So I haven't met with Graham since turning in my first draft.... I've tried, multiple times, but it gets to a point where you just stop caring. I'm starting to look at the play again, and frankly I could care less now. I have so much more important things going on in my life. So many projects on the horizon: a poetry art night evolving into something truly spectacular, a free school where anyone and everyone can contribute and teach something to others willing to learn, and countless musical projects. Frankly, I just want to end this whole college experience. I'm not even attending graduation...that's how much I care, really. Everyone I met here is lovely and all, but this environment is just not for me. It's too restricting. So maybe Graham will decide to contact me again. Maybe not. He doesn't really care. I don't really care. I'll try to edit this play the best I can on my own...but really, it's practically worse than jerking off right now. I'm sorry you have to read this Matt. I knew what I was getting into with Graham...I just didn't think it would be with me as well. But I'm not at all disappointed.

Breaking, Music, Cliches

I haven't looked or really thought about my script for weeks. It's not a bad thing. I feel I need this break before I go into draft 2. I need some distance between us before I can truly see what I had originally missed. I should also think about the music attached to this piece...or not. I'm having difficulties with this aspect of my script. Normally, I would not give two shits about writing in music. Plus, Graham would hate it. But this is about a DJ, and the music shows his growth and adds depth to each scene. I don't know. I should worry about the bigger picture before delving into arbitrary things like this. If I directed this, then maybe things would be different. I think a lot these days about how things could have ended up very differently. I don't regret, I just think. I don't really know where I am going right now, but it's strange...I feel more sure of myself than I have ever felt all four years at college. And I guess that's what my play is essentially about: learning to respect yourself and live life the way you want to. It's cliche, but there's a reason why it's overused.

Here's to the Journey

Just got back from Colombia in the deep, deep South. It was rainy, then sunny, then rainy, with a chance of gringo all the time. I wrote a lot, mainly useless letters to lovely penpals, two of them from philly (so not much distance there). I took some pictures with a disposable like a hipster would, but you really should see the strangeness that resulted from such archaic technology. It's refreshing to have something so temperamental. Now I have to get my head straight and write this beautifully piece of crap that will hopefully blossom into something semi-pleasing, at least pleasant in smell. 73 pages in, most likely 27 pages to go. Even one hundred is what I'm hoping for, with lower expectations just as grand. Here's to the journey.

Stomach Bleh

This weekend was not pleasant. I planned on getting work done; I planned on writing until the pages ran thick with my brain stew. I did not plan on catching a stomach virus (what I originally mistook for a hangover). I can still feel it, in pit of my stomach, clenched and toxic and just waiting for me to fuck up on my diet (I'm working with the no-grease police).

I haven't eaten a real meal in 48 hours—just apple sauce and pieces of bread. I did manage to pump out my Writing the Short Film script; I didn't manage to get work done on my Senior Project. I've been around 30 pages for what feels like months (but in reality, is only a couple weeks). I plan on whipping through the next thirty Tuesday, Wednesday night, Thursday afternoon, and possibly Friday. Then I'm off to Baltimore. Maybe I'll bring along a pad of paper and write it out on the bus ride. I just hope my head will clear and my stomach will unfurl by then.

Up in Smoke

How much dialogue is too much? When do you cut a scene? And how important is silence? I must forgo these questions for now and write and write and write and write and write and write and write (and so on and so forth). I need to see that lovely white page tarred with my sometimes not so grammatically sound writing. Push back indecisiveness, pull forth speed. Write it natural and let the voices come to me (the good kind of voices). When in rut, smoke a cig and stew. In the nicotine vapors are some of the best solutions (I just wish the price wasn't my health). Frankly, I blame technology. Sometimes, a cigarette out on the porch in the cover of darkness is the best way to beat distractions. You feel as if you are flickering through time. What year is it? Where did the time go? Oh...you filthy filter. I guess it's time to go back in. In and out and in. Is the end near, yet?

With a Little Gray-Matter Grease, It's Never Too Late

My meeting with Graham didn't go so well. I don't really feel like butting heads with him during this whole process. It's nearing the end, and I would like to leave this university on a positive note. I decided to think of a new play, which seems a daunting task, but luckily it all came rather quickly to me. He told me at some point we must sell out to be heard. Here's me writing about selling out (while selling out):

Dev is an inspiring DJ who sells his cult, record-flipping image for mainstream, laptop-scrolling fame, but at the cost of everyone and everything he loves.

Dev wants to not disappoint.

He has a successful father who works for pharmaceutical company. He blames his father’s leniency for his current position in life: a music major who graduated and now works for a café and DJs at a small bar for cheap drinks and little pay. He fears he has disappointed his father. And when his girlfriend becomes pregnant and decides to keep the baby, he fears that he will only end up as a disappointment to his child.

Then he gets his big break. A club owner hires him as a DJ, but now he must give up his underground music, his record digging, for playing the familiar club anthems of a crowd all about image. His success turns him into something ugly. He loses touch with his friends, he spends less time with his girlfriend, and when he cheats on her for some club bimbo, she leaves him. He breaks down and sees everybody now around him as superficial and uncaring. He ends up causing a scene at the club and is fired.

Wandering home, drunk and alone, he comes across the bar he used to DJ at. The record guru he meets at the beginning of the play draws him in with a poignant song. He gets a job at the guru’s record store. He learns to stop worrying about disappointing others and to just live life his own life: to choose his own music and be content with his smallness. His girlfriend returns to the record store and agrees to allow him to be part of their child’s life. It ends on this note of hope.

I've already written the treatment; now I just need to run it past Graham. I just hope there's less blood spilt this time around.

One

So my professor, Bruce Graham, is nervous about my senior project. I don't blame him. My writing is usually very open-ended and unnecessarily complex, while successful plays usually are matter of fact and to the point. I think I know how my future will turn out...but I'm still young and foolish and very, very ignorant.

Still, I might as well learn as much as I can from somebody as successful as Graham, while I still can. School isn't over yet; the real world still hasn't come to turn me into even more of a cynic. So there may still be hope for me...

I just need to focus on what I want, which is much harder than it sounds. I feel this college experience is one long sorting process. I'm here, now I'm there, now I'm nowhere. Films to plays to films to comic books to prose to plays: will the cycle just keep on repeating? Fuck. No. It's all good. For now, I need to focus on the immediates–like my meeting with Graham tomorrow. I must compact this whole story into one sentence (a tagline, if you will). One sentence. One. How the hell am I going to do that? Yeah. This is going to be a long quarter.