Tag Archives: Seattle

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Welcome to Biden’s America

The first day that Biden was president of the United States saw riots in Portland and Seattle organized by Antifa and BLM. In Portland a democratic political office had the windows smashed and graffiti spray painted outside the building. The common theme was “fuck Biden”. This is Biden’s America, the one where police use tear gas on free speech protesters. Just kidding.

If there is anything that we should learn from this news, it’s that nothing has changed when it comes to the violent protests, we saw last year. These were the things that Biden promised would disappear along with Trump from the White House. As usual nothing has changed and we have to deal with an administration that bailed out rioters throughout the year and hope they smarten up with their policies.

It doesn’t matter who would have won back in November. These people would be protesting regardless of who sits in the oval office. Antifa is an anarchist group that uses the term Anti-Fascist to disguise their fascist tactics and gains approval from the media and politicians. The useful idiots that thought supporting the democratic party were on their side is quickly learning that they are no longer needed. The guns and power are now in their hands and the power of people in the streets is no longer necessary. One party has the house, senate, and the executive branch. The people who helped put them there are disposable and unless they start to keep their mouth shut and stay home from now on, I suspect they will become the focus of investigations just like the “white supremist” they have been complaining about for the past four years. Grab a bag of popcorn, sit back and relax as you get to watch the tide turn and anyone who is causing trouble regardless of their loyalties disappear from social media and likely the landscape of the land.

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Black Lives Matter, the white agenda

 

Let’s be honest here, there is a lot of horseshit when it comes to the discussion of racism in this country. Black Lives Matter, an organization created by black women after the death of Trevon Martin has been over run by an army of white guilt sadomasochist that enjoy nothing more than talking about there white shame while also trying to make others feel guilty about theirs. The movement went from a black movement to all races and now sexual orientation hijacking the plane and making it about them instead of the people it was started for. There was a time white black pride was the cause and anyone else trying to get in on the action would have their ass beat for trying to that the moment away from a black man or woman. “We got this. We don’t need your help.”

This sort of take over is becoming more common. During the #metoo events of 2016 the movement became less about empowering women who have been abused or oppressed by men and moved into the realm of trans rights. At the height of the movement Bruce Jenner declared himself a woman and was made woman of the year. Men are so awesome they are better at being women than women are. Keep in mind that Bruce still had his penis at the time, he never had a period and never will, he won’t ever give birth, and menopause isn’t possible unless he messes with his hormone medications. The focus of the movement became about something else and the movement was lost.

The brother of George Floyd spoke publicly about his brother’s death and told the protesters, rioters, and looters to stop what they were doing and that his brother wouldn’t want others hurt in his name. because the protest was no longer about George his message was ignored and the looting continues in Chicago, where 48 people were shot last week and 17 were killed in the deadliest weekend the city has seen. In Seattle, City Hall and third precinct were taken over and declared an autonomous zone. Protesters walk around armed and wearing body armor hoping the create some kind of left-wing utopia that has already started to fall apart after two days. The leader of the group, an 18-year-old named Lauracouc on Twitter, states that she is a lesbian Anarchist who wants to abolish whiteness, capitalism, and civilization while having a link to her cash app account. During their well thought out plan, the homeless were invited into their post-apocalyptic utopia, who immediately stole all of their food and left the autonomous zone. I wonder if they are still feeling righteous? In the video footage of this region I didn’t see one black person in the group. It should not surprise me that a black empowering movement should be taken over by communist Marxist like Jim Jones did in the 1970s. That ended well.

Today organizers of a protest set up stations on the sidewalk where black protesters could have their feet washed by white protesters in a feeble attempt to say they were sorry, for things they didn’t do, or did they? What is it that these people are hiding that would make them go to these extremes, or is there something more sinister at heart like a foot fetish of the dark variety? In a biblical sense I can see the comparison, a woman has nothing to wash Jesus’ feet when he was a guest in her house. This was a common tradition in the middle east at the time so this act actually meant something. She used her tears instead and dried his feet with her hair. I doubt the protesters went to such extremes and unless they did a pedicure afterwards the meaning is lost. After all what is the point except for some symbolism that will be lost on most of the crowd due to lack of education and an inability to read. I have seen more than my fair share of misspelled signs and poorly articulated arguments from these protests.

The 60s were a time of great change for black folk. They secured the ability to inherit wealth, receive equal education, and secured equal protection under the law. While some people sought to go back to their roots in Africa Malcom X changed his name to symbolize a new start, the beginning of his family starting with him, separating himself from his African roots. The world was going to be better and it was going to start with him, until he was shot in the head, but that ruins the story doesn’t it.

Black people don’t need our help. They didn’t ask for it and from what I can tell they don’t want it. In Grand Rapids Michigan 6 out of the 8 people that have brought up on charges of rioting were white. These people are not helping anyone, not even themselves. As for the notion that “silence is violence” you should be glad I as a white man is saying nothing about the protest (until now). I wasn’t marching on the street throwing rocks at the police making you look like a bunch of assholes. I kept my ass at home, shut my mouth and let you do your thing. Others didn’t have the same respect instead making it about them and their cultish white guilt.

I would suggest one thing while continuing from here, tell your white friends to go home and stop fucking things up for you. I’m forty-one years old and I can not recall all the times I had been told that black folks did not need help from a white man and I respect that. This is the American way, pave your own road, make things happen and don’t count on anyone else to make your dreams happen for you. I guarantee you that the white people who are running these events will stop when they get what they think you need and leave when you haven’t received what it is you are looking for. You are being used.

We are at a strange crossroads in this country where both side of the political spectrum want the same thing but the media tells us hat both sides are dumb. A few months ago, protesters stormed the capital building in Lansing, Michigan demanding an end to the lock down. They wanted Life Liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The BLM protest wants Life Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. And yet each side scolds the other about their “white privilege” and “looting pieces of *&%$.” And yet they are both demanding the same thing. Maybe next time you organize a protest you should invite the white guys with guns who will keep the police away and protect private property at the same time. If you are looking for white friends to have that might be the group for you. The current assholes you are hanging out with are doing you no favors. BLM has already turned into Gay Pride, next month it will be some other horrible cause that you are shadowed by. Take back your cause and get something done, otherwise all of this was for nothing.

