A Brief Note To Suitors

If you ask the girls for a kiss, they will let you lean in, pucker your lips, and then they will headbutt you. I'm willing to put up with this in the hopes that this remains their definition of kissing well into their teenage years.

Proper Anniversary Post

Note: I was supposed to post this on our actual anniversary, but was instead visiting landfills. The idea was to do it yearly to not only remember the fateful day, but to avoid ever having to actually write an anniversary post again. The fact that I'm late my actually be the best possible comment on what it's actually like to be stuck with me.

Some number of years ago, some number of people turned out to watch Amy put on a gorgeous dress and make an incredible mistake. Armed with the courage of an open bar, this is what I told them -

When Amy was in medical school she was assigned partners for each of her various rotations. And from talking to them it sounds like having Amy in your group was a mixed blessing. On the one hand she was likely to make you a pretty nametag that not only told people who you were, but used drawings of little animals to depict your inner self, and stickers with phrases like “You’re Super” and “Neato” to keep your spirits up when times got hard. Someone told me it was like going to work everyday with a cheerleader. The problem was that on most rotations the attending only gave out one A and it turned out that the cheerleader was as smart as she was happy, and anyone who uses the word “Yippe” in conversation is pretty damn happy. And so the next thing they knew her partners would look up and the smiley little blond girl would have taken the A. Her classmates came up with a name for this phenomenon, and that’s how Amy became known in some circles as the Little White Cloud. Some days it’s a puppy, some days it’s a little bird, but it always looks cute and harmless, right up until it rains on your head.

I met Amy when I was in fourth grade and spent the next eight years with the Little White Cloud, so I was intimately familiar with this phenomenon. At some point you just come to accept the fact that she seems to float along while the rest of us have to walk. In fact, after a while, in its own warped way, it almost seems fair. What I wasn’t prepared for was the fact that you can never really escape the Little White Cloud. The minute I met her I knew that Amy was one in a million. When I went away to school in a city of something like 16 million I figured I had at least a fighting chance of finding another one. But it turns out it’s not really a question of large numbers. As anyone who’s ever met her can attest, Amy is absolutely unique. And that’s when I discovered the second curse of the Little White Cloud: even when it’s gone, it casts an impossibly long shadow. When she’s around you’re desperate just to keep up, and when she’s gone you’re desperate for something that measures up. Either way, there is only one Little White Cloud.

When we actually started dating I fully expected one of two outcomes. Either she would eventually wake up and move on, or I would wake up and discover that it was all a dream and that I actually lived in a small cardboard box. So I’m not positive how we actually ended up here. What I can say is that for the past 8 and ¾ years she has not only tolerated my idiocy, but supported, encouraged, and made cute little nametags for it. What I’ve chosen to do with my life isn’t easy and it certainly doesn’t pay well, and if at any time she had ever asked me to stop, to give it up, I’d have done so in a heartbeat. It’s a testament to just how incredibly lucky I am that the only times she’s used the words "stop" or "give up", they were directly preceded by the word "never".

So the question I get asked most often, right after where are my grandchildren, is why it’s taken almost nine years to get here. Honestly, like most of the people who’ve crossed her path in the past, I think it’s because I’ve spent the last nine years trying to be her equal, when all she’s ever asked is that I be myself. Given that she’s such an incredibly brilliant person, I have no rational explanation for why she’s sitting next to me today, except to say that this must all be in my head. So if, as I’ve suspected all along, this is indeed too good to be true and tomorrow I do wake up in a box I will gladly look around my cardboard home and count myself lucky to have even dreamed of such a person, let alone to have imagined marrying her. I will simply walk down to the nearest liquor store, buy myself a malt liquor, and next the time I find myself staring up at a little white cloud I will raise my Colt 45 and say I knew you were too good to be true. But until then, and for the last time tonight, I will raise this glass and thank you all for making it seem so real. Cheers.

NY People

Amy and I are now in year 12 of what I consider the best first date ever. To celebrate we went to NY. In lieu of gifts we posed for pictures near a landfill. That's how you do it in year 12.

To be fair it was a lovingly crafted landfill, built by some of the most talented landfill technicians in the feature film business and some of Amy's pictures include the back of JF's head (you know, the director, I just don't want to bait the search engines), which is the kind of thing you don't get if you just go to your local landfill for your anniversary. In all I think Amy saw enough of the filmmaking process to grasp how unglamorous and surprisingly smelly it all is. I expect her to pay more attention to locations in my future scripts. 'Would it hurt to put this North Korean prison in Paris?'

