With social media usage approaching something like ubiquity, it’s not surprising to see creative endeavors that are are hatched and nurtured in social find their way into the more traditional mainstream media. To name just a few: Twitter’s @shitmydadsays has been optioned for television, countless writers have gone from blog to book including the successful and surprisingly good horror send-up John Dies at the End, more still — like J.C. Hutchins (who is profiled in my book) — go from podcast to print.

It’s practically harping on yesterday’s news to talk about social media projects making the jump into the so-called real world. But I’d like to call your attention to a crossover that is near to my heart and for which I’d love to solicit your support (hey, I don’t ask for much – the next time I do, it will be to ask you to buy my book – so indulge me for a few minutes.)

Enter David Niall Wilson: a horror and science fiction novelist turned Twitter fanatic. Early in 2009, a couple of chance remarks made on Twitter got his creative juices flowing and, as often happens with creative types, before long those stray remarks had inspired the basic plot for a horror screenplay that is equal parts slasher movie, serial killer story and ecological thriller. David called his script Killer Green, began publishing it to his blog one scene at a time (the first two scenes are still online), and letting his Twitter followers know when they should tune in for more.

With the script written, David quietly went about optioning the screenplay to a small indie production house that, in turn, secured commitments from some talent to play key roles. And so the movie sits, awaiting production which — as you undoubtedly realize — costs money… More on that in a second but first:

Why am I telling you all of this?

Well, for one thing David is a friend (disclosure: he has also sent Amanda and me some free stuff over the course of the past couple of years and suffered through a very bizarre phone call on Thanksgiving 2008). For another, taking his inspiration from Twitter in more ways than one, David loosely modeled Killer Green’s cast of characters after people he had gotten to know 140-characters at a time. One of the film’s main protagonists — Professor Gregory Verdino — is, well, inspired yours truly; Professor Verdino’s love interest is inspired by my love interest; and other social media notables like geekosaurus Chris Brogan feature prominently as well. So hell yeah I’d love to see this thing on the silver screen.

Cut to close-up of you: It’s fitting that a movie inspired by the social media community find its funding in the social media community as well. And that’s exactly what the Killer Green crew are aiming to do — which is why I’m writing this post, because I’m hoping you can help.

How?

Most of all, I’d like to encourage you to check out the Killer Green fundraising page on IndieGoGo — if you’re familiar with social fundraising startups like Kickstarter or the music-focused SellaBand, think of IndieGoGo as something similar, with a big focus around helping indie producers get their movies made through small financial contributions from regular people.

You can learn more about the movie and, if you like the idea or just want to support it, you can contribute toward its $50,000 fundraising goal.

Even if you can’t contribute money, you can certainly help to build the buzz. I’d love it if you would share this post on Twitter, Facebook or with your friends. Point people to the Killer Green page. Tell David Niall Wilson you love him (ok – I can’t ask that much, but it doesn’t take much to spread the word and help something social come to life on the screen.)

Professor Gregory Verdino will thank you. I will too.

Amanda and I just got back from a relaxing long weekend in Providenciales, Turks & Caicos. We didn’t do much more than veg out and get sunburns, which is just what the doctor ordered. (Note to self: check into the credentials of that doctor that evidently never heard of skin cancer. Anyway…)

I packed my crap little point-and-shoot camera and managed to snap some nice shots of the beach. Here are four photos that work together as a sort of ‘day in the life of Grace Bay’ set. Waddaya think?

Morning Clouds

Afternoon Glare

At Dusk

The Setting Sun

Of course, I also fired off plenty of shots of people, food, trees, buildings, bikinis, feet and miscellaneous other things – if you’re interested in any or all of the above you can find all my Turks & Caicos pics on Flickr.

If I had to make a list of favorite weekend activities, house hunting would rank somewhere near the bottom — higher than watching Amanda comment on hundreds of her high school friends’ Facebook walls for hours on end, but lower than allowing Amanda and Olivia to paint my toenails. In other words, somewhere near the bottom third of the list.

Don’t get me wrong. Thinking about what the future holds, imagining the possibilities, and just the prospect of owning a new place are all exciting things. But the problem is, house hunting can be seriously depressing. No matter how it looks on television.

