HOH Magazine: June 2017 Issue

June. Summer. Officially. Let's get it started in hot, let's get it started in here.

In all honesty, I am getting back to try and finish this in August. August 2nd/3rd/4th/5th/6th/7th, to be precise, but don't fret: still June subjects. I wrote the Black Panther trailer "I'm Into This!" bit back then but I have to fill out the rest of this issue now, in August. How can I? I don't even remember June.

[Over the course of writing, and finding images, David remembers June.]

What happened? Where was I? Ugh. You ever feel like you're stuck? As the months roll on and you're feeling "How is it ____ary/ber already!?" but that reaction feels like it's is based less on needing some smalltalk for prefacing a Monday Morning Meeting at work, and more because mentally, you still feel "in January" or "in June" or whatever month has your sock caught in its barb?

I've got those. I'll entitle them "Gregorian Barriers" (until or unless you have something better.) I can pinpoint them, like clusters of leaves along a curb, damming the rainwater runoff so the flow gets thinner and thinner on its way to the grate. You feel like parts of you are held up at points in the past.

Off the top of my head, here's where's I'm's stuck's:

February 2017 – the 1st or 2nd, to be precise, when I began letting my facial hair grow for the Reverse-Valentine's Day video I've oft talked about in, what? Every single issue of this magazine so far? I'm still editing it. I don't feel any pressing deadline, so, like, whatever. I don't have the ability to rush a video to meet a holiday like I did back in the days of Airik, before that show devolved into only holiday videos since the lack of a culturally-decided checkpoint was the only deadline that would make me make an episode. That and, it's a much loftier and complex project to put together. Anyway, I'm still in the mindset of February 2017 in some regards. Having finished my Detective P.I. fake-trailer I've been able to shave, and having finished the RV-Day video I've been able to cut my fingernails, however, the aftereffects of the latter is my nails don't have to grow very long before I decide I must trim them. I used to let them get fairly long, as is what happened making that video. Now, I'm almost repulsed by how long they were, as I had them that long for so long.

A triptych of my only self-portrait photographs from my all-nighter shoot/morning-after in May.

This is the Gregorian Barrier I'm mostly still feeling stuck in/on, partly because I'm not finished editing the video for the February 15th holiday, but also partly because there have not been any of the many needed impeachments. I cannot physiologically "accept" that it isn't still "the beginning of 2017" even as we approach the second half. Target still has "2017" party plates on clearance, and I was able to make the same "Target's already given up on this year!" joke that I made back in January, which I believe I made into a Vine. (Remember that burgeoning artistic medium that was axed because it was too popular amongst black teens and there was no way for white people to make money from it? [A cynical theory of mine, I'll probably do a big "why Vine is great" essay that goes into depth later, let me be cynical for now.]) I made that joke in January which still feels like last week, because it still feels like we're just starting the second-worst year ever, and not halfway there, living on a prayer. And that cynicism and darkness propels me to...

November 2016 – when darkness descended upon the land and I started fearing for my white cishet privileged* life every fucking day since, when I no longer thought I had a future that included such stellar highs as "living to 35." When all I wanted to do was tell someone I love them and mean it, and make my fucking movie because how gotdamn selfish do other people have to be to deny me my own little vanity project, which at its most selfish was only going to harm myself through arrested development and constant Sisyphean disappointment about not accomplishing it every summer? (But we'll get to that.) My selfishness to want these things didn't come at the price of murdering millions of people, or thinking that a reality show host gave a shit about me and my white neighbors or undocumented husband, you pitiful suckers. In other words: I'm not a fucking sellout, I'm not a shitheaded hazard, and I ain't no, God damn, nazi.

I'm sorry, did I get sidetracked? Maybe it's because I'm stuck in a constant loop of "if I'm panicking it means I'm sane. If I'm happy or calm it means I'm delusionally distracted and ignorant. Escapism is a lie, normalization is the death sentence."

I'm sorry, did I get sidetr--what I mean is, I expected a president to get elected, and I guess like most of these Gregorian Barriers, it's because one finds oneself still waiting. Speaking of which:

June 2015 – Saturday the 13th, the night Northern Spark happened to happen upon, to be specific. Why? Well, easy; it's the last time I saw "Her" in person. It's also the night (or morning of the 14th, semantically) I said "well we should/you gotta see Mad Max: Fury Road." and she was all "sure." and I was all "how about Friday [the 19th]?" and she was all "okay." and then I e-mailed** her (as I had earlier to invite her to Northern Spark) about it that Thursday [the 18th] and didn't hear back from her until I started watching Luke Cage on Netflix.

