how hard could it be?

Long-standing readers may recall that I started keeping a blog mainly as a writing exercise. Once upon a time, I wrote short stories; having fallen out of the habit, I wanted something to goad me into daily writing, and blogging seemed to fit the bill.

Recently, however, I’ve again been seized by the desire to write short fiction, and I’ve consequently spent the last few weeks mulling ideas for my first post-hiatus piece. While several interesting ideas have hit me, they’ve all seemed to structure themselves in my head as screenplays, rather than traditional prose. So, having no real reason to do otherwise, I’ve decided to give in to that urge, and draft my first short script.

I’ve banged out a bit of it today, but suspect it will be a while still before I’m ready to share with anyone. I will, however, pass along the root of the idea, an old zen parable:

One day, walking through the wilderness, a man stumbled upon a sleeping tiger. As he tried to sneak past, the tiger awoke, and began to chase the man. The man took flight, running as fast as he could until finding himself at the edge of a high cliff. Desperate to save himself, the man climbed down a vine and dangled over the jagged precipice. As he hung there, two mice, one white and one black, appeared from a hole in the cliff and began gnawing on the vine. Suddenly, the man noticed on the vine a plump wild strawberry. He plucked it and popped it in his mouth. It was incredibly delicious!

In short, the screenplay is a rough retelling of that story, set in the world of high-finance New York, and focusing around an unhappy young investment banker trying to adjust to life in the city. I can’t promise it will be any good, but I will say it’s certainly a bit out of the ordinary. You might as well stick around to see how it turns out.

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November 3, 2002

hallway woes

In the past year that I’ve lived in my current apartment, nearly every single person coming to visit has cracked a joke about the hallway. Its not just that the hallway is bad – which it is – but rather that it also seems remarkably out of place in a building that is otherwise reasonably upscale.

Entering the building, for example, one passes through a two story high lobby, tastefully decorated with large pieces of Asian art. Then into one of the elevators, marble-floored and oak-walled. Upon the doors opening onto the 24th floor, however, one is suddenly transported from New York luxury building to mid-’70s Howard Johnson: faux-bamboo wallpaper, quasi-psychedelic orange/brown carpeting, and bizarrely overwrought and underlit lighting fixtures.

Sensitive to this issue, the building’s management has been gradually upgrading the halls – jumping ahead twenty years from ’70s HoJo to what strikes me as more of a mid-’90s Holliday Inn. About six of the floors have been converted, and so far as I can tell, there isn’t much rhyme or reason to the order in which they’ve been tackled, so I’m not sure to what I can attribute the luck of my floor being the latest endeavor.

Normally, I suppose, I would be excited at the upgrade. But as I’m only in the building for another few weeks, I don’t suspect I’ll get much time to enjoy the improvements. Instead, I simply get the intensive ongoing construction – tearing out the carpet, wallpaper and fixtures, re-wiring the lighting, adding a drop ceiling and wood moldings, re-painting, re-carpeting and re-wallpapering, and so on. If I’m working from home for the day (as I usually do a few times a week), I’m trapped in my apartment by the piles and piles of construction equipment and materials, serenaded by the sound of power tools and loud Springsteen-esque rock in various foreign languages. In the evenings, after everything has been cleared out, the entire hallway remains covered with a fine, asbestos-like dust of indiscriminate origin.

On the plus side, however, that same dust makes most of my shoes remarkably slippery on marble flooring, allowing me to skate out of the elevator, across the lobby, and onto the street with enough casually-effortless aplomb to make Nancy Kerrigan proud.

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