The advertisement promotes a tobacco free ....California..... Tobacco smoking is linked to cancer and other ills.  But should it be illegal?  What about someone who likes to have a couple of cigarettes a day?  Is there such a person?   The cigarette industry has been caught purposely making their products more highly addictive.  They've been fined.  They should be imprisoned.  These are not people we want running around free in our society.  They're clearly sociopathic.  They've gone so far beyond the pale, that I think the state of ....California....can reasonably justify these anti-tobacco commercials, and I won't be surprised
if, at some point, there is a real move to make the use of tobacco illegal.  However, I'd be against that, I think.

Tobacco is a plant. It is cured - not sure exactly what that means - and can then be crumbled up, wrapped in something (paper) or stuck in something (pipe), and
smoked.  It was, at one time, considered medicinal.  More to the point, it is
unlikely that a little will do you much harm. It is not the place of the government, at any level, to tell you what you can or cannot do if the only possible harm is to yourself. 

On the other hand, the tobacco industry is another matter.  When they alter the chemical composition of the tobacco product, it is no longer simply a plant that may even grow wild.  Now it is a product, and the product is marketed in ways designed to psychologically lure people to it.  And the product is altered in a way
to make it something people may become physically addicted to.  Well, that's another matter.  That should be criminalalized.

There is an argument made that other people suffer from your smoke.  Second hand smoke, it's called.  So I can see banning smoking in many places, such as hospitals, movie theaters, offices, schools.  But outside?  Or inside a person's own home?  Or even inside a person's private office?  You go in to see, say, an attorney, and he or she is smoking.  Don't like that?  Go to a different attorney.  Someone is smoking sitting on a park bench in a public park?  Don't sit there, go sit someplace else.  It seems to me that the likelihood of anyone suffering physical harm from the second hand smoke of a person smoking in a park is far less likely than the harm a person may suffer from the various noxious fumes emitted by dozens, or hundreds of cars, trucks and buses driving on streets around and perhaps through the park.  Now if the park has a thousand people in it, all chain smoking, maybe that's a problem.  Address that problem when it arises. 
It's probably not going to arise.

Not that I'm in favor of smoking.  I smoked for years.  Wish I hadn't, though I miss it.

I see advertisements on tv for pizza.  They make me want pizza.  Nothing wrong with pizza.  Yum yum.  Though I have a tendency to overeat when I buy one.  And obesity is a real problem in the ....U.S.....  And obesity seems to lead to diabetes.  Should we outlaw pizza?  Or advertisements for pizza?  Chocolate? 
Beer?  Beer is equated, in commercials, with good times, and good looking women who like YOU!  Oh boy!  Chocolate seems to be equated with treating yourself well.  Cheeseburgers?  Cars?  Cars pollute and there are thousands of vehicle related deaths and thousands more vehicle related injuries in the ....U.S..... every year.  And most of the commercials are about how fast they go.  Zoom, zoom, zoom.  Should cars be illegal?  Should the advertisements for cars be more
strictly regulated?  One thing for sure, the miles per gallon claims should probably be more strictly looked at, because I think they're all exaggerated.

Back to tobacco.  Sort of.  Another plant that is illegal is marijuana.  It's been illegal for about seventy years.  Before that, it wasn't.  One school of thought is that Wm. Randolph Hearst, the newspaper magnate, may have had something to do with making it illegal, because hemp was grown and used for some of the same
products that are made from trees, and Hearst owned forests, not hemp farms.  Most of the arguments that were used to convince the Congress to make marijuana illegal were specious.  Many of the arguments were flat out lies,
concocted by people who would benefit by making marijuana illegal.  But the main thing, to my mind, is that it's a plant.  It's not like heroin or cocaine,
where a part of a plant is put through a number of procedures, involving
chemicals to end up with the product.  There are people who have bred marijuana for greater THC - the active ingredient in terms of getting high - content, and perhaps that's a different matter.  But you can take a marijuana seed, and put it into some dirt, in a cut down milk carton, and plunk it down on your kitchen windowsill, and water it, and it'll grow.  And you can take off the leaves, and dry them out, and roll them up in a piece of paper, and smoke it, and get high.  Who the hell's business is that, except yours?  It's a plant!  If marijuana can be illegal, then they could make oak trees, or lilacs illegal.  I want the government involved in keeping industry from dumping toxic waste in the groundwater, not in keeping me from doing what I please that has no effect on anyone other than myself.

