| Chirp |
[Dec. 14th, 2009|01:03 pm] |
Oh the pointlessness you've been missing!
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| Chirp |
[Dec. 13th, 2009|01:02 pm] |
Oh the pointlessness you've been missing!
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| Chirp |
[Dec. 12th, 2009|01:02 pm] |
Oh the pointlessness you've been missing!
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[Dec. 11th, 2009|01:03 pm] |
Oh the pointlessness you've been missing!
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[Dec. 10th, 2009|01:04 pm] |
Oh the pointlessness you've been missing!
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[Dec. 9th, 2009|01:04 pm] |
Oh the pointlessness you've been missing!
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[Dec. 8th, 2009|12:03 pm] |
Oh the pointlessness you've been missing!
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[Dec. 7th, 2009|12:04 pm] |
Oh the pointlessness you've been missing!
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| Theatrical Head Trauma |
[Dec. 6th, 2009|07:34 pm] |
Depending on who you ask and what education level they achieved in life, people who purport to understand literature will tell you that there are somewhere between four and seven different and distinct kinds of conflict that you can encounter in any given story. But tonight, tonight dear friends, I came across a heretofore unquantified methodology to story telling. A concept so daring, so bold, so unprecedented, that I felt the need to rush straight home from my local community theater and document that which unfolded before my very eyes. I speak, of course, of the conflict inherent in "Character vs. Absolutely Nothing."
Now, I know what you're thinking. "Richard, you dashing rogue of literary and conceptual playwright criticism you, how on earth can you have a story with absolutely no conflict? What would be the point?" And I would laugh heartily in your general direction before slapping you about the head and neck area with a playbill, you wanton Philistine! That is the beauty, nay, the glory of this method of storytelling. There doesn't have to be a point! Gone are the cumbersome days of plots and narrative devices! No more must we labor under the oppressive yokes of character development and chronological progression! Because of the groundwork laid out by the play that I witnessed tonight, these are all archaic concepts, notions of a bygone era when a play or a novel or a story had to be more than simply one's recounting of your last trip to Kroger. It is the dawn of a new era!
Take, for example, the very first ten lines of the triumphant banquet set upon the stage this evening. The first family to arrive on scene, holiday parcels in hand, are beginning to load their car for the traditional journey to their grandparents' house, when lo, it is revealed that their oldest son has failed out of college! In a lesser play, there may be wailing, and gnashing of teeth, and bothersome vexation on the part of his parents as to how such a thing could have happened. But no! In this, the new style, the seminal moment of the Character vs. Absolutely Nothing movement, not only do they not make a big deal out of their eldest offspring's predicament, it is not even acknowledged! The events of the play move forward, because here, in this frictionless environment, this well-oiled realm of existence where no such conflicts take place, this is not a development worthy of our time.
For when your characters face the challenge of facing no challenge at all, anything becomes possible. The fifth and final family to enter the scene--after the four previous families have both entered and performed impromptu musical numbers, triggered by nothing, about nothing, impacting nothing, and most importantly conflicting nothing--are blessed with an abundance of children. Six adorable, precocious children, who in a world without the conflict of logic versus reality are able to deliver lines one would normally expect to be delivered by a 40-year-old woman. In an effort to temporarily stymie the delivery of such lines, the mother figure instructs the family that they must now be quiet for the next 500 parsecs on their way to grandmother's house. That's right, their grandmother lives 1630 light years away. They have ceased to conflict with gravity, such is the power of this storytelling method.
The next scene sees everyone begin to arrive at grandma and grandpa's house, presumably after either a long and cryogenic stasis aided journey at several times the speed of light or a quick utilization of Hawking theoretics and wormhole generation. Or at least, that's what they would have done in a world where reasoning mattered, but in this bold new frontier where characters no longer conflict with time, this house on a distant moon orbiting a planet in the Cygni-IX cluster is as nearby as the turn of a page!
