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Last night was a monumental moment in American history. Casting aside the shackles of the past we strode boldly, arm and arm into a brighter future. The next generation has taken the reigns and true change has finally arrived.

I am referring of course to the MUTHAFUCKIN’ HOLOGRAM ON CNN!

HOLY CRAP THAT WAS FREAKIN’ AWESOME!

Is it truly possible in this day and age that we can watch a holographic interview that makes Jessica Yellin look like Darth Sideous?

Yes we can.

If holograms are a reality, can’t we be only a few years away from phasers, teleporters, tricorders and food replicators?

Yes we can.

And can we now envision a reality in which we will have access to public holodecks, sometimes used to recreate famous Sherlock Holmes capers but much more frequently used (following the example of the internet) as super-safe fantasy brothels?

Yes we can.

And if tens of thousands of nerds throughout the nation watch the debut of holographic technology on CNN at the same exact moment, can they feel the sense of community as they all simultaneously cream their pants?

Yes.

We.

Can.

I had two experiences in the last 12 hours that together effectively summarize my feelings on religion.

Last night I saw the Reverend Vince Anderson play his weekly Monday-night show at Black Betty in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. I met the good Reverend through the family of my friend Nate Bock. Nate’s father is a former minister and one of the most decent people I’ve encountered. He once spoke with me briefly about the branch of Lutheranism that his family practices, a faith so inclusive of other beliefs that it seemed to me to almost border on Unitarianism, but with a genuine embracement of traditional Christian scripture.

This is closely related to the faith the Reverend Vince preaches every Monday night to a packed house of sweaty sinners in a bar under the BQE. Vince is the genuine article. He’s the rare performer that treats his music as a religious experience and exhibits it without a trace of artifice. In the so-ironic-it’s-almost-sincere-again world of hipster culture this remarkable honesty has garnered him quite a following.

In what is probably the most cynical neighborhood in America, the Reverend thrives by preaching a gospel of love. His religious fervor is not dogmatic, but rather pure enthusiasm for life. I have always admired, even envied, the passion that churchgoers can achieve in support of their faith. The Reverend certainly has passion to spare, complete with prayers, fainting spells, tap-dancing, sing-alongs and resounding shouts of “Amen!” The message he preaches is love for your fellow man and acceptance of all faiths, classes and races, a message that he rightly proclaimed last night might cause him to be labeled a heretic. However, this kind of unabashed acceptance is, in my mind, much closer to the spirit of Christianity as it likely originated, and speaks to a truth so universal that even the most jaded kids in the country lose themselves in prayer and praise.

Conversely, this morning found me confronted with a very different kind of preaching. I had crammed myself merrily onto the A Train at 8AM to ride to work like I do every morning and will continue to do UNTIL I DIE. Pre-coffee, burdened with bags, my hair sticking up like an aloe plant from borrowing my girlfriends “Blond Vibrance” conditioner, I was already not in the best of moods when I saw the A Train Preacher board my car. While some of you might take issue at my disparaging a man’s honest attempt to create positive change, I’m going to go out on a limb and say that the A Train Preacher, and those like him, are abominations on the face of this city.

The man is ostensibly collecting for the homeless, a task he dispatches with great haste, quickly moving on to his preferred topic: the eternity that we will all spend in hell if we refuse to accept Jesus as our savior. in the 3 minutes between 34th and 42nd streets, he manages to embody everything I hate about religion. He takes a captive audience (separation of church and state sadly doesn’t apply to busking) and he uses fear as his main selling point. As the doors closed behind me, that last words I heard were, “I hope you don’t have to die to find out I was right!”

No one needs that at 8 in the morning. No one needs that ever. At it’s worst religion attempts to control people’s behavior through fear of eternal damnation. At best it gives them a vessel into which they can pour their faith, love and hope for humanity. You can see both in 12 hours in New York City.

Last week I snuck off to the Southwest and surprised my mom by joining her and my dad on their vacation to Zion National Park. We somehow managed to keep my inclusion in the trip a secret, despite massive setbacks such as her having to approve the credit card charge for my plane ticket. I coordinated with my dad in the Las Vegas airport by texting our locations (incidentally, texting with one’s parents is a very disturbing experience. I can’t explain it, but it feels like their catching you doing something wrong) and I was eventually rewarded with a slack-jawed look of abject shock on my mother’s face.

