The Secret Life of Walter Mitty

Looks good!

Did I mention that I had thought that I was dying, or that I'd started taking acting lessons?
No?
Well, I'm not (at least not anytime soon, barring all kinds of foul acts and disasters) and yes, I am.
When I was in high school, a long, long time ago, I was in theater and did competitive speech, and according to some of the folks who judged such things back in Oklahoma in the 1980s, I was pretty good at it. Which actually might not be a shining indicator of theatrical prowess, but I did alright in that little pond, and during my last year of high school I toyed with the idea of going to OU as a theater major, or of hopping on a Greyhound and heading off to Hollywood.
Of course, I didn't...I went to a small two year college near where I grew up, studied police science, went into the army, and was sent to Germany. There, I got married, and my first child was born. After the army, I became a cop, and not long after that, the twins were born. Occasionally, I would think about joining a community theater, or of making my own independent movies, and I even wrote a screenplay. It sits in a manilla folder in a milk crate next to my desk, and every couple of years I thumb through it, and think that I should do something with it. But it's really not very good, and no, you can't read it.
Several years ago the bug got me pretty bad, I was reading everything about moviemaking that I could get my hands on, and I had the chance to be an extra in a movie that was shooting up in Albuquerque. If you watch "21 Grams" there is a scene in which Sean Penn and Naomi Watts are arguing outside of a bar when a police car drives by and they decide it would be best to move on. I drove that police car. I drove it around the block for a couple of hours while the scene was shot over and over again. Then I pulled the police car up to within five feet of Mr. Penn and Ms. Watts and turned the red and blue lights on and off as they shot close ups of them doing their dialog. Then the crew hauled everything across the street and we did the driving in circles shit again. We started shooting at 10 p.m. and when we finished, the sky was beginning to lighten. Then I bought a restaurant, and got sidetracked again.
A couple of years ago I started thinking about it again, that little bugging thought that I'd fucked up, and  done the wrong thing. Of course, I hadn't. I have my kids, and a decent living to show for my earlier decisions, but that little bug wouldn't stop, so I put myself into a database for extras and background actors, and got another background role (a cop again, I've been typecast!) in a movie called "Odd Thomas" which will probably go straight to video due to some problems with distribution financing. It's based on a Dean Koontz series and looks pretty good, though.

I had several more shots at background work soon after, but the jobs were all about three to four hours away and they only give you a day or two notice most of the time, so I had to turn them down, and I guess I got myself blackballed with that agency for that, because there hasn't been a peep since.
Jump to January of this year...I'm seated in a coffee shop, cursing the weather, convinced that the swelling I feel in my throat is a tumor, and thinking that if I only had a year, or a handful of years left, what would I have wanted to try. I would have wished that I'd at least tried to become an actor. When I was young, I imagined being the star. Now, I know that I'd be very lucky to be the character actor, "that guy who was in that thing," and I'm very okay with that. Just to be able to make a living as an actor would be such a privilege.
So, I upgraded to a paid membership with that one agency (that was supposed to result in more exposure to casting directors, and turned out to be a minor waste of money and hope), signed up with a couple of others, and took a weekend intensive acting workshop up in Albuquerque. The bug really took hold then...I've since taken a longer course in film and TV acting at the same acting school, and am currently taking two more classes, another film/TV class at different school, and voice and speech with a Tony-nominated actress.
I'm not sure what classes I'll be taking next, I was hoping to take improv classes with a troupe in Albuquerque, but my schedule conflicted too much to pull that off this time around, but I am going to Los Angeles in September to take an improv class at The Second City! Beyond that, I plan to keep training, put myself out there for anything that I feel I fit the part for, and I've got a thought lodged in my brain for a local actors' workshop.
That thing in my throat? I don't know what it is. I went to a throat specialist, he poked, scoped, said he saw and felt nothing, and ordered an MRI, which came up clear. It comes and goes, a tightness, and what feels to me like swelling, I'm slightly convinced that I've developed a flour allergy (fairly common in bakers), but I really don't know. Whatever it is, it reminds me that I need get out and do things, and to try to be a little bit nicer, so it's not such a bad thing to have.

