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2:51 am
i saw the new pepsi-starwars-cross-promotional-whatever ad the other day where the pizza hut girl takes a swan dive off of a freeway overpass and lands safely into colonel sanders' speeding convertible. and in tiny letters on the bottom of the screen it says, "do not attempt." why is pepsi interfering with the natural selection of the human species? i say go for it. hey, you might fly, you never know. enough with the coddling protection of the stupid! if instead the disclaimer just read "attempt", the rest of us could have a nice little picnic on the side of the freeway, kick back, and watch the stunning beauty of mother nature take her course. do you know what next month is? of course you do! it's the 150th anniversary of the gas mask!! and i had better not get screwed out of a present this year. eating disorder awareness day just came and went, and i was one sad, gift-less little boy. what a bunch of selfish rat bastards my friends are. not even a card for holocaust remembrance week. i discovered something MOVING AROUND in my neck last night. when you poke a certain part of my throat something sort of squirms around in there. it doesn't emit a high pitched shriek and scramble under my skin for safety or anything, but there is definitely something LOOSE in there. i have decided to quit poking at it. ooh it just did it again plus i got a bad hair cut the other day. : ( they did it way too short. walking around with a bad haircut is like walking around with a curse because there's nothing you can do about it. other than look really angry. did you ever notice how the most mean and angry people in the world also happen to have really bad haircuts? that's no coincidence. mostly you just have to make eye contact with people on the street, point at your hair and just shake your head sadly. sometimes i just stand outside of the barber shop pointing at my head with tears running down my cheeks. i was trying to look all shiny and sassy in time for cannes and now i look like a 12 year old with this hair. rrrrrr. if you see me on the independent film channel or anything, please no mean comments. off to france! wish me luck. voo lay voo wave byebye to don don
12:03 am
thank you to aimee for again scaring me, this time with the denver article about the chicken that lived for four years with its entire head cut off, thriving only with an intact brain stem. yes!! so i was driving back from another meeting in LA last week, wooshing down the 101, when a squirrel darts right into my lane. one does not expect to see such wildlife on the freeway in los angeles and i swerve like a madman onto the left shoulder as the happy squirrel leaps RIGHT UNDER MY TIRES anyway. i narrowly miss smashing into the center divider and somehow careen back into the left lane, all in the frame of two seconds. there was that moment of confusion - "did i hit squirrel??" - during which i wasn't quite sure if the crunchy noises i heard under the car were simply the tires digging into the shoulder gravel or if they were squirrel crunchy noises. a quick check into the rear view mirror revealed - as if in slow motion - a mangy bouncing squirrel ball hurtling through the air after the car, end over end. horrors!! i've never run over anything before. that was terrible. i'm not sure why mr.squirrel decided that an industrial stretch of highway 101 was a nice place to gather his nuts and twigs. but now i feel all guilty. damn it. stupid squirrel. (tears) i should probably talk about the production, shouldn't i? still working on the BIG DANCE NUMBER. not a fun sequence to do. it wasn't until i had planned to animate six separate dances that i realized that i really hate animating dancing things. whoops... atleast it will be very strange. but i've been really flighty lately and easily distracted so i'm not quite the pressurized work-horse that i used to be. which is always frustrating but atleast i'm enjoying the process a little more than when i was dealing with school at the same time. moreover, somebody needs to take my stupid nintendo time-sucker unit and throw that out the window. you could probably shoot me in the foot and i wouldn't get as angry as when they screw me out of getting through the moonraker level on 00 mode. stupid game. see, the problem is i have way too much time on my hands right now which is used horribly rather than productively. besides that, i'm busy going over all of the things than can possibly go wrong in france next week as my brain is wont to do. thus don is forced to get any and all actual work done at 4 in the morning when there are less things buzzing around his head. and there you go. i share with you now a lovely story i heard once about a nile river explorer who, while camping, noticed a huge beetle struggling its way into