 

 

 

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letters to Harrison

Letters to Harrison: 2

Did you finish that last poem? Lying there on the floor, pen in hand, shall it be labeled unfinished? I read an article by a reporter who had met you at a young age. Your advice to a thirteen-year-old boy was to stay away from the Hollywood coke scene. You forgot to mention the booze and women too, or are those okay in your book? I worked on a television show in Seattle and while I wasn’t offered the magic powder to help with my writing, I was given copious amounts of alcohol by a man who was five years sober in AA. Leave it to alcoholics to live vicariously through others. We all do that don’t we? A writer lives the life he wants to live through his characters. He imagines himself with the damsel, doing things that he could not physically do on a good day. And if you are a horrible writer they live happily ever after, because we both know that isn’t true. I have a second daughter on the way, another life I have to disappoint with the truth if I want her to live a decent life. There is nothing worse than living in a world of false expectations and learning later that princesses and fairies are pure imagination. Puberty takes care of most of that for those that are fortunate. High school takes care of the rest. Men with daughters are destined to feel guilty about their desires. What was it that led you to drink? We have opposite taste you and I. I can not touch vodka without ruining my week and have learned that bourbon is my drink of choice. As for red wine I have always been fond of the Italians but will admit that a recent Cotes Du Rhone was a delicious choice last week. Maybe it was the red wine that kept you with us for so long, making up for those American Spirits, removing one nail from the coffin at a time. I made that pumpkin soup today, playing around with cookbooks as you would have done. Its amazing how one can long for food from their past, meals you will never have again. A Muslim friend longed for his mother’s stuffed grape leaves and when I found some and brought them for his lunch break, he never talked to me again. Sometimes it is the gesture of kindness that gets us into the most trouble. It’s the long recipes that discourage me, dozens of ingredients that turn a twenty-minute cook time into an hour of work and a trip to the grocery store. Truth be told, the best meals need little but good ingredients and a little bit of love. But you already knew that, didn’t you?

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Golden

Golden: part 11

After a week of disappearing, Nick finally reappeared. Sam was able to reach him, and just as we had thought he was in California, but not in the way we were hoping. She girlfriend’s divorce was being finalized, but this only came up after a long and elaborate story about meeting with producers and the show being bought by a studio. Sam passed us word and a meeting was scheduled a few days later.
The Skype call was pointless. Nick was walking around a house with his iPad and kept losing signal and there were large patches of the conversation where we couldn’t hear him and wondered if the call was lost. We couldn’t hear the information we were being given and as far as we knew the job was almost done. We sat back and waited.
Nick said the meeting had been cancelled. He retreated back to Bellevue and the project continued. In the meantime he continued to pressure me to write the novels for him, the book versions of the show we were working on. It didn’t make any sense. The plot and the season weren’t even near completion and he wanted me to start writing a book that wouldn’t fit the end product of the show. After my last refusal Nick found someone else.
Two people were brought in around this time, a man who had worked in television doing commercials for different companies and a writer like myself. The director I was not familiar with and had never seen any of his material. He seemed to be a nice guy that knew what he was talking about and was very professional during our meetings. He also, to his credit, made it a point during the meetings to reduce time by cutting off Nick and focusing the conversation on the task at hand. Nick did not like this at first but the risk of losing someone who currently did work in television was too great. A few weeks later, with too many projects on the table, the director left and things started to unravel.
The writer was a retired gentleman who had written over 30 westerns on Amazon and was doing well for himself. Nick had never read any of his books but thought a western was a close fit with the show we were making. It wasn’t the writer that pissed me off in the end it was Nick trying to get rid of me.
“He has over 30 books Matt, how many have you written?”
“12.”
“How many did you say you have sold in a day?” Nick asked the new guy.
“Oh, I’ve seen a hundred sold in a day.”
Nick acting like this guy was Stephen King compared to me. I couldn’t compare myself to this guy and Nick shouldn’t have been either. He was retired, money coming in that he didn’t have to work for anymore and all the free time in the world to continue writing without the worry of bills being paid. And yet, Nick acted like I was a failure because I was not like this guy.
I couldn’t believe how agreeable this new guy was. He was excited to be brought into the project, he kind of reminded me of myself when I started. The real kick in the pants came when Nick assigned me to show the new guy where all the files were in the system with character profiles and the several versions of the plot that had never been finalized. Everything was up in the air and waiting for Nick’s approval until he had some moment of genius on the toilet changing everything again.
“This isn’t the time to start working on a book.”
“This is exactly the time.” Nick argued. “I want to have this out when the show it about the air.” Even if the show had been bought weeks ago the soonest it could have aired would have been a year and most shows are shelved indefinitely for years until they are forgotten about. Nick couldn’t publish a book because the studio would have bought those rights as well. He had no idea what the fuck he was talking about or doing. The meetings had gone back to Nick’s rants about AA and his capitalist ambitions. My own book sales had dwindled and I wasn’t close to having anything new in print.
I never showed the new guy where the files were. Sam was in charge of organizing the information and he lived with Nick. The only purpose of Nick doing this was to rub it in my face that I had turned it down and I am still glad to this day that I had.
I sent an email the next day that I was done, going back to writing on Amazon, I would no longer be working on the show. For once Nick was humble in his response. An email was sent to the rest of the group, remember I was being carbon copied for all emails, wishing me the best. After that everything went downhill.
For over a year I was still getting emails about the project, meetings, and possible investors. Pictures of Nick with middle eastern men and white guys with gold chains hanging just above their hairy bellies started to appear in my email. Then silence.
Sam contacted me a year after I had left the show. Nick had disappeared again and wasn’t returning emails or phone calls. Todd was still working on the script but without the leader there was nothing they could do. Sam tried to bring me back into the project to have Nick’s attention and finally finish things. The night we were supposed to Skype and play catch up I became violently ill and canceled less than an hour before the meeting. It was never rescheduled and a week later there were emails about Todd leaving the show.
“If that guy thinks he doesn’t need our money while he’s driving Uber to pay bills he’s mistaken.” Nick wrote in an email. “I understand that things are tough but he’s not worth what he’s asking. Low ball him, he’ll fold and take what he’s offered. He’s desperate.”
To Todd’s credit he didn’t fold. He made his offer to what it would cost to stay on the show and when they didn’t agree he left. Todd was one of the nicest guys you could ever meet and that was his downside as well. Things might have been changing for him. As someone who would always agree to what was being offered being in a financial hotspot was making his spine grow and I knew that he had learned something while working on this project.
There was a long list of insults and complaints once Todd left. The shit talking had reached epic proportions. Suddenly Todd was the worst human being on the planet and wasn’t worth the work he had put in. Nick was convinced they would find somebody else and they would be a real professional this time, but it never happened. That was the end of the show. Emails continued, mostly sending questions about the cable bill to Sam. The show was never mentioned again and soon the emails stopped as well. Either Nick was no longer using his email or he stopped linking me and everyone else to his account.
The show was never bought, it was never completed, and while I had worked on it for years, I have to admit it was something that I never would have chosen to watch if it was on television. I learned a lot of valuable lessons along the way. When you smell bullshit run away. Know what your time is worth. Do not work with people who can not focus on the task at hand. If you find yourself feeding someone else’s ego run away. Don’t work for someone who knows less than you.
Nick’s advice for life would boil down to one thing, marry rich. Out of all of his stories, comments about his hot daughter, the gaining and losing of money over the years, the one thing he always went back to was not marrying the rich Jewish girl. Nick had a habit of directing his attention to anything other than what he should be working on. I could only imagine what that would have been like if you added your dick as a wingman to the situation. These days you can find Nick on a cruise ship or in southern California. The show is a forgotten relic, Walden has been abandoned, my writing career is still recovering. Nick had dreams of being a Vegas star at one time, memorizing the American song book and recording his own album, and while he gave the appearance of being a man of the world it became obvious to those who knew him, he was more like Dolemite than Sinatra. A human tornado came to down, upended my life, filled my head with promises and fantasies of greatness, and in the end left with little to show for it.
In the end all I got was this blog post and a flannel shirt.

