The Rough Draft

Well boys and girls, it’s about that time for the year in review… Sort of.

It’s been the usual mish mash of success tempered with failure and as is the want with this fucking country it’s one step forward, one step back. Sometimes I despair as a Canadian of ever getting something of merit that people will want to see off the ground. Add to that the film landscape populated by idiots, fools, flim flam men (and women) and those who simply don’t have a fucking clue and it can all lead to bit more banging of your head against the wall than is good for you.

So, lets see… Had one major thing fall through, because the so called producer turned out to be twenty pounds of shit in a ten pound bag. Once again, didn’t listen to my gut and paid the price.

Yes, your gut is smarter than your brain… Scientific tests have proven it.

Had my first feature premiere. They gave me the written by credit (which is both a blessing and a curse) and then it became evident after the opening frames that they abandoned the majority of my script for either expeidiency or through sheer laziness. I’m going with the latter. So, yet another example of the project only being as good as the team. I guess the next part of the story is typical too. You bust your hump for somebody and do they consider you for their next project? Fuck no. An armored plate between your shoulder blades is pretty much a requirement in this industry. But as they say, that is the biz, so I really can’t have too many bad feelings about that. The way I see it they only get to fuck up one of my scripts (unless they get back to me with a bigger cheque-grin).

On the positive side… The episodes I penned for Creepy Canada on OLN were a different side of life. The pace was hectic but the work was interesting. I’m hoping they get picked up for another season as they pay promptly. So look out for, “Alien Abduction in Kelowna,” and, “Incident at Nordegg Mine,” to air in January. They will be followed by, “The Hamilton Customs House,” and “The Headless Hooker of Montreal,” in February. I mean how can you not read those titles and smile?

In the meantime, we’re going for feature funding on a low budget feature written by a friend of mine and directed by another (acomplished) friend. We’ve made a compact to cut out all of the usual petty personal bullshit that seems to go along with so much of this industry. We know exactly why were all in this together… Revenge.

We’re out show the fuckwits and tossers (yeah, you know who you are) how to do it properly and sanely. I want the only drama to be happening in front of the camera. So right now, I’m strapping on my armor, sharpening my weapons and getting my shit wired tight before charging into the fray. I doubt I’ll make many friends in the coming months but I will make allies and to those who would stand in our way, think twice about it.

We’re hungry.

Luck to all in the new year.

Ask anybody who knows me, I’m an avid paintballer. I’ve been playing for about thirteen years now. This makes me (according to the majority of the younger players) ancient. This also leads to me teaching them that, “Old age and treachery will beat youth and enthusiasm.” A lesson I might add they do not always enjoy learning but then who likes to be sent off the field from a hit by a six foot two, two hundred and forty pound individual wearing a bright red shirt with a demon on it? I mean you should be able to see a guy dressed like that no problem right? Somebody that big, he’s got to be slow right? A guy that age, he shouldn’t be able to see too good, right? These are of course all misconceptions. Of course the players sitting in the dead zone already know that.

Personally I don’t like to judge a player until I’ve seen him or her on the field through a few games. You get a pretty good idea if they like to camp in one spot or if they make rash choices of where to move to, if they’ll stick and shoot it out or tuck and run to better cover. In other words, their style of play will reveal their inner character. Their gender simply won’t enter into the equation.

Which is why it gets a bit tedious to listen to some of the younger male players blathering on about how it’s a guys sport and girls simply can’t cut it. Which as we know it patent bull. Of course these are the same people who invariably rely on the price of their marker and not the skill in their game. They also happen to be the type of player I enjoy sending off the field the most.

I introduced my daughter to the sport about a year ago. She asked to go out and play for her birthday. At that time due to the pressures of life I hadn’t played for about three years. I dusted off my gear and off we went. We both had a blast and I decided to make it a monthly thing that we do together. Sure it’s not cheap, but I don’t smoke or play Golf so I figure it all works out in the end.

Kathleen has a natural feel for the game. She reads the field pretty well and knows when to stick and when to cut and run. Of course there were a few lessons learned along the way about how and how not to take on a bunker and when I brought her back her own marker from a business trip (so she wouldn’t have to rent) her game upped itself dramatically. Now when we play I know I can depend on her to take and hold her section of the field (she likes to play left) and if she’s on the other team, I count her as a threat, the players that don’t, leave the field well marked (she’s damned accurate with that marker of hers). And she always likes to seek them out after the match to let them know they were sent off by a girl. It makes up for the crap they were spouting off earlier in the dead zone about how girls can’t shoot.

I watched her go head to head with a guy last week and take him out to win the game. It was a proud moment. So here it is. Paintball is an inclusive sport, regardless of age, sex or gender. Everybody can play paintball! Wait till you see their game before you judge. And if you just can’t bring yourself to accept it remember this, any player can improve with practice but you’ll still be an asshole.

I actually wrote this over a month ago but just hadn’t had the time to go back and give it a brush up. It’s a bit of a rant but that’s winter for you.

Steve

This last weekend I took my son to the Toronto Zoo. Which as zoos go is a good day if you’re moving fast or a good three days if you’re moving slow. My son Colin is Autistic, so it’s the fast track all of the way. Some people more melodramatic than me would say he suffers from Autism but I’d say they need to get out and have a bit more of a life. Even though he’s for the most part non verbal, he manages to get his point across by either dragging you to what he wants or bringing it to you. Oh and when he actually does want a specific thing, he will learn its proper name and then proceed to bring you every advertisement in sight and repeat over and over (while pointing) the name and or release date of the thing he would like.

