So Very New, All Over Again

I haven’t written because I’ve been waning.

And you’d better believe, when I’m waning, I’m whining, if I’m writing at all. And thus, I thought I’d spare myself the sight of myself being so sloppy and dire. I’m in partial recovery now, but I warn you, I’m not symptom-free.

After all these years, you might wonder why I haven’t found some way to avoid the seasons of mope. Similarly, you might wonder why, after all these years, humans haven’t found some way to make it constantly daylight all over Earth. 

Well, it’s because shit doesn’t work that way. Shit is a force of nature. The moon slips into shadow, and lunacy dims. Then, there comes a period of sanity – dismal, doubtful, shining, stark sanity – a cold, porcelain sanity – a sanity that, it never fails, I fear may never break.

Yes, each time, I wonder if I’ll write again. And yes, similarly, each night, I wonder if the sun will rise again. So, okay, fine. Clearly, everybody’s got some flaws in their understanding of the solar system. But, according to a thing I heard this one time, the skies are like clockwork; they  keep doing the same things, over and over, for better or worse, and my creative cycle is basically like that.

When the moon is in shadow, it’s easy to see things like a sane person would. 

It’s easy to see that my arbitrary deadlines are arbitrary.

It’s easy to see that I have no real audience waiting for my writing.

It’s easy to see that this whole expedition is a tactical disaster, that it’s time to cut my losses and save what little is salvageable.

It’s easy to see that this writing-and-movies bullshit snake-oil-show has been an embarrassing waste of the only lifetime I’m likely to receive.

It’s easy to go out to dinner, it’s easy to sit in bed and read, it’s easy to watch a movie on streaming, it’s easy to drive somewhere I’ve never been, it’s easy to play a game on my phone, it’s easy to enjoy TV on DVD, to walk the dog, to clean the kitchen.

When the moon is in shadow, it’s hard to find the urgency I felt when I was an idiot child.

It’s hard to imagine myself like I once imagined I would become, as the head of a production team, as the master of a creative machine, as an award-winner, as a trend setter, as someone to study and admire.

It’s hard to dream stupid dreams and be unashamed of them.

It’s hard to keep doing what I’ve done a thousand, thousand, thousand times before, and still continue expecting different results.

When the moon is in shadow, it’s hard to be crazy enough to do all this.

I suspect that everyone who struggles to prove themselves needs a healthy dose of lunacy.

How can a comedian, or a musician, or an actor, how can anyone, face a half-empty, disinterested house, and still perform?

They need madness.

How can a writer lay awake in bed, or sit alone at the keyboard, struggling to find a better idea, struggling to find a better phrase, struggling to make a better scene, when no one will read it or see it performed?

The only answer readily available – is madness.

I suspect that everyone who struggles to prove themselves wishes, in some small corner of their heart, that they were mad. If they were mad, they too could believe six impossible things before breakfast, even when the moon is tediously failing to be as full as it should.

And now I’m thinking –

Isn’t it interesting, when the moon is called new, it’s so very new – that it’s not there at all?

Marketing Pitch

Chase has posted one of the below advertisements on Pico Blvd, where I am pleased to view it daily, first-thing in the morning, on my approach to the Fox gate:

It says – CHASE: Almost as many ATMs as unsold screenplays! (exclamation point mine)

Teehee.

Well, that tickled me so much that a whole bunch of other, similar slogans came to me. I wonder if some of them are already part of the campaign.

Anyway, here are a few of the slogan ideas I came up with, following the same general theme!
 
CHASE: Almost as many ATMs as still-born babies! 

CHASE: Almost as many ATMs as elderly widowers, quietly contemplating suicide! 

CHASE: Almost as many ATMs as abandoned family pets, wandering the streets alone tonight, wondering what happened, what happened, what did I do wrong? 

CHASE: Almost as many ATMS as things you never took the time to tell him. 

CHASE: Almost as many ATMs as middle-aged women who, sighing softly, have finally accepted the hard truth – he’s the best she will ever do – and so, she settles for this man, this man who always greets her – with a wedgie. 

CHASE: Your money was not enough. Give us your dreams. GIVE US YOUR DREAMS.

PS: I actually do think the advertisement is mildly funny – in exactly the same way that mine are substantially funnier.

Stupid Question

Laying in bed tonight, I was struck with something very obvious. So obvious, it’s deeply important to me. It’s the central question that causes me so many sleepless nights of calculating and weighing experiences, so much hopeless pattern searching and uncertainty.

Simply:

Does life work out the way it’s supposed to, or does it just work out the way it does?

Do we get out of life what we make of things, or do we just get whatever we can grab?

I don’t know the answer. It could be any one of these, or any two, or any three, or all four, or none of them. Is there justice? Is it survival of the fittest? Is there God or Quantum Mechanics? A set future or infinite possibility?

I can make a strong argument for any possibility. I feel strongly about each. And when I’m writing about the tension between these choices, that is when I’m writing something I care about. Because, for some reason, I care about his stupid question.

Again, it’s so obvious. It’s been phrased a million ways. Science and religion and fiction all struggle with it at the core. I can’t imagine people who don’t, deep down, wonder what the answer is. Since we’re constantly being asked to make choices, to place wagers on how the future will unfold, we have to adopt some sort of theory on how to gamble. Even having no theory is a theory in itself. Even a strategy of avoiding the topic is a reasonable and practical strategy. They all seem equal, and yet, on some days, one seems so much more likely than the others.