his ear. when he tried to grab at it, it only crawled deeper inside his head, and his attempts of prying it out only shoved it in further. he tried flushing it out with melted butter and finally attempted digging it out with his pen knife, succeeding only in killing it in there and further damaging his ear. things got messy and infected and his face got all distorted with boils. the infection ate a hole through his sinuses so that when he blew his nose his ear whistled. after seven or so months, little pieces of the beetle gradually emerged and fell out of his ear - a little leg, pieces of the shell, a little wing - bit by bit... did you know that the ideal weight for a 20 foot 4 inch woman is 1,814 pounds?? i sure didn't! may 3, 1999 wow it's not often that i update this section so... often. what a stupid sentence i just wrote. it's 3:28 am so i'm going to write this but probably not get it online for a little while. well that's not true. look at don talk at himself all rhetorically. sometimes the voices control the typing, too. I'M RUNNING OUT OF BLOOD# $#$ guys - remember how in like first grade there were those slightly clueless kids who, upon using the urinal in the boy's room and not understanding the concept, wouldn't utilize their zipper and would just totally drop their pants instead? and so the bullies would enthusiastically spank their bare asses with sticks and things so that they'd inadvertantly piss all over the walls and onto their shoes? that was always pretty funny. and remember how your first grade teacher would always douse the lucky spelling bee winner with vaseline and lighter fluid before employing the psychosexual communist felching gimp? man, school was pretty crazy. there's this really big and weird spooky looking cloud hanging over my building tonight. it's the only cloud in the sky, and is sort of long and oval shaped and dark gray and is just one of those scary clouds that just seems really ANGRY at you personally, you know? it's really windy tonight so i hope it goes away because i was planning on going outside tomorrow
may 1, 1999
i bought a new pair of shoes yesterday and noticed one of those little white baggies of powdery chemical that they stick inside every pair of new shoes for some reason, and in really big letters it says DO NOT EAT. thank god for that! i think my trip next month for cannes is finally set and everything has been pretty much taken care of. i am really dreading the 11 or so hour flight to paris because i really hate flying. i'm not so much afraid of flying per se and that whole fiery death crashing thing as much as i'm afraid of FALLING OUT OF THE PLANE. i always feel like my chair is going to get ripped out of the floor or i'll get sucked out of a window or something at any given moment. i would really hate to get sucked out of a window. because then it's like a minute or so free-falling before you smack the ground and during that time you have nothing to do but think to yourself, "damn it! i just got sucked out of a window! what the hell??" and i bet there would be a lot of screaming involved and scary wooooshing noises. not a good way to die. that and drowning. i wouldn't like to drown. or get eaten by big angry wild animals. i guess that would be pretty bad too. or that whole burning alive thing. that would be just awful. ok i digress... so don doesn't like to fly too much. somebody needs to come in here and throw my computer out the window. don has not only discovered that he can sit on his ass while ordering 90 dollars worth of books through amazon (after visiting dallas again, we have a sudden urge to explore jfk conspiracy theories and join the spooky people with metal detectors at dealey plaza STILL LOOKING for spent bullet casings while deliberating over all of the autopsy photos and those ill-corresponding hole-in-the-head xrays), but he has also discovered mp3 files and now wastes mucho hours scouring the web for obscure b-sides or just those certain songs that he's just waaaaay too embarrassed to be seen actually purchasing. i think you all know what i mean. but i do have a question for all of you mp3 folks out there, the ones who are hosting all of the songs on your ftp thingies or whatnot. why are 95 percent of your servers perpetually offline? i mean, are you just trying to piss me off?? did you know that when bees die, they give off this death phermone that all of the other bees detect immediately, so they automatically grab his dead body and toss it out of the honeycomb? but if you take a living bee and douse him with that same chemical, all of the other bees will still react as if he were dead, despite his kicking and screaming, and toss him out of the honeycomb just the same? isn't that scary? don't you feel sometimes that you're covered with DEATH PHERMONE and people just don't understand?
g'night!
