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Friday, November 28, 2003 In drama, it's called "conflict," and is much sought-after. A drama without conflict is boring. But in life, it's called "confrontation," and it's squalid and upsetting and boring and I hate it. But what am I gonna do? If someone comes after me, I hate to just swallow it. That can ruin your day. Problem is, if you come back at a person giving you a hard time, it can ruin your day worse. I was picking up Nick, 7, from his second-grade class, and just as the hallways were filled Adam, 1.5, bolted down the hallway at top speed. Now, this kid is fast. And he has a way of disappearing in a crowd. In fact, it is his purpose, his goal. As soon as he has any freedom at all, he bolts. If he were a character in a screenplay, you would say of him that his "superobjective" is: "escape from Dad. Melt into crowd, seek freedom!" But my job, obviously, is not to let this happen. So I took off after him. And as I did, I kind of, KIND OF, brushed by a teacher. Now, here's an important point: I DID NOT TOUCH HER. Actually, I did not even see her. I was aware of the general vicinity in which she was standing, but I was focused on catching my little kid. Obviously. But as I went by her, she *hissed* at me. "Excuse me" were the words she said, but she *hissed* them at me. Now, I've noted before that this teacher, Mary Jane something, is hanging on by a pretty thin thread. But in the back of my mind, as I grabbed Adam, I was thinking: "Did a kid just hiss at me? It couldn't have been that teacher, could it?" It was so full of hostility. I guess I should have let it go. After all, as Pam is always saying, "think about what you have to lose and what you have to gain." But I'm a little hot-headed, I admit. If someone pushes me, I push back. So I asked her: "Did you just hiss at me?" She denied it. "You hissed at me like a snake," I said. "I just said excuse me. You barreled right by me." So fucking what, you psycho? I was chasing a kid. I DIDN'T EVEN TOUCH YOU. What bothered me about her was she was so concerned about her precious little self, and-- well, everything about her bothered me, frankly, I hate people who are wound up like that, who act like security guards coming up to you and saying: "May I HELP you?" Hey, man, if I want help, I'll ask for it, hmmmkay? Anyway, I didn't say any of this, obviously. I just asked her her name and what grade she taught. "Why?" she said. "Because I'm interested," I said. And here's where I added a little hostility of my own, I admit: "I think you're an interesting person." All very controlled, see, but lots bubbling under the surface. Perhaps the reason I asked was clear. I don't want my kids in the class of some tightly wound control freak who freaks out at the slightest provocation. And I'm kind of glad we had this encounter because she showed me her true colours and now I know not to put my kids in her class. But this encounter ruined my day, I couldn't stop thinking about it. Why is it that bad things crowd out the good, and that one spends so much time thinking about the people who are hostile to you, and not the ones who like you? Why is every bad review I've ever received imprinted eternally on my brain and I can't remember a thing about the good ones? I gotta get tougher. Everyone can't like me. If some teacher's a little bitch, I wanna be able to laugh at her and forget it. It's her problem, anyway. Friday, November 21, 2003 Got a call from my beloved agent in Los Angeles, Jerry K. He and I have been talking for four years, he's been very patient. I love him, he's a macher, a deal-maker, and he says all the things I want to hear. He sounds quite exasperated I've never written him a script. Now, he says, "Write my a good script and I'll fly up there with a canvas bag full of cash." Now...that is precisely what I need and want to hear, at this point. Why haven't I written him something? The only catch is he wants the thing in six weeks and I'm inclined not to put him off anymore. So let the Great Six-Week Experiment begin. I have to teach myself to write fast, which means to work even harder than before. Writing scripts is fun. They're not too long, if they were laid out in prose they'd only be about 20 pages long (or 40, depending who you talk to), so you can rework them again and again. William Faulkner claimed to be able to write them in two days "if the wind was blowing right." Now, I'm not William Faulkner, but I think it's high time I started writing faster. We need a new roof on our house, and Pam is getting sick of supporting my tired ass. I think she