You watch those shows on HGTV — programs like Property Virgins, My First Place or House Hunters — and you envision yourself — just like those eager-eyed mom-jean-wearing (the men) and sweatshirt-donning (the women) Kentucky couples — nabbing your move-in-ready dream McMansion for just under $200,000, making the seller pay your closing costs AND agree to clean your pool in the nude for 12-months just for the privilege of handing their keys over to you and your spouse. But then, in the real world, your realtor treks you around to a dozen Long Island shanties that sell for $800,000 and, at best, haven’t seen renovations since Lyndon B. Johnson was president.

Still, house hunting (as a process) benefits from one saving grace — one thing that makes it bearable, turns it into a mild form of guilty pleasure entertainment, and caters to the armchair voyeur’s perverse sense of morbid curiosity. You get to see how other people live. And that, in itself, is worth the price of admission. Sure admission is free (until you decide to buy something, of course), but seeing how all these random strangers let their freak flags fly behind the privacy of closed doors is worth every goddamn penny.

This is just a quick rundown of some things I’ve observed while slinking through other people’s homes:

Clown Town & Other Design Disasters: Well maybe the town was perfectly normal but this one house looked like it could only have been decorated by a clown – lots of bright colors and pop art flourishes, even a puppet or two. Other strange design choices (that might not have seemed so strange when they were chosen, but c’mon people it’s 2010 – let’s replace those shag carpets):

• Well, shag carpets of course, generally in shocking shades not often found in nature and less often found in tastefully appointed modern homes.
• Pink / orange / yellow counter tops and tiles.
• Those tacky carpeted toilet seat covers.
• Mauve everything – yes, everything.
• In one powder room, a pair of alien hands reaching beseechingly from the wall, holding a pair of neatly folded hand towels.
• An honest-to-god vintage stove that was leaking enough gas to blow up the block.
• A faithful replica of Molly Ringwald’s bedroom from Pretty in Pink, complete with a killer New Wave record collection and hastily snapped photos of Andrew McCarthy.

Architectural Oddities: To each his own I suppose, but in our hunting we have seen a number of head-scratchers:

• Sliding doors that open into a garden. Not onto a garden path or to a patio that offers prime viewing of a garden, but directly into the plantings, offering no way out but to tromp across the mulch, shrubs and flowers.
• As bad as that was, how about a newly renovated home with an attached garage accessible only from outside the house, a lovely backyard but no way to access it other than leaving by the front door and walking around outside, plus (for the incontinent among us) a dining room with its very own half bath.
• Two massive wooden closet doors. Doesn’t sound so weird when I put it like that, but I should point out that these doors went only halfway to the floor (stopping a good 3 feet above the carpet) and opened onto a large crawlspace suitable for harboring underage Thai sex slaves.

Creepy Collections: Dolls mostly. But also anything emblazoned with the words “Bless Our Home” or meant-to-be-reassuring-but-actually-quite-ominous Bible verses. In one house, an inordinate number of little Gravy Master bottles. Not 100% certain this last one qualifies as a collection, so much as signifies an insatiable hunger for roast beef dinners.

That Which Has Been Left Behind: Belongings are often odd and awkward to others, but sometimes it’s the relative lack of belongings that makes something stand out. I’m talking about houses where it seems the furniture has been cleared and the family has moved on, but for some reason one thing or another has been left behind:

• Two fully assembled, copiously laquered jigsaw puzzles, framed and hanging on the walls — one of a wizard casting a spell, the other of a group of gray wolves howling at the moon (think Three Wolf Moon but with maybe an extra wolf or two.)
• Creepy ancestral portrait showing an older woman with bare breasts. Now, to be honest, this painting was in the attic of one home that was clearly still occupied by its family – and I have no idea whether the woman depicted in the picture was really related to the family (let’s just say I’d be shocked if she was a professional artists’ model), but it struck me as some kind of family heirloom that the current generation found awkward and inappropriate for the living room walls. They probably tucked it into the attic, not even thinking that one day some snarky sonofabitch would be climbing the stairs to scope out their storage space.
• An old man. OK, being completely honest, I suspect the old man actually lived in this one condo we saw. But as he shuffled forlornly around a mostly empty living room and then settled into the one piece of furniture — an oversized chair with cupholders built into the armrests — I couldn’t help but consider whether or not his son and daughter-in-law had simply tired of him and moved on to a new life without him.

