...And If We Throw It All Away Things Can Only Get Better
Bad news, first off. They fixed Prado Dam. No bursting, no giant flood to wash away 1/3 of SoCal's 20 million people in a rampaging wall of white water. So go on world, go back to ignoring us. You'll come back. You always do. One mountain range burns down and all of a sudden everyone will want a piece of the Cali. Wait and see.

Best piece of local news hyperbole from the whole episode though goes to Channel 4, our NBC affiliate. The reporter, standing in the Corona High School gym (that's like less than 20 miles from my house!) evacuation center surrounded by evacuees, said this: "If the dam were to fail [that's the euphemism, "fail", rather than "rupture" or my own favorite "'splode"] Angel Stadium--that's twenty miles from here!--would be under four feet of water!" He did not add: "Dooooooomed! We're all dooooomed!" and then collapse, swallowing his tongue. Although that would have been some compelling TV if he had.

Today I'm here to write about my close personal friend Happy Fun Ball, the only blogger I know with a worse pseudonym than me. HFB has been on the same career trajectory toward spectacular Failed Writerdom for quite some time. We even have the same lame excuses about our kids and whatnot. I would characterize the arrangement as mutually beneficial up to this point. That or obliquely enabling as we tacitly justify each other's march toward permanent obscurity.

But now HFB has taken it upon herself to torture me by announcing she has decided to write something someone may actually one day buy. I find this new explosion of ambition and enthusiasm to be personally insulting, not to mention a complete betrayal of our unspoken pact to reach Failed Writerdom as a team, to douse each other's creative spark should the nasty, contrarian thing ever threaten the embrace of utter darkness under the all-encompassing canopy of Perpetual Procrastination.

Are you starting to understand why I've never sold anything?

So panicked, betrayed, alone and bored, I took it upon myself this weekend to turn the old Writer Radar back on, just to see what I could pick up.

For those who don't know, the Writer Radar (sometimes intentionally misspelt "Writer Wradar" by people with broken senses of humor) is an innate quality writer's have whereby we are able to observe life at a molecular level, observing and understanding the world around us in ways simultaneously profound and mundane; to collect subject matter from the Everyday, then allow it to germinate into something that will one day bear artistic fruit.

You may know it by it's layman's name, Pretentious Obnoxiousness.

Shamed and annoyed then, I found myself hard at work once again. On Saturday this took the form of sitting on my ass watching the James Bond marathon on Cinemax. Or maybe it was Encore. Somehow my keen powers of observation failed to pick up on what channel I was watching. All I know is that it was in the high channel numbers somehwere where I usually find my soft-core porn.

I think it was during The Living Daylights that it happened: the Magic found me. I remember very clearly thinking it, as though it were only yesterday: why do people hate Timothy Dalton as James Bond so much? I thought he was quite good. Only it just happened that when his turn came, the material had begun to seriously degrade, culminating in the truly awful Die Another Day (sorry, no link... can't afford to perpetuate knowledge of that one). Not his fault, surely. It's probably because he's Welsh. For some reason people hate the Welsh. Is there a more perjorative verb than "to welsh"? OK, maybe "to gyp", but come on. Those Gyspies kind of had that coming.

What was I... oh yes. No, that wasn't the Magic. The Magic was some little detail somewhere started the billiard ball rolling which kicked off the Rube Goldberg machine that is my useless imagination. Suffice it to say, I am now the proud owner of a Really Good Premise.

I'm not going to share what the premise is because like every other Failed Writer I'm convinced that everyone is out to steal my few precious Really Good Premises, so I guard them jealously. I put them on a list with a short synopsis. I currently have 27 Really Good Premises whose security is absolutely guaranteed by the knowledge that they will never be developed into anything read by the general public, if they're developed at all. Most are carefully and meticulously ignored each and every day while I play Star Wars Battlefront and read blogs. Now that, my friends, is secure.

The ones I have developed are usually fairly disappointing. The curse of the failed writer is impatience. I want it to be great just as soon as the words travel out of my head, down to my fingers, out the keyboard and on to the digital page. But everyone tells me "real writing is re-writing", which--I'm sorry--just sounds like alot of work. Don't these people have internet access?

The awful truth may be that my particular writing talents (yes, make your funny jokes) may be less suited to fiction than to writing, say, about the legal and cultural ramifications of the Act of Union between England and Wales in 1536. That's what my master's thesis was about. I did quite well. And somehow it all comes back to the Welsh again...

If I do say so myself, however, I can write the hell out of a blogpost. Some tend to be somewhat self-interested and long winded. Wordy. Dull. Bloviatory. Full of made-up words. Insufferable. Obnoxious. Ill-informed. Unfunny. Did I say "dull"? Dull.

The weird thing is, I've never been so dedicated. I write on this thing six days a week, some times seven. Meanwhile my list of Really Good Premises snuggles safely in a warm corner of my hard drive, safe in the knowledge that they will never be disturbed by human ambition.

Boy, you know, I really thought this was going to be about HFB and her cruel back-stabbery, but somehow it turned out to be all about me. Funny, that.

I blame the Welsh.



This post on the Narcissus Scale: 9.7


Pops

- posted by Pops @ 9:26 PM