Last week, I was mentioned (briefly) in the Burbank Leader’s coverage of a forum that I agreed to moderate about developments within our fair city’s police department. Click here if you’d like to read it. Public response so far, on some blogs, is that no doubt I was paid to intentionally get some people’s names wrong. Good theory — and I wish I’d thought of that.

Also in the Burbank Leader comes news that Gun World is closing.  For those of you who’ve seen my play “About the Deep Woods Killer,” this may strike a chord. Here’s Scene Three, in which Jack, the son of the Deep Woods Killer, struggles to stay on a good path:

 

 

                                                (Scene Three: Testimony.)

           

(Spotlight on Jack. He stands alone, addressing us as though we were a group. He holds his baseball cap in his hands and fidgets with it, at times twisting and turning it.)

 

                        JACK

My name is Jack. I’m an alcoholic. But you know that. I had a tough week. Well, a tough day. The same thing happened at work, again, the thing that happens every time I think it’s okay. They hired this new girl, woman, Alice, and somebody told her. About me. Well, about my father. I know you all already know, so what’s the point. It’s about honesty in here. So at work, nobody said anything to me but I could tell. Monday morning Alice was filling out paperwork while I was in the breakroom and she smiled and said hello. I didn’t want to talk to her, I wasn’t trying to talk to her, I wasn’t even trying to look at her, but I did like her hair, it was red, pulled up behind. She talked to me and I looked up and looked up at her hair, that was when I saw it, and she smiled again. And after lunch she wouldn’t look at me. She came into the breakroom and I was there again and she acted like she didn’t mean to come in there and turned and left, and I knew what that was. I was… I was really down after that. The whole day that feeling was back, it felt like there was something on me, something heavy I couldn’t get off and the drive home took me past the Dew Drop Inn, and the Rustic Inn, and the Pitney Tavern, and the Stop and Go Liquor – I don’t know why we have so many of these places, it’s like they build ‘em right where I’m going to drive by, that’s what I was thinking – then I stopped at the light at Leeds Road and there was Gun World. And I looked at myself in the rearview and I just looked tired, real tired. The light changed… and after a bit I drove home and I got inside and I –

(He starts to choke up.)

–  I called Tony. I got through it all, I got home, but I might not’ve gotten further ‘cept for Tony. He saved me. So I thank him and I praise God for him. I am a strong person, a strong man, but sometimes everybody needs a little help, and I had Tony. Thank you.

 

This play was performed in the Moving Arts one-act festival two years ago here in Los Angeles. One of the actors was walking down Magnolia Boulevard and did a double-take. He called our producer, Steve, to say, “You’re not going to believe this… but I’m standing in front of Gun World.” He later told me how very strange it felt to one moment be leading his normal life, and the next moment to feel that he’d entered the world of the play. For this reason alone, I’m sad that Gun World is closing.

Finally,  the current issue of Inc. magazine has a profile of my company, Counterintuity. Counterintuity is the place where I write those other things that blur the lines between reality and fantasy (we call that marketing copy). Click here if you’d like to read it and use my image for target practice.

I’m fascinated with Danielle Sacks’ profile of former ad man Alex Bogusky in the current issue of Fast Company. I think you should click here and read it.

While at Crispin Porter Bogusky, Bogusky was the creative director behind relaunching Burger King’s King (and the viral hit “Subservient Chicken”) as well as the terrific campaign against teen drinking and drugs,  and the very gimmicky magazine inserts for Mini. One of the magazines I get had a punch-out-and-assemble cardboard Mini on one page, and little punch-out traffic cones on the opposite page. Yes, I popped out both and played with them. During his tenure, CP+B became the hot, hip agency, and for good reason:  their work was clever, and they delivered a lot of sales for clients. In 2009, Ad Agency named it the agency of the decade.

In this profile, Bogusky now makes himself out to be a man transformed. He’s left advertising and discovered soul-searching. With about $45 million now in hand, he’s hanging out all day writing or playing or doing finger paints in a cottage he calls FearLess, and handing out keycards to the cottage to other cool people he thinks can help change the world. I read all this and thought about Alfred Nobel, who suffered the accidental indignity of reading his own obituary, which condemned him for inventing dynamite; Nobel set out to redeem himself by creating the Nobel Prizes. Bogusky devoted a lot of his life to getting people to consume more from Burger King, Coke, Domino’s, Jose Cuervo, and Kraft, and now he regrets it. Because — and please don’t think I’m cynical — he can now afford it. Easily. Stylishly. It doesn’t seem that these self-doubts plagued him while he was devising those campaigns.

