This costume looked more menacing in the catalogue

I haven’t made a movie in xtranormal for a long time, so I thought I should give it a go. But I didn’t have any idea what I should write about. So I just sat down and started typing random dialogue. It’s not the best, but it’s not the worst, so I decided to keep it.  Here it is:

I was Trying to Avoid a Squirrel

I thought I would write about Larry O’Donnell, my roommate during my first freshman year in college (that’s not his real name). I went to a college that required us to live on campus for the first year (unless you’re a local and your family lives in town).

So, Larry O’Donnell was a local, but he decided to live on campus, to get the full college experience. And he already had a reputation. He wanted to be an extreme skier (I went to college near a ski town. Yes, I live in Miami, but I am a good skiier. I’m full of interesting contradictions. Just ask my wife).

So Larry’s ambition was to earn a living by skiing of cliff tops, and down glaciers, and make money by filming it and making movies and distributing the movies to various outlets for other crazy people. This was before Jackass, which basically raised the bar so high for making money from this kind of behavior that you can only make a living from it by – strange as it sounds – by being a complete jackass.

But this was before the success of Jackass, so even though Larry was only half jackass, he was, I think, well on his way to achieving his dream of being an extreme skier. Or of being something extreme. His niche was to only halfway succeed, so he might have paved a new path for people in this industry.

I say he was already well on his way because, on the first day I moved in, he mentioned that he had tried to jump the highway on his skis, and eventually succeeded, but on the first try, he missed. Being normal (in comparison), I naturally didn’t believe him. He was well prepared for people not believing him, and he happened to have a tape of the attempt, which he popped into the machine. Sure enough, there he was on the top of a hill which overlooked the highway.

He skied down the hill (in a tuck, no less), went of a rickety ramp that had probably taken three minutes to build, and flew most of the way over the highway. He landed on the furthest lane, bounced, and, fortunately, had enough momentum to go hurling off the other side into the hill below, barely avoiding the oncoming Mac truck. The camera man, a fellow “extreme skier,” who I would meet a few months later, was laughing so hard it was difficult to watch Larry tumbling down the far hill without getting motion sickness. But he eventually came to a stop.

At this point, Larry stopped the tape to point out that “that really hurt.” I nodded in agreement as he started up the tape again, to show the second try, in which he got all the way over the highway and landed successfully. He explained that the angle of the ramp on the first try was to steep, which had blunted his momentum. He also wondered out loud why people never seemed as interested in the successful jump as the failed attempt. I answered by asking if I would watch the failed attempt again.

Then, there was his habit of climbing in through the window instead of using the front door. This wouldn’t be so bad, except that our dorm room was on the fourth floor. So, on the day’s he didn’t have books with him, or something else to prevent a good climb, he would take the window. He got pretty good at climbing, until one day, when he was trying to open the window wide enough to slip in, and he lost his balance, and fell backwards to the ground. That would simply be another “don’t be a jackass” story, except that there were a few staff offices on the second floor below.

The Director of the dorm looked out her window just in time to see Larry float past her window with, as she later described it (and at first I thought she was just embellishing the story, but now that I reflect on it, knowing Larry, it was true) an expression like “hey, have you seen my keys?” She poked her head out the window to follow his descent, and watched as he bounced off the bike rack below, and lay on the ground, moaning.

In the aftermath of these types of failed attempts at extreme sports, I would rush up to him to see if he was okay. The conversation usually went something like this:

“Are you okay? Can you wiggle your toes?” I would ask, rushing to him.

“That really hurt, man.”

“I should think so.”

“Do you think these chicks staring at us want to talk to me?”

Larry had some trouble with “chicks,” because of his extreme nature. The first and only woman I ever saw him successfully pick up was a girl at the skating rink. She was standing on the other side of the glass, talking to a friend, when he came hurling towards her (apparently he had never been on ice skates until then, although he informed me “the principles of physics are the same as being on a skate board.”) and slammed into the wall, and smacked his head into the glass hard enough that the girl let out a squeak of fear.

She rushed onto the ice, coming to his side. He was so stunned by the impact that his normal extreme fear of women didn’t surface, and instead of stuttering and making rude comments, he actually seemed charming in a “owe, that hurts, could you hold me?” kind of way. But any relationship based on one party being only half conscious is doomed to failure. I was there when he called her, and he had a weird look on his face when he hung up.

“How did it go?”

“She said if I called her again, she would call the campus police.”

Larry spent a lot of time attracting – and then repelling – women who were fascinated by his… Larryness.

For example, the party we went to where he knocked himself out by accidentally bashing his head into the ceiling. It was a hip-hop house party. He started dancing, and got into a trance, into the zone that only Larry can get into.

