Been strange since I’ve been back in SF, as I’ve primarily been staying in my apartment and not venturing out too much.

First, the gas company is putting in new lines/sewers on my street, so around 9 a.m. every morning, it sounds like the Jurassic Park backlot, with the T-Rexes walking out to the exhibit.

Behind me, a neighbor is doing some sort of work that has resulted in constant jackhammering throughout most of Monday and Tuesday, although it has been absent today.

My phone line was down for about seven hours yesterday for no good reason, cutting out right in time for an important interview with a recruiter and a very special job I hope to get. Thankfully, we worked it out and did the interview on my cell phone.

Last night, my apartment shook for a good 15 seconds from the South Bay earthquake, although I really didn’t do anything but wonder how long it would last. I hit the quake info webpage while my room was still shaking and it showed no activity in the last hour. So, for a while there, I was wondering if the gas company screwed up and there was a big hole on the street outside or something.

Today, after my movie, I walked through the Castro as it prepared for “No Halloween,” with police barricades, and a lot of cops and tow trucks ready for the non-festivities. I will not be going anywhere near that area tonight, as it will either be nothing to see or Halloween in Thunderdome.

Just seems like a lot of chaotic events at once, no?

Just spent a week in Orlando with the family, hitting the sites. Pretty much did it all: Magic Kingdom, EPCOT, Disney-MGM Studios, Animal Kingdom, and Universal Studios and Universal Islands of Adventure.

Got sick for the latter half of the trip, not sure exactly why, although I’m still getting better. I tend to always get a sinus thing when I’m in an air-conditioned setting for more than 3-4 days. Then again, there was also the whole repeating cycle of: you just got wet on a ride, you’re in an air conditioned line, you’re in the humidity and sun again. The good part was it was mainly just a sinus thing and I didn’t feel all that run-down, so it didn’t make the parks too bad, just a bit more somber and quiet as a result.

Today, I went to see a matinee movie and from not doing all that much, I did get pretty sweaty, so there’s definitely still something going on in my system. I’ve not started back up at the gym yet, but we’ll see about trying it one of these days.

The trip was good, but I think I’m getting too used to down time. The vacation didn’t have much. I had seniors waking up in time to nudge the roosters, infants crying for fake powdered chemical nourishment at all hours, 4 year-olds demanding attention, and trying to hit the parks around all of this. So not much sleep, no reading, no writing… I don’t think I have many of those vacations in me anymore. I like my quiet. I like reading before bed.

Taking nine people ranging from 7 months to 85 years to an amusement park is its own magic. I went in with no expectations, aside from eating a lot of veggie burgers, and that was a pretty good plan. The whole vacation was sort of a bonus, so I was just along for the ride. When the occasion presented itself to peel off of something boring (parade) and hit a ride (Haunted Mansion, which wasn’t much more exciting), I tried, but largely stuck with the group.

I tried to keep quiet when relatives said I should have been able to write four books by now, let alone not have finished one, or someone else passed off some South Beach cheese thing as “healthy” dessert. Of course, having gained weight as a vegan doesn’t help in that regard, if they lost weight eating their junk food, hehe. I mean, sure, I’d win a blood test, but we’re working on a superficial level here.

Of course, this vacation is unlikely to repeat ever, so no point dissecting it too much for what I would do differently in the future.

As I stated earlier, the point was mainly to see Disney through the eyes of the young kids in our party. My niece was a bit too young to go on anything, or know she was on a ride when she was. She did do well with at the character breakfast, though, taking great pictures with Mickey, Lilo and Stitch. My nephew on the other hand got shy and a bit freaked out around them. I think it’s partially because he’s the size of a five year old, but is only three and a half, so you have to keep adjusting for age, even when kids his size are doing the same things.

As expected, I was most intrigued with EPCOT, but bought no souvenirs there, using it primarily as a precursor to seeing proper all of the various countries on display. I’ll get my future Japanese trinkets in Japan, my French stuff in France, etc. My only purchase on the whole trip was a classic old-school Mickey ringer-T.

It was hard adjusting to time on vacation. I never got to the gym, because I would hear people say we needed to get ready to go soon. In the first half of the week, I would often be ready and then realize that “soon” for nine people is 90 minutes, enough time for me to have worked out for 45 minutes, come back, showered, and still not held things up. Once I realized the system, I was sinusy and not in the mood to work out.

But just the ability of getting nine family members on vacation in one suite together, and everyone is still talking afterward, that’s accomplishment enough.

