The Triplets of Belleville is one of my favorite movies.

Last month, I was discussing it, and one of my first thoughts was, "It should've won Best Animated Feature. It's absurd that it lost to Finding Nemo.

"To me, Belleville is a work of purest cinema, and Nemo is a jumble of chase scenes, stock characters, and witless banter. Why, it's offensive to even list them in the same category!"

And then I realized, "Wait, they're not only different categories, they're different species! They have nothing to do with one another!

"Discussing Belleville makes me spite an irrelevant movie. I'm the one who brought Nemo up, in the first place. Why am I getting upset?"

Finding Nemo offers ninety-eight minutes' worth of reasons to dislike it--but resenting it because someone on TV liked it more than another movie that happened to premiere the same year...well, that's not sane.

So fuck the Oscars. And the Pulitzer Prize. And any award that turns creativity into a competition.

You can have a favorite work of art. You can have several favorites. You can hate everything you've ever seen, or love anything you've never seen.

But there isn't a best work of art.

That's not the point.

The only people warring on Christmas...

...are the ones trying to put Christ back into it.

I wish them a happy holiday, and to all my fellow heathens: merry Christmas!

Grist for the mill.

MY GRANDMA
I wish you heard the conversation those people were having. It could go in a script.

ME
What were they talking about?

MY GRANDMA
Not a fucking thing.

I used to cry because I had no shoes...

...until I met a man with no feet. He laughed at my pettiness, which improved his mood, and he went on to have a nice day, but I still had no shoes, so now I cry twice as hard.

The Pulitzer Tweets.

I tweet a joke.

@ENKEsq
Not saying we should, but if we fused English and Hebrew into a new language, palindroms could be read from left-to-right AND right-to-left.

A day passes.

I get pissy at having so few followers.

@ENKEsq
If I've followed you and you haven't reciprocated, it's fine. Maybe you'll read my English-Hebrew Palindrome joke WHEN IT WINS A PULITZER.

@PulitzerTweets
(re-tweets me)
If I've followed you and you haven't reciprocated, it's fine. Maybe you'll read my English-Hebrew Palindrome joke WHEN IT WINS A PULITZER.

[MY FRIEND]
How will the people who aren't following you read your spite?

@ENKEsq
They'll see it when my People Who Aren't Follwing Me joke wins me MY SECOND PULITZER.

@PulitzerTweets does not re-tweet this.

@ENKEsq
@PulitzerTweets re-tweeted my first Pulitzer joke, but not the second. Fine. Maybe they'll re-tweet it WHEN IT WINS AN EMMY.

If I admitted that...

...I think about you while masturbating, it would be creepy,

but if you knew how often I did it, you'd be flattered,
but if you were flattered, then you'd be happy,

and you're never happy in my fantasies,
so out of self-interest,

I ain't admitting nothing.

Pure Imagineering.

I used to Hate on creative missteps in the Disney parks.

Now I've decided to use my powers for Good by writing Disney Theme Park Fan Fiction!!

(...that sounded healthier in my head.)

Check out my new blog, Pure Imagineering!

Go where you need to go.

The people who love you may not go with you.

Don't be dissuaded.

You're too important.

And they'll still love you.

A simple word.

Dirgedicate, v., To sympathize with sad music so thoroughly that you start to feel better, since there's someone who's as sad as you...

...but you get sad again when you remember that they've made music and you haven't done anything.

AT NIGHT

leaves fall on the tennis court.

BEFORE WORK
a tennis coach sweeps the court.

AT WORK
the tennis coach guilts me.

DURING WORK
no leaves fall on the tennis court.

AT NIGHT
leaves fall on the tennis court.

The wind knocked over my Red Bull can.

It spilled on my script notes.

I had a fuckin' paroxysm.

It only spilled on a few pages of notes. These notes were typed. These notes were saved on my computer. These notes could be replaced by pressing Ctrl+P.

But I took the can and whipped it around my head until the remaining Red Bull was marinating me, my chair, the sliding glass door, and some palm trees.

And I grabbed the notes--both the wet pages and the dry--and flung them into the pool.

And I crushed the can against a wall, and then I crushed it width-ways.

And this tantrum was directed at the wind.

The fucking wind.

I'm in therapy, and I exercise, and I meditate, and I keep myself very well occupied. I don't quite know how to cope with wanting to beat up a meteorological force.

If you have any ideas, you can find me taunting Poseidon's bullshit son, Aeolus.

I went on a date.

She was interesting. I was awkward, and wanted to die.

But the night had its perks. She had pretty great taste in music. She was kind enough to share Gold Panda's "Quitters Raga" with me, for one.



She also had pretty great taste in music videos.