...alright, you know what, I can't do this anymore. I can't even pretend to satirically lend legitimacy to what I saw tonight. Everything I've said up to this point was true, including the parsec line, but minus me sounding happy about it. Or the grandparents being aliens. Maybe. This was a play completely without conflict, devoid of character development, devoid of resolution, devoid of build up, climax, or denouement. Everyone is, at the end of the play, precisely where they were when you found them, as though a child had been playing with their dolls and studiously returned them to their places in the toy chest when he was finished. It is a piece in which five different extended branches of a Southern family come home to spend Christmas together, and everyone gets along.
There is made reference at one point that one sister is a Democrat and her brother a Republican, and they begin to have a political discussion. Oh noes! Conflict! Oh look, grandma made cookies! Yay! There is a grandchild who has brought her Indian boyfriend home from med school, but will someone with such an ethnically different background than the family fit in? Oh noes! Conflict! Oh look, they're playing football! Yay! One son and his wife have adopted three African American children to raise as their own, but will their grandmother and grandfather raised during a very different era in the South be alright with this? Oh noes! Conflict! Oh look, one of them won an eating contest! Yay! One granddaughter has married a Jewish man, and is going to to Temple for Christmas instead of church (wait, what?), but will a traditional Southern family find a place in its heart for Hanukkah? Oh noes! Conflict! Oh look, they're singing a song about the menorah! Yay!
I am not saying that the family has to be dysfunctional, I am not saying there aren't families that are tolerant and accepting out there, I think that the world would be a better place if life looked exactly like what I laid out in the paragraph above. But there is ideal, and then there is idyllic, a fantasy land that goes beyond reasonable human expectation, especially where large family gatherings are concerned. If the play contained some other sort of conflict, another point of contention on which our focus could be lain, then none of this would matter. But there is no conflict, anywhere. This entire family just crawled out of Norman Rockwell's anus and began singing musical numbers with little to no provocation while holding hands and swaying in time to Osmond's holiday albums.
To pretend that all of these characters are exactly the same is to do them a disservice. When you put that many diverse elements into one family, it seems a little forced to begin with, a bit of an odd coincidence. But if you made the message that they are all getting along in spite of their differences, differences that exist but do not have to be divisive, then the tone is one of hope and inspiration. This play did no such thing. The differences were never even pointed out, no one batted an eye, no one asked a single tough question all night. Now we have overshot tolerance and have gone into a ham-handed territory where the characters were obviously not written to be ethnic, or multi-cultural, or multi-denominational. They were simply cast that way, in a base and demeaning attempt to rainbow up a play that is extraordinarily Conservative Caucasian Christian in delivery and dialogue alike. It is crass tokenism at its most nauseating.
Speaking of nauseating, Norman Rockwell's Anus is, so far as I can tell, a vanity piece project from a playwright who has essentially just had a two and a half hour long conversation with herself through the subjective consciousnesses of approximately 358092374210 different characters split into roughly 893242 family groups. They all have the same voice, they all use the same phrases, even the children and the adults could have their lines interchanged without any obvious variation. It's as if Quentin Tarantino directed a community theater troupe in dramatic re-enactments of your old family holiday videos. And most of these characters will remain on stage at the same time. Often talking over one another as three different scenes play out simultaneously on stage. And that right there is all you need to know about this performance.
To have that much action going on at the same time on the same stage is an admission, inadvertent though it may have been in the fevered mind of the author, that absolutely nothing going on at the moment is vital. You can, and through the writer's concession probably will, miss at least a third of all the dialogue taking place, and this will in no way negatively impact your understanding of the storyline. And since the majority of the play is delivered in precisely this fashion, one can then infer that the play, itself, is not important in the slightest.
Further consider this. In most editing courses, one of the earliest lessons they teach you when deciding what does and does not belong in a story is to ask yourself, "If I were to remove this scene from the entire work, what else would I have to change?" If the answer is nothing, then you should probably leave that bit on the cutting room floor. By this logic, I could have taken this entire play, dramatis personae to curtain call, and effectively edited it by lifting it off the desk and depositing it directly into the nearest waste bin. Though to be fair, I would likely have hired an illiterate person to carry this task out, to limit the chance of a human being exposing themselves.
