Broken Glass

I went for a walk late last night. Even the nights off work, I still can't sleep before 3. It was chilly for an Austin summer night - low 60's - and so I put on a long-sleeved shirt, grabbed a pad, a pen and a flashlight and wandered through the new neighborhood. For close to two hours I walked up and down my neighbor's streets, occasionally the lights of a passing car lighting the way for a second or two before they disappeared and went home. I walked without a destination in mind. I walked to walk, to be outside and feel the cold in my hands and on my face.  


I had hit something of a roadblock with my movie a week or so ago. I had finished the second draft and sent it out to friends. They liked it. It was funny and made them laugh out loud [which is good, since it was a comedy]. But there was a problem with the story itself. They all saw it, and I had felt it since I had started writing. The problem was my main character's motivation, or lack thereof. In a movie, the main character needs a reason for why they are doing the things they are doing. There have to be consequences if they fail, rewards if they succeed; that's what makes a reader keep turning the page. Think of any movie you like. I promise you, they all have this. Mine didn't. So I had a funny script that needed fixing. I put off working on it for days and days. I had already spent so much time crafting this story. So much time writing and re-writing single lines until I found the right one. So many cuts already. And to fix this problem, the only solution that I could find was to cut so many scenes I had fallen in love with and nearly start from the beginning. Because when you pull one thread in a story, the rest can quickly come undone (and if you pull a thread and nothing comes undone  -- maybe it shouldn't have been in the story in the first place).  


When Joe was studying for the bar, he had mentioned that he would walk for hours and hours around Town Lake with his notecards. It had made the studying somewhat bearable, not to mention more productive. The procedures and cases that needed to be memorized somehow became more digestible when looked at beneath the trees and alongside the water. I, of course, had ridiculed him for this at the time, tossing a few creative and witty barbs his way. Somehow impervious to the attacks, Joe kept walking and studying, and in the moments when I got to see him when he wasn't studying, I could tell if he'd been out walking or not. 


And so I sat in my room, staring at a 103 page script that needed changing, and then I'd look at a yellow pad full of new ideas that needed to be transplanted into my unmotivated script. It wasn't writer's block, because I knew what needed to be done. It was as though I was the unmotivated character in my script; I simply didn't want to start over again. I grew tired of staring at a screen that wouldn't write for me, so I thought about what Joe had told me and grabbed the pen, flashlight and pad, and decided that I'd rather be uncreative outside than in. 


By the time I returned home I had outlined the first half of the movie and had pages more of ideas for the second. I stayed up and typed out what I had written down, adding more ideas along the way.  


There was no point going to sleep now. It was 4 am, and I had to take Brogan to the airport in 30 minutes. So I kept writing. 


Brogan knocked on my door when he was ready to go and I grabbed my car keys and tried to detach myself from the script, which has become increasingly difficult to do, but I find I can do through a video game or good music. I thought about good songs to play on an early morning drive, and then  we walked outside and locked the front door and made our way down the path to the street where we park our cars. It was still cold, and even though I'd been out in it for hours, it was still a pleasant surprise.  


We ended up taking Brogan's car to the airport because when we got to my truck, this is what we saw:

I don't remember what I said, or what Brogan said. I think it might have been "Jesus Christ." But that was about the extent of it. We were laughing in the car a few minutes later, and then a few minutes after that we were talking about Wisconsin and in the long silences I could tell both of our minds were there, for very different reasons.

These things happen. Why is there such a shock when it happens to you?

I thought about the broken window and the missing stereo on the drive to the airport, trying to picture the person responsible. It is a sad life they lead, and I doubt a very fulfilling one. They are a thief and dishonest. And that is worse than being a victim. 

Bizarrely, I found myself trying to justify it all. See if I had done something to deserve this. I joked about this with Brogan, something to the effect of: "Maybe this is karma for breaking a heart." It may or may not be, though I'm more inclined to think of it as a random act, an event that is better left behind than continually ransacked for meaning.  

It is a beautiful Thursday afternoon in Austin. Mid 90's, reports calling for it to be in the mid to low 50's tonight. At this moment, a friendly enough man is fixing my window and vacuuming out all the glass from my front seat. "I was so pissed when that shit happened to me," he said. "Wanted to kill the fuckers."  

In a few hours my brother gets off work and we will go out for beers and some food and we'll chat about the window and the stereo I'm sure, and then we'll talk about Wisconsin and how he's feeling. We'll talk about the bike course, how his running's been. He'll tell me a story about Liana in a way that people who are in love talk about each other. I'm sure at some point we'll talk about dumb things that we always do. We'll figure out what time I'm picking him and Liana up for the airport tomorrow. 

And then whenever we finish eating, I'm going to drive home and park my car in the same spot. I'm going to grab the same pad, pen and flashlight, and I'm going to walk down different streets in the same neighborhood.

My stereo is gone. My window is in pieces. I will fix the window. I will buy a new stereo. If only all of life's problems were this easy to fix.