It’s after two in the morning. Recap: the Amoeba Holiday Party is amazing. Then I drive Candace by the house on Franklin that looks like a Mayan temple where Steve Hodel claims Beth Short spent happy fun times with his father. Hungry, we then hit Cafe 101. I think I steal a spoon by accident. Now I’m home. I shall drink water and sit up and watch Dark Angel until I can’t keep my eyes open.

A couple decades ago, my friend’s dad derided our obsession with Dungeons & Dragons, referring to the game as “garbage.” We didn’t mind. We were used to that sort of reaction. In retrospect, the alarm and consternation the game caused among parents is laughable. Some found the subject matter (a pagan world of monsters and magic) a threat to the morals and values of their children. I’ve always maintained that the act of sheer creativity that went into playing the game, even as badly as we played it, stimulated a need in me to tell stories. An article in the Boston Globe has a similar view:

Our influence is now everywhere. My generation of gamers — whose youths were spent holed up in paneled wood basements crafting identities, mythologies, and geographies with a few lead figurines — are the filmmakers, computer programmers, writers, DJs, and musicians of today.

Sometimes I think that if I hadn’t been an avid gamer in my youth I wouldn’t be where I am today. I might have a respectable job. I might have a nice car. A decent life insurance plan. The rest of my life mapped out in front of me…

I know you’re gonna buy it. Don’t pretend you won’t. But until you do, you can stream the new U2 album here.

Late Update: Oh yeah. It won’t play on Macs. Sorry about that, Ginny…

My Berkeley friend, Dayle, comes down to attend a conference this weekend. It’s Saturday night at Amoeba, one of the flat-out busiest Saturdays I’ve had the pleasure to work yet, with scores of people crowding the mezzanine, flipping through action, through classics, through cult, through television, pulling product, leaving it in piles around the store, rearranging, deconstructing, contributing to the general entropy of the scene. It’s dark outside. Dayle arrives to say hello and pick up an apartment key so she can kick back at my place. She arrives breathless and in a state of high adrenaline.

“I just got shot at!”

She says that she’s driving around looking for a parking space, when she passes a cluster of thuggish looking dudes walking through the parking lot of the Jack in the Box at Sunset and Cahuenga. She parks her car, and she’s walking back down past the Jack in the Box when explosions ring out from somewhere on the street. There are sparks on the pavement. In an instant Dayle freezes, thinking something along the lines of “WTF??” And fifteen people around her dive for cover behind cars. Then something passes through Dayle’s mind which, when vocalized, might soung like, “When in Rome…” So she leaps for cover behind a nice, large sedan.

Confusion descends. The police arrive. Dayle scurries past the excitement into the relative safety of Amoeba, where she curses me for living in a city where this sort of thing is likely to happen. I’m amazed, myself. I’ve been out and about in that area on a hundred occasions, and it never seemed unsafe. A little demented, perhaps, with a hint of sketchiness and a lot of blaring horns (the intersection of Ivar and Sunset is one of the most high-tension intersections in L.A.) but never outright dangerous.

Dayle leaves to go buy a much-neeed bottle of wine and retire to the relative safety of my apartment. As she leaves I see J.D., wheeling a stack of bins brimming with CDs away from the chaos of the front counter. I ask him, “Were there really shots fired outside?”

“That’s what everyone thought,” he says, “But the police came in and told us it was just firecrackers.”

Heh.

But there’s a weird truth at the center of this. We live in a big, swirling city. We live in a tense city. And if someone should happen to set off a cluster of Black Cats in the street, especially outside of the sprawl of early July, we’re a citizenry conditioned to dive for cover behind a sedan. I suppose this is because it’s not always just firecrackers, but there’s still something both hilarious and depressing about that.

Heavy writing time. I had yesterday off, which is unusual for me. I’ve been working every Tuesday for months and months. I spent it by my lonesome, working hard on the script, drinking a tea made from maple syrup, lemon and cayenne pepper, and in the evening, watching my DVD of Hitchcock’s Rebecca for the very first time.

Great Scott, Joan Fontaine is beautiful. And she’s still alive, living in Carmel, I think. In fact her sister, Olivia de Havilland, is still alive as well. The rest of the cast is long gone. Dame Judith Anderson died in Santa Barbara back in the early Nineties, which I remember becasue I lived there. Olivier died in ’89. And George Sanders, who reputedly told David Niven in the Thirties that he would kill himself one day, declared in the Seventies that he was bored with life and did just that.

In case you were wondering.

I owe email to so many people I find myself paralyzed. I need to tell Elana I can’t make her birthday tomorrow, and remind her that her birthday four years ago fell on election day. I want to talk about the ghosts of her youth with Molly. I want to congratulate Jamy on her new beau. I want to trade Thomas Newman scores with Drew. I need to tell Michael that Dara’s thinking about moving to Portland and can she give him a call? I need to tell Charlotte that I’m still working on Strange Angels and that I’m still fighting the screenplay war and that I miss her pithy advice. I need to tell Daniel that all is well in Hollywood, even though sometimes I feel as if I’m imploding. I want to tell Scott and Barbara that we should get together for drinks. I’ve got to tell Dayle that I forgot that I work on Friday and may not be able to hang out with her after all (she’ll kill me.) I’d like to ask Michael what that book was we saw at Book Soup that had all the list of names that were inadvisable for professional wrestlers (I’ve thought of a few myself, such as “Glad-Handing Dandy.”) I want to write Iris and tell her remark about her age-old post about her late night panics about death and futility, and ask her to send that picture of the Space Invader to me. I have to write Joy and apologize for completely forgetting to help her install that memory into her laptop. And of course, I’d like to tell “Jagged A. Rehired” that I’ll have to pass on the V!aG-Ra this time, thanks.

Instead of writing email this morning, I work on a script. It’s a trade-off, an obsession. And it’s probably cost me a few friendships. But I can’t help myself.

One more thing: this I just picked up from boingboing, and since I’m in a Bill Hicks mood lately, I’m posting it here:

Bill Hicks once told a story about an American friend of his who complained about the USA. When told, “well, if you don’t like it then move somewhere else” the friend’s reply would be, “What? And become a victim of our foreign policy?”

I gotta go arrange copies of The Simple Life 2 on a shelf for people to buy. See ya.