My Life as an Extended DVD release

If you, like 90% of the North American population, live in a world where simple words like "snap" or "not" can be traced to a film, song, television series, video game or commercial as repeated by someone you only wish you had the luxury of bumping into at LAX or the subway in Paris, then my popularly cultured friend, welcome to my world. It's a big world, filled with neon street signs that reflect images of Kanye West and Crazy Frog. It has no dialog, only screenplays. And instead of emotions, there's atmosphere, mood, and depth of field. I've often seen my life as an extended DVD release. If you, unlike me, can go into Costco without wondering if some of the employees are Dane Cook, then please, eject disc now.

If not - Insert Disc

►► Fast Forward

Unlike the conventional DVD releases with 2 or more discs, this life has but one disc. Disc2. There is no feature film, no scene selection, no settings, no subtitles and perhaps most importantly, no heavily typographed titles with an intricate display of special scenes of any one particular movie that some graphic designer spent weeks making only to be ignored by Joe Too-Cheap-To-Buy-The-DVD because it's much quicker to download the darn thing. The simplicity of this release is that it's nothing but bonus features filled with things you'd only know if you did one of two things: 1. Had been in the medium. 2. Spent an unforgivably lengthy time committing aspects of media to your memory.

- ■ Stop

If you're lucky, then life for you has been a feature. You have your daily routine but every so often something happens that makes you think about how fortunate you are. Walking down the street and BOOM you see $20 on the street. Of course you don't pick it up. And you don't pick it up because you don't need to because life has been kind to you. Or maybe you don't in order to avoid getting the fish-eye from passers-by who wouldn't make eye contact with you, but rest assured that Ashley will tell Mary-Kate about the douchebag who pocketed someone else's $20. That's just not the kind of thing they approve of, right Danny Tanner? What I'm getting at is that you're life doesn't consist of repetition of somebody else's work. You do your thing, and you have the ability to carry on a conversation without alluding to that time that Chandler said "Good Will Humping".

Life for me is an extension of the collective works of everything I've enjoyed. No of course YOU don't recite a huge monologue that starts "Voila, in view a humble vaudevillian veteran, cast veraciously as both victim and villain by the viscissitudes of fate..." everytime you hear a fancy word that starts with a certain letter of the english language... but I do (albeit in the back of my mind). It seems today that all you see is violence and movies and terribly terribly put together sentences that begin with "Yo did you catch that episode of ________ ". If you heard the word "Go" twice in a row, you'd be inclined to hurry or rush to wherever whoever's telling you to go go to. Civil war erupts within realms of my soul whether to yell "Gadget", "Power Rangers", or start singing "Jitterbug" and dancing like Derek Zoolander. When you hear the word "No", you get dejected where I raise my right arm perpendicular to my shoulder creating a right angle at my armpit with my fingers out, slowly open my eyes, and pretend that I'm the One who's been sent to destroy the matrix and deliver Zion from the machines.

If you're currently under the impression that my life is something so utterly repetitive and is something you should pity me for, then you've missed the entire point and I regret to inform you that you will not get back the 4 minutes you've spent reading this without the slightest inclination of the root to my consistently inconsistent ramblings. Bonus features are what we live for. My life offers the entended varieties of that which most people dream of and that is a life, a conversation, a moment, an instant of pure and utter ecstacy and embarassment where I acknowledge reciprocation of this bliss. Nothing is more satisfying when someone gets it before you can say "get it?". When the credits roll, my crew is the world, my leads are the people closest to me, and the moments that fulfill my version of this feature film are the alternate endings that comprise the interactions with my cast and crew.

► Play.