February 17, 1997

On Winged Feet

That's as in wing-ed, two syllables, say it right.

This weekend has gone by way too fast. I can't believe it's Monday night. Mostly I can't believe it because Tuesday morning I leave and what this means is: I come back to our Cupertino one more time to pack the place up in March. Then I leave and a couple of weeks later Darin moves down. And that's it, we're gone. It's not like we're moving to Fiji or anything, I know, but...inertia is the strongest force in the universe, and overcoming it will take effort.

(Add to To-Do list: get in touch with Bay Area people and see them for a last time...while doing all that packing stuff and writing the term paper and working on the first draft of the screenplay...)

Both Darin and I are going out of our minds with stress. Darin says that there's always something weighing on his mind now. I've taken it upon myself to feel responsible. It's a stressful time though, no doubt. Moving, new jobs, the future. Usually the future doesn't fall on you all in one big piece.

CJ Silverio -- yes, the very one; you know her -- wrote me after reading Saturday's entry about Crash and Crush. I am culturally illiterate, and she took pity on me:

_Crash_ is a rather famous novel by J.G. Ballard. Recommended reading, as is much of Ballard's stuff. _Crush_ is probably a play on _Crash_ or an homage. At any rate, a script based on a novel with that sort of notoriety wouldn't have to be dumped just because something like it was already being shopped around.
I'm sure the book itself isn't banned in the UK. Isn't it nice how the printed word manages to enveigle itself into places where other media cannot follow? Probably it's because novel-reading is the entertainment of the elite, whereas the movie-watching masses must have their entertainment censored for their own good.

And you know what? She's probably right about the censorship thing. Although books are banned and suffer calls for censorship even today, in nice "enlightened" places like the US. Basically what censorship says is, You can't think for yourself, so we, a committee of your betters, shall do it for you.

Conversation this weekend:

"I love you." Ruffle of hair. "Is there anything I can do for you?"

"Anything? Write those TV specs you said you were going to do. Whenever you ask yourself, What can I do, answer yourself with, Write more."

I think that is the first time Darin has ever explicitly asked me to work on getting my career in motion. To keep writing. Writing The Paperwork every day is fine with him, but he wants me to concentrate on my screenwriting and most importantly, teleplay writing.

He's tense, he knows I'm tense, and he knows that when I get tense I tend to freeze up, unable to move. If I keep busy, I tend to be a little more relaxed and not build up the mental bogeyman of I can't do this, I'll never be able to do this, I'm kidding myself. The hardest part of getting a job in Hollywood is showing that you can do the work without getting the incentive: you have to put out before anyone will trust you to do anything, because there are a million people in Hollywood who claim to be able to do it with no ability whatsoever.