Once My Looks Go, I've Got Nothing

          When I was young, I lived in a mobile home park. It was a wonderful place not unlike Disneyland, that is, if you replaced the cute cartoon characters with meth and the rides with arsons. It was a fascinating little social bubble, where nearly every married couple consisted of a morbidly obese wife and a skinny, geeky husband. This is a phenomenon that I have labeled "Jack Sprat Syndrome."      Our home life there was interesting. Possums would sometimes run into the house through some sort of crawlspace, the location of which I was never able to ascertain. My sister used to tell me that the ghost of an old woman would visit her at night, sitting on the edge of her bed and talking to her. I never saw any ghosts, but the walls of my room were laden with toxic mold. My lungs are still haunted by those abundant spores.           One Sunday morning, my mother went to go get the newspaper, leaving my sister and I home alone for a few minutes. I was about

     I'm not trying to brag, but I'm pretty good at Words With Friends. Or maybe I am trying to brag...it's been long enough since I felt pride that I can't really say for sure. Anyway, I'm not trying to pull an R. Kelly and say I'm the world's greatest or anything. Though I have in the past pulled an R. Kelly, by other meanings of the phrase.      I fear I'm starting to lose my point.      Oh yes, Words With Friends. So anyway, just like the rest of the country, I enjoy playing it. I mean, it's no Magic: The Gathering or anything, but in terms of free cell phone games it gets a hearty thumbs up from yours truly. Now, I understand that in order to play Words for free, I have to put up with advertisements inserted into the middle of my games. I'm completely OK with this, since Lord knows I'm in no position to pay money for anything. My dinner for the last three weeks has been plain white rice with sriracha sauce due to a case of what Ted N

Anyone with more than a passing familiarity with me knows that I have an extensive history of making decisions ranging anywhere from questionable to downright insane. Usually, I am fully cognizant of the consequences of these decisions, so when my wrist shatters or I find myself in a month-long depressive funk due to the ramifications of my choices, I am not so much awed by the after-effects as I am by the lunacy that allowed them to come to pass in the first place. The water bottles, though… See, oftentimes the most seemingly innocuous decisions, mere ripples in the ocean of choices we all make every day, end up creating a veritable tsunami of long-term effects when analyzed in hindsight. Nowhere has this been clearer to me than when I began pondering the ramifications of one of the most mundane decisions a person can make: I decided one afternoon to purchase a twelve-pack of bottled water at Safeway. On the surface, it seems almost impossible for the event to have any life-long s

“Damn it!” I exclaimed as I slammed my computer keyboard in frustration, sending up a thick cloud of Cool Ranch Dorito dust. I took one of the angriest sips of Red Bull in the history of man and threw myself backwards against my chair, which rocked haphazardly due to the sudden force. Stupid low-quality furniture I pick up off the sidewalk. But my angst this afternoon had nothing to do with the decomposing construct I called my chair. Rather, the object of my ire was a tad more abstract: the internet. Not the entire thing (I love me some porn and fast food reviews), but rather the fact that the internet has a certain galling way of perpetuating things I might wish myself and others to simply forget about. Examples of this include Rick Astley, Goatse and my own personal lapses in judgment. Well, maybe not Rick Astley. Anyway, I had just spent hours trying to erase a particularly grievous error of mine from several years ago, but I was at a loss. Forced to confront my o

The holidays are a spectacular time of year, a season where the chilly weather is counterbalanced by the warmth and cheer of spending time with our loved ones. I am a deeply compassionate man, though, and as a result such mirthful activities at times lead me to feel pangs of sadness for those among us who lack family and friends, who have fallen on hard times and who could probably use a little cheering up. Recently I decided to don my Santa hat and give the gift of conversation and whiskey to an old friend who has seen better days. You probably know Grimace from McDonald's long-running and moderately emotionally scarring ad campaign for children, wherein Grimace is one of the characters often seen frolicking among sentient food items. Like his compatriot The Hamburglar, Grimace was introduced in a villainous role during the early days of the ad campaign, but Grimace was quick to change his ways (and appearance) to become the cuddly amorphous blob we all know and...well, not love

As the summer of 2003 set in, Steel & Marsilio was, at best, in limbo. Back then, uploading content to the internet was not so easy as it is today, so any potential projects Garrett and I might make had no clear method of distribution. Since we had never exactly been renowned for our productivity, the fact that anything we produced might never be seen by anyone (although, given the viewership of public access, one might venture to say no one had ever seen anything we’d done) meant that we simply didn’t do anything. Well, we went to Rasputin Music a fair amount, but I’d say that doesn’t really apply. One day, our fortunes shifted, as Garrett received a letter from the public access station in Mountain View, KMVT15. Apparently, since the De Anza television station closed, the responsibilities for Cupertino’s public access now fell to KMVT, a larger and presumably more financially secure station. When Cupertino closed, I guess the Mountain View staff asked our old

Immediat- ely (relatively, at least) after the third episode of Steel & Marsilio wrapped, Garrett pitched a theme for our next project: “The Steel & Marsilio Halloween Spectacular.” My lifelong love of Halloween put me on board without hesitation. The idea of having a central theme for an entire episode was new to us, but we had made great strides in finding our voice, and it seemed like a good idea to take our usual random pastiche of skits and have some unifying factor tying them together, albeit loosely. That the factor in question was my favorite holiday made it all the more appealing. The pieces were in place for our best work ever. Mikey agreed to continue handling our editing, so the usual scramble to find an editor was not an issue, and Garrett and I had a wealth of ideas. In addition, we had learned from some of our past mistakes, so we decided from the outset that this episode would be comprised of a greater number of shorter skits rather than our previous handfuls