Don’t Even Get Me Started on the People. The awkward homeowners who sit slumped on their sofas or buried in bed sheets (yes, we’ve seen people – mostly kids but still – hunkered down in their beds) while total strangers tromp through their homes, doing their best not to appear like they’ve had any outside human contact for years. I suppose these homeowners are better than the overly eager tour-givers. We went to one house where the owner felt compelled to narrate our walk through the rooms with the most minute of details about the walls, windows and floors. We went back to the house a week later because, frankly, it was a pretty nice place and she proceeded to do the same thing, with no recollection that we had been in her house just 7 days earlier. Her performance was all the more bizarre given that her hushand (slumped on the sofa) and daughters (buried in bedsheets) steadfastly ignored our presence altogether.

Note to self: the next time I sell a house, I will be certain to plan plenty of away-from-home activities so that I am not sulking in my living room like some creepy looky-loo every time a potential buyer takes a look.

And last but not least, the thing that inspired me to write this post. My number one favorite house hunt sighting…

The Piece (of Shit) de Resistance: Yesterday, while touring a reasonably well-appointed home on a nice quiet suburban street, we discovered a turd in the master bathroom toilet. Not a straggling floater that escaped the flush but a full-fledged load accompanied by all the accoutrements. I suppose nothing says “Welcome to your New Home” like a stranger’s feces, so we gamely continued our walk-through of the house and blithely discussed the property’s pros and cons (interestingly a giant, steaming turd left to greet prospective buyers was listed as neither a pro nor a con.) I’m happy to say the other toilets were devoid of substances the human body voids.

Anyway, I know some of you must be thinking, who is he to judge? You’re probably right. It’s easy to sit here upon an armchair made entirely of elk antlers (untrue), feet resting upon a massive pile of dirty laundry (true), wearing my last pair of almost-clean pajama pants (true) , tapping away on my laptop (true) as I sip human tears (untrue) from a gold-rimmed chalice (untrue), poking fun at other people’s houses (true). But at the end of the day, it’s my blog and I can say what I want. Right?

Besides, here at Chateau Verdineau we almost always remember to flush the toilet.

It’s Thanksgiving eve and it’s mighty lonely around Chateau Verdineau. And it’s not even that Amanda has wandered off into a different wing and I just need to wait for her to return to the Great Room bearing a silver platter heaped with gourds, gizzards or some other kind of holiday crap. She left for Florida (friggin’ FLORIDA!) yesterday, to spend Thanksgiving with her family and won’t be back until next Tuesday.

I was invited (at least that’s what Amanda tells me) and all is good in Gremandaland. But the trip just wasn’t in the cards for me. I’ll be spending my Thanksgiving with my daughter and my parents here on Strong Island while Amanda spends hers lounging around in a bikini while roast turkeys float in little plastic boats atop the pool water (sorry grefandas, but that’s how I imagine they roll down in the Sunshine State.)

Don’t get me wrong – I am so happy to have my little girl for the holiday. I just wish Amanda could have been here to share the day with us. And I’m happy A gets some quality time with her family. I just wish I could have shared that with her. Sooo – um yeah – the crisp autumn air bears the ever so slight scent of bummer. Wicked different from last year…

One year ago, I met Amanda’s parents for the first time. Amanda finagled me an invite to their home for Thanksgiving dinner. If I remember her end of the phone conversation correctly, it went something like this: “Yeah, so mom, I’m like probably going to bring this weird old man with me… Uh huh… Right… Well no, not exactly… I’m kinda maybe dating him..? Yes…I think like 27 or something, so not like THAT much older…Um OK… New York… No, he’s not a Yankees fan… I promise he doesn’t smell too bad… K… Love you b… What…? Oh. I think it’s Craig or something like that…Toodles.”

My memory might be off with that “toodles” bit but I’m pretty sure the rest of it is right on.

I, of course, combined my considerable charm and even more considerable monster bankroll to hatch a master plan to win over Mama and Big Papa Gravel. We’re talking the whole nine yards — flowers, fine wine, a new shirt (for me, not for them – I have worn this same no-longer-new shirt in roughly 40% of all Gremanda photos since then. To my knowledge the Gravels all wore their own shirts that day; these shirts may or may not have been new.)

As you can tell from the photographic evidence, my plan was a resounding success.

At my first ThanksGraveling, I discovered that a meat pie is something you eat (not just something gross you read about on Urban Dictionary), Amanda crank called one of our favorite Twitter people David Niall Wilson, and then I looked on helplessly as Amanda spilled wine on her crotch and mopped it up with paper towels. (For the record I did offer to help, even suggested we could save on the paper towels ROWR – nobody seemed to think this was a particularly good idea.) Of course we ate a crapload of turkey and, if memory serves, I didn’t get yelled at for putting my feet on the dining room table.

