H: Beautiful and blunt

I had today off for Yom Kippur. I was hoping not to waste it, but I essentially did. It was a little inevitable, I even said so to Brandon yesterday, "I've got tomorrow off and I am just going to do nothing." I had a pretty good weekend, a productive one, even, since I finished off the first draft of this play I've been working on.

Like everything I write, I've got mixed feelings. Further complicating this is the fact, which I've acknowledged since the beginning, that it was an awful lot like Half-Past. There are a number of things about it that are distinct, but there is a certain thread of plot, which I allow to dominate probably more than I should, that is an awful lot like Mark's plight. Now, this is because I based the play on a couple stories I wrote a while back, when Half-Past was a non-entity anyway. In prose, it doesn't really read like a copy, but you put it on the stage and it's like a rerun.

It's frustrating. You write something like Half-Past and suddenly it looms large. This must be how Rivers Cuomo feels about Pinkerton. It doesn't help that a disproportionate amount of my body is made of self-loathing. I fancy myself a writer, but secretly I think of myself an asshole who has no idea what he's doing.

People tell me otherwise. I want to believe them, but I get so very easily frustrated with myself, with what I perceive as my limitations. The key to this script is in there, somewhere. A lot of the time I feel like I have no grasp of what comedy is and have no business attempting to write it. Somewhere the ghost of my 16-year-old self is kicking my ass.

Well, at least I've touched boobs. I've got that over him.

I'm agonizing over this shit because I know I'm better than it. I feel like I'm capable of good work and the truth is, my first drafts aren't bad, they just need... work. I keep toying with the idea of expanding out to two acts, but the idea of generating that much material is intimidating. Fuck me and my insecurity. I'm too serious. I can do this, I can do this, I can do this, I suck.

I wasn't having a bad weekend. Let's tie these two threads together for your enlightenment.

There's this movie, Night on Earth. Waaaay back when Eric was popping pills 24/7 (so glad we're able to laugh about that now) he would spend a lot of time watching movies On Demand (as he was not in school nor working and therefore had nothing better to do) and he happened across a film by Jim Jarmusch, entitled Night on Earth. Now, for whatever reason, out of all the movies he ever randomly discovered, this was the only one he ever felt the need to share with me, and one day we sat down and watched it.

The movie is comprised of five unrelated segments set at night in taxicabs in five different cities -- Los Angeles, New York, Paris, Rome and Helsinki. They are, in turns, funny, deep, provocative, strange, tragic... sometimes at once. It begins with sunset in LA and ends with sunrise in Helsinki. I had only seen it the one time, but it made an impact on me for a long time afterward, and a lot of what I've written since has been influenced by it, my attempt to recreate the feelings it stirred up in me.

Anyway. They were doing a Free Friday screening of it at Innis on Friday. I had always meant to come to a Friday film at Innis, ever since first year, but I always felt it wasn't worth coming down for. But since Eric and I were so attached to this film, I decided to go and invite him along.

So we met up at St. George station in time for the film. It was very enjoyable, even better than I remembered. We grabbed a drink afterward and caught up on stuff. It was a good night and we agreed we should do it again sometime.

A few beers deep, I was falling asleep on the last GO train, which had left late anyway.

Butanyway. Saturday was uneventful. Coffee with Manda as usual, as she described certain measures that were approaching to help improve her work situation. I had intended to go see the show at Mac, on Cary's recommendations, but my inability to properly plan anything got the better of me, so things didn't work out and I ended up hanging around the house catching up on reading Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, which I'd borrowed from Martina. It's a pretty interesting book, although it's large about who was fucking who and snorting what, it's still insightful enough about the politics behind 70's filmmaking. Then I watched the season premiere of SNL. Bleh.

Sunday, aunt Lori's birthday, which means several solid hours of hauling kids around. This family is lucky I'm still young and vital enough to put up with the offspring. I'm a tough kid, accustomed to roughhousing, used to abuse. Yeah, it's tiring, more to be begged for attention than to actually be giving it, but I get on with my life.

I went home last night, watched Curb Your Enthusiasm and Entourage, then finished off that script. That brings us to today, a day that began with Vasa texting me to say she had some time to hang out, and me saying I wasn't gonna be in Toronto today. She's real keen to hang out, yet she has so many demands on her time that it's hard to reconcile with my commuting.

In the course of composing this entry, I've talked with Cary a bit. A lot of the angst that I wrote at the beginning has subsided as I've brainstormed some ways to bust through these problems and attempt to rehabilitate my sense of self-value. I guess we'll see how it works out once I complete this next draft. Well, now I feel slightly better-prepared to handle it.

It's like... I don't wanna be Seth MacFarlane, with all the talking babies and animals. Family Guy had that sheen of originality when it debuted, and then a few years later we had American Dad with it's Paul Lynde alien and German goldfish, and now the Cleveland Show with its jive playah baby and vaguely Eurotrash talking bear. What a load of shit! No transexual mobsters in the new play. Instead, I'm leaning toward time-traveling robot hunter. It's just crazy enough to work.

Am I fucking with you? We'll have to tune in in 2010 to find out.

Keep on rockin'
-Scotto