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Golden

Golden: part 10

I met my wife through an online app, no joke. I was working for the county and while cleaning the old Nazareth College campus I hid in the main ballroom, watching the deer eat from the lawn and opened the Tinder app. It didn’t take long for her picture to appear. She was cute with dark brown hair and green eyes. There was only the one picture and her name with nothing written in the profile. I swiped and moved on. Twenty minutes later she popped up again. This had never happened before.
There were five pictures this time, a written profile and the words American Splendor popped out. Not only did she know of the classic American comic book but she added it into her profile. I had to meet this person. I swiped again and we instantly had a match. The rest of the night we messaged back and forth. Working opposite shifts it would be a while before we could meet in person. This waiting game would become our regular routine.
With an increase in Skype meetings there was talk among Todd and I about a pay increase. Nick didn’t like it at first, treating the topic like we were forming a union. We were receiving the same low pay for ever increasing hours and a rise in verbal abuse. These days nothing seemed to be satisfactory. Todd and I were assigned to put together character profiles with little more to go on than the characters ethnic background. We were expected to create a character out of thin air that would fit with the show. we Skyped a couple times that week, went down some profile sheets to create a background, strengths, and weaknesses. When it was time for the next Skype meeting, we spent 20 minutes going over the profiles and explaining who these people were. In the end, Nick expected more.
Here was the trick with Nick. What he wanted was what he envisioned in his head. He didn’t want to put it on paper but have someone else do it. To be slightly off from his image was to be completely wrong. That was the meeting where I told him “do it yourself next time.” Todd and I had worked to squeeze in meetings for this one project and all we heard was “I was expecting better. It’s flat. There is no substance. What the hell were you guys doing?” That was when we started demanding more money. It came slow at first. Nick was trying to assigned a number of tasks to us and as if we had the same thought, we started saying no.
There was a long list of uncompleted assignments that kept lagging behind and Nick would move ahead as if the scene in question didn’t really matter. Each of us would be given three to four assignments and the more we were given the sooner our next meeting would be. We were coming close to have full time jobs with this project on $300 a month. We had better things to do.
“If you could rewrite that scene, do these three characters profiles and clean up that file folder by the next meeting I think we could make some headway.”
“No.” I said. “I’ll rewrite the scene but the other stuff needs to go to someone else.” Sam had a knack for creating his own task and Nick went along with it. We were constantly changing online storage systems and switching to different programs for things. It was confusing and just as we became accustomed to using one platform it would change because “this is better.” The explanation never fit and we were left using something that was completely foreign to us.
The books I had uploaded to Amazon before joining the project were starting to sell. I had money coming in from several places and this was paying the least amount from them all. I had some leeway on what I wanted to do and should be doing.
I met Sarah at a local bar downtown. Her friends were going to a concert for the Fried Egg Nebula and when I arrived, I notice the boyfriend of the other girl was someone I went to high school with. Casey was a character straight out of Dazed and Confused and the first thing that popped into my mind was having a music class with him. He had done a report on The Doors and while giving the oral presentation he jumped off a table and yelled “Mom, I want to FUCK YOU!” according to him this was an actual event in Jim Morrison’s life. We shared stories and before the first hour was over, I knew that I wanted to see Sarah again. I wasn’t fully confident of my bullshit meter but a common thing that would happen with meeting someone new was the cringe of hearing someone talk. Was there substance, was her IQ higher that her shoes size, did she watch reality TV? In the first few words I could tell if this was someone I could have a conversation with. I had friends in the past that would say “you don’t fuck her mind.” These people now have kids with people they can’t stand, life is not going well for them.
Few months later I was being paid a little more. Things were going well with Sarah and the show. There was talk of a meeting with producers to have it picked up. Nick made promises of working as a writer after it was bought but I did my own research, rarely did the people who created the show work on these things. The company writers were brought it to make necessary changes, it became company property and the last thing they wanted was someone else coming in and telling them what it really was. I just wanted out.
Sarah and I were hanging out with my friend Steve one night. He asked how my books were doing and when I looked it up on my phone, I was about to receive a $3000 payment from sales three months prior. Things were going really well. This should have been a news flash. I should have quit the show and went to writing novels full time. There were a lot of things I should have done. After investing so much time, a trip to Seattle, and putting up with incompetent leadership how could I walk away with nothing more than a small paycheck?
Every week we heard the same thing, the meeting was coming. It was like watching Game of thrones every week and waiting for winter to arrive. This was starting to appear as a bullshit gimmick to motivate us to work. Then Nick disappeared.
We didn’t hear from him for a while. Sam thought he had gone to California to make a deal but how could we know for sure? With our jobs done until the next meeting there was nothing else to do, we sat back and waited.

