I am so quiet these days. I suppose I'm recovering from working so hard on this film. I don't know. I just don't feel like doing anything. That seems a good attitude to adapt a screenplay. I'll probably do that this week. Who knows? Maybe, I'll find some more inspiration this weekend. I head to Tokyo. I've never been there. I've always wanted to go. My life is consumed with Akira Kurosawa films. I watch at least one a day. I think they are moving paintings. I watch them over and over again. I also like watching Toshiro Mifune. He is an excellent actor. I like to see his extreme facial expressions. I might write about my experience in Japan. I might just sit around and do nothing. I definitely feel like I'm in a perpetual daze of 1991 all over again.
Each week a few writers in Seoul are getting together to write comics, stories, or poems on a particular theme. This week when we got together we discussed near death experiences. Below was my week's installment. For some reason, I was interested in the master villain. I may write some more on this, but considering that I haven't written anything and it's almost Wednesday, I doubt it. Usually, I know when something launches long because that's all I do for a couple weeks. Looks like the search continues for the next novel.
Next Week's Writing Assignment: Getting Jiggy
I am not much of a hero. I wish I were. I wish I woke up in the morning with thoughts of “saving the world” or “kittens.” I wish I could look in the mirror and see something besides destruction, brimstone, and a pestilence so severe it peels the skin from human skulls to expose the hidden vanity and dishonesty that lies hidden beneath them. It would make life so much easier to see the “beauty of all things” or have a “poster of Gandhi” on my wall. Believe me. I might have had some semblance of a life that wouldn’t be consumed by how I could invoke a thirty year old curse passed onto me by a witch doctor in Haiti that would make my younger sister think she was a troll, or spend six months trying to hypnotize the students in Mercer County to commit mass suicide rather than studying for my SAT. I could have been a product of Pac-Man, Cheerios, Reaganomics, and the golden arches. Instead, I am hopelessly crippled by my deafening superiority to the insects around me. I sit by myself in the tall, overgrown grass by the bleachers at Roosevelt High and practice my Chinese. That’s the only thing that can soothe my criminal tendencies. Then I think about how I could conquer the world.
I have several methods to bring villainous thoughts into reality. In most cases, I free associate. I don’t mind map or filter a plan with the use of an outline. I just allow treachery to come freely without control. I see the Amoco on Route 6. I think “boom” or simply “get Max, the attendant, to check my oil, while I lift the latch that holds the hood of my car and let it fall on his fucking back and terminate his apparent uselessness to the world.” That’s one of the secrets to creating an effective and ruthless plan for destruction. It’s all about freedom. You can’t hope to melt off the fingers of everyone in your chemistry class by just rigging one Bunsen burner. You’ve got to have the creative freedom to max out the fuse box and pump acetone peroxide and silver nitride overnight into a U-tube, until the next morning, when a mild explosion sends seventeen useless bags of skin to Mercer Community Hospital.
Ruthlessness requires a singular mind that is not corrupted by frivolities that a hero might consider. I don’t sit around in the cafeteria and stare at the smoking hot babes and pretend to be shy because I’ve got some secret identity I’ve got to keep. No, fuck that. I watch how the lunch ladies get the contents for meatloaf from the yellow cabinets by the gas range. I make a note of the size of the bag. I take a few photos with a camera I’ve installed in the top button of my white Oxford. I navigate my way past the buffet line and ask “Miss Charlotte” – because that’s what she asks me to call her – what makes her tater tots so good, and like a dunce, she lifts the key ring from the nail sticking to the side of the fryer to open up the yellow cabinets to see “all them food stores” during her pathetic tour that takes all of about two minutes.
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