Pyramids

Am I back to blogging? Maybe. The blog below is posted parallel on my myspace one which I dislike, but keep around because people actually read it. This one is the directors cut, with a picture and corrected typos. It's also in HD.

On Saturday, I fell and skidded on my side about ten feet down a wooden pyramid before hitting the floor like the lower ninety percent of an Aztec sacrifice. I got up and my board was gone. It took a second before I finally spotted it about a third of the way across the skate park wedged between a quarter pipe and a second wooden pyramid. Some kid knee-boarding on a Sector9 had stopped and was staring at it, like it had fallen from the sky, a sign from the skateboard gods.

I'm not sure if the structures like the one I just fell from have a proper skateboarding name. Imagine an Egyptian Pyramid with the upper section sliced off and flattened into a platform for UFO's to land on in preparation for their crew's all-important probing missions. I plucked my board out like a lesser sword-in-the-stone and made my way back to the top of the platform. The fall didn't tick me off as much as the fact that I'd been skating for only half an hour and I was winded. Made me feel old. That and the fact that I suck at this now.

The whole thing started when I decided to try skateparks again. There's one by my office and I thought it would be a cool alternative to just doing a gym workout in the same building I'm cooped up in for most of the day. That park (Carmel Valley) is smooth concrete and uncrowded when I drop by because the kids have to go to school and learn about things they probably don't care about. Suckers. After two sessions at the place, I realized I had the bug again.

I started skateboarding when I was about 14 through about 23 when the appeal just kind of faded away to me. Then, something like two years ago I went snowboarding and it kind of came back. I bought a longboard and rode that around for a while before my inability to maintain focus on anything at all caused my interest in that to wane as well. It's an ongoing problem with me.

But now the desire was back for skating (for now anyway). I decided to try another skate park, this one only about five minutes from my house (if I flew there, avoiding shitty drivers and traffic lights). It's larger than my lunch break skate park, but about a third of it is made out of wood, which means it's not in the greatest condition after it's rained.

Another kid, probably about half my age eats shit trying to kickflip a set of stairs on the other end of the park. It looks far worse than my fall, but the little bastard gets up and shakes it off like nothing. The place is getting crowded now. No lines to be had. I try to find some anyway and almost run over the kid on the Sector9 before deciding call it a day and head to my car.

When I was tossing my helmet into my car I noticed the part that covers the left side of my head was pretty scratched up from the fall earlier. Nice. I don't know why I keep coming back to skateboarding. Maybe because it's one of those things that doesn't lie to you. Truth is, I think most people spend an average of fifty percent of their interactions with other people lying or hiding something or trying to "tell it like it is" while actually telling it like they want it to be.

Sometimes I need a break from that shit. I've realized that when I'm on a board, if I don't land a trick, it's because I need to practice more. If I'm are winded after less than half an hour, it's because I'm out of shape. If I crash, I did something wrong. It's simple and uncomplicated. Yet I'm able to write a long, rambling blog about it.

Even the best fall down sometimes...

It is a little after 1am on a Wednesday, and there is an episode of "The Twilight Zone" on the Sci-Fi Channel right now. Rod Serling's familiar narration has just given us an intro to tonight's tale of the strange. Yet instead of settling in for a half-hour of classic television, I'm witnessing what is easily the worst episode ever to bear the name of the otherwise great program. This is an episode called "The Bewitchin' Pool".

This episode is bad. Real bad. Inexplicably bad. Especially when you consider that at it's best, the Twilight Zone was groundbreaking television. A show that despite heavy doses of 1950's science fiction campiness still holds up in terms of innovation and storytelling. This particular story follows two children named Jeb (the son) and inexplicably, "Sport" (daughter) whose parents are having marital problems and are on the verge of divorce. Now, if you know the Twilight Zone, you'd expect a twisted, yet somehow insightful tale that skews the 1950's ideas of divorce and family into strange directions.

Instead, you get writing that seems like it was written in between lines of cocaine and constant strikes to the head with a sock full of lead pesos. But what makes this stand out from the infinite mass of bad television are a number of strange production and directorial choices. Here is the short list:

1. The parents are portrayed as shallow, uncaring WASPs, yet both their children speak with weird country bumpkin "Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn" accents that seem to come from nowhere.
2. The daughter's voice sounds like it was dubbed by an older actress who smoked throughout her teen years, up through her forties, and up to the recording date for most of her lines here. I'm 99% sure the voice was dubbed, but have zero idea why anyone would think this was a good idea.
3. The old woman who presides over the Neverland-like world on the other side of the "Bewitchin' Pool" is completely unintelligible. She is more difficult to understand than Lando's co-pilot in "Return of the Jedi", though she does bear a striking resemblance.
4. Instead of doing kid-stuff in what is supposed to be some kind of kid's Utopia, Grandma Mumbles has them do chores.

I guess the reason I even bothered to blog this is because of the whole "fall 8 times, get up 9" factor. If the show could survive a trainwreck like this, or the hour-long "Jess Belle" episode, maybe we can all avoid drowning in our own personal "Bewitchin' Pools".

Long live small apertures and text messaging.

