I miss romance. I watch a lot of romantic comedies and dramas that have romantic themes and TV shows full of… well you get the idea. I think the reason I do that is I’ve been married for seven years, together for thirteen as of the 20th of this month. The romance in my life is pretty much gone. That feeling of first love and the horribly wonderful butterflies that come with that is something that I’ll never experience again. I love my wife and my life but that is one of the single greatest feelings in the world. First love. I liken it to creation. Whether that creation is art, music, science or even new life isn’t important. It all amounts to continuing humanity as a species. Making a mark on the world that is real and tangible. Whoever designed the human race was as brilliant as he was cruel and he had one warped sense of humor.
So that stuff above? I wrote it a few hours ago. Since then I have watched two episodes of the Office, read the new Bryan Talbot graphic novel, attempted to watch a movie on Hulu and ate a bag of microwave popcorn. There may have been a trip or two to the bathroom, I’m not really sure. I’m starting to think that signing up for NaNoWriMo was a mistake. I’m lazy, easily distracted and I hate everything I write.
I started writing on the internet before people started calling it blogging. Back then they were “opinion boards” where people would get together and write about whatever struck their fancy. I got my start writing about professional wrestling in 1999. I’ve been a fan of the “sport” for most of my life but in ‘99 it had become something of a pop culture phenomenon. You could go into Wal Mart and buy t-shirts and lunch boxes with your favorite wrestler on them. It was a great time to be a fan but like most things, the upswing was followed by a horrible downturn not only in attendance but in quality. Yes, I just used the word “quality” when talking about pro wrestling. Like any other form of entertainment wrestling follows some kind of a script. The more talented and intelligent the writing (or “booking” as is the case in wrestling) the better the product will be. Add in some healthy competition and you have a success. Unfortunately the monster that was the WWF consumed all other wrestling in its path and the entire thing got very boring to me. Mix that with my favorites retiring or murdering their entire families and I was done with it.
In the middle of all this I saw Stanly Kubrik’s final film “Eyes Wide Shut”. Normally going to a movie that makes me violent and a little nauseous at the same time isn’t really cause for celebration but in this case it lead to one of the best friendships and collaborations of my life. On the forums for one of these wrestling op boards I got into an altercation with a fellow calling himself “Stevo” over the merits of Eyes Wide Shut. I said it was two hours and forty five minutes of Tom Cruise trying in vain to get laid and failing miserably while the most annoying sound in the world (BING!) echoed in the background. He said something along the lines of “nuh-uh!” and an instant rivalry was made. Our diametrically opposed view on this and many MANY other films eventually caused us to start a movie review website together. We called ourselves “Two Film Guys” for a while until two OTHER film guys who had dibs on the name shot us an e-mail that said something to the effect of “C’mon dude, seriously?” so we changed our name to “Filmspies”. We had a cool 50’s G-man spy theme to our site and we had news, reviews and commentary. We even added a couple of other writers for a while and almost got sued. Sadly, Steve and myself suffer from terminal laziness so the site kind of died. And then came back. Over and over we’ve tried to keep the thing alive even going so far as to change the name of the site to the kind of porno sounding WTFEntertainment.com. We were back in business for a while with both of us adding content to the site. I was mostly doing comic book reviews while Steve covered music of the metalish variety. That was when we almost got sued again. Or, we had some guy threaten us with a lawsuit and then I mocked him publicly and we never heard about it again.
And that really only covers three of the bajillion sites I’ve written for over the years. Sites with names like Lethal Injection, HATE and Impaler. I hope I still have it in me to do this, I’ve wanted to be a writer since I was a little kid and realized I couldn’t draw worth a crap.
Soundtrack for this post:
Good Times Bad Times – Led Zepplin
The Winter of 1985 – Mint
When You’re Young – The Jam
If I Were a Carpenter – June Carter Cash
Jackson, Monk and Rowe – Elvis Costello
Los Angeles is Burning – Bad Religion
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