Phase Two of my mission to change careers and get into working in studio transportation is under way. I just finished my first day as a driver on a low budget non-union feature shooting in and around L.A. It’s a tiny little show being shot very much on the cheap and there’s only two guys in the transportation department — me and the guy who hired me — but it’s a start.

One thing that hasn’t changed since my grip days is the long hours. My call time was 9:00 a.m. this morning and I didn’t finish my day and head for home until about 12:30 a.m. tonight. Something I hadn’t really thought much about as I planned this move into transportation but was blatantly called to my attention tonight is that grips may be among the last to leave the set after wrap is called, but transportation leaves last, after everyone else — and often drives every else’s trucks somewhere else before they’re done.

I’m tired, I’m beat, and I feel like I’ve been rode hard and put up wet. It’s good to be back.

After getting laid off from yet another software training gig and having my years of experience pissed on by potential employers because I don’t happen to have the latest set of credentials that say I’ve spent X number of hours in a classroom learning what I taught myself how to do on my own… Well, after all that I decided “Fuck It” and I’m changing careers. So I’ve been back to school. Truck driving school.

The game plan is not, however, to be a long-haul trucker. I may do that if it comes to it, but the ultimate goal is Teamsters Local 399. These are the guys who drive for the TV and movie studios and that’s what I want to do. I’ve held a lot of jobs over the course of my life, and the most fun I had was when I worked on movies as a grip. I think I’m too old and my knees are too shot to try to get back in as a grip, but I think coming back in as a driver is an achievable goal. So… back to school.

I “graduated” yesterday after taking my driving test at the DMV. I now hold a Class A commercial drivers license with endorsements for air brakes, doubles and triples, tankers, and hazmat. That means I can drive anything on the road but a bus, and I’m going back in two weeks with a shuttle van to test for my passenger endorsement so I can do that too.

It’s not easy getting into 399. Hiring is done off their Industry Experience Roster, which has three different levels of seniority: Group 1, Group 2, and Group 3, and jobs are filled from the roster in that order. To get on the roster on Group 3, I’ll need to work 30 days on union shows in a one-year period. That only happens when the town is so busy that everyone’s working and they can’t fill the jobs from Groups 1, 2, or 3. They call that being “in permits,” and that’s when non-union people like me get our shot — when we’re “permitted” to work on 399’s shows without actually being members.

So I’m gambling a little bit in doing this. The writer’s strike crippled Hollywood over the year-end, and SAG’s contract is about to come up for renewal and there’s some fear that the actors will strike too. As a result of that, production is at a low ebb right now — nothing new is in production because nobody wants a strike to shut down their show. I’m gambling that production will spike when the actors sign and that things are going to get really busy — busy enough for me to get my shot to get in, and start a new career as a driver.

Wish me luck.

Driving in the car with Zoe this evening, one of those robotic, generic, breathy, wanna-be R&B songs that pass for music these days came on the radio. The following conversation ensued:

Zoe: Oh, that’s my jam.
Me: You’re twelve. You don’t have a jam.

My View From Here photo series has gone medium-time.

I took a stealth trip to Fort Worth, TX back in October and did my usual View From Here schtick, taking a picture of the room as I walked in…

…and another picture looking out the window…

…and then I uploaded them to my View From Here flickr set, as usual.

Someone from Schmap, who I guess was assigned the Fort Worth beat and thus was obviously on someone’s shit-list, saw them and asked if they could use them in their new Fort Worth Schmap. Being the publicity whore that I am, I said yes. So now my Fort Worth pictures can be seen by Fort Worth-curious travelers around the world — as long as they’re curious about the Homewood Suites by Hilton ® Ft. Worth-North at Fossil Creek in general and Room 702 in particular. Check it out.

I’m a little concerned about their presentation of that exterior shot, though. It lacks clarity; I think it’s misleading. Is that the Homewood Suites in the picture or is it the view from the window of the Homewood Suites? We know that it’s the view out the window, but there’s nothing to indicate that to Frau Blücher from Stuttgart, who might decide she wants to stay in a motel with a small parking lot and park right outside her room and would be disappointed once she gets there and finds the parking lot is actually quite spacious and that it’s a hotel, not a motel, and she’ll have to actually park her car in and go inside the hotel and walk down a carpeted hallway and maybe even take an elevator to get to her room. It’s a minor quibble, but it’s important to me that my work be presented with accuracy and integrity.

All concerns aside, though: Woo hoo, go me, I’m a professional photographer! (If by “Professional Photographer” you mean someone whose throwaway snapshots of an obscure hotel that very few people will ever even stay at, let alone be interested in, is used without payment on a web-based travel guide that very few people will ever see.) Next stop: Pulitzer!!!

