seeyou@therally

One of these is the greatest 30 seconds or so of film ever produced.

2008-10-27T07:35:00.000-07:00

Made possible by Deron McBee. The worlds greatest actor.

I can't choose. You do it.

Some jobs are thankless

2008-10-24T13:08:00.001-07:00

Last night I dreamt I was a deeply respected philosophy professor at a prestigious university that had been kept - probably by the university's strict zoning requirements - deliberately quaint, lush and green.

Here's a few other things: a) it was autumn, the years most contemplative season, b) I totally had a long gray beard that I would stroke as I sipped bourbon and read difficult philosophical passages, c) I was every bit of 50 years old but the young co-ed's still somehow considered me to be very, very sexy.

So this was all pretty cool and I was probably about to put the moves on a cute little undergrad, which might have taken the dream in a whole new (read: better) direction, when I started receiving memos via email explaining that I had been put in charge of the forthcoming rapture.

That's right, the rapture...like apocalypse.

Imagine that.

So I spend the rest of this dream, which had to amount to weeks and weeks in dream-time, trying to convince anybody who will listen that I most certainly did not want this job. After all I had no rapture experience and was destined to do important things out of order if not all together incorrectly. Also I felt that my tendency to procrastinate would be a problem.

I might note that I never felt stressed about the responsibility. All I felt was annoyance. As thought the extra work was going to cut into my tv time too much.

Unfortunately nobody would listen to me so the rapture came and went as I'd been told that it would and there I was, the last remaining person on earth, standing upon a gigantic pile of rubble that used to be my city, looking down with little to no emotion on the carnage burning below me.

It was then that I noticed a seagull soaring in and out of the rising smoke plumes above me, disappearing and reappearing again like the moon behind fast moving clouds. And with full knowlege that these would be the last words I would ever utter I yelled, "I really don't need this kind of responsibility right now," but it didn't hear me or at least it pretended not to.

life is about choices. someone told me that once probably.

2008-09-23T15:06:00.001-07:00

Sometimes I wonder why at my age I'm not happily married with a family then a friend of mine posts to the internet a picture like this.

An open letter to all of the people who keep vandalizing my car.

2008-08-18T09:13:00.000-07:00

Please stop.

what have you done to help out today?

2008-08-12T08:25:00.000-07:00

This Sunday I went on a long motorcycle ride with my father. We were having such a wonderful time riding around lakes and canyons and nature and the like when, as we were nearing the end of our adventure, another motorcyclist pulled up next to us wearing a t-shirt that read, “Ride for the Cause."

Here we’d ridden for hours, nearly 200 miles, and for what?! Because we enjoyed riding? Because we enjoyed spending time together as father and son? I couldn't believe how selfish we’d been.

For years I've ridden my motorcycle nearly every day without thought but now, thanks entirely to this selfless motorcyclist’s selfless shirt-message, I ride for causes. Everyday a different cause. Everyday making a difference. Every day the world a little better place because I’m in it…riding.

So I think you should ride for a cause too. And maybe we’ll see each other out there, out riding to and from work but also out riding for causes, and who knows, maybe one day we’ll be riding for the same cause and I can’t imagine how that couldn't mean something important somehow.

This morning on my way to work I rode for ‘Save the Donkeys in the Holy Land,’ and let me tell you, it feels good to do good.

I haven’t decided yet what worthy cause I’ll be riding for on my way home. Not sick kids, or hungry people, or disaster relief of any kind though. You can take that to the bank. No, I’m here to bring attention to lesser known yet equally important causes that get overlooked by the sick and hungry as well as the healthy and well fed. Right now I’m considering a charity in Georgia that selflessly (and thanklessly) replaces people’s lost retainers. Because losing your retainer probably sucks but most of you are too busy ignoring the massacres in Darfur or Global Warming to even be bothered to think about things like that.

conversations that center around traffic

2008-08-11T16:32:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I was driving with someone I love (more than life has the right to allow) having perfectly banal conversations mostly concerned with the peculiarities of the local neighborhood car traffic, i.e. reasons someone might park so strangely or drive so slowly, et cetera when without much warning this person started to cry. I tried to get her to tell me why but she wouldn't. The best she would offer was that she was the age that she was. I thought about pressing her for a better reason before it occurred to me that there probably wasn't one. Sometimes talking about traffic or weather can make me feel that way too and I suppose it's simply because I'm the age that I am and I always just assumed that I'd know what that meant by the time I got here but I don't yet.

Why are...

2008-08-07T15:42:00.000-07:00

...moderately-offensive, psuedo-nonsensical captions to old drawings the funniest thing ever?

God this makes me so happy...

2008-06-24T15:35:00.000-07:00

Love letter to LA

2008-06-23T13:42:00.000-07:00

For the past 5+ years I've traveled for work full-time. I'm gone somewhere during the weekdays for work and on the weekends I go somewhere for fun. Often (half of the time or so) I go home to SLC. I love Salt Lake and my friends and family there. The other half of the time I'm somewhere else and since I have many friends in LA I'm often there. There's something about LA that I love. I feel fortunate as all hell to get to have this home away from home over the last few years. What's so great about LA? Besides some great friends I'd just have to say, it just is. Here's what I did this weekend for example:

Thursday I send the below cell phone picture to my little brother who's slaving away at work with the caption, "I win". He agreed (he had to).

Friday I'm having Lunch at a coffee shop in Echo Park with my friend Jonathon when Shannyn Sossamon, the girl I've obsessed over for 10 years sits next to us. This is the third time in as many years that I've seen her in person. Once on the street, once in a bar, and now. She smiles at us and despite being arms-length away I don't say anything because I feel 10 years old and scared of girls again. She gets her coffee and leaves and I obsess about what a coward I was all day.

Saturday more beach and then I find these shoes for half off at Opening Ceremonies. I buy them despite probably not being good looking enough to pull them off properly.

Then there's the perfect weather, biking and/or running around Venice, free drinks at bars, parties we have no business being at but we're at anyway, bacon-wrapped hot-dogs from the street stand, bad decisions, etc.

So next weekend let's go to the Standard Hotel's Roof-top pool party. This is Tyler there last week. You can't tell me it doesn't look fun. It's a pool on the 40th floor of a hotel with an open bar for christsakes...plus, Tyler looks like Jack Nicholson in this picture.