Friday, August 6, 2010

Work and luck and work

I want a highway that leads me forward, to all the places where I am going to be eventually, I want to be there now, just for a little bit, just so that I know what to pack. I want to see myself sitting at a round table- no I don't want to see myself, I want to be myself- surrounded by coffee cups and bowls of caramels, I want a crushing deadline, a windowless room, the clock reading three four five in the morning and a group of people, sacrilegious and clever, fading in and out between the sharpness of brilliance and the fog of sleep. I want to throw out ideas like handfuls of birdseed at a wedding and I want to work so hard that my plants die and I forget how to cook.

I want a highway that leads me away from the place where I was born. I want to be there for a few weeks, long enough so that when I'm back I'll have things over which to reminisce. I want to live alone in an apartment in New York, a white painted house in LA where people sit cross legged on the floors and we never bother to move in the chairs because no one is ever really home. Please let me live in the place where the credits roll. Please let me forget to exercise and be so submerged in the script and the season that any amount of sunlight makes me blink.Listen, if you just take me there- just for a few days even- then it will be easier, so much easier for me to be here, now, waving away the ticket to South American, sitting alone on a Friday night trying to pull jokes out of the air, watching friendships grow dust, like I'm on an unhinged bit of continent that is breaking away, working completely on faith, that weird not-really-there-at-all-except-in-weak-moments kind of faith that atheists work hard to deny ever having. Life is built from work and luck and only one of those you have control over. Work and luck and attitude, maybe.

I'm just saying. Typing out a full episode length comedy script when you're all alone with no comedy background-and pinning so much of your life dreams on its success- is like free soloing Yosemite with an infant on your back.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Cousin Katty says: you are already on that highway. or is that too obnoxiously obvious?

Cassandra said...

I don't want to be on a highway. I want to live on a round, spinning globe where things so obviously work in cycles. Where there never really is a beginning or an end. Where living things are always beginning anew and others return to the earth.
If we view time, or our lives, as a timeline, we rush and we hurry. Because the timeline is running out! There must be a finish line! But if we do that then we never really live.

Take it slow, Coogan. Enjoy WHO you are and WHERE you are right now. Then go to Woodstock Coffee & Tea and grab a latte with me so I can give you a big hug. :)