There are many arguments that can be made, on both sides, for and against the government stepping in to protect people from themselves.  For the most part, I think the government should only be involved in protecting you from others.  That might include keeping advertisers from psychologically preying on the vulnerable. 
Axe Body Spray makes young men irresistable to beautiful women.  Budweiser beer ensures you'll have a great time.  Taxapraxahydrocandyholysmokerino
will have you shedding those excess pounds in days.  The new Jeep Cherokee will allow you to drive like a madman across environmentally fragile terrain. 

Advertising sometimes is about letting you know there exists a product, that does certain things, and that it's available certain places at a certain price.  Other advertisements let you know this information while seeking to amuse you.  Far too many advertisements seek to mislead you in one manner or another, though mostly about self-image, self-esteem and/or sexual attraction.  These
advertisements seek to manipulate people, and are concocted by firms with
access to the latest psychological studies, so they are very good at manipulating
people.  They're con artists, and paid very well.

If you smoke, you are more likely, statistically, to need more medical care.  If you're insured, that means the costs of your care will be distributed throughout that insurance system, so everyone may pay a bit more.  That could be a reasonable argument against allowing you to do something with a strong potential to harm your health.  But two packs a day isn't the same as a pack a week, and sure isn't the same as a cigarette each St. Patrick's day.  And too many Big Macs are going to be harmful to your health too.  So is living too close to the 405.  Driving too fast.  Driving under the influence of alcohol.  Driving on a freeway where some other driver is under the influence of alcohol.   Skiing, probably.  Skateboarding.  Swimming at our polluted beaches.  Too much candy.  Too much time spent playing video games?  Listening to music at too loud volumes.  Football.  Hockey.

Once we get started, where will it stop?  There will always be people who advocate for more government intervention into our private lives.  I think they fall into two categories.  Those who advocate for restrictions on  behavior that they themselves have no interest in participating in, so it creates no restrictions on their own livestyle; and those who fear the behavior and their own involvement in it, and so advocate for government restrictions to protect them from themselves.

Finally, it's an easy out for politicians.  The tobacco industry has already been kicked and bloodied, so taking them on is pretty easy and popular.  Easier than taking on major corporations caught illegally polluting - they usually get fined some insanely small percentage of that year's profits, and nobody goes to jail - unlike the 26 year old who gets caught selling an 1/8th of pot.   Him they'll jail and fine, and make sure he can't ever get a student loan, or, perhaps any sort of help if he's hungry and homeless.  Fucking dope dealer.  Or if the two are combined, somehow, like the corporate honcho (or Rush Limbaugh) gets caught with illegal drugs, he gets to make a public apology, give 1/100th of 1% of his month's salary to a charity (and probably take a tax write off on that) and do community service, which he probably won't actually do.

Tobacco does little if any good.  I imagine the same could be said for the new
TV series '90210'.  Should '90210' be illegal?  Tobacco does a lot of
harm.  But banning it?  Shouldn't that be my choice?  We can't make idiocy illegal.  If you want to smoke too much, or eat too many pizzas, or skateboard without a helmet, or have unprotected sex...do we want a society where the government, a la big brother, tells us what personal behavior we can and cannot indulge in. 

Whose life is it, anyway?

2/5/09

.. ..

For awhile there, a bunch of people thought they might
finally have it licked.  They owned
houses and the houses just kept going up in value, and they were able to
re-finance, or reverse mortgage, or some other type of voodoo and it seemed
they were financially stable.  There must
be some people who are able to keep a broader scope of history in their heads,
but most of us can't seem to manage it. 
Bull markets, bear markets. 
Recession, depression, inflation, stagflation, global economy, CDs,
bonds, dividends, tax breaks, deductions, default credit swaps, and a bunch of
things with initials.  TWA, CIA, STD,
IOU, Y2K, ....USA....,
ASAP, CBS, DHL, NBA, AARP, RIP.  When I
was a kid we bought 45's.  When we had a
bit more money we bought LPs.  Then there
were audiocassettes and 8-tracks.  I had
reel-to-reel.  Now there's CDs, mpg's.  We all bought videocassettes.  Now they're worth nearly nothing.  Same with the CDs for the most part.  Five years from now, Blue Ray discs will
probably be being used as coasters.