Evidently, I wasn’t the only one starting to wonder a thing or two about Bogusky’s transformation, because  Sacks then goes and talks to a lot of Bogusky’s former employees. A far different picture emerges. What Sacks thinks she finds isn’t interesting (news alert:  creative types can be narcissistic). What’s more interesting is the theory that Bogusky had manipulated Sacks into getting exactly the kind of profile he wanted — until she figured that out and turned on him for the back half of the piece. This is the biggest such reversal I’ve ever seen in a profile. It’s like the last few minutes of “The Sixth Sense,” which has you revisiting everything you just saw, but now from a completely different angle.

Days later, I’m still trying to figure out why this is newsworthy:  Martin Short’s wife has died.

I mean no ill intent to her surviving family members, including Mr. Short, whom I had a very pleasant half-hour press interview with once.  But why was this newsworthy enough to be covered by  CNN, Entertainment Weekly, the Associated Press, The Los Angeles Times, and by my Google count at least 500 other news sources?

If I’m reading her biography correctly, her last and most noteworthy acting appearance, as a supporting player on the sitcom “Soap,” was in 1981, the year that Ronald Reagan became president. The year “Raiders of the Lost Ark” opened. The year Britney Spears was born. Since then, she’s been a housewife and mother. These are good and important things. But housewives die all the time, with little notice by the media.

The greatest clue we get is the headline from the LA Times: ” ‘Three Amigos’ and ‘Father of the Bride’ funnyman Martin Short’s wife dies.” So what we have is an obit in which the subject of the obit is mentioned after the names of two films in which she didn’t appear, and after her husband, an obit in which she is mentioned in the next-to-last word, and not by name, but by title:  “wife.”

This has me asking:

When Phil Silvers’ wife died, whoever she was, was it reported?

Who is Jason Alexander’s wife? Wikipedia tells me they’ve been married almost 30 years, like the Shorts. If she dies, of natural causes, will there be an obit?

How is the health of Billy Crystal’s wife? Would she get an obit?

Small-town papers run obits of all the locals. (Or, at least, they used to. Now unless the local is notable, they run a death notice — which is a paid service offered to the family.) But with mainstream media, obits are restricted to notable people. The late Mrs. Short is notable solely for having been married to Mr. Short. While understandably, her demise is newsworthy to him and to their children, and perhaps to people in the entertainment industry who knew the couple, why is this important to outside mainstream media? I honestly can’t figure this out. She died of natural causes. What is the news angle? The fact that this is being reported at all makes me wonder if there’s some aspect that is not being reported (yet?). As it is, it seems to be a dog bites man story:  a not-well-known person died after a lengthy illness.

I am sorry for the Short family’s loss.

Few people are more miserable than closet cases. My gay friends told me this years ago, and it seems truer and truer. Case in point:  Bush campaign chief Ken Mehlman who has now announced that he’s gay. Evidently, he’s only recently come to this conclusion, and now must bear the agony of helping Karl Rove fan the flames of homophobia for fun and profit. In previous off-the-record interviews, it’s revealed that Mehlman “often wondered why gay voters never formed common cause with Republican opponents of Islamic jihad, which he called ‘the greatest anti-gay force in the world right now.'” Theory for you Ken:  Maybe it was all the hatred you and your pals were stirring up against, well, your own kind.

Not sure how to spot closeted gays? I understand. I have poor gaydar. I’m someone who’s still unsure that all the guys on “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy” were gay. Sure, they were knowledgeable about hair products and where the couch should go, but that doesn’t always translate into “gay.” But now I’ve locked into one surefire tell-tale clue. You should just assume that any Republican opposed to gays and gay marriage is himself a self-loathing closeted gay person. That would explain Congressman Mark Foley, Ken Mehlman, Senator Larry Craig, Pastor Ted Haggard, Congressman Bob Allen, California State Senator Roy Ashburn and so many others. Now I understand whom they hate, and why.

The other night my daughter and I watched the movie “Unbreakable.” This is one of my favorite movies. I respond to its central message — that if you don’t express who you really are, you will be lost — and to its driving metaphor:  that comic books reflect inner truths about us as a species. I was thrilled at her interest in watching his movie. When it was over, I asked her if she liked it. She said, “No. It was boring.”

A night or two later, I invited her to watch an episode of “Wonders of the Solar System” with me. When it was over she insisted that we never watch that together again, because it was boring.

Then on Sunday we were in my car when she suddenly perked up to a song playing on my stereo. “What is this?” she asked. “Raygun Suitcase,” I said, “by Pere Ubu.” “I don’t like the way he sings this,” she announced, adding, “I don’t like the way he sings ‘Kathleen’ or ‘Oh, Catherine, in fact, I just don’t like the way he sings.” In this way, she overturned 15 years of universal agreement in our household that these are wonderful songs, brilliantly delivered.