The pilot of Steel & Marsilio was in the can and, minor glitches aside (for example, I thought I could watch the broadcast premiere at my parents’ San Jose home…turns out there’s a reason it’s called Cupertino Public Access), we were off and running. After a brief respite to bask in the glory of our accomplishment (read: get drunk and watch the pilot over and over), Garrett and I set to work planning our second episode. The idea was simple: as much as we liked the first episode, we were conscientious of its flaws and sought to improve our overall product. In a sense, the second episode was a beefed up version of the pilot. It followed the same basic structure, but with a host of changes that, in large part, added to the overall experience. There was a brief, mildly surreal intro, followed by a lengthy opening credits sequence, just like the pilot, but this time the credits sequence had a discernible plot (in this case, a gangsta/drug dealer vignette) that ended

With the upcoming release of the Steel & Marsilio: Season One DVD, several people have expressed curiosity as to what exactly Steel & Marsilio is all about. This, in conjunction with a puzzling lack of interview requests, has spurred me to pen a series of articles about S & M ’s rich history, as well as its bright future. Without further ado, allow me to present Part One of the Steel & Marsilio Companion. I may as well start in the halcyon days of my youth, before Steel & Marsilio (as a televised program, anyway) existed. Garrett Wroblewski and I met in 1999, when I was a senior and he was a junior at Monta Vista High School in Cupertino, CA. Destiny, for whatever reason (ed. note: Money. It was money) led post-graduation Joey to De Anza, the local community college, and Garrett followed me there soon after. Though in the interim year we hung out quite a bit and collaborated on some things (a skit wherein we played the biggest Kriss Kross fans in the world, co

Events of late have made me wonder whether or not my reality has been supplanted by surreality. I don't know, perhaps it has something to do with my recent propensity for 48-hour waking periods, or maybe the oddness is some sort of a ripple effect from Mountain Dew releasing three x-treme new flavors and KFC dropping the gloriously apocalyptic Double Down sandwich within such a short time period. Regardless of the root cause, when I went to go see A Nightmare on Elm Street yesterday, I found myself sympathizing with certain characters in the film, not (only) because I was molested by a groundskeeper, but lately I've been questioning what is real and what ( wait for it... ) isn't. For example, in what universe does the following make sense? I recently picked up a 10-pack of plain white Hanes crew socks, since the ones I have been wearing were purchased some time in the early aughts and are beginning to show their age...as in, I attempted to put on a sock and had it tear a

Anyone who actually listens to and remembers my incessant babbling about trivial nonsense (a limited crowd, to be sure) is probably aware of a gripe of mine that I have held for some time. That is, of course, an overly vague and nebulous bit of information, as my list of gripes could probably fill your average grain silo, were they in some sort of tangible form; one way of achieving this might involve using a label-making machine to print out adhesive white stripes of bitching. So, in the interests of specificity, let me give you a bit of history, that you may understand the level to which this particular issue concerns me, and has for some time. Back in January, 1995, Doritos introduced a radical (I may be using that term too loosely) redesign of their line of flavored tortilla chips, in response to what Wikipedia claims vice president of tortilla chip marketing Roger J. Berdusco claims was “greater competition from restaurant-style tortilla chips, that are larger and more strongly s

I've been trying to eat less red meat lately. Not because of its potentially detrimental effect on my health, but because red is the color of Communism, and Lord knows I don't want to get blacklisted. Then again, a friend of mine lives in a Communist country (China), and seems to enjoy the hell out of it, so who am I to judge? I suppose having to use a proxy server to log into Facebook has its own unique charms. Regardless, I was feeling like steak today, and I don't mean the steak they serve at Taco Bell. Not that I want Taco Bell anyway, after the Five Layer Burrito took my digestive system through the Nine Circles of Hell. So I ventured to the grocery store and bought a steak, some salad and a Sapporo Reserve (it was on sale). Upon my return home, I slapped the steak on the old George Foreman Grill-still going strong seven years later-and poured my Sapporo into the only glass that could contain it, the Samuel Adams Octoberfest beer stein that I fought valiantly with B

When I was a teenager (a time period that has shifted in classification from recent past to quaint, nausea-inducing memory), I was involved in quite a string of malicious acts. Some were perpetrated by me, others against me. There's a reason, for example, that I don't particularly care for situations in which people sit directly behind me...I'm no longer actively nervous during these situations, but there is always a shred of paranoia in my mind. Some of these incidents taught me valuable lessons about my fellow man. Other just reinforced certain anxieties I had. One such incident occurred on what I remember as a warm spring day. I was washing the dishes, as was my daily duty at the time, when my father sidled up beside me with an odd request. Before I go any further, you should know that I am no stranger to the machinations of the drunken mind (for example, I am two glasses of scotch in right now), but there are some thoughts/behaviors that even my mild psychosis can

Maybe it's just me, but for some reason I am unreasonably irritated when I see stupid things on display while I'm driving. Perhaps the fact that the stupidity is linked to travel causes me to make the assumption that it will be more widespread than traditional, sedentary stupidity. I don't know; trying to figure out the whys and hows of my psyche is like trying to do a Sudoku puzzle immediately after being stabbed 23 times. For a while, the object of my ire was a license plate that I saw during my travels (to the liquor store). It was attached to a hybrid car (maybe a Prius , I'm not sure), and it said, "MPG X 2." Now, I'm as liberal as the next UC Santa Cruz graduate, so if you're driving a hybrid, more power to you. But the fact that this guy, after purchasing his hybrid, was so enamored by his miles per gallon that he had to go out and spend extra money to trumpet to the world "I DON'T HAVE TO BUY GAS AS OFTEN AS I USED TO!" reeks o