I’ll tell you what I thought. My entire life, I was under the impression it meant a diamond buried deep in the ground that needed to be unearthed, a gem hidden below the surface that could be brought to the fore.

Is that what you thought too? Because if so…

You’re goddamn wrong!

Yesterday, I found myself using the phrase, and suddenly my brain began to process it. I’d always assumed “the rough” was a place, kind of like in golf when your ball lands in “the rough.” But no!

“The rough” isn’t a place; it’s a state of being. The diamond is unpolished, or in professional gem-cutter parlance, IN THE ROUGH!!!

Because when you first see a diamond, you’re all meh about it. It’s just some hunk of rock. But then when you cut and polish it, kablam! You’re a freakin’ chamillionaire.

I was a bit shaken by this realization. I take misunderstanding of language incredibly seriously. After all, there’s reason my chosen profession is unemployed screenwriter. How could I be worthy of that noble mantle if i didn’t understand this basic concept?

But NO, I told myself. This is not your fault, Russ. There’s no reason why you, in this modern age, should be expected to know some niche hobbyist’s random colloquialisms just to understand a rare idiomatic expression!

And then it came to me. I realized the reason I’d spent my whole life misinformed, that year after year after year I’d been living a lie…

Disney’s Aladdin.

That’s right. Motherfuckin’ Aladdin.

I distinctly remember that’s where I first heard the phrase.

It’s that goddamn sand-cat cave. It opens its mouth and talks about how there’s a diamond in the rough. And then what’s inside that cave, deep in the depths of the earth? A bunch of fuckin’ diamonds! And others jewels and shit.

Little did they realize their film would feed an entire generation a heaping helping of misinformation. By far the sneakiest element of their dastardly plot was that the meaning of this misunderstood phrase ends up being the same. Whether the diamond needs uncovering or polishing doesn’t matter! The result? We’ve all been using the phrase correctly despite not understanding what it means!

Maybe it was their plan all along! A nihilistic linguist’s prank, insidiously manipulating our slumbering  subconscious. Of course kids are going to think that those diamonds buried in the sand are “in the rough.”

“Oh, what a great pun we have made,” the writers probably thought. “In the rough/in the rough. A ha ha la tee doo tee dahahoo.” Laughing their hoity-toity laughs.

This is an exposé, people. Disney needs to be held accountable for its actions. I want to how many people had this wrong. Because I brought it up to my girlfriend, and she had it wrong (and was very on board with my Disney theory). Then I brought it up to beloved Sam, reasonably ludicrous co-conspirator, and he also had it wrong!!!

Sam then explained that this was a wonderful example about the endless mutability of language, of the power of puns and creativity to hew new meaning out of the ever-less-solid rock of the collective lexicon.

But that’s a bunch of hogswallop. All I have to say is:

What the fuck, Disney? What the fuck?

I’m sure most of you, oh classy and attractive readers, have had to move at least once in your classy and attractive lives. I know I have! In fact, I’m pretty sure I’ve moved 17 times in the last 8 years. But each of those moves was a cake walk compared to the most move-y of all moves, the one move to move them all, the move when I was dispelled from the warm, fuzzy, warmth-fuzz of higher education into the cold, spiky, ice-spikes of real life.

I’ve never really thought about what a cake walk is until now. Maybe it meant something back in ye olden times when you were just a blacksmith’s daughter and the most exciting moment in your life was when the traveling cake salesman came into town. But right now all I’m picturing is trying to hop from one cake to the next in a “the floor is lava” kind of scenario. Seems like an awfully wasteful use of cake, although I guess it’s better to stomp those sugary anti-lava platforms than to ingest their frivolous, delicious calories. Mmm… cake.

So there I was, completely done with my schooling. I’d just returned from producing a feature film I co-wrote, and everything I owned was safely resting in the hands of a highly reputable portable storage company, whose representative had assured us that he had most definitely left the murderous gang life behind. (But that he couldn’t quite afford tattoo removal). And that’s when I, my roommate, and my one, precious suitcase which had kept me afloat for the last month checked into an Airbnb.

Get ready for it.

This particular studio apartment claimed to be in Koreatown, but was in fact in Little Salvador, I think. Salvadoria, they call it. And what a lovely town it was. Except for the fact that every night, there were prostitutes ten feet from our front door. And these were not just any prostitutes. Nay! These were the scariest, hairiest, bare-(it-all)-iest prostitutes I’d ever seen, and believe me, when I say a prostitute is frightening, you can trust me, because I know pretty much nothing about prostitution.

Now, even though there were a lot of nice ladies with whom you could go for a ride, there wasn’t any place to park your ride. (Best joke ever!) We had to wake up every morning at 7am to move our car to a pay lot before the meter kicked in, and every night we had to move the car back to the street. And this was not just any pay lot. Nay! It was the jankiest, skankiest, rank-(it-low)-iest parking lot I’d ever seen, and it was run by an old black man named Pops. He had one, single tooth, and as far as I could tell, he was homeless (like me!) and spent every hour of his day on a milk crate doing drugs.

I swear to mighty Zeus, I am not making any of this up.

Pops was quite the character. I felt all kinds of confidence turning my keys over to him, especially when he’d add comments such as “You boys look familiar. Were you in the cell over from me?” Or “Thanks for bringin’ my car back. I’m gonna drive it to Beverly Hills and bang dem bitches.” Then he’d laugh his scary, one-toothed laugh, straddling the line between doing some sort of stand-up bit and simply plunging deeper into the abyss of his insanity. Classic Pops.

One day, after making eye contact—a lot of eye contact—with a homeless person whilst he urinated all over a pay phone, my roommate and I were leaving the pay lot to move our car to the street. Pops was sitting on his milk crate, doing some hard drugs with a deranged homeless lady with pigtails, so we rolled down the window and asked, “Hey Pops, do you know what time the lot closes?”

