Your "I Really Hate My Birthday" Quizo Update

I get asked often why it is I dislike my birthday so much. It’s simple, really:

If every day is just another inexorable step towards our demise, birthdays are signposts along the way, reminding us that we are that much closer to the end of the road.

This year I took the first-ever step of getting a “birthday present for myself.” This is not something I have ever done on my birthday or Christmas – a “present to yourself” being not a present after all, but just another thing one spends money on – but after Chelsea’s unfortunate loss to Arsenal yesterday I was feeling especially morbid, so on a previously planned shopping trip to the Death Star I said, “you know what, the hell with it,” and got myself something for my birthday. My choice of self-present was Call of Duty: World at War (aka Call of Duty 5). Now I enjoy Call of Duty 4 as much as the next person, but CoD5 surpasses its predecessor in three very important ways.

Firstly, while CoD4’s story about fighting terrorism and rogue states and the fragility of the modern political order was very surprising for both its excellence and how depressing it was – one must give respect to a game where one of your characters gets quite literally nuked halfway through it and the other quietly bleeds out at the end – as far as wargames go there is little that compares to the visceral thrill of fighting Nazis. What can I say? I’m a sucker for the classics.

Secondly, CoD5 has the most uses of the word “fuck” in a video game since… well, ever, actually. I can’t think of one that comes even close, and looking back on it CoD4 would have been greatly improved if every time a grenade went off or one of your squadmates got shot or you looked at a bush someone shouted “FUCK!” or some variation thereto. It’s like someone took the screenplays for Saving Private Ryan and Scarface and mashed them together.

Thirdly, CoD5 points out that CoD4 suffers from a distinct lack of Kiefer Sutherland. I’m playing the first level yesterday and the first time your sergeant starts talking I went “OH MY GOD JACK BAUER!” and knew that the rest of the game could be awful (it is not) and I wouldn’t care and that because of the presence of Kiefer would love it forever. Kiefer Sutherland is like the butter of entertainment: he can make anything taste better.

JLK

Your Death By Metaphor Quizo Update

You know what I don't get?

Neo-Nazis.

And it's not just that Nazis are clearly, you know, evil. People have been making the evil choice for as long as there have been people. I make the evil choice all the time (though not THAT evil). No, what I don't get is why you'd want to be a Nazi NOW. I mean, aside from the obvious social problems it would cause - you can't really go to the bar on a Saturday night and when some woman you're hitting on asks you what you do say, "I'm a Neo-Nazi!" and expect any sort of success - I find it a strange choice mainly because, you know...

The Nazis LOST.

I mean, by becoming a Neo-Nazi you are basically saying, "I support a losing side." WWII isn't like the Super Bowl where if you lose you head over to the Maginot Sideline and tell Suzy Kolber, "well, we fought hard and tried our best, but we just couldn't pull it out late in the war. Full credit to them, the Allies are a very talented squad. They've got great depth on offense where they're very stong in the air and on the ground, and when we thought we were mounting a real comeback at Bastogne their defense just made a fantastic goal-line stand. They deserve to win. All we can do now is go home, process the loss, and get ready for World War III next year, Suzy."

No. This does not happen. If things like this did happen, during the last Super Bowl Bill Belicheck would have had to go back to his own locker room in the fourth quarter and blown himself up once he realized the Giants were winning. Which, admittedly, might not have been that bad. But really, if you're going to make the evil choice at least make one that has SOME measure of longevity like Maoist Communism or the Sith. Nazis have no game. None. And that head coach of theirs is NUTS.

Moving on...

I went to New York this past Saturday for a friend’s birthday. As my car is dying a slow, wheezing, sputtering death - I am convinced it has the car equivalent of pneumonia, as though there are communicable automotive pathogens - and I truly, truly despise taking the last train out of New York on a Saturday night, an exercise in misery if there ever was one, I convinced my father to lend me his car for the evening. My father's car now has in it the GPS unit my mother got him for Christmas - guess who installed THAT - and I have come to the conclusion that GPS is to cars what DVR is to television: once you’ve used it you can’t imagine living without it.

