cartoon network

I’m writing something odd these days. I’m writing a script, for free, for a friend who wants to make a no budget feature. It’s incredibly fun to write because she has these big cartoonish sensibilities which are in direct opposition to my more grounded style of writing. The thing is, she can’t write. Not that she’s illiterate, no it’s just that she cannot grasp screenplay structure. Her attempts are tangental and unfocused. She throws in everything and the kitchen sink. As Picasso said, "art is the elimination of the unnecessary." I’ve known her for over 20 years and all her work is autobiographical. She makes documentaries about a variety of subjects but somehow she’s always in the documentary. Like Michael Moore but not as focused.
So this is her first attempt at feature length narrative. She’s made a million short films. You’ve not seen any of her work. Maybe you have if you’ve been living in France. In France it doesn’t matter if a film has a beginning, middle and end. It’s just a slice of life. We went to college together and then she moved to Paris for 13 years. She’d visit every so often and then finally 2 years ago she moved to L.A.  She hates it here like everyone else who is not from L.A. Or everyone who moves to L.A. to make it and doesn’t. And that is the subject of the feature film I’m writing for her. It’s about a filmmaker who after writing a script for 13 years finally gives up trying to make her film and instead agrees to make a no budget remake of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? with an all female cast. 
The film I’m writing is called "Anna’s Midlife Crisis" but the film within the film, the one she’s trying to make is called "Who’s Afraid of Vagina Woolf?" It’s been the most fun I’ve had in years writing anything and I’ll never see a dime from it. One thing though, she loves the first act so far and she’s got actors for all the roles pretty much locked down. Half the cast of The L Word plus a few random trannies thrown in for good measure. I’m in it, too. I play a screenwriter who hasn’t had a produced film in seven years and is currently suffering from severe spinal troubles. Sounds very familiar.
It’s late-ish and I can’t sleep. So odd. I’m feeling very out of sorts. Kind of buggy. I’m also somehow comfortable. That is to say, I’m not bothered by the fact that I’m in pain. My pain isn’t less — I’m just used to it. The other day I caught my nail the edge of the table and tore it a bit and I was actually kind of relieved to have something that hurt worse than my leg.
I met another Spiney today. She told me that the key to living with this stuff is psychological. You have to make friends with the pain. She had a micro d then herniated at another level later. She’s just kind of coping with it. She’s been reading Dr. Sarno — which I’d read months ago. I like the idea and have used parts of it. (He has a theory that most back pain is psychological in nature and that if you deal with the underlying emotions you’ll eliminate back pain.) It’s not entirely a bad idea. But even Dr. Sarno admits that if you have actual nerve compression and inflammatory response you’re not going to be able to journal your way out of it. So I have the one kind of back pain that Dr. Sarno basically agrees is physiological rather than psychological in nature. 
I learned a new word today: Punnet — it’s a British word that means "a small basket used as a measure for fruits." I learned it because I asked for a friend’s Stroganoff recipe and she said it required, "a punnet of mushrooms." She’s British. So, yeah. Punnet. Try to work it into conversation today.