This guy Heath that I went to school with--he was a year behind me--got blown up the other day. He's some kind of oil field worker, and there was an explosion, and hey you know the rest. He's not dead, though, and is currently in intensive care some place close by, waiting for the day when the doctors tell him he's free to again walk the earth, and how lucky he is.

My most vivid memory of him is when I went to take the ACT. I went along with my friend Robby, and this guy, the one who got blown up, went along with us to take it as well. The three of us, packed into the brand-new Mustang that Robby's parents had just bought (a horrendous idea, as Robby was a fucking insane driver--he was going 110 mph the entire way to and from the testing site, on a two-lane highway, in the rain), drove from the little town we lived in (population 925) to the slightly larger town of Magnolia, Arkansas (population 11,800) to take the test. I guess Heath had never been in such a large and exotic city before, because every time he saw a black person, he was happy to point out to us "there's a nigger," or "look at that nigger over there," or, while waiting for our food at a fast food place, "I hope these niggers don't fuck up our order."

When I found out about his getting blown up, I took a look at his Facebook page. There were an enormous amount of get-well messages, and I scrolled through probably thirty-five and counted only three that didn't include some variant of "we're praying for you" or "you're in our prayers" or something along those lines, which means, I guess, that if he dies, then they were just not very good at praying, and God hates them.

I spent the first twelve years of my life in Texas, and then another four years shortly after I graduated high school, going to what was technically a college, and living with my grandparents. Practically all of my extended family still lives there, and though I only moved about eighty miles away, it feels much farther in my mind, and I rarely go back. I doubt that anywhere I live will ever feel like home the same way it does when I take that left turn off Highway 155 onto the one-lane blacktop where I spent the majority of my earliest years. I left a lot of bones buried back there.

Guy Clark--seen above with his incredibly beautiful wife, Susanna--is from Texas. He’s one of those great Texas singer-songwriters you hear so much about, along with Steve Earle and Willis Alan Ramsey and of course Townes Van Zandt; he and Van Zandt were great friends, and while Clark is nowhere near as consistent as Townes, every now and then he would strike gold—“LA Freeway”, “The Randall Knife”, “Dublin Blues”, and, probably my favorite, “Desperados Waiting For A Train,” a song about the relationship between a young man and an older mentor figure—in this case the young man was Clark and the older was his grandmother’s boyfriend. It’s a beautiful song, and sad, and it tells the truth about how cruel time can be, its thousand little thefts that leave even the strongest of us with nothing. It tells the truth about what it’s like to love someone.

Funnily enough, the lyric I respond to most is the line about “them old men…playing/Moon and 42,” which are both domino games, and one of which, 42, was played by all the adults at every family event I can remember. Everyone would come to my grandparents’ and after whatever big holiday meal we would have, the shitty old card table would get broken out and the clack of dominoes would be inescapable for the next five or six hours. It’s honestly one of my favorite memories, and probably all the more precious to me because I never learned to play the game despite it being the background to literally a couple of hundred hours of my life: it’s just one of the countless regrets that pile themselves up on top of you when you think back to the people you knew and loved and all the things you could have done or said.

I could still learn to play, of course, but what would the point be? Anyone I would want to play with is long gone.

I went to a barbecue at a friend's house the other day, and there was a little girl there. She was maybe twelve years old, pretty tall for a young kid, and she was wearing a t-shirt that said "Hating me won't make you pretty," and it was easily one of the most depressing thing I've seen in a long time. It made me feel absolutely awful. Do people really want to turn their kids into vapid, catty little bitches? How can you see something like that and not feel sad? How can you see something like that and think it's funny?

On Friday, I had the day off work, and I had couple of errands to run. Nothing too major--I just had to cash a couple of paychecks, then use the cash to pay my rent and my electric bill. Simple.

So I set off for the grocery store. There was an old woman in front of me, maybe 65 years old, but hit pretty hard by life. She was maybe five feet tall and at best she weighed 90 pounds. She had an oxygen tank with her, hanging from a sling around her shoulder. Her skin had taken on that old-person quality--translucent and thin, with networks of bluish veins plainly visible. It would have the texture of cold wet silk, if you were inclined to touch it. She was meekly trying to catch the attention of the man behind the glass partition, who was working to repair the money-order printer. "Sir...sir...sir," she muttered weakly, trying her best to peek over the countertop. She had a pretty ghetto, rail-thin nurse with her, who took time from scolding her two children to caw "he tryin to fix that thang," at her patient. Finally, the man behind the counter finished repairing the printer, handed the woman two money orders, and the four of them made their way out of my life, hopefully forever.

While all this was going on, I took some time to look around. In the grocery line behind me, a guy was checking out. Older, wearing a t-shirt and cargo shorts. Baseball cap with long stringy hair hanging down. Moustache. He had a fanny pack on, cinched so tight around his gut it looked like someone had tied a piece of string around a sack of meal. Not terribly strange, true, but for the fact that he was wearing one of those weird claw-ring things that Ozzy Osbourne and Alan Moore wear.

