Maybe you haven’t heard, but Erin Andrews can be seen performing mini-squats in front of a hotel-room mirror while curling her hair. Oh, yeah. and she’s naked (I refuse to attach this link here. If you haven’t seen it, good for you. If you have, I hope a virus is not eating your computer). This, OF COURSE, is information, which I have gleaned from other sick bastards who have seen this disgraceful video. I have respected the sanctity of the poor woman and not taken a look (hear that, baby; the only woman I want to see doing mini-squats in the nude is you).
Okay, Mr. Carlin. Call me out, why don’t you!
Truthfully, I tried to obtain the video but was denied.
This morning, I turned on the radio (WSCR-Chicago, The Score) and was informed a new development in the Erin Andrews saga.
So, I listen to the audio clip, then call my brother just to make sure he hadn’t traded in his van for a Rav-4 with handicap plates (he hadn’t, but claimed he’d been trying to slip a five dollar bill to the guard at Erin Andrew’s gated community when the Rav-4 zoomed from behind him and zipped past the distracted guard), and a came to a major breakthrough.
I’m going to buy a camera and a Rav-4 and stalk the paparazzi.
I mean, really. Why can’t they leave this woman alone? I know why they can’t, of course, and it’s money, and a lot of Americans buy copies of US Weekly and People Magazine in the check-out lines at Dominick’s and watch the TMZ show on TV (I mean, really, the show costs like fifty cents an episode to make and people enjoy WATCHING these slimy bastards during a company meeting) so we are really the guilty party. It’s our fault. If issues of US Weekly didn’t fly off the turnstiles then these professional stalkers would pack up their telescopic lenses and return to their mother’s basement.
So, my solution intrigues me. Paparazzi for the paparazzi. Might be interesting. I’m going to sit in a Rav-4 outside their houses and munch on and down cans of with my telescopic lensed camera on the seat next to me, waiting until paparazzi dude steps outside to play ball with his kids, or sneak around the back to snap pictures of his wife sunbathing topless in the backyard.
(I might be taking a leap of faith assuming these idiots are married; or even if they are married, that I have a lens that is WIDE ENOUGH to capture the nude form of their wives).
I’ll follow them around when they go to the store for continence, when they pick their kids up from day-care, when they go to the new Harry Potter movie with their wife, when they visit their mother at the hospice. I’ll knock on their doors at four in the morning and ask for comment every time they come out of their house. I’ll snap pictures of them when they drag their garbage to the street on Garbage Day and post photos of them clipping their bushes with their ass crack hanging out of their pants on the Internet.
See how they like it.
The second part of the plane is a boycott of all magazines that carry paparazzi pictures. I’ve never bought one of those rags, but many people do, and I don’t understand why. Do people view these celebrities as PEOPLE? Or are they a commodity? I think some celebs try to do things to get the paparazzi to focus on them in order to publicize their projects (albums, books, movies, whatever), so maybe some blame needs to be directed their. You get what you sow. But Erin Andrews never asked for this. Erin Andrews was VIOLATED by someone through her peep-hole. Erin Andrews is a victim. And this really disgusts me.
It’s sad that there’s a market for this trash out there. It’s such a blemish on the face of our society that people can be paid millions of dollars to stalk people and violate their privacy, make them prisoners in their own homes.
I feel so bad for Erin Andrews. She’s a person people! A human being! She just wants to do her job and make some money. She never placed herself in the spot-light and asked to be exploited by these vultures.
So, it’s probably too early in my blog’s life-span to have reruns. I doubt I’d have made syndication yet. But, what the hell, even Carson took time off. I am too busy these last couple weeks to sit down for a couple hours and write a fresh, snappy blog. (For those of you who care , raise your hands).
Mr. Greenwald: “Oh, wow. Thanks for your support, Molly.”
Molly: “Mr. Greenwald, can I go to the bathroom?”
Mr. Greenwald: Sigh. “Sure.”
Well, you’re all forced to be here, so I’ll just say that I’m 250 pages into my rewrite of my first novel (“Haply I May Remember”: “A young girl’s strange, erotic journey from Milan to Minsk”), and I’ve relocated to Chicago, Illinois to be closer to my family. So, this summer has been stuffed with family drama, work, friends, and trying to settle in in Chicago.
With that in mind, I bring back one of my favorite blogs: “An Ode to Underperforming Milk Cows.” It’s lengthy, and strange…equal parts lengthy and strange. Enjoy.
