling, don swamped with meetings, or things are going really really bad: don in hospital, don fall off roof, don on fire. the pencil tests for "rejected" are making me laugh, which is a really good sign. i've forgotten how the fine point sharpie ink fumes affect one's nervous system - it's much worse than caffeine and makes you just really frisky. but frisky with an incredibly short fuse. fun with confusing friends. also make brain cells go. brain go slowly away. sharpie good. happy smells make good stuff go. you know? you know. brain go bye with good stuff and sometimes if you're good they let you watch tv. kittens. i wrapped up a scene with a flying pig last week and am on the brink of finishing another, which is far beyond description. on top of that, i am in the middle of a wave of really great news that i'm not allowed to announce yet, other than that single-handedly having to put together 2,000 press releases is a giant nuisance, let me tell you. may have still more (and actually reportable) good news by tomorrow. we'll see. don vague and spooky tonight. i return to work. i promise to have a story to tell for next time, and will try and have it up before i take off for texas next week... don
so don the professional animator has run out of paper. i was in the middle of this scene and turned to the paper stack all expectantly to find it empty. paper gone! no more drawy for idiot! so i have time to tell a story. about a year or so ago, i was knee deep in animating 'billy' and was doing the whole all-night animating thing - where you eat meals out of whatever's-open fast food slots and basically stagger around blankly like a drooly person with ink all over his fingers. so i finished up a scene one night and set out at around 3 in the morning to do the old grocery shopping, with a little list quickly scribbled on some fast food napkin. it included all of those same things you always get every single time you go shopping, written in that usual instantly-recognizable-shopping-list-shorthand-code, where BAN is BANANAS and PT is PAPER TOWELS, you know? so i make the usual rounds in the store in all of those usual aisles when i come across a partially-illegible little anomaly on the bottom of the list, something i had no recollection of writing down or ever shopping for before. but there it was, casually scribbled down along with all the other items: MUNT. what the hell is MUNT? i had no idea. but apparently i was all out of it. MUNT didn't really look like an abbrieviation for anything else, and what could it be short for anyway, and it looked like i was interpreting all of the letters correctly. that's MUNT all right. so i stared at MUNT for a little while and then wandered a few of the aisles half-looking for some munt. maybe my present sleepy state of dizziness was the incorrect one and as soon as i saw the supermarket's big munt display it would totally jog my memory. oh yeah, munt! of course i needed munt! this got frustrating really quickly. on one hand i may have written down MUNT when i was meaning something entirely else.. like STRAWBERRIES.. but maybe i was just not able to find the munt now that i was in the store. and uh, that's my story. i had a moral for you but i completely forgot it. oh yeah! a penny saved is a penny earned. there ya go don
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