Zoe’s little cat Ebi died this morning.

Ebi was a sickly cat from the moment Zoe found her out front, tucked behind the saddlebag of one of my motorcycles. She had some kind nasal obstruction that prevented her from breathing properly, so she could only mouth-breathe and always sounded like she was snoring. Except, for her, snoring was never really an option because she never ever really got to sleep — she had to have her head tilted a certain way to breathe clearly, and if she deviated from that then she simply didn’t breathe. So when she fell asleep and her head drooped, she’d stop breathing, and she’d wake up gasping for air about a minute later. This poor little kitten suffered from extreme sleep apnea her entire life, and she also had developed some kind of mucus build-up thing that made her breathing challenges worse, and it was getting worse and worse toward the end.

And then this morning she choked while eating her breakfast. We feed the cats on top of the washer/dryer and I had just given Ebi her breakfast — a fried egg, because we were trying to find a food that didn’t contribute to the mucus problem. A few minutes later I heard a thud — she had fallen off the dryer and was convulsing on the floor, struggling for air. I tried to give her some kind of mouth-to-mouth, trying both to blow air into her lungs or suck out whatever the obstruction was, but it was no use. She never took a breath and her heartbeat slowly faded and her pupils dilated until she was gone. It was a horrible, horrible way for her to go.

She was a sweet little kitten and deserved a more peaceful end. Watching her go out like that was really hard.

Zoe’s at school now. She’ll be devastated when she gets home and finds out.

Ebi and Zoe when Ebi was new to us.

The last picture we have of Ebi. This is from mid-December.

We had to put my dog Billy to sleep two weeks ago on Tuesday, December 18. I haven’t been able to write about until now — and, really, I’m not able to write about it yet — but I wanted to mark his passing here before the year passed with him.

We had him for so long that I don’t know exactly how long it was. Billy was a part of our family for longer than Beth and I have been married. We got married in June of ‘95 and I think he was still our “new” dog during the Northridge earthquake back in ‘94, so he was with us for at least 14 years. That’s a long time no matter what species’ clock you’re using.

Billy was a really good boy, but he did have his idiosyncrasies. He was not a brave dog, for example. He may have been at one time, but the Northridge quake changed all that. That earthquake really did a number on him, totally scrambled his brains. Everything scared him after that. I can remember one time when a drawing Zoe had done at school that we had taped to the refrigerator came loose and slowly wafted to the floor like a leaf on the wind. That paper scared the ever-loving shit out of Billy and he ran as fast as he could to get away from it. Unfortunately, he was on the hardwood floor when this happened, so he ended up running in place like Scooby Doo, claws skittering on the floor as he scrambled madly away from the dangerous toddler crayon artwork, going nowhere fast.

He wasn’t terribly bright, either. He and Suki (another of our dogs) got out of the yard one day and disappeared for several hours. Suki finally showed up at dinnertime, but Billy didn’t come back. So I went out looking for him, riding my bike all through our neighborhood, certain that I was going to find his dead body in the gutter of one of the busy streets surrounding our neighborhood. When I didn’t find him I went to the local animal shelter to see if he was there. And sure enough, there he was, looking sheepish and forlorn and, yes, scared in one of the kennels there.

I didn’t take him home right away, though. You see, I had gotten Billy from the dog pound in the first place, so I sat down there on the ground outside his kennel and we had a little talk about where he wanted to live. I reminded him that I had rescued him from the pound once — and spent quite a bit of money doing so — and now here he was back at the pound again. So he had a decision to make: live with me, or keep coming back to the pound? Because him leaving my perfectly good home to come back to the dog pound made me wonder if he really wanted to stay with us. We sat there and I waited while he thought about it, and I guess he decided he wanted to come home with me because he gave me a Ha ha, really funny, make jokes while I’m in jail, can we just go home now? kind of look. So I bailed him out and took him home again.

Billy also had a particularly disgusting eating habit - his favorite bed-time snack was cat poop. Every night as we were closing the house up for the night, his last stop before lying down on the floor on my side of the bed was at the catbox, where he would root around looking for what we called “kitty truffles.” He’d clean the catbox for us, and then curl up next to the bed with kitty litter still stuck to his nose. He absolutely loved cat shit.