While the previous figure may have been a slight exaggeration, the play does have roughly 25 characters with large enough parts to be billed. This is not unheard of for theater, though still a bit on the high side. The primary difference being that in most plays, any given scene contains a chunk of the cast, the presence of characters ebbing and flowing, their individual prominence determined by their place in the story. I'm not kidding when I tell you that all 25 characters in this play will be on stage at the same time for almost the entire show. Fun fact, the human mind can only hold five to seven pieces of information in short term memory before that knowledge is either converted to long term memory, or pushed out by another piece of information rushing in like a big, squishy Newton's cradle of gray matter. Ten minutes after the play ended, I could already only tell you three character names. It is a sensory overload of simpering sameness.
The only thing that even begins to pass for any sort of struggle in the entire performance is the grandparents trying to decide if they want to sell the house next year and move into a retirement condo, thus bringing to an end a run of traditional meetings at their house that stretches back to the very dawn of time itself. This primary conflict is mentioned four times the entire show, and is resolved in five minutes by their son buying their house, out from under them, moving from offer to closing in 24 hours, using a realtor and bank apparently willing to work Christmas Eve night and into Christmas Day. Maybe that's how they roll 1630 light years out. I dunno.
There was so much more I wanted to come here and scream about, there was so much more sticking in my head, roiling around, threatening me with impending aneurysms. Something in my neck actually twinged so hard when a group of the younger girls came out dressed in skin tight penguin outfits for a completely non-sequitur musical number that I temporarily lost feeling in my right hand. That's how bad this play was. I suffered neurological damage with physically manifesting symptoms. But I can't remember enough of it now. It's already fading. Just a large wall of suck, a wrinkle in my brain I can never get back.
I want to write a play in rebuttal. It will have only 12 characters, because the rest of the family couldn't be bothered to show up. Six of the characters will hate the other six, and vice versa. Someone will be addicted to drugs. Someone will be openly gay and constantly fighting with his alcoholic father while his mother attempts to keep the peace. Someone will have children out of wedlock and will be pointedly ignored by the grandmother the entire night. The police will eventually be called to break up a knife fight that erupts during the carving of the Christmas ham.
Will it bomb around here? Absolutely. But I will feel like an agent of cultural karmic balance, restoring reality to the stage.
And then I could option it out as a prime time show on the CW. |
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| Chirp |
[Dec. 6th, 2009|01:03 pm] |
Oh the pointlessness you've been missing!
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[Dec. 5th, 2009|01:03 pm] |
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[Dec. 4th, 2009|01:03 pm] |
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[Dec. 3rd, 2009|01:03 pm] |
Oh the pointlessness you've been missing!
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| Wheee? |
[Dec. 3rd, 2009|08:31 am] |
I totaled my truck on interstate 75 yesterday, in an accident that by all rights should have been far worse than it was. But as with most traumatic events in my life, it was sudden and jarring enough to make a good story, but stopped just short of actually being terminal. And that's how I'm choosing to look at this whole experience. You can only write what you know, and now I know how to write about being the driver in an accident where there are some serious physics involved.
I have been in accidents before, but never as the person behind the wheel, and only in one other I'd qualify as more violent than this. I'd never actually seen the road disappear, turned a steering wheel ineffectually, had to try and go through my full defensive driver checklist in the span of 1.2 seconds, or watched as an airbag exploded directly into my head. All of these things I can now describe in minutia. Most people have always told me you don't remember a thing. I remember every last millisecond. I can even tell you what I was thinking. Maybe I'm wired funny. Maybe it's actually because I'm a writer. Even as the truck was spinning, my mind was furiously scribbling down notes. "If we live through this, this is going to be AWESOME detail fodder!"
I left the apartment during a break in the weather. I'd even checked the radar to confirm I wasn't just in a sucker hole. It was still drizzly, but I do not fear the drizzle! There were papers that needed dropping off downtown, and lunch that needed to be acquired. Everything was fine, another day in the slog, until I hit the Sabbath Creek Bridge just past exit 167.