Then we went back to Amanda’s Boston apartment for a weekend full of buying weird hats and kissing (while wearing said weird hats.)

A lot has happened in the year that has passed since then. Amanda decided that she liked “Craig” enough to take up residence in the Chateau. She met and fell in love with my daughter – and my daughter fell in love with her too. She finally met my parents who, so far, have not tried to drive her from their home with torches and pitchforks. (I have a few ideas as to why that might be. See: bikini photo above. See Also: my father.) We’ve had some adventures, visited some fun places, and have had lots of time to hang out together and just be nekkid us.

I’m thankful for everything we’ve had, done and been over this past year. I’m thankful for the opportunity to keep on having these things forever or until I die – probably somewhere around 3 years down the road at the rate I’m going.  Don’t get me wrong,  I’m thankful for lots of other things too (my daughter, my career, my co-workers, my more or less pretty decent health, etc.) — but right now, even though she’s far far away, I’m thankful most of all for Amanda.

I’m thankful that she lets me love her and that she loves me back. She’s my one, the honest-to-god-fer-real-this-time love of my life and I love everything about her: she’s thoughtful, loving, sweet, smart, almost funny, the most beautiful woman in the world, and pretty damn fun to squeeze. I’m thankful for every bit of her from the very top of her weird hat to the teeny tips of her weird toes. And I can’t wait to pick up her hat, toes and everything in between when she arrives back at JFK next Tuesday.

1. Sunday nights.
2. To-do lists.
3. Black tie events.
4. Reply to all.
5. Going to the post office to return something I purchased online.
6. Unexplained traffic jams.
7. Explained traffic jams.
8. Rappers who think they are actors.
9. Actors who want to be singers.
10. Passive aggressive behavior.
11. Carrying a tray in a cafeteria or fast food restaurant.
12. The royal “we”.
13. Royal blue.
14. Meeting new people.
15. Waiting in line.
16. Alarmists.
17. Smokers.
18. When I take off my glasses and then can’t find them again because I can’t see anything without my glasses on.
19. Being mistaken for Zac Efron.
20. Going to the beach.
21. Moisturizer.
22. Other people’s opinions.
23. Most of my own opinions.
24. People who describe curly hair as “kinky.”
25. Meetings.
26. The sound of clarinets.
27. Conversations that begin, “Hey, can you do me a favor?”
28. People who ask me to do simple things that they could just as easily done themselves.
29. Teenagers.
30. Also, anyone who has ever been or will ever be a teenager.
31. The internet.
32. The paparazzi who follow me everywhere I go.
33. People who confuse “there” and “their”, “your” and “you’re”, or “its” and “it’s”.
34. When someone blatantly rips of my latest catchphrase and claims it as their own. (Hey, how’d you come up with “bling bling” Lil Wayne? Yeah, thought so…)
35. Numbered lists.
36. When publishers replace a perfectly good book cover with a lame movie tie-in cover.
37. Irregardless.
38. Forgetting to wear a watch.
39. Running out of printer ink.
40. Righteousness.
41. Getting stains on my clothing.
42. Religious fervor.
43. Checking the mail out of habit, even when I know it’s a postal holiday.
44. Television.
45. Celebrities who think we care about their political views.
46. Decaf.
47. Restaurants that don’t accept reservations even though they always have a long wait.
48. Cologne.
49. Sans-A-Belt slacks.
50. Obtuse angles.

Of all the activities I plan for weekends with my daughter, our semi-regular visits to Dave & Buster’s offer the best odds of landing my ugly mug on Why the Fuck Do You Have a Kid?

“Why’s that?” you ask. (OK – maybe you didn’t really ask but I’m gonna tell you anyway…)

Well, you see, Olivia turns six later this month so you might think we’d spend our time inside the mad-house-masquerading-as-an-arcade popping tokens into some harmless game featuring SpongeBob or racking up the points in skee ball or maybe even testing our skills in a grab machine or two. And we do. But not until after we’ve spent a good 30 minutes or so blasting the shit out of zombies and other b-movie monsters in the decidedly kid-unfriendly The House of the Dead 2.

