RandomBrandon.com Random Brandon Adamson

Well….. I wish I could just telepathically transcribe my entries so that I didn’t have to type everything out. In other words, this is going to be a long ass entry which may or may not have an intermission depending upon whether or not I get kicked out of the library….

“The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it.” -George Bernard Shaw

It’s safe to say, that as a time period, March and April have for the most part sucked ass. The combination of playing too much tennis, and the air conditioning being turned too cold led to a prolonged battle with legionnaire’s disease. Or at least that is what I’m calling it for the purposes of this journal entry. I was sick for nearly the entire month of March. My mother came to visit and brought me some antibiotics which helped, but I was almost fully recovered at that point. She also took me out for dinner at Applebee’s and bought me a steak, which felt like the bread that cures all hunger probably because I was anemic or something.

I’ve taken to riding my skateboard again. Some girl saw me riding it at like 9:00 in the morning and said I looked like I was in “whimsical heaven”. Ahh the irony of that. Trying some things I probably shouldn’t have, I ended up with a pretty nasty ankle sprain. It hurt like a sonofabitch to walk on it, but almost felt good in a way.
Other than a few wounds, I’m probably in the best physical shape I’ve been in since 2000 when Anika and I broke up, and I used to jog in the Melrose area, ride my bike from Hollywood to Santa Monica every day, and drink this green shit called “Dr. Hagiwara’s Green Magma”`which tasted like…. I don’t know come to think of it the taste was so obscure that I can’t even come up with anything of a proper analogy. The best I can do is say that the green stuff tasted like what I would imagine a “diet wheat grass” drink from jamba juice to taste like (if such a thing existed).

Nearly every girl I run into these days who I haven’t seen in a while…the first thing they mention is something along the lines of “Whoa you look a lot more manly with all that facial hair”. That kind of sucks. The cool thing about shaving was always that it’s sort of the male way of exfoliating. At least that’s what I read in some woman’s magazine at Safeway at 5 in the morning a few years ago.It has a certain appeal to it though. I mean it does suit my personality. After all, it’s just like my last foray into the realm of facial hair in the summer of 2001. What a miserable time that was. Does anyone remember when I made up that fake cologne and called it “despair for men” and tried to sell it on my old website ‘allthingsdark.com’(which I sold to some random internet dude who ended up just redirecting the webpage to porn)?

(intermission)

Okay so I did get kicked out of the library, but now I’m back… I’m back FROM the future. Might as well just change the subject to movies. I always seem to gravitate towards directors who seem to share my world view and present characters I can identify with. I think that Whit Stillman fits that category and his ‘Doomed-Bourgeois-In Love trilogy’ of “Metropolitan”, “Barcelona”, and “The Last Days of Disco” seems to indicate that. I don’t even think those films are all that good, but Stillman really wanted to be a novelist, and just decided to use movies as vessels for his writing, much in the way that I’m a better writer than I am a musician, yet I use songs as a way to get across my message to compensate for being unable to finish lengthy screenplays or books due to losing the passion for them midway through. Stillman’s views on women and relationships and his style of expressing are so similar to mine that I wonder just what he must have gone through or came from. His overanalyzing and business analogies of relationships, human nature, etc are right up my alley. I mean, just consider this classic exchange from Barcelona:

TED
When you get deeply into sales you find that every major transaction involves a mini-identity crisis for the buyer: “A green carpet? Am I really a green carpet person?” In romance the same thing applies — but on a humongous scale.
FRED
But what is Maneuver X?
TED
It’s removing all pressure, creating a sort of space that the customer has to affirmatively cross. Only by disappearing more thoroughly and inexplicably than Montserrat can I change the current dynamic. Will it? I don’t know. I think it will. If not, I’m dead.
FRED
Wow. You’ve really thought this through. I haven’t thought through anything about Marta… But isn’t Maneuver X really just another way of putting what we usually refer to as ‘playing hard to get?’
TED
No.

In The Last Days of Disco, it is Josh & Alice’s relationship on which Maneuver X comes to play:

Stillman says in his Halifax Herald interview, “Alice has a lot to do with that, and I think the identity crisis moment is when she decides not to commit to Josh which we see in a kind of oblique way, when she gets weirded out by his hymn-singing.”

“She uses that as a way to distance herself from Josh, but she’s pondering that, thinking about that in the background of other scenes, but by the end of the film she’s made a choice and decides to go with the baggage. Every kind of a relationship means accepting some sort of baggage or a little worry.”

In fact, Josh also seperates himself from Alice. He stops calling her, after the singing incident, but it’s not an active ploy. After all, Josh is merely a bit ‘thin skinned.’ He took ‘No’ for an answer.”

