September 14

We start filming Monday. When I think about the mall pet store where I was born, my tiny jet black eyes fill with tears. I will never forget the day my mother — who was also born in a mall pet store, as was her mother before her — looked at me and said, “Cashew, I heard Netflix is going to start creating original, subscriber-only programming.” I said, “Mother, what an incredibly complex idea to get across with high-pitched squeaks,” and she said, “My beloved Cashew! All creatures intuitively understand the concept of high quality on-demand programming.” I promised one day I’d make her proud. Now that day has come.

September 15

I arrived in Baltimore terribly jet-lagged. All I wanted to do was have a few licks of salt and go to bed, but first I had to contend with the enormous exercise wheel someone had “thoughtfully” installed in my hotel room. I called the front desk. I explained that guinea pigs were not actually supposed to run on wheels because it was bad for their backs, and requested a small grassed-in play area. The clerk said, “First of all, we don’t have any ‘small grassed-in play areas.’ Second, I’m not an expert on guinea pigs, but if you can dial a telephone I’m guessing you can figure out a StairMaster.”

Kevin Spacey was up in the rooftop gym when I got there in the morning. Man oh man, does he have incredible focus! I wanted to tell him I’m a big fan, but it just didn’t seem like the right time. Like a jerk, I ended up scuttling into the corner and peeing on a towel. Big mistake. It was Kevin Spacey’s towel! He wiped his face with it, and then he shouted, “This towel smells like guinea pig piss,” and then, of course, he looked right at me. I called my agent, expecting him to rip me a new one but all he said was, “Kevin’s agent is a friend. I’ll reach out.” One thing I have learned in this business: Find an agent who understands that sometimes you pee on towels.

September 16

The actor Jimmi Simpson plays computer hacker Gavin Orsay, and I have most of my scenes with him. He wanted to know what I do to get into character, and I said, “I just think about how much the person playing opposite me really needs the sweet, uncomplicated love of a guinea pig, and I try to become the embodiment of that love.” He looked at me for a long time. I was a little scared, because I had totally made that up, and I thought he might call me on it. But then he shook his head slowly and said, “Isn’t it so amazing, when you just take the time to shut up and listen, what you learn from your fellow actors?”

“Oh, yeah,” I said. “Totally.”

He asked me who my influences were, and I couldn’t think of anyone. And that’s when, like an idiot, I blurted out “Marcel, the monkey on ‘Friends!’” Pretty sure it’s going to be all business between me and Jimmi from now on.

September 18

Robin Wright finally smiled at me. I said, “I’m a big admirer of yours.” And she said, “Thank you, Cashew,” and then I said, “I’ve chewed pencils before but you know, I’ve always wanted to chew on a pencil skirt.” She knelt down, and for a second I thought she was going to let me do it. But she said: “You know how sometimes people say to you ‘Hey, we’re just using you as a guinea pig?’ What you said to me is like that, but stupider.”

September 18

The director wanted to meet with me. He closed the door. He said, “Cashew, the next script calls for you being stepped on. Hard. For a few minutes. Now we can get a double for this….” I interrupted him. “Hold on,” I said. “Is it important to the story?” He explained to me that the guy who steps on me wants Gavin to know that he is ruthless, that he will basically kill his pet guinea pig and not bat an eyelash. I said, “Can’t he just say, ‘I will kill your pet guinea pig and not bat an eyelash?’” The director looked kind of uncomfortable. “Go ahead,” I said. “Just say what you’re going to say.” He sighed and told me that it was plausible story-wise to verbally threaten people, especially children, but that “to get people to give a fuck about a guinea pig you pretty much have to squash the thing within an inch of its life and it has to squeak, a lot.”

September 22

Kevin Spacey came up to me in the commissary. He said, “I was in the hotel gym the other night and a guinea pig pissed on my towel. You wouldn’t happen to know anything about that, would you?” “Would you excuse me for a second?” I said, and ducked around the corner to text my agent: “Abort, abort. Spacey doesn’t know it was me!”

