Perhaps...

...it's clear now that I can't keep up with this thing if I try to write about my experiences in such detailed narratives.

And before I continue...let me reiterate why it is that I write in the first place: I write only to remember.

I'm not sure what it was that took over my life either...

The pressure of having to remember the nuances of every moment? The fact that a million fucking things have happened in the last two months? The job? Fuck...I say "job" as if it's my new career...as if it's the next big step in my life. Who am I trying to convince that I won't be working at Blockbuster for another year or two? My readers? Myself?

I should be the last person to forget why I quit working at Nutrilite...and while I'm on the topic of forgetting shit, am I really starting to forget the major things that have happened since Sound and Fury?

Perhaps I'm actually getting to a point where I can't remember everything the way I thought I could. I figured if I could just take things one at a time that it would actually help...but I can barely remember what happened in the month of August.

One of my closest cousins just got married. It was a big fucking deal, but it all went by so fast. It was like I went to New Mexico and came back in the blink of an eye...and now all of a sudden the cousin I grew up making fart jokes and watching hours of Ren and Stimpy with has a wife.

How the fuck did that happen?

It feels like everything from the last day I worked for Street Blimps up to this very moment has been nothing but a wildly intoxicating blur of life-altering shit.

I met new people at the Sound and Fury festival, including an incredibly sweet girl whom my roommate and I had at first thought purposely gave us a wrong phone number to keep in touch with her. Our confusion only led us to find that we were in fact both responsible for quite possibly the biggest fail of all 2009.

I walked away from that weekend with extensive pictures (some of which were taken by other people)...:

(photo courtesy of our friend Erin and one of my trusty disposables)

...while apparently I got caught in at least one music video:


My best friend's band, Dead Hours, came to visit while hilarity and awkward nakedness ensued, punx were upped, things were probably stolen, and I was forced to work the whole Goddamned time they were here. Gotta love those closing shifts.

I made extensive trips to the legendary Pinks on my way home from work and became a fan of the triple bacon chili cheese dog:

About a week of this went by before I made the incredibly low-key trip back to New Mexico for my cousin's wedding. I was literally in New Mexico for five minutes and the first thing that happened was I got sick. I stayed in a room at my parents' place the whole time I was there, eventually came out and put on a suit for my cousin's wedding, and then flew back to California. Somewhere in the middle of all the music, the ceremony, the dancing...all the random people I didn't know, I had a conversation with my dad and a close friend of his...and it basically changed my entire life. Sort of...

There isn't any sense in making a big deal out of this story unless people ask about it...so I'm going to go ahead and leave that one alone for now.

One of my best friends came to visit for some technical assistance with an unruly hard drive (unfortunately one that had Windows Vista installed on it), and the visit resulted in quite an epic, inebriated conversation about some serious shit...and it took a "WHOLE LOT OF EFFORT" for us to talk about it.

I spent the next few weeks talking to the girl I met at Sound and Fury...a girl who unfortunately lives about seven-hundred miles away. She's nice to me. She always texts me. If she ever came to visit and I took her places, would she have fun?

I am scarred for life from previous experience. Ugh...

Such deep philosophical questions turned over and over in my mind...but in the meantime I had to stay focused. There were things that had changed after my cousin's wedding. Plans. Priorities.

Then I cut my hair...

...and that's about when things REALLY changed.

So far only a few people understand the significance of this...but that's probably because they have known me for a very long time. It won't stay that way forever.

Another best friend of mine drove his car all the way out to LA from Phoenix just so we could kick it for a few days. He forgot to bring his camera, but that didn't stop him from just buying a new one. We documented our adventures:

First order of business (soul food):

Don't be a pussy - get the original:

Keepin' it homo:

Grauman's Chinese Theater - some dude on the left warbling:

Hollywood and Highland Center:

Entrance to Playboy Mansion:

Redondo Beach:

Huntington Beach, Labor Day weekend:

Los Angeles, close to Elysian Park during Fuck Yeah Fest (probably just before Converge started melting faces):

Traveling close to the speed of light:

Ludicrous speed:

Waiting for Bossa Nova delivery, apartment balcony:

My mom came to visit shortly afterward. She went to a premiere of Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs with my sister and brother-in-law (who worked on the movie), and got to walk the red carpet and meet Mr. T:

Apparently Mr. T is a sweet dude. When my mom told him that she was a big fan, he said to her, "God bless." Then they all stood together for a quick iPhone picture. I wish I could make this shit up - I'd be rolling in royalties by now.

After Mr. T's words of encouragement and my mom's inevitable trip back to New Mexico, another one of my best friends came to visit.