.. ..

How is one supposed to plan for the future?  Even when it's low, there always seems to be
inflation.  You can't stick your money
under the mattress because its value will decrease.  Or for that matter, someone might take it, or
there could be a fire.  Invest it.  Then what happens?  I've had money invested for about 7 or 8
years - before that I didn't have any money to invest.  It increased in value until it decreased, and
then it wiped out not only the increase, but some of what I'd started
with.  I'd have been better off with a
savings account.  Or that mattress idea.  My financial advisor - I actually have one of
those, he's an old friend, very bright, who went into the field right around
the time I began having money to invest - says the market will eventually
recover and I'll make money.  Will
it?  Will I?  Will it be in time for me to retire?

.. ..

Prices keep going up. 
Food.  Gas - well gas goes up,
goes down, goes up a bit, who knows? 
Movie tickets.  Travel, I
guess.  The L.A. Times daily paper costs
75 cents now.  Health matters?  Forget about it.  If you don't have insurance they may as well
just give you the undertaker's business card. 
And even if you do.  I have one friend
now, he has a fatal illness.  But he is a
vet.  According to the VA website, the
illness he has is covered because he was in ..Viet
Nam.. when the ....U.S..... was fighting there.  But they haven't covered his medication, and
he's going broke.  Another friend has the
same insurance I have.  He also has an
illness that, according to what he's read, is exactly the same as another
illness.  One illness with two names.  But his doctor called it the wrong one of the
two names.  And the insurance company
would cover his medication if the doctor had called it the other name, but not
for the name his doctor used.  He needs
interferon, 3 times a week, at $500 each time. 
So without insurance coverage, he can't have the medication that is
keeping him from getting ill, and maybe from dieing.

.. ..

And I'm afraid I haven't even gotten to what I wanted to
write about.  How does one plan for the
future?  If you manage to save money,
will it keep its value?  If you invest
it, will you lose it?  If you spend it on
property, will the property increase in value? 
Or decrease?  Or burn down, get
blown away by a hurricane, get flooded like in the Big Easy, destroyed by an
earthquake, be made toxic by some chemical spill?  Or will you live in it, grow old, and be
hoodwinked out of it by some con artist or banker or con artist banker?  How does one plan for that time down the
line?  You could have kids.  They can take care of you.  Will they? 
Or will they continue to need you to take care of them?  Bordering on cynicism here, better watch it.

.. ..

I suppose one could plan on making so much money that you'd
be sure to have enough.  No guarantees
there, but still, if you've got a hundred million, surely you're financially
secure.  Maybe even with twenty
million.  Of course, I don't know anyone
who has that kind of money.  I don't
think I know anyone who is worth a million. 
A measly million.  For gosh sakes,
what's wrong with me?

.. ..

I have some money.  I
think I'm probably better off - financially anyway - than most of my
friends.  Course, I worry about
them.  Partly I worry because I'm a
friend.  Partly I worry because I wonder
if they'll look to me for help down the line. 
And I don't see how I even have enough for myself.  Will they knock on my door, and I'll pretend
I'm not home?  Or will I open the door
and share?  Then whatever I've got will
go twice as fast.  And when it's all
gone, then what will we do?

.. ..

I have a pension coming from SAG.  It's not a lot, but it's certainly not
nothing.  I have a really tiny pension
coming from AFTRA.  And there's social
security.  But pension funds get
invested.  What if whatever they're
invested in goes into the crapper?  What
if there's no money left in the social security fund when I want to
collect?  Couldn't happen?  I don't know. 
The state of ....California....
is about to start issuing IOUs to people instead of giving them their tax
refunds, because the state doesn't have the money.  The state doesn't even have the money people
paid in advance on their state taxes. 
Money the state had no right to, since when these people file their
taxes, they have refunds coming to them. 
If that can happen to the state of ..California..,
one of the largest economies in the world, why couldn't it happen to the ....U.S.....?

