Last
night, I became an adult.
I sat alone last night at my bar
hangout and wrote a screenplay. I love this bar. It’s a micro-brewery with the
best craft beer around. I’ve been on every Tinder date there, seated at the
wooden counter under the dim lights. The bartenders probably think I’m a
prostitute. I’m there so often that Rick, the owner, knows to simply surprise
me with a drink. Don’t even have to order. I sound like an alcoholic. I’m not.
Anyway, my mad scientist boss calls me
into his office last week and melodramatically announces that he has a job for
me that he thinks might be asking too much of me, but he feels that I may be
competent enough as a writer to help him out. He needs me to write episode 2 of
the web show we plan to produce. This show’s been in the works for weeks, and
everyone here is on board. It’s a show about…marijuana. Of which I knew nothing
until I came out here two months ago. For ten minutes he walks me through his
vision for the show, which I’ve heard a million and one times having attended
the meetings, then he walks me through a screenplay template, then he gives me
a plot synopsis that he has in mind for the episode (a very basic plotline),
and then he asks me to develop an ~18
scene, 25 minute screenplay for it. I still don’t know why he asked me, but he did. Fortunately all the
dialogue will be developed later, so really I only have to write a simple
breakdown of scenes and characters. Easy, right? No. The creative genius and
the boss I have to live up to are two magnanimous shadows of nail-biting
pressure.
So I sit on the task for like two days
writing absolutely nothing and glowering indignantly at a blank computer screen
that glowers back with its cruel, blank stare that makes me feel like a completely
incompetent human being. Boss wants it ASAP though. That means sitting on it
for two days is not a good idea. But he says nothing of it when he sees me,
although we both know neither one of us has forgotten the task that has been
assigned and, so far, unfulfilled. Finally, yesterday morning I promise to have
it to him that evening.
Nine o’clock rolls around. I haven’t
written anything. I get back from the gym and it’s dark out, the steady Seattle
rain falling, bringing with it the cold autumn weather that has been held off
for the past month. Pressure’s on. It feels like college again and the many
all-nighters I pulled to finish a paper on time. I need to write. I need to
drink. Choices. So many choices.
And this is the moment where I reached
adulthood, dear reader. This is when I became an adult.
I take my notebook and the show’s Bible
(the book of characters, plotlines, etc.), and I go to my bar hangout. And on a
Friday night, I sit in the corner of said bar, and I work. In a bar. On a
Friday night. I remember in college what a Friday night at a bar meant, and I
laugh dryly in my mind. The owner of the bar gives me free beer and I bury
myself in the task at hand, politely excusing myself from conversations with
the men who curiously approach my corner table. The hours pass, and this
motherf***ing screenplay gets written. And as I drink more I actually laugh a
little bit at my comedic creative genius which probably isn’t that funny, but I
wouldn’t know because I haven’t had the guts to read what I wrote since I sent
it off to my boss at 1am last night.
So that’s how I became an adult.
No comments:
Post a Comment