But I digress, the Zoo was my idea. I’ve been trying to go all summer with my family but it turned out that it was just going to be me and Colin. Now we live in Mississauga and the Zoo is squarely in Scarborough, which means you’ve got to drive across all of the bottom part of Toronto to get there. No problem, Colin enjoys a good drive. Me, not so much.

We arrive at the zoo and after I figure out which is the closest of their huge parking lots (I bet this place is a huge blast in Summer) to the entrance off we go. The two women in front of us were bitching mightily about how expensive it was to go to the zoo ($19.00per person if you’re interested) and that she’d seen on the zoo’s webpage it was only $12.00 to get in. Now I had looked at the website too and I knew it was going to be a $38.00 day at the very least (but it’s still cheaper than Playdium) so had come prepared with cash. Anyway, they reluctantly paid and went on in. Now Colin and I step up to the kiosk and I hand over two twenties.

Colin says, “Hello.” To the young guy behind the counter and he says to me…

“We have a special rate for people in your situation.”

“My situation?” Says I. “That’s a very diplomatic way of putting things. It’s okay, my son is handicapped. I don’t mind hearing it.”

He looks at the two receding women, “Well, some people are a bit sensitive.” He then hands me back one of my twenties and another ten. “So your son gets in for half price and you get in for free.”

Now this does strike me as a bit odd. Shouldn’t I the able bodied individual with all of my faculties (such as they are) be the one to pay half price while my son gets in for free? But no matter, I’m thirty bucks to the good… Sweet deal! This is way better than a handicapped parking sticker. *My wife later explained that it has to do with the child care worker and the funding etc. She’s much smarter than me when it comes to these money things.

So off we go, and after some initial arguing about buying a bottle of Coke from one of the numerous and very handy pop vending machines, which involved me actually turning out my pockets to show I really didn’t have any change, we hit the park proper.

Now the zoo is broken up into different zones. These represent the biodiversity of our globe. The Tiger’s outdoor enclosure was huge and taught me a very valuable lesson. Tigers are virtually invisible when they are surrounded by the fall foliage of Canada. So there’s a good chance there’s going to be an escaped Tiger story somewhere in the future and I’m betting you can figure out what time of year the Tiger escapes in.

But it’s the apes and monkeys you’ve been waiting for. I feel very sorry for the Gorillas. They’re intelligent enough to know that they’re basically in a crap situation. The one male Gorilla I observed was sitting in such a way in his enclosure that his back was to the door and for the most part you couldn’t see him at all. Sort of a general, “Yeah I’m here but I’ll be fucked if you get to look at me.” Imagine being in prison and the warden organizes tours round the clock, we’d do the same thing. The female Gorilla in the other enclosure with her two young just sat there like with her head in her hands like she didn’t know where the money to pay the heating bill was going to come from. While her kids as kids do played on the rope swings. Which is why monkeys are more fun. They’re not self aware, like the apes. As long as they’ve got plenty of food, and a lack of predators, they’re good to go. The Gorillas look like they know their lot and they know who put them there and we feel guilty, as we should and if we’d stop cutting down their habitat and using their meat and sexual organs for stupid aphrodisiacs that don’t work (and I’m including all animals that we do this sort of shit to here) maybe, we’d learn more from them in the wild than locked up in an enclosure.

But back once again to the monkeys. I have in the past compared humans to monkeys and to apes. “We’re just monkeys with guns,” or “apes with digital watches.” The truth is, this is disingenuous to these two species (though Dr. Jane Goodall. Feels if we taught Chimps how to use and maintain guns, they’d use them to full advantage).

Apes and to some extent monkeys live within a social compact that sort of states, “We’re all in this together.” Sure there are dominant members of these groups but everybody gets their share and if one is hurt, the group tries to take care of the individual until they either die or get better. They don’t leave them behind, they don’t shun them from the community, they don’t place ridiculous parameters of behavior on them either. That’s a human thing. So I’m sorry I compared us to apes and monkeys, it does them no favors.

Now comes a bit of a rant.

Recently I was listening to a professor talk about his latest book on Global Climate change. “It’s only a couple of degrees,” he said. “It’s no big deal.” On the surface you go sure, he’s right, a couple of degrees is no big deal. Until you look at the really big picture. Take that two degrees Celsius and break it down to the amount of energy required to raise a liter of water by those two degrees and you get two thousand calories. Now that’s the energy required to raise an area 20cm x 20cm x 20cm two degrees. About two Big Macs or four really good candy bars. Now that’s also a good sized fish bowl one you can hold in your hands for a few minutes. It’ll get heavy though, it weighs two kilos or about four and a half pounds. Now multiply that by the area of the Caribbean Ocean or the Atlantic or the Pacific. How many Big Macs and Candy bars are we talking about now?

Right now, the Florida and Louisiana coastlines are forever changed by the impact of a series of category four and five hurricanes. The coral reefs in the Caribbean are being bleached out because of the high water temperatures there and we ran out of letters in the alphabet in which to name hurricanes and had to go into the Greek alphabet to keep up. All of that being said, how much of a FUCKING THEORY do you think global warming is now? What? Do we need to be treading water before we do anything here? Sure Kyoto isn’t the be all and end all in regards to the problem but it’s a start and if our cousins to the south can pull their collective heads out of their asses for a few minutes, maybe they can wake up and get a move on. Or they can just keep on down the same old path and act all surprised when going to the beach means vacationing in Iowa.

In the immortal words of Bill Cosby… “How long can you tread water.”