He turned to us, mad look in his eye, and shouted, as if possessed by the milk crate parking demons of old “You gotta go NOW! NOW, I say! Go boys, GO!” He wasn’t joking around, but we hadn’t quite gotten our answer, so we repeated the question. “No no, we’re just wondering when the lot closes.”

“NOW! Quick! You gotta get out while you still can!”

We weren’t making a lot of progress with the whole getting answers thing.

Luckily for us, there was still one key player: deranged homeless lady with the pigtails. She turns to Pops. “I think they just want to know what time the lot closes.”

The fire leaves Pops’ eyes, parking demon exorcised, and he calmly responds, “Oh, it closes it eight.”

For a brief moment, we wondered what had overtaken our dear friend Pops. Drugs? The aforementioned demons? And then we glanced at our clock. It was 7:58. He knew! He was trying to save us.

And that’s why, to this day, Pops is my very best friend.

Part Two

We found the place! Sure, it’s a little expensive, but it’s walking distance from awesome, there’s plenty of room, and the toilets work. Definitely the place. Only there’s one caveat: the owner wants to meet us.

When you dive deep into the mires of craigslist, you’re bound to run into some unsavory characters… If they’re unsavory, does that mean they’re sweet? The palate of personalities is a confusing place. Our particular dish was an Asian guy named Alex, young dude, slick suit, slick hair, no grasp of the English language. As the guy who listed the house, he joined us on our meet-the-owner adventure.

And meet her we did! This little old lady is like a Chihuahua in human form, what with the constant shaking, the fear of anything and everything, the fraying coat. You know how people start to resemble their pets? Me neither, but in this case, the made-up concept clearly applies, for the most frightening part of the extensive interview process was this lady’s derpy dog. It’s 17 years old, blind, deaf, and barely has any hair left. Basically, it’s this wrinkly, furless skin scrap that has no means of sensing the outside world, so it periodically makes these strange sounds that remind me of a dying bird trapped inside a whirling vacuum cleaner.

I imagine the sounds translated roughly to “Someone, please kill me.” But maybe the other dogs couldn’t quite understand it because its teeth had rotted away, so its tongue was always lolling out of its mouth, and the tongue was bent so it was lolling at a 90 degree angle, which looked about as comfortable as being in a conversation with a scared old lady who thinks you’re some kind of serial killer.

So this lady interviews us,to the background tune of scary dog sounds… For. An. Hour. More than an hour! And the whole thing is some gargantuan sob story/guilt trip.

No, Sam. That’s a gilt trip.

Now that’s a guilt trip.

She says she lives in an apartment with no furniture and no TV, so she needs the money incredibly badly. We won’t screw her over, will we? We’ll make all our payments? And we’ll make them on time? In fact, her payments are due on the first of the month, so ours will have to come before then. In fact, who knows if checks might get lost in the mail, so we can’t mail our checks to her. We have to go to her bank each week and deposit money directly. We’ll do that, won’t we? And her daughter has made horrible life choices, so she needs money for her daughter, so we won’t screw her over, right? Please god, promise we won’t screw her over. And this house is all she has left, so we’ll take the best care of it ever, right? We won’t ever wear our shoes inside the house? Even though we’re leasing it, we’ll follow all these specific rules for its upkeep? And since she’s so worried, we’ll pay a seven thousand dollar deposit? She’s taking such a huge risk renting to us, she’s just not sure if it’s worth it.

And throughout this speech, she’ll keep wandering into random rooms for who knows what reason, and Alex will turn to us and say “You sign lease, you party! No follow rules, eh? Wear shoes, fuck bitches. You like fuck bitches? I know some bitches, you want fuck them?” And we’re like, “Yeah, sure, Alex. Whatever!” Doing our best to appease the strange personalities around us. Though there was no pleasing that dog.

Then the woman’s leasing agent arrives. Apparently she’d been trying to sell the house and had never rented anything to anyone (obviously), but the market was bad, so she was forced to consider drastic options, like trusting me, the worst person in the world.

Her agent steps in and does the worst job of being reassuring I’ve encountered since my Uncle told me that it’d be fine; everyone accidentally kills a hooker sometime. Just kidding. I don’t know anything about prostitution, remember?

So this agent comes in and explains that our credit is fine, but there’s not much of it because we’re young, but he says we seem incredibly trustworthy so she should definitely lease the apartment to us. Then again, she’s taking a HUGE RISK, but who cares about that? Just go for it. Then again, there’s NO GUARANTEE. But who needs guarantees? We seem nice. Then again, it would be an INCREDIBLE LEAP OF FAITH. He goes on like this, telling her she should do it, then undercutting his own point with this slowly-delivered, over-the-top sense of worry.

The two of them go off to confer, and Alex turns to us again. “You guys do molly? You such cool guys. We go to Vegas, yeah? We party. I have room. We drop molly together. I bring beautiful bitches. They down to fuck. Fuck anybody. When they rolling they just want the sex. They totally fuck you. Gotta wear a condom though. Definitely condom. You down?”

“Yeah, sure, whatever!” we say, wondering how all this madness will play out.

Part Three

We didn’t get the apartment.

Wait, wait. Let me try that again:

FADE IN:

INT. APARTMENT THAT’S NOT RUSS’S BECAUSE HE’S HOMELESS – DAY

RUSS NICKEL (20s) tosses and turns on a fold-out IKEA futon. Wearing only boxers, his shaved head does little to hide his bald spot, and he grinds away at his adult retainer like a madman.

Suddenly, he sits up and his eyes fly open. He SCREAMS. Then looks to the ceiling.

RUSS

What have I done?!