I had mixed feelings about going to see Body Worlds 2 & the Three Pound Gem on a recent jaunt to San Jose. I had heard there was some questions as to whether the donors knew hanging a skateboard hand plant would be their final resting place (but Wikipedia seems to indicate they did). Many people I told about the exhibit said they wouldn’t go, that it seemed “creepy.”

I don’t really get grossed out by such things. In fact, back when I was an obituary writer and then criminal justice reporter, the coroner and his assistant deputy coroners said I could see them perform an autopsy, as long as the deceased wasn’t part of a criminal case (so I wouldn’t show up in any future court transcripts, etc.), but it never happened.

Going there, I did think of it as more of a science exhibit. But afterward, it was predominately an art exhibit. It does take a bit of adjustment to realize that you’re looking at actual corpses pretending to figure skate, ski jump, and hit home runs, but eventually you start to marvel at how the various systems of the body work together. It is less about some anonymous donor trapped in a skateboard pose, but what muscles work together to make the body pull off such a pose.

You can see what it means to have an artificial hip, replacement heart valve, the effects of smoking on a lung, and they become more real than anecdotes and pictures in textbooks. Seeing the lungs of a coal miner, looking much like coal themselves, made me think of my grandfather who receive a black lung check and somehow stayed alive into his 80s. How every morning, there would be noises from the bathroom, like he was trying to cough something up, and that sometimes black stuff would actually come out, and now here’s what those lungs possibly looked like (although his black lung ultimately didn’t cause his death, go figure).

The more the exhibit went on, the less they were corpses. You just get pulled into the exhibit and realize how the body is such an amazing, interlocking system: How the bones in our ears are nearly the size of grains of rice; the minuscule nervous system; the amount of blood vessels in your arm.

The strangest part of the exhibit was that, after seeing these skinless corpses, I wanted to start muscle training. I mean, living in my gay ghetto, it’s not an uncommon sight to see muscular people. But something about seeing the exhibit made it more important to get muscle training back into the mix, rather than my all-cardio approach. I have no idea why that is, exactly. Seeing the younger, athletic corpses made it seem more relevant in a way it never was before.

Of course, wanting to get rid of the fat is nothing new, and there’s a bit more of it now than there was recently. But again, the fatter corpses made body fat even less appealing. It seems the opposite of vanity that I’ve become more interested in building muscle and losing fat because of what it looks like on the inside (it is all about while I’m alive, though, I’m not concerned about having a hot corpse).

So, a lot of strange things came out of the visit. All of the creepy downside was non-existent, and somehow seeing all of the dead people made me question how I’m living… all due to a graceful, thought-provoking exhibit. Good stuff…

So, I would recommend anyone on the fence go see it.

For the past few days, I’ve been house-sitting and part of the arrangement is access to a car. So, just to check out how the other half lives, I’ve been driving everywhere.

It’s quite a shock to see how much it reduces the time between acting and doing. “I should work out at the gym” goes from thought to fruition in under 5 minutes. I am cheating slightly, though. In San Francisco, the biggest enemy of drivers is parking, and I’ve been going to places that have on-site parking, and there’s a garage on this side, as well. So, not getting the *real* experience, or at least what it would be like if I had to park near my current apartment. Even today, I cheated in that regard, driving over to my apartment in the middle of the two-hour street cleaning zone, knowing they usually do it in the first hour, and parking directly in front of my apartment door.

But on the other side of the equation, I don’t think I’m saving much time. Usually I listen to specific podcasts on my way to and from places, as I walk. I’ve still been listening to them here in my friend’s loft, just not walking at the same time. So, the car didn’t really free me up very much overall. Just increased my Donkey Kong/Ms. Pac Man playing.

Main objective of the house-sitting is watching my friend’s cats. I’ve cat-sat before for people, and each time, I’m missing the appeal. But here’s what I don’t understand. Cats are largely indifferent to the people around them, and that’s part of their charm. Yet, if I’m indifferent to cats, that’s seemingly negative and I’m an animal hater. Seems like I should get more props for my very cat-like attitude, no?

I recently went to the Great Big Book Sale here in SF, which is basically an airport hangar-sized room where people spend hours of self-inflicted scoliosis digging through something like 400,000+ used library and donated books, looking for gems.

I walked away with a few choice samples, but the first one I opened and tore through at a rather brisk pace was: Woody Allen on Woody Allen. I always think of him as sort of an artistic template. He works in a variety of genres, has an amazing work ethic, is a brilliant writer/director, and has amassed an amazing body of work.

As I read the book, whereby Woody (prompted by an interviewer/friend) walks through his career on a film-by-film basis, I was rather startled how few of the movies I recalled, knowing I didn’t see many of the flicks he considers his best work. For someone I cite as an influence, this seemed shoddy. I mean, sure, if he was a novelist with 40 books to dig through, that would be one thing. But a filmmaker? That’s easy.

