12.24.09: jbellamy can’t name shit

So I’m in Rhode Island and SHOCK OF SHOCKS, it’s freezing cold and not getting any warmer, despite my best attempts at swaddling myself in all the lame hoodies I left behind when I became an artiste and moved to Hollywood~ Also, here is an anecdote for the lols about how I felt upon looking into my closet when I came back home (to my CHILDHOOD home, even, where my parents still live – the Bellamys are not movable folk). How I felt when I came and looked into my childhood closet because all I brought with me from LA was a big old bag full of Hanes undershirts (because that’s what I wear at home, shh) was sadness.

And also hilarity, because you know what, the bulk of my childhood wardrobe is comprised of ~official band merch~ from bands such as Slipknot, Stone Sour (they’re actually not the same thing at all, and I will defend this to the death despite my lack of enduring passion for either one), Linkin Park – I seriously thought I was too old to get into the Linkin Park thing when it came around, and I think I actually still am, so guys, guys, I must have bought my awesome Hybrid Theory inspired hoodie when I was in college – and then

Let me tell you about my childhood bedroom, okay. I have a mobile of the Enterprise revolving above my bed, and I thought for a second hey, it must have been so weird to bring girls home to fool around~ under this thing and wow, I must have had a lot of game if they stuck around even after seeing this amazing three hundred piece model that I clearly put together myself, but then I realized hey …no, that never happened, because what the hell, I never had a girl in my room during high school, what the hell Jason, why is your memory trying to make you look like a stud.

In addition to this, I have posters that go along with all the bands I loved most passionately as a kid all over the walls, including one that appears to be of late 90s supergrouptrio Hanson – what? Really? What? I grew up during the 90s and came of age in the year 2000 and all I got from that amazing decade of music was Hanson? Oh my God, young Jason, diaf. This leads into my amazing CD collection, which is stored in one of those sweet wavy CD towers in neon orange. I want to say that my stylistic tastes, at least where home decor is concerned, have changed, but the last thing that I did before I left LA was paint my ceilings purple because that totally goes with the floor-to-ceiling wall collage I’ve been working on bit-by-Bit since I moved in. Basically, all that needs to be said of my CD collection is that I own a copy of Silver Side Up, which is the amazing US debut of Nickelback and contained the hit single How You Remind Me.

Seriously, young!Jason. What is this.

Anyway, from there I can neatly move into talking about music in general, which leads me to hey, hi, The Treadmill Video has been watched by 935,543 of you on YouTube since I posted it last month, and somehow, someway, the background music (which I made on GarageBand so we’d have something to ~move to without me having to pay royalties for using someone else’s music) has been given a name. So hey, you guys, thank you for apparently liking Jason Bellamy – Here It Goes Again enough to rip it, make an mp3 and distribute it around the internet, because that kind of makes me lol a little. As of now, no, I totally have no plans whatsoever to release an album AND up until a couple of days ago, had no intentions on making up any more random Garagebandy music for kicks, however. Prior to leaving LA, I realized that oh, hey, the holidays are upon us and this lady I am kind of into really appreciates the random dance breaks SO.

I may or may not have made up a brand new dance, filmed that shit before I went back home for Christmas using a click track to keep us all in time and then used my time at home in my room to concoct more happy funtimes music so that we don’t look like four assholes dancing around to random drum beats.

SO. Happiest of happy holidays to everyone on ~bellamybellows, and elsewhere, and here is the new dance video for your entertainment. It is nameless, but feel free to suggest something outside of The Jason’s Backyard Video!

12.01.09 – jbellamy is a dancing queen

I was going to post this long, rambling ramble thing about how I recovered from the swine flu and how I rocked the fucking house with my US History Films term paper because basically, when I found out that I did in fact rock the fucking house, my gut instinct was to run alllll over UCLA with the paper held aloft so that the world could be wicked impressed with my wicked awesomeness, but instead, I’m just going to skip all that bullshit and go right into ANECDOTE TIME again, because my month is not complete without it.

So! Starting when I developed my epic case of H1N1, I had to find all these awesome ways to entertain myself. The Tyra Show, Oprah, Doctor Phil and a little bit of Maury (just a little bit, I only sat through two rounds of “you are not the father” before I cracked) worked out for the first little while, but then I moved on to some online games – not Farmville, because that would have spelled the beginning of the end of Jason Bellamy’s Social Life – and when that got boring, I upgraded to fucking around with Garage Band.