Today I saw my Alma Mater, San Diego State, beat BYU in basketball. There were many politically incorrect Mormon jokes from the fans and a family dressed like bananas trying to distract the BYU players behind the basket. It's possible they were plantains, but I'm not a botanist and plantains are a far less funny. I tried to take some snazzy cell-phone-camera shots, but the gain was out of control.
The band played the SDSU fight song so many times that I've memorized the melody, but for the life of me I couldn't tell you what any of the words are. The lyrics were written on a free binder they gave me as a freshman, but that binder is long gone.

While walking around campus, I realized that all those annoying construction detours closed-down areas that blocked my way when I was on the way to class are now a whole bunch of nice things I didn't have when I was a student. I want to go back in time to tell myself in the past to go forward in time and check out where our tuition money is going.

Zork and Zorker

I felt very Rambo-ish the other night as I fired a rocket-propelled grenade across a narrow ravine toward a hulking Eastern European man. He was armed with a whirling menace of a chain gun that had already sliced two of my comrades into something resembling red confetti. My RPG smashed into the side of the cliff about a foot from his bald head and the resulting detonation dispatched him before the smoke trail had even cleared. I didn't have long to celebrate. An enemy combatant in a red jumpsuit burst from the rickety wooden shack nearby and ignited me with his (or her) flamethrower. It wasn't long before nothing remained but a smoldering lump.

I checked the clock on my book shelf. 12:15am already. Way past this guy's bed time. Despite an urge to re-spawn and get some revenge on the Red Team's pyro, I had big kid stuff (read: work) in a couple hours. Team Fortress 2 and anonymous vengeance would have to wait for another night. I tapped out the usual "good game all" and logged off. ("But Ben, I thought you had screenplays you needed to work on... Why were you playing games for an hour and half?" "Because fuck you, that's why.")

Fast forward about eight hours and I'm in a rectangular division of an office building cubicle struggling with an ancient computer system that I am quite sure was only recently converted from Sumarian BASIC. I'm guessing that this software was programmed in the age of Zork. For those of you who don't remember or were born after Ronald Reagan was president, Zork was a text-based video game. No graphics, just descriptions of where you were. You interacted by typing commands and reading the results of your choices. Kind of like a choose-your-own-adventure novel. That's probably a bad example, since those books were from the same era as Zork.
Oh, the irony. This is not the first time I've run into software that was obsolete ten years ago. This is the era that "real work" and productivity are stuck in. Yet, when I'm bored and need to kill/waste time, I can control a fully articulated character in a 3-dimensional audio/visual world with dynamic lighting that can be affected by tracer fire or muzzle flash from the weapons of any of the other 31 people connected remotely to a server from all corners of the country and even the world, all presented to me at a modest 38 frames-per second at 600 x 800 resolution. And I'm at the trailing edge of this technology. Game stats are updated in real time so I can review my individual performance on the server's website. I wonder if somewhere deep in the coding for this technology, Zork is lurking.

I accidentally hit "enter" on my console at work. I ask around how to go back a step and correct my error. Impossible, I'm told. The only way to correct the error is to tag my last action as invalid, then create a new identical action to replace it and notate which was the correct one to pay attention to. I have just cost myself about ten minutes. Even "Zork" allowed you to step back and see if you missed something... I suddenly feel obsolete.

Live for nothing, or die for the 80's.

Rambo 2008 is a horrible movie that is completely awesome. It is a throwback to the 1980's low-story, high body-count flicks such as Stallone's own "Cobra" and the masterwork of the genre, "Commando". (Note: AFI did not place Commando on their list of top 100 films of all time, proving they are a terrorist organization run by Communist Nazis who kill whales for fun by shooting baby seals from a cannon at them.)

It's tough to review this movie because on the level of "art" and storycraft, we'd be lucky to test at a 3rd grade special-ed level (though it is surprisingly well-shot.) On the visceral level of watching scores of baddies dispatched in the most violent (and manly) ways possible, the movie is in fact rocket science. The "rocket" in question being one fired from one person into another person, blasting them to a million beautiful pieces. Therefore, I give this movie a unprecedented 9.0 and 2.5 out of 10.

Basically, all you need to know is that Rambo is living in Thailand, there are some fascist thugs up river in Burma raping women, killing children, eating non-dolphin safe tuna, and voting Republican (probably). Some do-gooder Christian Missionaries catch a ride on Rambo's boat, but end up getting captured by aforementioned thugs. It's unclear exactly why Rambo decides to go after them after playing reluctant hero for the first section of the movie. It was either due to an exchange with the cute blonde woman earlier in the movie where she laments people not helping other people, or the fact that there were some assholes up river that needed killing and Rambo was bored.

We are then treated to about an hour of feel-good carnage. The morals of the movie are so black and white, and the bad guys so one-dimensionally evil, I didn't feel bad cheering on their dismemberment with the rest of the theater. Ah, mob rule... The kills come via .50 machine gun, .50 sniper rifle (wielded by a mercenary bearing an eerie resemblance to Bear Grylls) knives, a large bomb, and of course bow-and-arrow. What is it about these action flicks that calls for bow-and-arrow deaths? (Think Hard Target, Predator, or... Deliverance, I guess.)

If you're in the mood for some nostalgic old-school action, I highly recommend Rambo 2008. Bring your kids so they can see a real American in action. Bring in a bag of nachos and dip them in the dialogue because it is dripping with cheese. Bring your girlfriend because you've been waiting to get revenge on her for making you watch "27 Dresses". This movie was entertaining and had a moral. The moral being: DON'T FUCK WITH RAMBO.