World, meet Rex Dollman

Ha ha ha! I'm sorry! I'm laughing so hard, when I try to type, I just keep writing ha ha ha! Ha ha ha! See? It ha ha ha happened again!

Don't worry—you'll get it in a second.

Is Gary Coleman still alive? I thought I heard that he died of the Webster disease, but I've also heard that little people live a long time. I mean, just look at Bilbo. Or Doctor Ruth!

I only ask, because I'm looking for someone like Mr. Gary Coleman to involve in a new project I've been brewing upstairs: Rex Dollman! I bet some of you were worried that Rex Dollman was some sort of Andy Kaufman/Juaquin Phoenix alter ego. I guess he is a little bit, but not for me (please, I have enough on my hands balancing Dandy and Frisky Chesterton.)

No, Rex Dollman is an exciting new character, about to burst onto the literary/Hollywood scene. Is he a little person? With a name like "Dollman," I'd certainly think so. But not necessarily! (Sorry, Gary—nothing was finalized, and plans can change just like that.) Is he a detective? Um, well his name is "Rex," isn't it? So, yes, he's a detective.

Or is his name Rex? At this point, his name could be, say, Jiminy. (Gary! You're back in!) Or it could be Gary, for that matter.

So, yeah, it's not done yet. Rex Dollman is still being birthed, as it were, and I just want to get things slippery by talking it out a little. But I wanted you to know that I haven't just been sitting on my butt for the last three months. I've been busy conceiving Rex.

A new thing?

Birds with hats. I won't be starting a tumblr for it, but when someone does you can be sure that I'll be there with a lawsuit.

I wonder: does it seem like I threaten the hypothetical deeds of anonymous strangers with legal action too often? I don't know. I doubt it. I mean, I'm not one to support frivolous lawsuits (especially after that time* my neighbor tried to sue for throwing hot coffee in her face), but we're talking about something special here: birds with hats!

It's special because you almost never see real birds wearing real hats. It makes me wonder if wearing a hat during flight is aerodynamically impossible, or something. Someone should test that out by putting a hat on a plane. (I understand that a passenger jet isn't a perfect analog for, say, a chickadee, but I'd hate to see a bird crash just because I wanted to see if it could wear while flying.)


*That is to say, "those times."

A little update about what I've been working on in my head

You know what would make crocodiles so much scarier?

If they could walk on ceilings and walls! Like bugs do!

The same thing probably also applies to alligators of course, although I'm not certain if they would be as good at walking on vertical or inverted surfaces. The scare factor would decrease considerably if you saw an alligator lose its grip and drop off the ceiling.

This is how art happens: fast, dangerous, and in bullet points

It has been two or three months now since I've written a genius play, and I think I'm getting a little bit ... the opposite of dry. I am wet with drama, if you know what I mean.

Unfortunately, inspiration hasn't really struck. Some writers will tell you that you can't just wait for inspiration; you have to work for it, and if it doesn't happen, it's your own fault. I will tell you now that this is a lie. "Grapes in the Snow," for instance, wasn't the product of weeks or months of hard work and revision. Obviously not. No, Grapes in the Snow was pounded, fully formed, into my head when I crashed my bicycle on the street nearly a year ago today. (To be exact, it was a year plus four days.)

I won't pretend that I woke up in the hospital thinking about orphans and Dickensian factories and shit. No, I woke up in the hospital wondering if I was about to get arrested. But the idea, even just the shadow of the idea, was already in my head, each detail filling with color as I regained consciousness, like a photo negative getting developed. By the time I was released, I wasn't even wondering anymore if the nurse had touched my penis when I went to the bathroom when I was still amnesic. I was wondering which aspect of Grapes in the Snow would reveal itself to me next.

That was awesome in the most literal sense of the word.

But that's not the case right now. I mean, I've got the words inside me, but it's all like Jello without a mold. Give me a mold, Dandy, give me a mold!

I'll try, Dandy, I'll try. Ok ... here. I'm just going to throw ideas onto the page. No editing, no second-guessing. Let's kill this shit and think about it all later.

BOOM

-The extinction of the dinosaurs

-The inception of Facebook

-Two indian tribes go to war

-More than two indian tribes go to war

-The invention of electricity

-Heirs struggle over the control of their ancestral distillery

-Two cats learn to talk shortly before hearing about Jesus

-What's a blog?!

-A man has a pet snake. They rob banks.

