One: Finish up quick

I should be concise and quick tonight. It's one of those night where it would probably be in my best interest to go to bed, clear my head, start fresh in the morning.

I've talked about my tendency to have a lot of things going at once before; how I often procrastinate my procrastinations. I go long periods without drawing my webcomic, I still efed but have a bad habit of keeping people waiting, I review when I can but have gotten inconsistent, and of course, the play I ought to be writing, the most pressing of all my projects because that's the one that's for people. Not to mention this blog.

I won't go too deep into it tonight, I've been there and done that. That's just where I'm at right now. I'd like to take the weekend and knock things off that list. I could too. Or I could go to Nuit Blanche. I had no plans to go to Nuit Blanche until someone asked me whether I'd be going along to Nuit Blanche, and then the next day someone else asked about it. I don't wanna be the asshole who says "It's not my thing" all the time but at the same time I could get some stuff done this weekend. I made this mess myself. I probably won't go. I might, though, at least for a bit. Fark.

I could've written a post last night. Let me tell you what I was thinking. I was in Literary Theory which isn't a half bad class... a bit boring of course but I'm actually getting a fair bit out of it. As in every class I was letting my mind wander (I am a bad student, there is a ton of proof on this blog,) and I started thinking about my current play, and Half-Past. In Half-Past, Perry is cheating on his fiancee, or he claims to, or he intends to. It's vague. In the new play (The End of the Night, working title,) a character has a history of cheating. This isn't even the thing I was annoyed with myself for repeating, it's just one of those motifs. I was watching Vicky Cristina Barcelona the other day. Pretty much every Woody Allen movie of note involves an infidelity of some kind (not so much Annie Hall, but Manhattan, Hannah and Her Sisters, Mighty Aphrodite, Crimes and Misdemeanors, Small Time Crooks, Anything Else, Melinda & Melinda, Vicky Cristina, and the excellent Match Point spring to mind.)

My Short Story Prof over the summer, J. Kuhn, said, notably, "What would fiction writers do without infidelity?" noting how prevalent it was in general but in particular referencing Chekhov's "The Lady With The Dog." I love the dynamics of cheating and love triangles, and I plan to revisit them compulsively in my work, as long as I can keep finding different angles. For one thing, they're quite pervasive, you can always believe a character might be tempted. If you want to characterize a character as rotten, it's an easy, effective start that will add to the drama.

For another, having an affair, being unfaithful, strikes right to the heart of constructed fiction. An unwritten contract between two people says they'll be together, but someone breaks it, and now how, if at all, does one deal with punishment? There are a trillion stories about infidelity. Admittedly a lot of overlap but still, so much variation.

And one would think, although this is not always the case, you would have to really want someone to break the "contract" for them. Or else, you really want to hurt your partner. A cheater can be a hero or a villain.

My only serious relationship was a love triangle, a fact I mention to myself with a lot of amusement and wonder. It's the only interesting thing about my romantic career, aside from how abnormally dull it has been.

I pledged I would never put myself in that situation again, and since then I really haven't had any serious intentions with any girl who's already with someone. I don't pine over girls that are taken, at least I make it my policy not to.

So that leads me to my wandering mind in Literary Theory while the prof is going on about Ferdinand De Saussure, I start to think about this girl I know, who has a boyfriend. No names yawl. Let's call her Kim. I don't know any Kim. As I was idly daydreaming about hypothetical fictional affairs, I imagined a situation where I was with Kim.

In a terribly uncreative way, in this fictional scenario, I imagined convincing Kim to cheat on her boyfriend with me. She didn't put up much of a fight (why should she, it was my subconscious.) It was exciting, until I imagined her friends looking at me and going "That's the guy Kim's cheating on her boyfriend with." I'm lame.

It wasn't exactly like that, but anyway. If I was bold enough (read: asshole enough) to do things like that, I'd be in a much different place.

Well this thought lingered with me as I headed toward the GO train and ran into Jess. I hadn't seen her much since high school, and I admitted to her later on the ride that it was one of those occasions where you run into someone you kinda know, and you wonder "Should we sit together? Am I obligated to? Are we gonna have enough to say during this train ride, or will it get awkward?" We actually had a really good conversation, mostly catching up from high school but also talking about life in general. It may actually qualify as the best conversation we've had, since a lot of our conversations when we knew each other in high school concerned her and Angela making fun of me. I brought this up, but admitted it wasn't so bad, and I can take stuff like that better now. I've grown, I've mellowed, and she's not really like that anymore anyhow.

Anyway, we had a good talk, shared some laughs. She asked if I was still doing this, and I admitted yeah, and she asked for the URL, so Jess, if you're reading this....... yeah.

Today was what it was. Watched Klute in film, talked Joyce in story collection. Over the course of about a week I read most of Peter Biskind's Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, starting at Bonnie & Clyde and reading through the completion of Star Wars and how it destroyed the film industry.

I'll maybe get into it later, but there's a fascinating way that film critics/historians/pundits look at the mid-late-70's Jaws/Star Wars shift away from the artistic to the blockbuster. I find it problematic to say that Star Wars is somehow less valuable as a film than the Godfather. I don't know that importance is based on box office receipts (the Godfather did pretty well for itself back in the day) or some kind of nebulous artistic criteria, or what. Maybe the truth is, there is no hard and fast way to determine what is an important film, it just simply makes a crater in the public consciousness, a place where it lives on.

My brain is a little addled, it's late, I'm not really making my point. I wanted to say something about this, you know, about the way film history looks at that moment, but I'm just rambling now.

You can't deny the course of history. You know?

Keep on rockin'
-Scotto