Everyone stopped dancing and formed a circle around him. They were fascinated by his wild gyrations. He was bouncing up and down. He moved his hips in wide circles. His shoulders did painful looking jerking motions. It was quite amazing, especially since his eyes were closed and he kept coming really close to the coffee table but never actually stepped on it. A couple brave women tried to dance with him, but he ran into the back of one, sending her flying, and hit the other in the shoulder (she ducked out before it became her face).

But he didn’t notice. He was Larry, the music was good, and he was in the zone. Then, he started jumping to the rhythm of the song. Swing left, swing right, and jump. Then again, then again, each time jumping higher. The crowd was cheering each jump, although I doubt he heard us. Then, he jumped high enough that he hit his head on the ceiling. The ceiling was concrete. He bashed into it so hard, that he was unconscious before he hit the floor. There he was, just lying unconscious.

The crowd stopped cheering. Some people laughed. We all looked at each other. He hadn’t made any friends, because as soon as we entered the party he had made a b-line for the living room (which was serving as the dance floor) and started dancing. So the crowd just stepped over him, and everyone went back to dancing. I prodded him, slightly worried but not THAT worried because, after all, it was Larry. He woke up, put his hand to his head, and walked off. I saw him the next morning playing speed chess (badly) on the computer. “The nurse said I probably got a concussion last night. Man, what a party.” I had to put up with his alarm going off every three hours because he had read somewhere that you aren’t supposed to sleep for too long when you have a concussion.

“Why don’t you go to the doctor?”

“The emergency room nurses know me pretty well. I don’t want to bother the doctor with minor stuff.”

Then there was the time he was on his bike, and grabbed onto the back of a car that went onto the highway, with him hold onto it (like a jackass). Or when he built a home made bungee chord, and hung it from a large tree in the courtyard. The tree branch broke on the second try, and he smacked right into the ground.

“I should have chosen a stronger branch,” he explained to me.

But he also was an aspiring engineer. He built a contraption that was hooked up to three car batteries, and asked me if I wanted to watch him vaporize a steel wire. I told him no, but he took that as a yes, put on a heavy smock and protective goggles (he didn’t offer me any), and pressed the two cables together. The wire was vaporized, but it also blew out the window. “That will make it easier to climb through.” He said, lamely.

He built a hydraulic system for his bed. It would automatically raise to the ceiling, so it would be out of the way when not in use. The second woman I ever saw (briefly) show interest in him sat on the bed.

“I heard that you do wild things on here,” she said. But Larry, being Larry, didn’t get the double entendre.

“Yeah, check it out,” he said, and rushed to the other side of the room to throw the lever. The bed shot up to the ceiling, with the poor woman, shrieking, stuck on the bed for the launch towards the ceiling. Fortunately for her, he had built it with about ten inches between the bed and the ceiling. By lying flat, she was able to avoid being squished.

But Larry had hit the lever with such enthusiasm that the bed kept pumping up, falling a few feet, pumping up, falling, all the while the woman screaming “stop it, let me off here. Stop this thing.” Finally, Larry grabbed a lead pipe (I’m not sure why he had a led pipe laying around, but he did) and used it to hammer away at the hose, which caused it to loose hydraulic pressure. The bed fell to the floor.

The woman sprang from the bed, straightened her dress, and ran out the room.

After that first freshman year, I saw him a few times. Last I heard, he was a recluse in the mountains, making iron sculptures. He makes more money, I heard, by charging people to watch him do the sculptures than from selling the sculptures themselves.

Well, that goes to show you, there is always someone interesting. And everyone’s got a niche in life.

Another Movie I did with using xtranormal’s website. I wrote the dialogue myself. So, I have that going for me…

I still haven’t gotten over the novelty of this.

Wear My Jammies!

How to form a cult in 6 easy steps:

Cult leaders have a sketchy history. Most of them have a good run for a while, then it all ends in chaos and mayham, or insurmountable shame. Or, if they really go crazy about it, probably both. If this sounds like fun to you, I came up with 6 easy steps.

Step 1: Cultivate an attitude that says “I am going to see how far I can take this until it all blows up in my face.” This is the foundational characteristic. It separates the true cult leaders from, say, a motivational speaker, or a quirky megachurch pastor.

You have to be willing to suggest totally ridulous and bizarre things, just to see if people will believe you, and then when they believe you, see if you can really push it over the cliff by asking them for money. If, for example, it seems like fun to try convincing people that the universe was created by an infinite number of celestial trouts swimming through the primordial mist thereby sparking the big wake – which is the universe – then you are off to a good start.

Step 2: Develop some personality quirk that only a cult leader or an overpaid athlete can get away with. There is an interesting phenomonon I like to call the hit or hug principal. Most people either want to hit or hug people who are different than the norm. The trick, if you’re different, is to develop the skill of convincing them to do the latter.

