Marculations

The U.S. trade deficit reached a record level in September. Sixty-six billion dollars in deficit.

A lot of people don’t seem to know what that means, and rightly, they don’t care. But, it’s helpful to know. Knowing things is the first step to, you know, being smart.

A trade deficit means that we, as a nation, imported more goods from other countries than we exported to other countries. We don’t make enough of anything here to self-sustain. So, we buy things from other countries. Unfortunately, we don’t even make enough here to sell back to the world to pay for the things we buy.

Where do we buy these things, anyway? We get them from all over. China, mostly. Canada, too. Really, anywhere but here. And we don’t have much to offer back to the rest of the world.

But does that matter?

My take is, right now, it seems to. But we live in a global economy. The economic boundaries between countries are breaking down. Money is becoming less real and more conceptual. Vast sums of currency are transferred around the world instantly, with no physical materials ever being moved.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t just work like that. Our country, and its’ citizens, need to stay relevant to the rest of the world. If we aren’t producing anything of value to the world’s inhabitants, they won’t continue to allow us to exist in this economy. The United States is propping itself up on credit and service industries. Much of our profitable industry is focused inward. Fast food, domestic product manufacturing, real estate sales, construction, inter-state tourism. Money changes hands between service workers in exchange for the services they each provide to the other. That is a very fragile system.

Our economy has typically thrived during periods of armed conflict. The United States is well known for its’ capacity to make war, and to make war profitable. Let’s just hope it doesn’t come to that again.

Yes, they hurt like a bitch.

I strongly recommend you disable your air bags if your car was built in the nineties. If you are wearing your seatbelt, these will do more damage than the accident itself will. I can almost guarantee it.

Notice that the passenger airbag cover burst apart with such force that it broke the windshield. Now imagine what that will do to you, when it hits you in the fucking face.

You’ll wish you’d hit the windshield.

Sometimes, we make decisions we know are justified, and use the same justification to stick by our decisions, even if every other part of us wants desperately to go back on that decision.

Now is one of those times.

One thing I’ll never understand, though, is the so-called “selfless act.”

“I have to do this. I don’t want to do this, but I know you want to do this. You can’t bring yourself to do it, though, so I’ll do it for you.”

Is that an ego trip, or is it genuine care? If someone wants to do something, can’t they decide on their own to do it or not do it? Shouldn’t it be their decision regardless? Does it help maintain the illusion of control to “do it for them”?

Don’t force someone’s hand. Let them make their own choices.

I would make a terrible father.

This past weekend, I found myself in a rickety, stripped down junk car, hurtling towards a makeshift dirt ramp at high speeds. The approach could not have taken more than fifteen seconds, but if you had asked me at the time, I would’ve told you it took a very, very long time. During that time, I thought about things. Many things. One thought stuck in my head for the longest, dominating everything else.

What I’m doing is irresponsible.

If I had a child, or a wife, or even a girlfriend who cared about me, what would it do to them if I were to die, or seriously injure myself? If I had any of those things, would I have thought twice about doing this? Would I still be strapped into this mobile coffin, launching myself at this ramp? Would I be doing anything else that might put my life or safety in jeopardy?

This extends into every aspect of my life. Would I be goofing off, without a full-time job, without so much as a part-time job, bouncing between cities as I pleased? Or would I stop, and settle down, and button up a work shirt with my name on it, if that’s what it took to ensure that my child had proper care and feeding?

I want to say, no, I wouldn’t be doing those things. I’d be a responsible, mature adult. I don’t believe it, though. There are others who don’t believe it as well.

So, as I sit here, alone in a hotel room, picking at the airbag burn on my chin, I wonder if the hand I’ve been dealt recently is some kind of cosmic payback for shirking my responsibilities and descending into this life I’m living now. Did I do something to deserve this?

Yes, I’m sure I did. I take it in stride, though. This isn’t bad. It’s just something you have to get used to.

Plus, chicks dig scars.

I’m in a quandary.

Back in the day, as it were, I cheated on my girlfriend.

I’ll wait for the booing to subside.

Yes, I cheated on my girlfriend. It was a fucking stupid thing to do, and it accomplished nothing. It felt terrible in every sense. I will never subject myself to it again.