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Golden

Golden: part 9

It took time to recover from the journey home. It was the weekend and I didn’t return to work until Monday. I went to the local brewery and people were curious about my trip, wondering if I was going to be moving anytime soon. Samantha, one of the bartenders and a friend at the time, asked about the trip and all I could do was shake my head with a look of disappointment. She asked if I had seen the space needle, the troll under the bridge, Pike place market… the list went on and on. I continued to shake my head.
“What the heck happened?” she asked, thinking I was going to have this great story.
I wen through the process of obtaining a passport a few weeks prior to leaving with the hopes of going a few places and starting to see the world. Things were opening up for me and yet I was still at home. That passport still sits in my dresser, unstamped and soon to expire.
I told her everything, all the things you read until now came out. I never saw the one place I wanted to go and the places that any tourist would have been taken to remained a mystery to me after a week. After drinking my beer, I went home feeling like a disappointment to myself. I sat at my computer in my dining room turned writing studio, and looked at a blank page. Instead of working on the show I decided to focus on something different, my next book.
Later that week, after going back to work and returning to the grind of cleaning courtrooms and offices, we had another Skype meeting.
“We are scrapping the season. We’re going to focus on the pilot and make sure that is fine tuned to perfection.”
If I had hair, I would have pulled it out. The cameras were off. Skype was a glorified conference call. I shook my head in disbelief and wondered why the hell I was brought all the way to the other end of the country to begin with. We were literally backing up to a place before my trip to Seattle.
Even with my frustration I decided to stay. The extra $300 a month wasn’t bad for a few hours of work but I would learn later how much Nick was expecting from me. What was a few hours a week turned into more meetings, more projects assigned and soon he was trying to add more shows when we couldn’t get one moving along.
Nick wanted to add more characters, add some random thing for no reason here and that’s what we were working with. Everything had to be in the first season. Before I knew it was working more hours on the show than I was on my own books, the real money makers and I wondered what the heck I was doing. A script writer was brought in and Todd was in charge of writing the pilot episode. I felt bad for the man, not knowing what he was getting involved in. during our meetings a came across as a good man, someone who was agreeable but didn’t stand up to unrealistic expectations. He was a father with two kids and while he was trying to become a television writer, he worked other various jobs to get by. What he was being paid wasn’t worth the time he was putting in. during our emails back and forth on certain topics I tried to warn him about what he was getting into but like me when I first started, he was promised the glitter and glory of Hollywood. Neither of us could see the forest for the weeds.
It was around this time that Nick started to have the project funded by his girlfriend, the wealthy soon to be divorcee, he had met on a cruise the year prior. She was unhappy in her marriage and started shacking up with Nick to get away. California laws were tricky so they kept their affair a secret until the final papers were signed. She received a 3-million-dollar payout along with annual alimony. Convinced by Nick to invest some of the money they started a company that only existed on paper and payroll was set for the next few years. Nick had finally corrected his mistake from decades before by nailing a rich woman to set him for the rest of his life. At the time it appeared that the project would move forward and we would eventually sell everything and move along to something else. As time went on the expectations became unrealistic and we here running around with our heads cut off trying to figure out what the hell Nick wanted. He was becoming harder to contact and when he did pop up there were frustrated tirades about nothing being done. Meetings would go on for hours, the majority of the time spend listening to Nick talk about some story in his life we had already heard several times before. I didn’t want to hear about Norway, the textile factory, the production company, his AA meetings. That ended up being the last straw.
After 2o minutes of hearing Nick talk about the everything but the project he started discussing his time in AA and how it turned his life around.
“Glad it worked for you. It doesn’t work for most people.” It was three am and I wanted to sleep. I knew that AA would be another 20-30 minutes and my time was being wasted.
“It works. How would you know if it works or not?”
“the success rate is 13% and AA wouldn’t know that because anyone who doesn’t stick with the program isn’t tracked. They have false statistics to make themselves look good.”
“that’s bullshit. You don’t know what you’re talking about. I needed a higher power to get me through and come out sober in the end. AA saved my life and you think you know better than someone who was in it? Where do you come across saying these things?” Sam and Todd were silent. A button had been pushed and all I wanted to do was go to bed already having nothing to work with from the meeting.
“You said yourself you had to stop smoking to stop drinking. That’s not a higher power, that’s thinking.”
There was an eruption on the other end. Sam jumped in trying to calm Nick down. While Nick went on a rampage I sat back and listened. It was the only joy I would get out of this meeting and it all happened because he could only focus on himself and not the show.
“we’ve been on this call for three hours and for the last 30 minutes all you have done is talk about yourself. I don’t know what you do during the day but I need some sleep and I have to go to work tomorrow. Stop wasting my time!” I finally said it. I was expecting to be fired. I wanted to be fired. I was begging to be let go. For once Nick listened.
“You’re right, I’m not respecting your time. Let’s wrap this up and start again in a few days.” There was a sigh of relief from Todd’s end and I signed off without saying goodbye.
The next morning, I started receiving the emails. Nick had added me to his carbon copy list at the beginning of the project and I would receive emails about everything from bills to be paid and the show. It also included messages back and forth with Sam. Shit was starting to get real.
“If that son of a bitch starts that shit again, he’s gone.” The messages continued all day as Nick and Sam discussed what to do with me, and I read everything. I wasn’t the only person they were talking about. Todd was viewed as the suck who was working for less money than he was worth. Nick started looking for other writers to replace me, and I was glad. I would continue to receive payment until the last day, at least that was the plan.
“I’m bringing another writer into the project,” Nick said at the next meeting. He was in contact with a woman from the Seattle area that he wanted to hire. The next day he was bitching through email that she had told him to contact her agent to arrange a deal for the job. Nick lost his shit when he demanded to negotiate with her directly and she stopped responding to his messages. He didn’t handle rejection very well. I was still the only writer he had to work with and the demands I was making were viewed as obscene. Don’t waste my time. Focus on the show. Finish one thing before going onto the next. No, I’m not writing your books for a show that hasn’t been thought through yet. If I’m working on more than one show then you are paying me an equal amount for each show. we had come to a crossroad and neither of us would budge. We stood there going nowhere and that was where the show would stay until something changed.