But Billy was getting really old, and the vet thought he probably had liver cancer, and he had really bad arthritis and was always in pain. By the end he’d gotten so bad that he could barely walk and he couldn’t stand up on his own at all. We have hardwood floors through about half the house and he simply could not navigate them at all — he’d slip and fall down and then couldn’t get up. We put carpet runners down to help him with the traction, but he needed our help getting up at the end — he’d just lie there and bark until someone came and picked him up, and then he’d totter off a few steps and fall down again half the time. He simply couldn’t get around on his own anymore, so we knew it was time.

Our vet agreed to come to the house so he wouldn’t have to go through the stress of going to the vet’s office — something that always gave him a lot of stress. We spent our last evening with him pampering him and loving him and cherishing our last moments with him, and we took the pictures below with him that night. When the vet came we all surrounded him and held him and petted him as he went to sleep for the last time. I think he felt safe and loved at the end. I hope he did.

His ashes came back from the pet crematory on Friday, so Billy’s home again. We miss him a lot.

I got “Merry Christmas”ed today — and not in a nice way. I was on the bike at the local mall, navigating my way through the maze of idiot drivers on my way out of the parking lot. As I approached an intersection of sorts where pedestrians were leaving the store and crossing in to the parking lot and cars entering the lot were trying to turn left down one of the parking lot lanes, there were a couple of guys directing traffic.

Unfortunately, they weren’t exactly working as a team.

As Parking Monkey #1 stopped traffic and motioned me to proceed forward, Parking Monkey #2 waved a car to go ahead and turn left — directly in my path. I stopped and waved the car through.

I said to PM1, “You guys need to get on the same page.”

PM1 ignores me, again stops traffic and waves me forward again, and this time PM2 waves a pedestrian across — directly in my path. I stopped and waved the pedestrian through. Then I just sat there until I had both PMs looking at me and said “Are you ready for me yet?”

PM1 waves me through, I start rolling, and — you guessed it — PM2 starts waving another left-turning car through. What an idiot. I gunned it and cut the car off, and as I passed PM2 I said “You need to pay attention to what he’s (PM1) doing.”

Both of them called after me in unison, “Merry Christmas, sir!!!” and it was pretty obvious that they were using it as a euphemism for “Fuck off, you asshole.”

Nice.

So with that in mind… Merry Christmas to all two or three of my readers. Watch out for parking monkeys in the new year.

We lost one of our cats today — The Dude. We got him from the pound about a year and a half ago (check his arrival here), so we didn’t have him for very long. He was an old guy when we got him, so we knew it was going to be a short time, but I didn’t know it’d be this short.

He’s been losing weight for awhile and getting old and generally just getting more and more decrepit, until this morning when he was in an obvious bad way. I took him to the vet and we put him to sleep this evening. It was kidney failure, we think. The doc was maddeningly vague about his condition and whether or not it was time, but it was pretty clear that putting him to sleep was the right thing to do.

He was a cool dude. He made a place for himself among this madhouse of animals and fit right in. I’m going to miss his insistent tap-tap-tapping at the dinner table as he begged for food, his blatant jumping up on the dinner table when the tapping didn’t work, his falling asleep face down in my lap while watching TV at night, his drooly kisses in bed when he’d want to rub his nose against my mouth and I’d always complain to Beth that “Goddamit, honey, my cat is such a fag!” I’m going to miss The Dude, period. He was my cat and I loved him.

Here’s The Dude with Beth and Zoe this morning when we all pretty much knew how the day would end but we hadn’t taken him to the vet yet.

He was loved. He’ll be missed.

Goodbye, Dude.

The Writer’s Guild is on strike, as anyone who pays even passing attention to the entertainment industry knows. Being a (struggling) writer myself, I am 100% behind the WGA and I’d be on the picket line with them if I were a member. But being that I live here in L.A., I’m in an uncomfortable position.

On the one hand, I fully support the writers. On the other hand, though, quite a few of my friends work on several TV shows as cast or crew or drivers, and they’re going to be out of work when the town shuts down. Most of them can’t afford to be out of work.

On a related note, I can’t afford to be out of work. But I also don’t want to cross the WGA’s picket lines. That’s not going to be an issue for me most of the time, since I do most of my training at various business units not involved with production, but it will be an issue occasionally. Like tomorrow, when I’m scheduled to train on the studio’s lot, which is currently being picketed by 100+ writers.

I’ve worked it out with my boss, at least temporarily. A co-worker else is taking my classes on the lot for me tomorrow while I work back at the office, so I won’t have to cross the picket line. But the longer the strike goes on the more this is going to come up for me, and I think the more it comes up the less accomodating my boss is going to be. This is a very temporary solution, but at least it’s a solution for now.

Go, WGA.