Insane Times

The most frustrating thing about living in these insane times is the number of lovely, kind-hearted people I know who don't (won't?) see how absolutely nut-bonkers everything has gotten—the degree to which so many good things in this world are under serious threat.

Threat-level awareness hasn't done me any favors, that's for sure.

The first thing I did after the election was get horribly, uselessly depressed. Then I banged out a feature length script called RETAIL, an off-the-wall bit of catharsis that'll pretty much for sure never get made. I felt better while writing it, but it didn't break me out of the question that's been pounding my brain since November, jamming me up creatively: 

"How do I write something relevant with an apocalypse hanging over my head?"

I know, I know: alarmist liberal bull-excrement, right? Everything is fine. Nothing can possibly go wrong. This is America. Blah, blah, blah.

Nonetheless, that's where I was.

So I decided to do something different. 

I decided to let go of control a bit, and just BE in my creative moment.

For me, this meant I would start writing a screenplay with zero preparation. No outlining. No cork board with index cards. Just a loose idea for an opening scene and the words, "FADE THE H*LL IN..."

See, in these insane times I feel it's incumbent upon me to shake off any of the remaining strictures of fear that would keep me from telling the truth, as I see it. And although if you know me, you know that I'm a guy who doesn't really go in for swearing so much, one of the strictures I knew I needed to shake off was that I was worried what the people I grew up with would think about the profanity in some of my scripts.

Sure, I put it in anyways, because that's the truth about how people talk.

But I was worried about it.

For this script, though, I was gonna throw that concern to the wind. My only rule beyond "don't prepare" and "have fun while you do it" was that I had to put as much profanity on every page as was humanly possible. 

So I called my script "F**K THE APOCALYPSE" and dove right in. 

I swore my eff-starking head off.

On every bleeping page. 

For ninety-four pages.

And now (less than half an hour ago), I typed "FADE THE H*LL OUT" and that was it.

My fourteenth feature-length script.

Done like clustercussing dinner.