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Golden

Golden: part 8

The last day in Seattle started out like all of the others. This morning a jazz band was playing in the corner of the deli and when they asked for requested, I suggested something from Kind of Blue, the Miles Davis classic. Without a horn in the group the electric guitar took over the role and played the piece for ten minutes. I was impressed and the head of the band told me that the guitarist had really improved over the past ten years. Nick added afterwards that he had recorded some of the American song book with this group but others in the band were not up to his standards for the job.
We sat at the counter with the picture window overlooking the street and patio. Nick read one of the local papers and discussed how the governor of Washington state was meeting with President Xi of China. Some people were suggesting that the Governor might run for president but I knew that role was already going to Hillary. I knew nothing about local politics and sat silent eating my meal listening to the conversations around me.
Out of the corner of my eye I watched a woman walk into the deli. I had been repeatedly told about the beautiful exotic Asian women living in Seattle but after a week of staying there and seeing little of Seattle I took the information to be a local myth I should disregard. I few women I did meet were just like the college students I saw in my own town with three universities. Young naive and consumed by pointless over charged educations, with a thirst for consumerism, the women I saw in Seattle were clones of this model, until this day.
The woman who walked in was very different from anything I had seen at home or abroad. Wearing a blue sundress, her hair was pulled back into a pony tail as she stood in line only a few feet away. Dark red lipstick emphasized her smile and when the owner of the shop walked up to say hello her eyes squinted as she smiled. She knew the owner and continued her conversation as I sat silently watching from afar hoping she wouldn’t notice me. The sundress did little to hide her curvaceous body and I fought to remember the details of this rare beauty. Thick calf muscles teased there way into view between the brown boots and the skirt. Thick thighs blended into wide hips and a healthy attractive midsection. Completing her curvaceous figure were her full breasts. These details I was fortunate to remember and looking away from her simple and classical face of beauty was a task upon itself. Big brown eyes and thick red lips filled her oval face gave her a constant expression of kindness that wasn’t faked or forced like so many I had met before. The girl at the airport bar in Salt Lake City came to mind.
The woman was called to order her coffee and just as fast as she appeared, she was gone. So, the mythical women of Seattle are actually real and just like any unicorn, snipe, or bigfoot you have to enjoy them for the few seconds they are there before they are gone.
I asked Nick bout the girl afterwards hoping to have a name to go with the face. He had never seen her before but by his recollection she might work for one of the local advertising agencies in Bellevue. Flying back to Kalamazoo later that night there was no point in pushing the issue.
Nick had this strange idea that I needed an iPad. He had a second device that he wanted to give me and that was our mission for the day. The second iPad belonged to his girlfriend Jan who came to own it from buying a new Cadillac. She used it once, set the pin number and after two years of sitting in the closet she forgot what the number was. Nick drove to the local mall where there was an Apple store.
The mall was no different from any other except for the Tesla car store in the middle. Nick was fascinated by these cars and thought these must be a rare breed in the land of Detroit muscle. The car by itself was odd, no motor, exhaust, gas tank, transmission, or cooling system. Everything was touch controlled and the car talked to you. I thought of Nightrider.
At the Apple store we spent an hour arguing with an employee about the resetting of the iPad.
“Unless you have the code, we can’t help you.”
“But we don’t know the code because it’s forgotten. Are you telling me that I own an iPad that I can’t have fixed if I forget the code?”
“do you have the receipt?”
“it belongs to my girlfriend and she got it from buying a new car.”
“Well unless you have the receipt, I can’t help you.”
“I want to talk to somebody else.”
This went on for more than an hour and this was how I spent the last day in Seattle, sitting in a mall surrounded by stores I don’t go to and people I don’t like. I could be doing this at home.
We left the mall with Nick promising that he would have the iPad unlocked and mail it to me. I didn’t want the iPad. I didn’t have WIFI. I didn’t and still don’t like Apple products. The iPad, even when it did become mine would become a useless pile of crap taking up space with little or no use to me. Nick never listened to me.
“You don’t know what you’re missing. Once you have it, you’ll like it.”
Back at Walden I packed my bags and carried everything upstairs to wait by the door. I had been awake for almost 24 hours at that time and it was another 12 hours home, flying overnight to Minneapolis and then to Chicago after a three-hour layover. I was hoping to sleep on the plane but knew that would be near to impossible.
When went to a local Hooters in Seattle close to the airport. The three of us sat at a table ordering beer. I didn’t want any food, my stomach felt like it was filled with rocks and the discomfort was getting to me. A cute little Latina waitress was serving us. Her hair was cute to her shoulders with bangs, her skin glowed and she was polite even when others were not. She was fit and you could tell that she went to the gym regularly. Sam flirted with her and she said things like “that sweet” or “you don’t say.” These are the “I’m not interested, please stop being creepy” clues. Nick talked about asking her to be in a demo video for the show and Sam suggested they get business cards as producer or executive producer for getting laid in the future. The slapped each other on the back for the great idea and grew excited at all the pussy in their foreseeable future. These were not the kind of guys I would hang out with in any other circumstance. I kept looking at the time and suggested that we go to the airport.
Once I was dropped off, I made my way to the loading area and waited. There were little shops and I bought a rechargeable battery for my phone so that I could use it while flying back. Only problem was that you had to pay to use the WIFI on the plane. They didn’t even supply free WIFI.
I unwrapped a movie I had bought in town, Under the Red Hood, an animated Batman movie and popped it into my laptop. Myself and the two people next to me watched the movie with subtitles while the rest of the plane pretended to sleep.
On the top of the mountains below us were flashing lights that didn’t appear as far away as I would have liked. Small towns were glowing petri dishes in the dark. The lights condensed to the main street and gradually spreading out from the center.
Minneapolis was a great non-event. I recall nothing. I was now at 30 hours without sleep. The 1.5-hour flight to Chicago took five hours with you include the layover and waiting on the tarmac forever.
In Chicago, there was the wait for my luggage, again forced to be checked in at no extra cost. I took the shuttle to the garage where my car was still parked in the same spot, I left it. Leaving the garage, I set my phone for directions to Kalamazoo. It didn’t matter where I went the phone kept telling me to make a U-turn. Frustrated I tossed the phone in the back seat. I jumped on the highway and drove as far and as fast as I could. I lost an hour in town from a stupid app and now the trip back to my hometown was taking me three hours. Then there was the traffic backup.
Some idiot had jackknifed a truck and the traffic was at a standstill. Many people were jumping off the highway to take side streets around the accident. The side streets were their own traffic jam. I stayed on the highway and looked at the morons who were twiddling their thumbs trying to figure out how to move the truck.
I put the audiobook on and tried not to fall asleep at the wheel. Clear blue skies and a bright sun kept me awake while squinting the whole time.
I drove up to my house. Pulled into the driveway. Left everything in the car. Went upstairs and climbed into bed. I had just hit 48 hours of being awake and no it was time to crash. I wouldn’t wake up until the next morning. 14 ours of sleep was just what I needed.