All she wanted to do was play video games and eat ridiculous amounts of food during her visit...so, I decided to pull out all the stops. We hit as many major food joints as we could possibly stand. We hit beaches, we hit a donut shop. We hit a tavern where she thought the vintage cash register was the coolest thing she had ever seen:

Redondo Beach in the afternoon:

One of my favorite pictures of Hermosa Beach:

The infamous cash register:

Huntington Beach on a Monday morning:

Santa Monica Pier at night:

Pink Berry before flying home...that and the new "hair cut":

I probably gained about five pounds from that visit - but eventually lost it all over again due to my strict diet of "oatmeal and tuna fish."

I made a trip to orange county for an art show featuring some of my roommate's girlfriend's artwork and got my first request ever for a postcard from the girl I met at Sound and Fury.

I've never had a girl ask me to send her a postcard before...not even when I was dating someone. I don't really know what that means. All I know is that I liked it, and I hope she keeps asking for them.

One season of The Office, a season and a half of Californication, Three seasons of Dexter and a postcard later, I find myself staying up way too late for my own good...but at the same time as a side effect of always having to close the Goddamned Blockbuster in Hollywood.

I would love more than anything to be able to say that this hasn't been an evasive attempt to avoid putting my all into a colorful adaptation of my life from the last two months...the last two months that I can't seem to remember well enough (or perhaps don't have the patience to sit down and recapitulate). However, if I said all that...it would be a fucking lie.

Therefore, my readers - you will have to excuse me...

I need to study for the AFOQT.

Walking the Red Carpet

Andy Samberg arrived at the July 28th Paper Heart Hollywood premiere some time within the first hour and a half of my first shift at Blockbuster Video. He was wearing a blue, hooded sweatshirt. Very hip, Andy.

It was my first night dealing with customers face to face, and after a weekend of driving around in the ghettos of South Central LA, I was ready for a change.

Hundreds of people stood outside of our little store on the awkward intersection of Hollywood, Sunset and Virgil. You could hear all the girls screaming outside, horns honking, the hustle and bustle of LA's rush hour traffic.

It was my first night handling a cash register...perhaps a big step from using a dated GPS system in a twenty-year-old truck.

My manager on duty for the night was totally convinced that we were looking at Michael Cera.

From across the street, behind a thick, glass window, he could have been anyone...but having the sense that girls would necessarily go wild for a young guy like Michael Cera, we were all pretty much convinced it was Michael Cera.

It was clearly Andy Samberg:



If you look close enough at 55 seconds, you can see someone inside the store walking near the window. That was me, walking back to the counter to help some girl who was curious about what was going on outside. If I remember correctly, she may have been renting one of the seasons of The Office.

My memory never ceases to amaze me. Perhaps that's why I studied physics...quite a monumental step from tendering a transaction for a season of The Office for some girl at a Blockbuster Video in Hollywood.

It was my first night for a lot of things. Perhaps things that everyone else feels when they're sixteen and they get that first summer job when they're still in high school...when you're standing behind that cash register for the first time and your supervisor is standing right next to you.

They stand next to you and they walk you through the whole thing.

"Don't forget to hit total."

"Don't forget to clear out of the account before you handle the next customer."

"Don't forget to type 'find' before you do a title search."

It's all so simple and elementary for someone like me, but it's still a lot to remember all at once.

There are two customers behind the counter.

The first one changes their mind after I've already totaled their transaction...I'm taking too long to fix the problem...now there are three customers behind the counter.

Four. Five.

I am a monkey pushing buttons. The best way to get through this is to not think about the fact that I went from generating recurrence relations for bessel functions to dealing with impatient Blockbuster customers.

If I were still in school while doing this, that would be one thing. I have my master's degree in science now, and the next customer is a bitch who has no patience for mistakes.

She eyeballs me...knowing that it's my first night.

There are now ten customers behind the counter.

The crowd outside thickens and more and more people begin pouring into our shrinking store. The line behind the counter begins to remind me of the one in front of Pink's (more on that later).

I've finished totaling her transaction and she hands me cash, a scowl on her face.

Everything is going fine, except for the fact that her change is 33 cents and I mistakenly handed her two nickels and three pennies...perhaps the most common dimensionality mistake I make when dealing with coins.

She holds the change in her hand and stares at me, the same scowl on her face.

I look at the five coins in her hand and realize I've handed her two nickels instead of a nickel and a quarter. I laugh and smack my head...

I apologize, take the nickel and hand her a quarter.

Apology not accepted.

I pick up her movies and mistakenly hand them to her over the counter...a mental lapse in the wake of my first official mistake, and I've forgotten that she can't walk through the detector at the front of the store with the movies in her hand without the alarm going off.