FADE OUT

Okay, I admit it. That’s not much of a scene (but those cops will be happy; they’re always telling me not to make a scene). And it’s not even that accurate. I mean, c’mon. I obviously don’t wear boxers when I sleep. I just wanted to protect myself in case Sam thought about drawing me naked. Again.

But the rest is true. I’ve made a huge mistake. I got a masters in screenwriting.

When I got my English degree and found myself unemployed, what did I do? Did I grit my teeth, buckle down my bootstraps, hike up my pants, put my nose to the grindstone and otherwise idiomatically prepare myself to start from the bottom and work my way up? Of course not! I took another loop on the roundabout and went to graduate school like any self-aggrandizing young adult with a crippling fear of actual work and the real world.

Graduate school offers post-adolescents like me the opportunity to postpone troubling questions like “how do I pay for food?” “what are taxes?” and “oh my god what if lemurs become sentient through a medical mishap, master the art of horseback riding, and go on a rampage to overthrow their human masters?!”

I figured that I’d poured about twenty years into my schooling so… two more years should be just the amount of time I needed to get it all figured out. At the time, my final, ultimate, daunting graduation seemed endlessly far away. But real life comes for all of us sooner than you think, and mine came in the form of a furry panther creature handing me a diploma.

At first I was frightened that I might be having acid flashbacks to that time I had that weird dream that I’d accidentally tried acid, but then I remembered it was our school mascot. I didn’t see it around too often since I was a graduate student, meaning my only interaction with main campus was awkwardly hitting on sorority girls. Anyways, with a growl of ‘good luck’, ol’ panther sent me on my way, and I found myself unequivocally unemployed, and even less quivocally homeless.

But what’s a little case of homelessness when you’re writing the next great American screenplay? That just enhances its authenticity! All I have to do is find a 24 hour café and wash my armpits in their bathroom.

In my experience that’s the only part of the human body that builds up any level of grossness, but I could be wrong about that. Keep in mind that I have English and Screenwriting degrees, so science mostly evades me.

Now, when I say homeless, I don’t mean, oh, I just haven’t figured out where I’m moving. I mean my lease ran out in July, I have basically no money because grad school is ridiculously expensive, and all my stuff is in storage. For the last quarter of a year I’ve been living out of a suitcase, sleeping on the proverbial street-side that is a string of friends’ couches, err, IKEA futons.

I’d thought Screenwriting was a good idea. English was too vague, but Screenwriting, that was a vocation. It’s more focused. There’s a real practical application, an industry built around it. Someone in said industry would surely employ me, right? And once again, my friends and family foolishly supported me in my endeavor. Live your dream! Make movies! Move to Hollywood, woo Yvonne Strahovski, and have beautiful, beautiful Strahovskian children. It all sounded so simple.

But it’s not all guns n’ roses. In school, writing had been relatively easy. After all, there were domineering authority figures with impressive scarves and even more impressive imdb pages giving me deadlines, hope, and a fair bit of good ol’, swear-word-filled tough love. Writing isn’t so easy out here in RL. Suddenly I realize that, rather than coming naturally, it’s a muscle to be stretched, berated, pulled, and then overcome. Without the structure of education, without a home base, I’m trapped in an echo chamber of reality, sputtering down the river of my rapidly depleting budget toward the waterfall of regular job-iness, trying desperately to build a raft out of my own creativity, and even if I do construct said raft, the odds that it’ll float are like one in a thousand. It’s not a perfect metaphor.

You’d think people who get accepted to an institute of higher education would be educated enough to know that an MFA in Screenwriting doesn’t put you on the fast track to success. I’ve got a lot of hard work ahead of me, and I don’t know if there’s light at the end of the tunnel.

So what went wrong? Looking back on it, I think I must have seen one too many movies. Movies where the message is that anybody can make it if they believe hard enough. Said believing will trigger a montage that gets you to the exciting part of your life in the time it takes to play Eye of the Tiger. I thought, if I just go to school, if I work my ass off, if I pour my soul into script after script after script, I could become the person who… writes one of those ridiculously misleading movies that tricks a whole generation of young adults into throwing their lives away in order to make movies. It’s an endless feedback loop of that most despicable of all feelings: hope.

But there are still ways for me to feel good about myself. I just have to think of screenplays as my home, my ethereal, 1s and 0s, totally un-move-into-able home. And you know what, I’m okay with that. So if you ever see me begging for spare change on the side of the road, don’t pity me. By all means, still give me a dollar, but as you do, think of how incredibly fulfilled I am. Because I’m living the dream.

But it was a close shave, let me tell ya. Also, I didn’t end up shaving that often. That turned out to be ok, though, because I didn’t have to impress too many people with my face, except with the mouth part of my face, and even then, it was more about what I was saying and less about the relative attractiveness of my succulent lips. What I mean to say is, my groomédness rarely came into play because film school is about 90% male, and as far as those Y chromosome folks are concerned, the mangier the better (after all, you can’t spell mangy without man! and guy is almost in there too). Which brings me to the first danger of student filmmaking: incidental abstinence.

It would be nice if we were like those frogs those scientists used to fill in the missing strands of DNA in Jurassic Park and we could just change our gender at will. But alas, despite Jeff Goldblum’s insistence, in my personal experience, Life does not find a way. It just ends up sitting in its room a lot, debating whether it has too much pride to head over to the casual encounters section of craigslist.

Luckily, abstinence is one of those non-life-threatening dangers. It’s when you go around town shooting without proper permits or crew that things get really interesting (not that I would ever do that, readers who are also Chapman faculty). Yes, I’ve come close to death on pretty much every set, but one of those experiences stands above the rest, the veritable giraffe of danger.

