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Saturday, October 18th, 2003
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1:06 pm - A Chance Encounter
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You're never gonna friggin' believe who I met the other day. My friend's brother-in-law is the director for a TV pilot they're hoping to get picked up by Comedy Central called Uncle Davver's Really Scary Movie Show. It's kind of a Mystery Science Theater 3000 meets Rocky Horror Picture Show. So anyway, the night they premiered the pilot at the Fairfax Silent Movie Theater in Hollywood, they had quite a few prestigious celebrity guests in attendance.
Now, I don't get star-struck as a rule. I just don't bother going up to celebrities to remind them who they are, 'cause I'm pretty sure they know. But I caught this guy as he was leaving. It was Phil Austin, one of the guys from Firesign Theatre. I couldn't fucking believe it. In my opinion those dudes are the most talented entertainers this planet has seen in a very, very long time. And wouldn't you know it, I got struck dumb when I was introducing myself. I wasted a perfect opportunity by going blank. I just said, "Hi, Phil, I'm Todd Abrams," and shook his hand. He must have thought I was part of the whole Uncle Davver's making process, because he seemed genuinely enthusiastic to meet me, but then again, maybe he's just a kind gentleman like that. Or maybe it had something to do with the outfit I was wearing as I was decked out head to toe in my Stormtrooper armor (costumes were encouraged but not required for the event), and was quite the hit at the premiere.
I felt like quite the choad by having nothing clever to say or interesting to talk about, but hey, at least I got to shake the hand of a comedic genius. I just wish I'd gotten a picture.
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| Monday, April 7th, 2003
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10:28 pm - Celebrity Sighting Number One
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Ok, so I finally saw my first celebrity. I've been here two months and nuthin. When Kayla got out here, she saw like six people her first week. Including a brief conversation with Marky Mark (he complemented her on this groovy Koala backpack/purse she has). Then a week later Laura winds up strolling behind Vin Diesel on the 3rd St Promenade in Santa Monica. And me? Nutin'.
Then there was tonight. Yeah, so the guy lied about his credentials to get his career off the ground, and he's been described as quite the jack-ass, but I really liked a few of his earlier flicks. The dude was none other than Jean-Claude Van Damme.
We were behind him on the elevator, and his girlfriend tried to swish her empty water bottle into a trash can. She missed horribly. I immediately commented, "Hell yeah, two points." She turned and smiled, at started to say something, but he couldn't be bothered to even acknowledge me, so she had to turn back around. I almost started laughing. It was like, "Come here, bitch, don't talk to the strangers..."
Anyway, so that's my first sighting out here of a "celebrity".
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| Saturday, April 5th, 2003
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6:38 pm - A Note on the Paranoid Schizophrenic Colleague Rob -- from the Ongoing Adventure of Sandy F-F
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Rob was off his meds. He usually strolls into work any time between 8:30am and 1pm, and puts in as much time as his conflicting personalities decide is ok for him to contribute. He usually hits the copy machine as soon as he walks in the door and starts making his daily duplications of whatever crap he brought on the bus with him.
He mumbles for a while, makes his copies, then strolls over to the boss and mumbles (while looking everywhere else but at the boss), "So how's this gonna work? I mean is there something going on here? I mean, I'd like to do some work, or maybe get something done, so is there something going on?"
I'm sure, any given day, if Boss had the patience, he could allow Rob's perpetual question to, uh, perpetuate. He'd probably string out his question indefinitely until somebody cut him off with a response, relative to the question or not.
No one's really sure why Boss picked up the pet project of Rob. Whether the decision was philanthropic in nature, curiosity based, or if Boss just wanted to get on the guy's good side before the inevitable day that he goes postal, no one knows. The latter of which could never happen, though. Rob was anything but dangerous. He was odd maybe, sick definitely, but totally benign.
"Hey how ya doin', Rob?" Sandy asked.
You could tell by his body language at the copier that he was off his meds, but Sandy still enjoyed seeing him. He was kind of fond of the guy; there was just something likeable about him. He wasn't trying to be anything he wasn't. He didn't have the mental or social capacity to try anything like that. He simply "was." You always knew exactly who Rob was. Hard to understand sometimes, but he was real and on display for the world. No bullshit.
"Hey, you know I've got this picture," Rob turned and slid a sketch onto Sandy's desk, "of my girlfriend, yeah, and she's laying down on this kind of chaise lounge, she's kind of relaxing, and I've got this picture."
"It's nice," Sandy lied. The picture was done in the artistic style of second grade. Stick figure, stick chaise. And it was dated 1993.
"Did you just draw this?"