On a gray, rainy highway with a gray, overcast sky, everything runs together. Highway and heavens merge into one gloomy, monochromatic sheet, and any large collections of water become very difficult to discern if they haven't been disturbed recently. Ironically enough, I was being the one safety conscious driver in the inclement weather that day, traveling 60 mph in the right hand lane while all of Macon shot past me in the left lane, going somewhere between 75 and Mach 3. The final car in traffic had cleared my left front quarter panel about 10 seconds before things got bad.
As I approached the bridge, I felt a sudden resistance against my tires, and knew I'd hit some standing water. I could feel it shuddering beneath my feet. The driver's side wheels were in it, too. Lord knows how deep that meant the passenger side tires were. I made no sudden adjustments, either to direction, or to speed. Once you hit water like that, you are basically fording, and the best you can do is hold course and hope it turns out alright. On this particular day, it did not.
Ford Rangers are incredibly light back-end vehicles. If your rear tires lose contact with the road, even the driver becomes a passenger. Mine did. I hit the water, and physics said, "Haha! Mine is an evil laugh!" My truck replied, "Curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal!" and began turning sideways. The steering wheel never even moved. Tire direction meant nothing. I was a water bug at that point, skipping along the surface of a small pond without a care in the world. Except ponds have banks, which beget solid asphalt once more.
When traction returned to my tires, I was fully perpendicular to the road. The lane divider line was running underneath BOTH my front tires, which it is generally agreed is not an optimal position to be in. My rear tires were on the shoulder. The truck still thought it was going 60. And the only thing ahead of me was a concrete barrier with a 15 foot drop off the other side. The slide had actually finished taking me on to the bridge itself, almost exactly halfway across to be precise. Impact was inevitable. There was no braking distance between the nose of my truck and the wall, and speed reduction isn't really an option without friction anyway. There was not enough space to compensate for my full turn radius. it simply became a matter of how I wanted it.
Turning the wheel right would have put the onus of the impact directly on my corner of the truck, likely causing the most damage to me but giving me some chance of maintaining control of the vehicle afterward, provided I was conscious. If I could drive it in at enough of an angle, the force would bring the side of the truck up against the wall for the secondary impact, pointing me in the right direction to drive (of a sort) the last 20 feet of the bridge and pull off into the center median. I had a hard time getting over that "most damage to me" bit.
Turning the wheel left would have deflected the bulk of the damage to the empty passenger side of the cab, but the rebound and need for immediate direction compensation would have surrendered what little control I had left of the vehicle and sent me spinning back out across two lanes of highway, on which more traffic was closing in fast. Less damage to me in the short-term, until someone not paying enough attention broadsides me on a yet-to-be-determined side of my truck, and now we've got a multi-car accident.
Not turning the wheel at all, while a bit of an odd choice at first blush, would distribute the force equally across the largest surface, allow the entire front crumple zone to do its work, and whatever force returned to the truck would be a little like driving in reverse. Just...you know, really fast, with compromised steering, a deployed airbag, and a little head trauma.
So, still going about 55-60 mph, I drove face first into a concrete bridge barrier.
I turned the wheel to the left just as I made contact, using only my left hand to stay clear of the airbag space. The theory was that this might give the truck's recoil a little spin in the proper direction to still be facing flow of traffic when all was said and done. Also, I figured if my tire was going to get locked in to a direction by impact, it might as well be pointing toward the nearest side of the road and a proper escape. Funnily enough, this (or sheer dumb luck) worked as planned.
I came off the wall and back into the left lane, going the right way, and was able to wrestle the truck, still very much in the throes of Newtonian madness at that point, to the end of the bridge and ten feet beyond, where it proceeded to die in the left lane and would not restart. Not four seconds later, cars were going by me on the right.
Had my accident happened 10 seconds earlier, or four seconds later, I would have taken someone with me. I lost control in the ONLY empty pocket of traffic I had seen the entire day.
The cab was filled with smoke and talcum from the airbag's explosive release. My ears were ringing a bit, and while I was aware enough to do a quick cognitive memory test, I was also dazed enough to fail it. I knew my bell had been rung, but I was coherent, and I had things I needed to be doing. I paused for a moment and focused on my body.
