Experiments: One Page at a Time - 1

I WILL BE POSTING A PAGE A DAY OF SOME EXPERIMENTS I'VE WRITTEN IN THE FUTURE.

Some people can write without thinking about it. Other people need to stare a long time at a blank canvas. I have to make it a performance. I imagine a stage. My words appear on a screen.

I can see imaginary friends in the audience I talked to when I envisioned myself as a winter fly dead in a cupboard of a Jack Kerouac haiku. Old chums with tacky names like Gupta, Sven, and Roger. That is one possibility.

If science fiction that dealt with robots and time machines was doing better these days, I would probably invite a man named Gupven (photosynthesis) who had a robotic brain to come and discuss the finer points of quarks and other pseudo scientific topics without any firm basis in theoretical physics because I have no background in science and I’m too lazy to find out the inner workings of Stephen or Gupven or whatever’s digital mainframe.

Without getting too meta on the data, or dodo on the DADA, or dido on the doo-doo, let me say that while I stood on this stage of the mind, I motioned to a young maiden who compelled me to speak to her from a shared perception of the world as a constant distribution scale dictating how much any variable or human being might desire or want me and how my life depended on this approval or attention because of my insecurity and jaded hipster or post Generation X lifestyle.

The devastating truth of the matter is that my conversation with this woman I often envisioned as being on a stage in my mind was not actually a figment of my imagination, but a real live American housewife of 36-7 years old with a love for Lindsay Lohan, and a slight distrust in me as a narrator, since I would be telling our story – and notice I say our – when, in fact, I am not the narrator of the story, but a character who is speaking through the narrator in a very confusing manner.

To bring this horrendous opening to a close and offer the first segue into a reality readers can accept, let me offer a few specific details to help ground us in the X, Y, and Z of our American housewife and the main character of our story.

My name is Glen. I am a script doctor for Hollywood movies. I don’t live in the past or the present. That means it could be the future by now, but how am I supposed to know when you’re reading this, or if you’re in some movie theater, and some jack-off hack of a writer has decided to use voice over done by some droning asshole with a voice like Christian Slater, and you’ve got me getting to the punch-line and I say something stupid like “Greeting and salutations” in that bad cop movie he did. Jesus, that was a bad movie. Anyway, I’m Glen. This isn’t some crazy story or anything. It’s just some bullshit that happened when I got my heart broken by an American housewife. It’s reality, you know? Every once in a while I’ll try and make things more interesting and get you all confused with some fancy footwork about how I’m not me and you’re not you and blah, blah, blah, and who is Glen, and who is Veronica really, and we’ll all feel a little bit smarter or more confused based on how smart or confused we already are. So, Veronica...