We left sin city behind and drove two hours to god’s country. When I was a kid my parents took me on a three-week tour of all the major parks in southern Utah: Zion, Bryce Canyon, Capitol Reef, Canyonlands and Arches. The striking geology in this part of the country made a lasting impression on me and I have been dying to get back there ever since. Of all these parks, Zion is the most magical. It doesn’t have the craziest rock formations or the most bizarre natural wonders, but there’s something about the huge red rock walls towering above lush green groves of trees and the flowing Virgin River that just feels like the way the world was meant to be designed. It’s as if Zion was the last place that god made on the planet and by that time he had finally figured out how to constructed the perfect landscape. Satisfied, he cleaned up his workspace for his seventh day rest, dumping the unused detritus of the world in a desert a little ways to the southwest. By that point pretty much all he had left were neon signs and hookers.

ANYWAY I spend two glorious days exploring Zion with my family. Above you can see my parents approaching the “Weeping Wall” which is early-settler poetry for “Half-Assed Waterfall.”

A lot has changed since we were there 10 years ago. There’s now a shuttle through the canyon with a Disneyland-style voice over which is kind of a shame, but I suppose better than a perpetual traffic jam.

The highlight of the trip by far was the hike to Angel’s Landing. This is Zion’s claim-to-fame hike and with good reason, although why the Park Service allows people to do it is beyond me. It seems so dangerous that you should have to sign 3 waivers and a nondisclosure agreement just to get to the trailhead, but instead they have t-shirts daring you to try it! And an “I Survived Angel’s Landing” shirt can seem a little grim if not everybody qualifies for one.

Ok, so I checked it out when I got back, and only five people have actually died on it, and it was the most spectacular hike I’ve ever been on in my life so I have to recommend it, but it still makes me a little uneasy. I mean, is there such a thing as “acceptable losses” on a pleasure trip? I guess you just have to look at it as a Darwin thing.

Here’s the deal: you hike up two miles of switchbacks disarmingly named “Walter’s Wiggles.” This part of the hike, gaining elevation in the ever-changing light of the canyon, is spectacular enough, but it’s the last 1/2 mile that’s the real piece of work.

Basically you spend this 1/2 mile climbing along a narrow rock spine with a THOUSAND foot drop off on each side. And the walls of Zion are steep and flat like the side of a building, so one wrong step means no second chance. At times the trail is about 4 feet wide and it’s all sandstone, which has this irritating tendency to be covered in sand. Fortunately, in order to combat these obstacles, the National Park Service has adorned the trail with some heavy chains hammered into the red rock walls. The spine curves left and right and up and down (you can see it trailing behind me in the above picture) and all the while you’re pulling yourself hand over hand along a weathered length of chain, trying not to look down, back or forward or to think much at all about what the hell you are doing. You’re able to almost lose a sense of the height, it’s when you see what’s to come or what’s behind you that you begin to question your sanity and the morals of the NPS.

The payoff, of course, makes it all far beyond worthwhile. 360 degree views from high above Zion canyon, strikingly different from each direction. California Condors circling hundreds of feet below (you have to try not to think about their plans for you). A hundred shades of red changing with each sink of the sun. The attached picture was taken with my shitty iphone camera so you can imagine the effect on the unaided eyeball. It was an absolutely breathtaking experience, and one that I will store up in my mind as I spend this winter hibernating in the frozen canyons of New York City.

I’m on a mini-vacation with my folks. We’re heading to Zion National Park but flew in to Vegas and are currently in a rented Prius making a run for the Arizona border.
Vegas has always impressed me with it’s sheer ballsiness…it’s honest endorsment of vice and life-ruiningly bad decisions. It’s the place you go to fall in love with the worst this country has to offer. Or to put it visually:

This week I have lived in New York City for 7 years.

5 things I love:
The Anonymity – You’re never more alone than in a crowd.
The Randomness – I saw a pantsless tranny santa dancing in the street. Yesterday.
The Community – No matter what you’re doing, someone else is doing it too.
The Hours – I am now incapable of living somewhere that I can’t get a taco at four in the morning.
The People – Like living in a library filled with biographies.

