Christmas is ruined

I got the email on Thursday that USA was not doing any Christmas movies this year, so my movie is DEAD. I felt the plunging elevator sensation I feel whenever I find out that a project is dead. Which is 90% of the time. Is it me? No, most writers will tell you the same. One out of 10 gets made. I get paid for 10 out of 10, but still… It would be nice to have something less dusty on IMDB.

I went to see Sorry To Bother You tonight. Well we only got to see about 40 minutes of the movie. Then, as if we were watching a streaming film on a bad connection, the movie stuttered and froze. I knew that with digital projection the “print” of the film was delivered via the internet, but I had no idea that it was streamed rather than downloaded to a hard drive. Apparently because of the heatwave we’re having, the distribution point and/or the ISP had a black out and the theater couldn’t play the movie. We went out into the lobby, where the heat had overwhelmed the AC and crowded into an endless line to get our “raincheck” tickets. It was so Soylent Green. The whole thing was kind of a perfect, dystopic moment — emblematic of 2018 in every possible way. What I saw of the movie I really liked. I think it’s the first Marxist comedy I’ve ever seen. As a panicky gay, prone to worse-case-scenario thinking, life in the US right now feels like the Weimar Republic. I can’t help but feel like some really dark shit is about to come down.

So yes, we had temperatures in the 40’s this week. In LA it doesn’t usually get that hot until October. We have an “Indian summer” and you’ll get those sort of temperatures. For it to be scary hot in July is ominous. What does the real heat of summer hold for us? My lime tree baked in the back yard. It was a couple of years old, well established, but it just dried out and died in the heat. I’d planted it after learning that the Mexican lime farms had been taken over by Narco gangs in the wake of legalized weed. Lime prices in town went from ten cents per lime to a dollar per lime. Not to mention, you were supporting deadly Narco gangs by buying limes. So, grow your own, right? We have the climate. Yeah, not if the sun kills your tree in a 5 hour span.

At the Arclight theater in Hollywood, they have a six level parking garage next to the theater. It’s a popular suicide spot. They have gotten around to putting a razor wire topped fence on the top level. I was thinking about the absurd irony. “I’d kill myself, but I was discouraged once I saw the razor wire.” It makes sense, though. You’ve no doubt heard about how everyone who has ever jumped from the golden gate bridge and survived has had the same thought on the way down: “There was nothing in my life that was so bad I had to do this.” If you don’t want to get cut by razor wire, you probably really don’t want to kill yourself. I’m not trying to make light of suicide or depression — I’ve been there — both places in a big way. It’s just the sight of the razor wire at an entertainment complex, and its very sad purpose, combined with this apocalyptic heat has me in a space gloomier than a goth teen’s bedroom.

The future is very weird.