Saturday, September 17, 2005

When He Goes Quiet, I Know I've Got Him

SMS. 8.07. Nick’s (St Kilda) probably being comforted in his b/f Adam’s (Essendon) arms, after y’days loss – Christian

Two days off and it is only Saturday, you gotta love that. Off to mum’s soon and then coffee and cake with Leah, Jill and Rachel.

No milk for my muesli. Bugger!

It’s raining and cold.

I decided that I really had things to do and places to go, no sitting behind my computer whiling the day away.

Turn the computer off, Christian! Turn it off! You do it! You!

Then I went to my mum’s, where she proceeded to thumb through a cook book to look up a recipe for the scrambled eggs she promised me. I made them in minutes - the way she taught me. I went to Blackburn to pick up Leah. Wilma-Joan looked fantastic. She is back to how she is meant to look in my mind - slim, stylish and smiling. We drove to Prahran to pick up Jill, then headed off to Hampton Street Hampton to have lunch with Rachel, as she worked in Urchin Bar.

SMS. 13.33. By the way. Happy birthday doll. Love sheen – Shane

SMS. 13.33. Who is Adam? – Tom

SMS. 13.36. McFee – Christian

Then I drove Jill home and drove Leah to the airport by 17.30 and now I’m home.

I called Tom. I was going to proceed straight back along the freeway to Prahran to see him; stay out and get everything you have to do done, kind of thing. And then I got to thinking about the joint I could have and I turned off at Flemington Road and was in the middle of a rather fun scrap with a blue WRX, when in mid gear change, I suddenly said, Tom! Where am I? Fuck! I’m such an airhead sometimes. He didn’t sound happy. I think I woke him and I made the excuse of letting him go back to sleep. But, I guess it is annoying if people ring up and say I was going to come and visit you. But I was! I meant to! Oh. Kick of the shoe into the dirt.

Aby didn’t enthuse about my Hansel & Grethel script, as I thought she might.


Subject: Melbourne Calling


thats tres olay but is she sea worthy?

America is fun fun fun my friend and cute cute cute...

today i walked past this store and there were life LIFE sized zombies for sale and they screamed and everything!

mmmmmmmmmmmmmm braaaaaaaaaains.

oh and i bought 3 pairs of shoes today,

i justified it because i went to see the beautiful girls last night and i didn't pay, they gave me free clothes and a vip wristband that allowed me ANYTHING i wanted behind the bar... of course i went straight to the bar tender informed him of my status then made him do tricks all night.

xx (Ab)

wish you were here :)



Clearly, she didn’t think my synopsis, which I sent her just before she left, was sea worthy. But it wasn’t, I’m sure I told her that. Rough as. Maybe, I didn’t make that clear. We would have to have edited it. Oops! Oh well. She’ll be pleasantly surprised then. I’d better get back to work on it. You know, if I put my mind to it, I could bang out a very rough version of a full 100 page draft, before she got back. I could. I’m not going to. But, in actual fact, I could. But, I could.

Prove it!

Too much dope to smoke, babe.

That’s what you’ll say in forty years and nothing will ever get written. Full of promise, as has always been the case with you, Christian. Hard work. Step up. Push yourself. Put in the hard effort. That’s what you have to do if you want to be a…success. Doesn’t matter what you are being successful at, the process is the same. (Ed note – I can do it when I am driven by the threat of failing a subject)

I’m rolling a joint. Don’t get me wrong, I think it has got to the stage now that if I want to be a successful writer, I have to produce some credible work. Shit or get off the pot. Never has that saying been so apt. I have to produce work now. Because, I know I can.

Goodness me that would be an awful lot of work for a project that I only half believe in, in a process I have my serious doubts about. Collaborating? (Ed note – that’s just fear talking) But on the other hand, like I’m so busy with so many other projects. This is a serious proposition. Maybe, I’m just scared. I don’t feel scared. Kind of confidant in my abilities in a general sense, but not confidant I can get a project finished. It kind of feels like because of apathy, but I guess it has to be a well masked vein of fear. Fear of failure, I guess. But I don’t fear failing, or at least I don’t feel like I do. It’s a fear of being locked into something, which may expose the real me, a failure. But I don’t feel fearful. To tell you the truth, I think I feel numb. It feels like apathy. But that has to be based in something, otherwise apathy wouldn’t matter. I don’t know why I want to write. Do I have to take it seriously? Why? So my script can be made into a movie. And then what? It’s a movie. Nothing feels of any more importance than anything else, at the moment. Everything is even. Of even value. Importance. I’m having trouble feeling the difference. Too much dope?

So, do I want to get to the end and have them say he always had a drug problem, he could have been…?

What do I care if they do? What would it matter, really? I’d be dead. Dust. And by that stage, anything anybody did is equal. Over. Gone.

What is wrong with me? Is this a completely self focused attitude? Oh sweetie, I know I should feel something… Give pleasure to so many others.

I guess I am precious, after all.

But is she sea worthy.


Manny called and talked so wantonly dirty that I got the mind numbing whoosh up the spine and went quiet on the phone – we both see the sign in each other, when an offer of sex has been made that is too good to pass up, the recipient goes dead quiet on the other end of the phone, as his dirty thoughts process. At that point, you know you don’t have to say any more. Got him!