5 things I hate:
The Seen-it-all – Too much time seeing random tranny santas really kills your sense of wonder.
The Inability to Get Out – There’s no horizon, literally and figuratively.
The Competition – No matter what you’re doing, someone else is doing it too.
The Money – This place makes you value it more than it deserves.
The Man Made World – Even the parks are designed.

I forgot the thing that I hate most about new york. More than any of the profoundly evil people that walk this earth…more than a legion of disease-ridden, mouth-breathing zombie slug mutants…more than a massive squad of badly-dressed nazi creationists…I HATE the people emerging from the stairs of a subway station, indicating that I’ve just missed the train and relegated myself to 30 minutes of waiting in a pee-soaked concrete tube. In could be half a dozen nuns herding a fleet of baby ducks, I would still curse them under my breath as I shuffled by.

The last page on this blog, after everything dedicated to my various endeavors, is “OMFG.” This is my comedy blog based on a series of video sketches I started working on early in 2008. It’s the closest I can come to a gimmick, and it’s my hope that people will be able to relate to it on some level, or at least laugh and feel ashamed of themselves.
I’ve always thought that relationships are the most interesting thing in a very interesting world. There’s something about love that forces its way to the top of all our priority lists and at some point (or many points) throws us completely for a loop. There’s no other thing that is so compelling and yet makes people act so completely insane. Ok, maybe organized religion. I’ve always been a very self-analytical person, but when it comes to relationships, it doesn’t matter how much I analyze, I still act in ways that seem completely out of my control…both as an asshole and as a hopeless romantic.
So OMFG is my way of sending up the whole mess. It’s always safer to make fun of yourself, and I think the funniest thing about men is what pig-headed idiots they can be when it comes to love. I’m writing this disclaimer because the last thing I want is for a bunch as chauvinist morons to write me and tell me that I’m awesome. That would be worse than a feminist attacking me, thinking I was serious. It’s meant to be funny, while hopefully revealing some of our little social insanities. My honest feelings about the genders have already been best expressed by George Carlin: women are crazy and men are stupid, and the reason women are crazy is that men are so stupid.
My mother raised me to love and respect women, and since I was old enough to blow kisses the pursuit of an honest and fulfilling relationship has been my top priority.
But make no mistake.
Bitches…
They do trip.

If you have discovered this blog in the heat of a sweaty-palmed search for suggestive pictures of a certain leggy blond, star of such fine films as “White Chicks” and “Cheaper by the Dozen 2,” you need to check your spelling. The actress in question uses the feminine version of our name, which places the “i” before the “m”. She can also be easily disguished by her wild success. While only three years older than myself, she has already achieved several of my personal life goals such as:
1) Staring in horror movies (“The Tripper,” “They Wait.”)
2) Staring in comic book movies (“Sin City,” “The Spirit.”)
3) Appearing in music videos.
4) Becoming the face of Rocawear.
5) Kicking heroin.
6) Fucking Kid Rock.

Suffice it to say that this bitch is ruining my career and I would totally boycot her if she wasn’t in such cool movies.
On a related topic, someone who should be boycotted if not assiassinated is Jamie King the choreographer who not only steals my exact spelling but also gets to hang out with Prince. Other assholes stealing my name include a British swimmer, some dude on “The Tudors” and a fictional Australian TV character.

Friends and Admirers,
Feast your eyes on the first words of the first post of my first blog ever. As I am a 76-old-men trapped in a 26-year-old body, I have long resisted carving out a presence for myself on the “world-wide web,” largely due to confusion and fear. However my desire to forge a career out of my self-indulgent hobbies has forced me to speak out.
I am originally from Washington State, but have lived in New York for the past 7 years. I came here to act, but have recently opened myself up to other hyper-competitive and unrealistic career paths such as music, writing and comedy. Right now these four activities take up the bulk of my free time while I earn my money as an administrative assistant. I would love to reverse this, to make my money doing something I’m passionate about and in my off hours indulge in some recreational administrating. So if you like what you see in these pages, please to not hesitate to offer me a high paying job as an actor, musician, or comedy writer. If you’re not in a position to do so, just enjoy. And send cash.