I have a hard time regretting it. It taught me the lesson. I cheated, and I saw the effect it had on my relationship and on my girlfriend. I felt like scum. I never wanted to put anybody through that again, and I never wanted to be put through that.

On the other hand, I do regret it. It was despicable and wrong, and I irreparably damaged a relationship that was very important to me. To this day, I wish it had not happened.

But, if it had not happened, I wouldn’t feel so strongly about this.

Therein lies the quandary: the struggle to not regret something that I feel like I should not have done.

I can say this, though: I’ll never fucking do it again.

I’m going down to Ft. Lauderdale at around 10am to look at a new apartment.

Another new apartment.

The whole moving around thing is getting pretty old. But I like it, I think. The actual process of moving is annoying, and the first few weeks of being in a new place are kinda scary, but overall, I prefer it this way. Full time jobs, with full time houses, full time relationships and full time lives are for suckers. Every day I do something different, and every so often I totally change things up. It’s what I wanted to do. When I get tired of it, that’ll be different. Right now, though, it’s all good.

The new place is apparently off of A1A, right across from the beach. That’s going to be pretty sweet. I’m looking forward to getting all moved in. I just wish we could move in before the middle of next month. I don’t know what I’m going to do with my stuff until then. Maybe we can swing it and stay in this place until then, who knows. I just don’t want to pay the bills for two places in one month. That puts a bit of a damper on the financial situation.

The short film I’ve been working on is still heavily in post-production. Terrifyingly so. That’s okay, though. I love working on tight deadlines. Really tight deadlines. Deadlines so tight, they’re like virgins you don’t know how you’ll ever meet them. I work best in that sort of a situation.

I want to push The Last Regret through pre-production (again) and get it done before I leave the area for two weeks. My leaving the area is also coinciding with another project spinning up, which is due in December. That one’s important, and its start date crashing head first into my departure leaves me wondering just who is going to direct it. Suddenly, things are getting hectic.

I’m going to do table reads for “The Last Regret” this weekend, time permitting. I love rushing into production with revision “zero” of a script. Seeing groups of people busting their ass and investing large amounts of time and effort to produce a script that was written in fifteen minutes, and then never revised, just brings an odd smile to my face. It’s quite possible I’m a sadist. (I often convince myself that I produced the original draft of “Selling The Faith”, but that’s not true. It was revised once, at the behest of a member of the crew. I like to forget that. I remember every time I watch the credits.)

It’s odd working with talent that doesn’t tactlessly second guess the direction. Not that they won’t have opinions, and interject them as they feel they should. That’s fine, I want that. It’s that they do it gracefully, and tactfully. Satisfying the directors ego, while still getting your opinion to matter, is not easy. It’s more of an art form. Some might say that the director should be less sensitive, less tempermental, and more open to all forms of input from cast and crew, regardless of any ego stoking. To that, I say, no fucking way I’ll think about it.

I live in Florida. Most of the people who read this do.

We know hurricanes. We don’t even call them hurricanes. We call them “storms.” I’m serious. Ask someone who’s from Florida about the “hurricane.” We’ll call it the “storm.” We can tell you the names of the big storms we’ve gone through, but not the small ones. We lose count. The different parts of Florida don’t even keep up on the storms that are hitting the other parts. I’m not originally from South Florida, but I moved here this year. When hurricane discussions would come up, I’d hear about Hurricane Charley. I didn’t know about it. I’d talk about Hurricane Opal and Hurricane Ivan. Noone here could recall any specifics on those. People from Northwest Florida will remember Hurricane Erin. People from South Florida probably couldn’t tell you about it.

The media coverage on hurricanes now is sickening.

Nobody cared before Katrina. Now, it’s popular to freak out.

Hurricanes that hit Florida weren’t a big deal anymore, because we actually know how to deal with a hurricane. We have to know. Our entire economy is based on tourism. We can’t have Florida storms getting dragged through the news for weeks and weeks as we struggle to clean up and get our act together, because it’ll lower our tourism revenue. We don’t have an income tax. We like it that way. We need tourism revenue to keep that going.

