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