-A baker accidentally blinds himself

-Life in a jug

-Pointy ears

-A woman and her husband live in a gully which is slowly filling up with trash

-Three schoolchildren eat bugs off the street, until one of them gets superpowers/poisoned

-My favorite blanket

-A dog finds a hat that takes away his powers of speech

-Santa Claus' funeral

-Santa Claus' funeral—nobody attends

-A man accidentally builds a house

-After inventing the perfect poison, a man cannot bake a cake that will not poison his dinner guests

-A king has sex with his mother, which practically kills his father

-A man bites through his mouth guard while asleep, awakes to discover a mouth full of plastic

Ooooh-kay! Let's have some drama!

Here's your new indie blockbuster, Hollywood!!!

Hey, sorry, folks, but things are about to get just a little meta. I try to avoid that sort of bullshit usually, but the problem here was that I apparently started writing an Internet diary entry for y'all the other night, and then passed out half way through. How did this happen? Hell if I know. I had gone through about three tins of chewing tobacco (I had never even chewed before!), so I was flying from that, and when I woke up I found two broken claw hammers on my bed. If you can figure that out, send me a letter with an illustration of the nights events. (I don't have time to read.)

In any case, I also found this partially completed diary entry. So what we have here is an entry in itself, as well as entry about an entry. Professors call it the "Arabian Nights Effect." (The Arabian Nights Effect is also what you call it when you don't know exactly who you got an std from, but I'm not talking about that here. Not here, and not anywhere.)

Without further ado:

I've been watching a lot of movies and television lately, and I've come to an important—and valuable—realization: you can squeeze a lot of entertainment out of people who are different from you. I've got to do more of this.

By "different from" I don't mean, like, racial people. Or even people who are retarded. I'm thinking more along the lines of a person who is just retarded in a specific way. Someone who doesn't get it when the dance they're doing is inappropriate (they just love to dance so much!), or someone who's good at math, but bad at talking to children and people.

These people, or "people," or whatever the politically correct term is, are walking goldmines! (Assuming they can walk.) Sometimes they're funny, sometimes they touch our hearts, but they're always engaging and entertaining. It's like their entertainment value is inversely proportional to their ability to understand social cues! Ha ha ha! I'm laughing already! Also, I'm touched! Also, cha-ching!

Brainstorm time!!!

Protagonist's name: Um... Dominic. No! something cuter! Mikey!

Mikey is a ... janitor! Duh! But he doesn't just mop and stuff like all the normal janitors. (That's why normal people don't get movies—too normal. This is a movie now, by the way.) No, he mops, but he also ballroom dances with his mop! And he takes it seriously! Ah ha ha ha!

And... he has names for all of his janitor tools: Sarah the mop, Jeff the bucket, Jeannie the knife! But he can't remember his real coworkers' names! Ha ha ha! (Also, why does he have a knife?! Ha ha!)

Ok, what happens to Mikey the dancing janitor? He falls in looOooOOoove! But does he even know what love is?! We're going to find out with the help of ... Sam! Sam is a girl, and she works at the building Mikey dance-cleans! She is a ... an account executive! I don't even know what that is, but it sounds boring and square! How is it that Sam is so young and so funky-hot? I don't care! But how is it that Sam is so stressed out with her account executive duties? Sam, who will teach you how to live? You, who have already accomplished so much in your short, hot life, and yet feel so little?!

We're starting to worry that no one can save you from yourself, as you sit in your office on yet another late-nighter, when ... someone who is just retarded enough to dance with a mop waltzes right by your open door! Literally waltzes! Well this is intriguing!

Except I think Mikey does something that rubs Sam the wrong way. It's probably just because she wishes she could fart around as much as he does, but she tells herself she doesn't like the way he forgot to dust the copier.

Here's where I left off. Both of the claw hammers had quite a bit of my hair and blood on them, so I'm assuming I stopped because of a concussion.

I was on to something though. Something good! I don't think I can finish it tonight, but where do we go from there?

Ok, Sam is angry/jealous at Mikey for his care-free life and thought-free brain. (He's not really thought-free, but we don't care about that. Not more than a dream sequence, anyway.) Sam is angry/jealous. They flirt a little bit (as much as a guy like Mikey can flirt ha ha), but Mikey does something to piss Sam off, like not have gone to college, or paint her car a color that's too fun while she's asleep. (That's it.)

This is probably the end for Weirdo and Juliet, huh? That's what I thought too, but NO! You know what Mikey does? He gets the shit kicked out of him by some toughs, because he was trying to defend Sam! Was he literally defending her, like from a mugging, or did he just stand up for her when some skeezy male coworkers were talking about her breasts? You know, that doesn't matter. Probably both.