would look at me with new eyes if I started pulling down six-figure checks every few weeks. Of course she would look at me differently. Everyone would. Because I'd be dressed in a full-length fur coat, wide-brimmed hat, huge diamond pinkie ring, gold-knobbed cane, and a custom designed alligator-patterned, low-rider stretch Humvee that matched my shoes. And I would fulfill a lifelong dream: my left front tooth, the one I chipped at age 9 when a dog bonked into it with his skull ("You're the only kid I know who chipped his tooth from biting a dog" my Mom used to say): pure gold. Yeah, a gold tooth. I want a gold tooth really, really badly. Oh, yeah, and whatever was left over I'd put towards my kids' educations, and...stuff like that. Tuesday, November 18, 2003 I would like to speak glancingly and perhaps somewhat ignorantly about two power-transitions. I'm not really a political animal, I speak only from gut-reactions and what I've read about each. Here in Canada, a new Prime Minister is about to "succeed" the old one and the ceremony surruonding his succession is referred to, only half-ironically, as a "coronation." Does that not bother anyone at all? Here is a man running one of the largest countries in the world, not much of a military power, but certainly a major economic player, that describes itself as a democracy-- but we didn't elect him. It's a curious anomaly of Canada's "parliamentary democracy" that's always sort of bothered me, as a transplanted American. Obviously, Paul Martin is a good man for the job, but what about Kim Campbell? She became Prime Minister under similar circumstances, and it was obvious she had no business running the country. What if war had broken out? What if Sheila Copps had won the Liberal leadership? What if Sheila Copps had won the Liberal leadership and war had broken out? God help us all. While I'm on the topic, I'm a little tired of Liberal hegemony. How can this country not have a proper conservative party? Even the PCs of Canada are way left of America' left-wing option, the Democrats (because the PCs don't realize how many truly socialist platform planks they take for granted-- universal government-sponsored health care, and so forth). I appreciate universal health care-- and my father, a classical Kennedy Democrat, and American and an MIT-trained economist-- says all in all Canadians get good value for their tax dollars-- health care, clean streets, not too many homeless, etc-- (Americans are so litigious their nonexistent health care system actually costs them more, per capita, than ours does, because of all the malpractice suits)-- but my eyes bug out at some of the ways our tax dollars are spent. I guess, along with many others, the business with Adrian Clarkson taking a giant entourage of a hundred hotshots on a Northwern States Conference, or whatever the hell it was, to hoover up the gravlax and fine wines of other countries on the taxpayers' tab, seemed like a slap in the face; or else a boondoggle by someone so accustomed to boondoogles and pork-barreling it no longer seemed strange to her. She seemed surprised when people objected. And (further digression) when is this country going to abolish its useless, wasteful, toothless, pointless, embarassing Senate? Think of what that money, wasted on dozing old old farts (if they even show up), could be put to use for. There's some health care money! There's some fucking helicopters! Are we so rich we can afford to piss it away on a Senate which wastes millions and does nothing? The other political transition that has me scratching my head is America's political transition in Iraq. That has disaster written all over it. It's like, when they were getting ready to attack, no one stopped to think: "Hmm, if we actually succeed in deposing Saddam, then Iraq will suddenly belong to us and what are we going to do with it?" America has a quirky, somewhat endearing history of what to do with powers it has overthrown. Actually, for the greatest superpower in history, it has overthrown very few countries. The U.S. has much, much more power than Portugal had in her day as a superpower, or England in hers-- and yet, look at their empires, and look at America's. America's entertainment and fast-food industries have done more annexing than the military, by first rotting their brains and then their stomachs with greasy junk. The last time America (officially: for the purposes of clarity in this argument, we're not counting the numerous CIA-backed depositiions of leaders) overthrew a country, that I can think of, was Germany, and that was sort of in self-defense (it shows how