.. ..

Maybe there isn't any way to plan.  Stuff happens.  Man plans and god laughs.  Maybe old age, while not quite the horror it
was once, is still something far short of the stuff that dreams are made
of.  Maybe you'll have enough money to
live decently.  Maybe your health will
allow you to live with some modicum of dignity, and even happiness.  Maybe not.

.. ..

Seven come eleven. 
Maybe it's all a crap shoot.  Oy.

I have at least a couple of friends who blog everyday.  Why am I having difficulty managing even one a month?

I talk to myself.  Or another way of looking at it, I write out loud.  I think Dickens is said to have done that.  So it's not like: "Mark, where did you leave the keys?"  More like conversations, sometimes with someone famous, and sometimes where neither of the voices are me.  Infrequently, but sometimes, something occurs to me that seems worth rushing to my computer to write down, with the hope that it'll develop into something more substantial later on.  I'm a big one for later on.

I don't think of myself as very ambitious.  And since, at least for the time being, I'm getting by all right - got enough to eat, a place to live, a car that runs
(quite well, thank you Honda - my Civic is 9 years old, has run 86000 miles
with no problems at all!), tv, computer, stereo, gym membership, pocket
money.  Man, I'm going to miss some of that if the economy demands I give it up...especially having enough to eat.  At any rate, getting by with
sufficient for my needs is, I think, a bit of a drain on me getting down to
work on this or that, including a blog.

In the 1990s, my dark years, when for most of the decade I
was depressed, and at times wondered if I wouldn't rather be dead than feel the
ways I felt - basically I didn't like myself - the stuff I wrote, while not
necessarily dark, usually had one or more deaths, usually violent.  I thought, at the time, it was my dark sense of humor, but since my sense of humor seems to be the same now as then, and the stuff I write now rarely has deaths or violence, I guess it was the depression.  Most of that decade I was in therapy.  Thank you Leslie.

What I got out of therapy was a change in attitude.  I like myself now.  I'd like you to like me too, but I'm okay if you don't.  This change in attitude
completely defeated the depression.  Or maybe it was simply the passage of time, or Leslie's magical therapy.  Or the array of the stars and planets.  Or pure chance.  I don't know.  Occasionally I fear a return of the depression, and maybe that will happen.  Best to enjoy the time now.  My hopes for advancement in my chosen field are, perhaps, less expectant of return than they were once.  My financial situation, like everyone on the planet except the poorest of the poor, who had, I suppose, nowhere further to fall, is less good than it was.  Getting
acting work seems to get more and more difficult.  I am, from what people tell me, quite youthful in attitude and appearance for my age, but I am feeling some creaks and groans from bones that have held me upright for quite a long time, and more and more friends seem to be having health problems.  I don't think I handle stress well, and I've managed to lessen the stress level of my life quite a bit.  I don't want a return to rushing around rushing around, too much to do - unless it's a series regular role.  I think it sounds a bit daunting, but I'd take that on, yessiree bob.  Rather win the lottery, though.

And there's something. 

I really enjoy acting - that's my profession.  It's endlessly interesting, and can be very challenging.  But I know people who, if they won the lottery, or got rich some other way, would stay in L.A. and keep acting.  I'd move to Cambria.  Or maybe ....New Zealand.....  I'd rather walk on the beach or in the woods
with my dog (I don't have a dog now, but if I had a yard, I'd get one) than
act.  Not that one couldn't do both - live elsewhere and act, but seeing as how I'm not a famous actor, I think if I lived elsewhere there wouldn't be much call for me as an actor.  Way back when, when I thought I'd try to make a living as an actor, my motivation was not the siren call of the stage, or a wish or need for fame, but simply that it looked like an interesting way to make a living.  So, were I to win the lottery or if you'd like to give me lots of money yourself, then I wouldn't
need to make a living anymore.