What matters is that ol' Mikey just about dies! But not in a way that would make him physically ugly. And Sam realizes what an important thing they have, or could have, and she kisses him and lies down next to him in his hospital bed. It's sweet and sexy! And then she does something whimsical for him, like play him a song she wrote for/about him on the ukulele she is always too embarrassed to admit she owns and plays. And, oh my god, she's good at it! They're meant for each other!

They'll probably have a kid who is practically normal.

$24 million dollars, opening weekend. Good enough, because we spent only 11 million making it.

Some quick thoughts to sizzle in your brain pans.

Open your minds, and let these hot idea pokers sear through.

Ok, number one: Dog food made with real bones. Dogs love bones, they eat dog food ... dog food made with real bones. The only real obstacle I can see is finding the right animal to harvest the bones from. Each bone should be small enough to be eaten in one bite, but they should also retain the classic bone shape. Horse bones: too big. Bird and turtle bones: too weird looking. What are my options? Small monkeys? Baby cows? Let's throw this one back to R&D.

Second, unplanned idea: R&D ... &D!! This is a Dungeons and Dragons joke! But what would R&D&D do? Probably research powerful new spells, and look at heterosexual pornography.

Third idea: the main motivation for me to ever have children would be to put them on the internet. Not, of course, in any illegal way, like footage of them gluing athletic shoes together in a hot, dimly lit factory. More like in a Kids Say The Darnd'st Things way. The point here is to get me rich. So they would act out the plots from early 90s action movies, or, like, fight each other. Sort of like Baby Fights (see below), except it'd be more along the lines of Baby Fights 2: Toddlers With Hammers. They probably wouldn't get hammers, though, now that I think of it. You don't arm the people you're exploiting. Rookie mistake. If I wanted a machete lodged somewhere in my body, I'd go ice skating in a frozen, flooded machete factory.

Idea four: Frozen, flooded machete factories probably aren't even a real thing.

Baby Fights: I can't be the first person to think of this

I'll be the first one to acknowledge that I get a lot of really good, really unique ideas. I'm not too humble for that. (Remember my polar bear cub-shaped land mines, for safely blowing up polar bears, or the soon to be famous Scott Stapp sports drink, HotGodSweat? Ideas like that.)

But this one... it seems too good to be true. It's so perfect and so obvious that, despite the great powers of my imagination, I simply cannot imagine that no one has thought of it before. I hesitate to check the Internet, because last time I entered "baby" into Google I was treated to an image of a tiny, naked man exploding from a woman's torso, but I know for certain that there isn't a prime time TV show called Baby Fights (or Babyfight, or Fighting Babies, or any permutation of that). And if someone had plucked that sweet apple from the tree of ideas already, I feel sure that it would be on TV.

It came to me in a dream, you see. I was in a parking lot with two friends who recently became mothers, and I asked one of them, "So... why haven't you had your baby fight her baby yet?" The dream response was as lackluster and unimaginative as you'd expect from a real mother, but it got me thinking, why haven't I had your baby fight her baby yet? If I want to be rich (I do!), this is the way to do it.

Now, obviously, I don't want the babies to kill each other. Frankly, I don't think that's possible, because babies are so weak. And I don't want them permanently maiming each other, because for as much as someone might pay to see a one-eyed baby in a fight, I think truly exciting matches would require all fighters to be in top physical form. So none of that. But I do want those babies in rings and straw-floored pits, and I want their fists and shins to be wrapped up like little muay thai fighters, and I want them fighting! Hell, we could even dope them up a little to make it interesting (with the approval of the fathers, of course).

I can't accept contestants yet, because a whole sport league can't be set up over night. but if you're planning on doing it with a fertile member of the opposite sex anytime soon, I suggest that you attempt to sabotage your contraception somehow. No doubt there will be some discussion about that later on, but nothing wins an argument like the prospect of owning a champion baby fighter.

There's an empty space at the top, and I think we—you and I—could climb there on the doughy fists of your child. Let's get cracking!

Baby Fights!

Try this one out real quick

Noah's Pirate Ark!! Or maybe Pirate Noah!!

See where I'm going here? It's like the same old Noah story, except he's a pirate! A pirate on a ship full of animals?! I know, right!

What does pirate Noah want with those animals? I don't know. It's not my job to know. Maybe he's going to try to eat them, or maybe he wants them for something sexual? Maybe he's going to sell some, and save some for sexual stuff. Those are the sorts of things a writer can figure out. I'm an ideas man. Just start sending me checks when it hits theaters.