Garage Band, how I love thee. I would so do a ‘let me count the ways’ thing here, but I’m kind of awful at itemizing lists without going off on rambling tangents, so! Long anecdote short, I spent a couple of weeks trying to figure out the functions and everything before I did anything with it. And then, when I came back to full health, I finally decided to ~do something with it and THEN I went back to work on Criminal Minds and THEN I recruited, in a fit of hilarity and nightshoot related exhaustion, three of my most cherished crew to help me with …

Jason Bellamy’s Synchronized Treadmill Dance Debut

Follow my red pants as I try to scale the treadmills (and totally slip very, very obviously at 1:00 in, but you didn’t hear that from me). In no particular order, except this is obviously a particular order, Bald Man is Keith, who does my hair (get it, girl, get it), Burgundy Vest is Derek, who does my makeup, and Blazer = Brian = just basically my life and platonic lover because be brought me soup when I was all fucked up on swine.

I’d like to dedicate this video and my dancing and my illustrious musical career (lols) to Miss Bit Rawn, for whom it was made because she was depressed and I didn’t think my high heeled fire engine red Crocs could save the day for her all on their own.

11.05.09. – DEATH

ANECDOTE. I just came back from the E.R., where I was probed and prodded and swabbed in my bad places (the nose), because I’ve been exhibiting flu-like symptoms for the last three, four days. And basically I’ve been like “NO I’m totally fine what are you talking about, sickness? I don’t get sick” since then, except today my random cold shakes made the last six hours kind of funny and, you know, cold, so when I came home I went to the E.R. (as I admittedly should have done earlier). It’s probably regular flu, but in the event that it is the H1N1, my life has just effectively been shut down for the next week. As it is, I’ve been ordered to sleep for the next dayish.

But that’s not the anecdote! (Although I guess it sort of is).

While there – there being the hospital – my file thing was labeled J.Bellamy, which in and of itself is hilarious to me because hey, hi, I have this thing where I automatically try to pronounced the first letter as though it’s a legitimate part of the world. So J.Bellamy is really Juhbellamy in my head. That whole awkward period where Jennifer Lopez was JLo? God, let’s not even talk about it, that was an uncomfortable time for me and my speech patterns.

Anyway! I was at the UCLA Medical center, which is a training hospital more or less, so there are ~residents or whatever. When I went into the examining room thing to chill and wait for someone to see me, someone at the nursing station started reading the name on my file – Juhbellamy! – out loud, then re-reading it, etc, and then finally, in this really hushed voice, asked someone else, “Is it the guy from SBS?” Which could have violated my patient/doctor confidentiality (no one answered, don’t worry) but mostly just made me lol for days. Which kicked my light-headedness into high gear so I felt like I was on a most excellent high.

/ANECDOTE.

So at least for the next day, I’ve got a load of free time which I think I’m going to spend working on my term paper for the U.S. History Through Film class I’ve been taking over at UCLA on my off-days (ie, during the couple of hours I have in the mornings MWF before I have other shit that needs to get done). I also realized the other day that it’s called Reel U.S. History, which I find really cute and lolsy, I don’t know why. Anyway, I’ve still got a lot of technical time to work on this paper – it’s not due for another month – but I have a tendency to get sucked in by other activities and completely forget what I was supposed to be doing.

If you’re curious, and I know I would be, my paper proposal makes some vague allusions to female sexual expression during the early years of cinema, OR:

In its early years, the film industry was a veritable boys club. For this reason, early films give a telling look at men of the era’s understanding of the female gender. In particular, I will examine a male-dominated society’s views on female sexuality as early American film presents them, and how the changing depictions of female sexual expression in film reflects the changing male attitudes of the period.

Since the work of male inventors and filmmakers shaped the early days if the cinema, I believe that examining the depictions of women in these films is essential to understanding the attitudes of men toward female sexual expression  from the turn of the century until the end of the Second World War.

I was mildly concerned that I gave myself a HUGE BROAD TOPIC (my proposal goes on to talk about how I’m going to watch like six films and give detailed analysis of all of them, so my prof was kind of like “Simmer down, Jason”), but I’ve been bed-ridden for about six hours and I’ve already gotten through the first one (my detailed analysis of “It”). My random E.R. doctor would be opposed – he suggested that I read a ‘good book’ to avoid being overly stimulated – but I’m physically incapable of being unproductive and I think this is a nice compromise over what I could be doing.