"You're allowed to hand the movies to me right here?" The scowl remains on her face.

I failed to amuse this woman by passively admitting my mistake, apologizing to her and handing her the additional twenty cents that I almost short changed her by...

"No, I gotta hand them to you over here," I say as we both walk around the counter to the front...she continues to eyeball me.

"You have a nice night," I say.

Regards unrequitted.

She used me. I could see it in her eyes. I've seen that look before.

What she saw that night was a boy in his early twenties who couldn't do simple math...even with a computer right in front of him telling him exactly what to do.

I know this is what she was thinking because this is how my dad thinks...and she had the exact same look in her eyes that my dad has when he becomes frustrated with having to wait in lines. The teenagers who work at all those fast food joints...the malls, the supermarkets...when he gets frustrated because he has to wait in line longer than usual for someone who's in training only to find
that somehow the educational system has failed us all.

"How is it that they can't do simple math when they've got a computer right in front of them telling them what to do?"

This woman looked at me the same way my dad looks at all those kids...like they've been reduced to their lowest possible form of existence. That night she got an opportunity to look down on me because it was my first night working a cash register and I mistook a nickel for a quarter, and she thought it meant I couldn't add...a woman who more than likely hasn't seen any math beyond simple algebra, yet happens to be old enough to have grown up in an age where she might not have had the advantage of a calculator when she had my job.

That night, my job was not to rent movies out to customers. It was not to sell rewards or to restock shelves or to keep the store clean.

That first night, there was a hovering urge to inform all of the impatient customers that I was smarter than them, that I was more educated than they were and that I was above the job...that instead of being there I should have been working with a team of engineers designing a new satellite communications system so they could download more crap onto their iPods faster, or a new type of semi-conductor to use in a technologically advanced optical receiver for some new ground-based communications network...

That first night...my job was to NOT say any of those things.

Eventually the premier across the street at the Vista theatre ended and the crowd outside of our store began to thin out. The old, rotten cunt who tried to insult me was long gone, but took with her the last opportunity a Blockbuster customer will ever get to treat me like dirt...or so I thought.

It was a rude awakening for a first timer at Blockbuster. One of the busiest nights of the week, at the busiest location in Hollywood, during a red carpet premier right across the street, and all my manager kept telling me that night was that I was doing an incredible job for a first timer.

If it weren't for that, the woman with the stink eye might have actually gotten to me.

Once the traffic in our store finally died down, I had a few breif opportunities to get to know my coworkers...a chance to explain to them why my previous job actually stressed me out more than having to deal with miss hag-bitch.

We were approaching close when an old, black homeless man entered the store and began harassing us.

He stood at the counter, hunched over, looking at me sideways and mumbled what sounded like a bunch of hobo gibberish. I'm not one to dismiss people like that automatically though because I have terrible hearing, and for all I know they're trying to tell me that they're my long-lost cousin or some random shit...which is far too interesting to dismiss. Either way, I have to treat everyone who comes into the store like a customer. It's my first fucking day.

It wasn't until I asked him to repeat himself a second time that I heard him say, "what's a matter? You can't understand simple English? You a high school graduate, boy? Did you have college? You get your degree or something? I'm trying to ask you for the Blockbuster website, I'm tryin'a get online. I want the number to one of the other stores - the one on Western."

It being my first night, I have no idea where to look to find him the number for the Blockbuster on Western. I didn't even realize there was a Blockbuster on Western. I don't know the neighborhood.

One of my coworkers walks up to me and points at a tiny strip of paper with the numbers of all the local stores printed on it. The strip of paper is taped to the counter right behind my computer monitor.

I give him the address for the website and the number for the Blockbuster on Western and resist the urge to be an asshole about it even after his attempt to insult me. He then recedes into the back of the store and creepily stays there for an hour or so, wandering around aimlessly until my manager realizes that he intends to stay the night.

Just one more night of dealing with annoying customers like this and I'll be on my way to Oxnard, California for a weekend of sight-seeing and hardcore sing-alongs.

Eventually the police had to show up and escort the hobo from the store after he tried to get real on my manager.

What a first night, right?

We closed up the store and cleaned up the mess left behind by the several hundred customers who visited us that day. It wasn't until I had been working at Blockbuster for a few weeks that I discovered the clear view of the infamous Hollywood sign right in front of our store.

Perhaps if I play my cards right, this won't be the closest I'll ever get to being a part of all the silver screen action...and maybe all the Andy Sambergs of an era ten or twenty years from now will be walking on the same red carpet across the street for a premiere of something I've written.

Maybe not.

Maybe the premiere will be somewhere else.