A friend and I are working on a film project. We’re looking for actors and actresses who are interested in auditioning for the various roles in the film (which consists of about four main characters and a few minor characters with speaking parts). Auditions will be held on Saturday and Sunday, August 18th and 19th. Time and location are to follow.

It’ll be a good time. We’re all new to this, so it should at least be fun. The script will be completed this Friday and will be available to read. Drop me a line if you’re interested, and/or pass this along to anyone you know who may be.

As always, feedback is welcome. Enjoy.

We are a twisted bunch. We give birth to characters and torture them for no apparent reason. We break their hearts, we get them beaten up after school, we have their family members killed, and sometimes we even kill them. Why, in my last story, I took two young kids who were given a second chance at love and had them drive into each other at a fatal speed. God, how fucked up of me.

It turns out that he was also a loner. Here’s another surprise for you: most writers, if not all, are loners. If we’re not explicitly loners, we certainly are at heart. We create these characters to keep us company. We create these worlds to escape our own. We write what we write and how we write because it’s a part of who we are; it’s the way we look at the world. It’s our way of nudging the person next to us and pointing out a person who had just slipped on a banana peel and giving him a name, a personality, making him a three dimensional human being with a beginning, a middle, and an end. It’s our interpretation of the chaos around us.

What did he even write about, anyway? Apparently, one story was about “a fight between a stepson and his stepfather, and involved throwing of hammers and attacks with a chainsaw.” Yeah, no one has ever thought of using hammers as weapons before. And don’t get me started on chainsaws as weapons. That’s just simply unheard of.

I’m going to let you all in on a little secret. This may be shocking, so you better sit down. All right. Ready? You know all those horror/slasher/gorefest flicks you watched as a kid/still watch? Get this…those were written by HUMAN BEINGS, sometimes even more than one. Yes, yes, I know. It’s insane. Friday the 13th? Human. Saw? One, two, and three, all human. Dead Alive? Ding ding ding. If you guessed “human,” you are correct! These movies were not written by mere machines, they were written by man. Why, you highly paid talking heads in your swanky New York and L.A. apartments might even be living next to one of those men. They might be frantically typing away their next blood-soaked masterpiece right now.

I’m not making light of this tragedy. I am shining the light on the ne(ntertainment)ws media once again grasping at straws in the midst of this terrible event in history. I’m pointing out the reasons why there is such things as outcasts, why the bookworms and quiet kids in high school get picked on and are looked at as weirdoes. You, news media, make them stand out. You take the music they listen to, the clothes they wear, and the hobbies they partake in, and mark them as “potential threats.” You sensationalize these tragedies, calling them the “deadliest shootings in US history,” setting the benchmark for the next lost soul waiting to snap and claim his page in the history books. If you’re looking for something in the fuckup who took thirty-two innocent lives with him that will tell you why exactly he did it, you will never find it; that died with him. You can speculate all you want, you can look for clues that look crystal clear in hindsight, but you will never find out what went through his head when he made the decision to go fucking nuts. His music preferences didn’t do it, his extra curricular activities didn’t do it, his TV viewing habits didn’t do it, his writing didn’t do it. He fucked up. Warning signs only become warning signs after the fact.

Report on something that matters. Report on the lives of the thirty-two lost. Who were they as people? What did they enjoy doing? Who did they love and who loves them? Here’s your chance to take a crack at writing a real story. Here’s your chance to make these people three dimensional. And hey, you’ve already got most of the work done for you. You’re dealing with real people with real lives, no make believe. You already have their beginning, their middle, and their end. Now write it down, and let us crazy fiction writers do our fucking jobs in peace.

I plan on performing as much as possible. Performing at the Inferno on Sundays is easiest for me due to my work schedule. I will still try to get into other venues in the area during the week and just request the days off from work. It’ll be good to get back into the game after being out for so long. I’ll post dates/times/locations to this site and my MySpace page whenever they become available.

I start my new job Monday. How fucking weird. I don’t even have a chance to let this all really sink in…I’m going to be working in Michigan again for the first time since 2001. I’m living back home with my parents after living away for four years. While time was passing, it seemed to go very quickly. Now I look back and think about it, and so much has happened in these past four years. I’ve gone to so many different places and met so many people and made so many friends. I’ve played and toured in a band, I had a long relationship which taught me a lot about myself and the world as a whole, I’ve done standup and improv comedy…

Here I am in Michigan; now what?

What’s more frightning are Iran’s warnings that their country would become a “scorching hell” for any possible attackers. The fact that we’re even whispering about Iran should be cause for concern for anybody. These are the early days, where we hear the word “Iran” dropped into the news here and there…it’s not quite time yet for the full flood of propaganda and false reasoning to go to war with them. If the Bush administration were smart (heaven forbid), they’d keep any operation in Iran on the back page of the news where nobody will read about it. Then again, it’s not like it’ll be the wake up call for anyone in the US if it were all over the news. It’ll just be another damn day. Hell, I wouldn’t put it past the majority of Jesusland to confuse Iran with Iraq…it’s only a one letter difference, leave them alone!

It doesn’t matter that the Iraq war is still a near-complete failure, troop morale is down the gutter, and troops are stretched thin. It doesn’t matter that numerous polls show the majority of people thinking Iraq was a mistake. Tell them the Reichstag is burning and the cry for war will be heard. All the fear surrounding the question “Is Iran next?” seems to be justified.

Unlike other services (except for Maps24), the Google Maps service is almost completely interactive, allowing you to scroll around the map using the mouse. Other hot features are the direction markers, which, with a simple click, will show you a zoomed window of a small area surrounding your location or destination point. The maps look beautiful, and have the most clear looking street lines that I’ve ever seen in an online map service.

Three cheers for Google! I can’t think of many companies who dip into so many different markets without pissing off the consumer and sacrificing quality for quantity. They’re becoming a massive internet portal, and I for one welcome our new internet overlords.