In summary, my body is even in favor of keeping me productive, since it didn’t give up on the epic fight against illness until right now – again, it could just be regular flu-flu – when CM has enough eps in the can to warrant an awesome break of epic proportions of those of us in fragile health/everyone. If anyone wants to debate the female gender in ~film or watch these epic films with me – we’ll have to Skype that shit, since you can’t get close to me – let me know! Already Bit Rawn and I are planning out our epic THANKSGIVING FEAST, which you can find through my Facebook (it’s an ~event), so if you want to go the extra mile and do a Juhbellamy Does Early Cinema party, I’ll just roll around in the wonder and awe of modern technology and feel like less of an invalid.

10.10.09 – houseandhome!

jbell likes foodandpicturesandcoffeecoffeecoffee

I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t know anything at all about finances, beyond how much of a crazy penny-pincher I am. The one upside to this is that the economic downturn didn’t really hit me hard – I never really know what my paycheck is supposed to amount to and I’ve been hoarding all acting money since I first started out. Probably the one downside to that is that until I slid out of RISD, I lived in the dorm followed by a $1,700 a month three-room (bedroom and/or living room, plus a kitchen, plus a bathroom) apartment in whatever slummy (ie, not so slummy at all) part of Rhode Island I could find.

Honestly, I would probably never have moved nor unpacked the dozens of boxes I still had in storage from when I finally came back out to California to start working again if outside forces hadn’t taken matters into their own hands on that one (“What the fuck, Jason, stop living like a vagrant and buy some goddamn curtains”). I don’t like change and I don’t like taking initiative. It’s my way.

It’s weird for me to live in a place that looks as good as the one I’m in now, honestly. I’m used to kind of crappy decor and interior design coming in second to the needs of my fly by the seat  of my pants lifestyle. It’s still kind of that way, except that I do think I’d have to actively throw paint at the walls or something to make this place look even marginally crappy. The nifty classiness is sort of bred into the ceiling fixtures. There are multiple bedrooms – slept on a mattress for the first two years I lived in SanFran, by the way, because buying a bed and getting it up the stairs to my apartment just completely boggled my mind – and multiple beds, and I don’t actually have to sort of teeter out onto the fire escape if I want to have a cigarette because there are little verandaish things here and there that really enable my habit.

I need to be eased into things, sort of like an old man set in his ways, but I’ve been here for awhile now and it’s hard to think I lived anywhere else.

17.09.09 – dubious origins

So I started out actually trying to take serious notes on the most ridiculous movie ever made, in a ham-fisted attempt at Perfecting My Craft and also Recapturing the Beauty of My Time at Art School By Enrolling in a Medieval Literature Course via UCLA but that soon changed. You can see where I start to slip. I apologize to anyone who was affiliated with the creation of this film but omg what. Whaaaat.

—–

Excalibur: Arthurian Movie (Warner Brothers home entertainment)
Covers a very large number of the themes and motifs associated with the stages of King Arthur’s story. Looks at the story and the legend as it develops into different themes.

The Dark Ages
The land was divided and without a king. Out of those lost centuries rose a legend – of the sorcerer Merlin, of the coming of a king, of the sword of power – Excalibur. It is the sword that Arthur needs to heal the land of the Celts (I assume) and to become king. It was forged when the world was young.

Arthur? starts a war over Igrayne and destroys the truce that Merlin somehow managed to work out between the warring Celts and the Saxons? There’s an epic battle and Arthur is apparently losing, because he needs to seek out help from Merlin. Whoever opposes Arthur appears to be retreating but Merlin cautions him that they actually aren’t. It looks like this may be the battle of Salisbury, because it seems that Merlin goes into the ruins at Stonehenge to cast a spell? on Arthur? [Merlin: "I have awoken the dragon. Can't you see all around you the dragon's breath? We have drawn him out. The duke is off to pursue your men. There he goes, good. Man your horse. I will transform you into the semblance of the Duke (of Cornwall). Your lust will hold you up."]

***I think the beginning of this movie may actually be about Arthur’s father as opposed to Arthur himself, because his mother’s name is mentioned (she’s the inexplicable dancer).

