I know that I’ve been away from this blog for some time now (like, four months!), but I can explain. Around October-ish I started a new job at a nice little Cafe here in Long Beach. Nothing big, just something to get me out of the house and away from all all those idle hours spent waiting for Spielberg to call, my screenplay to become readable or the dishes to do their damned selves. I mean, it’s not as easy as you might think getting things done when there isn’t some boss or deadline hovering over your head. You know what it’s like – you wake up feeling productive, brimming with ideas and the creative impulse. An hour later, though, and you’re back in bed with the computer on your chest, a cacophony of amateur renditions of “Barbie Girl” filling the room, and your t-shirt, face and hair bemired with the remains of the previous night’s leftovers. At least that’s the way it is for me.

Well anyway, as I was saying I wound up getting a job downtown. The hours were initially part-time, in accordance with the laws governing all jobs involving aprons and name-tags, but somewhere along the way something went wrong, and before I knew it I found myself doing the daily grind in a full-time manner. This, naturally, took a big bite out of my free time.

Not that I minded, of course; I’m as eager as the next guy to be a productive part of society – to say nothing of wanting to fulfill my role as an at least partial supporter of my family – it’s just that since removing myself from the Brobdingnagian pool of film types looking for a job in L.A, I’ve had kind of a hard time figuring out where I’d be happy working. I want to act, write, and be generally amusing, not sit at a desk going over spreadsheets and quarterly reports or whatever it is people do in offices. Is that so wrong? Add to this scenario the fact that I possess a nice, shiny, 1993-vintage bachelor’s degree in English, of all things, and you can see how the prospect of full employment in a meaningful field would prove elusive.

As it turned out, the full-time thing was really only temporary; my hours at the cafe are card-carrying members of the under-thirty demographic again, allowing me at least a couple hours a day to try to squeeze some small volume of thin, acrid juice out of the withered, dry husk of this really, really tortured metaphor of, um, creativity fruit (?) I have growing in my head.

So time to start writing! As you might imagine, tons of things have gone on in the Miller family since my last post, each episode wackier than the last and each deserving of at least 1,200 words and every imaginable sequence of punctuation devoted to its documentation. Just you wait – it’ll be grand!