January 2006 Archives

There's this whole great story about why we're not going to be on Japanese television anymore, but I'll save that for my book. All I'll say is that I already said it in my last post.

That said, that does not mean that we are not leaving for Connecticut in a few hours. I believe I am going to be in some OnDemand stuff for my dad's site. Mainly, we're just taking a vacation.

I am also taking a vacation from Ribcage this week. Sucks, yes. I've been in a temporary funk as it is, so the time will be nice. I've been reading more to crawl my way out of it.

I've also been working out, eating better and all of that. Feels good. Feels really good after that whole turning twenty-one thing. The wine, the beer--no matter how light--it's a little too much.

Seems like that's all I've done this past week--work out. I went down to the gym the last four days in a row. Raquetball one day. Weights and mostly cardio the three others. Now I'm probably going to go to Connecticut and toss back some beers with friends and cancel a lot of that shit out, but that's just fine.

This Japanese television show is called World's Most Amazing People and they're flying Elise and I up to Connecticut on Monday.

My family is going to be on Japanese television and I get to see my dog again!

Last night Elise and I celebrated the news with sushi. Okay, the Japanese food was just a coincidence. I thought I'd be so sophisticated and drink the correct wine for the occasion. Some Japanese plum wine that I was worried would be too sweet until I saw that it had a rather high alcohol percentage. That, it turned out, didn't matter. This wine was indistinguishable from Juicy Juice in every way. Wherever the 13% of alcohol was, I have no idea. This stuff is dangerous. They should do background checks to purchase it. No sexual predators. I'm surprised teenage girls aren't all over it like the sugary malt drinks they keep coming out with. It was so sweet it was making me sick. I went and worked out afterwards for fear of such sweetness so soon to Japanese television appearances. I waited an hour first of course--had to let the buzz subside.

They wanted me to "show my body" on this show. Those were their words. The Japanese television producers. I guess they want us to rip our shirts off like The Hulk now that we've overcome the whole obesity thing. But I'm declining on that one. If they ask. I'll say that it's because I'm not feeling so great about my body after all that Japanese wine.

I was looking for pictures of King Tut's tomb and found this page of many alleged alien photos. It's pretty cool, even though you know they're mostly? fake.

This weekend we made our way down to Ft. Lauderdale to see everything but King Tut's mummy. Seeing as Ft. Lauderdale is probably the closest that all of King Tut's stuff is going to be to me for a very long, long time--I'm glad that I got to see it. The same way that you know that you should probably see the pyramids at some point in your life (being that wonder of the world and all), you know that if you are just a short drive away from two floors of ancient and sacred and cursed objects--you should be seeing them.

That said, this is the smarmy I'm-a-jackass-stuff that I learned this weekend...

1. All of those beautiful golden statues and masks and things that made Egyptian tombs so very robbed--they're actually carved out of wood. Call me stupid, but I see these pictures in National Geographic and I think, "That is one BIG hunk of gold." Like King Tut's mask--just think of how much gold that is! But it's all wood that's been dipped in liquid gold. All of it. I can't possibly be the only one that's had this misconception. Please tell me I am not the only one that's stupid enough to think that the Egyptians were carving seven foot sarcophaguses out of a solid slab of gold.

2. The exhibit didn't actually have any of Tut's several, nested sarcophaguses--or even the famous mask that they use in every brochure and ad for the exhibit. (They did have aother pharaoh's mask and sarcophagus.) This was kind of a letdown because...

3. The crowd was so overwhelmingly large--full to capacity at nine in the morning--that by the time you make it through the maze of rooms, you've been knocked around more than a few times. By the time you've made it to the end, you really feel like you deserve the mummy. You want to see the mummy. You've been sandwiched between six hundred other people for two hours and you've seen all kinds of statues and chairs and boxes and things--but you're getting tired and you want an encore. You want to see the mummy. Or a mummy. But you'd settle for the sarcophagus or the mask but they don't have any of that.

Okay, now the facts that I'm reading online are.