Fuck writing. My life is full of insubstantiality, something I thought I’d live with through my 20’s then discover stability enough to have what you have by 33. Something that I fear I might never have and wonder which will be a bigger disappointment, never to have had a wife and children, or never to have achieved my dreams, something I might never achieve regardless. Do you realize how many PEOPLE there are in this world? I was at the main train station in the city the other morning during rush hour, waiting to board my train. An inbound train arrived carrying people who live in the suburbs of Chicago and commute to the city. Literally, a thousand people funneled passed me like cattle herding from open-range into their fenced enclosure. I wondered, staring at the faces, “how many of these people have the same dreams as me?” “How many of these people hadthe same dreams as me?” “What does this person, that person want out of life?” “How many of these people will never even smell a whiff of their dreams?” “What makes me think I’m so goddamn special?”
Got to tell you. The magnitude of this scared the hell out of me. As writers, it’s easy to sit in our rooms and type away and think we are the smartest, wittiest, most revolutionary writers in the world and our books will sell and we’ll make a difference. Gets much harder if we allow ourselves to realize how many people there are in the world, how few will succeed and how many, many, many will fail.
Then another thought came to me. It’s out of our hands.Ninety percent of the people who want to be writers will have the same thought I had above, and this realization will stop them in their tracks. They’ll go to law school, med school, get their MBA’s; become accountants, file clerks, restaurant managers, bus drivers, bartenders, carpenters. They’ll spend the rest of their lives lying to themselves: “I didn’t have the talent”, “People don’t read anymore”, “I’m in love with my husband Ralph and my boys Jimmy and Sonny and being a wife and mother was my destiny”, “Being a writer wasn’t in the cards for me”, “No one makes it as a writer”, “Everyone must grow up someday”…
Out of the other ten percent, eight will half-heartedly make an effort. Write sometimes, not for weeks. Research contests, publishing houses, contacts, avenues of distribution every other Sunday. Sign up for a writing class at a community college one semester. Submit one or two stories a year for publication. Contemplate getting their MFA.Think about teaching.
The last two percent will fight for their dream like hyenas snapping after the last scrap of antelope meat (we all see ourselves as lions, don’t we, lions are lazy). Take the abuse from parents, friends, peers, potential mates: “Why don’t you get a real job?” “Grow up.” “At some point, you realize, you’re going to have to move out of my basement.” We’ll absorb the financial risks, the societal frownings, the blows to our self-esteem. We’ll eat Ramen by the Costco pallet. Sure, writers in the last two percent might not have the most talent, but they don’t care. They convince themselves that they do. They hold onto this delusion as though the last breath of air. They wall themselves up, protect egos against the world, then like my buddy who is convinced any girl that doesn’t want him is a lesbian, they take rejection and throw it back on the rejecter: “That magazine is a rag anyway”, “That agent wouldn’t know good literature if Milton unearthed his body and dropped ‘The Experience of Being Eating By Worms’ on his desk”, “That publisher is so corporate, I wouldn’t want my book published there anyway”, “What do people know about reading great books, they love Nicolas Sparks”, “Ah, the industry is set against writers, only about money”, “You don’t comprehend my short story/novel/screenplay/blog/newspaper article/opinion column/essay? Can’t recognize the genius, huh. Well, then you are a television loving philistine who opens beer bottles with his toes, breathes with his mouth open, reads out loud, is convinced Larry the Cable Guy is the King of Comedy, thinks foreplay is missionary position, and believes that reality TV is anything but the catalyst to thrust our culture into a contemporary dark-ages.Congratulations for being the first rate imbecile that you are. If you’d recognized my level of brilliance, I’d fear for the progression of Hominidae.”
