Friday, February 29, 2008
Quiet, Indeed
Posted by Greg in grandma, greg white, Los Angeles, the wire, trader joe's
Here in good, old LA, there are two types of days I have: fun and not so much fun. The fun days usually involve going to a meeting or, even better, an interview in some industry stronghold. On these days I feel connected and encouraged. I return home, enthused, and bang out a script, outline or revision. Sometimes the fun days even involve hiking and/or running through pretty wilderness. The fun days also involve sun light and typically end with the preparation of a delicious family meal. The not so much fun days make up the rest of the time in between fun days (and the third kind of day: sensory depravation days spent watching entire seasons of The Wire on DVD). Not so much fun days usually involve me sitting near my phone (even though it’s a cell phone there is still something to be said for the sedentary lifestyle of waiting by the phone) waiting for it to ring. The phone calls I am waiting for are typically the people that I had met with earlier during the fun days. Not so much fun days typically occur on overcast days.
As I type this in my apartment in Los Angeles, the strike is over and done with but even though I’ve been here for over a month, this new post-strike environment is basically like starting over. Starting over in the same way that if you were the kind of person who really enjoyed watching elephants run and you move to Africa to pursue this hobby, and while you’re about to disembark en route to the tusk and trunk laden planes, a bunch of harmless but mischievous poachers pop out and pump the elephants full of tranquilizer darts. So now here you are, with the stub of your one way ticket to Africa getting soggy from your palm sweat (it’s hot in the desert) waiting for the sleeping behemoths to finally wake up and gore the poachers. That’s what things are like right now: waiting for the the industry to kick up some dirt and go charging up to full speed once more, giant, dripping penis flopping about in the arid, dusty wind. Eventually the current television season will collide with pilot season, causing a thundercrack of opportunities (or phrased differently, a solar flare of work, or a human spontaneous combustion of employment). And even now, in the still smoldering wake of the strike, options are beginning to shyly show themselves, like coy elves selling arboreal patchwork to humans on the roadside.