Music videos are not my thing. I love music because I'm jealous of it...of how easily it evokes emotions: subtle emotions, bold emotions, and emotions that're too alien for words.

It takes reams of prose to do what music does in two minutes. And music doesn't need the investigation that poetry requires, nor the focus that paintings demand.

Music slugs you in the fucking heart.

So attaching a video to it...well, it limits the experience. It does the introspection for you. "Here's what you should be imagining when you hear this."

Critics of Fantasia, for example, resent associating "Dance of the Hours" with tutu'd hippopotami.



The counter-argument is that Fantasia is a fucking masterpiece, and fuck you.

My date phrased it better (but only slightly). She explained that her favorite music videos provide a thrill of escapism.

The video for Beirut's "Elephant Gun" has a bunch of people twirling on a soundstage, but the song loads it with so much nostalgia, celebration, longing, and whimsy that she wished she could live there. The combination of music and film was enough to make her feel like a crowded, confetti-littered room could be a home.



Sigur Rós is important to me and my introspection...but when she showed me the video for "Gobbledigook," I had to admit, it wasn't half bad.



I was not my best self during my date, but if audio and visual can coexist, maybe I can too.

My inaugural moustache.

September 2010 - May 2011.


I don't remember my upper lip being so tall. It must've grown since September.

I was feeling adventurous...

...so I put my iTunes on 'shuffle' while I was wanking. The score of Full Metal Jacket came on.

I shot a blank.

I didn't want my pipe clogged, so I changed the track and wanked again. This time, it was the score of a Clockwork Orange.

I got really, really sick before I could finish.

By now, it was a point of pride. I changed the track and returned to wanking, now to the score of Spartacus.

It worked, but it was so underwhelming that I disowned the spunk.

Some wordsmithery.

Pre-nostalgia, n., When you're happy, and someone's about to take a photograph of you, and you think, "I hope when I see that photo, I feel as good as I feel right now."

One of my jobs is burying roadkill.

Today I found an armadillo.


It didn't look like an armadillo at first. More like a gray football that had been deflated. I only realized that it wasn't a football when I lifted it, and felt its weight.

While this was unsanitary, it wasn't gruesome. The armadillo was packed neatly inside its cracked taco of a shell. It didn't twitch, leak, or even squish.

As I laid it in its grave, I couldn't help but think, "What remarkable manners!"

Is that so much to ask for?

I just want a girl who'll keep re-watching Hannah and Her Sisters, Company, and Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice while daydreaming about the girls I love with me.

(Maybe I should wait to make an eHarmony profile.)

I wrote a joke yesterday.

The premise is okay, but the execution needs work. It goes:

I'm gonna put an assortment of my personal essays into one book, and call them a manual biography.

The punchline relies upon the audience associating a manual biography with an autobiography.

Unfortunately, the phrasing does a lousy job of leading the audience to the punchline. This was confirmed by my test audience. My mother was part of the test audience.

Meanwhile.

I've written a lot of poems. I hadn't read 'em for a while, but I remember they were publishable-ish. My ego could use a boost...and I guess I could deign to be published...so I looked back over the ol' oeuvre.

The good news: my poems are pretty good.

The bad news: my poems are all about male insecurity and masturbation.

There's not much of a market for that.

I presented this problem to my mother. "Should I widen the scope of my subject matter," I asked, "or should I publish a book of poems about male insecurity and masturbation?"

Mom thought hard for a moment, and then her eyes lit up.

"If you did the latter," she said, "it would definitely be a manual biography!"

The greatest human achievement of the twentieth century.

When I was in Los Angeles, I took a standardized test that would certify me to teach high school. The test had three sections: Reading Comprehension, Math, and Writing.

One of the prompts in the Writing section was, "What is the greatest human achievement of the twentieth century?"

I was a little paralyzed by the scope of the question, but by the end, I was proud of my essay. So proud, in fact, that I've re-written it here.

Humankind had an especially productive twentieth century. When comparing feats like the isolation of penicillin, Apollo 11's moon landing, and the creation of the internet, it is difficult to exalt one above the others. Fortunately, these paltry successes are dwarfed by an achievement that will no doubt be remembered as our legacy to nature, itself. This triumph is the Rainier cherry, and it is the most perfect fruit on Earth.

Sometimes my dad sends me inspirational text messages.

Today's text was, "Dr. Seuss' first book was rejected thirty times before it was published."

"That's encouraging," I replied," but Dr. Seuss' books are, like, ten pages long. How many times can you re-write a ten page book before it becomes a new book?"

"That was his niche," he explained, nonplussed.

I wonder how many times I'll have to re-write my joke for him to understand it.