Fall...

I love fall. The weather is cool enough that you can actually walk around town without sweating to death. The Simpsons come back tonight, the Jets have a game tonight and the Rangers are playing as well. It's almost perfect. The only problem is how to watch them all at the same time.

It's In the Mail

I took the first step towards selling one of my scripts to Hollywood today. Now we wait and see. Dribble and shoot, that's all you can do, right? Cross your fingers for me.

How Much Can Government Actually Do?

We’d all like to think that the President- whoever that may be at any particular moment- can come into office and singlehandedly fix all of our problems. We like to think this because it is easy, it gives us hope that with the simple pull of a switch in a voting booth on one November day we can effect the outcome of a game most of us aren’t actually playing.
The problem is that, though President’s can change every four years, their mistakes and problems have no such limits. The President can cajole, strong-arm or collaborate with Congress to pass a tax or repeal it, to lower it or raise it, but what then? We all got $300 checks in the mail a couple of years ago- yet Circuit City and many other retailers like it still shuttered their doors. How was that money spent? Mostly, paying the rent or mortgage we were behind on, or the credit card debt we rang up by spending money that we didn’t really have. This extra $300 had nearly zero effect on the economy, as we saw a year and a half later when the whole thing collapsed anyway.

Not long after that we elected a new President, one from the opposing party, yet unemployment is still near double digits, and underemployment is estimated to be twice as high, at 20%.

Obama’s spent a great deal of his political capital on health insurance, which is all fine and well. I guess if you’re one of the millions of people that’s working below their skill set, or not at all, you’ll need him to hand you health insurance. But does the best insurance in the world matter if you’re homeless because you can’t pay your rent? Doesn’t seem so. The stock market is back up after the bottom fell out, yet I don’t have any extra money in my pocket to show for it. Do you? The banks that caused this whole mess in the first place are handing out seven figure bonuses to their employees, yet I can’t piece together seven dollars some days. And we shouldn’t expect banks to start handing out loans to use any time soon. Why is this happening? Because this is all an illusion- the U.S. economy, our representatives in Washington- it’s all fake.
At this point all it seems the people we’ve elected can agree on is it’s not their fault, that they have a better plan or that we shouldn’t listen to the other guy. And this I agree with. Both sides have been equally as responsible for getting us here and neither seems to be capable of doing anything to get us out. So who will?

A Year in the Making

here's a clip from my short film, 'Paroxysms of Caesars',