So, as soon as I watch Orson Welles’ The Third Man, my Netflix queue is literally the Woody Allen filmography, in chronological order, save for one unavailable title (I am sad to report that Netflix offers no one-click button to add a director’s entire filmography in order to one’s queue, but I got it done).

The goal is to just tear through them pretty briskly, and re-read his comments before each viewing. So, if I start quoting more Woody Allen in the short term, now you’ll know why.

The best thing about the book was just seeing how unencumbered he was about his work. That is, of course, my idee fixe: making the work enjoyable. This whole notion of the put-upon novelist in a world of construction workers, dim sum rollers, and animal agriculture gut pullers is really something that needs to end. I’m not saying I don’t understand it, but it is really something that can and needs to be disconnected from the work.

As I read, whenever Woody would talk about his work process, I’d fold the corner of that page down. Here’s what I found on those bent pages…

ON WORKING REGULARLY:

“I’ve tried very hard to make my films into a non-event. I just want to work, that’s all. Just put the film out for people to see, just keep grinding them out. I hope I’ll have a long and healthy life, that I can keep working all the time, and that I can look back in old age and say, ‘I made fifty movies and some of them were excellent and some of them were not so good and some were funny…’ I just don’t want to get into that situation that so many of my contemporaries are in, where they make one film every few years and it’s a Big Event. That’s why I’ve always admired Bergman. He’d be working quietly on the island and would make a little tiny film and put it out, and then he’d be working on the next one. You know, the work was important. Not the eventual success or failure, the money or the critical reception. What’s important is that your work is part of your daily life and you can live decently. You can, as in my case, do other things I want to do at the same time. I like to play music, I like to see my children, I like to go to restaurants, I like to talk walks and watch sports and things. When you’re working at the same time, you have a nice, integrated life.”

ON ACTING IN A BROADWAY PLAY:

“There is no easier job than being in a play. I mean, you have the whole day off and you do whatever you want. You can write, you can relax, whatever you want. You just drop over to the theatre at eight o’clock at night. I would walk over there with Diane (Keaton). I lived within walking distance and we could take a nice stroll down Broadway. Then you go in. There’s no nervous tension. The play is running. You’re onstage with your friends. Curtain goes up. You play it. It’s about an hour and a half. And two hours later you’re in a restaurant having dinner with your friends. It’s the easiest job in the world! So it was very pleasurable.”

HIS WORK PHILOSOPHY:

“I’ve always kept my nose to the grindstone. All I do is work, and my philosophy has been that if I just keep working, just focus on my work, everything else will fall into place. It’s irrelevant whether I make a lot of money or don’t, or whether the films are successful or not. All that is total nonsense and superfluous and superficial. If you just look at the work and try and keep working and striving and setting ambitious goals for yourself, the rest is unimportant. You find that, if you do that, everything else falls into place.”

ON WRITING RITUALS:

“I felt that anything that distracted from the work and minimized your effort on it was a self-deception that was going to be detrimental. So to avoid getting caught up with a lot of writing rituals and time-wasting, you’ve got to get there and just work. Art in general, and show-business, is full to the brim of people who talk, talk, talk, talk. And when you hear them talk, theoretically they’re brilliant and they’re right and this and that, but in the end it’s just a question of ‘Who can sit down and do it?’ That’s what counts. All the rest doesn’t mean a thing.”

ON KEEPING WRITING HOURS:

“When I’m writing, it’s easy. When I get up the day when I’m going to start the actual writing, I can celebrate. Because that’s the day when everything is over. The day I put pen to paper, it’s all over. Because all the agonizing work is done before that. And to write it down is pure pleasure. And I write it fast. I will be as fast as I can write, because I’ve done the work already. Once in a while I’ll get huing up on some special thing, but very rarely. And I can write in any place, under any conditions. I’ve written in hotel rooms, I’ve written sitting on the sidewalk. I’ve got scenes written on the back on envelopes. I don’t need all that nonsense I’ve seen purported writers do. They have to have nice white paper and sharpened pencils. I don’t have any of that, I don’t care about any of that. I can write something in longhand and then thype the next few pages and write the next thing on the back of a laundry bill. The script can look like anything at all. It doesn’t mean anything to me. But once I’m writing, then the pleasure sets in. Writing is a complete pleasure for me. I love it. It’s a sensual, pleasurable, intellectual activity that’s fun. Thinking of it, planning it, plotting it, is agony. That’s hard.”

So, there you have it: Woody on writing. I’ll check in after the Woody Allen film festival to see if I have any new favorites.