The scary part of the macro writing equation, or depending on how you look at it, the enlightening part, is that luck is the variable.Ultimately, you can’t help that a writer in the Ten-Percent Group attended a writer’s conference in New York City, got snowed in on his return flight and happened to be tossing back whiskey sours at the airport Howard Johnson bar at four A.M. with the Vice President of Acquisitions at Random House. Or, this girl you used to bang sent out a mass email to all the guys she infected with Gonorrhea and Quentin Tarantino’s return address happens to be CC’d. That’s luck.Good news for the Two-Percenters is that luck as the variable in the macro writing equation is independent, but not completely out of the realm of manipulation. You control dependent variables that can improve your chance at luck. For example, if at that moment, yourmoment, you are presented with an opportunity, following three hammer-throws of Patron or a hasty email to recommend the best itch ointment, and the conversation thread leads to, “so, what do you do?” and you answer, sheepishly, “I’m a bartender but sometimes I write stuff”, then you didn’t raise your odds. But if you are savvy and confident (or a decent actor) in your work, then you can lasso luck to the ground. “I’m actually a screenwriter, Mr. Tarantino, I highly respect your work, especially an as yet non-produced early script of yours, ‘Motherfucker, Fuck You, Crack-Whore-Cow, Motherfucker’, which I read in film school. It was very intense, very raw, beautiful. I especially like when Cornrows Benny, the pimp/farmer, beats Snow, his milk-cow, with the milk bucket because she shorted him on her daily requirement of milk. I actually wrote a screenplay in a similar vein, and since you are the master, I was wondering if you might look at, you know, while both of us are soaking our STD’s in Epsom salts and not working for seven to ten days.”
Christians, or Catholics in general—I’m not sure, I guess we could ask Dan Brown, just don’t ask the guy to place his response in a well-constructed, coherent, active, literary sentence—make use of the marketing pitch for non-believers to place travel bags loaded with guilt and pressure and fear at Jesus Christ’s feet. The selling point here is that it behooves a person to let go of all the factors which can’t be controlled in order to focus in on the one that can: faith. Writers should utilize a similar technique, though in a different vein, for if you want to be worth his or her salt, placing your faith in Jesus Christ proves to be a precarious bedfellow, like Ice-T appearing in a public service ad for the LAPD (ironic he plays a cop on TV?), for the strongest literature, most powerful stories generally rail against the establishment, Roman Catholic Church at the front of the line. A writer cannot control luck. A writer can only continually convince him or herself, and it will take daily, sometimes hourly internal preaching sessions, that he or she is a member of the microscopic percentage of the Two-Percent who will even publish a book.
But why wouldn’t you? I’ve lived as many things in my life. I’ve been a salesman, bowling alley porter, bus boy, television producer, baseball player, bartender, file clerk, secretary, teacher, stripper (once, for very little money…let’s not go there), minor league announcer, valet, manager, and for the last two and a half years basically a bum.What have I learned? To be successful in any field, you have to position yourself in the Ten-Percent Group. To be really successful, the Two-Percent Group is you. So, why, when you know what your dream is, what you would eat and drink if writing could be converted into palatable form, would you convince yourself that you can’t make it? Especially, when you’ll end up becoming some tire salesman, who hates everyday and whose heart isn’t in it, or go to law school and become some feckless lawyer? Like we need any more of those.
So, after pondering through all of this, I’ve realized that I am what I am. Sure, I sleep on my friend’s couches because I can’t afford hotel rooms when I visit Chicago; sure, I live in my parent’s summerhouse in Arizona; sure, I feed people drinks to feed myself; sure, I spend more time in a world of my head than a world with my family and friends; sure, ninety-eight percent of attractive girls wouldn’t spit on me if I were on fire; sure, I believe Wal-Mart food is too expensive; sure, I got my mother flowers for Mother’s Day by pillaging a neighbor’s flower bed; sure, most people would assume I have a membership card to Lazy M.F. Anonymous; sure, my parents are begging me to knock some poor girl up so they’ll have something to brag about to their friends (“How’s my son? Oh…he’s still…creative…but the Good Lord believes his genes merited a hand-me-down; you should see my grandson, he’s the cutest baby I’ve ever seen, destined to be a doctor or a lawyer or something quantitative and respectable”); sure, dad still has to pick-up the check at family dinners; sure, I hide behind the Green Defense to justify my elimination of a car as a necessary life expense; sure, if I get so much as the common cold I’ll have to seek medical treatment from la clinica publico/la burdel publico in Tijuana; sure, I ditched my ten year high school reunion, citing the flu as an excuse, when really the thought of facing Ted Emmons—JD Summa Cum Laude and fast-track associate at Rich Dick, Really Rich Dick, and Super Bloody Rich Dick in Chicago— drove me to embrace the porcelain God; sure, my San Diego accountant chuckles when I send my W-2’s, then spends ten minutes filling out my tax returns, hollers to his secretary that today looks to be a light day, and spends the rest of his afternoon surfing; sure, the reality of the matter is I may never, not once, publish one word of my writing before I die.