Arthur takes on the facade of the Duke of Cornwall in order to sleep with his wife. The actual Duke of Cornwall’s daughter, Morgana, knows that her father is dead, but his wife can’t see that he’s not her husband. Then they have an extreme amount of sex and I’m not exactly sure what’s going on, but I do believe that the actual duke of Cornwall knows what creepiness Arthur has gotten up to as he lies dying on the field. In the flames. In the morning, the Duke’s body is brought back to his home and his wife questions how he could possibly have been dead on the field since he was at home with her. She wonders what will become of her and Morgana now that the Duke is dead.

She’s had a baby and someone questions who the father is; she says that a man came to her and ‘made the child’, and while she thought it was her husband, he was already dead. Merlin arrives while the child is being nursed and claims that Aruthur? owes something to him because he helped him get with the Duke’s wife. The wife suddenly realizes that Arthur? came to her that night and is the father of her child. He questions Merlin: “To kill and be king, is that all?” Merlin: “You killed the Duke, you stole his wife, you took his castle, now no one trusts you.” And demands that Arthur give him the child as payment for what he’s done.

Merlin’s a creepy bitch.

Morgana, like the Children of the Corn, pops out of nowhere and asks if Merlin is the mother and the father of the child. He, rightly so, does not answer. Cut to the forest, where Arthur’s father is riding through screaming for Merlin that he wants his son. He’s ambushed and left to die on the forest floor. (“The King is ambushed!” = a man pushed him off of his horse and rode away). He takes up Excalibur and begins to attack his attackers. Someone makes off with the King’s sword and it gets incredibly hard to tell all of these people apart. He calls out to Merlin to call his dragon and weave a mist. Merlin’s not dealing with this tonight,so he doesn’t answer and the King staggers around the woods, screams that no one else will wield Excalibur, and sinks it into a rock. (The sword is in the stone.) Many of the King’s attackers try to yank the sword back out, like you would, and Merlin gives some exposition by saying that the one who draws the sword from the stone will be king. No one can do it.

Arthur, the baby produced by the Duke’s wife and the sketchy king, has now grown and is told to help his brother uphold the good name of something, as a good knight should. A holy man, I believe, is on the outskirts of the wood, right next to where Excalibur is still in the stone, calling out to the heavens for someone to draw the sword from the stone and save the land. The man who just won the joust that Arthur, his brother, and another old man were attending tries to pull Excalibur out of the stone and (predictably) fails. The crowd disperses.

They’re actually jousting for the right to try and pull the sword out of the stone. Arthur is the squire to his brother, and has lost his sword. In a big, Irish panic, he runs about trying to find it only to realize that it has been stolen. He goes to the blacksmith to try and find a sword and then realizes that there’s a sword conveniently located in a stone somewhere behind the tent. As you would, he runs to it and, because it’s glowing neon Green, yanks it out of the stone. His brother runs out of the field and sees what he’s done, and then all of a sudden this woman is screaming SOMEONE HAS DRAWN EXCALIBUR FROM THE STONE. Arthur says, “Your sword was stolen, brother.” So I got you a new one?

Kay = Arthur’s brother
Sir Ector = the old man who raised him, who Arthur thought was his father

Kay, did you free Excalibur?
I didn’t.
…You must put it back!

Now, Arthur, try to draw it again.

They actually stick the sword back into the stone to see if he can get it again or if the mystical powers keeping it there fluked out or something. And he pulls it out and is the king. His father and everyone bows and then Arthur says, “Before I was a king, I was a son.”

Seriously, he’s fucking Irish.

Merlin pops out of nowhere and tells him that he is King Arthur. The crowd flips out because he’s drawn the sword from the stone, and the man who tried to draw it earlier actually says that he should be king because he got the sword out of the stone.

Are you with us or against us?
…AGAINST YOU.

Arthur flips his shit and runs through the words, where creepy bitch Merlin pops out of the trees and grabs him. Arthur Irishes it up a little bit more, and Merlin sits in a tree. He essentially tells him that he will be king because he’s supposed to be king. It’s inexplicably night now, and Arthur wanders through the trees toward the sound of wolves howling. He touches a treebranch and loses his shit again. Merlin is behind him again and asks him what he’s afraid of. He tells Arthur about the dragon. [Arthur: Where is it? Merlin: IT IS EVERYWHERE.] In a fit of being Irish, he grabs Excalibur again and begins asking Merlin what kind of man his father was. Merlin tells him that he was a great man, but as a king he was rash. Arthur asks if he loved him, and Merlin says well, it’s easy to love a child.

