Post 86

Finally....

I just saw Stranger than Fiction. I've been wanting to see that movie and trying to hunt down a copy for a couple of months now, but I finally got to see it tonight and--perhaps it was a very different experience for me than it is for many people. Perhaps not; I have the tendency to believe that I am far more different from the general population than I actually am. Every time I get to thinking that I'm weird, I notice something about my peers that makes me realize that I'm not weird--not in the ways I thought, at least. I still harbor secret hopes that I'm generally perceived as outstandingly unique--not superior or inferior to those around me, just different in more than the usual way.

I am an obsessive journal writer--obsessive I say. I just finished off a 200-sheet notebook a couple weeks ago. Four hundred pages, and you know how long it covered? It started on October 1, 2007 and ended January 31, 2008--four months in four hundred pages. Writing in my journal is what I do; it's how I define myself, sort out my problems, grapple with reality and my various fantasies. And I occasionally find myself narrating my life as I live it--consciously, in real time, imagining what I will say about the day when it concludes. Sometimes my thoughts make it to my journal, often they do not; if every narrative thought that crawled across my mind crawled onto a page somewhere, I can't imagine how many notebooks I'd go through in four months--a lot more than one, I'm pretty sure.

But I can't imagine that narrating one's own life as it happens is all that crazy; the problem is that I try to narrate the future, as well. Unfortunately, I'm a terrible prognosticator; my predictions are very often wrong, and this really makes me sad because I have these secret fantasies that one day I'll look back on my life, gather all my various journals together, and abridge and revise them into the next great American novel. Oh, sure, I'd settle for an autobiography that'd be worth reading, but I really have no ambitions to do anything in my life that would cause people to want to take a book down from the shelf because it has my name in the title. No, I don't want to be historic; I want to be fantastic.

So it's very hard for me to describe to you the way this movie struck me. Especially the line, "Sounds like a comedy; you should develop that." To get far more personal than I think is prudent (because my inhibitions go to bed at a fairly early hour), I am often very disappointed in the way the female supporting roles in the story of my life fail to play their part in the delightful romantic comedy that I've composed in my head--and I think about these things in those terms. See, mostly I want my life to be a story worth telling; I see so many opportunities to live funny little subplots, and I think of them mostly in the frame of reference of relating the story to future acquaintances. It's strange, but I can describe it to you: a little basement apartment with a low ceiling and poor lighting, an overstuffed couch whose pinstriped upholstery is worn and patched, a coffee table that is in less than perfect condition, and a couple of white wicker chairs opposite the couch. I sit, partially reclined on the couch with my girl next to me, and we tell the most charming little stories to the couple sitting in the wicker chairs--well, I do most of the telling because I'm naturally narcissistic and have high confidence in my mastery of the artful exaggeration, but my wife (who is naturally brilliant and probably has a keener sense of humor than I but loves me enough to let me tell the story) makes her witty little additions here and there, and thus we keep our guests entertained all night long.

The scene is always the same; it's the story we tell that is constantly changing. It's funny, the vision is clear enough that I can describe the room and furnishings to you--the carpet is beige and not at all fluffy; the wall behind us contains sparsely filled shelving; the walls are white; the ceiling is uncovered rafters--but the vision is simultaneously abstract enough that I have absolutely no concept of what my wife looks like, how old I am, who our guests are or why they're visiting us--no, the setting (including the people there) is all secondary to the story I'm telling.

Well? How the heck can that become a reality if I don't have a cool story to tell? And how am I ever going to get a good story to tell if my life doesn't start being more clever? Huh?

It is a great frustration to me. I could claim that Hollywood has poisoned my mind, but I think it's just the way I am. It's kinda sick, really. I can't tell you how many apparently funny coincidences in my life have actually been carefully planned and performed. I mean, sure, sometimes I'm spontaneous and sometimes funny just happens--that's how it is most of the time, in fact. But I've done some pretty devious things to appear witty--things that, even at 12:30am, I have enough inhibition to keep to myself.

So anyway. The movie. Sometimes I feel very much like Harold Crick, but my frustration is not that my life is dictated by the narrative of some unknown author, it's that my life refuses to be dictated. Not that that would be any fun, really, but there have been some pretty amazing scenes that have fallen flat--and not just romantically comedic scenes; all kinds of scenes.

So anyway. The movie. It's a good one. I think it's the sort of movie that I may have to watch again before I'll be able to form any really solid opinion on it, but up until the ending, it was pretty much my favorite movie e-ver. The ending wasn't bad, mind you--au contraire, it may have actually be very, very good--but I'm really a fan of finality, and the point of the ending seemed to be that life goes on and is actually worth living.

What a depressing thought....