For example, the very same behavior that made William Faulkner a complete jackass at cocktail parties (ever try to have a conversation with a cubist? It’s like trying to understand your 14 year old niece’s text messages by reading every third letter, backwards) also made him one of the greatest American writers of all time. Why? Because he put it on paper and convinced a publishing company to use their overdeveloped marketing skills to convince everyone to hug him. Metaphorically speaking.

The same thing holds true if you are going to lead a cult. If you are hopelessly normal, then fake it. Practice faking a nasty tick in the mirror. Or always go out in public wearing the same pair of jammees. Or get a crazy beard and goofy hat, and never take it off.

Step 3: Get a compound. This is another thing that separates the motivational speakers from the cult leaders. If you travel from place to place, giving speaches about what people should think, and why they should give you money, then you aren’t a cult leader. You may eventually become a cult leader. But not until you start making them come to you.

Step 4: Demand that you followers do outrageous things. This is where it gets dangerous, and it’s where a lot of cult leaders go wrong. I recomend outrageous things that aren’t actually dangerous. In fact, this is what separates the cult leaders who die rich from old age (and gluttony) from the cult leaders who die young and painfully and whose followers suddenly realize “damn, why was I following that nut? He never changed his jamees once!”

For example, you might demand that your followers memorize the Articles of Confederation. If they succeed, then tell them the trouts won’t love them unless they also translate it into an invented language like Klingon or Esperanto.

Step 5: Get some intelligent yet loyal disciples. At some point, some of your followers will wake up and realize you are just seeing how much ridiculous mush you can stuff into their brains and still get them to come to the party the next day. You have two choices: expel them (which should be terrifying to your other followers, because you have previously made up some horrible thing that will happen to people who are expelled. For example, that a supernatural Liza Minellie will appear at random times for the rest of their lives and sing Cabaret songs at them), or you can make them disciples.

Basically, you explain that you’ve got a good thing going, and you’ll give them a cut, but they have to start spouting the same celestial trouts will stave you stuff that you’ve been spouting. And they have to sound like they believe it. Kind of like Amway, but with funny hats.

Step 5: Incorporate. This is an important step for two reasons. First, it gives you protection from those people who you can’t brainwash, which will be the vast majority of the people out there. Since they are infidels, of course, horrible things will happen to them when the celestial trouts find out. But in the mean time, you need a tax shelter, a way to limit your liability, and, most importantly, that feel of legitimacy that only a “tax free religious institution” can achieve. It also makes it easier to convince people that their money is better off in your hands.

Step 6: Get a house and bank account in Switzerland. If you wanted this to last forever, you would have become a motivational speaker. But you got into this to see how far you could go before it all blows up in your face! So, get a place to go when your followers wake up and realize that, basically, they gave you all their money in exchange for the chance to memorize obsolete documents and hang out in their jammees while trying on funny hats, and it wasn’t a fare trade after all.

Plus, Dragon*Con in Atlanta is this weekend, so it’s appropriate, I guess, to share my Con experience.

The article is not so much about the Con, as it is about me being my weirdo self at the Con and my wife being really cool.  For some reason, those entries seem to get the most hits.  I don’t get it, but I can’t deny it.

My Plan to be the Weird Al Yankovic of Motivational Speakers

I have nearly all the skills needed to be a successful motivational speaker. I could be a great sports broadcaster, too, except for one fatal flaw, which is that I don’t have a full head of hair. Also, I don’t follow sports very closely, but that doesn’t really matter too much as long as I can read the teleprompter. The real issue is the lack of hair. So the next best thing from being a sports broadcaster is to be a motivational speaker. If I really went for it, I could repackage Benjamin Franklin’s ideas and be the best motivational speaker since Benjamin Franklin.

On the other hand, I do need to find my own style. If I’m going to be a motivational speaker, I should find my own niche, based on what I do better than other people. Benjamin Franklin already cornered the market on overachieving. That is why I am considering writing a book on how to kind of succeed.

It all came to me last weekend when I was hanging out in the book store. I was in the self help section (just out of curiosity, of course. Not because I needed it), and I of course realized that were there lots of books that tell you how to help yourself. But I also realized there are books in the business section that basically say exactly the same thing, except that the theme of those books is to tell you how to be a success in the office.

In both cases – self help and business success – They all tell you how to be the best, how to conquer all obstacles, and how to reach your full potential. They are quite clever, with suggestions like “try to get to work on time,” or “compliment people who do things really well.” Still, even though there are two entire sections on how to be the best, there’s not much on how to be mediocre. And that’s when it hit me. The world needs a book that explains how to kind of succeed.