You see, I was to play the lead in a simple, one-minute story about a man whose car runs out of gas. We thought it would be a breeze, but as the things on our todo list spiraled out of control, it ended up less breeze and more tornado. A spiraly tornado.

First off, it’s raining, and since I’m part witch (of a Cardinal direction, no less), that’s never a good thing. I know then in my boots, or rather, non-rain-proof flip-flops, that it is an omen of fortune most ill.

Still, not wanting to have a meltdown in front of everyone (see what I did there?), especially that cute editor I was trying to impress (because film school did have at least one girl in it), I soldier on and hop in the car with the affable director, who proceeds to drive us way, way up into the clearly deserted hills, a place where no one would hear us scream. He pulls the car off to the side of the road on some dilapidated gravelly overlook near a bridge and tells me to get out. It’s time.

But before we can get the camera rolling, or sliding, or any form of lateral motion, another car pulls off onto the gravel right behind us. Keep in mind, there is nobody around as far as the eye can see. There are turnouts every few hundred feet, but no, this car chooses to stop directly behind us. Don’t they know this is a film set?

Oh, and then a bunch of gang members pile out.

It was a lot like a clown car, except instead of pouring out seemingly forever, there were only three of them, and instead of being clowns, they were all natural born killers! Or killers created by experience and circumstance or whatever; I’m no Calvinist. Experience that left them covered in tattoos. And muscles. Muscles everywhere.

“Let’s just keep filming,” says the director bravely, right before he crosses the street and walks far far away from the danger, leaving me all alone.

I act like my car has run out of gas for a little while (a stirring performance, I assure you), while shaking in my proverbial “boots,” feet soaked with the liquid fear that I hope is merely the rain and not something more. And then another car pulls up behind us. Just as my dark imagination predicted, more gang members get out. Now it’s a gang soiree?!

Oh, and then there’s another car. Suddenly ten of the most hardcore dudes I’ve ever seen are convening right behind me, plotting how to murder the witnesses who were stupid enough to be FILMING their drug deal.

I look at our possé. There’s me, a buffoon practiced at avoiding conflict; the affable director whose main form of attack is a barrage of smiles; the tall, handsome cinematographer who likes to sing silly songs and whose loyalties probably lie with the camera rather than with me; and this cute girl in front of whom I can show no fear lest I lose face (unshaven as it might be).

The three of them cower on the other side of the road, so far away that they have to call my cell phone to give me acting directions. They promise we’re almost done, but then I see it: the flash of something metal in one of the killer’s hands.

He’s walking toward me now; what little light filters through the ominous rain glints off the object he carries, and I say a quick prayer to Odon, but I know it’s too late. This is it for me.

I spin, confronting the bearer of my demise and see him squat down and pretend to take a dump? He hands his reflective phone to one of his buddies, and the whole gang starts cracking up. They’re posing in front of a “No Dumping” sign, and loving the shit out of it. They each take turns flouting authority by disobeying the government warning…via word play. Apparently three cars worth of these guys met up in the hills not for a drug deal, but for a photo op.

This shatters my perception of gangs.

Location Two: The Gas Station

We arrive at a seedy gas station, thankful to be alive, and more than ready to put this damn shoot behind us. Unfortunately, the location is overrun with homeless people. Now, I’m a big fan of bums, but maybe that’s because all the one’s I’ve interacted with are beach bums who like to talk about the waves, play you guitar on the sand, and compliment you on your fine burrito-purchasing skills. In fact, my most recent interaction lasted about half an hour, and the guy told me he’d written a story about how Obama and Santa Claus team up to prevent the Mayan apocalypse (which comes in the form of aliens).

I sort of assumed that all homeless people were friendly, but as we set up for our final shot, this one guy starts yelling at us about how we’re on his turf, and if we don’t get the hell out of there, he’s going to kill us. Now, I’m not a big fan of my own death, so this worries me, nerves fraying like that now-disintegrated blanket my grandmother promised would always keep me safe. After delivering his message, he simply retreats to a sort of homeless haven in the bushes, where he meets up with what are presumably members of his crew.

And that’s when we see that one of his compatriots has his pants around his ankles and is, um, defecating, right in the open onto some unsuspecting grass.

It’s some sort of conspiracy! The “No Dumping” sign, and now this! The hobos and gangs must have made a pact, working together to…I don’t know! Something!

I try to explain my theory to the director, but he laughs it off as one of those all-too-common crazy Russ ideas. Doesn’t he understand?! If there’s one thing my time as a detective has taught me, it’s that there’s no such thing as coincidence!

He instructs me to keep acting, dammit, but before he can call action, another homeless guy comes at us, screaming. “You didn’t listen to my king? He gave you a direct order, and what the king says, goes. Ya hear me? You take that camera outta here! You take it down now. NOW!”

He’s heading straight toward me. We lock eyes, and I sense his brutal purpose.

“I carry the word of the king!” he shouts, and he’s almost on us.

Finally the director’s resolve breaks, and we run for our car.

But it’s not enough. The homeless guy follows us, and we have one of those movie moments, the driver struggling to hit the unlock button, the monster only moments away.

And then, to our rescue, a shining knight. The lone gas station employee, not your usual knight figure, bursts out of the quik-e-purchase, sprints over, and antagonizes the homeless guy.

“Why you messin’ with their movie, man? Huh? Why you gotta bother these poor people?”

Before I realize what’s happening, the two of them are circling each other, shouting taunts just out of fist-smashing range. The gas station guy keeps telling us to go ahead and finish our movie, but we know when we’ve been beaten, and the driver floors it.

As I look back on it now, I find it rather odd that shooting a movie about running out of gas on the side of the road ended up being much more dangerous than any of the times I’ve actually run out of gas, almost as if, in making the movie, we were forced to live through the movie ourselves…

It’s like some sort of conspiracy.