much their foreign policy has changed to think they were actually going to stay out of it because it wasn't any of their business, until the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbour). And the way they dealt with that was quirky, perhaps a little misguided: dividing the country, the Berlin Wall, etc. Say what you will, it kept Germany from rising yet again-- and it was accompanied by what is surely one of the most staggering programs of systematic generosity in the history of warfare, the Marshall Plan. To respond to the phenomenon of Nazi Germany with a Marshall Plan-- anyone may disagree with me, but I feel like it was a demonstration of not only America's vast power and wealth but innocence and purity, right after the Nazis had finished turning the 20th into probably the ugliest century in memory. America was so strong, so wealthy, it could afford such gestures. That has not changed. The U.S. needs a Marshall Plan in Iraq-- they need to throw staggering sums of money at that country, not just sell off all the assets and split, calling over their shoulders: "Hold some democratic elections," the essence of the current plan. If for no other reason, they need a stable, solid country to furnish them with oil for their giant Mercedes M-classes and megalithic Ford Explorers. Look at Germany. A peaceful, stable economy who supplies them with those same M-classes. This is a great opportunity, to snatch a victory from the jaws of almost certain disaster. Don't we need something like that in the middle east? Another peaceful, stable democracy-- with problems, maybe, but-- like Israel? The U.S. tried to get out of Afganistan on the sheap, look what happened there. Or maybe I'm dreaming. Maybe I'm naive. If so, that's my perogative, as an American-- really the only country in the world founded on a set of philosophical principles. Friday, November 14, 2003 Told my friend Abi last night about the work-in-progress. She's British, so I figured she'd understand when I said: "It's sort of like a typical North London Adultery Novel" [it's a well-known sub-genre, which includes, I believe, Iris Murdoch, and others: the main way I know about it is Nick Horny's book How to be Good was described as 'a typical North London Adultery Novel']..." "Anawggasawga," she seemed to say. "I beg your pardon?" Aga's a type of stove, very popular amongst a certain segment of the British bourgeoisie. Anyway, they're called "Aga Sagas," apparently. Anyway, I told her the story: happily married man, writer-slash-TV producer with three kids (remind anyone of anyone?), formulates a crush on a sexy new colleague at work, has friend who suggests he "overeexpose" himself to the source of temptation-- "hey, works for me as a bachelor: if I want to get rid of a girl I just spend s alot of tiome with her, until I'm thoroughly sick of her: why shouldn't it work for a married man?"-- put so succinctly, it sounds like a Seinfeld premise, but it's really much deeper than that, and addresses the crucial question which I think remains spectacularly unanswered in our era: how do two people STAY together? In any eras, really. I'm not sure our parents had the answer, either. They stayed together, but so often, it seems, by turning themselves into robots, into zombies. Not the answer... The TRUE answer probably is: it all depends on choosing the right person in the first place, but that's obviously easier said than done. And from that sentence can be extracted a world of pain. My superintellegent and ultraperceptive e-mail correspondent Indian Summer (who was so irritated by my blog she went out and bought my book-- excellent: EXCELLENT! [diabolical laughter]) told me the other day about going to amarried friends' house and sitting in a stew of envy because HE brought HER a glass of wine, and she had never, or rarely, had such a service performed for her. This breaks my heart... Anyway, blah blah blah, I'm telling the whole story of Overexposure to Abi, who listened in semi-skeptical silence. The fiorst thing she said: "I'd love to see something like that written by a woman." I AM A WOMAN! I wanted to scream at her. In all the ways that count, for a writer, that is... I'm sensitive, I like to talk, etc. In our relationship, Pam's the taciturn one, I'm always asking her what's on HER mind, etc; I cook, change diapers-- HELLO? What's with all this modern prejudice against male writers? I know what it is, actually. Men spent so long trying to be Hemingway-- who was so proud of what he left out of his stuff, but it always struck me he left out the BEST STUFF-- thoughts, feelings, insecurities, etc.