Credit: Harley J Seeley Photography

June 2014 – Sunday the 15th, specifically. From the 12th through the 15th I went on a trip to Nebraska with my mom and grandma. The hotel we stayed at had bed bugs in my mom & I's room so we switched to new, clean ones and kept all our stuff in plastic bags and away from any fabric (which we did anyway for exactly this reason. It's Hotel 101.) When we returned home on the 15th we cleaned everything we brought with us with alcohol and such. The unusual unpack/repack in the driveway with my uncle – putting things into plastic bags – and the general caution about resettling into normalcy kind of created a Gregorian Barrier. It's a minor one, but sometimes in my lower emotional states I might lament "I haven't even unpacked from Nebraska..." because I still have a plastic bag or two still un-unpacked. Things I haven't needed but nevertheless never put back anywhere. The one item I can recall off the top of my head is a uni-pod, one that I believe I bought in Nebraska or for the trip. Either way. I haven't used it since then, but it sort of haunts me a little bit.

June 2011 – When I began work on my Magnum Hope-us. The DatelessWonders Movie started out rough, and shitty, and incomplete in its script stage for long enough that the first full draft was actually written in screenwriting software I got in college. I made Demon Gourd out of a TextEdit document I whipped up and cranked out in a week. "#"TDWM took a little longer. It's a feature, not a short, after all. Also, like, procrastination plagued me.

Period-accuracy, 2011.

"No biggie – I'll shoot it next summer!" You see, setting the film in June of 2011 was a byproduct of making the movie about kids just like me: Dennis Wright and friends just graduated from high school and are in that weird period of "last [public school] summer vacation." And in a small way I'm still on that vacation, mentally, still trying to produce this love-letter to my high school/apology-letter for my own stupidity around girls I am attracted to. And as the years went on, and though Ex Machina said basically the same thing I'm trying to in a sci-fi drama film, I never lost determination in my no-budget no-mantic comedy film. But fuck, man, shit keeps cropping up. Things to do. Avengers to watch assemble, Warped's to see Watsky Tour at, Pokémon to Go! Life to live, yadda yadda yadda. It's very difficult.

This is probably my furthest back – and biggest – Gregorian Barrier. It's hardly even a barrier; I don't think I reasonably expected to shoot it that June, and unlike other "stuck waiting for" mentalities, I kept moving the goalposts. It's not something I am "still waiting to have happen" but rather something I am "still waiting to do." As in, I'm the one driving. I'm in control of it. It lives with me, and the only thing keeping it from happening is myself and my own abilities, not the lack of campaigning in Wisconsin. Every new summer I would realize I could rewrite the script better. And maybe I'd try to do it over a winter rather than waste a summer on it. And maybe I'd do that once or twice. And maybe I'd be at a place like now: where I have a perfected, 10th generation script, but so little confidence in rallying friends because scheduling is hard and nobody can possibly be as invested in this as I. And I got no money to put into it because I want don't want to be beholden to some backers or anything, and I want to put the music it needs in there.

So maybe this isn't a real Gregorian Barrier. It's arrested development. The real kind, not the funniest-thing-on-TV kind. My commitment to this idea – refined and revised into something both "me" and "really good" – and my insistence on using my knowledge from college but not necessarily the tech or the bureaucracy is keeping me held back from making higher-quality, short/er films. I'll get to those; I just want this first. This is my final high school movie, before growing on to new chapters of creativity and videos and filmmaking. And so I am stuck.

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Hey speaking of being stuck, I've tried to have a system to switch out clothes between "regular rotation" and "storage for the season." And it worked when transitioning from summer to fall in 2016. But I haven't had the time or wherewithal to sit down and swap the boxes of tees with the cubbies of long-sleeves. I've simply pulled out a t-shirt here or tank top there when the need/mood arises, and I've put all my hoodies aside mostly to conserve space. Really make-shift and piecemeal rather than officially organized. And this sucks, to some extent.

Like the fact that this summer, I've only got four pairs of shorts.

I don't own four pairs of shorts, but I can only find three pairs for wearing: a pair of soft, khaki-colored shorts that I can "pull off" and wear to work when it's really hot; a pair of brown plaid shorts, with two inner buttons, one of which was recently sewn back into place, which is why I suspect it was out and available in the first place; and a newer pair of cargo-ish-but-not-cargo-shorts shorts that I just got brand new because I could only find those previous two pairs, and I needed a third. Even with the oldest trick in the book – wearing them more than one day at a time – it wasn't enough. It came with its own Mossimo-y belt, and the brown plaid shorts require a belt themselves; and I've got an extra Mossimo belt to use, from a previously purchased pair...but I have no idea where the shorts themselves are.

The fourth pair of shorts are new as well, purchased before the new Mossimo-with-belt pair. There's a story behind them.