But knowing all this, realizing what my life has become (outlining it here in my blog, I believe I am going to pull a Tobias Funke and get in the shower and scrub myself raw with a loofah) I’ve worked at my craft, studied our bibles (not The Bible, now…if you are confused, see paragraph seven…if you’re still confused, see the very end of paragraph five), wrote every single day, researched new publishing opportunities, mined contacts, did favors (might help to explain the stripper thing), worked with/for established writers, made contacts, attended readings and open mics and speaking engagements and seminars and round-table discussions and, as soon as I win the lottery or marry a rich girl, writing conventions and workshops.
In the end, that’s the best I can do. In the end that’s the best any of us can do. If I could speak to the Ninety-Percenters, I’d say good riddance. You are right. I support your decision. If I were to speak to the Ten-Percenters, I’d say some more need to succumb to joining up with the Ninety-Percenters. If I were to speak to the Two-Percenters, I’d say that you better be on your games because I am coming for you. This isn’t, let’s all hold hands and chant “Kum Ba Yah” and make it together, this is I will scratch your eyes out to get what I want. That doesn’t make me a bad person, just not naïve, because I know you’ll disembowel me for a publishing contract, but if I’m wearing my Kevlar Vest and beat you to it. And I will because I am delusional, for Hemmingway’s sake, I’m a writer!
A dear friend of mine and I were talking in a dark bar the other night, and she (with a shot of tequila in her hand, if I’m remembering correctly) said, “you deserve to be happy.” I, for quite possibly the first time in my life, reached into my brain for a response and couldn’t find one.
I deserve to be happy. I deserve to be happy. I deserve…
Okay, easy enough, but…what the hell does happiness mean?
Lennon and McCartney famously said, “happiness is a warm gun.” Though that might work for some (notably Charlton Heston), I don’t think that’s what my friend was getting at.
Chinese Philosopher Mencius argues that if we did not feel satisfaction or pleasure in nourishing one’s “vital force” with “righteous deeds”, that force would shrivel up. I don’t know what he’s talking about, but I think his philosophy-speak is a fancy cloak to conceal his Shanhai horniness. And, quite honestly, the word “shrivel” used in any context, but especially when proceeded by the words “satisfaction” and “pleasure”, causes other things… things of a more personal nature…to shrivel up, which impedes my ability to decipher any philosophy, much less one 2,300 years old.
All religions claim to hold the recipe for Happiness and all one has to do to obtain the rights is purchase a membership. Scientists have attacked the Happiness Question for a purely physiologic approach, focusing on the chemicals of dopamine and attempting to isolate the pleasuring ingredients in a bar of chocolate. Even the Founding Father’s of the United States make sure to include a guarantee in the Bill of Right’s for happiness, though they didn’t hyperlink a step-by-step approach for obtaining it. Plus, Tommy Boy revealed to all of us about the potential fraudulence in a guarantee, right?
So, I return to my original musing…what is Happiness? How does one accomplish what my dear friend so eloquently posed I do in that Chicago bar that one drunken night?
Hmmmmmm…
Hmmmmmm…
Hmmmmmmmm??????
My only conclusion from this long musing is Happiness can’t be described in generalities. As intelligent as Mencius and Buddha and Aristotle and Martin Seligman and the thousands of other thinkers and philosophers of humankind; as certain as Christianity and Judaism and Hindu and Islamic and all the other religions in the world are they have the Insider Secret; I believe the formula for happiness can only be attained on an individual level, defined by each one of us in our our ways.
One of my favorite movies is “The Pursuit of Happyness.” In it, Will Smith (as Chris Gardener) says, “It was right then that I started thinking about Thomas Jefferson on the Declaration of Independence and the part about our right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And I remember thinking how did he know to put the pursuit part in there? That maybe happiness is something that we can only pursue and maybe we can actually never have it. No matter what. How did he know that?”
That voice-over has always stuck with me. Maybe we are always pursuing happiness. Maybe happiness is not an attainable stasis. Maybe the second we reach happiness is the second we die.
Maybe I have no idea.
Yeah. That seems to be the most compelling statement I’ve made so far.
I’d love to hear your thoughts. What makes you happy? What do you think Happiness is? How do you attain Happiness? Or do you think it’s an attainable goal?
Michael Greenwald
and down cans of 
with my telescopic lensed camera on the seat next to me, waiting until paparazzi dude steps outside to play ball with his kids, or sneak around the back to snap pictures of his wife sunbathing topless in the backyard. 
SleepSunshine 