A lot of the great knights now back Arthur’s kingliness. There is an epic battle.

Arthur Pendragon is knighted in the moat o the castle that they just destroyed in the battle to secure his kingship. Puffy-haired Maiden (Guinevere) dresses his wounds against a tree and then there is much dancing at a feast to celebrate the victory of Arthur. He pops some stitches in the process of partying too hard and goes to have a seat with creepy bitch Merlin. Arthur remarks that their kingdom is merry afterall, and requests that Merlin make Guinevere love him. Knowing what happened the last time he tried that, Merlin refuses.

Guinevere and a trusted friend will betray Arthur, Merlin cautions. She drugs him with magic pastries and tells them that it will heal him and make him sleepy. [Merlin: "Looking at the cake is like looking at the future; you don't know what it's really like until you've tasted it. And thne, of course, it's too late. ...Too late."]

Arthur is leading his troops into more battle, and Lancelot makes his appearance. [Merlin: "There's always something cleverer than yourself."] Lancelot refuses to move out of the way of Arthur as he tries to cross the kingsly bridge and questions Arthur’s kingship. Arthur brandishes Excalibur at him and tell Lancelot that he is not humble enough for knighthood. Lancelot laments this, as he has not found a sword that has matched him in duel or in joust. They ride into a wide, open space to joust and prove this theory, and after a false start, Arthur is knocked from his horse by Lancelot. After calling for his sword, Arthur screams at Lancelot to get down on his level and fight him. [Arthur: "Your avoidance mocks me."] They agree to fight to the death. with the root cause being that Arthur refuses to ride around the bridge instead of going over it.

Arthur is thrown down an embankment, and after he and Lancelot duel in the middle of a river, he calls upon the power of Excalibur and strikes down Lancelot, breaking the tip off of Excalibur in the process. After creepy bitch Merlin pops up again to tell him that he’s broken whta could not be broke, Arthur laments that he used Excalibur to do that which should not have been in a fit of rage. As they both stare into the water, the Lady of the Lake holds the repaired Excalibur out to Arthur, because he is meant to have it for all of time. Lancelot is still alive and declares it a great day, because he’s found his life partner. Or his king. Whichever. Kissing the tip of Excalibur, Lancelot is brought into the fold as Arthur’s champion.

At another battle, Arthur’s army – led by Lancelot – kill almost everyone, leaving a few alive so that they might tell the others what they did to the opposing army. As they rejoice, Merlin encourages them to celebrate and to remember what they have done. According to the note the teacher put on the board here, these men constitute the Knights of the Round Table. Arthur announces that since they have been joined by the events of the battle, that they will be forever joined in a Round Table, which he will buiild, so that they might share stories of other victories.

Merlin brings Lancelot to escort Guinevere back to Aruthur, and the whole shot blurs, so we assume that they’ve fallen madly in love. The rest of the maidens ask Guin to ask Lancelot if any of them might have a change at getting into those metal trousers of his. Lancelot says that he will love her, as his queen and as the wife of his best friend, always. And while he loves her, he will love no other. Cut to the next scene, where Arthur and Guin are getting married.

After the wedding, Morgana approaches Merlin. She has her father’s eyes, and announces that she is one like Merlin (a creepy bitch). He runs her through a bunch of tests, and finally seems at least halfway satisified. He does tell her, though, that the time of the creepy bitches is passing, and the one God has replaced their many gods.

Lancelot rides away from the wedding, with a man watching him from the bushes. His name is Percival, and as he crouches over Lancelot while he sleeps, the other tells him

to run home to his mother. Instead, he kills a rabbit and cooks it. No, Lancelot, Arthur is your life partner. Percival is possibly gay and maybe Hispanic, and he wants to be Lancelot’s squire, so they ride back to Camelot together, with Percival running behind Lancelot’s horse. Once there, Kay opts to help train him to be a squire.

Guin comes down a flight of stairs just as Gawain invites Lancelot to stay for a meeting of the Round Table. He declines, and Guin makes sad eyes. At a feast post-Table meeting, Morgana tekls Gawain to watch Guin and Lancelot, and then goes to hit on Merlin. She flips her shit because he won’t give her his secrets, but before it gets really intense, Arthur calls Merlin over for more advice on his kingsihp.Closely followin this, Gawain comments on how Lancelot is never at the round table, and basically calls Guin out on being a ho and doing him dirty. She also tells him to drink of Lancelot’s cup and taste his goodness.