Tom called just after that and sounded as though he needed a visit. I offered to dump Manny for him, but he said he’d probably be asleep in an hour, anyway. And besides, said Tom. It's good stress relief. You need it.



Subject: Melbourne calling


(Aby)

So you didn’t think my synopsis was sea worthy? It wasn’t. Rough as, you would have had to edit it. I thought I said that. The script? I don’t know. Most of the time I think I’m faking it, anyway, so who am I to judge. But it’s the full story of Hansel & Grethel, in scenes, 21st Century style, even if it is only twenty pages. I can see it all fitting together. I think a full length draft of a script will be a piece of cake. First draft, that is. Genius may take time.

The barman doing tricks? Now you are talking babe. Cheeky American boys. Yum.

I’ll pass on the zombies, remember I work in the corporate world. We’ve got one woman who lost twins a year, or so ago and she’s just had a miscarriage, surprise, surprise, she’s practically fifty. What does she expect? But she has started a charity run to get some new equipment for the children’s hospital, complete with charity boxes with pictures of her cradling her child – which is now clearly dead – dotted around the office. I don’t think she thought she was getting enough sympathy. I’ve seen her in the lift and about the place this last week, getting comforted by everyone she meets. I see her lapping up the attention. She comes alive in a very creepy walking-dead chill-up-the-spine kind of way.

But I digress.

Americans? Clear skin, good jaws. Yes, it’s coming back to me. Bright eyes and white teeth. And big togers. Ah yes, now it’s coming back to me. Slapped about the face with those monsters. Yum!

Sometime later…

Just boofed Manny, so I’m feeling mighty relaxed. Yes, yes, contradicted what I said last time, but hey, it’s a great relaxant.

I didn’t tell you that Tom got his results back and he is cancer free. Cool huh? Especially, after that conversation the other night. Now he’s just bored in hospital, the bladder problem persists.

I went to see Renee Geyer at the concert Hall last night, with Mark and Luke. She was everything you’d expect a diva of thirty years standing to be. She looked great (actually, optional with divas, but there you go), note perfect – not quite, but in that bluesy way you’d expect her not to be anyway – in fine voice; black, husky-smooth, smoky-gravel. I didn’t quite see god as I would expect, even momentarily, with a black chic, but, as fine and as full-bodied as pure honey sliding over you from the scalp. I guess she’s got legend status, Australian legend, of course. If we did the time and remain standing, we’d even get it in the end…mmm?... in Australia, anyway. Which wouldn’t be so bad. I suppose there could be worse fates than being Australian Art House in America. Which I would guess Renee would be, or the musical equivalent thereof.

Christian



Let’s face it, if I don’t produce something soon that I have written that is good… and complete, well, I guess, I’ll have to stop saying I’m a writer. I hardly say it to anyone now.

Now, is that a symptom or a cause? Believe in yourself. Call yourself a writer. It’s like singing, until you let go and believe you can do it, it never really comes smoothly. Belief in one’s self.

I might fail.

Being a finance boffin and retiring at, whatever age, never having done, I know, is a greater failure.

So you just can’t win really. :(

Not until I let go of everything, write full time… Jasus! I’m such a princess and I don’t even know it. Like everyone who I sneer at in the twenty first century, I want it all now, no work. Stop making having to work an excuse. The universe knows that I waste time at the speed of sound puffing the hooch or, even worse, mind numbingly as the hours cruise by on gaydar.

I never get above 50% (Ed note – I can do it when I am driven by the threat of failing a subject…or crashing and burning at work.)

Joint?

My creativity clocks in and clocks out. While I was writing the Hansel & Grethel script, it clocked in. But now it’s clocked out. No use pushing, if it’s clocked out it can be tedious. (Ed note – but it can be cajoled, coaxed, if one sits down and actually writes) It’s not far out though, I can feel a kind of back-burner sensation going on when I think about pumping out a full-length script. When I look at my bit and I look at Ab’s bit, I feel I have a problem I need to fix. Which is good, it means the writer’s interest is still pumped.

So my usual modis de operandi would be to write something else, (Ed note – I also have a full first-draft of Magic) which would mean I would have to distract myself from that by writing something else. You know, put it off. (Ed note – my own version of tandem writing, I should just except the process) I would just have to make sure that the ‘something else’ is Hansel & Grethel. But it would be, because I know my interest is still pumped. Obvious distraction piece.

Missy is rubbing herself constantly against my shins.

I just have to believe I can do it. But I believe I can do it, I’m just lazy. No, it must mean I don’t believe I can do it. Logically. Deep seated. Childhood trauma, possibly.

The trouble is that the next stage is reading what has been written and I’m smoking too much pot to read anything and take it in. If I could read all of what we have written and what Aby has written, absorb it so our entire story has a shape in my head, image wise… and I was driven, I could pump it out to forty pages, easy. No work, I could pump it out to sixty. If the creative process chugged on out and I felt like I had something to prove… to complete. See the vision. Sure. One hundred, at a push. Blood gone, completely drained.

Joint?


3am


Subject: here ya go



(Aby)

I know it’s got continuity problems, but that just means writing more.

Christian



Tim and Nicholas got home at 4.30am.

I decided it was time to go to bed, at that point. 


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