-- humanity-- his characters were like robots, and so were the characters of all his imitators-- Raymond Carver, and yes, I'm talking about YOU, Richard Ford, you SUCK-- I'm coming after you, motherfucker, your time has passed, shorty. Uh, where was I? Oh, yeah, her other thing was (imagine this being spoken in a beautiful British accent, an accent that if it were a smell, would smell like evergreens, leather saddles, moss on the wall of a stone castle): "And I suppose this woman is younger, then?" "Oh, yes," I said, "she's a lot younger." She wrinkled her nose at this. "What? You're not crazy about that little detail, I see." No, she wasn't. Not dramatically interesting. "It would be interesting if she were his age-- or older." Now (and I can feel the heat of Indian Summer's glare on this sentence, and I'm braced for a barrage of emails), this had never occurred to me. But it's a thought. Maybe it would be more dramatically interesting if the woman was his age, or older. The story had not presented itself to my imagination this way, but I can see it. He's entranced by a smoky-voiced, chain-smoking older woman dropping witticisms, etc. Maybe his wife is TOO YOUNG. And he meets a sophisticated older woman and is attracted to her-- obviously because she has many qualities he feels are lacking in his wife. The story, as it stands, is that the wife cuts him off from sex, and the woman he becomes attracted to is all about sex, but I realize that my shallow preoccupation with sex may have something to do with my chromosomal structure, with the angry peanut in my pants. So, if you are reading this, e-mail me any thoughts you migt have. I appreciate all input! I need advice! My wife, who normally leads me confidently by the hand through the tangled underbrush of my own manuscripts, is too busy! She has kids, and job! xo Tuesday, November 11, 2003 My fucking kids are eating me alive. I know I'm not the first one to make this observation, but when you have kids, you're not even permitted the luxury of illness. The other night, probably from exhaustion, I was woozy, almost delirious, running a high fever. I needed to crawl into bed-- but the kids had to be fed, PJ-ed, etc. I was going through the motions, practically hallucinating as I kept saying to JJ: "Brush your teeth, JJ, brush your teeth. Did you hear me? Brush your teeth! C'mon, JJ, brush your teeth." They just ignore you until you flip your wig and start yelling at them, then they burst into tears. I yelled at JJ "BRUSH YOUR TEETH!" and of course he started crying, Pam came in, started brushing his teeth while tears were streaming down his cheeks. She said "Maybe you should go to bed." She said to JJ: "Your father isn't feeling too well, that's why he yelled." "Not true," I said, "not true." But it probably was. I slunk off to bed, grateful. Earlier her attitude was: "I can't afford the luxury of getting sick, why should you be able to?" Which is also fair enough, but I could hardly see straight. It's the same with death. I still smoke & drink and Pam's attitude towards me can be summed up as: "You better not die or I'll kill you." She needs the help, see, the kids need a Dad, etc. Well, I've been going to the gym, I only smoke and drink at night (so far), so... Lots of longevity on the women in my family, not so much the men. Couple of heart attacks among the men in the family, in their forties. Yikes. I've got to work harder at the gym, and at my writing... Meanwhile, Doug Flutie shows us all the way. Leaping, prancing, dancing, quarterback sneaking, he started for the first time in two years on Sunday. The man is forty-one years old. He played like a teenager. Last time he was starting quarterback was 2 years ago-- or, as my friend Carl puts it (a man acutely aware of the passage of time) more than 600 days. Last time he played he played brilliantly, too. He not only plays brilliantly, your heart is in your mouth the whole time you watch him, he's out there, risking it, the fans love it, because he plays with everything he's got. "He's all heart, motherfucker." He's so little he has to do these little jumps, to see over the heads of the linebackers who are coming down on him like darkness, to see the guy he's throwing to. He fumbled a couple times, at which point it's like (gulp) change of plans-- and he scampers with the ball himself, into the end zone. No quarterback has come close to being this old. He's a beacon for everyone. All heart and will, never gives up... He snatches victory from the jaws of defeat, which is the greatest thing to do on this earth...
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