On a particularly hot June [3rd] day, I had to rescue my friends who had a car breakdown. I had just gotten home from work and I did not. want. to. wear. pants. So I put on swim trunks – swim trunks!*** – and went to pick them up. From there we went to a Target Express and as we perused the rainbow-clad Pride items they had for sale, I figured I'd buy a pair of shorts right then and there, and those shorts would be these tie-dye rainbow shorts they had. So I got them. When I put them on later, I realized they were loose. But they were size M, so they'd have to do. And they did! When home from work, I'd enter them to alleviate the air around my legs while I sat around my room. ...But if I ventured outside, say for a Pokémon Go-related walk, I realized that these shorts are looooose. Like, they'll fall down if I have my phone in the pocket. Super lightweights. Can't run in them either, so the Magikarp raid battle I was headed to was one I joined at the very last second, as I had to pace myself on the way to the park, keeping my shorts up with one hand. Very gangsta.

This pair of shorts doesn't have belt loops. It's supposed to hold up using a kind of elastic waistband and it's supposed to be for someone who fits them better, and possibly doesn't carry anything in their pockets. So I don't wear these shorts much, and they've found residence in the tier of "shorts I only wear inside" along with sweatpant-cutoffs and the occasional boxer-shorts-repurposed-as-pajama-shorts. Point being, I only really have three pairs of shorts to wear outside this summer. And all because I didn't do a seasonal wardrobe change, I assume. It could be because of gnomes. Wherever my other shorts are, they're not on my thighs.

Speaking of June 3rd, June 3rd was also the day I shaved most of my facial hair. In order to take full advantage of the process of s/having facial hair, I shot a video during it, a parody of the Philips Nroelvooco "I'd F******* Me" commercial, where they're like, totally getting away with saying "fuck" but not actually saying it, lolololol.

Before, After.

...Anyway, I stopped filming that right around the stage where the mustache looked good enough for the next facial-hair-video-project: Detective P.I.

And so I spent many a day at home and at work filming the pieces that you'll see at some point. It's a straightforward 70's cop spoof and I think it'll make a good fake trailer. I've written on this before, so there's not much else to say. Like the two fake trailers I've written (but never produced) that were created entirely around owning a gorilla suit, Detective P.I. is centered entirely around the mustache, and a good pair of dollar store glasses. And speaking through gritted teeth at all times. And that party store prop "special agent" badge. But the mustache is the centerpiece, the sun which all other elements orbit and from which sprung the work. Are you into the mustache? Because I am.

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I'm Into This! — June 2017

The BLACK PANTHER Trailer

So far this has been the Marvel At Marvel section, but come on; this trailer is ALSO one of the coolest things and I love watching it. The use of Legend Has It with the little bits before the beat fully drops, UGH SO GOOD. It feels like the kind of song that every movie would use in trailers for half a year, sort of like how Can't Hold Us was in every trailer a few years back. But Marvel, who has an affectionate history with Run The Jewels, slammed down the gauntlet during the first at-bat, and used this song in a way that nobody can use this song anymore. It's been done to perfection, so it cannot be done to death. As for the other content in the trailer, it's just gorgeous. You figure out what you like best: the colorful costumes, the weapons (panther-head hand-blasters!) the cinematography, whatever! It's the best trailer since Thor: Ragnarok!

Planning for a Day at the Beach!

Been a long time since I've swum. It's exciting to plan a day at the beach, because you get to flex organization skills on something ostensibly fun and relaxing. I enjoyed shopping for things like goggles, squirt guns, and pool floats. For my first beach expedition of the summer, I bought a floaty pretzel and a floaty pizza, the latter of which served better as a kind of kiddie-pool, upside-down you could fill it with water and sit in it to cool off, or wash your sandy feet in it. Certainly it served as quick refill for water shooters. This first beach visit in a long time was built around shooting a sequence in the fake trailer for Detective P.I. where he goes to the beach, and discovers something a little fishy, haha, and it isn't the water! Haha!

This is a video of me blowing up the inflatable pepperoni pizza.

But seriously, this day at the beach was more seriously about filming, with some relaxation for myself all the shots were wrapped. In future I'll enjoy the full extent of visiting a lake.

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And now for a quote:

Use a combination of sunscreen and bug spray when headed to the beach.

Yarr.

— David "The Pants" Hoh 

*Qualifiers only meant to sketch the idea of how "welcome to the club" I am vis-a-vis fearing that the government will make you dead. I'm not a fucking villainous coward who thinks I will be made dead because of any of those qualities. I checked my privilege at the door, boy.
**Since my relationship to 'having her phone number' is like my relationship to 'trying to hold onto a frog that's tied to a bar of soap using water snakes', and I didn't have a phone of my own at the time.
***Pictured: Me wearing one of my pairs of swim trunks as shorts, June 2nd, 8:42pm.