Sorry there haven’t been that many posts lately. This is due partly thanks to the fact that I spent my summer as a TA at Stanford summer camp again, encumbered by a constant barrage of high school enthusiasm, and partly because I just started film school!

Film school is this magical place where you go to spend two years writing screenplays, or so I thought. Then I arrived for the orientation and was immediately bombarded by the general idea that networking was the be all and end all of a successful life. Nothing makes for a smoother first impression than knowing that the people you’re just now introducing yourself to are the same people that will change your life forever and make or break your career.

In fact, said a professor, I’ve watched a million kids graduate from film school, and it didn’t matter how talented they were or how motivated. The only thing they had in common was how many friends they’d made. Oh, and all famous people ever met their most important contacts the very first day of film school. Great.

“Hi, I’m Russ,” I say, and then am filled with trepidation. Did my greetings come off as insincere? Should I have said “hello” instead of “hi?” Is my silly pun shirt giving off an unprofessional vibe? Is it good for a quirky screenwriter to give off an unprofessional vibe?

While all of these thoughts run through my head, the conversation moves on and everyone’s wondering why that weird guy with the shaved head is just staring blankly forward, drooling on his weird shirt.

Anyway, hopefully I haven’t made too big a fool of myself thus far. It’s important that I not only impress my future contacts, but I also must woo the 6 girls at the school.

And if I might not be writing as many blog posts as I once did, well, at least maybe I’ll make some entertaining movies? Like this assignment where we were required to make a two minute video introducing ourselves but weren’t allowed to appear in it.

Everybody else has all these artsy pieces, and then I come out with this. First impressions, here we go!

The Tuolomne is apparently not located in San Luis Obispo, so I have to drive north to a super secret predetermined rendezvous spot: the Sunnyvale In N Out. I get there around 10pm, at which point Brian, Zack, and I pile into one car and set off for the motel room Brian’s dad (Andy) had booked. Everything looks like it’s going to go swimmingly, which is perhaps not something you want on a rafting trip (PUN). But since I’m writing this blog post, you, being the discerning reader that you are, know that trouble awaits.

In fact, just as we’re pulling out of the parking lot, Brian gets a frenzied call from his dad: “So this motel is—static static—service doesn’t really work—static static—because there’s no gps signal. Just make sure to turn when you see a—static static—if so, then you know you’ve gone too far—static static—and remember—static static—white mailbox.”

Luckily, I once earned a merit badge in Orienteering, so with my expert navigation skills, we’re able to immediately miss the onramp. Undaunted, we find an alternate route to the freeway and speed into the distance…only to accidentally exit and go 15 miles directly out of the way. No big deal. We’re having fun. We just backtrack 15 miles to where we went wrong.

Turns out we’d done it right the first time.

It was supposed to be a two-and-a-half hour drive, but by the time one in the morning rolls around, we’re only halfway there. Plus we’re on some windy, backcountry road in the middle of nowhere with only a tenuous belief that we’re heading in the right direction.

For many miles, the only non-plant-thing we zoom past in the darkness is a single building surrounded by dozens of parked cars. You know, since we’re already so late, maybe we should check it out. We’re men of adventure, and who knows what this place is! Dive bar? Strip club? Secret meeting place for the occult? Plus we’d already pulled so many u-turns, we figured we should try to set a record. So after yet more backtracking, we park and stumble straight into an after-hours redneck convention, or at least a community of people tremendously dedicated to fulfilling their stereotype. Everyone sports tattoos of skulls or tractors or other hick-things, and one guy had even shaved the back of his head to look like a beard.

Not sure what we’re doing here (besides boosting our egos and feeling out of place), we figure we’ll let the bartender decide for us. Let him express his creativity, right? Apparently he’s in a bad mood, because he hands us raspberry vodkas mixed with seltzer water, a concoction so feminine and so vile that I think it actually took hair off my chest. Not wanting to get beaten up by the women who now had more chest hair than we did, we drained our glasses and got the hick out of there (PUN).

Brian and I need something, anything, to wash away that horrible flavor, but after miles of empty, barren darkness dotted only with the occasional murder-shack or rusted car, the only thing we can find that’s remotely food-like is a 7-11. We burst through the doors and immediately lay our eyes on two wrinkled and unappealing hot dogs who had clearly spent their entire existence rotating on those endlessly twirling spits, waiting behind that scratched and foggy pane of glass, hoping against hope that someday they’d be freed and could fulfill their destiny: ingestion. Unable to turn down something so clearly horrible (and really feeling for the hot dogs’ plight), and pleased that they’re only a dollar apiece, Brian and I go full-on Kobayashi.

A choice made deadlier and more exciting when we happen upon a machine that sports a single red button labeled “Push for Chili.”

We push. Chili oozes out in a constant stream of uniform, moist goop. What could this chili possibly be made of that allows it to remain unrefrigerated indefinitely, and how can chili have such a slimy-smooth consistency? We gloss over these questions and skip straight to the more important question: who can eat more “Nozzle Chili?”

Minutes later, the question morphs into “By the burning entrails of Prometheus, how do we end this soul-consuming stomach pain?”

Unable to find an answer, we crawl back into the car and press on. After getting lost about a dozen more times, we finally take the last left turn we can remember reading before our gps cut out. The dark forest road greets us with a giant “No Trespassing” sign.

We ignore it.

All we know about our destination is “white mailbox” and “a left turn into a driveway,” but nothing looks too promising. Then again, Brian’s dad is one o’ them hippy types, so it’s perfectly conceivable that he booked a room at some crazy person’s cottage in this valley of death purely for the eye-opening meditative experience it would provide.