———-

Okay back to other stuff, “it’s not just a job it’s a va-venture” was the first sentence I ever spoke as a little boy, and my current place of employment fits the bill. Seriously, I’ve been sent on all these random CIA style missions to various offices and business getting paid quite nicely to secretly study people’s business dealings and shopping habits. Last week I had to sit
in one of our clients offices where I had to sit there all day in the waiting room stealthly, monitoring and keeping track of dozens upon dozens people coming and going. It felt like training for the CIA. Each person had to be given a unique personal identifier which I used to track their activities (girl with heart shaped earring and velour pants spoke with CSC regarding such and such and 3:21 p.m etc etc). I’ve really learned so much working at my job about people. It’s really increased my powers of observation, my perceptory skills, attention to detail, and my overall ability to size people up. It’s amazing really, just by a person’s tone, accent and general demeanor, I can tell where they shop, what movies they’d like, what they eat, how long ago they’ve done this or that, what they watch on tv, their politics. When I talk to people I can tell how they are going to answer before they do based upon clues in their behavior. There’s a negative side to this of course, that being that I understand people too well to be able to interact with them normally. In my relationships with people I can spot details in their demeanor or what they say that inform me there’s something not quite right, or a hint at some sort of looming issue in in the future, and I have to try to act as though I can’t tell and not let it affect my behavior, mood and attitude in the present. It makes it impossible to act natural because I recognize too much about what’s going on. I’m also so good at sizing people up, that I often dismiss people out of hand, but as I’ve always said, my time is valuable so I have to have some kind of screening process in so far as who I choose to share it with.

Anyway, this week team Brandon and Billy have been spending nine hours a day in the baby care product section at Target working on a study(though I don’t go back until Thursday because the next two days I’m working on something else). These past 6 days I’ve learned almost everything there is to know about diapers, training pants, baby wash, baby wipes, you name it .

Some examples of what I’ve learned from this study:

1. Target brand diapers are not elastic enough, so you should get Huggies or White Cloud.
2. Lots of people only buy organic baby food which they do not sell at target.
3. Toys R’ Us is apparently the best place to buy diapers because they have Box size(wtf I didn’t even know they sold them there)
4. Diapers, training pants etc have all sorts of absurd sub brands like convertibles, natural care, ultra, supreme, feel and learn, and sizes like mega, super mega, mega man,….. etc.
5. Hello Kitty has been around since 1974
6. They sell Spiderman toilet seats at target.

It seems my job or (every job for that matter) has its own corporate lingo which becomes second nature after a while. “Check it out, that guy’s totally a non-converter.”
While we were hanging out, guess who showed up?…. No, it was the pepperidge farm guy who was stocking goldfish crackers two feet away from us. We got to talking fishies, and he was like “Have you tried the extra cheddar?”, and I said something to the effect of,”I’m really just a plain old cheddar kind of guy”(how typical). He ended up hooking us up with some sort or golden package sample of goldfish crackers. It seriously reminded me of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory and the whole golden wrapper deal. We’re talking THAT kind of quality here. Oh, and Ben the Pepperidge Farm guy was right, the extra cheddar is damn good. Maybe my luck is starting to change.

p.s. I got a totally random myspace message from someone from Milwaukee who I haven’t seen or talked to in ten years as I never returned even a single time after leaving in 1996

Subject: S.S.C.
Body: Hey I was in Phoenix in feb. and I could’nt find your number. I even got Julian to look up your file but no luck. Hey what are you doing now? I remember drinking 40′s and playing the keyboard . I got some good old footy of you skating. Inward heel for days!

Now I don’t know what “file” he’s referring to or what’s in it, but I’d love to know. Some people probably have old movies of me playing shows or singing. I played a show in a deer suit one time like a million years ago where they interviewed me afterwards, and I’m pretty sure someone videotaped that. Now that’s something i want to see. Those were my earliest days of music and I wrote songs about girls I liked that worked at the mayfair mall food court who tried to get their boyfriends to beat me up, and I distinctly remember singing an early live version of the song “Outer Space” only back then it was called “Soggy Flakes”.

Fast forward to the now, I’ve started mastering some of the new songs for my album. My long time friend Lawrence Hearn is producing it. All the new songs I’ve written are awesome, and it’s merely a matter of execution, and not fucking up the mixing. A certain girl drew a picture for me while playing bingo that i was going to use for the cover, but I forgot it in her coat pocket, and it probably is irretrievable at this point. Maybe it will miraculously show up in the mail one day. We can only dream.

The working track list for my new album will look something like this(not like this means anything to anyone, but i might as well have a record of it)

1.Alternate Ending
2.Partner in Time
3.The Last Coup Fourre
4.Bright Colors That Fade
5.Yellow Light Blues
6.A Thousand Words
7.(can’t write the title here)
8.Spring Times Two (Instrumental)
9.The Last Coup Fourre(Instrumental)
10.Boy Who Glows in the Dark
11.Fly With Me To the Elevators

(the order of these will likely change slightly at some point, and there may be a few surprise tracks)

I’m trying my hardest to be done with it in two weeks, and hopefully release it before June. Once it’s done(but not a moment before!!!) I can finally be free to embark upon that quest to find the ever so elusive “third girl”…..

Whole Wide World (the Monkees)

I’d go the whole wide world
[repeat to fade]