Have you seen this? I love this movie, absolutely love it.

Well, today is eleven weeks. I'd like to say that I feel much better and that my head is clear and I'm getting sooooo much more done, but none of that is true. Okay, I have gotten a few things done...I read a good book (Bossypants, by Tina Fey) and have managed to paint my dining room and most of my living room. Oh, and I planted basil and it hasn't died yet.
That's about it.

Checking in...

I have been sober for over eight weeks. I don’t remember a conscious decision to stop drinking, though I’d been thinking about it for a long time. It just happened.

I’d been feeling like shit for a while, had gained a lot of weight, and was having some problems with my health, but kept telling myself that I just needed to slow down, not stop. If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, I think you’ve gathered that alcohol is a large part of the culture at the café, it’s not a good thing, but that’s the way it’s been for a long time. I’ve made half-hearted attempts to change that, but never had much follow through, being as bad as, or worse than, everyone else.

Then, one Wednesday, I didn’t drink. That turned into a couple of days, I made it through the anger and agitation which had attended the first few days of sobriety each time I had tried in the past few years, and I just kept going. I knew that if I had a drink, it would turn into two, then three, then a six pack and a couple of shots, so I held off. I haven’t avoided being around alcohol, I will still go next door to the bar with the crew from time to time and have a limeade while they have a beer or shot, and I still go to the pseudo-Irish pub in town to see my friends, I just drink tea. There was a period, about a month in, where I was pissed off about the whole thing, wanted to drink, was tired about the “still on the wagon?” question, or worse, the “why?” but I got through it and around week six my mood improved and I started hitting the gym with a bit of regularity.

I had beer in the fridge for about the first month, then I poured them out. There is still a bottle of nice bourbon and a good bottle of wine in the cabinet, but I feel no desire to drink them. I think that if I got rid of those I would get mad again, better to just leave them where they are, let myself think that I might be able to enjoy them some day.

This morning I was at work, we were getting ready to open, when a friend of mine came in with news that the guy who worked the produce department at the market I frequent had died of a heart attack. I barely knew Terry, I know that he was from New Jersey, that he smoked a lot, and that he could be counted on to round up some extra mushrooms or lettuce for the cafe if I hadn't ordered properly. He and the elderly cashier, Harold, would often trade good natured verbal jabs about who worked harder. His mother has cancer. He was around fifty. That's it, that's all I know.
I'm always taken aback at how unreal it is to get news like that, how I had just seen him a day or two before, or how she had posted on Facebook this morning, or how I didn't even know he was sick. I was thinking on this, how fast life can be lost, when I read the news of the school shooting at Sandy Hook. I am so sick and hurt right now, I cannot believe how man can be so evil, so cruel. I also cannot believe how many people posted on Facebook things along the line of, "So thankful that God was there to protect and comfort the survivors" or "Now is not the time to be talking about gun control."
Well, where was god while all the children and adults who didn't survive were being murdered? When is a good time to talk about gun control? An acquaintance posted a charming (sarcasm) little tale about how she grew up around guns and how it was disrespectful to be talking about changing gun laws as these victims hadn't even been buried yet. I wrote a comment stating that neither had the victims of the Oregon mall shooting on Tuesday, and the seven year old boy accidentally killed in front of a gun store last week likely hadn't been either. Should we wait until we had a fucking week without a gun-related tragedy to have this debate, or should we just squeeze it in between mass shootings. I argued that it was disrespectful to the victims to NOT be having a debate over gun laws right now, that perhaps if we had had this debate after Columbine, or Aurora, or any other number of mass shootings in this country, we might have avoided the one today. Then I deleted all I had written and logged out.
Later, I logged in again and read several posts along the same lines and wrote that I was deactivating my account as I was going to snap if I read one more post praising a Stone Age desert god that doesn't even bother to protect the most vulnerable of society's members or the need to maintain an 18th Century view on firearm ownership. I then deleted that one as well and logged back out.
I really do believe that social media has been at great force over the last few years, it has given so many people a voice who had never had one before, I just don't want to listen to those voices any longer.

Sometimes you see something and you think of those who would enjoy it and immediately want to share it with them. So, Maria and John...

and...