What if you don’t want to be number one, but would much prefer, for example, number three? Three is pretty good, unless there are only three people in the race. But even then, it still sounds good. You just change the subject whenever someone asks how many people were in the race. Then, when they are sufficiently distracted, bring it back to the bronze metal you got. Like this:

You: I got third place in that race.

Them: That’s pretty good, I guess. But how many people were in the race?

You: Hey, did you notice that rhymes? “Third place in that race.”

Them: Um…

You: Clever, right? You see, “race” rhymes with “place.”

Them: Yes, I know.

You: So check out my bronze metal. Should I wear it around my neck, or is that too

flashy? Michael Phelps is a wimp.

So the idea of the book is that plenty of people who hang out at the bookstore reading self help books know how to be the best, or CEO, or top of the heap, or king of the hill, or whatever. But the reason that there aren’t more CEO’s in the world is that, when you get down to it, most people don’t want to be the CEO. Most people actually just want to be happy the majority of the time. And, except for the control freaks, the best way to be happy is to not be famous or in charge of anything. Of course, people won’t admit it, which is why all the best selling self help books and leadership books have titles like “ten ways to get ahead,” or “How to unlock your true potential.” But I think there is a whole different niche out there of people hungry to only kind of succeed.

Sure, if you suddenly appear in the midst of a coffee break of people doing their best not to be noticed, and ask them, “what do you want in life,” they will respond that they are trying to get a promotion or a raise or they want more people to manage or a bigger project to bring to fruition (by the way, that is a great way to convince your boss to extend his deadline. Tell him you need a few more days to bring it to fruition. Sounds much better than “I’ve been on Facebook all day, so there’s no way I can meet that deadline).

But people who are really good at being mediocre know two laws of nature that the rest of us don’t know about: 1) people who earn the biggest salaries are the first to get laid off when there is a budget crisis and 2) the more people you manage, the less likely you are to be invited to happy hour.

The fact is that staying ahead of the pack takes a lot of time and energy. It stresses you out, man! But being a part of the pack? For most people, that is happiness. I’ve got a huge potential market. So here are the five habits.

1. Don’t be the first in the office. Let others turn on the lights and make the coffee

2. Be the first to give an idea during brainstorming. The first idea always gets shot down, so you don’t have to follow through on it, but you get credit for participating. A corollary is that if you are told to do a project, suggest a brainstorming session as the first step.

3. Always know who prefers bagels and who prefers donuts.

4. Get a job with a company that is the right size. It should be a big company, but not too big. If the company is too small, everyone will know who is doing the least work (hopefully you). If the company is too large, there will be a lot of consultants who will sniff you out.

5. Don’t work for the government. The competition to be mediocre is too fierce.

I admit these are more like guidelines. Plus, I’m still working out the kinks, so there are so provisos and exceptions I have to come up with. But Steven Covey had great success with “7 Habits of Highly Successful People,” which is the book that revitalized the whole self help genre. That sounds better than “the 7 Guidelines of Highly Successful People, with exceptions and provisos. So, I’ll copy him, and call it “the 5 habits,” or “the 5 rules,” or something similarly official sounding. Of course, I’ll use the number 5 instead of 7 because it sounds more conformist (successful mediocrity requires a conformist attitude), and also because I don’t want it to be too obvious that I am trying to milk another Guru’s success.

I guess the fact that I am putting down in writing the fact that I am trying to milk his success makes it kind of obvious, but actually that’s habit number 6 (every once in a while do something that is both mysterious and foolish. The successful people will spend a lot of time trying to figure out if you know something they don’t know, and while they are doing that, you’ll be able to take another coffee break). Habit number 7 is to learn five words that everyone has heard, and feels like they should know, but that nobody knows the definition of. It is a great way to distract people who are about to assign you work. For example, the word “puerile” (childish).

Manager: You should write a report on the most effective way to make decisions.

You: Are you sure? That seems so puerile.

Manager: (hesitating) Maybe you’re right.

You: I’ll get a brainstorming session together, and some you some ideas.

Manager: Okay, take your time. We have to get this right.

Habit number 6 and 7 will be in the follow up book. I could have put them in the first book, but then I would have to brainstorm more ideas for the sequel.

Still not convinced you should try to be mediocre? You’ve simply spent too much time in the self help section. If you have read enough of those books, you are probably saying to yourself something like: Nobody remembers the second man to walk on the moon. Nobody knows who the second best cellist in the world is.

After reading my book, of course, you’ll know how to respond to those expressions. For example:

So everyone knows the name Yo Yo Ma, but now he has to hire a publicist, and a personal assistant, and if he ever hits a wrong note in a concert, they’ll never let him live it down. The second best cellist in the world is sitting back in some symphony, getting paid to play music (which overachievers spend energy learning to do as a hobby… fools!), and not having to worry if someone will recognize him if he calls in sick and goes golfing. Would you like a donut?