SoaP

You know it’s late at night when conversations like the following develop:

“It’s kismet!”

“Kiss who?”

“Not me!”

“Fuck.”

“Not that either!”

There is a bottle of maple syrup on my kitchen counter, won yesterday night at the NPC Pub Quiz. It is glass and allegedly modeled on the State of Liberty and amber with sugary goodness, looking in all respects so much like an Oscar that I can’t help but pick it up every time I walk by and intone, “I’d like to thank the Academy…” They say that those who pick up an Oscar replica and fake like they’re accepting the award for best supporting actor tend to be passive-aggressive; those who accept for director, type-A personalities; those for best actor or actress, ego-driven. I tend to rehearse my best-screenplay speech, so I’m not sure where that places me, other than mildly delusional.

M. and I did a read-through of the screenplay on Wednesday night. What I thought was a pretty decent first draft is going to need its proverbial flooring torn up and replaced, particularly in Act II. It reads too much like stuff that’s come before. In the meantime, a couple of freelance projects and work have been chewing up my time. I’ve become cynically insurgent against one project, seeding it with lines such as, “Ronald Reagan’s greatest achievement was remaining relentlessly chipper in the face of the threat of Soviet hegemony.”

It’s either that or sparing my sanity by watching the new fan-edited trailer for next year’s shoo-in for Best Picture, “Snakes on a Plane.” Actually, I'm enjoying how the term 'Snakes on a Plane' has started to register in the popular lexicon as a sort of geeky 'C'est la vie,' a kind of shorthand for a sense of existential resignation.

Sports Gods Are Just Like Us

Sunday afternoon and I am lost in the bowels of the Verizon Center, trotting down white cinderblock corridor after corridor, looking for the Press Room. I have my press badge around my neck, which is probably the only thing keeping me from being tackled to the ground by some roving security guard. Through layers of concrete, I can hear a couple of thousand people cheering; a gaggle of cheerleaders runs by at one point to take starting positions. Finally, I find where I’m supposed to be going – a bunker filled with gray semi-cubes, a phone and a plaque bolted to the wall of each one: Associated Press, Washington Post, Washington Times, etc.

I am none of these. People glance at my tag and the name of the magazine on it with curiosity, but nobody speaks up. In the next room, a crowd of cameramen has gathered to watch the finale of some NCAA game on the television above. I have a fair amount of money on the tournament but can’t tell the teams apart; made my selections last week based on a complicated mathematical system that my editor up in NYC devised but whose thickets of probability and numbers I can't penetrate. Unlike everyone else here, I have little interest in basketball (although I do have an interest in making a 2000 percent return on my cash investment); I grab one of the plates of slowly melting pie lined up on the nearby counter, and find an empty table, and work on my interview notes while the small crowd around me erupts in cheers at a near-basket. Sports reporters seem to be artifacts of a bygone era of journalism – they remind me of the guys from the Sun-Times and the Tribune who used to hang out at the Billy Goat on Hubbard Street in Chicago – profanely avuncular, often massively obese, chewing out copy rapid-fire on the phone, the look in their eyes like they’ve seen so many press conferences where the coach talks about how well the team is doing, they practically don’t even need to attend anymore. They wear faded polo shirts and glasses and sometimes swipe a soft rhetorical paw at the team employees, dressed in slick suits, who cluster around them and jabber.

The game starts; we file out to courtside to witness the bread and circus. Players’ moves and collisions, which resemble nothing so much as airy wire-fu from a bird’s eye TV camera, becomes sweaty and crunchy when viewed from six feet away. The Wizards are playing the Bulls. Fortunately for the hometown team, they are playing the Bulls about ten years past their sell-by date; the Wizards win by ten points. The giant screens above the court flash messages such as ‘the Verizon Center tries to create an atmosphere conducive to family entertainment,’ as the cheerleaders roll out at halftime to do some sort of borderline-stripper routine. Yeah, fun for the whole clan; the irony, obviously, is priceless.

Afterwards we file into the locker room for the post-game interviews. Each locker has no door – the better to see your bling – and each is stacked high with pristine-white Nike sneakers, jacks for satellite radio, expensive suits in bags. Each player files out, some of them in towels, playing oblivious for a few more seconds as the crowd of reporters sneaks up on them like hyenas stalking the herd. The average post-game getup for your mid-level NBA player seems to involve a tailored three-piece single-breasted suit of extremely loose cut and long coat, along with diamond studs in the ears and watch-faces crusted with diamonds. The lights on the cameras click on, and every player gives their humble, mumbling spiel about teamwork and chances at the playoffs, and then they lope away. Outside, a bunch of teenagers wait at the entrance to the parking lot for whatever pimped-out SUV carrying their hero to emerge.

I got what I needed, but it came to exactly 1:30 worth of tape. Which I am stretching at the moment, Gumby-like, to 1,000 words' worth of article. Fun times.

Afterwards, went to the Go!Team concert at the Black Cat; they were great and the crowd was raucous, in that arm-waving way; the first opening band was good, the second, well ... made me want to stick my thumbs in my eardrums. A good time was had by all, although I was moving half-speed this morning as a result, my hand still marked with that indelible blue ink signifying over-21. My ears still humming faintly with deafness.

Soon to Be a Major Motion Picture. Ha.

Meanwhile, M. and I finish the first draft of the screenplay: 110 pages, 29 days in the writing. Now comes the hard part, to wit, rewriting. We’ve been firing tender broadsides at each other all day (“You are the man who wants Bollywood dance numbers, insane chase scenes, and 1970s rockers hanging out as ghosts after their deaths, but you’re worried that what might not be believable is that a pilot would have a cargo run to the right airport?” etc.). We might get M’s theatre group together to do a read-through.

In the meantime, there’s also the book. I’ve put the Western aside for now, if only because a giant book with Shakespearean pretensions, tracing along years of incestuous bloodlines, involving genocide and patricide and all those other happy things, is probably outside the scope of my somewhat discombobulated and frantic self at the moment. So I’ve switched back to the other one, which hopefully I’ll have done in a few months.

Memo

From: The Department of Snark
To: World
Subj: Biking

To those nuclear families using the Capitol Crescent Trail on an unseasonably warm Sunday morning, walking four abreast down a two-lane path with dogs in tow and three-wheeled athletic baby-carriers in front: You are the plaque in this particular cardiovascular system of running/walking/biking trails. You refuse to heave to one side or another in the face of incoming traffic, preferring instead to prattle obliviously about breeding as one or another Lance Armstrong wannabe bears down on you at a healthy fraction of light-speed. And while I am not one of spandex-clad legions of weekend warriors with the titanium-frame hybrids, their Type-A personality on full display, I swear next time you refuse to heed the call of ‘left,’ I will drive my front wheel so far up your chubby patriarch’s ass, he’ll be able to roll from one side of the house to the other just by sitting down. Thank you.