We finally see a few huts shambled together to form a makeshift house. There’s a white mailbox in front, and the driveway is a left turn. Huzzah! Except there’s no lights on anywhere, and Andy’s car is nowhere to be seen. “Maybe he rented a car,” we tell ourselves.

We drive through it once.

Not too promising.

We drive through it again.

It can’t possibly be the place. But if that’s not it, then where the hell are we supposed to go? We decide to investigate on foot. One shamble-hut looks the most like a guest room, so we walk up to it, using our phones’ last remaining battery power to combat the darkness.

We creep to the door, shine our lights, and, just as we’re about to peer into the windows, we hear a shout.

“Fredbert! There’s somebody at ma’s place!” Followed by some gibberish I interpreted as “Grab the shotgun! And don’t leave any witnesses this time.”

“No, wait!” I shout. I can see her eyeing us from behind her door, licking her lips as she imagines the sweet taste of man flesh. “We’re lost, I swear. We’re trying to find an inn, one with a white mailbox.”

“Don’t know nothing like that round these parts. Now, if you’ll just move a little bit to left; that pillar is blocking my husband’s line of sight …”

Or maybe she just shrieked something about returning to the main road and never coming back…Either way, we were too busy sprinting to the car to pay much attention.

Turns out the place is only like two blocks farther down the road and is a very upstanding and obvious motel with a giant white mailbox. And we made it with three hours to spare before we had to be on the river!

In the morning, we roll out of bed minutes before we’re supposed to be at the launch spot. We scramble to our destination like eggs in a pan (SIMILE PUN), and right before we’re going to get on the water, our guide drops some serious knowledge on us: we’re not allowed to bring glass on the river. “But Andy,” we cry, “you told us a six pack per person per day.”

Andy shrugs innocently, as if he would never have said such a thing. Look around, he gestures. No one else brought any beer. At this point, it’s all too much. The travel, the lack of sleep, the perfectly good beer that will spend the trip in the trunk of Brian’s car. We sit down, the wind ripped from our sails. But then, in a moment of inspiration, we realize that rafts don’t even have metaphorical sails!

In our car lay a gallon of water. Why not turn that into…a gallon of beer!

And thus, the River Brew was conceived.

We empty every variety of beer we’d brought into that jug, then pack it away and hope for the best. And what a best it is! When we arrive at the campsite, we dig a hole in the river and submerge the jug. After it’s been cooled to perfection, we whip out our concoction and take a swig. Consensus: delicious.

Things were really going great. I mean, no one had even fallen out of the raft that day. And falling out is a seriously nerve-wracking prospect. Sure, you could die, but we weren’t too worried about that. The truly horrifying aspect was that we’d all agreed: whoever falls out first is required to eat a wrinkle-dog absolutely drowned in Nozzle Chili.

The trip itself was kinda fun too, I guess. We surfed rapids, played bocce, hiked into an abandoned mine full of centipedes and bat (singular), and enjoyed that rare adrenaline rush that comes only when you know you could float to your doom at any moment.

But the only doom we ever faced came when we were docking for lunch on the second day. We’d pulled in at a problematic angle and were starting to float downriver. One of the guides yelled “Somebody get out and grab the ropes!” I bravely rose to the occasion and attempted to step out of the raft, only to slip and faceplant into the water.

It was the closest any of us came to falling out, and let me tell you, to this day, I have not recovered from that second Nozzle Chili dog.

I’m under the impression that everyone shares the fantasy of meeting a tall dark stranger on a plane, hitting it off over a mutual hatred of the shoddy in-flight entertainment and, thanks to the cramped seating that ensures levels of intimacy which would normally take months to develop, deciding to share a cab fare to the hotel (for the sake of economy, of course), and as long as you’re both staying in town for a couple of days, there’s really no reason to waste money on individual rooms when hotel beds are so sizable…and so lonely.

At least, I know I’ve been waiting for this to happen ever since that whole puberty fiasco. This unspoken desire that I assume is shared by every passenger adds an exciting and erotic undertone to all those forced conversations of uncanny politeness. The people who refuse to talk to me when I assail them with an unending barrage of friendly inquiries into their line of work, reading material of choice, and sex life aren’t actually trying to sleep or work; they’re using body language to convince me that they’re not particularly interested in getting a hotel with me. Most likely because they’re already spoken for. What else could it be?

But I don’t let failure after failure get me down. Every flight, I disregard my A-priority seating, wait until about half the passengers have boarded, then try to sit next to the person who looks most receptive to hours and hours of friendly conversation and a little flirting. College was a golden era for this, since every flight to or from Spring/Christmas/Thanksgiving break was packed with students.

The very first time I flew home from Stanford was at the end of admit weekend. I spent the whole weekend wandering campus and taking in life with a beautiful girl (with whom I was very honorable since my then girlfriend was waiting for me back in San Diego), and before I knew it, I was taking a flight home. And just by chance, aforementioned beautiful girl Emily was on the very same flight. So of course I sat with her…and her mother, who’d come along to keep her safe from predators like me. Having a girl you’ve just met’s mom sit a foot away from you makes hormone-driven dialogue a difficult endeavor, and age-specific innuendo becomes the better part of valor. I kept having to engage her mom in conversation to seem polite, and somehow the discussion shifted rather unfortunately to their belief in Catholicism, a topic that God in no way intended for in-flight banter. What followed was nigh on an hour of high-minded philosophizing that my half-semester of Dante could never have prepared me for. Attempting to atheistically deflect the good-natured religious prodding of a cute girl’s mother is like walking on eggshells (or water), and meeting the parent(s) after just 2 days made me feel like things were moving faster than locusts on plague day. Still, I must’ve been sufficiently charming and uncontrarian, because during the descent, Emily offered me her number.