The best part about the GPS is when, after leaving, I realized that there was a backup on the NJ Turnpike stretching from Exit 6 to Exit 8. That’s about 14 miles of stop-and-go traffic, which we do not endorse when driving anywhere, let alone New York. I had to go against the directions of the Garmin, and I was talking on the phone to my Dad just after this happened.

“It got a little pissed when I wouldn’t get off at the Turnpike. It actually told me to get off at Neshaminy and make a U-turn to go back to the Turnpike before it recalculated for 195,” I said.

“Yes,” my father said. “She gets very strident if you don’t follow directions. Even confused sometimes.”

“She? You call it she?” I said. I realize that the GPS unit synthesizes a woman’s voice, but “she,” really?

My father said, “yes, she. I enjoy personalizing the technology.”

“It doesn’t have gender, Dad,” I said. “It’s not a Cylon.”

After waiting for almost 40 minutes to get through the Holland Tunnel – which, as I predicted, my car never would have survived – and then trying to hack my way through Tribeca Film Festival traffic in downtown Manhattan, I finally got to said birthday party. When I found the birthday girl she handed me a carton of cigarettes she had picked me up in England. Woohoo! Imported cigarettes! I loves me some Silk Cut.

I asked, “what do I owe you?”

“Fifty bucks,” she said.

Now then:

0.25 seconds after I heard that I thought, “wow, that’s a lot more expensive than the last time someone got me these.”

0.75 seconds after I heard that I thought, “actually, the local price is probably the same from last time and the amount I’m paying now is likely the result of the dollar’s severe loss of value against foreign currency the last several fiscal quarters.”

Unfortunately, 0.5 seconds after I heard that I SAID, “50 bucks? You’re the worst drug mule ever.”

It occurred to me in that moment that the differential between how I perceive the things I say – i.e. as a lighthearted, well-meaning joke 98% of the time – and how the people I am saying these things to perceive the things I say – i.e. as the cruelest utterance in the history of language – may explain a large percentage of my difficulty in dealing with other people.

I maintain that my innate need to make jokes all the time is the sign of a deep, altruistic desire to please others by making them laugh and brightening their day. Most of my ex-girlfriends would say in the moment just before they BECAME ex-girlfriends that I use verbal chicanery as a way to put up emotional barriers and keep people at a distance. In these moments I tend to say to my ex-girlfriends things like, “you’re too drunk to drive to your boyfriend’s house” or “what do you mean you and your boyfriend are getting married” or “it’s not my fault your fiancée is CLEARLY a homosexual.”

(It’s a long story.)

On the way home from the birthday party I was listening to an audiobook which is a different title from the deadtreebook I’m reading and for a moment around exit 10 I was suddenly possessed by this wracking feeling of guilt, as though I were committing some strange form of book-adultery. I then realized that I am dangerously close to completely losing my mind, if in fact being worried – seriously, legitimately worried – about “book-adultery” isn’t a sign that I already have.

Also, I have another calculus exam next week, so if you're gazing at the night sky this weekend and see a star suddenly wink out, that's just me studying.

JLK

Your Increasing Entropy Quizo Update

A friend of mine turns 30 today - happy birthday, Brian - and I was at his birthday party over the weekend and came to a strange realization.

There were, I dunno, maybe 15-20 people at this thing, including a couple married folks who had brought along their kids. It was about as grown-up a party as I've been to in a long time, no wanton stupidity was on offer like fighting with Norwegian shipwrights (my 28th birthday), or people drinking beer out of saucepans with straws (my 25th birthday). Suffice it to say this was not a party in which anyone would end up sleeping in a bathtub (my 30th birthday).

I'm at this party and I'm taking it all in; everyone is just standing/sitting around, talking with each other, eating Brian's Delicious Food - back when Brian and I and a bunch of other guys lived in a house in college the rule of thumb was that Brian's food was always delicious - generally having a pleasant time while the few little kids hung out with each other and did, I dunno, whatever the fuck little kids do at grown-up parties their parents take them to.