All that being said, when I refer to Florida being prepared for these storms, I am only referring to the government. The people are clueless. It’s because we just don’t care anymore. We’ll all run to the store like three hours before the damn thing hits and buy like six dozen triple-A batteries and a bottle of lighter fluid. We’ll put enough gas in our cars and in gas cans to last us through the rest of our lives, and we’ll duck tape plywood to the insides of our windows or something if the spirit moves us. Few native Floridians will actually leave. The people who do leave will spend the rest of their time before the storm hits on either I-10, I-75, I-4 or I-95. I don’t know the status of the Turnpike during these things, so you might look there for any stragglers.

Now that we’ve discussed how Floridians like myself react to these storms, let’s discuss the one that’s out there right now.

Chances are, when you went to bed, this storm was a cat. two. Well, good morning. It’s a five now. Wind speeds of 175 miles per hour. And it’s headed for South Florida. We haven’t had a nasty storm down here yet this year. We got Katrina, but it passed over as a cat. one.

I have overlayed several charts and added a few annotations to express my dismay upon looking at the situation a few moments ago. The graph is a composite of the projected path and the tropical update, with notes on the thoughts that ran through my head as I read each item.

Not that I’ll evacuate, given the situation. But it should prove to be very exciting.

Got to make sure the cameras are charged up.

Sometimes, for whatever reason, you are struck with a brief insight into the larger picture.

People become so constrained by their self-imposed boundaries that they sometimes fail to realize, you can do pretty much anything you want. There are usually consequences, but ultimately, the sky is the limit.

I had several flashes of insight today.

The first one was, I can go anywhere. I don’t have a full time job. There’s nothing tying me to this place except the fact that I don’t want to leave. If I decided tomorrow to leave, I could do it. That’s a great feeling. Just knowing you can do something is almost as good as doing it.

The second was, you have to stand out. My generation was raised to celebrate mediocrity. Everybody is just as good as everybody else, we can all do anything we want and be just as good as anybody else, etc. It’s not true. People have natural talents, and talents should be championed and wielded proudly. But talent isn’t enough. The real trick is getting noticed. People can say to you all day long, you are talented, you should be doing this or that. It doesn’t matter. You have to prove it to the world at large. People have to know your name. Someone who’s only moderately good at what they do, but have a known name, will do much better than someone who is awesome, and unknown. Don’t sit around and wait to be discovered. Get out there and do it. Even in this internet age, it amazes me the trouble people won’t go to in order to be noticed.

Of course, the third flash of insight was, if you drink nothing but Pepsi all day, it leaves this weird burning and tingling taste behind after a while.

I have a new mission.

This is a more long-term mission. And I’m going to need help.

Would you like to know my mission?

I’m going to share it with you.

I want to drink a can of Pepsi that has sugar in it.

You may be saying to yourself, “Has the boy gone off his rocker? What’s wrong with him? Pepsi has sugar in it. In fact, it has shitloads. 41 grams in a single can!”

Well, technically, you’d be mistaken about that. Let’s look at the ingredients list of the can.

Pepsi contains: Carbonated water, high fructose corn syrup and/or sugar, caramel coloring, phosphoric acid, caffeine, citric acid and other flavoring.

So, there’s a possibility of it having either corn syrup or sugar. In the case of soda bottled for the American drinking public, it’s corn syrup. Our market is simply too large to put real sugar in our Pepsi.

If you go to Canada, Mexico or South America, Pepsi uses sugar. Real sugar.

And I want to know what that tastes like.

Now that I’ve ranted, and I’m calmer. let me add this to the previous entry.

It’s not that I don’t like programming, specifically.

It’s not that I don’t like programmers.

It’s not that I can’t write C, because obviously, I can. (I wrote that example code damnit!)

It’s just that you put me behind a computer, writing C, and I want to claw my eyeballs out of their sockets within ten minutes. You put me behind a camera, and tell me to light a scene, compose a shot, direct the talent, set up the camera and run it during the shot, and I’ll be the most meticulous fucker you’ve ever seen. And I’ll love every minute of it. Same if you put me behind a computer, or even a pen and paper, and have me write something. Or edit some video.

And once you’ve done all of those things, it’s hard to go back.

I mean, seriously. Who wants to look at this:

when you can look at this:

Hmpf.