Did I mention that she just turned 12?

Back here I noted that I had taken a two-week break from this blog and hoped to finally explain why that night. That was on August 9th, and I still haven’t done it. Why not? Because I have struggled for a month to figure out what to say about this, with no resolution. So now I’m just going to say it.

Someone I know killed himself.

On July 26th, the day after I came back from Comic-Con, during the middle of a day with many other delights and joys in it, I got an email that this colleague had died suddenly. It didn’t take long for me to piece together what had happened from a couple of calls and  some investigation on the Internet. I knew, as many of us did, that he had risen to a position of local prominence, then suffered a major career setback. After struggling with the aftermath of that for many months, months during which many of us still saw him on a regular basis, he one day parked his car at the end of a bridge, walked to the middle, and jumped to his death, a fall of 255 feet, farther than from the Golden Gate Bridge, in a descent that must have seemed an hour long to the man taking it. Pedestrians and bicyclists are protected from falls on that bridge by a 54-inch-tall concrete and metal safety rail.  An accidental slip off the side would be impossible.

I have a lot more to add to this story, but I don’t think I can add it here (at least not now). That’s what I was struggling with for weeks. This incident was foremost in my thoughts, and I did discuss it with my family and close friends, but I didn’t think it seemed appropriate to go on the Internet right now with my feelings about this.

I wasn’t close to this man, but we did serve on a board and on a committee together, and I saw him at many other civic and private functions. Over the course of the past year, I probably saw him three dozen times. That’s more often than I saw some of the people I consider my closest friends (especially those on the east coast). I had a lunch with him that left me very impressed with his intelligence and his ideas and his passion for his field, and I told him after that how glad I was that I’d gotten to know him better. We exchanged several emails following up on our discussion. I’m glad I got that opportunity.

Seven years ago, another man I knew killed himself. This man was a  close friend. He was one of the founders of my theatre company, and a regular guest to my house for holiday celebrations and parties. He was enormously talented and funny and strange, and generous with his time and his skills, but one day he just got tired of battling the mental illness he was always on guard against, and so he drank an entire bottle of whiskey while talking all his prescription pills. We did a lot of things together over the course of almost 15 years, and I have many, many fond memories, but here’s my last memory of that friend:  that one night four of us went to see a show together at La Mirada Theatre, two of us to a car, him riding with someone else, and before the show and after the show I don’t think I took much notice of him or said much to him, not willfully, but in a sort of blind ignorance because I was wrapped up in my own thoughts, and that was the last time I saw him. I doubt I could’ve changed anything (although I know I would have tried). But I do wish I could go back in time and pay a little more attention on that last night I was ever going to see him alive.

If you commit a sex offense, do not try to Friend the victim on Facebook.

Today is my son’s 8th birthday, so to celebrate we’re having three of his friends over for a sleepover. All night the boys have been jumping into and out of a wading pool, eating pizza, staging mock gun battles with plastic pistols, playing “Halo” on the xBox, and generally creating havoc. I told my wife that this was precisely the sort of birthday party I yearned for all of my boyhood.

I grew up in the Pine Barrens of Southern New Jersey, an isolated and protected area of deep woods. Sometimes actually in the Pinelands, in and around the cabin built by my grandfather, surrounded by trails and streams, and sometimes what we’ll call Pinelands-adjacent, at my parents’ house, with a highway in front and deep woods in the back. But in neither circumstance where there many people around, and certainly few people my own age. So I read an awful lot of books and comic books.

In my adulthood, I have lots of friends. In retrospect, this was a life ambition:  Get out of the Pine Barrens, and get some friends. Now I’ve got them, and they’re good ones. I intend to keep them. But because of my upbringing, I still need lots of time to myself. Example:  I said good night to my wife an hour and a half ago. (She’s still downstairs keeping an eye on those boys.) What am I doing? I’m upstairs writing this and other things. Sometimes I need to be by myself for days. Oftentimes, I’ve driven hours away, and rented a motel room in the desert, or on a near-deserted stretch of the coastline, so that I can spend days alone by myself, writing and smoking cigars and eating my prepacked food and drinking and thinking.

In other words, isolation still calls to me.

But only in moderation. Only for brief stints. Then I need re-immersion into society. But what would it be like to stay isolated? To stay as isolated as, say, the most isolated man on the planet, a man with 31 square miles all to himself in the middle of the  Brazilian Amazon? Read this story and then imagine what it must feel like to be the last person in your world.

Today a good friend of mine sent me a link to photos he took recently of a visit to his hometown in the middle of America, on the occasion of his 35th high school reunion, and of the town’s annual parade. For reasons that at first weren’t clear to me, I clicked and viewed every one of these hundreds of photos. By the time I got to the end, I understood why I had done so. It’s because I find both of his topics — high school reunions and local parades — completely inexplicable.

