The Real Lance Brown

Here’s another chop at the short bio tree:

Lance Brown is a freelancer who specializes in WordPress web site development. He writes a bi-weekly column called The Not-So-Simple Life, and occasionally emits new editions of his web comic strip The Little Things. In his private life, Lance specializes in building mountains of expectations for himself, and waking up each day in a frustrated-but-enthusiastic attempt to get more done than 50 people could accomplish. Lance used to have a giant ego, and still has a rather large one, but he has also met with great enhumblement. He lives with two dogs and one cat. An aspiring comedian and wanna-be screenwriter–or vice versa–Lance enjoys walking, World and U.S. maps, and Arrested Development. He raises his right eyebrow pretty well, but has a tough time with the left.

I’m currently working hard at my re-emergence into the world in many ways. I’ve had a very shaken year so far, but things are finally settling down, and now that I’m in the greater LA area, I’m just about ready to start busting out with a major new phase of my public life. Stand-up comedy will be involved, as well as podcasting, and my long-awaited (by me) entry into the collaborative world of filmmaking. (There will also be lots and lots of writing, but that’s not the most public of activities.)

It was in the spirit of re-emergence that I accepted a generous invitation by a new Twitter friend of mine, @Crobama, to be a guest on his Dylan Brody’s Neighbor’s Couch podcast. I think he may have thought I was someone. Which at one point I kind of was, at least by some measures. Nowadays I’m not totally sure who I am, especially in terms of presenting myself to the public. Just check out my About page–it’s OK, but it’s not very succinct, to say the least. And there’s no indication of where you should focus when trying to figure out who I am. (Which is probably a reflection of my inner state; we’ll get to that soon enough.)

To get to the point, Darren (@Crobama) asked me for a short bio to use for my appearance on his show. (It will be in late September by the way. On or after the 23rd.)  I don’t know what I’ll end up deciding to use, but I thought it would be a fun exercise to work up some bio draft attempts. Maybe I’ll use them for something someday, or maybe these posts will be the end game for them. We’ll have to wait and see.

Either way, with no further ado, here’s my first run at defining myself at this point in my life. It’s not very serious, but it is all true.

Lance Brown has taken on the FBI and the Project for the New American Century. He’s done local grassroots activism, and he has campaigned for president. He has herded peacocks, and walked over 15,000 miles with his dog. He was once suspended from school for reciting a poem about his math teacher. He saves insects from drowning with the delicate use of pushpins. He writes a bi-weekly column about seeking simplicity, has a comic strip with characters that have no faces, and saves all of his ideas on a digital voice recorder—amassing almost 9,000 audio files, with which he has done very little. He has brown hair, wears glasses, and puts his pets before anything else.

I’ll post more bio-experimentation soon. Let me know what you think of this one!

It’s been slow going getting set up at my new place. One side effect of that is that I still don’t have a real refrigerator. Thus it has been tough to keep up with my burgeoning giant salad addiction. I took a pass at making a salad a while back, but due to limited supplies it was not nearly eye-popping enough for my standards. Today I righted that wrong.

It’s hard to tell from that perspective, but those sunflower seeds are riding at about 10 inches above the counter. This is no side salad.

Here’s the first single portion from that mega-salad:

That plateful basically leveled the big bowl off. There are at least 4 more of those left to go.

Mmmm…salad. It even smells good, with the sunflower seeds in the mix.

I’m about ready for round 2!

Earlier today, in an instant messenger conversation, a woman I had just met at a dating site asked me: “What’s your story?”

I thought about it for a minute and replied:

“Boy meets world. Boy fights world. Man loves world. Man changes world.”

I loved it as soon as I wrote it. But, ever the editor, I soon concluded it was missing a bridge…here’s my minor rewrite:

Boy meets world. Boy fights world. Boy becomes man. Man loves world. Man changes world.

I haven’t decided which I prefer for sure, but one or the other is probably the top nominee for what I’d like to see on my gravestone. (Since it will be the future, I’m assuming grave-o-vision will have been invented by then, to make such a thing possible.)

I have been ridiculously delinquent about posting, and I am officially marking that trend for demolition right now.

Things have been pretty turbulent for the past couple months. A tree bashed my house in, then I moved, and now I’m probably about to move again. That’s no excuse, but that’s my excuse nonetheless.

More tomorrow. [EDIT, days later: Or soon, at least.]

I’ve been digging around in my archive of voice recordings, which is one reason why I haven’t been posting quite as much as I should here. (A power outage and a major toothache are the other reasons.)