At one point I caught a glimpse of said kids and was very violently hit with this wave of memories of MY parents taking me and my sister to THEIR friends' houses for parties when we were young. In fact, a couple people reading this will actually also remember those parties, from both the tall and short perspectives, so to speak. You know who you are.

It's Saturday night and I'm having pleasant conversation - well, as pleasant as I get in conversation, which still tends to involve a lot of shouting - at a party with people who brought their kids.

Then, the realization:

Oh, God, I have turned into my parents.

This knowledge didn't get any easier to take after I considered it for a bit. You may recall I was pretty sanguine about turning 30, but this one hurts. This one really hurts. This shit makes me feel OLD. My friends and I are (for the most part) respectable adults. We have responsibilities beyond (but not without) acquiring video games. We have to plan our social lives more than three hours in advance. We bring our kids to our friends' houses.

I've turned into my parents. Except for, you know, having two kids and a house and something like 5 academic degrees between them, but in all the ways that matter to my warped brain at this particular moment, I've turned into my parents.

My little Zen moment was broken when one of the mothers at the party - Christ I can't believe I can say that about people I know - came into the room saying "Kylie? Kylie?"

I immediately jerked my head up and said, "where? WHERE?!"

My friend Justin said, a look of absolute pity on his face, "not THAT one."

It turns out that she actually was looking for her daughter named Kylie and my hopes were dashed. Hey, stranger things have happened. I once saw Paul McCartney at a rest stop on the New Jersey Turnpike; Kylie Minogue at a birthday party in Fox Chase isn't much more unlikely.

And, finally, there is hope that the Patriots' despicable unbeaten season can finally be stopped, since the New York Football giants seem to have acquired some sort of foul magic - voodoo, perhaps - that makes good teams turn to crap when they play the Giants. If you had told me four months ago the NFC Championship would have been between the Packers and the Giants and that, what's worse, the Giants would actually win I (and just about anyone else) would have laughed in your face and said that you were clearly insane, or at the very least retarded. Because, folks, I'll tell you what - the Giants are NOT THAT GOOD. They're not. But somehow they have managed to tap into the arcane energies of the universe to turn other teams that ARE good into total crap. The hope now is that whatever hideous black magic the Patriots have worked is not as strong, or that Tom Brady's Faustian pact expires on February 2.

One cannot live without hope, after all. So, you know, go Giants.

Wow, that hurt more than I thought it would. Think I sprained something...

JLK

Your "I Can Turn Back The Hands Of Time, You Better Believe I Can" Quizo Update

Though I have been awake when the sun was rising more times than I care or am able to count, the only two times I've ever purposefully witnessed the event directly – actually set out specifically to watch the sun rise as opposed to, say, squinting out the driver's side window while speeding down the Parkway at 5:45AM and wondering why I can never seem to leave New York at a remotely reasonable hour – both took place, as it happens, on the Delaware Avenue end of the South Street walkway.

I started doing theatre in grade school (I just realized I've been doing shows for TWENTY YEARS, and god that's frightening), but I didn't get serious about it until I did Anything Goes in the fall of my senior year of high school.

(Interesting side note: no less than three other high schools around here were doing the same show at the same time, and when I got to the theatre at LaSalle there was this whole great big lot of us who had all been in separate productions of Anything Goes within like three weeks of each other.)

Even for those who at that age realize they're pretty good at this stuff and get vaguely serious about it and may want to keep on doing it, high school theatre is something of a fool's errand. It's a bit like that statistic you hear about athletes: only 2% of high school athletes will play college ball, and only 2% of those will turn pro. I'd wager the percentages for folks who do theatre in high school are roughly the same. Of the 50 or so people I worked with on that production of Anything Goes way back when – by far the largest show I ever did in high school – precisely two do professional theatre work, and I'm one of them. (Okay, 4%, fuck off.) People fall off the bandwagon, discover other interests, get sick of doing tons of hard work for nothing. I've heard "discover girls" mentioned in that list when talking to people about this phenomenon, but only someone who's never met the kind of girls who work in the theatre would say something like that.