Arthur declares that two days from now, Gawian will fight Lancelot over the matter of Guin’s purity. Lancelot, in a fit of nudity, stabs himself and comments on the fact that he’s fighting against himself. As a result, he can’t come to the duel, so his squire steps up to the plate to do the jousting. Arthur knights Percival so that he can help prove that Guin’;s not a ho, and it’s loltastic.After all the tension rises, Lancelot shows up.and does the dueling himself.

However, he ends up incredibly wounded, and Arthur tells Merlin to do whatever necessary to save him. He does. Then he asks if he’ll ever have a son. And he says yes.

Lancelot is all well again, so he rides out into the woods and meet Guin, and they kiss.

Arthur, not being a total retard now, goes to Merlin and asks if they’re together. They are. Then he asks if he’s supposed ti hll them.Merlin informs him that his days have passed and he can’t tell him anything. They hug, and Merlin tells him the;ll be together in another world.

Merlin then goes to Morgana, while at the same time Lancelot and Guin are going at it.He takes Morgana into the cave where he saw the dragon; he refuses to show her the dragon, but she insists.

People added in the third installment of Excalibur: Mordred, Son of Arthur, the Waste Land, the Search for the Holy Grail

20.08.09 – long beach, ca.

the sky goes into the sea!

So I’m bizarre and always get the urge to blog only when I have no time whatsoever to actually do it. And then another two or three or four weeks from now, I’ll actually be sitting around in a decadent, lounge-wear-wearing fashion and have nothing to say and  hours of time to bullshit through it. Less than three months ago, I had literally twenty-four hours a day to babble on about whatever I wanted to, because I’d hit this really unfortunate lull where, after the weeks of constant filming and living life by the ‘hurry up and wait’ principle (you know what I mean, where you’re rushed through the gauntlet of hair/makeup/wardrobe then shuttled between base camp and principle filming location 43A where you sit for about six hours in stone. cold. silence), I was sort of waiting around in limbo for the season four to unfold so I could watch myself like a freaaaak and get all caught up the in storyline and the cliff hangers and the anthrax.

So I basically sat in my Long Beach apartment for the whole day and did nothing. No joke, there was a time there where I went almost six whole hours (six is my magic number – “Six whole hours!” “I called her six times!” “This is my sixth cup of coffee today, whaaat.”) without seeing any other living people outside of the television. My day boiled down to getting out of bed at random, putting on a new pair of sweatpants and watching like, twelve hours of the game show network.

I bitched about it all the time, but now I look back at it and kind of pine for the ancient past when I could get fifteen hours of sleep in a row. Obviously, I’ve got a crazy amount of hindsight bias here, because I hate having nothing to do with myself, but I’m highly influenced by other people and the basic consensus among most of my acquaintances is that now I’m crazy busy and that’s something to abhor. I find myself complaining now as I go over my call sheet for the week and  it surprises me, because these are the conditions under which I thrive.

It only just occurred to me that I don’t actually know how to live in the moment. I really should, given my happy-go-lucky-ishness (I swear to g-d, I know real words; the made-up ones just usually make more sense), but I don’t. It’s an acting thing, I guess, since most of actions are dictated by where I’m supposed to be in the following year. This time next year, for example, (barring some massive network upheaval), I’ll be right back where I am right now, and then  then spending a couple of months stuck in the mind of  someone who is not quite as mad as a hatter, but who I’m hoping is just as ass-kickin’ in a badass sidekick henchman sort of way. Which I’m sure will be a fun time for everyone involved.

But I am so vain, I truly think this song is about me. Most people know where they’re going to be next year. In 2011, I’ll still be in the Mind of a Criminal (again, barring massive network upheaval, because I could stay right in here in make-shift Quantico for decades) and  then doing months of crossword puzzles and mid-morning Starbucks runs to set me up for my downtime.  This doesn’t really fit with the borderline Debbie Downer tone of my update as a whole, since the idea of doing anything in the mid-morning is enough to send me on a sweet trip to a psychadelic place where people who aren’t garbage men or actors don’t get up at four A.M.