Even though it always feels odd and indulgent, I have to force myself to work my way through those files, and I took out a good swath of them in this recent session. (You can read more about my ongoing battle with my voice recordings here.) I got through the 300 most recent recordings in my “C” (for “Creative”) folder, which amounts to the most recent 8 months worth of recordings.

So now, when it comes to my “C” folder, I am caught up to early 2006 on the far end and mid-2010 on the near end–leaving about 4 and a half years worth left to go. (And about 4 and a half years worth completed so far.) The good news is that at least half of that has been done in the past few months…which means that when I really buckle down and get into it, I can get through this giant backlog over time.

(I store different sorts of things in other folders in my voice recorder – business and/or politics in “B”, to-do items in “A”, and various things in “D” and “E”. But “C/creative” is the most populated over the past 5 years, by far.)

Those 300 recordings that I just finished sorting consisted of a wide range of stuff, though very heavy on the first four here:

• songs – spoken/lyrics only
• songs on the keyboard recorded “live”
• many “silly dog songs”*
• jokes and ideas for stand-up comedy
• new screenplay/movie ideas
• sketch and short video ideas
• drafts of my columns, some which have been finished/published, others still drafts
• same thing, but for my The Little Things comics
• several ideas for small situations or concepts for within movies
• an essay about walking in the dark
• an e-book about being a responsible pet owner
• social media blog post ideas
• various loose ideas for several of my existing screenplay projects

*We’ll get into why I am collecting “silly dog songs”, and why I record almost all my ideas, in another post.

Listening to all these things in rapid succession provides a dizzying rush, and a nice reminder of the reality behind what I’m trying to build in my life. There is certainly an aspect to my backlog of ideas/recordings that could be seen as unfortunate or even sad, but for me they are only problematic if they aren’t under control somehow.

Having thousands of unsorted (and effectively unknown, since most of my recordings sound like fresh ideas when I finally get back to them) ideas, songs, writings, and potential projects just sitting in masses, with generic names like “DM420511″ and “C0000033.VOC” is the very picture of untapped potential. But once I go through and revisit them, naming and sorting them into my ever-growing folders titled “non-fiction”, “movies, shows, and screenplays”, “songs”, and so on…it changes their nature in a key way. (See the pic above for an idea of my main folder categories. [Note: "Animal noises" is actual recordings of animal noises, out in the woods...not me making various animal noises. Just for the record.])

It’s one thing to wave vaguely at 8,000+ recordings and say, “There are tons of song ideas in there that I’ve recorded over the years”–and not be able to effectively point at an actual example of such a thing, because all the song ideas are buried in piles 100-deep or deeper with all sorts of other ideas, all in the exact same brown paper packaging. It’s a very different thing  to point to a “songs’ folder that has dozens of ideas sorted into genres, albums, and type (i.e., lyrics vs full-on recordings, finished ideas vs. snippets).

Of course, it’s a different thing again to actually get all those ideas manifested into completed things that I put out into the world, but I don’t mind the slow-and-steady approach. I’m taking a long-game view of all this. Which is fine, as long as progress is being made.

The plan at this point is to continue sorting through the masses of backlogged “Creative” files, in a quest to ferret out all my notes on my main ongoing screenplay projects. (Because I have been using the excuse of not having all those notes together as a way to avoid finishing those projects for years now.) And while I slog my way through them–which is actually really fun to do, to the point of feeling indulgent, as I mentioned earlier–I am working on putting the machinery in place to actually get my ideas into production as the sorting gets finished up.

And listening to the ideas themselves, knowing all the things that I have waiting for me as I take my efforts to the next level, really fuels my energy for getting things in place to make sure I can start making more of my outrageous dreams come true.

I might share a small sample of what I’ve been mining from my voice recording archives; I’m not sure. Most of it is rough, by its nature. And I have a habit of thinking things are great that I later think are really dumb. Which actually is one nice thing about the fact that most of my ideas have sat dormant for years…I’ve had time to grow up some and now can see many of them as the crap they are. :-)

I know I’ve gone on a lot about this, but don’t worry, I’ll go on more about it later. My voice recorder has been such a huge and integral part of my creative process for so long, that I think it’s important to let people know about the potential of using one religiously. And I’ve been learning more lately about how the use of the tool, and my freeflow method of capturing things, has paid creative dividends over the years.

Until recently, it’s been hard to discuss the so-called benefits, because it really seemed like my recordings were getting the best of me. But I have knocked out a tremendous amount of them in the past year, and can now see a time where they might all be at least named and sorted, if not yet transcribed and fully realized.