1. Today, the mummy is still in the original tomb, so that's cool. I mean, it's the least we could do after stealing all of his afterlife treasures.

2. At least one of the sarcophaguses is solid gold. So I guess I'm not that crazy. Still, all of the stuff we saw was covered wood.

The strangest thing about the trip was that it was the first time I went back to South Florida since I moved away from there at nine years old. Back to Broward County, where I was born. I was looking for anything I'd remember from when I was younger--like the billboard I saw for Lion Country Safari--a zoo that you drive your car through. The main thing I was looking for was this water park called Atlantis that I have very fuzzy memories of.

I found it. Just now, online. It closed after being damaged in Hurricane Andrew.

Me: The Mothman Prophecies is on!
E: Isn't that the movie where the baby survives in the jungle?
Me: No. It's the movie with the Moth-man.

New story later! I feel broken or something. Everything I write is so short that it makes me puke. In the last week I've thrown out at least eight finished or semi-finished stories because they were short and I was upset. They make me so sick that I really feel like one of those dick-ass writers now. Like on Gray's Anatomy this week, this writer thought his novel was shit, so he ate it. I got that kind of over-dramatic starving artist kind of beat poet over-reaction to my recent, short little failures. So yeah. New story later!

So I stumbled into watching this three part documentary with Jack Osbourne, called Jack Osbourne: Adrenaline Junkie. It was, quite simply, amazing.

The fat, drinking, drugging bastard cleaned up his act and then decided that he wanted to climb El Capitan, a Yosemite rock face that is three times as high as the Empire State Building.

The documentary was basically him preparing for the climb by doing crazy shit like running with the bulls in Spain and climbing in The Alps. In the process, he lost 70 pounds.

Now, people climb mountains every day, but there was something incredible about this because of the complete 180 Jack Osbourne has gone through since the last time I ever watched The Osbournes on MTV.

He did make it up El Capitan in five nights and six days. Six days of digging your fingers into cracks in mostly flat rock, sleeping on a collapsable platform, bolted into the rock with one bolt, thousands of feet above the earth.

Now I hear he wants to spend the next 13 years training to go to the moon. No shit. He wants in on President Bush's whole "We're going to go back to the moon; then Mars!" thing.

So the least I could do was get the fuck into the gym this morning. For the first time since we moved in.

And I feel good.

And I made the most amazing discovery.

You see, our 24-hour gym here is in the clubhouse, which doesn't look all that big from the outside. I mean, who would've imagined that there is...

A FULL SIZED, FULLY ENCLOSED, 24-HOUR, RACQUETBALL COURT UP IN THAT SHIT. It's ubelievable. Nobody even uses the thing. I have to go out and buy the necessary implements immediately. The racquets and the balls. But then we're in business.

...should pay royalties to Lydia Davis. Then again, the three new stories or story fragments over at Ribcage today are some of the oldest I've written.

At least, they were in some of the oldest notebooks I own. I don't remember when I wrote them. But it was certainly this morning, spent reading Lydia Davis, that made me say, "Yeah, I'll post some old fragments today." That and that I spent five hours trying to come up with anything new and just plain couldn't.

I got Elise sea monkeys in her Christmas stocking because she said that she's never had them. I take care of them though, because I don't trust her to remember to feed them or aerate the water often enough. So I guess that's the continuation of her gift. Dealing with the little creatures.

I keep them on the top of my bookcase, so that the cat doesn't topple the tank over. But now they've grown big enough to see, even from sitting at my computer: about four feet away.

What I was trying to get at is that they've become a distraction. Like right now, I'm wondering if I can get a really good photo of one.

Okay. Apparently I was nominated for The Pushcart Prize earlier this year. It sounds like a big deal because I don't know how many books say that the author was nominated for The Pushcart Prize on the back flap.

So now I can say that. Because Facets Literary Magazine nominated Four Fictional Vignettes (early Ribcage stories) as one of the best pieces they published in 2004. Apparently that is how Pushcart works. Pieces are nominated by small presses and then a select few make it into the Pushcart Prize book, which is already out and I'm obviously not in.