After a high school show closes you have the "cast party" at someone's house, where their parents serve soda and chips and whatnot and your drama teachers are there and you talk about how great everyone was – everyone in a high school show is great, if the talk is to be believed – and you hang out for a little bit. After that ends you go to someone else's house who has more permissive parents for the REAL cast party where you give that person's mother your car keys and everyone sits around and gets blitzed. (Oddly enough I was NOT one of those people; I didn't start drinking until college.)

The real cast party for Anything Goes was at some guy's house in Society Hill – can't remember who it was – and there were about 30 of us spread out over the entire third floor of one of those gigantic townhouses that you see all around the pub. Most of the people there were heavily invested into getting drunk. I remember at one point that I got into a heated discussion – at the age of 16, before film school was even a fleeting thought in my head – about why The Empire Strikes Back was CLEARLY a far superior movie to Return of the Jedi and how anyone who thought otherwise was obviously retarded.

There was one other guy there who wasn't drinking – Christ, I can't remember his name either, but I do remember he was blind in one eye because he took a paintball to the cornea the year before – and at around 6:00AM, when most of the rest of the party was either drunk, passed out, or having sex in one of the 27 bedrooms, he suggested that since we were sober and wide awake, hey, you want to go watch the sunrise?

I thought, I've never done that. Why the fuck not?

We drove over to the parking lot in front of Downey's - I DO remember that was the second time in one night and, swear to God, second of only two times I ever violated my Cinderella licence – and ambled over the South Street walkway to watch the sun come up over Camden. This was before the USS New Jersey was there, so it was just pink skies and industrial wasteland on the other side of the river. It was early November and it was absolutely freezing, but we just stood there for a solid twenty minutes in silence watching the sun come up, and when it was finally finished he just turned to me and said, "pretty cool, huh?"

I had to admit that he was right.

The second time I watched the sun come up from the South Street walkway was this past Saturday morning after a very, very, very long night of celebrating my 30th birthday. I was by myself this time, largely because I hate the world and everything in it.

The party itself went smashingly well – I believe over the entire course of the evening we had about 60 people go through the Rigger Bar, including at one bizarre point a sizeable delegation from the Pennsylvania Ballet. I am not making this up. I went outside for a cigarette around 10:30 and when I came back in there was a very large bunch of very small women standing in a cluster in the middle of the room. Not knowing who these women were or how they got there, I shouted "who the fuck are they?" at no one in particular.

My friend Mike came over to me and said, "they're ballerinas."

I said, I thought not unreasonably, "who the fuck are they?" again.

"The Pennsylvania Ballet is having a party next door," Mike said. "I went in there and invited them over here."

"They look like they're 14," I said. I had never seen so many tiny little ostensibly-adults in one place before.

"I think the one might be," Mike said.

"I can't live in this world," I said.

People continued to come and go, mostly coming and not going, and the bar got filled pretty nicely. What was supposed to be the highlight of my evening happened around 11, when a large group of Chelsea friends of mine arrived from New York, including a young lady who I had hoped, at the very least, to get a word in edgewise with at some point over the course of the following 12 hours.

This did not happen, and thus begins my hatred of the world and all its contents.

This did not happen because amongst the group of folks who came down from New York was this douche nozzle who was cockblocking me like fucking Mike Munchak in a Nashville whorehouse. When I say I couldn't get a word in edgewise I mean this quite literally. This guy made any attempt at conversation impossible – and we're not talking conversation like, "so, your hotel room or mine once we're done here?" I mean "so, how was the train ride?" conversation. I couldn't get more than eight seconds of one-on-one with this woman without him showing up and – I am not making this up – positioning himself in such a way that no one – myself included, and I feel I'm the most important actor in this particular drama – could even LOOK at this woman without craning their head around this fuckwad. I couldn't make EYE CONTACT with her.

It actually got a point where my FRIENDS were getting angry at this guy. I had to turn down repeated offers of, alternatively, throwing him into the Delaware River, beating him up under the stairs out the back of the pub, and things that began with, "I have this knife in my car, and…" I made a for-me rare determination that violence was not the answer and I would solve this problem in a civilized way.

