Mom sent me frozen alligator steaks.

Dad sent a DVD of "Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus"

It's already shaping up to be a pretty awesome day. Longer rant to come once I recover from last night's birthday shenanigans.

I love you, blogosphere.

So my jaw just hit the floor.

I was just catching up on some cartoons on AdultSwim.com and on the latest episode of Aqua Teen Hunger Force there's a shaved Wookiee character (who looks a lot like what I look like naked) and take a wild guess what his name is?

Here's the clip:

http://www.adultswim.com/video/?episodeID=8a250aae212fa9c3012130170c690029

I'm a happy boy

This is why I'm still single.

One Friday night about four years ago, I had showered, shellacked my hair, laced up my favorite pair of Vans and was about to switch off the TV and head out to the Party of the Year when a commercial came on the T.V. that stopped me in my tracks. When the commercial finished, I sat back down on the couch, cracked a beer, kicked off my shoes and called my buddy Aaron.

"Hey man. I'm not gonna make it out tonight."

"Are you fucking serious!? Why not?"

"You want the truth?" There was no way to say this without it sounding dumb. "There's a movie on the Sci-Fi Channel tonight about the Chupacabra. You know, the Mexican goat-sucker?"

A long pause.

"I'm listening..."

"It's about a Chupacabra that stows away on a Carnival cruise ship and eats everyone. It's called Chupacabra: Dark Seas"

Another pause. "Wow," he said. "I totally understand."

And so all my buddies went off to dance in a loft with hot girls until 6 AM where it was raining free beer, psychadelics and handjobs, while I sat on my ass at home and watched a legendary Mexican monster eviscerate senior citizens on a shuffleboard court. It was totally worth it.

I am a huge lover of crappy movies. When I was eighteen, my family shelled out a ton of money to send me to The Dramatic Writing Program at NYU. I was a C-student in high school with extremely average SATs, but I was somehow accepted to my top choice college which my folks hoped would mold me into the next Martin Scorcese. I just wanted to be the next Roger Corman. I sat in dark classrooms for hours on end, where we watched and analyzed the works of Kubrick, Antonioni, Coppola, and all the while I was fantasizing about making the Raging Bull of giant animal movies. I had friends who wrote screenplays which were eventually produced by Gus Van Sant while I sat in bars and coffeeshops trying to scribble out a good plotline for my movie Quahog, about a giant killer Rhode Island clam.

My college roommate Bongo dropped out of film school to work with Troma Films, makers of such fabulous crap as The Toxic Avenger, Class of Nuke'm High, Surf Nazis Must Die and Bloodsucking Freaks. He was making six dollars an hour, but I was insanely jealous. A good part of his job was revolved around the promotion of Killer Condom, where he had to stand on a street corner with a dude dressed as said condom and hand out flyers to screenings. As far as I was concerned, Bongo had the hookup. We were even able to have my 22nd birthday at the premiere party for Sergeant Kabukiman, NYPD.

God, how I wanted to make movies like this. It just isn't easy to get people onboard for the ride. I had a genius idea for a movie called Prawn! about killer radioactive shrimp, but you try convincing your girl friends to stand in the surf in Coney Island in bikinis, screaming, while you chuck buckets of frozen shrimp at them.

And so, like my professors advised me, I focussed on selling-out - writing the kind of scripts a studio might actually be interested in. Like every other schmo in film school, I wrote my coming-of-age scripts, my Tarantino knockoffs. I was proud of them, but they all suffered from a horrible lack of having a giant anaconda, crocodile, or genetically engineered wolverine gobble up my protagonists in the end.

When I was in Los Angeles a year and a half ago, an old college friend called me up. We hadn't really spoken in ages. He was a working actor of some renown, and had produced a number of small independent films. I had a decent reputation as a writer in college, so he wanted to meet with me to see if we could work together.

He brought his idea to the table first. He was a dramatic actor who had made a film about being homeless which was extraordinarily moving and impressive, so I knew anything this guy was going to be in was gonna be good. The film he wanted to make next was a biopic of a famous choreographer who died of AIDS. It sounded interesting.

"And what about you, Drew? You have anything you want to work on?"

I scootched forward in my seat. Rolled back my sleeves.

"Okay. Buckle the fuck in." I took a sip of my beer. "In Australia in the early 1930s, the sugar cane crop was being decimated by a little bug called the cane weevil, so the government brought in the North American bullfrog to take care of them. The thing is, the bullfrogs wound up multiplying and eating up everything but the weevils. So, to this day, the Australian countryside is overrun with these frogs, right?

"So our hero is this American scientist who makes it his mission to rid Australia of this scourge of frogs, so he decides to make this new kind of poison to kill them off. What it really winds up doing, however, is making them giant! The size of Volkswagons! Imagine that: being eaten by a giant frog. People will be shitting in their seats!

"And there's layers to this, you see. It's all a big allegory for American intervention in ... ah, who gives a shit? Giant fucking frogs, man! And the best part is the title. You ready for this? ... CROAK! ... Boom. That's it. I'm telling you, man. This cocksucker's gonna make us thousands!"

I never heard from him again.

Ah well. One of these days, Drew. One of these days...

I'm not a big believer in the afterlife, but if there is one, I will kiss the good lord's purple tentacles if it's anything like Austin, Texas: a paradise of pork and whiskey, great music, and the friendliest people on Earth. After months of juggling four jobs at once and trying to live and party in NYC on less than a hundo a week (harder than it sounds), I couldn't wait to get to South By Southwest and I felt like Austin was waving me in with welcome arms. By some fluke in the weather it even made our plane land three hours early -- who has luck like that? Oh cloven-footed Gods of Austin: how many cute and fuzzy woodland critters must I sacrifice to show my thanks?