And why Cambria or New Zealand?  Cambria is beautiful!  Oy, it's so nice there.  And New Zealand, where I went in 2004 for a bit over 2 weeks - as far as I can tell, the entire nation is gorgeous.  I loved it there.  Of course pretty much everyplace seems a bit nicer when you're on vacation, because you're on vacation.

Well, I've hardly stuck to a theme, but I have written a blog.  January, with only a few days left to go, has at least one blog posted by yours truly.

Maybe my next one will be about something.

12/5/08

I'm writing this, now, because of a schedule change that opened up a few hours of my time unexpectedly.  And I'm writing what I'll write, because of the nature of the change, and a few other matters of this past week.  Cryptic enough for ya?

Earlier in the week I received an e-mail that was sent to me and probably a couple of hundred other actors, from a woman I know who runs an acting workshop that I have participated in, and so I am part of her e-mail list.  She was forwarding a request from another member of her group who was looking for actors to participate in a reading of a pilot aimed at the internet, and  may be an animated series, I'm not clear on that.  It's called Hero Hospital.

I responded that I'd be interested, and lo and behold, I ended up with the lead role.  Not a common occurrence in my experience, even in matters like this, which involve no pay.  The reading would be done, if I understood correctly, for some people who, if interested, might produce the pilot.  Should that happen, I would have put my talents before them during the reading, and could hope they'd consider me for the actual produced pilot, should it go that far.  This is a kind of thing that actors do, often over and over.  It's a chance to practice one's craft, and network too.

There were only a couple of days between getting the script e-mailed to me and the reading itself, and I had other things that needed to be done, but I spent at least a couple of hours on the 32 page script: reading it, making notes, trying different voices.

The reading is scheduled for this afternoon at 1:30.  At 10 a.m., I received a call from my commercial agent, letting me know that I have an audition, a 2nd audition, a callback, today, for a beer commercial that I auditioned for just yesterday.  And the time of the appointment falls smack dab in the middle of the reading.  So I called the woman who had cast me right away, and left her a message, and she got back to me about an hour later and let me know they'd decided to get someone else, but that she understood, no hard feelings, and maybe, if the show goes, they'll see me for some other role then.  I couldn't have asked for a better reaction. 

I'm glad I have this callback audition.  I'm sad I won't get to read the script this afternoon for the potential producers.  However, here's the thing.  I had a commercial audition on Tuesday.  I had acting class Tuesday night - and there was some good work done, including, I believe, by me, so it was a particularly satisfying evening.  Yesterday I had two more commercial auditions, including the one I'm going back to this afternoon.  In between those two auditions, I had lunch with an actor friend and his husband, to discuss the current state of the business, in relation to a particular decision I needed to make.  Tomorrow I'll attend my commercial acting class.

It's an acting week.  I'm not terribly busy, but I have been busy.  Having to shift my schedule on the fly, drive here, drive there, making and receiving phone calls.  It's been awhile since I've had a week like this.  It feels quite a bit like it did years ago, when I was more excited about things, more eager to participate and try to move ahead.  Not that I don't want to move ahead now.  Oh my goodness, do I ever!  It's just different now.  I've done quite a bit of work over the years.  I've been to hundreds of auditions.  I've driven back and forth and back and forth and back and forth, and that part of it I'm quite tired of.

And to top it all off, my financial situation is quite a bit more like it was years ago, when I was struggling to make ends meet and be free for auditioning.  This part of it, obviously, isn't pleasant, though it's an experience I seem to be sharing with pretty much EVERYONE else.

So there's a bit of "return to youth" feeling about it all, that is somewhat pleasant.

And, in a few hours, I'll have a 2nd chance to get this beer commercial, and, perhaps, make some money.  All in all, though hardly dramatic, intense, edgy, or out-there, it's pleasant and makes me smile, doggone it

Finally, a new blog posting:

So far I have mostly discovered the FOR SALE area, and within that, garage sales, musical instruments, CDs and DVDs and FREE.  Goodness gracious, the Diggers gone digital, so to speak.