Once they’re sorted and assessed, they can be dealt with in an intelligent and informed way. I’ll know just how many songs there are, and what type. I’ll have all the notes gathered for my screenplay ideas. I’ll have a list of all the stand-up jokes I have in draft form. And literally hundreds of other ideas will be corralled, and ready to be tamed completely.

It might sound like only a slightly-better mega-pile of unfinished stuff to you, but to me it sounds like heaven.

Call me a cheapo whiner, but I find paid dating sites to be a pain. In a lot of cases, it’s not entirely clear who can message who in such a situation–i.e., it’s possible that you as a paid member are able to message someone, but they as a non-paid member can’t write you back. Which just means that paid members are effectively serving as salespeople, with each communication providing a chance for the site to tease the intended recipient: “You’ve received a message! Sign up for our paid membership so you can read it!” Or: “You’ve got a message! Go ahead and read it. Now, want to reply? Sign up for our paid membership!”

Pardon my language, but that’s bullshit. And that’s exactly how some of the paid dating sites work. Even the paid members get jacked. Some sites are more clear about this than others, but…hey, wait a minute! Who cares? There are 3 perfectly-functional and well-populated dating sites that let you communicate openly for free. One of them is even pretty good! So why not just use them, and leave the Match.coms of the world behind?

Here are the three sites, with my least favorite first:

Plenty of Fish
POF is plenty big and works OK, but I find their interface to be clunky and non-intuitive (it most likely still looks a lot like the site did when it started in 2001). I also don’t like their attitude toward vices (drugs, etc.), and they have been increasingly pushy about forcing you to answer certain profile questions just to keep using the site. Overall, I would say that if PlentyOfFish.com was a person, he would be kind of a dick, and annoying to deal with. I’ve been phasing out my usage of that site. That said, there are plenty of people there, and communication is free–if a bit censored. (Example: mention “OK Cupid” (see below) in a message to someone, and POF changes it to “another dating site” without telling you. Like I said – kind of a dick.)

DateHookup
DateHookup.com has a vibe kind of like what you might imagine from its name – though the people seem earnest and aren’t just looking for “hookups”. It’s just got a loose, social, slightly meat-markety feel to it. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. The profiles here tend to be pretty short and sweet, and stylistically, there is a bit of a myspace-like decorative feel to some profiles. (Probably less so if you’re surfing guys’ profiles, I assume.) You will probably get the highest percentage of bathroom-mirror pics at DateHookup compared to the other two.

OKCupid
OKCupid is really great. I have nothing bad to say about it so far, and it has a lot of features that make it stand out from other dating sites, paid or free. It’s pretty aggressive in terms of trying to introduce people to each other, both directly via email match alerts, and indirectly via suggested profiles that run alongside the person you’re viewing. The interesting thing about these suggested folks is that OKCupid characterizes them in comparison to the person you’re viewing, with things like: “more conservative”, “more desiring”, “less spiritual”, “more adventurous”, “less organized”, “more pure”, “sloppier”, and so on. I’ve never seen anything quite like that, on the 10 or so dating sites I’ve scoped out over the past decade. Pretty neat. I’ve been using this site the least amount of time, but I’ve been more impressed, and have gotten more responses, than with any other site.

I could describe more of what makes OKCupid stand out, but it’s easier just to go and get a feel for it yourself. They seem to have tapped into the next wave of online dating sites in some way. Exactly the opposite of where Plenty of Fish is at. (with DateHookup being almost exactly between the two on that spectrum.) However, all three sites do have active memberships, with some overlap but not a ton. And OKCupid can’t match you up with someone if they are only a member of one of those other sites. So you might want to just try all three anyway. I’d be curious to see what happened if someone signed up for all three at once with the same exact profile–how the responses would compare. If anyone has a clean slate and tries that out, please let us know how it goes.

Do you of another good free dating site? Post a comment and share it!

I’m definitely not one of those people who sticks my nose up at folks posting relatively ordinary occurrences from their day on Twitter.

I’ve been on the Internet for a long damn time, and one of the things that makes it great is its ability to bridge the invisible divide that has grown between “strangers” in the world. (And between the haves and have-nots, and the powered and the powerless, and so on.)

As we become more distinctive and narrowed in our daily lives–honing in on what we know and love, and excluding the rest–it’s more important than ever to remember that we’re all still human beings, and we all have a lot in common. Including mundane things, like eating, dealing with traffic, flying on planes, watching TV, whatever.

