The Big Sleep

There's too much that I want to do, but not enough worth devoting full attention to achieving. In the end, when I curse myself for not being as far along as I ought to be, I resolve to shape down my focus but just end up getting bored. Classic ADHD, you're saying of course; no use in denying it. But it's not as if these things are impossible, just poorly orchestrated. This year, all I want is to keep working, maybe start performing live again, finish this play I'm writing... and maybe it comes down to getting life as a process rather than an ascension or declension that is bound to leave you behind. Ugh. How morbid. How morbid and completely boring.

Up until now, the weather in Chicago has been intolerable. Subzero temperatures, wind and snow scraping at the skin shards of glass, the streets empty and post-apocalyptic... Jolly Jack has never been so dead on. [ http://www.thepostshow.com/2006/01/26 ] I've been watching the Olympics on and off with Nick and Alice, nostalgic for the days where I'd put Chopin waltzes in the record player and skate across the kitchen floor in my socks and long underwear. What gets me the most are the contestants who finally get there and can't perform because of some drunken ankle sprain or some petty feud between team members. I mean, you spend years training for a few brief seconds of potential glory and it suddenly, all potential is devoured whole and you're back to zero. And you can either wait another four years or decide to hang up your suit to dry, but either way, you've lost a lot of time trying to get to a boat which sails you by before your very eyes. I can't imagine that anything hurts worse than that. But it's what I love about the Olympic; that sense of finality, the "epic upsets, victories and everything in between" as NPR described it.

I wrote the opening to a screenplay yesterday that might have potential. [ http://community.livejournal.com/theboysupstairs/2290.html ] The half-baked premise involves a man who has spent the past three decades in a celluloid coma after being sentenced to life-in-prison at age twenty-five. He sells a successful screenplay and uses his films as a means to live, breathe and interact with the world as he might have known it. A studio decides to commission him a two-picture a year deal and hire a lawyer to reevaluate his case and possibly bring about his release. He is subsequently forced to deal with messiness of the life as he left it behind and to disengage from the cinematic illusions he has dedicated himself to for the last thirty years. I like the idea of expanding our scope to include behind-the-scenes action footage as a framing device. It's a stylistic conceit, but it's there to never let you forget that it's a film; I think it would support the story and I don't know if I've ever seen that done before. Maybe in Dogville, which was fucking garbage. Anyway, I think I started it because I wanted to write something that dealt with our modern-day fixation on voyuerism, entertainment and the self-absorbing (though necessarily self-fulfilling) root of it all. Ha! I'm much too tired to take any of this seriously. You can probably tell.

I don't know where to end. So I guess I'll end with a vague quote from my (written) journal. Take from it what you will:

"Ask him why he underlines his books, if he lives in your neighborhood, then ask him if he'd like to have dinner. You'd have done it already if you weren't so afraid that he might find out that you're wearing his name on your boxer briefs."