Upon hearing the news that Mark Shields was going over the prospects of marriage, Drew Barrymore immediately dropped out of her pending marriage to MTV comedian Tom Green, bought a tight pair of leather pants and a plane ticket to Houston. "I can’t believe she’s gone! I mean, yeah, he’s great and all, but what am I gonna do now?" inquired a somber Green.

Let me catch you up with the past week. The following entry was saved on my wireless email device 12 minutes before 2001 began:


Standing around playing pool at Adam and Shawn’s place. Very drunk. 30
minutes until the end of the millenium. Did I mention I was drunk? Just saw
my first episode of Sex and the City and was impressed. Almost saw an
episode of Queer as Folk but luckily Will and Steve talked us into another
channel. Second episode of Sex is on right now. Interesting way to enter
the 21st century. Told everyone that one of my resolutions for the new year
was to find my future wife and marry her. There was a lot of talk about how
I would have to work fast but I have faith that this is the year that it’s
going to happen. Oktober is here eating Tostitos and drinking a strawberry
daquiri that Shawn made. This episode is sexy so I am happy (and drunk). Not sure what I
will do at the stroke of midnight. Last year I had to do Y2K stuff at 5 AM the following morning
for 12 hours so this year there’s less to worry about.
Perhaps I will clean the house. Perhaps I will find leaves to turn over. Maybe I’ll do some laundry.


My next entry came five days later on the 5th while I was sitting in court waiting for the judge to bust a move:


Sitting in courtroom number three waiting on the fate of my ticket. Tiny
little kid to my right. Wondering if she wants to play with this wireless
device. Sorry, not a toy. Okay, they just left. I think the dad saw trouble as
she started to become fascinated by how fast I can type with my thumb.
Surly bunch in here. Unusual things about this docket include two
people who had their names misspelled and an enormous number of hispanic
people. Another weird thing is that the only other two non-hispanic people here happen to be the people who have
their names misspelled. Conspiracy! Judge pronounced my middle name
correctly (most people skip it). It is Chahine and can be pronounced as
either ‘Shane’ or ‘Sha-heen’ — you can probably guess that I prefer the
first version.


Very sleepy. At midnight I decided that I really wanted to
go to the movie premiere in LA for Rock Star, Mark Wahlberg’s next flick. To
the uninitiated, I used to run MarkyMark.com and MarkWahlberg.com. At first
I did it in an unofficial capacity because all I really wanted was the
domain markymark.com. Two girls in the Netherlands were running the site
until 1998 when they began searching for new caretakers for the site. Most
of the content dealt with Mark when he was a rapper, so that made it easier
on me for updates because nothing really changed. I got the job easily. It
paid nothing, it was unofficial, but it had hella-traffic. I redesigned the site and added lots of GQ colors (black, dark blues, grays)
to give the site more of a straightforward appearance. Before I did this I kept getting offers for help from gay sites dedicated to
lusting over Mark. After the rainbows and giant pictures of his chest were removed they suddenly stopped writing.
Besides, I am busy lusting after the 18 and over
female population. Only odd thing is that you’re a legal adult in Texas when you turn 17.
Check out ageofconsent.com if you are worried about your dating partner being too young for you.
Very strange considering the society and culture of Texas is sooo conservative.
I am not looking to date anyone younger than 21, however.
Having a college degree is also a nice feature.


I ran
MarkWahlberg.com solo until Wahlberg’s management wrote me out of the blue and asked about
doing everything under their control. They would pay all fees and hosting
costs. I got tickets to see ‘Three Kings’ and ‘The Perfect Storm’ in Los
Angeles at the world premiere with all of the stars. I will write about
those experiences later. I basically did small tasks but my work schedule
made anything difficult like a redesign that would please Mark’s personal
assistant was a major pain in the ass. They wanted first generation (circa
1997) look and feel. And ugly colors. It was hard to let artistic license
get away from me and let the site quality go down. Another problem was the
Fan Club section that my company did for cheap. It did not match the site
(both then and even now). In the end, Mark’s management gave control to
some firm called The Wilen Group but they have done basically jack. They
were unable to transfer the fan club database that we’d made so that was a
loss. But that’s okay cuz he never paid my company for the work. He also was using a lot of bandwidth and never paid the hosting
company for those charges. Whatever.
Today I’m surprised that the message board even works because it was
broken for several weeks when they moved the domain. These guys also disabled
the MarkyMark domain altogether. Search engines spidered that domain so
many times since the site went up in early 1996 and now all that traffic as
well as links were broken.


I designed a comp (creative geek speak for proposed graphic layout design) that does not venture too far
from how the site looks today, but I applied more recent looks and
styles. I am keeping my fingers crossed that this will get me back in
with them, but we will see. The next film, Rock Star, opens April 13th so
the premiere will likely be at the start of April. I’m hoping to bring someone from my company
again only this time with the intent of networking with all of the
executives and all the other vendors that worked on the film for Warner
Brothers. George Clooney produced this film so he is sure to be there. I
have a Clooney story that I will tell in a future blog.


Back to my courtroom woes… The prosecuting attorney tells me my case is
being reset which sucks. I went up to the judge. He was the same pleasant guy from the arraignment. He told me
there were no jurors for my trial, but he could arrange 6 police officers to be my jury. HA! Ummm… no. I asked if
I could use some of the people in the courtroom for my jury. He laughed and declined. So we rescheduled.
Judge started to say, "How about February sehhh… errr… I mean how about Ground Hog Day?" I agreed and was off after
sitting around and accomplishing nothing more than some log entries for the past three hours. I was given a lengthy warning
about representing myself and blah blah blah. Heard this before. I decided I’d see what kind of discount I could get from
the lawyer’s across the street now that I’m a recurring customer. $85 and they’d do it. Fine. Wrote check. Went back
to car. Drove to work. Arrived. Got chided by Jerald who asked (and I’m paraphrasing), "Do you still work here?"