"No, no, she died a couple of months ago. I've had this picture for a while, but I'm thinking about going to see her, with time travel-" Yes, Rob was definitely off the meds, "-You see, my friend, a friend of mine did that, he went to see her... but I don't know if he's really my friend, 'cause why did he do that? He is kind of evil, he's always talking about evil things, no, I don't think he's really my friend, why would he go see her?" Rob continued muttering under his breath as he turned back to the copier, clearly his mind was now on other things.
There being no appropriate response to someone's waxing emotional about a recently deceased significant other, and their friend's questionable motives to visit the aforementioned deceased via time travel, Sandy just cracked his knuckles and continued invoicing.
Rob didn't bother to work that day. He just gathered up his copies and went to catch the several busses it would take to get back to the half-way house. Probably droning the whole way about flux-capacitors.
This truly is a bizarre town I live in, Sandy thought, not for the first time.
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| Monday, March 31st, 2003
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10:17 pm - An Excerpt for the Ongoing Adventures of Sandy F-F
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The completely "do-able" girl looked up into Sandy's eyes and grinned, easing into a good strong flirt.
"So why is your name Sandy?" she breathed.
"My parents conceived me on the beach. And apparently my mom kept complaining about the grit that was getting in her hoo-hah. She received no pleasure during my conception. Basically it was a pain in her, well, hoo-hah.
"So when I was born she held all that against me. One of the few times my father felt like really touching my mother and he kept telling her to shut up, saying something tender and sweet like, 'Come on, it can't be that bad, bitch.'
"It must have been that bad, because she insisted on naming me Sandy, and introducing me to all of her friends as 'Sandy the-pain-in-her-vagina!'
"I'm not too keen on the name, either, if you really wanna know. But every time I try to change it, nothing sticks. This is how everybody knows me."
There was a moment of bemused silence as the young waif took it all in. Eventually, something resembling a thought began to form in her head, which urged he towards a response.
"No, I mean, Sandy. It's a girl's name, right?"
At this point there was a noticeable pause in the conversation.
"Well, it was good to get that out, but I guess it fell on deaf ears. Yes, Sandy is a girls name, by and large, and I am a guy." At this point it became completely necessary to fuck with the girl. "If you like Sandy, you should hear my middle name."
"What's that?" she responded with what was, for her, unprecedented conversational alacrity.
"Flism-Flasm."
"Hehehehehe -- bull shit," she said it like it was two separate words. Bull and shit. But she didn't really mean it. She believed him, heart and soul. Flism-Flasm just sounded like the kind of baby-talk type of humor that's right down her alley. But it really was his name! She beamed.
"No, seriously. My parents were huge Bill Cosby fans."
This was entirely too much off kilter data for such a small mind to process. I mean, they never approved of references to Bill Cosby, whoever that was, on the Real World, or Road Rules. So, for the moment, she floundered. Big surprise.
"Wh--?"
"Never mind. Bye-bye now."
Sandy very quickly took his leave, the warmth of anger, embarrassment and resentment reddening his cheeks. He hated his mom. Worse yet, he wished he was just a little bit stupid so at least he could get laid once in a while.
The truly sad thing was, this girl didn't know sarcasm, but she did know people, who knew other people, and pretty soon, Sandy's middle name really became Flism-Flasm. And not because people wanted to fuck with him, but because they really thought it was, and they loved it! And in a town like this, that kind of name can really fly.
Trying to get people to call him something other than Sandy proved an easier task than getting people to stop including the Flism-Flasm part. To Sandy, it was as if he'd been jumped, and the word "retard" had been branded in giant neon letters all over his face. But to everybody else, he'd become a social icon. Hanging his head, Sandy would later reflect upon the miserable ways that stars are born.
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| Saturday, March 29th, 2003
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2:15 pm - The dude in the corner...
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I've been jogging since I arrived in this shit-hole of a town. And I'm shocked that an asthmatic like myself can actually do that. I've found my lung strength improving a bit, and I have to use my inhaler less-frequently (which is great since I can't afford a new one), but I don't wanna bore you with details of personal health.
The reason I bring up jogging, is that I've built up to a circuit around the back of my neighborhood, up to Venice Blvd, and back to my side street, for a total of just under two miles. And near the end of this circuit, at the corner of a chain link fence that protects an innocent vacant lot from would-be pedestrianic invaders, there's always this homeless guy.
This guy is always at the corner of the fence, facing it, looking like he's taking a leak. I always run just after the sun goes down completely, so fewer people well stare at me and laugh, at about 7pm. I just figured maybe I caught him every day at his regular daily fluid drop-off. And I didn't want to give him too much attention if that was what he was doing. I mean, I'd want a little privacy, too, if I was trying to take a leak on a chain-link fence, even it I was on a major boulevard, so I didn't stare.
But he's there every night. And it's not exactly the same time, either. It fluctuates by as much as forty-five minutes one way or the other. So maybe this guy had a major prostate issue, and spent an hour or so each evening trying to get some desperately needed bladder relief.