I tasted blood, but spitting on a piece of paper I had with me revealed nothing but saliva. There was nothing screaming at me, there was no familiar sensation of blood loss, a full and deep breath using all of my diaphragm brought no discomfort, toes wiggled just fine, fingers OW Sonofa... Right arm was fine. Left wrist was very unhappy. But it had been the brave soul that had stayed tensed on the wheel to make the final course correction, and had thus had the most traumatic ride. Full range of motion in my neck, full swivel ability at the waist, knees cooperating. I got off light.
I needed to get out of the truck. I also needed to call 911. My phone had been in the passenger seat, serving as my mp3 player. Luckily this meant it was connected to my tape adapter, leaving a corded trail to its precise location in the floorboard. The collision itself had apparently been carrying some serious right-side lateral force with it. My glasses had flown off my face and settled in the back right corner of the cab. The drink that had been in my driver's side drink holder was upside down and wedged into the front right corner of the passenger's seat floorboard. It was also dumping its contents directly onto my iPhone. Crap.
I quickly recovered it from where it lay, face down in a spreading pool of dark red liquid. The symbolism of this did not escape me, even in the moment. I expected the faceplate to be shattered, or the back to be staved in, depending on which side was facing outward when its flight came to an abrupt end. There were no more scratches on it than there had been before. Physically, it was completely intact. I dried it off, hoping against hope. I pushed the home key. It lit up, flickered a moment, then stayed lit. It was as dazed as I was.
Phone in hand, I began to evaluating exiting the vehicle. One thought kept going through my head. "You are sitting in the left lane of I-75 going 0 mph, someone is going to hit you any second, and today is going to get so much worse."
But the phone had already been wet enough to be potentially functionally compromised, and it was now pouring down rain again outside. Decisions, decisions. Using side view mirrors, I saw that traffic had already slowed to a crawl around me, the rubberneckers serving as an unexpected but welcome natural retardant to anyone who might be oblivious enough to come barreling into me, unaware of what was going on. I guess they are good for something. I decided that, natural flow of traffic sufficiently obstructed, I was good for a few moments more.
Dialing 911, I noticed that I couldn't hear the push tones like I normally could with my volume turned all the way up. I said hello to myself, to make sure I hadn't overlooked some hearing loss, but the old ears were good. The phone was having sound issues. Mainly in the earpiece speaker. I had to strain to hear the dispatcher, but I got my message across. She even complimented me on the sheer level of detail I gave her as to my exact location. It seemed like the sort of thing that would help my cause. She assured me that help was on the way, disconnected the call, and I turned my attentions to the driver side door.
I pulled the handle with a protesting left hand and leaned into it. Five degrees of give. Ten. Fifteen. Twenty. Then the screeching wail of metal on metal. Ugh. I checked the scene outside my passenger door, but that was an exit that led straight into traffic. Slowed and voyeuristic or not, I had already tempted fate once today. Instead I shoulder checked the driver door once again. Maybe another five degrees of give, and then it was done. The paneling had been compressed into the door frame itself. Luckily I'm somewhat scrawny, and definitely bendy. I wormed my way out through the gap after one last unsuccessful attempt at cranking her up, and began walking through the rain back toward the barrier I'd hit. I didn't go to the front of the truck, because I honestly didn't want to know.
A few people rolled their windows down to ask if I was okay. I nodded mutely at them. I think. Mine was a mind with a thousand things trying to run through it, and only ten checkout lanes open. The scene on the bridge was...vaguely terrifying. I could identify pieces of headlight housing. Shattered lightbulbs. My deer whistlers. My Ole Miss front plate. What looked like a chunk of radiator housing. Pools of iridescent fluids slowly running off with the rain water. And then my bumper. My front bumper. The whole thing. I assumed this marked my point of initial impact. It seemed to hold a place of primacy on my trail of twisted debris. And god was it twisted. The lower lip of the barricade and torn it from my truck, and the force of the impact as it carried through had turned it into a double helix of sorts, the DNA of a very bad day.