This should in no way rob anyone else of their enjoyment of them, but to me they’re a mystery.

Let’s take the high school reunion first. I hated almost every moment of high school. I say almost, because while most of the moments of high school were about the authorities doing their best to contain me in various subtle and not-so-subtle ways, there were also those delicious moments when I stuck my thumb in their eye:  ditching class to hang out in the woods with girls; skipping whole periods by reading and writing what I wanted in the photographic darkroom courtesy of the key I had stolen; writing a play and directing it and casting it against their every objection (right up to the feedback that it was “Too long” — and so, I retitled the play “Too Long”), and then having the play be a hit that got big laughs; confronting the headmaster for years afterward in person and via letter over an injustice he visited upon me, until finally he died (I sent two letters to his next of kin, then finally let it drop); concocting an utterly implausible story about how I had been Saved and having them buy it; responding to the rule that one must “wear a tie” by wearing it around my head, draped over my shoulder, in the crook of my arm, backwards, tied wrong, essentially incorrectly in every conceivable way; and so forth. Actually, I owe the friend who sent the photos a debt of gratitude for summoning forth from me all these actually terrific memories of high school, however scattered. But the salient point is this:  Almost none of these good memories have almost anything to do with anyone else there. So the idea of reuniting with my classmates is truly alien. On Facebook someone who said she was an old classmate reconnected with me; I couldn’t remember her. Soon others did the same. Then I saw photos of the reunion they held. I couldn’t remember any of these people. They may be perfectly good and fine adults — in fact, they were probably perfectly good and fine adolescents. But because I didn’t want to be there — desperately didn’t want to be there — by extension, I didn’t want to know them. That feeling holds to this day. Hence my interest earlier today in watching photos of my friend now on a flatbed truck with a dozen fellow classmates, waving to the assembled parade watchers. I can’t understand this. Somehow, the dozen reunited classmates are temporary luminaries because, I guess, they’re still alive. Is that what this is about? What is the interest of the people on the sidelines in waving at these people who have lived long enough to sit in the truck? It almost seems like an appeal to God:  “We are glad to see that you are still alive, because at your age, we will still want to be alive and have people wave at us.” This is only way I can make sense of this.

Which takes me to the topic of the parades.

I’ve never liked parades. Here’s how a parade works:  The town lines the streets to watch people pass by. Almost all the time, the people who pass by in the parade — drum majorettes, the mayor, surviving high-school graduates, the town Rotary — are already known to the people on the sidelines. So this is some sort of aspirational classism:  “We salute you people we already know, because this year you’re in the parade. We have to for this one day treat you as though you are a celebrity, and not someone we live and work alongside every other day. And one day, if we join a club or maybe just live long enough, we will be in the parade and you will cheer us.” Put this way, our culture’s interest in Hollywood celebrity becomes all the clearer — it is a macro magnification of the parade. “I see you on TV and in supermarket checkout magazines and on billboards, and if I am lucky, some day I will see you in person, and then I can tell everyone I was someplace with you, and by extension, some of your celebrity will reflect onto me, and I will be a celebrity among my own people, at least for a while.” My personal feelings about celebrity are complicated. The people who to me are celebrities and whom I have met — people like Edward Albee and Athol Fugard and August Wilson — have proved to be personal disappointments; now I find that I would rather not meet most of the artists whose work I enjoy, because the experience of meeting them and interacting with them is so often detrimental to my continued enjoyment of their work. (Fortunately, there are exceptions:  I had the great good joy to hang out with Pulitzer prize-winning playwright David Lindsay-Abaire in May and June, and I can tell you, he is a brilliant writer and a truly great guy. But in my experience the combination of the two is rare.) So I would rather not meet with and work with celebrities — but at the same time, I’m aware of the power that celebrity can lend to your own perceived power and influence. Yes, I have dropped the names of very well-known or very influential or very wealthy people I have worked with, for reasons of esteem-building and business-building. But I will tell you:  Every time I do, I cringe a little inside.

I’m glad my friend sent the link to these photos. I am in no way am I sneering at them. I find them fascinating. (I also find that they make me hunger for corn on the cob, a major subject of the hometown parade.) I find them difficult to relate to. Lately I’ve been watching the series “Wonders of the Solar System”   and looking at my friend’s photos has me thinking how strange these alien worlds are, with their ice volcanoes and acid atmospheres and 61 moons and countless rings of frozen water. These alien worlds are beautiful and fascinating and difficult for me to understand, except as a visitor. Like these parade photos.

In which Peter Gabriel performs a heartfelt rendition of “Here Comes the Flood.”