Todd A

“Bowel movements,” the young man with the sand-colored hair said forthrightly. He said this to the table of men and women in suits. Nice-looking suits without milk stains on them from this morning’s bowl of Fruit Loops. They were nice-looking people whose hair was properly groomed and not at all truculent. His own hair stuck out from his head like straw. It projected straight across his large-framed glasses in a single direction, one whoosh to the right, like threshed stalks of wheat. His own suit was rumpled and quite possibly consisted of differently colored slacks and jacket. (continue reading…)

I tend to come off as being anti-cat when in fact I’m mostly just anti-dirt. I forgive dogs their dirtiness because they are… you know… awesome whereas cats exist simply because we couldn’t find anything to eat on them.

I also like dogs because they usually want to hang out with you while cats are simply too retarded to understand that they owe their survival to you. Sure, cat-people will tell you that cats are superior in intelligence to dogs and too mindful to do whatever their human companions wish. But, seriously, that’s just bullshit. Cats’ brains are the size of your thumb.

If cats were so smart, why don’t they lead the blind? Or help policemen? It’s not because they have a “mind-of-their-own” or they’re “too independent.” It’s because of the peanut brain. Look it up. It’s in a science book or something.

If you’ve got a cat that’s a reasonable size (not just one of those furry bags of fat) and it’s clean and lives indoors, I can totally deal with it. I’ll scratch it and pet it and all of that crap. I just won’t think it’s as cool as a dog. (Of course, it’s automatically cooler than one of those little fuzzy dogs that is just a glorified squirrel. But that’s another subject.)

I bring all this up to preface the story that Monty’s anti-social feline has been leaping on our kitchen counters. I suspected as much yesterday when I found some things on the floor in the kitchen. But this morning, my suspicions were confirmed when not only were some paper towels knocked to the floor but my new loaf of bread was askew.

Naturally, I inspected the bread bag for tiny puncture wounds and found several. Then I began a protracted internal debate about what to do about the bread: eat it or throw it all away. Everytime I would convince myself that I was being paranoid even to consider throwing it away, I would think of the microscopic pooplet particles surely in its filthy claws from digging in its crap box. Then I would consider that those microbes were floating around the house anyway. Then I woud think, not in my bread they’re not!

This went on for far longer than it should have. In the end, I made a sandwich with bread from the middle of the loaf — as far away from the punctures as I could manage. I am now about to eat that sandwich. If I am struck ill, tell the doctors about the pooplets.

(2006)
Barry Cherry is a washed up B-movie director who moves to Nashville to escape the Hollywood fame game. When one of his starlets discovers that a country musician has made a sex tape of her, Barry must dive into action to save her reputation from a fame-seeking sycophant.

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For the sake of setting the record straight, I feel I must tell of my encounters with the Duke boys.

For a year or so, probably from age 15 to 16, I took guitar lessons at a little music store in Green Hills. It was one of those tiny, stereotypical stores where the sheet music took up most of the space. (continue reading…)

From time to time, to supplement my erratic income, I have worked on families’ computers usually cleaning off all the junk their kids put on them. I started doing this when I realized how little parents know or can be bothered with how much their kids screw up their computers. Unfortunately, due to my lack of any kind of advertising budget and parents aforementioned lack of care, the business never really took off. And as game as I was at first, my advice to these parents eventually degenerated into “Buy a Mac.” (continue reading…)

With a lot of talk about Reese Witherspoon’s work in Walk the Line, I guess it’s a good time to share my Reese story. I mean to write about it every time someone drags out that tired old Kevin Smith story. If you haven’t read Smith’s tirade, it boils down to Reese dissing Smith and Smith wanting to egg her house. One amusing section goes:

Secondly, she compares her Stephen Dorff-starring flick S.F.W. to Clerks, calling them “…the same movie, essentially.” If you’re me, and you’ve seen S.F.W., this is tantamount to saying Clerks licks balls.

Clerks does lick balls, Kev.

Anyway, obviously I have no idea how Reese is these days, but she went to high school at my school’s “sister school.” I was in a play at her high school (since they had no dudes of their own) with my brother. Reese was working on the play as some sort of assistant director or something. She wasn’t super-famous yet, but we all knew her. Man in the Moon and probably A Far Off Place had come out and so, you know, as far as we were concerned she was a movie star. But it was still no real big deal. It was a crappy high school play.

However, to one of our friends who was not in the play, it was a large deal. He begged Eric and me to take him to rehearsal one night and introduce him to Reese. We just thought this was kind of silly. I mean, what was going to happen? “Hey Reese, this is Nate.” “Great. See you later.” We were pretty jaded about the whole thing.

Nonetheless, we brought him along thinking we probably wouldn’t even get a chance to introduce him to her. Well, we walk in the theatre and as we’re walking down the aisle towards the stage, Reese comes walking up the aisle towards us. We stop and say, “Hi Reese, this is our friend Nate.” And Reese smiles and looks up and says, “Hi, I’m Reese” and pours some Reese’s Pieces into his hand.

How cool is that?

I’ve looked at this a number of ways and I haven’t really come to any decent conclusions, so I’m just going to run this by you. When you’re at a little cookout get-together and you’ve had a giant glass and a half of wine and you’re acting a little sillier than usual and then, while leaning back in your chair, the chair slips and you end up on the deck, what do you do?

For starters, there is now no way you will be able to convince anyone that you are remotely sober, even when it was legitimately the chair’s goddam fault. (Not to mention the slippery deck.) I suppose you could start laughing. I mean, it is pretty funny. You could roll out of the chair and dust yourself off. You could sort of awkwardly reach for help since you’re kind of trapped in the chair now.

But you’re not going to be able to make an hilarious off-the-cuff crack about it. Because there’s something about the sudden shift from vertical to horizontal that will catch you the hell off guard.

So here’s what I’ve found–and mind you, I’m not admitting to anything. One of those slow falls back in a decently soft chair with a half bottle of wine in you is actually pretty damn fun. So while other party-goers may think you’re trashed in an admittedly gauche way, you’re like “let’s go again.” Even though you’ll never recapture that initial surprise that you felt as you leaned back and just kept going.

So don’t say anything. Because you already look like an idiot.

(2004)
Slav O Se has girl trouble. He should. He’s an unrepentant lothario, a teacher at a girls’ high school, and he has four sisters. In Being Good, an altercation at a strip club jeopardizes Slav’s beloved job. The resulting fiasco pushes Slav to the brink both of being good and being bad.

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