Before I’d left for admit weekend, Klaus (the ex) had informed me that I’d better not come home with any cute girls’ phone numbers. But how could I turn down Emily (especially in front of her mother)? It would’ve been one thing if I’d simply input her into my phone, but this was a plane, and apparently turning on a free-with-a-two-year-contract piece of technology causes multi-million dollar flying contraptions to crash. So good, ol’ fashioned writing it was. I didn’t have anything to write on, so Emily solves this problem by retrieving a giant colorful pen from her purse and scrawling her digits across my entire arm, then decorates my guilt-limb with cutesy hearts and stars.

I got off the plane, bid her farewell, headed toward the baggage claim, and ran right into the girlfriend, who’d come to pick me up as a surprise. Yay! Well, at least I had fond memories of the flight to keep me happy throughout my stay in the dog house.

But wait! There’s more! Like that time the pilot made an announcement on the P.A. during our descent. Apparently someone had left one of those extremely useful and cost-effective Juicy Couture handbags in the bathroom, and when they’d gone back for it, it was gone!

Suddenly, the plane was abuzz with rumor, and the witch hunt was on.

No one would fess up, and the plane quickly became a cramped prison, but without the amenities. The pilot announced that no one would be allowed to leave until the purse was recovered, and once we landed, police would be brought on board to search our belongings. Chaos broke out. People erupted in anger, jumping up and yelling at anyone and everyone, and I huddled in the corner attempting to appear as unobtrusive as my massive girth and witty t-shirt would allow.

The shouts continued, the threats escalated, and the pilots promised ever-increasing retribution, from “we’ll turn this plane around and go straight back home” to “we’ll force you to eat a second in-flight meal.” Finally, from just a couple rows in front of me, the purse hurtles through the air, flung with the vigorous abandon only a criminal fearing his or her capture can achieve. In this case said criminal was a her, and the her was a 6-year-old girl. Everyone watched as the purse sailed over their heads, bounced off an elderly man’s shoulder, and came to rest in the aisle, the lone testament to the purloining atrocity that had occurred.

Or what about that time I sat next to the very professional looking Asian man? We made a bit of small talk but mostly kept to ourselves. Then halfway through the flight an old man collapses in the aisle literally right next to me. A woman starts screaming, and a flight attendant rushes to the situation, then shouts those classic words: “Is there a doctor on board?!”

The guy next to me is already leaping into action, checking the old man’s pulse, looking into his eyes, trying to rouse him to consciousness. I can’t believe I actually got to experience that scene from all the movies, and first-hand, too! Dr. Lin helped the guy regain consciousness, then helped him back to his seat and administered some friendly and charming advice along the lines of “no more collapsing!” As the old man stood, the plane erupted into cheers and applause, and the doctor waved graciously. “Just doing my job,” I think I heard him say before he proceeded to get all the ladies.

I’ve found myself on some flights even that soulless character from Up in the Air would’ve found interesting (including a four-hour flight during which this guy paced up and down the aisle the entire time like a crazy person, casting waves of anxiety over every other passenger), but the most important flight of all was the one on the way to Stanford’s admit weekend. A lot went down going to and from that place. You see, that was the day I met life-long friend, sexy hunk of man, singer extraordinaire, and best artist in the blogosphere, Sam Julian. I guess technically we’d met before since we were both captains of our rival high schools’ Improv teams, and thus had needed to organize our fair share of competitive Improv battles, but it was on this flight that we truly got to know each other. Sam’s mom (in classic mom fashion) had forced him to get to the airport 3 hours early, you know, just to be safe, which meant that he arrived at the same time I did. Nothing particularly interesting happened, other than my sitting next to someone who would end up changing my life. We’ve kept in touch ever since, and look where it’s gotten us.

So even if I’ve never managed to have that airplane fling, I did end up with that special someone who’s more about the long term, and even though he can’t quite fulfill all my wishes (try being female, Sam. Seriously), he can certainly draw them.

Do you guys have any good plane stories?

Check it out!

Woohoo! I hope that cross-dressing didn’t frighten you too much, or worse yet, arouse strange new feelings you weren’t sure how to handle.

If you liked it enough and are reddit folk, I posted it over here and it could probably use some upvoting:

Sorry that wasn’t a blog post per se, but I hope you enjoyed it!

We’ve already taught you how to write a blog post, and in merely 39 steps, no less. But we neglected to explain what to write about.

This post will remedy that oversight. You see, people read our blog not because it’s entertaining or well-written, but because Sam and I, in a freak accident involving leeches, some exposed wires, and the color purple, stumbled upon the exact keywords and components that turn a blog from standard catnip into cat cocaine—you know, in a world where all blog readers are cats and internet virality is a physical drug.

And now, without further hilarious introductory paragraphs, we give you the 10 keys to generating massive blog traffic.

1. Write Posts in List Format and Bold Each List Item

People don’t like the idea of reading an endless series of paragraphs, even if the endlessness stops after 4 or 5 paragraphs. The more numbers and bulleting the better!

• By splitting the post into easily digestible sections,
• you’ll be able to overcome
• the A.D.D. of America.
• The reading feels
• like you’re going
• much faster!
• Ironically, splitting up those sentences into bullet points probably made for some very stilted reading.
• Examples: The 8 Types of Annoying Relative and Tips to Help You Avoid Them. How to Increase Blog Traffic in 10 Easy Steps: An Underhanded Guide

2. Link Back to Your Old Content!

People often rest their hands on their mice, and if they’re startled by a loud noise, they might accidentally click on one of your links, increasing your page views.

• Examples: This link right here. Go ahead, click it.

3. Link to Other Content!

But don’t just link to your own content! Link to everything you can possibly imagine! Through the magic of pingbacks, referrals, and actual magic, this will direct people to your site. Maybe a fellow blogger will be too curious to resist investigating why you’d link to them, or maybe your wife will come on here to tell you about the cease and desist order her lawyer filed for always directing people to those risqué photos of her.