Mini-mountain, yes...but self aware? Not yet-- maybe.

Especially with the flattening power of social media, where people who were formerly at a mythical distance from us are sharing themselves directly with fans and followers on a daily basis, it’s the mundane commonalities that help us to restructure our thoughts in a way that helps demystify the unhealthy societal hierarchies of the past. (Reality TV does the same thing in a way, but we’ll save that for another time.)

Put plainly, it’s a hyper-extension of the old mantra “we all put our pants on one leg at a time”. While I don’t know if there is a social media site yet that focuses on that specific mundane activity, people are sharing so-called “boring” details, vignettes, pictures, and snippets from their lives all the time…and while it’s popular and easy to sneer at such sharing, it’s also short-sighted and snobbish.

So don’t let anyone tell you that what you’re having for dinner, and how you feel about it, isn’t important. It is. I’ll explain more why that’s so as the year goes on, but for now, just trust me. You go ahead and share whatever the hell you want, and screw the haters. Send your frustrated partner, friend, or parent here if they have a beef with it. (If you’ve been sent here in accordance with that instruction: I know better than you about this stuff, and the person who sent you here is right about the sharing. Get off their case!)

Wow…I had no idea what was going to come out when I started to introduce my salad tweets from today, and the salad of which they spake. And I ended up creating a bridge of healing for divided couples everywhere. You never know what you’ll get when you tap into the Lance well!

Predecessor to the salad that will eat your family

Anyway…I’ve been on a major salad jag lately. I’ve always been a big fan of vegetables–I was one of those kids who was easy in that regard–but as a marginally-domesticated bachelor, I haven’t always managed to get salad into my life as much as my tastes would seem to support.

But, having decided to go the salad way for a while, I have been plunging in with earnest dedication–almost to a fault. (If we want to blame someone–and let’s assume we do–we should probably blame Robin Mallery and her call to create “6-color salads”.)

It takes about an hour to whip up one of my super-salads these days, and until today I was using a normal-sized wooden serving bowl and just ridiculously over-filling it, to the point where trying to serve from it, or toss or stir the salad, became a messy ordeal. And with my escalating madness, I was reaching the point where I ran out of space before I ran out of ingredients, so I’d end up with a giant-but-incomplete salad, with any new ingredients just spilling off the sides pointlessly.

So today I bit the bullet and went with the big plastic bowl–which, if I end up over-filling the way I did its predecessor, will be holding a salad that could potentially threaten a mid-size city, or more.

Such was the subject of a series of tweets from me today, as I realized the full consequences of my descent into Frankensteinishly hazardous food-preparation shenanigans.

WARNING: This is your last chance to back out before I pull away the curtain to expose the sad truth behind the inevitable hellscape future that I have unintentionally set into motion. You can still remain blissfully ignorant of your impending doom if you back out now. Read more…

Pittsfield, MA (born)
Dalton, MA
Los Angeles, CA (USC)
Amherst, MA (UMass)
Sunderland, MA
Northampton, MA
Springfield, MA
Easthampton, MA
Alameda/Oakland, CA
Sacramento, CA
Nevada City/North San Juan, CA
Smartville, CA
Nevada City, CA
Cedar Ridge, CA
Grass Valley, CA (current)

I have been working since before it was legal for me to do so – my first real job, as a tiny 14-year-old, was stripping and refinishing furniture for $3.50 an hour under the table. I can still remember riding home from work on the bus, coated from shin to chin with noxious goo — paint stripper mixed with paint and varnish and who knows what else. It set a good precedent for me; nearly every job since has seemed pleasant and easy by comparison.

Here is a partial list of the jobs I’ve performed since that first one in 1986:

furniture restoration (refinishing, etc.)
fast food: every station (x2)
dressing room attendant
dishwasher
cash register operator (x7)
temp work:
-proofreader
-furniture mover
-assembly line worker
-general labor
-data entry
-software training
laundromat attendant
convenience store clerk
front desk clerk for housing complex
copy shop clerk/operator
painter (buildings, not paintings)
telephone book deliverer
food delivery driver
print shop delivery driver
taxi driver
airport shuttle driver
dispatcher/office worker
telemarketer (just for one day, I swear)
Rainbow cleaning machine salesman
online forum administrator
entrepreneur/CEO
newspaper delivery
newspaper subscription sales
wine grape picking
landscape install laborer/rock worker
book editor/proofreader
computer tech support
PR writing
business writing
website design
website design training
newsletter production (w/ writing and editing)
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