Tuesday, January 20, 2004

smell that? My name is Mark Michaels.  I went to boot camp in 1988 at Fort Jackson, South Carolina.  There was a skinny guy directly across from my bunk in the barracks. His name was Mike Markley. Mike Markley was from West Virginia.  He looked and sounded really dumb, just like a dumb guy would look and sound in an old Warner Brothers cartoon.  But when it came time to qualify on our M-16s, Mike Markley got a near perfect score.  Mike Markley was a hawkeye. I barely qualified on my M-16.  Mark Michaels was just a marksman. One day we were standing in formation out in front of the barracks.  Mike Markley sniffed twice at the air. "Smell that?  It's gonna rain," he said with a certain excitement to his voice. One second later it started pouring. 10:53:52 PM    comment []

a book on directing by the director of a movie about killer bees that i had never heard of When I was about fifteen or sixteen, I really, really wanted to be a Hollywood movie director just like Steven Spielberg.  I figured I needed to learn everything I could about film directing so I went to the book store to look for a book about being a film director. Unfortuantely, there weren't any books about how to be a film director by Steven Spielberg, or Francis Ford Coppola, or Stanley Kubrick, or any other director that I had heard of.  I guess they were too busy directing movies to write a book about directing movies. But I did find this book by a director I had never heard of.  I flipped through it at the book store, and it seemed like there were lots of chapters and pictures about lighting and casting and script writing and all the right stuff, so I took the book home to learn about how to be a film director. But when I sat down and read the book at home, I kind of lost my confidence in it.  The director/author kept mentioning this one movie about killer bees that he had directed.  I had seen some movies with killer bees, and this wasn't one of them.  It was some really, really obscure movie about killer bees, that I had never heard of. I eventually read the whole book by the director who had made the movie about killer bees that I had never heard of.  But for some reason I was kind of sad and depressed when I put the book down.   10:44:06 PM    comment []

mom, it's your son I think it's safe to say that I've been kind of a disappointment and and an aggravation to my mom.  I think her disappointment started around the time when I threw up on her in highschool after my friends brought me home early in the morning with my pants around my ankles.  After that I went on to drop out of college about three or four times.  Then were there were all the calls I made late at night while having panic attacks on drugs.  Then there was the fact that my wife divorced me after I cheated on her.  And then there has been all the articles in the newspaper about the bizarre stunts and antics I have carried out around town over the years, including the one where my surprise barrel sculpture in front of the St. Petersburg Times was mistaken for a bomb, resulting in the deployment of the full HAZMAT  squad in bioprotective gear. Because of these things, and other things like them, I think I have been kind of a disappointment to my mom.  Because of her disappointment, ebarassment, shame, disgust, etc, there has always been this disappointed monotone quality to her voice when talking to me.  It's sort of like the way that a mom talks to a terrible teenager when he's too old to be spanked, and the parent is tired of yelling.  It's just the monotone of disgust and disappointment. In fact, most of my conversations with her are just very quick and pragmatic discussions about when she is going to watch my daughter over the weekend--when to bring her over, when to pick her up etc.  As soon as this is ironed out, she hangs up pretty quickly. Anyway, my mom has had this very short and disappointed tone of voice with me for about sixteen years now.  But there was this one time, a couple of years ago, when I got to hear my mom's cheerful and loving and bubbly side.  I had called my mom early one Saturday morning to arrange my daughter's weekend visit with her.  But instead of hearing her monotone voice of disgust, I heard this "well, GOOD-MORNING!!!"  Her voice was like a song from a broadway musical.  "It's such a gorgeous day out today!" my mom continued in this very strange and happy manner.  "What do you say to a round of golf?" A round of golf? I thought to myself.  Then I realized what was going on.  My mom didn't know who she was talking to.  She thought it was her son-in- law, Scott.  (My brother-in-law, Scott is a successful attorney who married my older sister and never threw up on my mom or wasted her tuition money or had his name in the paper for art that was mistaken for bombs).  I kind of voyeuristically listened to my mom while she thought I was someone better for a while, until I just couldn't take it any longer. "Mom, Mom!  It's me," I said.  "It's Mark." My Mom's cheerful voice melted away, but instead of the disappointed monotone there was the sound of confusion.  You see, my brother in law, has a brother named Mark.  This Mark is a pretty decent guy too.  He taught English in Korea for several years, married a Korean lady, and then came home to Florida to take over his Dad's hardware store. "I did-didn't realize you were in town," my mom said, trying to regain her mental footing.  "You and Oak-Yung will, will have to come over and--" "It's your son, Mom.  Your son, Mark." I said. Then there was this kind of mental and emotional overload that my mom couldn't recover from. "I know this has been a really strange conversation.  I'm going to have to go now," she said.  And then my mom hung up the phone.  I stood there for a while with the dead  receiver to my ear and then I  hung the phone up too. 7:32:56 PM    comment []

just beyond the threshold At some point in my teenage years I discovered the angusih of zits.  Soon after that I discovered the joy of popping zits.  This went on to be a lifetime passion.  There has been many a day in the last twenty years where the best, or only good part of it was a nice, ripe explosive zit. But back to the beginning of my story.  The first pimples I discovered were on my face, as is expected.  I would pick and pop every whitehead and blackhead and bump that I could find.  When I ran out of actual zits and pimples, I was still hungry for more.  So I would pick at microscopic little pores and specks of nothing, looking for any last precious bit of goo or slime. Before long I discovered pimples on my arms.  I would pop all of them and then look nearer, up to my shoulder and pop anything that was there.  But still I wanted more!  So I would bend my neck inward at a sharper and sharper angle, until I had reached the limits of my vertebrate capabilities, meanwhile straining my eyeballs to their closest possible field of focus.  Sometimes the pimple would be just beyond the threshhold of all of this stretching and straining and I would have to give up with a sigh of defeat. When I looked back out on the world around me, I noticed that everything was kind of blurry.  Pretty soon I had to get glasses. 6:01:48 PM    comment []

© Copyright 2004 Mark Michaels. Last update: 2/1/2004; 6:28:34 PM.