Had a freaky-weird experience last night…

I happened to glance out the window while Beth and I were tucking Zoe in bed and I saw a duck in the street. The duck was just standing there, a few feet out from the curb, just loitering in the intersection. I recognized it as our neighbor’s duck (there’s a story for another entry there), but it was still weird to see a duck in the road.

Weirder still, there was a car stopped next to it. Not really parked, more like it was just … stopped … sort of halfway through the intersection. At first I thought the driver side had been caved in in an accident, but then I realized that it was just the driver door standing wide open. So that was double weird: a duck in the road, and parked next to it a car with the door open but no driver.

I looked out the window to see what was going on. Not much, really: just a duck standing around in the street and an empty car stopped partway into the intersection with the driver side door open. Oh, and a grey cat walking by, also in the street. It was surreal. Something was just not right about this situation (obviously), so I went outside to investigate.

I opened the front door and stepped out to find a disheveled middle-aged man on my front lawn, sneaking up on Zoe’s cat Sparkle, who was sitting calmly at the foot of the front steps. My What The Fuck meter pegged itself in the red.

Let me digress for a moment and try to impress upon you just how surreal this scene was.

First, the car stopped in the street. That was just weird. It was just there, parked partway through the intersection, as though someone were driving along and then just suddenly stopped for no reason and got out, leaving the door open. I had the visceral impression that the driver had just disappeared, been called up by The Rapture or something. Weird.

Secondly, the duck. That was fucking weird. It wasn’t weird that there was a duck there in the first place, because our neighbors have ducks in their front yard wading pool (which is weird, but like I said, it’s a story for another entry), what was really weird was that A) the duck was outside their fence and standing in the street, and B) the fucking duck was just standing there in the street. It was standing about five feet away from the curb, on the other side of the car, and about five feet behind it. And it was just standing there, stock-still, almost at attention. Really weird.

Thirdly, the grey cat. Not mine, dunno whose it was, I’ve never seen it before. It ambled into view from behind the car, just sauntering its way across the street, paying no attention to the car or the duck, and the angle from which it appeared made it seem almost as though it had apparated into being in mid-stride. Really, really weird.

So I’ve got all this weirdness going on as I open the front door: Raptured car, at-attention duck, magic cat, all going on in the middle of the intersection in the harsh sodium glare of the streetlamp. And then I’ve got Freak Boy in my front yard.

I stepped out the door and in the same glance noted Sparkle sitting calmly on our walkway, and then Freak Boy on the lawn a few yards away sort of hunched over and creeping up on her.

What’s going on out here? I said.

I don’t remember his exact words, but they added to the surreality of the scene. He said that he lived “down the street,” that “the two black cats were playing with the bird” and that he was “trying to catch the black cat because I’m looking for a cat. I need a cat. Do you know if there are any stray cats around here? Do you know if anyone has any kittens?” I don’t remember his exact words but it was clear that he wanted a cat — why, I don’t know. And maybe don’t want to know.

My mental gears were already grinding from the duck and the car and cat and the surprise of finding this clown in my front yard, and this latest just made my brain short-circuit. My instinctive reaction should have been — under less confusing circumstances would have been — to run this weird motherfucker off with a quickness. I should have frog-marched his ass back to his car, tossed him into it, told him if I ever saw him again I would kick his ass, and that I would track him down if any of my cats ever went missing. Instead I sputtered something about “the black cat is mine, the duck belongs to the neighbors, and there aren’t any stray cats around here.”

He wandered back to his car while I stood there watching him. He got in, made a very sketchy U-turn, and drove slowly back down the street in the direction he’d said he lived. And that was the end of it. Or was it?

The more I think about it, the more I am convinced that he didn’t just happen to drive by and stop at random.

Consider this: Let’s imagine he was legitimately driving by when he stopped, maybe he was going to 7-11 for cigarettes. Then he sees two cats “playing” with a duck in the street. He stops, gets out, skulks around and acts like a fucking weirdo until a homeowner confronts him. Busted, he gets back into this car to leave.

The key question: Which way does he go?

He’s getting cigarettes, remember? So wouldn’t he get back in the car, start it up, and continue driving the way he was going when he stopped, keep on going for his smokes? Why the fuck would he make a U-turn that requires him to reverse-drive-reverse-drive his way through a 5-point turn and then go back in the direction of “home”? That just don’t add up.

I think maybe he came to my corner specifically looking for a cat. I think I just happened to come outside and interrupted him in mid-catnap. I also think maybe he’ll be back.

So tonight, when I get home from work, I’m going driving through the neighborhood until I find this clown’s car. And when I do, we’re going to have us a little talk. He’s not going to want a cat when I’m finished with him. At all.

Dear Starbucks Addicts,

Like you, I need my caffeine fix in the morning. Before I leave the house, I brew myself a cup of coffee. I grind a scoop of beans in my coffee grinder and put them in a paper filter suspended over an empty coffee mug. As I’m doing this, I have a kettle of tap water boiling on the stove. When the kettle starts whistling at me I pour hot water over the coffee grounds and allow it to drip through until the cup is filled. Then I drink it. Then I wipe my ass with a five dollar bill and throw it away.

So I’m just like you. But with a freshly wiped ass.

I’ve had time to reconsider and cool off and I now regret my comments in my last entry. I was a little hot and I let myself speak a little too soon and I suppose I didn’t really mean what I said after all. I don’t want to burn my house down, not really.

I wouldn’t miss the garage much, though. Yeah, I could lose that, easy. Hmm… How could I lure all the animals in there at once?