I don't know why, standing there and looking out over the dropoff I had avoided plummeting over by the grace of a well built concrete guard rail, it occurred to me I had other people I needed to call, too. I began the march back to my truck, picking my way through my own shrapnel minefield and marveling at how fascinating I had become to the people of interstate 75. I was grateful I'd left the door open, either by remarkable bit of foresight or by complete lack of caring, venting a good bit of the noxious gray dust out into the obnoxious gray day. They would get along splendidly. Crawling and squirming my way back into the cab, now safely cocooned on the right by a completely inert line of traffic, I called my father and gave him the details. I assured him that I was fine, more relieved than I expected to be to hear a genuinely concerned voice, and asked if he could act as a buffer between myself and my mother, who I fully expected to have a coronary and try to find a way to blame me for what was, in essence, a very unfortunate physics word problem brought to life.
Then I settled in and waited. About thirty seconds later, there were blue lights in my mirror.
"That was fast!" I remarked to myself.
Haha.
This was not a police officer, but in fact a Department of Natural Resources ranger. He asked me if I was fine, parked his car with lights on 20 feet back to prevent further pile-ups, and invited me to sit in his cab while we waited, since my vehicle was not about to pass any safety inspections any time soon. He called dispatch to see if there was an ETA on the deputy. It was at this point I was informed that, due to the location of my accident, there was some argument going on between the Macon police department and the Bibb County sheriff's department as to whose problem I was going to be. And to that effect, no one had actually been dispatched yet at all.
"I could pretend to be injured, if that would help," I offered. Ahh, humor as a defense mechanism.
DNR officer and I had a nice little chat. I found out that he was on his way to a funeral at 2:00, and offered to let him get on his way, assuring him I'd be fine. He'd hear none of it though, and insisted on staying around until the scene workers could get there. After a few more minutes of awkward small talk, because what do you really say at a time like this, there were more blue lights in the mirrors. Hooray, the deputies were here!
Haha.
It was another DNR officer, checking to make sure everything was okay. There would even be a third before the first relevant authority figure of any sort would make an appearance. And the one that did, a member of Macon PD, asked if I was alright, helped me put my bumper in the bed of the truck, made a snide comment about the weather and how this wouldn't have happened if I'd have had a Georgia plate instead of an Ole Miss one, and left.
Haha.
About 10 minutes later, approx. 35 minutes after the accident, the Bibb County Sheriff's Department arrived to actually do the report. They only beat my parents, coming in from Warner Robins with about 5 minutes less warning, by a handful of moments. He did not ask me how fast I was going. He did not ask me what I thought had happened. He didn't even go look at the point of impact. He got my license and my insurance card, sat in his car for about 10 minutes, waited for the wrecker's to arrive, then said I was free to go. No citation, no...anything, really. Just another weather statistic.
The truck was totaled, but by a handful of variables that lined up just right, I am not. The front end was pushed back about a foot. The radiator was destroyed, the engine block cracked, the front axle bent. The battery actually came up and out over the side of the hood space, so that you could check its expiration date without moving or opening a thing. The seatbelt and the airbag both did their jobs marveously. I'm not even sore this morning, save for a left wrist that is still not happy. I got to see some of the best (the DNR guys) and worst (everyone else) of civil service. And I get another story to tell.
But you know what my first thought was, once the motion stopped? My very first thought?
"Dammit, I just changed the oil in this thing last week!"
Le sigh. Oh well. Goodbye truck, you were a loyal transport these last four years. |
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| Chirp |
[Dec. 2nd, 2009|01:07 pm] |
Oh the pointlessness you've been missing!
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| (no subject) |
[Dec. 1st, 2009|04:10 pm] |
Blogosphere, ho! Entry detailing how I will be bouncing story ideas off of people over on the blog, and why I enjoy getting people's input on these matters so much. You can also check out the status and synopses on my current submissions, jump over to the FB fan page, and just harass me in general. ;)
Capturing Plot Bunnies |
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| Chirp |
[Dec. 1st, 2009|12:04 pm] |
Oh the pointlessness you've been missing!
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| Chirp |
[Nov. 30th, 2009|12:04 pm] |
Oh the pointlessness you've been missing!
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[Nov. 29th, 2009|12:03 pm] |
Oh the pointlessness you've been missing!
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