deeplyshallow // come twirl with me

come twirl with me

Awake early this morning, before the sun came up. My stomach is a mess, maybe a little like the rest of me. I stayed warm under the covers, wrapping them around me — like a burrito, wink-nudge — to fend off the chill coming through the window. I was shaking a little bit. Still am. Made a bowl of chicken soup to try to settle my guts, so there I am, six in the morning, eating chicken soup and watching Clean and Sober. There’s a scene where Michael Keaton is in detox and he rolls out of bed in the middle of the night and crawls toward the bathroom but doesn’t make it, and the fake vomit is maybe the chunkiest I have ever seen in a movie, nothing like the oatmealish splashes that are so common these days. Back in the eighties they had their moments, man, with these gritty make-you-really-feel-it drugs-and-alkie flicks, the Bright Lights, Big City thing, the Less Than Zero kinda thing. Of course, their drug dealers were all named Spence and Skip and Petey. Harsh realism only goes so far, I guess. Less Than Zero, that’s the one where Robert Downey, Jr., dies in the car at the end, right, while Andrew McCarthy drives him into the sunset? I just now realized that this is the exact same ending as Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, which I ought to buy because man I liked that movie. So there you go: I’ve spoiled two movies for you that, if you haven’t seen by now, you probably weren’t going to anyway.

Major run-ons here today.

In ninety minutes I’m driving to Los Osos, going for a hike with a few people I work with. Do I look like I feel up to a hike? I am not up to a hike. Out last night with these same people and a few more and fell asleep after the second drink and woke up in time for a couple more. That’s not really my style, and yet it was exactly what I needed. I am enjoying a little company these days, and the sheer distraction of just doing something. Already had plans for the weekend but they weren’t all that appealing to me, so I’ll squeeze them into tomorrow, maybe. Or maybe I’ll blow them off.

Yesterday I hauled my gym bag to work, and instead of going to lunch, I took a cycling class. They call it ’spinning’, and until recently I had no idea what that meant. I always imagined a big studio full of girls in leotard, twirling in elated circles, kind of like SaNDeE* in L.A. Story. I figured that couldn’t be it, really, but I never asked. I preferred my interpretation. Anyway, for those of you who don’t know, spinning is a pressure chamber: you go inside and they open the jets and flood the room with peer pressure. There are rows of exercise bikes that are more complicated than the rest of the gym’s equipment, with weird stirrups and too many adjustments, etc. So you strap yourself in, and then you pedal these bikes while the iTunes playlist from hell Pumps You Up. Oh, and there’s a butch-and-angry instructor at the front of the class, effortlessly pounding her own cycle, with a headset boom mike to her lips, yelling things like, “Here comes the mountain! Increase your resistance! Here’s your pace: onetwoonetwoonetwoonetwo! GO GO GO GO GO!” Look, I’ve been hitting the gym a lot lately, and all I ever do is cycle, but this class kicked my ass. No less than nine people at work warned me not to risk it, that it would kill me, but I went anyway. The girls from work who came along made it look ridiculously easy, and me, I was a movie montage mess. You know the scene I mean, where you’ve got some out-of-shape dude training like a madman every second of the day so he can win the prize, yeah? Cutting Edge, D.B. Sweeney, that was me. Except with moppier hair and sweat going everywhere. My legs are burning even this morning. And I’m going hiking. Go figure.

But it’s all okay, because today I came within a single pound of my weight-loss goal. Today I am 186 lbs, which I have not been since, oh, 1999. I’ve been working at this for three months, and I’ve dropped a total of forty-four pounds. Not half bad, eh? I’m even thinking of aiming a little lower. My ideal weight, for my height — which is six feet even, even though a couple of people I work with are convinced I’m 6′4″ (I wish; I’d love to tower over everybody like that) — is 175, I think. It’s doable. But I’m going to have to shift the routine a bit; my eating habits have been fiercely regimented, and I’m beginning to feel the effects, some dizziness and odd disconnectedness.

I am still writing this post mostly because I don’t want to finish watching Clean and Sober before I go on this hike. I don’t want to see any more Campbell’s Chunky Vomit. But by the way, whatever happened to Michael Keaton? I haven’t seen Game 6, which is the last thing I think he’s released, but man, this guy used to be one of those upper-echelon character actors. Scored a blow for underappreciated supporting actors everywhere when he landed Batman way back when. But since then, what? Well, there was My Life, which, hey, come on, you know you all watch the scene where he’s lying in his home hospital bed, cancer-ridden and almost wasted away, and his elderly father, who has been an asshole to his son his whole life, sits beside him and gently shaves his son’s face — you know you all watch that scene and bawl like little boys who got their swing stolen on the playground. But after My Life, what? Multiplicity? Fuck that shit. Jack Frost? Some teen comedy about a President’s daughter, I think, starring Disposable Girl of the Moment? Or maybe that was the one with Katie Holmes. I don’t remember. Weren’t there two President’s-daughter movies at the same time?

Hollywood’s got problems in this department. Competing films happen all the time. Remember the summer of, oh, what was it, 1997? when Dante’s Peak and Volcano went head-to-head? Or a few years later: Deep Impact, Armageddon? There are always big high-concept movies being developed too quickly because some other director is doing the same damned movie — Oliver Stone rushed the hell out of Alexander because Baz Luhrmann was working on an Alexander the Great picture, too, and Luhrmann’s had DiCaprio where all Stone could get was Colin ‘They Don’t Know I Suck Yet’ Farrell. Remember just last year, when Capote slayed the critics and everybody was happy? Dude, our new James Bond is playing Perry Smith in a new Capote movie that is based on the exact same time in Capote’s life. So basically, you could rewatch Capote with the sound off and just hold up little paper cutouts of Daniel Craig’s face over the screen and do some voices, and you could totally check Infamous (that is what the movie is called) off of your list. Truman Capote is played by some P.S. Hoffman knockoff named Toby Jones. Know who that is? Course you do! He provided the voice of that Dobby character in the Harry Potter flicks.

Yawn, yawn, yawn. Why am I going hiking today? And so early in the a.m., no less?

It just hit me: what if writing for this web site is the only lasting writing that I ever do? What if none of my books ever pan out, what if Eleanor is a pipe dream, what if I never sell another short story, etc.? That wouldn’t be so bad, would it? I have put eight years of my life into this site, and at least half of that hasn’t gotten blown up in hard drive crashes. Will I still post here when I am thirty-five? Will there be a few hundred thousand first-generation bloggers still clicking the publish button when they’re in their sixties? Maybe I will have learned how to stick with a topic by then. Because come on: there are really six or seven different posts crammed into this single entry. If I were smart, I’d have saved some of this shit for later, and I could take a few days off. If I were smart.