This framing of the obvious has given me a handle on my own work, and my emotional stress. So many people seem to have their system worked out, but I have no workable theory. I have no strategy. No method to handle the possibilities. They all seem plausible and wise. They all seem fanciful and blind.

Is there something, or nothing? If there is something, I know how I should behave tomorrow. If there is nothing, I also know what I should do tomorrow. But the way I should act is not the same, not even similar, between the two cases. And so — I hesitate to act at all. That is one way of acting that is certainly wrong, in my book. I must find a mythology of my own to reconcile these two opposite ways to wager.

What Makes People Change?

I’ve been thinking about the moment in every story when the hero makes either a life-altering decision, or has a life-altering realization, or both. The epiphany that allows the hero to change, or motivates them to remain steadfast against the temptation to surrender.

Again and again, I find myself dissatisfied with these moments in the stories I tell (and elsewhere). Again and again, I find myself working and reworking and reworking this moment. And I’ve been thinking, I’ve been realizing: the more real I am able to make the characters, the more alive, the more difficult it becomes to believe that they’d change, or have a realization that strong, all in a fictionalized, focused moment. Perhaps I do not believe that people have these realizations. Perhaps I too often doubt that people make these hard choices while the time is still ripe.

Yet, I refuse to be that cynical. It does not sit well with me, and not only because it would trap my work in art houses, at best, and I want to reach a wide range of people, not just intellectuals and movie buffs. I want to believe that people can, and do, make these decisions, do have these realizations, can have these moments where they take charge of fate. I want to believe that I have them myself, and may have another someday. I want to believe that I am here because of such moments. But they are so hard to recognize, so hard to dramatize — without falling back on formula, without simply fullfilling accepted plot expectations.

I beleive my mind will be focused on these moments for some time. Perhaps from now on. They are the atoms. It is obvious. It is no revelation. All must come from them. I feel it. I feel it like a thorn in my mind. A nagging problem to be solved. A place to find another piece of myself as a storyteller and a person. What is my answer to the question: “What Makes People Change?”

What will make people change? What will motivate people question their reality and answer their dreams, or question their dreams and answer to reality? Where do these realizations come from? Where does the bravery to change come from? How can those small moments be condensed, focused, and dramatized into a single, powerful movement? A moment with a hero, an inspiration. A moment with a real person, doing the extraordinary? How do I believe that happens?

I don’t have the answer. But having seized on the question is exciting.

Paper and Pencil

I have an image in my mind. It is me, writing. It’s strange. I have glasses in it. I’m at a desk, turning over sheets of paper. I think I’m writing in pencil, and the paper has a thick tooth, almost as rough as denim in my mind. I wrote an episode of Darwin’s Kids, in college, in a single night, all on paper like that, with a pencil. It was the Jan Term episode.

In the vision, I’m not sure what I’m wearing. I don’t know what time of day it is, the light is neither blue nor bronze. Not sure where I am. The camera’s looking up at such an angle, I can’t see the chair or the desk, or anything but the colorlessness of an out-of-focus ceiling. But what’s so romantic about this image is… I’m totally absorbed. I’m just writing.

How can I get there? How can I shut up the stress, the expectations, the commercial/success imperative? How can I write something passionately, freely, without the critics and the critiques hovering and editing? You can’t get lost — truly, gleefully lost — when always hear the chatter of the highway so nearby. Where are the dark woods I used to get lost in?

Sometimes I think, I need someone I can trust, someone to get lost with, someone beautiful, and difficult, and inspiring. But that’s foolish, a deflection of responsibility. Even though it would be nice, in that image, to have someone come up and look over my shoulder, I am the only one capable of getting lost in those pages, instead of lost in the worry of ticking clocks and closing chances, graying hair and mounting debt.

So, clearly, the solution is — paper and pencil. Right?

The Interviewer

I wrote the following in my head last night, when I couldn’t sleep.  It’s about my job.

Sometimes the Interviewer interviews six people a day.  Some are mothers looking for work, for a little extra cash, while their children are at school. Some are actors who want evening hours, so their days will be free, for the auditions that they’re sure will soon be calling.  Some are new arrivals, seeking a foothold in the city.  

The Interviewer is new to the city. Interviewing is his foothold.  

Many of those new arrivals that he interviews soon find themselves in exciting footholds somewhere else, and they turn down the boring foothold that the Interviewer offers.  

The Interviewer wonders why he never got any of those exciting footholds that he was interviewed for.

The Interviewer hires transcriptionists to type what they hear.  What they hear is Entertainment.  Some raw footage from reality television.  Some broadcast news.  Some DVD bonus material.  But mostly, celebrity interviews, promoting this movie or that TV show, discussing this production or that memory, recounting how their career first found a foothold. 

In those transcribed interviews, the celebrity always has a name.  


But the interviewer is always just called “INTERVIEWER.”

And Probably Will Be For Life

It’s becoming pretty clear, I’m not the piano man.

It’s becoming pretty clear, I’m the real estate novelist, who never had time for a wife.

My Haiku

and do nothing else
you need never hear the same
picture or painting

Your Whole Life, Even Twice

Should you live your whole life, even twice, and do nothing else, you need never hear the same song twice, you need never read the same sentence again, nor view the same picture or painting for more than a moment, and neither film nor play nor episode nor even joke need ever be repeated to you: for you will not run out. Life is so very full. And I am still so very bored.