Later in the evening when we learn that – and this is the best part - he is GOING OUT WITH SOMEONE ELSE, I started to feel my sense of Zen calmness slipping away and began to get seriously pissed off.

As Kyra was kicking us out of the bar around 2:20 a group consisting of Chelsea fans from Philly and New York who had all gotten rooms at the Society Hill Sheraton – we had a game on at 7AM, so it was determined we'd just crash for a few hours two blocks from the pub – headed back to the hotel, and on the way back and in the rooms I again had to deal with this fucking muppet making any attempt at even casual conversation with the woman I invited to the party specifically so I could HAVE a conversation or two, or three, or perhaps slightly more than a conversation with completely impossible.

It is also important to note at this point that at this time I am, as per usual, the only sober person in the group.

When the small party in the New York people's hotel room turned into, quite literally, a beer-throwing fight, and I resigned myself to the fact that I wasn't so much as going to say hello to this woman until the entropic heat death of the universe thanks to this cockblocking kumquat, I decided to head up to the room we of the Philly persuasion had gotten and try to get a whopping three hours of sleep before the match.

About ten minutes after I got down there my friend Tim rolls in and all I can say is that he is fucking DRUNK. I mean, wow. I learned later that he had polished off most of a mini-keg of Heineken in the New York room, and after screwing around for maybe 90 seconds he flops down on the floor and promptly passes out. I was lying awake in the bed, thinking that interfering jackasses aside, and making a note to thank my "friends" for bringing the jackass in the first place, I came to the conclusion that all things considered it was still a pretty damn good birthday. Maybe turning 30 isn't so bad after all.

About two minutes after coming to said conclusion, at almost exactly 4AM, Tim begins to snore.

Well, "snore" isn't exactly the right word for it. The proper description would be something more along the lines of, "at 4AM Tim began to emit noises of roughly the decibel level and vibrational magnitude of a 400-horsepower Evinrude outboard yacht engine."

Let me tell you something, folks – when I was a bouncer at a city pool, way back in my youth, I used to sleep in the pump house of a 40,000 gallon pool, which at the time I roughly equated to sleeping inside a jet engine. I used to sleep like a fucking ROCK in there.

Friday night, I was lying awake listening to these frightening noises coming from my friend, and I couldn't sleep to save my life. I actually – and yet again I am not making this up – attempted to hypnotize myself so as to be able to enter a state in which I would be able to get at least a modicum of restful sleep. (Yes, I actually know how to hypnotize myself.) I could not. The noise was unbearable.

At 5:30AM I said, out loud – since I knew my other friend Ron, who was also bunking in the room, was as wide awake as I was – "oh, fuck all THIS," and took my pillow and blanket into the bathroom, closed the door, and sacked out in the bathtub. I have done this before on road trips when a bed was not an option. It's actually not that uncomfortable, almost womb-like.

On my 30th birthday, lying in a bathtub, in the dark, with a blanket over my head, with the bathroom door closed, I can still hear Tim snoring.

It is loud enough to keep me awake.

Oh, God.

At one point I decided to try the age-old method of counting sheep – in my case, just counting up very slowly in my head – in a last ditch attempt to get maybe an hour of sleep before I had to get up for the match. When I reached NINE HUNDRED, I pulled my cell phone out of the soap dish, saw that it was 6:15 and said, "fuck it, SSD opens soon, might as well get some breakfast."

I showered, changed into my Chelsea kit, and walked down to South Street. I picked up an Inquirer at the WaWa and walked over to the South Street Diner at about 6:35 to see that it didn't open until 7. Hmph.

I looked out towards Front Street and saw the sky starting to turn pink and said out loud to no one in particular,
"we're sober and wide awake, hey, you want to go watch the sunrise?"

So there I am, standing on the river end of the South Street walkway, about a month past 13 years to the day from the last time, watching the sun rise over the USS New Jersey.

