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Today’s soundtrack: and in her mouth, an amethyst

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Today at 12:02pm: painting the floors of the studio

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Your passions make you do strange things. In recent months I've become obsessed with Scottish accents and also with Scotch whiskey, like something in my DNA suddenly snapped and went Glaswegian. I'm sure it sounds foolish but it's really no stranger than anything else happening in my life.

Bartender Girl even did me the favor of picking up a "Learning the Scottish Accent" CD at an actor's bookstore (which indirectly sparked the idea for my little "Learn the New York accent" segments on Youtube, more of which are to come). I've listened to the CD and followed along in the booklet but so far I can only say one or two things with any conviction, and I bet any real Scot who heard me would spit their Macallan's out.

Back to the strange things. Shortly after forming the first obsession I added a bunch of movies to my Netflix queue, movies I have absolutely no interest in watching, but which I selected because they feature people speaking in Scottish accents. Thus far I've seen:

- Gosford Park (anh)
- Trainspotting (which is good but which I've already seen)
- So I Married an Axe Murderer (Mike Myers playing the dad is hysterical)
- Dog Soldiers (which by Christ is a terrible movie)

The most recent was Rob Roy, which was far from fantastic, but a line in it resonated with me: In the middle of the movie Jessica Lange says something to the effect of "That which can't helped must be endured," which is a motto I can cling to. She did, however, say the line in reference to being sexually assaulted by a 17th-century English nobleman, and that's an experience I'm on-course to avoid. It would take a time machine, an ill-fitting petticoat and a lot of Macallan's.

Shortly I'll be off to roll my R's and lighten a bottle.

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Last month I got no less than five bottles of Scotch for my birthday, a combined 3,750 milliliters of both blended and single-malt. I go through it a few milliliters at a time in the evenings. Once when I didn't have work I drank it in the morning, but the rest of my day didn't go right so that experiment went unrepeated.

Drinking is weird, so is eating. Absent whatever sparse contributions to society I've managed to cough up on a given week, I am basically a middleman between consumables and sewage. Distillers in Scotland put whiskey into bottles and ship it across the Atlantic, where it makes a brief pit-stop in me before ending up in New York's septic tanks. Ditto with food.

Middleman. I've said this before, but sometimes I feel like I'm just walking around generating laundry and turning body soap into dirty water. Money passes through my fingers, movies play across my retinas and music enters my ear canals, exiting the body through foot-tapping. The times I feel most alive are when I'm laughing or making somebody else laugh, and if I could get paid to do either I'd spend the rest of my life punching that clock.

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