april 27, 1999 finally back from doing the whole national jury thing at the usa film festival in dallas. started unpacking but all of my suitcase clothes smell like airplane now. what is it about people who sit next to you on flights and feel all obligated to talk to you about nothing in particular just because you're THERE? is sharing that bit of space fair game for chatty time, mister friendly airplane neighbor? do i LOOK like i'm interested in nascar?? i can only politely grunt and nod with spacey eyes so much for three hours. and then you never know what to do when the plane lands and you're getting your things and you find yourself in that whole sudden obligation of awkward goodbyes with a complete stranger. do we hug or something now? anyway the short film judging process was a far more difficult undertaking than i had thought it would be. wasn't prepared for 10 hours of screening these things every day and still remaining conscious enough for intelligent debate. some of it got rather... "spirited," but happy to announce that no eyes were clawed out and no feces thrown. am also happy to announce passing the grand prize torch on to another animated film, a really great short by mark osborne, "more," that was also recently up for the oscar. also had a personal fave in the experimental film winner, "dirt," which was a beautifully dark and weird film these gems and others served as breaths of fresh air amid the maddeningly-identical dreck thanks in part to the 90's bandwagon hipness of being an "indie filmmaker," regardless of having any particular talent or intelligence. lots of people running around with cameras with nothing new to say. although some in the jury found it important to offer jury prizes as encouragement for a few young filmmakers, my proposal of a few well-placed "discouragement awards" was sadly voted down. hee hee! yes, don filled the role of the ANGRY BITTER JUROR. no, the shorts weren't all that bad. well some of them were. and lord were they bad. but others were pretty good. and still others were great. in fact, the student film entries were really strong (a student film took our fiction award) and there was some really amazing material in those pieces. but not those bad ones. cuz they was stinky. don really tired. my throat is really sore and i'm feeling itchy. i'll be back soon, perhaps to talk about this whole cannes thing. don april 13, 1999 hi everyone. mass apologies for taking so long in updating my little section. in the future, if i haven't written anything for a little while, this means things are either going really really well and i'm too busy to write, like now - don working on new project, don traveling, don swamped with meetings - or things are going really really bad - don in hospital, don fall off roof, don on fire. the pencil tests for "rejected" are making me laugh, which is always a really good sign. i have forgotten how the fine point sharpie ink fumes affect one's nervous system - it's much worse than caffeine and makes you just really frisky. but frisky with an incredibly short fuse. fun with confusing the friends. also make brain cells go. brain go slowly away. sharpie good. happy smells make good stuff go. you know? you know. brain go bye with good stuff and sometimes if you're good they let you watch tv. mmmmm, kittens. i wrapped up a scene with a flying piggy last week and am on the brink of finishing another, which is far beyond description. on top of that, i am in the middle of a wave of really great news that i'm not allowed to officially announce just yet, other than that single-handedly putting together 2,000 press releases is a giant pain in the ass, let me tell you. may have still more (and actually reportable) good news by tomorrow. we'll see. don really vague and spooky tonight, isn't he. i return to work. i promise to have a story to tell for next time, and will try and have it up before i take off for texas next week... don
so don the professional animator has run out of paper. i was in the middle of this scene and turned to the paper stack all expectantly to find it empty. paper gone! no more drawy for idiot! so i have time to tell a little story. around a year or so ago, i was knee deep in animating 'billy', and was doing the whole all-night animating life - where you eat meals out of whatever's-open fast food slots and basically stagger around blankly like a drooly person with ink all over his clothes. so i finished up a scene one night and set out at around 3 in the morning to do the old grocery shopping, with a little list quickly scribbled on some fast food napkin. it included all of those same things you always get every single time you go shopping, written in that usual instantly-recognizable-shopping-list-shorthand-code thing, where BAN is BANANAS and PT is PAPER TOWELS, you know? so i make the usual rounds in the store in all of those usual aisles when i come across a partially-illegible little anomaly on the bottom of the list, something i had no recollection of writing down or ever shopping for before. but there it was, casually scribbled down along with all the other items - MUNT. what the hell is MUNT? i had no idea. but apparently i was all out of it. MUNT didn't really look like an abbrieviation for anything else - and what could it be short for anyway - and it looked like i was interpreting all of the letters correctly. that's munt all right. so i stared at MUNT for a little while and then wandered a few of the aisles half-looking for some munt. maybe my present sleepy state of dizziness was the incorrect one and as soon as i saw the supermarket's munt display it would totally jog my memory. oh yeah, munt! of course i needed munt! this got frustrating really quickly. on one hand i may have written down MUNT when i was meaning something entirely else.. like STRAWBERRIES.. but maybe i was just not able to find the munt now that i was in the store. and uh, that's my story. i had a moral for you but i completely forgot it. oh yeah! a penny saved is a penny earned. there ya go don
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