When 7AM came I went back to SSD, availed myself of the best French Toast in Philadelphia, and headed to the pub to watch Chelsea beat West Ham 1-0 and stare at the back of that guy's head (conveniently placed directly between me and the woman in question, who I have now completely given up on ever saying another word to ever again).

As the day wore on I went home, got some sleep, watched my DVR of Navy destroying a hapless Army, made plans to watch the Ricky Hatton fight next week, and got some more sleep. Things returned to normal, at least as normal as they get around here.

Looking back at the whole experience of turning 30 I have come to the following conclusion:

I have faced, stared down, grappled with and survived thirty years of the weirdest, most ridiculous, most bizarre, most nerve-rattling insanity the universe can throw at anyone. And I won every time.

Thirty years down, a hundred to go. A hundred if those sons of bitches are LUCKY. I don't know about you, but I plan to live forever.

The last thirty years is the best you got?

Bring it on, motherfuckers.

JLK

Your "I'm Melting! I'm Melting!" Quizo Update

A WHOLE lot of things to get to this week, so let's get started.

Thing the first: let me quote, for a moment, the comic genius of Leonardo Leonardo from the abortive Clerks cartoon series when he told the Prime Minister of Canada: "NO! It's not evil spirits, it's just RAIN." Our attendance last week can only be described as piss-poor, which I must assume can be attributed to the fact that we had some weather. Trust me, folks, it won't hurt you. You can come to Quizo in the rain. No ill will befall you. Unless, of course, you are some manner of international superspy a la James Bond, in which case Dr. Chill may take offense and would attempt to befall some ill upon you. That strikes me as unlikely, however.

Thing the second: speaking of James Bond, I saw Casino Royale this past weekend. It is outstanding. I highly recommend it. I don't recommend it as much as Superman Returns, but still rather highly. Daniel Craig proves that ugly is the new not-ugly, and for the first time in the 21-movie series Bond points out the fact that martinis (vodka martinis especially) pretty much taste like lighter fluid no matter how you make them. And not the good tasting lighter fluid either, the really disgusting kind that kinda tastes like a martini. Note well that there will be... perhaps not a preponderance, but slightly less than a preponderance of Bond questions this week, because I really like James Bond movies and I really REALLY liked Casino Royale.

Thing the third: Thanks to Democrats finally getting their act together and winning control of the House and Senate two weeks ago, my theatre company's plans to produce Sam Shepard's "The God of Hell" - a play about the importance of Democrats getting their act together and winning control of the House and Senate - have had to be altered somewhat by the fact that we were in possession of a play written 18 months ago that is now dated and irrelevant. Instead we are now producing Euripides' "Medea," which (as near as I can figure after extensive research) has never been performed in Philadelphia. (Opening 8PM January 11 at Second Stage at the Adrienne, 2030 Sansom, tickets $20) So I essentially have the Philly premiere of a play written 2500 years ago. The theatre is a cool business sometimes.

Thing the fourth: We put up our audition notice this weekend, and now the inbox for my theatre company has been flooded with headshots and resumes. Medea (opening 8PM January 11 at Second Stage at the Adrienne, 2030 Sansom, tickets $20) is a 20-something woman, so I have spent all morning going over pictures of gorgeous actresses, deciding which ones I want to consider spending the next ten weeks with. The theatre is a cool business sometimes.

Thing the fifth: Someone needs to inform the Eagles that the NFL season is, in fact, 16 games long, and not 10. This will be the second year in a row where thanks to injuries the latter half of the season is essentially useless, which if nothing else makes scheduling rehearsals on Sunday afternoons in December and August a lot easier for me. We had a serious problem with our first show when we had performances on nights when the Eagles were in playoff games. As it was last year, this does not look to be a problem this time around (Medea, opening 8PM January 11 at Second Stage at the Adrienne, 2030 Sansom, tickets $20). Come on, lottery pick! Oh, wait, wrong league.

Thing the sixth: My birthday is next week. Next Thursday, to be precise. My last birthday in my 20s. Just letting you know.

See everyone tonight.

JLK