Now, whenever I am looking to buy pretty much anything that I don't absolutely need to have brand new - and, probably, that shouldn't deter me, either - I go to Craig's List first.  My goodness, this is sounding like a testimonial, and I guess it is.

A few weeks ago I went up to northern California - Mariposa, specifically - with a friend who had a wedding to attend and wanted company.  It was a nice drive, a lovely wedding, outside the town's 1846 erected Court House - great people.  Got to see the sky full of stars, which I really mean to see at least once a month, and probably manage once or twice a year.  And, on the way home, we took a fairly lengthy detour through Yosemite Park, from the SW corner to the NE corner, and from there onto California Highway 395 and all the way home. 

We stopped for dinner in Lone Pine.  Why I brought my backpack in with me, I don't know.  I did, though, and left it there, not noticing until we were parked outside my apartment building, 205 miles south of the restaurant, and I was pulling my belongings out of the car. 

At first, I was pretty upset, because I thought my cell phone was in the pack.  Once I'd discovered the phone was in my jacket pocket, I was much more relaxed about the situation.  And, cutting to this particular chase, since this is all a digression leading up to what comes next, I got one of the waitresses to mail my pack to me, and it arrived safe and unplundered about 10 days later.

One of the things in the pack was my iPod.  I had purchased, on-line (not on Craig's List), an original, refurbished, model, the size of a pack of gum, that would hold about 180 tunes.  It worked swell, but not too long ago it began to have a problem.  With the headphone jack all the way in - which is how it's supposed to be - it only played through one channel.  By pulling the jack out partway, it played both channels, but had a tendency to cut in and out if the jack got pulled a tiny bit further out.  And that happened quite a bit, because, pulled partway out, it didn't have a secure seating.

So, before I knew I would get the backpack back (Jack), I shopped - ta da!...on Craig's List for a new, or at least new to me, iPod.  I found a 4 gigabyte iPod mini for $20, with a note that the battery tended to die sooner than one might like.  I called on it, and was told that it would only hold a charge for about 3 days.  I thought I could live with that, and we arranged to meet.

We met at a Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf on Hillhurst in the Los Feliz neighborhood of Los Angeles, my old stomping grounds.  In fact, I'd been in the building the coffee shop is in years ago, when it was a laundramat.

The iPod would not work at all.  The young woman - a beautiful gal - said she'd only had a few minutes to charge it.  I wondered - silently - why she'd agreed to meet that evening instead of charging the unit and meeting, perhaps, the next day.  She wanted to use the power adaptor to plug it into the wall, so I could see that it worked - although that wouldn't have told me anything about the battery's ability to hold a charge.  There were no available outlets - all those coffee drinkers with laptops had used them all.  She got a clerk - barrista? - to plug it in behind the counter, but I couldn't go back there to listen - against the rules - and time was bleeding by.  I told her that I couldn't pay her what she'd asked for her iPod when I didn't know if it worked, but that I'd take a chance and offered her $10 instead of the $20 she'd asked for.  She was not happy.  I suggested that she didn't need to sell it to me, no problem - although, really, she'd wasted my time, but what the heck.  She accepted the $10 sale, with particular bad grace.  She didn't express anger at me, but it was plain that she was unhappy.

As it turned out, the battery would not hold a charge for 3 days.  More like 8 minutes. 

However, I researched the problem on the internet, found that this model seems to have battery problems, and found 2 companies that sold the batteries at a reasonable cost, along with directions on how to change the battery (a slightly delicate operation, involving taking the entire thing apart).  But shipping and handling cost more than the battery, which annoyed me.

That's when Craig's List occured to me.  There I found the battery, advertised as new, for less money, with shipping and handling half what the internet companies charged.  I ordered it....

Wait, I've got a bad feeling about this.  I ordered it?  That doesn't sound like Craig's List.  Maybe I found the battery on Amazon.  Whoops, there goes the entire subject of the blog. 

Yeah, I think I got it on Amazon.  It arrived promptly.  I was able to change the battery - the kind of operation I really like doing, although I tend to not be very competent at things like that.  The new to me iPod works fine, holds about 695 songs (it should, it's more than twice the size of the old one), and the whole thing cost me under $25.