I managed to cash only one paycheck: the larger one was over $400, and the store would not cash it, so I had no choice but to take my business to the liquor store. This was a little annoying, but so be it.

At the liquor store, as I was paying my electric bill, one of the employees came walking by. "Did you hear about Michael, that used to date Susan, when she lived next door to you?" he asked the clerk who was attending me. "No," she replied. "He killed hisself last night." "Oh my gawwwd," she said. "Yep. Hung hisself with a chain." And then he went right on by, back to work.

I finished up my business and turned to go, only to come face to face with an old man who looked sort of like a combination of Murderface from Metalocalypse and Captain Beefheart, only with long Willie Nelson-style braids. Right behind him was a youngish white guy with a sort of Kurt Cobain/grunge rock hairdo, ratty face, and ragged soul patch. He had a rather--ahem--effeminate walk, and was wearing a ripped-up red muscle shirt and cutoffs that were riddled with holes. Sticking up a good four or five inches from the waist of his pants was a leopard-print thong.

These nightmarish images still fresh in my mind, I made my way outside to my car, where I was counting and arranging my money. I looked over to my left and saw a youngish woman in a Statue of Liberty costume adjusting her breasts in her bra while smoking and playfully slap-fighting with a tow-truck driver. A few minutes later she was texting on her cellphone and disinterestedly waving to traffic while picking a wedgie out of her ass.

And I thought to myself, what a wonderful world...

There is a garden in the memory of America. There is a nightbird in its memory.

So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, and all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry, and tonight the stars'll be out, and don't you know that God is Pooh Bear? the evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all the rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what's going to happen to anybody...

12 March 1922--
21 October 1969

Every year at Christmas, my mother invariably buys me clothes. Which is fine, as long as it's just jeans or socks or maybe a button-down shirt. But she insists on buying me t-shirts with wacky sayings on them. It's a real window into what my mother thinks I'm like when you consider that past shirts have said things like "You call it slacking--I call it dedicated inactivity" or "I just can't take it anymore". I look forward to next year's shirt, which will most likely say something like "I'm not really a worthless piece of shit, but I can see why you would think that".

Script notes for Meerkat Manor: The Movie—Meerkats In The City

Note: all meerkats will be CGI.

We begin with a meerkat scientist/researcher, a Jane Goodall type, ideally played by Patrick Stewart. He lives among the meeerkats and observes them. He is struck by how extraordinarily intelligent the group he is studying seems to be. We see a lot of shots of him beginning to train/teach the meerkats. We see him reading to them as they sit in a semicircle, showing them how to take high tea, etc. The meerkats are a sassy and lively bunch.

Sadly, the meerkat scientist dies. This is a real tragedy, but there is a silver lining on this dark cloud: the scientist has left his substantial personal fortune/grant money to the meerkats, who quite naturally use this newfound wealth to travel to the city to live. They are convinced to do this by the wistful young main protagonist meerkat, who discovers the meerkat scientist's notes, outlining his dream of taking the meerkats into the wider world to show everyone just how smart and wonderful the meerkats are.

The meerkats take up residence in a fancy downtown hotel (think Home Alone 2), where they almost immediately run afoul of the bellhop, played by John Turturro. He is dedicated to the hotel and cannot stand to see it being overrun by what are in his mind vermin. A good introduction will show him walking to a limousine to open the door only—to his horror—to be confronted with a band of sassy meerkats. “Keep the change,” our young meerkat protagonist will quip as he and his friends scurry past, tossing the bellhop a quarter. “Meerkats,” the bellhop will mutter under his breath, “I hate meerkats.”

There will be the inevitable montage, where we see the meerkats inspecting their swanky new digs. James Brown's “I Feel Good” will play as they run around the suite, acting crazy, dancing, wearing sunglasses, etc. We will see the meerkats don swimming trunks and do cannonballs into a bubblebath.

Hopefully, Joan Cusack will be available to play the concierge, who is secretly in cahoots with the John Turturro character. She too, hates the meerkats, and the two of them are together scheming to swindle the meerkats out of their inherited fortune. Not sure how this will play out; most likely by befriending one of the stupider/less outgoing meerkats and spinning some kind of tale.

The meerkats will need a human friend to stand in for the audience. Probably another hotel employee, or, better yet, one of the meerkat scientist's students, who helps the meerkats. Need to do some work on this character.

Unsure of exactly how to wrap this up. Perhaps the meerkats will lose or squander their fortune in some way, and wind up in the laboratory care of the student, who will be full-fledged professor in the sequel.

Note: idea for sequel: the meerkats are stolen/kidnapped from the lab by someone who wants to exploit their intelligence for his own ends.

Need to continue workshopping these ideas so a full script can be shopped around. With any luck this can be in theaters by Christmas.