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Golden

Golden: Part 7

It had been three days since my last shower. That first ice cold shower convinced me something was wrong with the hot water heater. After four days a Walden I noticed Nick and Sam never showered while I had been there. I was with Nick 90% of the time and he would come out of his bedroom combing his wet hair back and adjusting his black track suit, the same one he wore the entire time I was in Seattle. When I mentioned the hot water situation Nick asked Sam if there was hot water, they mumbled back and forth until nick decided to jump in the hot tub, relaxing for twenty minutes and hopping back out. I never went into the hot tub.
We drove to downtown Seattle that evening, passing the Microsoft building with Nick pointing out how much money there was in the city. We parked in a ramp and went into the lobby passing two Lamborghini’s and a Ferrari parked at a turnaround. The restaurant was the go-to place for Microsoft executives to have a meal or conduct business during lunch. A bar ran along the back wall with the rest of the place filled with tables to seat four or more patrons. The special of the day was the hamburger and today it was half off the regular price of $50. I wasn’t sure what was supposed to be so special about this burger. We had a place downtown in Kalamazoo that did a foie gras burger for $50 and it didn’t last long on the menu. The burger was nothing special and it wasn’t cooked at medium like I had asked. The head chef and owner was some world-renowned chef that I had never heard of.
“This room is filled with some of the wealthiest men in the city, in the country.”
I looked around and didn’t see anything special. Take off the suits and ties and they weren’t any different than me. The women looked uncomfortable in their shoes and wore dresses that didn’t flatter their bodies, relying on the name of the designer rather than what would match their profile. Most of the servers were more attractive than the people dining in maybe it was because you could see who they really were instead of who they wanted others to see them as.
Sam talked about his start up and Nick discussed his previous business adventures. I said nothing. I never finished the burger; my appetite had disappeared after the morning breakfast at Gilbert’s. We left the Microsoft burger joint and went back to Walden for another evening of bashing our heads together. The days were starting to blend together and for every step forward it felt like we took two steps back.
The next day started out with coffee on the deck overlooking the woods. Deer were out grazing along the side of the house. The birds flew in the trees and looked for food in the feeders that had not been filled in years. I thought about my next book, what I would work on once I went home. Nick came out and joined me on the deck.
“you know once this thing sells, you’re going to have a lot of work coming your way.” Nick continued to sell me the project even when I was in it. “there is going to be so much money, and the women, oh I tell you the women…”
I didn’t want to go to Hollywood or sleep around. Fast cars and big house didn’t appeal to me. I wanted a little security and that was it. That day Sam worked all day and Nick had to go out for some errands. I was at the house by myself and there wasn’t anything to do for the show. We had come to a halt and by that time we were all burned out. I would be leaving soon and it looked like my one goal would never happen. I thought about riding a mountain bike to Seattle but it wasn’t mine and it wasn’t sure if I could trust it to go from point A to B and back again. I stayed at the house and spent that afternoon in the woods.
By the time I came back Nick was in the house and wondered if I had biked to town or not. The bridge to Seattle didn’t have bike lanes and it didn’t sound like a good idea to me. That night Nick and I drove to town. We were meeting Sam at a local bar but before then I was going to see the sites. There was Pike’s place market, which was closed because it was only open during mornings and afternoons. Then there was the gum wall, high school antics gone too far. We were told about a troll but didn’t know where to find it. The streets were hills running up and down in various directions. Nothing was flat. The place Nick wanted to go was closed, and had been for a while. Instead we went to an Irish pub called Kells. It was a classic bar with a wide selection of whiskeys on the wall. Nick was sober, several years post AA. He had discovered that if he smoked a cigar, he needed to have scotch. Once he quit smoking, he quit drinking.
“Do you know your whiskey, scotch and bourbon?” he asked.
“Not really,” I replied.
Nick asked the bartender to give me a taste of what was behind the bar. There must have been thirty brands waiting in their place in line. The first drink was smoky and I wasn’t sure what I was going to be able to taste afterwards. It went down smooth and Nick had this grin on his face while living vicariously through me.
“Next one,” nick said as he sipped his non-alcoholic beer.
The next drink was lighter in color. The bartender told me the flavors and smells I should look for but the first drink killed any chance of that happening. After three of four of this shots Sam finally arrived and we sat down to order some food. I couldn’t taste my beer that night or the food I ordered. Downtown Seattle reminded me of Chicago in some ways. There was the famous Starbucks that started it all. Shops I had ever heard of and a Déjà vu strip club that made sure Seattle was too classy. We wondered around not finding anything else to do and I sat in the back of the car with my head against the glass counting down the hours until I would be able to leave. We didn’t work that night and Sam had to be at work early the next morning. I fell asleep and woke up three hours later sober and wide awake. This was a common thing for me after drink hard liquor. I stayed up and surfed the internet until the sun started to rise and waited for everyone else to join the world. I sat on the deck sipping coffee again and was thankful to finally be alone and for once not think about the show. Kalamazoo was calling me and I wanted to go back to a land that I understood a little more than this place. Seattle was a city that was still dealing with puberty and didn’t know what it would be when it finally grew up.