My buddy Hersey and I flew down to stay with one of my favorite people on the planet, Jessi Cornett (buy her jewelry), the wonderfully talented Tara McPherson (buy her new book from Darkhorse Comics), and the lovely April Mirvis. Two months ago we had a dinner party in my dark little Brooklyn kitchen and I served these ladies roast pigeons that I had purchased in Chinatown. Amazingly, they are still my friends.

Our first night in Austin, Hersey and I got to see H.R. from Bad Brains, and The Circle Jerks - who I've been a fan of since I saw "Repo Man" in high school. The frontman for The Circle Jerks is 53 years old, and still jumps around the stage like he was 18. It was one of the better shows I've seen in years. The Circle Jerks recorded a song with Debbie Gibson (yeah, that Debbie Gibson) in the 90s, and I was a little bummed she didn't leap on stage and belt one out with them. I think my heart would have popped out of my chest like in Alien.

At 5 A.M. that night, I *somehow* managed to get a head wound at Jessi's house, which has since turned into a pretty awesome scar. It was an insanely lame and hilarious accident which I will not recap here out of shame, but we quickly decided to come up with a story to cover the real truth about what happened. The new story is that I was hit in the head with a flaming log at The Circle Jerks show. But you should see the other guy. That's my story and I'm stickin to it, and lucky for me I have friends who have my back. I was chatting with some tattooed guy at an afterparty one night and he was quick to ask where I got my scar. Tara just smiled and looked and me and just said "Circle Jerks". And we all clinked beers. Love her.

South By Southwest is something everyone who is interested in music should experience. I'm not a big fan of the Lollapalooza breed of festival where you need binoculars to see your favorite band. SXSW is held in tiny bars and clubs around Austin, which is a far more intimate way to see your favorite bands. In just 24 hours I was able to see my three favorite songwriters, Andy Falkous (of the Welsh punk band McLusky), Lou Barlow (of Sebadoh and Dinosaur, Jr.) and Daniel Johnston (Netflix this film immediately) all from less than 10 feet away.

I'm realizing that this post has quickly devolved into the lazy rantings of a music geek, so I am going to cut it short. But if you would like to see some pics from one of my best holidays in recent memory, they're up on my Flickr:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/27780059@N07/sets/72157616107276446

I spent a good chunk of my life poisoning my brain to the point where I can barely remember what I was doing before I started typing this (kids, it was fun and totally worth it). But lately, I've found myself awake at 4:30 in the morning, staring at the water stain on my ceiling and trying to figure out what nefarious act I might have done to piss off the Sandman so much. Is there a murdered prostitute in my past? Did I run over a homeless person on my way to the Piggly Wiggly? Did I accidentally pull the lever for Bush in '04?

This insomnia started exactly a year ago and haunted me up until January. The first few months of this year was like a vacation -- I'd forgotten what it was like to have a full night's sleep filled with pleasant dreams. Ones where I wasn't being eaten by a python with the head of my old boss, or being torn apart by wild packs of ex-girlfriends. I was finally having sweet dreams again - dreams of flying, falling in love with strangers, playing with my dear departed dog again, rainbows, beaches. You get the idea: sugarplum fairies and shit. To my dismay, tho, for the past two weeks this goddamned insomnia has returned.

But this time I have a plan.

Last weekend I took the bus down to Virginia to visit my family, and spent Saturday night at my sister's place. I always have fun when I visit, because down there I get to be Uncle Drew to my niece and nephew. I get to have lightsaber battles, watch cartoons, wrestle on the floor, eat potato chips and cupcakes on the couch and burp and fart and make them giggle. Being Uncle Drew is kind of like being Weekend Dad - it's like having all of the fun of being around the kids with none of the mess.

Whenever I come down for a visit, my niece graciously lets me sleep in her bedroom while she shares a bunk-bed with my nephew. Let me tell you people: this bed is magic. My niece is going to grow up to be the most relaxed woman on the planet, because it is virtually impossible to have a bad night's sleep on this thing.

The bed is this big white marshmallow of an island in the middle of a room with pink walls. As my niece is crazy about mermaids, her parents put a blue mesh netting around the bed dangling from the ceiling, with cutouts of little starfish and shells and what-not. And there's a little blue light that dangles in there that projects shadows of these undersea creatures all over the walls. After 30 seconds of lying on those fluffy pillows, staring at the shadows on the walls, surrounded by plastic unicorns and barbie dolls, you slip into a perfect nine-hour coma filled with the best dreams of your life.

Waking up in this bed is even better. This is how great a father my brother-in-law Brian is: I'm convinced he ventured into the forest and single-handedly hunted and killed fifty Care Bears with his bare hands to make stuffing for this mattress. He must have, because when I wake up from it, let me tell you: I feel like a fucking princess. As soon as I wipe the crust from my eyes, the windows swing open, a rainbow shoots into the room, and tiny animated birds fly in and sing zippedy-doo-da into my ear. It is the absolute greatest feeling in the world.

So, that's my plan folks. I'm going to try to recreate my niece's room in my crappy little railroad apartment in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. I'm going to paint the walls pink, find the fluffiest mattress in creation, surround myself with My Little Ponies and Pound Puppies, and have fancy blue netting surrounding me as I slumber. So, it's not the manliest plan in the world. So, it might freak people out and I'll never get laid in my own apartment again, but there wasn't much danger of that happening, anyway.

I'm ready to do whatever it takes. Get back here, Sandman.

Damn you!