Anyway, we got to ditch being parents for a few days and just trying being people again. NY People, which are like regular people but louder and more likely to whistle at each other. Turns out we're both still totally awesome at it. Especially me. I got several compliments on NY Kyle.

And then we came home.

The twins have become obsessed with this sing a long DVD. It was written, performed, and delivered to our car by Satan himself. It's twenty minutes long, it plays on a loop, and it's all I think about. I sing the songs in my sleep. I introduce myself to people as Tempo the Tiger. I can only do mathematical calculations if they're phrased in terms of the number of monkeys still jumping on the bed plus or minus the ones who've already bumped their heads. NY Kyle would never do these things.

Which is why he's dead now. Actually, the DVD just had him on life support. Stacey pulled his plug. Buried him unceremoniously, and, ironically, in a landfill.

I became fascinated with couchsurfing.org as she was planning her own trip to find NY Stacey. Basically, people offer up their couches and floors to strangers, and in turn sleep on the couches and floors of other strangers. This is basically the only way I've ever traveled, and there are no shortage of people with stories about me not getting off their couch to prove it. I can't even go to certain parts of Seattle because a fellow surfer somehow thought a closed bathroom door was a clear indication our hosts wife would NOT be naked on the other side. He was wrong, and I haven't been near UW since. Anyway, with such great experiences, how could I not sign up? So I did.

Stacey's response: Why? You have two kids who go to bed and get up at 7:30, a pregnant wife, and you're asking them to sleep on your dining room floor. Why would anyone want to stay with you? She's basically saying that my life has become so lame that someone in their 20's wouldn't even visit, FOR FREE. Your NY self just isn't going to survive something like that.

Of course Stacey has been walking around in a baseball cap for the last day because she did something to her eyebrows that she absolutely refuses to reveal, and she did just have a 20 minute argument with Amy over whether 'frot' was just a synonym for 'rot' only to have wikipedia reveal it actually refers to homosexual dry-humping. So I'm not going to declare my couch hopeless just yet. There's a Mormon boardgame lover out there somewhere in need of a place to crash.

I guess the important thing to remember from all this is, if a girl with no eyebrows offers you a frotten banana, you should run.

Hey Blog!

Hey blog. Long time no see. You look thinner. Except for your muscles, which look bigger. And you seem smarter, more confident, and funnier than I remember you. Not that you weren't those things before. This isn't coming out right.

What I'm trying to say is that I missed you.

Things happen and I'll think, I should tell my blog about this, and then I'll think, it's been so long since blog and I talked, can I really start up again with something this small? Hey blog, Ripley ate a squirrel... no, that won't do. And so I don't say anything. Even some kind of big things - like, did you know that Mars has a penis? - have gone without comment. And all this right when I need your help. How do you feel about Mojo as a middle name, blog? Because I really like it and it's meeting some resistance. Can you do anything about this, blog?

Anyway, we've started shooting The Beaver. At this moment Mel Gibson is wandering around New York with a beaver puppet on his hand because despite having a team of agents, managers, and years of experience, he was somehow convinced it was a good move. Here's hoping he's right. I would love to say more, blog, but as we've discussed, the most interesting things are the ones I end up not being able to write down. If you see me in person, like if you and I got on an elevator, I tend to talk a lot about this. I have thoughts, feelings, etc. about it. But they're elevator thoughts, not internet thoughts. And since you live in the internet, well... sorry about that.

We also tried to buy a house, and sell a house, and then build a house, and we accomplished none of these because we're afraid of everything. Apparently our house isn't worth what we're asking for it, but the one we wanted to buy, they wouldn't sell for anything less. And building, it turns out, takes a long, long, long time, and they want you to pay for the house even before you can live in it. Doesn't that seem wrong? It seemed wrong to us. So we're just going to keep the whole gang here, have the three kids share one room until one of them lands a Disney Channel series and buys us an island. Or Mel's place is apparently for sale and there's practically no limit to what some Hannah Montana money could buy us.

I'm taking Amy to the set for our 11th anniversary next week because as you know the 11th is the bring your spouse to work anniversary. It's also the get someone else to pay for your hotel and airfare anniversary and still probably complain about the price of food in New York anniversary. All this obviously comes before the 12th, which is the why did I marry this cheap idiot anniversary. I'll let you know how it goes.

That's all for now, blog. Don't give up on me. I have so much to say to you, we just keep letting the little things get in the way. Life's too short for that, blog. Let's talk. Everyday. We can do it. Okay, not everyday, but often. Sometimes. We'll do like an every other week thing. Every other solstice? Let's maybe not get bogged down in specifics. We'll just, you know, see each other around. Maybe on an elevator. I've missed you.

