It's been a week, Hubski.

Sunday started the week off with a bang by throwing my new Porsche into a 720 degree spin. Or the better part of one, at least - coming down an on-ramp I goosed the throttle (in 2nd, a little spirited but a long way from reckless) and had the car kick left into the better part of a 360. it refused to catch until I was about 20 degrees shy of a full revolution at which point I straightened it out only to have the car continue into another 3/4 revolution. We (me, the car, my wife and my daughter) came to rest about 40 degrees from straight. Fortunately we didn't so much as kiss a curb.

It's worth noting that Porsches are known for this. It's worth noting, however, that I drove that car up 1500 miles of the PCH in all weather and can only describe its handling as "predictable." There are no surprises whatsoever to be had from that car; you can break the ass loose and catch it again as if you had a cutting brake. The back tires are P-Zero Rosso Asymmetricos with less than 2,000 miles on them; the fronts are Conti Extreme DWS with less than 500. I spent the better part of Sunday breaking the thing loose everywhere I could under any conditions possible before I realized that the blessed little thing will happily crawl up the 50% grade mud hill next to my garage with nary a complaint, let alone manage wet pavement with no surprises (other than this one). It also took me more than a day to realize that the '77 Skylark with bald tires I drove in High School was so miserable on ice that I could turn the bitch 90 degrees by stomping the gas and lunging hard in the drivers seat to one side or the other. Miserable traction or no, I could never get that Buick more than 180 out and i once lunged it down an ice-covered hill and lurched it on purpose. I ended up on a friend's lawn but I never got a 360 out of it, let alone two of them (with barely 40mph of momentum). It had to have been diesel. HAD to have been. But dayum. It took me from distrusting my car to distrusting every road. Shit coulda been really bad.

Monday I discovered my book was dead at my agency.

It's been a long road. It's been a lot of work. It's been the better part of a year convincing my ex-agent's boss that her email eats attachments. But we solved that three weeks ago and I no longer have representation. So go find another agent! Something rarely mentioned to beginning writers is that the act of writing is far and away the easiest thing about being a writer. It's the act of selling that will kill you. The guy who talked me into writing a novel is on the NYT Best seller's list right now (for like the 8th time) and he's told me that if he were growing up in the climate right now, he'd never make it. And of course, it's NaNoWriMo, that one month a year where all your loser Facebook friends post their fucking word counts every day without caring one fucking iota that their bilgewater is why I'm not allowed to ask my agent if she got my book except for every twelfth week. That if there wasn't so much shit in the sewer rats like me would be able to get around easier. Know how you become a successful writer? Ask Anne LaMott - be independently wealthy and have a successful writer as a father whose agent will happily read your shit for ten fucking years.

I also got notes back on the short film I've been mixing. They make it abundantly clear that my involvement is resented, that every creative choice I've made has been rejected, and that really, they would like me to put it back exactly the way I found it. Which would not be a problem except that I took on this mix as a favor to my best friend and he's had to fight so hard to get any changes that whatever instruction the director gives, my friend browbeats me over. They've formed an insular little cadre over there where it's their film and I'm the interloper and I had to have a 3-hour fight about this before my friend even heard himself yelling at me for making a change and wouldn't even let me explain why I'd made it. Once he gave me the opportunity and I spent fifteen minutes explaining my thinking he acknowledged that I was being completely shut down and belittled but not that I might not want to do that for fun for every single improvement I've attempted to make to their fucking film.

So that's basically a month of my life I'll never get back. Meanwhile, they're the squeaky wheel which means the actual paying project I've got has taken a back seat. It's shit too, of course, but at least I'm appreciated... which made me realize that pounding fucking Pro Tools for appreciation is a shitty-ass business model. It also made me realize that all the clients I used to get good work from have exited the industry and all that's left are Premiere Punters that are not at all interested in my help.

I finished Monday never wanting to mix again and never wanting to write again. Frankly, I'm still there. And, of course, I have to execute those notes within the week. And the guy I wanna bitch to? he's the guy who caused the pain. yesterday he suggested that I could turn some other fucking screenplay into a novel and I told him "fuck writing forever". He responded that nobody ever hits on their first movie (he's wrong) and I responded "fuck movies forever too."

Yesterday I had to go fix shit at the birth center. Turns out birth educators are less gentle than fucking high school students. One of the women who rents our space for classes legit pushed an HDMI cable into the wall. I measured; it takes 8 lbs of force to do that. So I was left with the choice between making my wife tell everyone who rents there to stop being gorillas or gorilla-proofing my birth center. Now I'm left wondering what else is going to break; I need to switch the entire fucking network over from Netgear to Ubiquiti (we've blown the mind of a Nighthawk through the simple application of a few cameras) but I can't do that until I've systematically erased every creative touch I've put into this fucking film over the past month.

The wind is so bad here it ripped the cover on my motorcycle, which I haven't had a chance to touch in a year because I've been too busy dealing with other people's bullshit.

So here I sit. Drinking coffee and venting because the alternative is removing my work so I have time to gorilla-proof a business where every customer resents me. It's fuckin' great.

Where's the drambuie.