I really do like Craig's List, though, even if it isn't where I go for batteries.

As I recall, from my college lit. courses on Shakespeare, he used earlier works, by other writers, as the basis for many of his plays.  And, after all, it is not for his stories that he is remembered, but for his use of language, and his characters.  Not that there's anything wrong with his stories, just that that isn't the aspect of his writing that has kept his work alive over the centuries, and around the globe.

I can't write as well as Shakespeare.  You should know that about me.  And much as I envy his skills, and success, the thing I think I'm most likely to cop from him is his appropriation of other people's stories, because writing a story is hard, Jack.  Short story writing is a skill in itself, and there are masters of that particular universe, but for my money, the longer it is, the more difficult it is to write it.  Not just the tap tap tapping of my fingers on the keyboard, or the skritch, skritch, skritch of the pen across the page.  Oh no.  That's just labor and I can do that.  I can do that for days.  It's telling a story that goes on, hopefully intelligibly, for over one hundred pages.  This is difficult.  This is daunting. 

But if I lift, appropriate - oh heck - steal a story idea from someone else - hopefully someone who either predates copyright or whose copyright has expired, then I have my story, beginning, middle and end, and I can spend my time on the parts I enjoy more - which is to say the parts I seem to have some talent for - characters and dialogue. 

So it seems to me that it's time for me to start reading folk tales, fables, myths, Homer, Chaucer, Marlowe and a bunch o' other old geezers and "flatter" them.  For it's been said that "imitation is the sincerest form of flattery."

Exit I, slouching towards Bethlehem, or at least the Old Globe.

Limbo, according to Wikipedia, refers to the edge of hell.  So to say I'm in limbo is an exaggeration.  However, as we commonly use the word, it seems appropriate.

I'm in limbo.  On tenterhooks.  Anxious.  Worried.  Concerned.  And, using a different perspective, saving  around $17.50 a day.

Say wha?

I live in a one bedroom apartment, in a building with just over 20 units.  Two stories around a swimming pool.  I've lived here - cue stability theme music - just over 19 years now.  It's the longest I've ever lived in one place, beating the amazing stability of childhood, when I lived in the same house from birth 'til college.

About a month ago the building I live in changed hands.  New owners. 

I've been aware for some time that rents in the L.A. area had risen...and risen, and risen.  And risen.  Yet my rent had increased very little.  The city of Los Angeles has rent control.  My municipality does not.  If I had stayed in the (rent controlled) studio apartment I first lived in when I moved to L.A. - well, it would still be too small, but the rent...actually, the rent might be higher than what I'm paying now.  But I wouldn't be face to face with the very real possibility of a LARGE rent increase.  I didn't.  I moved.  What did I know?

I'm paying way below market rates.  I expected to receive a 30 day notice of rent increase on August first.  Haven't gotten it.  Don't know why.  I'm paying $715/mo.  Don't know what it's like in the rest of the country, or the rest of the world, but here in the L.A. area that is a steal.  It's amazing.  I only know one person who has a better deal.  Maybe two.

There is one unit in my building that is vacant.  It is nearly identical to my apartment.  They are asking $1250/mo. on a one year lease.  I've always been on a month to month agreement, not a lease.  $1250 is $535 over what I pay, which is how I come to the $17.50 a day.  535 divided by 30.5 (the approximate average number of days in a month...365/12) is approximately 17.50.

So, although I'm waiting and waiting and waiting for the boom to be lowered, the shoe to drop, the sentence to be pronounced, I'm still paying $715/mo. and "saving" $17.50/day.

This is limbo I can live with.  This limbo rocks.

Most if not all of the readers of my blogs (there are some, right?) probably know me personally.  In which case they already know I'm a professional actor.  If you didn't already know, now you do.  I started acting nearly 30 years ago.  I'm not famous.  I probably didn't need to tell you that.

Recently, I received an e-mail from a fellow with the wonderful first name of Dax, who wrote to me from his home in England, asking if I would autograph a photo of myself, taken from an episode of The X-Files that I did in 2000;

an episode with the internationally famous magician, and historian of magic, Ricky Jay. 