So picture this:

It’s Sunday afternoon, just after lunchtime. The local D&B’s is bustling with activity and noisy with the sound of game-play. Along one wall of the arcade, midway down a long row of first-person shooters, you’ll find Olivia and me firing molded plastic semi-automatics at the steady barrage of undead horrors that bear down upon us. Skinny zombies, fat zombies, mutant toads and blood-thirsty slugs. Giants, winged gargoyles and 7-headed dragons. All with a taste for human flesh and determined to make a meal out of us — until we ready, aim, fire, reload, fire again and stop them dead in their tracks (or undead in their tracks, as the case may be.)  Until we reduce them to graphic smudges of blood and guts on the floor of the game’s namesake “house.”

Amanda sits beside Olivia. She isn’t playing but she’s an accomplice nonetheless. She’s pumping money into the machine so we don’t lose our flow — replenishing our life lines as we advance from level 1 to level 2, through levels 3, 4 and 5. She’ll probably toss and turn all night, tormented with nightmares brought on by The House of the Dead’s violence and gore.

But Olivia won’t — she’ll sleep just fine. She’s unphased by the prospect of her character’s demise at the hands of imaginary monsters, and is remarkably level-headed as she assesses our progress: “Daddy, I’m killing more zombies than you. You keep missing everything.” The scoreboard says otherwise — if you go by the points, I’m doing just fine but Olivia has barely hit her targets at all. But what would you expect — she’s only five. Right?

And besides, at moments like this I’m dead certain I’m not missing anything at all.

So I don’t correct her. Instead, I give her a high five. I hug her and say, “I know, sweetie. You’re an awesome zombie killer.” She nuzzles me for a moment then fires a round directly into the chest of an advancing corpse. Her eyes dance with delight and she’s grinning ear to ear. I’m grinning too. Amanda later tells me that the sight of daddy and daughter blasting away at an army of undead menaces was one of the cutest things she’d ever seen. Ummm, OK… we’ll see how she feels once we turn out the lights.

But I know what she means. This is hands-down the best half-hour of the entire weekend. And it reminds me exactly why I have a kid and why this particular kid blows me away every time.

This morning I read a Wall Street Journal article called “Not So Fast” by Granta editor John Freeman. It’s worth the read if you have the time (doubly-so if you don’t have the time) and it begins like this:

The boundlessness of the Internet always runs into the hard fact of our animal nature, our physical limits, the dimensions of our cognitive present, the overheated capac­ity of our minds. “My friend has just had his PC wired for broadband,” writes the poet Don Paterson. “I meet him in the café; he looks terrible—his face puffy and pale, his eyes bloodshot. . . . He tells me he is now detained, night and day, in downloading every album he ever owned, lost, desired, or was casually intrigued by; he has now stopped even listen­ing to them, and spends his time sleeplessly monitoring a progress bar. . . . He says it’s like all my birthdays have come at once, by which I can see he means, precisely, that he feels he is going to die.”

We will die, that much is certain; and everyone we have ever loved and cared about will die, too, sometimes—heartbreakingly—before us. Being someone else, traveling the world, making new friends gives us a temporary reprieve from this knowledge, which is spared most of the animal kingdom. Busyness—or the simulated busyness of email addiction—numbs the pain of this awareness, but it can never totally submerge it. Given that our days are limited, our hours precious, we have to decide what we want to do, what we want to say, what and who we care about, and how we want to allocate our time to these things within the limits that do not and cannot change. In short, we need to slow down.

As someone who blogs (and blogs and blogs) and Tweets and Facebooks, met his girlfriend on the Internet, has a hand in raising a daughter of the whatever-comes-after-Y generation, and earns his living advising businesses on how to get ahead in a rapidly changing world, Freeman’s essay hit home.

And what better way to kick-start yet another blog than with a reminder that we’re all gonna die and a plea for spending our time doing the things that are most important to us. Like, ummm, blogging?  Well no, not really — actually, not at all. But after blogging about social media, marketing and business for the past few years I did want to make a place on the web to share my thoughts about (to paraphrase Freeman) what I want to do, what I want to say, what and who I care about.

So yeah, this is my new personal blog where I’ll share all kinds of things.  The things I’m doing, thinking and what I find interesting — well, anything and everything except business-talk. And god knows the world has been not-s-patiently awaiting a blog about the (hopefully not so boring) minutiae of my life. So this blog is less about the things I’m doing to be fast, and more about the things I do when I’m trying to be slow. Or something like that.

So who knows — we’ll see how it goes, right? If you like what you see, I hope you’ll come back now and then or subscribe to the RSS feed. That would be hella cool. If not, no hard feelings — we all need to make choices about the best way to squander away what little time we have left.

Peace out for now…