Pre-Thanksgiving Random Thoughts

Sorry again about the lack of blogging. Of course, I don't really have time to blog now with the holiday coming up. But just a few random thoughts before I head off to stuff myself for Thanksgiving.

-I headed up to San Francisco with the family last weekend for a wedding. Did the sight-seeing thing around town, which was fun. But then we headed up to Santa Rosa to check out the Charles Schulz Museum.

GO. Next to Comic Con, it's the closest thing to comic Mecca.

Not only is there a ton of wonderful material about Mr. Schulz and his creation, but it's a real working museum. Their exhibition on Schroeder and Beethoven was fantastic. I took in some culture while learning about both the topics of Schroeder and Beethoven - plus I laughed my head off at all the great comic strips.

I now believe that all museums should make you laugh hysterically in between exhibits. Louvre, Getty Center, D'Orsay? Get on that immediately please.

On the way out of the museum, I got into a great conversation with one of the museum volunteers - a guy who used to play ice hockey with Charles Schulz. He and I talked hockey, especially about the senior ice hockey tournament that Schulz held every summer. I'm still too young to play in the tournament, but once I'm over 40, I might have to get some of my friends and go play.

-This weather in Los Angeles is, in a word, NUTS. A week ago, it was 95 degrees. In NOVEMBER. One week later, it's raining cats and dogs. I have enough to worry about in my life without worrying about the weather.

Stupid Global Warming... or, er, Stupid Not-Enough Global Warming.

-There's a creepy stalker guy on Facebook now. A few of my writer friends have had the misfortune of having to deal with him, which sucks for them. But on the flip side, I'm kinda hurt that he's not bothering to stalk me on Facebook. What's the deal? I hate creepy stalking, too. I feel like Fredo Corleone.

-I broke my office chair again. Thanks to a recommendation, I bought a new one - an Aeron knock-off. So far, so good. This one is huge and sturdy. And for some reason it makes my figure look slimmer.

-I got a flu shot for the first time ever. After last year's dual flu season, I figured I might as well get one. But they really REALLY should give a separate informational sheet about your shot for people who are hypochondriacs. Like me.

Because within seconds of getting the shot, I was pretty sure I had every one of the rare symptoms they described. Sore shoulder, sore neck, angry cough, blurred vision, dry throat, incredible sense of one's own mortality.

Anyways, I better not get sick from this flu shot.

-Have a Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

November 2008 Music Diary

Weird music diary this month. Here're the new tracks that iTunes tells me I'm listening to this month-

Keep the Car Running - Foo Fighters
One Day Like This - Snow Patrol
Before the Worst - The Script

The Script track was a free iTunes single. The other two covers were from the Radio 1 Live Lounge.

Of course, most of what I'm listening to now are the two new albums - Coldplay's Prospekt's March and the Killers' Day & Age. I just got them, so they don't have a high playcount - but trust me, these are what I'm listening to. They're both awesome.

smiley thoughts from the road

What a day. Started this morning at a voice record for something I wrote. The script turned out great and the voice actors were amazing and brilliant. I couldn't wipe the smile off my face for the rest of the day.

Now I'm on the road for a few days with the family - and yet I'm still stuck in the hotel room swamped with work. I'm really sorry about the lack of blogging - hopefully I'll find some time over Thanksgiving.

Michael Crichton

Still busy and will hopefully do some blogging soon, but I felt like I had to say something about the passing of Michael Crichton.

When I was in high school, I'd walk home from school - at the halfway point was The Book Baron. It was this enormous, dusty and smelly and cavernous used book store. I used to spend hours in that place, just wandering the aisles, looking for something interesting and plunking down the $1 or $2 for a paperback.

It must have been the summer of 1992 that I found a well-worn used copy of Jurassic Park. I still have it - it's the white cover with a logo that exclaims that it's soon to be a major motion picture. That was the summer I discovered the nuttiness that is the last 100 pages of a Michael Crichton novel. Those last 100 can't-put-it-down-til-I-know-how-it-ends pages.

After I finished it, I re-read it two or three times. I even typed up a few of the pages from the book into my word processor, so I'd get the idea of page counts in the event that I ever wrote my own book. I studied how he formatted things, how he kept the dialogue crisp, how he used monologues to convey a ton of scientific information.

I went back to the Book Baron and bought used copies of every other Crichton book they had - Sphere, Great Train Robbery, Eaters of the Dead, Travels, Andromeda Strain, Congo. I ran over to the Buena Park Mall and bought the paperback of Rising Sun.

For a few years after that, he was the only author that I bought in hardcover the day it came out. Disclosure, Airframe, Timeline, The Lost World. I watched ER episodes over and over obsessively that first season.

I was floored by State of Fear. Not for political reasons, which is why most people loved or hated the book. Which is stupid, because I always felt they missed the point. Crichton wasn't making a political statement. He was making a point about science.

And of course, that's what was one of his greatest strengths. His passion for science. His ability to make it understandable, make it interesting, and then extrapolate a bit into fiction - and yet keep it believable. Whether it was time travel, or dinosaurs, or aliens, or apes, or nanobots, or vikings, or diseases.

Please indulge me for a moment while I post this bit from the preface to his book, Travels-

If you're a writer, the assimilation of important experiences almost obliges you to write about them. Writing is how you make experience your own, how you explore what it means to you, how you come to possess it, and ultimately release it...

I eventually realized that direct experience is the most valuable experience I can have. Western man is so surrounded by ideas, so bombarded with opinions, concepts, and information structures of all sorts, that it becomes difficult to experience anything without the intervening filter of these structures. And the natural world - our traditional source of direct insights - is rapidly disappearing. Modern city-dwellers cannot even see the stars at night. This humbling reminder of man's place in the greater scheme of things, which human beings formerly saw once every twenty-four hours, is denied them. It's no wonder that people lose their bearings, that they lose track of who they really are, and what their lives are really about.

So travel has helped me to have direct experiences. And to know more about myself.

Wish I'd gotten to meet the guy. As it is, I got to know him through his writing. As such, I know he was one hell of a man.