Still dodging the covids

By some miracle, I’ve managed to avoid getting covid. Yes, vaxxed and boosted and generally healthy and cautious. But so what? It has gotten some of my most cautious friends. I kind of braced myself for it with all the travel we did over the holidays.

Classes are back in session at Film School though mostly the students show up on Zoom rather than in person. For all their griping about how “we didn’t sign up to go to school online” when given the choice of driving in traffic or Zooming in, they, like all other reasonable people choose to stay at home. I go in because I’m sick of being at home. I have a good set up in my classroom so there’s a camera in front of the TV and it really makes it feel like those of us who are in the room are just talking to someone who is on the other side of a window.

I wrote a new pilot during December and January about a gay guy who fled his home in Two Egg Alabama to be a hairstylist to the rich and powerful of Seattle’s tech scene, but when his niece loses both her Trumpy, anti-vaxer parents to Covid, she shows up on his doorstep — her head filled with Fox New Lies and Info Wars brain tumors. It’s a culture clash show and is a long angry rant about all the things I dislike in my queer community and all the things I dislike in the world I ran from (the evangelical south). I figured my agents would not like it. They never like queer stories but they loved this one. So that was cool. I’m doing some rewrites but my plan is to try to get staffed on a show and this script is my writing sample. I’ve sold pilots before and I really can’t see this thing seeing the light of day — that’s why I wrote it this way, unfiltered and angry. I should do that more often.

I’m going to see my mom later this month in Florida. My sister says my mom’s memory is going. She isn’t sure of the cause. My mom is on a lot of pills for her various nerve problems (neuralgia) and she eats an all sugar diet pretty much. Inflammatory much? It could also be that my mom has lock-down fatigue but she’s in Florida and they never really took any of this seriously. I suppose though just the lack of normalcy is enough to be disorienting.

My money situation is not great. It’s what I worry about most of the time. My husband stopped working about a month before the pandemic hit here and he’s able to pay his share but nothing extra and sometimes not even that. We got an insane DWP bill. It’s every 2 months here. But seriously, I have no idea why this bill was so high. I have got to get enough solar panels to erase our utility bill. It just keeps going up and up.

Blah. Super dull entry. Which is why I don’t write very often. My life is mostly a comfortable repetition. I was thinking about the David Lynch weather report that airs on KCRW out here. It’s a routine he does where he comes on, gives the weather in Fahrenheit and Celsius, mentions a song title and then wishes everyone a good day. On Fridays he says, “and if yooooooooooou can believe it, it’s a Friday again!” It’s very cute and consistent. Each episode the same. He used to have a comic strip called “the World’s Angriest” dog. I would link to these things but I’m too lazy and links just get broken. Anyhow, world’s angriest dog was the same drawing, week after week but with the dialogue changed. He would phone in the dialogue to the local weekly paper that ran it. They were never funny but I read it anyhow because of how much Lynch influenced me as a teenager and aspiring filmmaker. I wonder, is the repetition part of his esthetic? His transcendental meditation practice? He used to go to Bob’s Big Boy in Burbank and sit in the same booth and order the same thing for years. What comfort there is in familiar rituals. My days are a bit like that. Especially during the pandemic with travel, I mean real travel, being so off the menu. Like who is going to Europe for fun right now?

They say it will be over but it’s hard to believe it could ever be over. Why would a mutating virus that breaks through vaccinations and can leap from animals to humans and back again ever be over? I read something about how they’re finding Covid in the deer population. Even over as in “endemic” feels like a distant dream.

I have to read 10 series outlines for a Sundance workshop. I’ve read them, sort of, already. I convert PDF’s to audio and listen to them first before I read them closely and give notes. I like to quickly get the big picture then circle back for the details. I like to know where I’m going before I get there. These 10 outlines are deeply uninspiring. To me. Maybe they’re great shows. I don’t know, but they all have the same earnest suffering. “A trans woman discovers…” “An inner-city educator fights for…” “An imperiled Native American tribe faces…” Each page weighs 100 kilos — packed with calculated concern. Don’t get me wrong, I like an issue, but I also want to be… entertained? Maybe they’re not meant to be entertaining to read, just entertaining to write.