Hold me?

p.s. Mars Mojo Killen - please register your support. Or I'm willing to go with Mars Jones Killen and have the nickname be Mojo. You love it, right?

Minivan Death March

Dear Mars,

I wrote letters to your sisters the whole time they were in-utero. They were mostly just panicked whining, so I'm not really sure you're missing anything. Anyway, it felt appropriate to finally drop you a line. What up?

Your mom thinks that you will need a place to live and a way to be carried between different destinations so we're trying to buy a house with more rooms and car with more seats. The house is out of our price range and there's virtually no hope that we'll be able to sell the one that we're in. And the car is a minivan. So, you know, thanks.

When you mom got a job after decades of schooling she got to page through hundreds of brochures and drive all kinds of fancy things before choosing exactly the car she wanted. Now that my chance to buy my first new car ever has come I was simply told that we were going to need something 'buslike' and that I could pick the color. It will be black, a vehicle dressed for the funeral of my youth that its purchase will represent. I can't tell you how many times I've said that I'd rather be hit by a minivan than drive one. And if we ever have another trip like the one to Colorado I might just lay down in front of this one.

Apparently your house will sell faster if prospective buyers don't step on cat shit and legos the second they come inside so we're hiding our real life in boxes and trying to make it look like an Ikea catalog in here. We also had a backyard installed. Your sisters we let play in dirt. For buyers we spring for sod.

And we're less than a month away from shooting on the movie, which is a whole other story that we'll get into when you get here. The important thing to remember will be that no matter how it turns out and no matter what people say or spray paint on our house, it will be the reason you have a room to sleep in.

And a minivan.

Yea.

Even The Furniture Is Talented

We had a table read for The Beaver. If you, like me, are new to movie making you might have expected this to involve a talking table. You, like me, would have been disappointed. Why call it a 'table read' you'd say. That's false advertising you'd say. And then someone would politely ask you to try not to speak for the next two hours.

But wait! Hard as it is to believe, there are better things than talking furniture. Turns out you can put people, not people, Actors!, around the table and let them read the script. If you've read anything about The Beaver then you're aware who some of the non furniture 'table read' participants were, but the people they got to round out the cast, to just come in off the street and like, read a stupid script by some moron about a talking beaver... well, it boggles the mind. I kept smiling at them and shaking their hands and asking how they could possibly be there since in my mind they actually lived in the clouds and only materialized to appear in movies and television.

And then they would ask me to get them another cup of coffee and I would say, no, no, see, I'm the writer, and then they would say, two sugars, and I would get their coffee. But still!

Anyway, at some point in this process I've begun to wrap my mind around the idea that a group of people were actually going to film the things I had written on a page, were going to say those lines, and record it, and put it together, and show it to people. And they were going to do all this on purpose!

But hearing them do it all at once, together, around a non speaking table, well, it would have given me chills had I not been sweating profusely and wondering how many people had noticed my sweating and wondering if the fact that everyone immediately went and got a paper towel after shaking my hand had anything to do with my sweating. Long story short, it was fantastic, thrilling, and I dropped like ten pounds of water weight.

As I've stressed countless times nothing's guaranteed and these things can and do fall apart, so rather than wait for the red carpet to enjoy myself, I'm pretty much breaking out the steak dinners for every step in the process. You received my W2! Steak! The woman reading Worker #1 was in three episodes of Mad Men! Medium rare! You've never seen anyone sweat through a jacket! Which way to Morton's? At this rate I will need a bypass before principal photography. If you, like me, were just an untalented hack whose idea for a beaver driven Teen Wolf spinoff had gotten you this far, you wouldn't have it any other way.

Vacation!

Amy and the girls flew home. The ride up was so indescribably awful for everyone that driving five hours in the wrong direction to drop them off at the airport seemed beyond reasonable. Sadly, their flight was delayed so much I almost beat them back to the house and 138 innocent individuals got a solid taste of Nipples lung capacity. But....

Totally worth it.

We were not only able to carry the twins up their first peak, but my mom, a woman who gets scared of heights on her tiptoes, somehow braved actual hand and foot scrambling at more than 12,000 feet and made her first summit. That picture alone justified the ride in our rolling scream machine.

We also hiked and biked and rafted and ate and did other things that brochures advised us to do. Nixie headbanged to old time bluegrass, Ripples touched fingers with anyone who came within ten feet. Both of them realized that everywhere we went the rocks were all out of order and spent hours carefully rearranging riverbeds and trailsides.

Now we're home, where you have to work and lock your doors and everything melts by noon. For summer they should change the sign at the border as you cross into Texas so instead of 'Welcome' it just says 'Are You Sure About This?'