I don't really understand why people collect autographs, except for those who do it for money.  I understand wanting more money.    I do however, have some understanding of the impulse to collect.  I have around 20 little toy cars, like Hot Wheels. 

I'm certain most of you wouldn't really understand why I want those.  Anyway, my autograph is worth very little.  In fact, earlier this year, I got a Google alert which led me to Ebay where I discovered that a photo of me, which I autographed in 1989 and sent to a fan of General Hospital, on which I appeared in 15 episodes as Serge, a Greek brain washer masquerading as an ice cream vendor, was offered for sale for 39 cents.  Which I found hilarious.

A couple of weeks later, my agent, Craig Wyckoff, called to let me know that a letter had arrived for me.  I drove over to get it.  As I walked into Craig's office, I pointed out to him that a huge billboard for the new X-Files movie was visible from his office window, which I found a pleasant coincidence, since I was there to pick up a photo of myself doing an episode of X-F.  Craig gave me the envelope, I opened it, and there was a card, like a baseball card, or a card from a board game, of me in my extensive makeup for the role I played

(myspace is giving me problems with the text here)

...the role I played on

S t a r T r e k:Enterprise in 2003.

I figured I had somehow misunderstood.

 My first reaction was that this card must have been part of something that had been sold, in which case why hadn't I been paid for the use of my image?  Then I noticed that the return address was from Massachusetts.  What an amazing coincidence.  This request for an autograph had nothing to do with the other request for an autograph, yet both had occurred within a 2 week period of each other, years after I'd done either show.

I contacted the Massachusetts guy, Greg, and found out that the Enterprise card with my image was homemade, but similar to ones (none of which had included me) that had been used for a now defunct web based game.  Greg offered to send me one of his homemade cards for me to keep.  As for me, I autographed the card and mailed it back.

A week later, the package from Dax arrived, and I autographed 2 photos and an X-Files trading card (that didn't have a picture of me on it) for Dax, and mailed it back to him.  I e-mailed Dax to let him know I had sent the photos back to him, and let him know about the curious coincidence, which then got even more curious.  As it turns out, Dax in England knows Greg in Massachusetts, but neither had known the other was also writing to me for an autograph.

How X-Files is that?  Cue spooky music.

Today should be a national, if not international, holiday.  It is the anniversary of Neil Armstrong setting foot on our moon, in 1969.  The "giant leap for mankind."  Not that we've done all that much with it, but some, some.

It'd be great if we would stop destroying this planet we live on.  Even if we had an escape plan, which we don't, it's still be great.  Al Gore's recent green challenge is visionary.  Not that anyone believes we're going to completely alter our energy sources in ten years - it's still a terrific benchmark.

However, I don't think we even need to consider energy matters, global warming, biodiversity or cute polar bear cubs for the exploration of space to be near the top of desirable human endeavors.  What's out there?  How can we possibly not want to know?  How can we possibly not put effort and treasure into finding out?  It's the equivalent of deciding never to leave the house.  The earth, our earth, our home, this blue green miniscule globe spinning around our sun, here in the Milky Way is so small, so very very small within the vastness of the universe.  There are kids in L.A. who have never seen the ocean.  Isn't that sad?  We've been to the moon.  We've sent unpeopled explorers to Mars.  We've done drive-bys of Saturn.  More.  Farther.  More.

There have been amazing advances.  Thank you thank you thank you to every single person who had anything to do with the Hubble telescope.  Thank you to every astronaut, with any of whom I would trade places in a heartbeat.  Thanks be for the exploration that has been accomplished, and is being accomplished at this very moment, and this one and this one.

More.  I want more.  More space exploration, with and without persons aboard.  More giant leaps for mankind (or person-kind...heroic space lingo seems a bit retro).

In 1969, a human being, for the first time, set foot on the moon.  What an amazing accomplishment.  Today should be a holiday.  Not Neil Armstrong day, hero that he is, but perhaps Moon Day, or Luna Day, Space Day or Great Leap Day.

What's out there?  Surely we want to know.  How could we not?