So I started looking more closely, as discretely as a passing jogger can, to see if he was dangling trow or what, but I could never see anything. And going by the stereotype, and this guy being black, his tackle should have been relatively easy to spot. So then I got to thinking.
Mr. Homeless Guy was standing in the corner. Sort of. An inverted corner, but he was meekly facing it, kind of hunched over and demur. And upon even closer inspection (all info gathered at a trot mind you, over the course of several days) he seemed to be mumbling. Sounded like apologizing. Maybe he was living out in an endless loop some childhood scolding. Being sent to the corner to put his nose against the wall and mutter in apologetic incoherencies. It's really sad. I wonder what popped inside his head and put him back in this place. Or if he's not revisiting some well-remembered time of his youth, then what made him think he needs to pay penance now? And for what? Is he a self-loather as the result of some unmentionable transgression? Or guilty and ashamed of his current status in life, and apologizing to someone or no one for landing there. Maybe he should quit mumbling and get a job. Maybe I should say hello. Maybe I should just go back to ignoring him and jog on by.
current mood:  contemplative
current music: silence
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| Sunday, February 16th, 2003
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3:58 pm - A Note on Tit Bars (fulfilling a request from cdlrosa.)
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Tales of ribaldry from the Men's Club, eh? Well, the stories I have to tell are merely interesting, not the exciting urban myth stuff you may have heard about the tit bar industry. But at least my stories are verifiably true. If you don't believe me, ask me. =) I don't bullshit or embellish; there's no need. Truth, as they say, is stranger than fiction.
Let's talk about the arrival of a pretty nifty bit of hardware on the cell phone scene. In particular, the new Sanyo phone. The one with a tiny pinhole camera built into the flip-top lid. Not a bulky add-on camera that you plug into the bottom of your color-enabled phone, this Sanyo is straight up James Bond. Remarkably discreet. Visit your nearest Best Buy and take a look at one, you'll be amazed. There's even this tiny little flash next to the lens in case it's a little dark in your chosen tit bar. Anyway, somebody gave one of these wonderful cameras to our head DJ. Probably a perv friend looking to see what he could do with it.
Needless to say, I couldn't wait to get to work each day to find out what new and curious sex act he'd surreptitiously captured on the ole phone. And it's amazing what colleagues (i.e., hookers, I mean dancers) will do for a pinhole lens when the image size is so small that there's no way their faces can be included in the frame. The pics are about the same size and the little thumbnail pics we can post with our journal entries on this site. Imagine a stretched open "hoo-ha" about 120 pixels or so tall. Annonymity only went so far, though, because there was always the tell-tale evidence of the "pulled aside" g-string, allowing us to identify the dancer to whom the vulgar orifice belonged. A girl's g-string is like her thumprint, an identifying scar, or a tatoo: it's pretty much all you see her in for eight hour stretches a day. So when their faces don't stick with you, that's ok, just check out what kind of undergarments she's wearing and voila!
These new phones also posed a bit of a security issue. As you could imagine, every blow-hard in town who could afford one wanted to run-not-walk to the nearest house of ill-repute and "capture some bitches" on his phone. Security being a major part of my job description as Floor Manager, this was just one more annoying thing for us to watch out for in the club, to kick people out for. I just wish I could have confiscated one of these phones in the process. Whenever I had to berate a guest for their using one of these phones in the club, I did it only half-heartedly. I knew if I had a phone like that I'd probably be doing the same damn thing. But the prostitutes (I mean, dancers) get real bent out of shape when they think their, get this, "integrity" is at risk. And it's easier to chastise the guests than listen to the addicts (see: Dancers) whine, bitch, and make a scene. Trivia: Four out of five guys with those phones in our clubs were lawyers. What's that about? Shouldn't they know the laws about cameras in tit bars (or are there any)?
I'll post more on the tit bar in the future. I can't blow my load all at once, right? Gotta try and maintain an expectant audience. =)
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| Saturday, February 15th, 2003
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10:15 pm - First Damn Entry
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Well, it's only been about six weeks or so since Erik and Jamie hooked me up with this account. I'd say I'm right on top of things. Typical. Six weeks isn't bad, though, in Abrams time. That translates to "immediate" in the real world.
Anyway, my intention is to regale the harrowing tale of my journey out west, and what I've done since my arrival. But not right now. Right now, in the surly mood that I'm in, I'd only bring you down. Everything would be painted with a bitter brush. I'd probably be saying a lot of "fuck this" and "fuck that", and well, as colorful as that may be, it's not very imaginative. So, I'll save the recounting for another day.
Thanks Jamie and Erik for this livejournal account. I promise I'll thrown down some mad entries in the near future. I just hope I have something intersting to tell everyone.
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