Sometime this week, my days as an extra will commence.  I lined up with about fifty other people on Saturday morning and every last one of us was selected to be extras on some show that takes place in the seventies. There really wasn't much more to it than that: arrive, have yourself danced in front of wardrobe, take a number, fill out a form, have your picture taken.  The wardrobe ladies were very matronly and quite relaxed about what it is exactly that can pass as suitably seventies.  My polyester thrift store shirt passed muster, and I was handed a number from a box; I was number 18.  Mark's turtleneck and blue jeans ensemble was up to par.  We stood in line to the camera.  Looking at the camera for the picture to be taken was next to impossible.  The SouthWestern sun cut a trail straight into my retinas as I forced a slight upward curve out of my lips and propped my eyelids open with toothpicks.  They were adament about having open eyes for the shot.  I gave them what they wanted.  It was surely a test of retinal stamina.

Everything they do is a test.  When you arrive at the audition, no one tells you where to wait.  Where you choose to wait is tallied up as part of the test score.  Who you talk to and what you say, documented and scored.    I'm sure of this.  I pick my words carefully.  What I say and to whom I say it is weighed and measured while the thought's form is still inchoate lest their telepaths detect a potential gaffe in my Hollywood linguistic protocol.  I am very careful not to shoot heroin into my eyeball while in the presence of the a.d.  Shooting heroin into your eyeball and joking about shooting heroin into the eyeball are terminal offences, as I well know.  Actually, shooting heroin into your eyeball is not legal grounds for dismissal since in L.A. heroin addiction is a disability.  I know many users of heroin are not addicts, but see if that matters.  Use it once a month on the weekend as an alternative to alcohol and you're a junkie.  You are protected by the law from having your employment terminated for its use.  But there is no protection for those who casually jape.  Mentioning heroin is worse than scarfing down a pound of the shit.

After becoming an extra for some nameless production, Mark and I went to Eagle's where I satisfied my only remaining drug addiction.  I scored forty fluid ounces of soothing black elixir and grabbed the chess board.  Although I fought gallantly, in the end, my king was slain.  Now I'm 1 and 2.  Today I'm looking for vengeance, but it will probably be not mine.  True vengeance, as Rob Halford fans know, is not sought but screamed for.

I have no good way to segue into the next topic or neatly wrap up the preceding.  First, I'll state the obvious.  It is December.  Chrstmas is approaching.
I've ruminated endlessly and most likely, dully, on the flatline nature of seasonal distinctions in the American South Land, but at no other time is it hitting quite so hard.  White, dammit.  Where is the white?  Where is the blinding glare of the sun off freshly poured piles snow to viciously greet me as I step from my home?  The homes with Christmas lights strung out on the porches,  electric Santas atop the roof, a manger scene on the front lawn, these homes in the wintery wonderlands of the north seem filled with warmth and mirth, a celebration of human unity and familial togetherness.  In the southwest desert lands, these homes take on a morose countenance like a pained man hiding a horrible truth.  L.A. houses decked out in their finest Christmas apparel seem to confess that they hung Jesus out to dry on the cross, and that the merriment of Christmas is for them a disguise to hide their guilt.  
Here's a line to tie some of this shit together, a thought too late to function as a segue (I don't edit these things), but not too late for a  home- fried homiletic overview, "The Christmas unfolding in the southwest is as an extra to the spirit of Christmas as a whole.  I feel removed from the actual story line of Christmas.  I am no longer part of the plot, just background filler like the animals stinking up Christ's stable.  This is, in fact, kind of depressing which might explain the silent fart writing I've been churning out as of late.  In January, after the holiday season is drawn to its close, I'll not envy anyone who has to drive on ice, tread carefully on compressed snow, shovel their front steps, stand outside waiting for the dog to color the snow, and scrape frost and ice off the windows of cars.(smartasses can here imagine a poodle furiously attacking the ice on the front windshield, ala, William H. Macy in "Fargo.")  I have a snowscraper/snow brush in the house as a reminder of this nuisance.  It's a good quality hard plastic Bear Claw brand scraper that I won't be using for at least a year.  Actually, the odorless shit verbiage on these pages could be a result of preoccupation with unemployment, rapidly dwindeling financial resources and that I'm out of coffee in the house.  I am a slave.

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