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.
But that is eventually. Right now there are still not so much fun days. There was one interview recently for a job that sounded pretty much like my ideal hobby, let alone hobby I could get paid for. That fell through, which was a bummer. So it was back on the phone immediately, letting people I had met with know what was what. But somewhere in between getting back on the horn to alert the contacts and those phone calls turning into actual jobs in a few weeks, there is right now. So I wait.
How do I wait? Well, there are multiple options available to one idling his way through a not so much fun day. If you happen to have several seasons of The Wire on DVD, that is perhaps the best way around this. If you are like me, and rely on Netflix or a similar video distribution service for your DVD viewing habits, then you might also consider, in addition to the actual viewing of said DVDs, counting off the minutes until the mailman arrives (a waiting game within a waiting game scenario, very popular in metaphysical circles). Other methods include working on the script you have piling up. Finished one? Terrific. Start outlining a new one. Force the malaise out of your system through a well structured two-act plot. On this note, you could also revise a previously completed script to similar effect. Or you could also clean the apartment that your roommates treat as though it were a frat house turned crack den. Nothing says productivity like really scrubbing those kitchen floors.
If you prefer to deny yourself a life unchecked, you could slap yourself in the face and announce that time is marching on with or without you, so that even though brainless watching of American Idol reject clips on YouTube might feel fun, you are ultimately dying with each passing moment. While pondering this, you could hold an internal debate on Schopenhauer and his notions of the world as will and power. “Will,” mind you, holds the same meaning for Schopenahauer as desire, striving and urging. You could note to yourself how these things must come from within and that self-validation is the only kind of validation there is (and thumb your nose at the position you successfully interviewed for yet were not awarded). You could say, Self, what make you of his ideas of life and death? That of course there is a life continuum. Do you honestly think that great men are allowed to die while you–YOU–are allowed to live? Of course not. Or might you say to yourself, self, there is no continuum, there is only this and there are only so many of these available.
Back home in New Jersey, my grandma lives about 3 miles from our house in a Jewish Assisted Living Home. She isn’t Jewish, but when we were moving her out of her old house after my grandfather died, she insisted on moving into the “Jew place.” So we moved her in. Soon enough, her proximity was the cause and most cursed effect. When she wasn’t lecturing us on the full list of daily grievances, the highlight of her day seemed to be waiting for the mail to come. She would shuffle out of her room, check the hallways, check her mailbox, ask the aides, and demand to know as soon as the mail would come. I’m not sure if you’ve seen an elderly woman’s mail, but it typically doesn’t include launch codes or urgent information regarding whether or not the prisoner lives or dies. When she was in the mood for a real treat, my mom and I would bring her to CVS where we would spend anywhere between thirty minutes and a full hour browsing the aisles, checking for bargains on cotton swabs and trying to catch the cashiers in their never ending conspiracy to cheat my grandma out of five cents.
I mention this because at the time I would scoff at the woman we affectionately refer to as The Dink. And yet now, during not so much fun days, my biggest thrill of the day is going to Trader Joe’s. Which Trader Joe’s will I go to today, I wonder to myself, the one on Sepulvida or National? Is this a restocking trip or is it simply pleasure? Oh, my, fair trade chocolate, how wonderful for the…chocolate pickers. I watch, with great interest, the grocery items belonging to the person in front of me as said customer refuses to bag their items and instead, this is very near Brentwood after all, wait for the cashier to magically turn into a bag boy. The whole point of Trader Joe’s is that you cut out the middle man–it’s an agreement founded on a mutual meeting at the halfway point. So I stand there watching, torn somewhere between venomous contempt and a strong desire to grab their package of frozen blueberries and comment, wide eyed and desperate for human contact, “So, blueberries, huh?”
Sometimes when I don’t feel like driving, I’ll walk the mile and a half north to the Brentwood Whole Foods where I can watch my neighbors ask inane questions about the health benefits of the various antioxidant rich jungle berries and taste organic, unfiltered honey as they comment to their friend, “Oh, this is nice!” I peruse the meat counter. I weigh the merits of lamb sausage. I shake my head at the price tag that puts my beloved flax cereal a full dollar above Trader Joe’s price. Then I buy a quinoa cake from the hot food section, pay for it in change, and stroll back to the apartment, anxiously wondering if there will be any new phone or email messages.
It’s amazing how heightened (or perhaps grateful) your senses become when you are not only trying to kill minutes until game time, but genuinely full of boredom. I am rarely bored at home in New Jersey: between my guitars, my garden, my kitchen, my wine shop, and the comparatively large food budget of my parents, I am pretty well covered. Dinner parties, visits to the wine store, and golf are tremendous ways to spend one’s day. Even in the winter there is still enough “stuff” to keep one occupied. In LA, however, I try to live something resembling a faux-ascetic life style. My room is sparsely furnished with a desk (that was left here by the room’s previous occupant), a mattress with a foam mattress topper, my laptop, and a closet. We have a DVR in the other room, and a nice, functional kitchen. But aside from that, it is just me, the work I came out here to do, and a whole lot of time.
When I am out and about during times like this, the simple sight of a couple walking their dog will cause me to look at the dog and smile widely, stupidly, as though I was just coming out of a rather unsuccessful chemotherapy session and this dog instilled in me the full beauty of God’s works. It is a sappy, dull-minded smile that recalls something out of a Dr. Seuss film, say, the Grinch’s smile at the end of How the Grinch Stole Christmas. I walk on and I realize that this is what it’s like to be old, to be without function, to be cut loose in the world. The phone rings, I’m in it. The phone doesn’t ring, I am washed over, eroded by time. It’s an amazingly fine line between in it and out of it, and it’s humbling and empowering at the same time. In it, out of it, either way I’m here. I check my bank account and realize I have enough money to, theoretically speaking, purchase a one way ticket somewhere, pretty much anywhere, board a plane early tomorrow morning, and be there within, at most, a day. What difference would it make? And more importantly, so what?
So it comes down to all of these things, the constant checking of email, the Baltimore police squad, of philosophical self-doubt, the woman who, sunglasses blocking any hint of emotion, refuses to bag her own groceries, the nagging sense that there is something just around the corner while you sit back waiting for life to begin, of the past and present and future colliding and synthesizing to fit your waiting game needs. Eventually, I remind myself, the phone will ring, thus putting an end to the not so fun days once and for all. But for now, it is quiet.
Greg White is a writer living and working in Los Angeles. Read his previous 2.0somethings columns and recipes here.
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