journal page 2
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2:51 am
in the new pepsi-starwars-cross-promotional-fast food ad the pizza hut girl takes a flipping dive from 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." i got a bad hair cut the other day, it's much 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 really only barely has anything to do with curses. but did you ever notice how the most angry people in the world also happen to have really bad haircuts? not coincidence. so today i stood for 7 hours outside the barber shop pointing at my head with tears running down my cheeks. i was trying to look great in time for cannes and now i am lopsided
12:03 am
thank you 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. 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 LA freeway and i swerve onto the left shoulder as the happy little squirrel skips RIGHT UNDER MY TIRES anyway. i narrowly miss smashing into the center divider and somehow yank back into the left lane, all in the frame of two seconds. there was that moment of confusion of "did i hit squirrel?" as i wasn't sure if the crunchy noises i heard under the car were just 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 don't know 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. so i'm still working on this dancing scene which is not much fun to do. it wasn't until i had planned to animate six separate dances that i realized that i really hate animating dancing things. but 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 don't feel like i'm 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 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, he only frightened it into wedging deeper inside of his head, and his attempts of prying it out with a knife blade only shoved it in further still. 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. the ear grew infected and his face become distorted with boils. the infection ate a hole through his sinuses so that when he blew his nose the ear would whistle. over the following seven months, little pieces of the dead insect would gradually emerged from his ear... one day a leg, a piece of shell, a little wing. there is a website where you can find your ideal weight based on inputting your height. i have learned that the ideal weight for a 20 foot 4 inch woman is 1,814 pounds. may 3, 1999 wow it's not often that i update this journal so often. what a miserable sentence that was. it's 3:28 am so i'm going to write this but probably not get it online for a little while. well maybe 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 clouds that just seems very ANGRY at you personally. 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 don't like flying. i'm not so much afraid of flying along the lines of that whole fiery death crashing thing as much as i'm afraid of actually FALLING OUT OF THE PLANE. i 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 wooshing noises. it's just 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 i 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. when bees die, they give off a phermone that all the other bees detect, so they can go and pick up 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 feel like you're covered with death phermones? april 27, 1999 back from being on a film festival jury in dallas. all of my 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 never know what to do when the plane lands and i'm getting your things and i find myself wondering if i have to actually say goodbye to this person or if it's ok to just leave. 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 smart enough for debate. my throat is really sore and i'm feeling itchy. april 13, 1999 sorry for taking so long to write. in the future, if i haven't been here in a little while, this means things are either going really well and i'm too busy to write, like now: don working on new project, don traveling, don stuck in meetings... or things are going 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. but 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 smelling make good stuff go. you know? you know. brain go bye with good stuff and sometimes you're good they let you tv. carpet.
so don the professional animator has just 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 draw for idiot! about a year ago i was knee deep in work 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 drooling with ink all over your fingers. i finished up a scene and set out at 3 in the morning to do the grocery shopping at the 24 hour market, with a little list quickly scribbled on some fast food napkin. it included all those same things you always get every time you go shopping, written in that usual instantly recognizable shopping list shorthand, where BAN is BANANAS and PT is PAPER TOWELS. so i make the usual rounds in the store in all the usual aisles when i come across a partially illegible anomaly at the bottom of the list, something i had no recollection of writing down or ever shopping for before. but there it was, casually scribbled out with the other items: MUNT. what the hell is MUNT? it looked like i was interpreting all the letters correctly. that's MUNT all right. what could it possibly be? an abbrieviation? for what? i had no idea. but i was apparently all out of it. 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 sleepless 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! i was down to my last munt at the house. this got frustrating. or maybe i wrote down MUNT by accident when i was meaning something entirely else... like STRAWBERRIES. and uh, that's my story. i had a moral for you but i completely forgot it. oh yeah! a bird in the hand and something something something
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