This will take some planning…

I had a moment of clarity just now, the kind where you’re having a conversation and you blurt out something that crystalizes how you feel and you didn’t know you felt that way until you said it. I was telling my coworker Gavin about how much I enjoyed stepping out of the shower and into a pile of fresh dog puke this morning when I said:

I hate all my animals. I want them to die. I wish my house would burn down with them trapped inside.

Clearly, I’m having pet issues right now. And maybe house issues, too.

You can’t throw a dead fish without hitting a sushi bar in this town. That’s not such a bad thing, since both Beth and I like sushi.

Lately, we’ve been going out for sushi about once a week (not a cheap habit), and our preferred restaurant is Teru Sushi. Teru Sushi is also popular among the celebrity set. It seems like every time we’re in there we see someone who looks vaguely familar in a ER walk-on role kind of way, and occasionally we see people who are familiar in a “holy shit, look who that is!” kind of way.

For example, a few years ago we had sushi with Captain Kirk. Well, maybe not with him, but William Shatner was definitely at the next table, and he was telling his self-absorbed stories loudly enough that we felt like we were part of his party. And his dinner companions, boy, they were lapping it up. It was obvious that they were there needing him to agree to do something for them, and they were grinning and nodding up a storm as he went on … and on … and on … and on about his trip to Mexico … and his home remodeling … and his trip to Mexico… But the vibe I got was that they weren’t going to be getting what they wanted — but the Captain would: an audience.

Saturday night, we saw another big celeb there: Paul Stanley, lead singer of KISS. That was pretty cool. He and his stick-thin girlfriend sat next to us at the bar and we exchanged pleasantries about the cucumber roll. I had no idea who he was at the time, but he looked vaguely familiar, and I overheard (eavesdropped) enough of his conversation to figure out that he was about to go to Australia and then Tokyo on tour. That put me on the musician path, and then when he and I made full-on eye contact I knew who he was. He ordered toro sashimi, in case you’re wondering.

That’s it. I just wanted to do some namedropping. And recommend a good sushi restaurant. But mainly just namedrop.

Fuck. I literally just finished posting that last entry, took two steps out of my office, and encountered Gable the cat squatting in a basket of laundry looking … suspicious.

Because he was fucking pissing on it!

That’s it. I’m looking up kitten recipes right now.

We have waaaay too many damned pets around here. We have:

• Two dogs: Billy and Suki
• Four cats: Natasha, Gable, March, and Sparkle
• Two fishtanks: one tropical, which is overrun with algae and is dying a slow death, the other a freshwater bowl with a googly-eyed goldfish

Like I said, we have way too many damned pets around here. And we recently dodged a furry pet-shaped bullet from my close personal co-worker Gavin, who had to give up his two cats and a dog when he moved and I insanely offered to take the cats as his “absolute last resort” … and he almost took me up on it. Whew.

So I’ve been approaching this animal population thing with a MacArthuresque strategy, fighting a war of attrition by trying to limit the influx of new pets while I wait for the existing ones to die. It’s maybe a little heartless to look at it that way, but it’s really just simple math, and besides: we have waaaay too many damned pets around here.

So you can perhaps guess how thrilled I was when Beth sprang a bit of news on me over dinner last night: Sparkle the cat is pregnant.

Fucking hell.

All our animals are “fixed” … except Sparkle. She was a wee little kitten when we got her (as a replacement for Zoe’s favorite cat Alice, who was hit by a car, and don’t even get me started on how that doesn’t fit in with the whole attrition thing) and she was too young to be spayed, so we put it off until she was old enough. And then someone — and I’m not naming names here, but I’m certainly looking hard in the direction of the other adult in the household who brought Sparkle home in the first place — kinda sorta never got around to taking care of that. And now the damned cat is pregnant.

I’m no math wiz, but I’m pretty sure this sort of thing doesn’t add up to fewer pets. We maybe have a battleground typo thing going on here — it’s supposed to be a war of attrition, not addition.

I’m pleased to report that today, March 24, I finally took our Christmas tree down.

It was time.

My dog Billy must surely think his name is “Move!”

Back in November, I gave one of my sitcom specs to an Executive Producer on Will & Grace. This was a re-write based on notes she had given me on an early draft, at which point she had said she’d “give it to the guys” after I punched it up. Well, I finally heard back from her, and the bottom line is that I ain’t quitting my day job.

Here’s a transcript of the voicemail she left me:

Chuck. It’s (Executive Producer). Sorry it took me a couple of days to get back to you. Umm… I read your script. And I think you did a GRRREAT job. Uh — It’s really funny. And really, uh… great. Um. So… You probably want to know what I think you should do next. Call me. And, uh, we’ll… talk.

She loved it, can’t you tell? Ha.

I “probably want to know what she thinks I should do next”? Uh, no, she was supposed to say “I’m giving it to the showrunner and we’ll see what he says.” It was pretty clear from the message and her tone of voice that this was a blow-off.

When I finally got her on the phone about a week later, that’s exactly what it was. Her big advice was to “Get an agent.” Duh. I was giving her the script to bypass the agent routine — and she knew it. And when I pointed out that at age 41 it was unlikely any sitcom would be interested in me even if I came in through an agent, she suggested that I ask the agent (that I don’t have) to look into getting me rewrite work for features. I didn’t bother pointing out that those assignments go to the David Koepp‘s of the world because very few film producers are going to be interested in having their multi-million dollar movies rewritten by an unproduced newbie writer. What would be the point? She was blowing me off as nicely as she could.

So that’s it, that’s the stake in the heart of my TV writing dreams — again. I had already killed them once a few years ago, but they reanimated and zombified themselves with this producer. Now they’re dead again, but it doesn’t hurt as much this time — I already said goodbye once.

This time around was more like the body twitching and you think for a second “Wait, it’s not dead yet!” — and then the corpse farts. It stinks, but it confirms what you already knew: it’s over.