wilderworks

We're All Sherman Oaks Adjacent, Now Last night, I waited much longer than usual to walk the dog. When I finally went out, it was dark. I don't generally care about that sort of thing. I lived happily in Harlem, and now I live in the similarly regarded Van Nuys. Luckily, I don't believe the local news represents the world, and neither do cop shows, so I've never acquired any appreciable fear of city streets or dark alleyways. Instead, I've found for myself that “bad” neighborhoods are full of nice people. No, it's the well-off places that you gotta worry about. Those people are monsters. My particular sliver of Van Nuys is a little, densely-populated cityscape hemmed in by post-industrial-wasteland sprawl to the north, and suburbanized-hipster-family sprawl to the south. I'm right on the border of Sherman Oaks, which used to be the southern part of Van Nuys, until the brown people started moving in, which encouraged the white people to flee. They hi...

What's Up With the Finger? Yesterday evening, when I arrived home, the power was out in my building. I walked Baker and checked out the neighborhood. I took some pictures of LADWP cones and broken electrical pipes, but there were no trucks or crew-persons to photograph. When I returned to building, many of the neighbors were out in the hall, because they were desperately bored, having already been deprived of their television and internet for an eternity lasting upwards of forty minutes. The halls were very dark. It's a bit of a walk in my building, from the entrance to my door. And on my floor, there lives a gigantic mammal. She appears to be part Dalmatian, part Great Dane, part Prehistoric Hippopotamus. She is energetic and nosy and, as best I can tell, entirely unspoiled by human discipline. This is probably the hippo in her. She is also spotted, which is the Dalmation, and has floppy jowls and big pointy ears, which is Great Dane. I believe her name is Bella....

I haven't written because I've been waning. And you'd better believe, when I'm waning, I'm whining, if I'm writing at all. And thus, I thought I'd spare myself the sight of myself being so sloppy and dire. I'm in partial recovery now, but I warn you, I'm not symptom-free. After all these years, you might wonder why I haven't found some way to avoid the seasons of mope. Similarly, you might wonder why, after all these years, humans haven't found some way to make it constantly daylight all over Earth.  Well, it's because shit doesn't work that way. Shit is a force of nature. The moon slips into shadow, and lunacy dims. Then, there comes a period of sanity - dismal, doubtful, shining, stark sanity - a cool, porcelain sanity – a sanity that, it never fails, I fear may never break. Yes, each time, I wonder if I'll write again. And yes, similarly, each night, I wonder if the sun will rise again. So, okay, fine. Clearly, everybody...

Chase has posted one of the below advertisements on Pico Blvd, where I am pleased to view it daily, first-thing in the morning, on my approach to the Fox gate: It says - CHASE: Almost as many ATMs as unsold screenplays! (exclamation point mine) Teehee. Well, that tickled me so much that a whole bunch of other, similar slogans came to me. I wonder if some of them are already part of the campaign. Anyway, here are a few of the slogan ideas I came up with, following the same general theme!   CHASE: Almost as many ATMs as still-born babies!  CHASE: Almost as many ATMs as elderly widowers, quietly contemplating suicide!  CHASE: Almost as many ATMs as abandoned family pets, wandering the streets alone tonight, wondering what happened, what happened, what did I do wrong?  CHASE: Almost as many ATMS as things you never took the time to tell him.  CHASE: Almost as many ATMs as middle-aged women who, sighing softly, have finally accepted the hard tr...

Here's a shocker: quitting smoking is hard. Not so much because you must stop smoking. More because it sets off a chain reaction of other changes. Many of these unexpected changes - you may not care for. I've broken the habit. But I'm not well-adjusted to the new ones. Smoking suppresses appetite. Which means, my appetite is now completely unsuppressed. My body doesn't remember how to make full feelings. Thus, I am hungry all the time. All the time. All. The. Time. While I'm eating, I wish I were eating. How many cheese-steaks could you eat? Eight? Nine? I bet I could eat a dozen. I'd like to try. I'd like to eat a whole head of lettuce with my hands. Right now. This insatiable hunger means that I can't eat the stuff I used to eat, because I'd become enormously unhealthy - and enormous. Thus, I am snacking on carrots and celery and crackers. I chain-snack for five hours a day. This daily fruit and vegetable binge adds more unfamiliar material ...