But I can say this now...

Christian Stella has been nominated for The Pushcart Prize.

Today is another Wednesday, two Wednesdays from then and I am still sick. It's fantastic. You should try this. Sick on Christmas. Sick on New Year's. Sick today, on my twenty-first birthday. But I did get better for a day or two somewhere in the middle of all of that. New Year's was a bust anyway.

I was watching Forensic Files all night, in a particularly sickened state, even for these past two weeks. I had a nicotine patch on my shoulder, because contrary to popular belief, I was a smoker for a brief period that I do not regret for three reasons:

1. I've kicked that shit for nearly two weeks now.
2. It was easy to kick that shit.
3. I learned a lot about addiction that I could not have grasped before. Something that has already come into play in my Ribcage stories.

The nicotine patches suggest that you remove them before sleep only if you are subject to "vivid dreams". Well, let me say that I am notorious for never dreaming. And don't give me that shit about everybody dreaming or I'll just rephrase that to never remembering my dreams upon awakening.

These past two weeks have been an amazing experience. These dreams are insane. I can't believe that the box was right. I'm talking, New Year's Eve, I was so sick that I shut Forensic Files off and passed out on the couch, only to dream of watching an entire Forensic Files episode, narration and all. Only this episode took place IN my apartment building, so it was quite frightening. When the episode ended, I left the apartment to do some further investigating and things blew into a full-blown blockbuster suspense thriller from there.

So that's how I spent New Year's Eve. Losing my mind.

Elise was imprisoned by Disney until two in the morning, which was probably the most fucked up thing they've done there. Last minute, they decided to just stay open past their usual NINE PM closing time. I'm sure it was Elise's co-workers that were really pissed, since everyone had to stay past Orlando's last call on New Year's Eve. I'd recorded the New Year's show in the DVR, but by the time Elise came home, we were just starving.

Last night, I went to Wal-Mart after midnight to buy my first alcohol to celebrate, but the Blue Nun wine wasn't jiving with my itchy throat. I drank one glass. That's the shit about this cold right now. I'm just coughing a lot. I've entered the coughing phase. But Blue Nun is good wine... tastes a lot like the Shmitte Sohne Riesling Wal-Mart and I like so much. I swear to God (who I'll get to in a minute) that Wal-Mart stocks 500 bottles of Shmitte Sohne Riesling. The same variety, the same blue bottle... it's one third of their entire wine section. (Note: Wal-Mart wine shopping is something I only did last night because it was after midnight, and I needed stronger cold medicine.)

In the soda aisle, Elise and I were stopped by a middle-aged Japanese woman who asked if we were Christians. I said, "Yes," because I felt like making such a slight woman happy. And she was happy! But it didn't stop her from telling her story. About how she was a Buddhist until seven years ago she almost died and she saw hell and she saw demons and she saw nightmares and that that was when she found Jesus. She said that she was glad that we had also found Jesus, glad because now, "Angels will party over your bodies."

Checking out with my wine and medicine and final box of nicotine patches, I told the cashier who was IDing me that I had just turned 21 an hour earlier and she wished me a happy birthday. Then she pointed to the Shmitte Sohne and said, "This one is very, very good."

I said, "I know! I shouldn't know, but I know."

She started laughing and said something about how I'd just turned twenty-one.

Then I said, "Well, it's been a very long hour."

I am hoping to have a new story later. I am also supposed to go to dinner for my birthday. And then, who knows which of my friends will be here. (You're invited.)

I really wanted to be a part of the Amazon Shorts program they have going, where you sell short e-books on demand, kinda like what I'm doing with Nine Lives for the Fat Kid Frame of Mind over at Lulu, but far more visible.

I was rejected from the program because, though I have a co-writing credit for Eating Stella Style, that credit is not listed on Amazon.com, and you have to have at least one book on Amazon to write for the shorts program.

But look! Now I'm on Amazon in France!

At least Barnes and Noble loves me.