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Golden

Golden: part 6

The show was moving along ahead of schedule. We had the first season mapped out. Nick was creating new characters and we looked at adding them in season two. Profiles were being created and maybe things weren’t as bad as I thought they were.
The daytime was reserved for Nick’s normal routine and going on adventures on an itinerary that only Nick knew. I had no idea what I would see on those days, we would leave Walden and cruise around town. When I brought up Bruce Lee’s grave Nick would say that Sam would take me and he would make sure it would happen. When I brought it up to Sam, he had a look of surprise and wonder revealing that he had never been talked to about it.
The Salmon fish hatchery was an interesting place, not exactly on the top of my list of places I would have seen while in Seattle, a place I would likely never see again. There were bridges and streams running through the park. In the center was a large box shaped contraption with windows on the side where you could watch salmon who had been trapped to spawn their eggs and die, trapping their future young for release into the wild keeping the species going for another year. A ramp went around the box leading to the center tank. Walking around the Salmon treadmill you could see fish jumping to the next level thinking they were going up stream to their final destination. In the end they fell into a tank of water with nowhere to go, the ultimate Secretary of State office where you waited to die and they took your first to last born.
In the shallow streams you could see the fungus that had been decimating the salmon population on their fins and backs. These fish were kept away from the rest and for good reason. The surrounding mountains reminded me of Tennessee with houses speckling the slopes hidden behind trees. Instead of the rounded tops the points were jagged and bear from trees and green foliage. There was an Indian reservation that I didn’t know about near the salmon hatchery. We went down winding roads, through narrow passageways and found a shop in the middle of nowhere. On the racks outside there was a sale for flannel insulated shirts with shiny snap on buttons that I had not seen since the 1980s. I picked one out and Nick bought it as a gift for me. The inside was a glorified tractor supply store complete with most items a farmer would need throughout the year.
On the way back to Bellevue, Nick continued to ask me if there was anything I wanted to see, we had time to kill and all I had to do was ask. I mentioned Bruce Lee’s grave and was met with resistance. I took my phone out and looked up local tourist attractions in the area. Jimi Hendrix grave came up. Only a few miles away and located between our current location and Bellevue we made a few turns and drove into the cemetery to find a large domed stone structure with images of Jimi etched into the marble surface. I had no idea Hendrix was buried here.
In the center was the small tomb holding Jimi’s ashes. Notes and flowers were still left for him and I went through his catalog of music in my mind. Nick had never heard of him, never listened to the music, the self-proclaimed social justice advocate was not familiar with one of the foundations of hippie culture rock.
Nick had moved away from the states in the late sixties, tired of the war and wanting to live in a society that wasn’t as blatantly corrupt he moved himself and his wife to Norway. The picture he showed me was of a young man in a boat with a smile of hope for the future. The etched brow and chiseled square jaw line never changed over the years. His hair was still thick but in the black and white photo it was much darker than it was now. I don’t know what he was trying to accomplish by running away, swearing to never step foot in the states again. He started a textile company, had a feud with Gloria Steinem, lost the company to investors after years of running the company and was back at stage one. This appeared to be a pattern in Nick’s life, gaining and losing fortunes over the years, never being able to hold on to something that he had created. Once his goal was achieved it almost appeared that a self-destructive nature would take over, inspiring to start over and go through the process again no knowing how to maintain the life that he had created. In some ways I felt sorry for Nick, always the lost boy in the boat looking for adventure but never able to let go of the boat and settle down in a place and live the rest of his life in peace.
I told Nick about Hendrix life, dying at 27, only working in the states for three years before dying of an overdose. Hendrix served in the army, went airborne, and supported the troops during a time that it was frowned upon. Nick appeared to show some interest and after a few photos we left and drove back to Walden to prepare for that nights meeting of the minds.
At this point we were shuffling around scenes from the season, creating new post it notes and placing them on the board to figure out what events would change afterwards. The cast of characters were growing and with each new addition the plot would shift. The grand finale of the show was set in stone, a Game of Thrones style mass extinction event to wipe the plate clean for season two. Things were coming together and to move ahead I started asking if these changes were set in stone, something we could forget about to move ahead in the project. I received a yes, several times and a day or two later it was changed to something “better” that wasn’t presented to the group. “we are doing this instead. Start over.” The changes would bounce around from the middle of the season to the opening scene in the pilot. The pilot was what drove me nuts the most, an episode that would rewrite the whole season depending on the changes that were made.
At one point I created a new female character, a strong-willed woman who could take care of herself and was tough as nails. There were two brothers on the show and she was a completing love interest, nothing new for tv and something that always worked. While I had her as a leading role, moving along in her own story and popping in when the time was right for other characters, Nick had other ideas.
We were going back and forth on the script, changing scenes and dialogue to fit the new layout of the episode. My new character was introduced filling a role that had been left out for some interactions and quickly putting her in as an important player in the show. Nick wrote his own version where she was quick to go to bed with one of the brothers as a way to pay her way out of a tough spot. I didn’t know we were making this show for the porn industry. I read the script in horror wondering what the hell Nick was thinking. That night I brought up the script and Nick had a look of excitement on his face to hear how great it was. I said everything to disappoint him. There was no build up, nothing that lead the audience to anticipate the moment, it was thrown out there as a fleeting act with my character turning into a cheap whore. In retaliation, the next day I sent a new script to Nick in the morning, Nick spent five minutes reading the 60-page document and came out of his bedroom belittling my dialogue, the way I described the opening scene, the poor use of characters, and the list went on and on. I pointed out the time that he took to read it with no way that he could have seen all that in five minutes.
“Your dialogue is horrible” he said. “I’m hiring a professional script writer.”
“I didn’t change the dialogue,” I pointed out. “It was all the lines you wrote in the original version. All I changed was the scene description and what the characters were doing.”
Flustered he tried to come back with something of substance. “I, well, no it wasn’t. It doesn’t matter. We clearly need someone else to work on the script.”
There was tension in the air the rest of that day. Breakfast at Gilbert’s was quiet. Nick didn’t say much about plans for the day. There was a rift taking place and while we were days ahead of schedule it was obvious that the project had problems. There was a strange desire for perfection on his list of priorities for the show, he couldn’t face the fact that nothing was perfect, there was only the best that you could do and you had to accept that. I had to come to grips that nothing would satisfy this man and to continue working on this project would ultimately be a dead end with a few paychecks along the way and a lot of grief. I didn’t see it then, too focused on the disagreement itself and hoping to smooth things over while saving the show. I had to get into Nick’s head, an open book with pages he wrote himself for how he wanted people to see him. You had to learn to read between the lines and be skeptical of anything you read. The best way to get in his good graces was to feed his hungry ego and make sure he thought he was the center of your world. I would have to kiss ass.