When I got back, Spacey was cracking up. “Oh, Cashew. I wasn’t born yesterday. Hey. Matt from CAA told me to say hi.” Then Kevin Spacey — an Academy Award winner — hugged me. He said, “You know, it was my idea to make Cashew a guinea pig. They were going to make him a cat. Then I had a conversation with the creator. I said, ‘Beau, you know, there haven’t been many guinea pigs in television but we might as well make Cashew our guinea pig.”

Kevin Spacey looked at me expectantly. I forced myself to laugh, but I knew something now: I was alone here.

But then I got back to my room and there was a bouquet of willow branches waiting for me, with a note from the director: “Thanks a million, Cashew. You are the moral center of this film.” I dialed Jimmi Simpson’s number and said, in my best imitation of his voice, “You know Jimmi, when you do good work, that’s when it’s all worth it.”

“Cashew? Cashew? Is this you?” he said. I hung up and ran squeaking around the hotel room. I knew I had arrived.

Sarah Miller is the author of Inside the Mind of Gideon Rayburn and The Other Girl. She lives in Nevada City, CA. Follow her on Twitter @sarahlovescali.

“[A]s temperatures jump into the 40s, and the mounds of snow begin melting away into nothing, artifacts of everyday city life have revealed themselves. Getty photographer Spencer Platt captured images of the mementos that had been frozen in time along city sidewalks: a cucumber on a cocktail pick, a half-eaten slice of pizza, a bottle of wine and a deflated balloon.”

Jeremiah Griffin Harrison, original member of the Modern Lovers and guitarist/keyboard for one of the 20th century’s greatest bands, turns 65 today. He also produced this massively underappreciated album. And he had a track on one of the best soundtracks of the ’80s. Guy got around. Happy birthday!

“America has its own way of confronting unfathomable horrors: It makes them comprehensible by transforming them into porn. We have poverty porn, disaster porn and, in the ultimate American reconciliation of the sublime, weather porn. We seem to get off on destruction as a visual experience, removed from participation and consequence. Pornography has long been seen as prurient but inevitable, and, in the Internet era, so ubiquitous as to be banal. Now apparently pain is, too. In the era of disaster porn, watching people suffer provokes the same sly admission of guilt as watching people have sex.”

“Here’s a look back at Canada’s most memorable hockey-inspired civil disturbances.”

In what the city’s Law Department is calling “a win for the community” around Union Square, the state’s highest court has ruled that “the Parks Department can move ahead with a plan to allow a seasonal restaurant to open in the park’s recently renovated northern pavilion.” This is not just a victory for those who live in the neighborhood; it is a boon to any hungry traveler whose desperation for sustenance is so strong that they cannot venture out to one of the dozen other options that are literally within eyeshot of the food desert that is the north end of the square. This will be especially welcome on the three days of the week during which the local farmers, bakers and culinary artisans who customarily set up stalls to vend their wares are not present. Menu prices are expected to top out at $33.95, which is at least in line with other local establishments.

Photo by Charles Hoffman, via Flickr

“David Bowie used his platform as the winner of the best British male solo artist on Wednesday night to make an unexpected intervention in the the debate over Scottish independence. In a statement delivered by the model Kate Moss, who accepted the prize for him, Bowie said, ‘Scotland, stay with us,’” is a thing that happened here in your world.

Chris Christie’s scandals have so damaged his standing in New Jersey that his constituents — who once stood to cheer as the state’s most powerful official mocked and berated any average citizen with the temerity to voice a difference of opinion over the governor’s actions — now seem unwilling to gaze upon him with adoration as he berates and bellows at ordinary New Jerseyans attempting to voice discomfort with the direction in which things are going, reports the New York Times.

Do you feel as if the future looks bright and the greatest times of your life are still ahead of you? Then you must be 24, because a “survey of retired people found the life changing highlights etched on their brains happened before they reached age of 25.” It’s all downhill from there, and if you’re worried that you wasted your teenage years and the first half of your 20s, too bad: You may as well pick out the least terrible moment from that period now and settle in on it as the good old days, because soon enough your that’s how your brain is going to think of it. What’s even worse is that your brain will be right: Whatever better it’s going to get has already been gotten, and what’s left is the slow trudge to the tomb. But at least you’ve got your memories.

“It is not clear why the mayor was in a rush, but he is often behind schedule.”