• Examples: I think that was enough examples.

4. Google Trends!

When choosing a topic, it’s important that you not fall into the trap of writing on a subject you’re passionate about. Rather, you should go to http://www.google.com/trends/ and see what the nation is searching. Choose one of the top 10 hottest searches at random (any method will do—ten sided die, random number generator, augury).

Then take an extreme stance and write about the search term in an angry and divisive fashion. This will rile up readers and get you loads of angry comments! Remember, it’s not the type of feedback that matters. It’s the quantity!

• Examples: Basketball playoffs are happening? I hate the most beloved team; it’s an outrage they’ve made it this far!
• Dan Harmon fired from Community?! Good riddance. He probably didn’t have any impact on the show anyway!
• Facebook stock is dropping? But Facebook is the next Google! Instagram is the next Apple!
• There was a solar eclipse? That’s not science, it’s an act of God! Therefore, it’s impossible to predict when the next one will be.
• There’s a thing called the Preakness? I thought the triple crown was just a special prize you got for winning the Kentucky Derby really well.

And if you can’t think of anything trendy, just include one of the 5 standbys of the internet: animals being cute, people accidentally hurting themselves, whatever magical/vampiric/arena-death-match book series is popular for teen girls at the time, cats doing weird things, or Star Wars.

5. Revealing Pictures of Female Video Game Characters!

You know what’s always trendy? Guys spending time on the internet for unsavory purposes. Nobody’s at their computer more than nerds, and those same people are the ones without girlfriends (myself included). Tap into this market. Their searches for “naked princess peach,” “star fox slippy sex” and “ecco the dolphin cosplay” will bring in hundreds of sexually frustrated new readers! They may not do any reading, but your new content will definitely make them come repeatedly to see if you’ve updated.

• Examples:

6. Tag Overload!

Remember when you were a kid and you couldn’t get enough of tag? It’s time to bring back that spirit and ignore all those “adults” who tell you to have fewer than 100 tags per post. Tags help you show up in search results no matter what you’ve written about. That’s the beauty of it. They don’t even have to be related!

• Examples: Barack Obama. Fire-Spitting Dinosaurs. Blake Lively Nude

7. Begging

There’s nothing like begging to emotionally guilt people into doing what you want. And don’t be afraid to toss in a threat or two. Seriously, would you please beg? For the love of god, beg! If you don’t beg right now, I’m going to come over there and break both your two-legged stool’s legs.

• Examples: Would you please share this post on Facebook? No really. That’d be awesome. If this post went viral it would be so meta!
• You could share it on Reddit too!
• Might as well click the stumbleupon button too. Do it! DO IT! Click every single button!

8. Be Freshly Pressed by WordPress

We don’t really have any tips on how to accomplish this, but we sure as hell wouldn’t have any readers at all if it weren’t for the people over at WordPress who thought we were funny. Or maybe they just threw a dart and it landed on us, I don’t know. As much as I hate to admit that others have power over me, it’s the truth. This isn’t very informative. We just thought we’d put it in here on the off chance that this post gets Freshly Pressed. Then we can say things like “Whoa. Meta” and “Boo-yeah!” and have them be applicable. And if it doesn’t, then we can say things like “I never liked WordPress anyway,” and “whatever those sounds are you make when you’re crying.”

• Examples: This post, hopefully.
• Making it to the front page of Reddit is also acceptable and equally inscrutable.

9. Lie to Your Audience

It’s important to keep readers on their toes. Nobody wants what they think they want. I mean, I was pretty sure I wanted Bruce Willis to be alive while I was watching the Sixth Sense, but Mr. Shyamalan knew me better than I knew myself. And I wanted The Last Airbender not to suck balls, but once again, he showed me who was boss.

• Examples: Tell them it’s a 10-step list but run out of ideas after 8 steps, then make the 9^th step a joke explaining away your deficiencies. That’s way better than having an 8-part list.

And there you have it! Follow these “10” simple “steps” and you’ll generate thousands of page views in no time. Sure, page views don’t mean anybody’s reading anything, and probably people will just be enraged by the fact that they didn’t find what they were looking for. But in the end, I think we can all agree that we blog not because we want to disseminate useful or entertaining information, but so we can see that little number go up on our stats page.

And if you’re interested, check out our new webcomic: The Joy Cannon!

But Sam and I cannot stop at a mere blog. We must take over the entirety of the internet! And for that, we will need…

Bum

BUm

BUM!

A WEBCOMIC!!

That’s right. All the buildup has been leading to this climax. We’re launching a brand-new squeaky clean extra green webcomic!

It’s called The Joy Cannon and it will shoot heavy iron spheres of humor at you once or twice a week. It’s our newest weapon in the continued war on sadness, and we aim to use it to its full potential.

Now, with great cannoning power comes great responsibility or something, and now that Sam and I are moving sideways in the internet world, we may not have as much time for blog posts. But never fear! You’ll actually be getting more updates from us! We’ll still post on Reasonably Ludicrous once or twice a month, and now we’ll also be posting on The Joy Cannon 4 to 8 times a month. That’s like 7.5 things every 4 weeks!

I hope we didn’t hype this up too much. We didn’t mean to have so much buildup, but as an English major, I’m not very good at computer science and tinkering with all the web code took me longer than expected.

Thanks for being so supportive all the time. Sam and I love reading all your comments, and it’s been amazing to watch the positive response this blog has garnered. You guys are the best, and we hope we can attempt to entertain you for a long time to come.

So go ahead! Click on over to The Joy Cannon and see what you think! We’ve got 3 snazzy comics up there right now, and more are on the way!