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Golden

Golden: part 5

The first evening started when Sam arrived at Walden after work. Sam had a dark complexion, jet black hair, and big brown eyes. He was on the chubby side and was enjoying civilian life after a stint in the armed forces either in the Army or Marines, I don’t remember which. He was a busy guy working several part time jobs, starting his own company, and also working on Nick’s television project. I was in the downstairs recreation room setting up for the meeting of the minds when Sam and Nick started talking in the hallway.
“This guy,” Nick said. “he thought I owned the park. It’s hilarious. I have him wrapped around my finger. He doesn’t know.” Sam snickered at my ignorance. “Let’s get this started I have a feeling we are going to get a ton of stuff done tonight.”
Should I have thought any differently about the situation? I was given the impression that Nick was well to do, the house was his, the land around it was part of the property. Had I really read into things so wrong?
I tried to brush the comments aside. I was stuck here. There was no option to go home. I had to ride it out until my flight in five days. We went over the first draft script for the pilot episode. There wasn’t a layout for the first season. Character profiles had not been written up. Other parts of the world we were creating had not been written out, just general descriptions that left a lot of interpretation. The only thing that had been thought out was the opening scene and even that we went back and forth on with constant changes and Nick, always a day later, deciding that what was set in stone was not good enough and we were starting over. This was a running problem with the show. We would have our starting point and then after hours of work the pilot would be scrapped and we were back at square one.
The initial script, written by Nick, was rough. There was some good dialogue, the relationships between certain characters were being established and it looked like changes could be made with the rewriting of different scenes without changing some of the other aspects of the script.
That first night went late, with an audio recorder documenting the whole thing. We decided how many episodes there should be, the length of each show, and knew there should be a grand finale leading up to season two. Nick and Sam went to be and I prepared for the morning ahead.
I woke up early, likely still feeling jet lag and my internal clock being four hours ahead. With my old job I would go to work at 7am and I was still on that clock. Nick and Sam slept while I jumped in the shower. For five minutes I adjusted the temperature and the water never turned hot. It was ice cold and I jumped in wanting to clean up for the first time since my flight. I scrubbed down and jumped out after a few minutes shivering and wanting to warm up as soon as possible.
Upstairs I made coffee and drank half the pot while running around the recreation room with post it notes naming episodes and looking over notes from the night before. I had a list of characters on the left-hand side and ran the episode titles across the top. The middle section was the events that would take place. There were details about the show that I had to ignore. Some of the characters had biblical names that nobody, especially a good Christian, would ever name their kid. It would be like a German naming their child Adolf after WWII or trying to wear a small mustache with greased over hair. The symbolism was fine but the names were not needed to portray it. Once I had the first season laid out, I sat down with my laptop and worked on the script.
I rewrote the opening scene, something that had some confusing elements to it and played around with the interactions of certain characters. I added a love interest that I would later write a profile for. There were other things that I added and subtracted and for some reason there was this idea that was supposed to be overlooking all of it about something that happened a hundred years before. Tying everything together wasn’t easy and in the end it never worked.
When Nick woke up, it was almost noon, he woke in to find the season laid out, a script sent to his email and half a pot of coffee upstairs. He didn’t say much and we left for breakfast at Gilbert’s on Main St.
The morning routine consisted of Nick reading that day’s newspaper, playing on his iPad and parking his car in a no parking zone in front of the deli. It had been dropped off that morning and supposedly fixed. We ate outside on the patio and watched the six figure cars drive by.
“This show works out, and it will, I have the utmost confidence that everyone will be interested in this, you will be driving one of those in a few years. When this is picked up, I’m going to make sure you are one of the writers. How does that sound?”
“That sounds nice,” I replied. I had already done my homework. I knew that when companies bought projects like this it was all or nothing. They would do with the script and characters as they please, they brought in their own writers, and in the end the person who created had little or no say in the project itself. I didn’t tell Nick that I knew this.
As we went to leave there was a puddle under the car and Nick spotted it right away. I crawled on my hands and knees and touched the oily liquid, the red tinted smudge on my hands told me again what it was.
“Your transmission is leaking,” I said seeing a look of fury on his face.
“that fucking cocksucker! He told me this was fixed. I’m going to ream that son of a bitch. I want this shit fixed today.” People looked around as the flurry of words escaped his mouth. We hopped in the car and drove back to Walden to wait for the car to be picked up again.
“If there is anything you want to see you can take the mountain bike.” Nick was being the optimist, I think. We were miles away from anything and Seattle was a ride over a bridge. I hung out at the house and worked on the project. I should have been working on my next book but decided it was best to keep those projects completely separate. I worked on the character profiles and we would have much to talk about that coming night. This was day two in Bellevue and we were already ahead of schedule. Little did I know that everything would change in the near future.
I roamed out in the woods by myself, traveling the trail and finding deer tracks and other signs of life in the middle of town. My phone had been sending me notifications all day about pushed likes on Tinder because I forgot to turn off the app while out of town. Apparently, I was a hot commodity on the West Coast. The only good thing about it was knowing that if things in Kalamazoo continued to go downhill, I had the option of starting over somewhere else where women actually wanted to meet me. This was a complete change of pace from the back and forth messaging with the sudden disappearance of the people I was talking to and never having a date from the app. Everyone had on their profiles that they weren’t looking to “hook up” and that included me, but when it came to meeting people, they fled like they had gone into witness protection. Seattle appeared to be the exact opposite.
While driving through town I never saw the hot Asian women that Sam had been talking about. Everyone looked the same. Thin, long straight hair with the same cut, t-shirts and jeans, it was like they were being mass produced in a factory. If that was what Sam was into then he was in heaven. I saw this kind of thing everyday in a college town and I had no interest in hearing about where to get the perfect latte, how long they have been a vegetarian, or what social justice groups they were a part of. Everyone dressed to impress, flashing their name brand clothes and having their hair styled every couple of days even if it was to make it appear messed up, but professionally messed up. Even the local Goodwill had outrageous prices for the simplest of things and people ran around trying not to be seen or noticed as they shopped and tried to find those rare name brand clothes with the tags still on. It wasn’t about getting the deal it was about finding something for a fraction of the cost and still being able to say you bought it at the mall. If you are not rich, try to look rich. In other words, fake it until you make it.
It was becoming obvious that that was Nick’s philosophy. There were many things about him that I was led to believe were true. He was a successful businessman, and at one time that was true. He didn’t own the house we were staying in, instead he managed the property for an investor from China who bought it for the rent money. The car, while it appeared to be a future classic, had the usual problems of any lemon. The world of Seattle was something that Nick and many others could hide in. Hustling their way along until they had that much sought-after break and could cash in for a little while until it was time to score again. Seattle was a city of junkies waiting for that next fix of cold hard cash. I hoped that after leaving here I wouldn’t have to go to rehab.

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