It happens about once a month. Someone else takes their turn at making a ground-breaking remark about my name of choice. That is, "Wilder." Their gem of wit usually implies that I could only live up to such a name by being an asshole - an unstable, irresponsible, violent, hard-drinking, hard-drugging, mass-fornicating, nincompoop, hellion, shark-kicker - or something like that. I always think, this demonstrates a lack of imagination on your part . I always think, this demonstrates the limitations of a tame mind such as your own . I always think, how dreary and routine your inner world must be . I always think, I am never buying you frozen yogurt . As best I can reason, these people must think "wild" means criminal, or rock-star, or lunatic. Or at least someone who shouts a lot. What they're describing is a fool, and wild things are not fools. A wild animal flourishes outside of domestication. They function, survive, and thrive. They find their own way. A fo...

Laying in bed tonight, I was struck with something very obvious. So obvious, it's deeply important to me. It's the central question that causes me so many sleepless nights of calculating and weighing experiences, so much hopeless pattern searching and uncertainty. Simply: Does life work out the way it's supposed to, or does it just work out the way it does? Do we get out of life what we make of things, or do we just get whatever we can grab? I don't know the answer. It could be any one of these, or any two, or any three, or all four, or none of them. Is there justice? Is it survival of the fittest? Is there God or Quantum Mechanics? A set future or infinite possibility? I can make a strong argument for any possibility. I feel strongly about each. And when I'm writing about the tension between these choices, that is when I'm writing something I care about. Because, for some reason, I care about his stupid question. Again, it's so obvious...

I've been thinking about the moment in every story when the hero makes either a life-altering decision, or has a life-altering realization, or both. The epiphany that allows the hero to change, or motivates them to remain steadfast against the temptation to surrender. Again and again, I find myself dissatisfied with these moments in the stories I tell (and elsewhere). Again and again, I find myself working and reworking and reworking this moment. And I've been thinking, I've been realizing: the more real I am able to make the characters, the more alive, the more difficult it becomes to believe that they'd change, or have a realization that strong, all in a fictionalized, focused moment. Perhaps I do not believe that people have these realizations. Perhaps I too often doubt that people make these hard choices while the time is still ripe. Yet, I refuse to be that cynical. It does not sit well with me, and not only because it would trap my work in art houses, at best,...

I have an image in my mind. It is me, writing. It's strange. I have glasses in it. I'm at a desk, turning over sheets of paper. I think I'm writing in pencil, and the paper has a thick tooth, almost as rough as denim in my mind. I wrote an episode of Darwin's Kids, in college, in a single night, all on paper like that, with a pencil. It was the Jan Term episode. In the vision, I'm not sure what I'm wearing. I don't know what time of day it is, the light is neither blue nor bronze. Not sure where I am. The camera's looking up at such an angle, I can't see the chair or the desk, or anything but the colorlessness of an out-of-focus ceiling. But what's so romantic about this image is... I'm totally absorbed. I'm just writing. How can I get there? How can I shut up the stress, the expectations, the commercial/success imperative? How can I write something passionately, freely, without the critics and the critiques hovering an...

I wrote the following in my head last night, when I couldn't sleep.  It's about my job. Sometimes the Interviewer interviews six people a day.  Some are mothers looking for work, for a little extra cash, while their children are at school. Some are actors who want evening hours, so their days will be free, for the auditions that they're sure will soon be calling.  Some are new arrivals, seeking a foothold in the city.   The Interviewer is new to the city. Interviewing is his foothold.   Many of those new arrivals that he interviews soon find themselves in exciting footholds somewhere else, and they turn down the boring foothold that the Interviewer offers.   The Interviewer wonders why he never got any of those exciting footholds that he was interviewed for. The Interviewer hires transcriptionists to type what they hear....

It's becoming pretty clear, I'm not the piano man. It's becoming pretty clear, I'm the real estate novelist, who never had time for a wife.

and do nothing else you need never hear the same picture or painting

Should you live your whole life, even twice, and do nothing else, you need never hear the same song twice, you need never read the same sentence again, nor view the same picture or painting for more than a moment, and neither film nor play nor episode nor even joke need ever be repeated to you: for you will not run out. Life is so very full.

Here is a souvenir from my little tiny road-trip up the east coast, through North Hampton and Amherst, through Boston and Salem, to a little Sheraton shaped like a castle, up in a town called Braintree.