Culture

Daily Prompt: T.M.I.

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Most of us will live somewhere around 28,000 days (75 years, give or take), and it is estimated that most Americans meet three new people every day. That comes to approximately 80,000-plus people you have met or will meet in person in your life.

(Do you say a personal hello to the person who takes your money for coffee in the morning? Count that person, or start saying hello more frequently and don’t be a Scrooge.)

I have worked as a college teacher, a reporter, and as a retail salesman, and I attend various support groups through the week, so my numbers might wind up skewed a bit higher than that, so perhaps I have already met 50,000 on my way to more than 80,000.

That is a small city, 50,000, or even 80,000. It is as if I never left Poughkeepsie, New York, my hometown, and set out to shake hands with every permanent resident there, never had any other ambitions, and never left. We would call that a weird life, a not-very fulfilling one, but that number describes most of our lives. We do not meet all that many people. It is a football stadium, and not a large one.

Going back a couple generations, when a person could live an entire life in one town, which my grandmother who lived to be 98 did, a person probably met about three people a day. Maybe two-and-a-half. One of my great-grandmothers grew up in Pinsk, traveled across Europe with a baby in her arms, came through Ellis Island, and eventually lived out her years in Poughkeepsie. She probably met three people a day. We call our lives more complicated, and claim they are growing more so, but they really are not. Not in person. I do not think that this has changed by a large quantitative margin over the generations. Most of us know, truly know, only a handful of people at any moment; many of us do not even know the names of all eight of our great-grandparents.

I have not included my online life here. Not yet. According to WordPress, this blog has received over 3600 visitors from 50 countries, from some time in late January to today, at an average visitor count of 14 per day. (Since I started publishing every day, the numbers have increased; 1300 visits have been tallied in the last seven weeks.) I have exchanged personal notes with a few readers who make me blush when I think that they know my writing almost as well as I do. I hope I am an encouraging reader for writers, as well.

Until recently, I have limited my Facebook life to friends I personally know, but I have lifted that self-imposed stipulation recently and I am happy I have. I have under 400 Twitter followers and have had perhaps a dozen lengthy personal Tweet-exchanges of some depth in my three or so years on there. In my online life, as in my in-person life, thousands of encounters to find a handful of true friends I value and hope to someday meet.

When we claim that our lives are more complicated and information-packed, we are not, not most of us, speaking of our personal lives. We are reflecting that we have given ourselves the great gift of more. There are more outlets, more ways to declare to any who will read or listen that we are living a “purpose-driven life” or some other catchphrase (sorry, Rick Warren) without actually living that life. If I am telling you I am living one kind of life or another, how do I have so much time to testify to this? (There are exceptions; sometimes the testimony is a part of walking a walk.)

And every song not only has a singer but a listener, it seems. Everything we hear and read is, in its rawest sense, “information,” but not all of it is necessary. What you prepared for dinner certainly is information, and if I send you directions to my house, that is information as well. We can and will filter out each other. I can give you a virtual thumbs-up on a nice-looking meal and forget I did while doing so. You might be amused I sent those directions that we both know you will ignore.

There is a lot of noise in this world because everyone seems to have purchased a mic and an amp and kept their utility bills up-to-date. This just means good has more ways of declaring itself and so does evil. The numbers of people wanting to be heard have not changed over the centuries, the tools to be heard have.

One hopes that most of the people that we truly know and love contribute more to the information side of our lives and less to the noise.

“… Everybody knows the scene is dead
But there’s gonna be a meter on your bed
That will disclose
What everybody knows …”
—”Everybody Knows,” Leonard Cohen

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The WordPress Daily Prompt for September 15 asks, “‘Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense.’—Gertrude Stein”

Daily Prompt: For Crying Out Loud

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

I’m a damn sap.

Sometimes it’s the television ads. There are some that get me every time. “Aw, they’re getting a new kitten!” (Never mind what the ad is selling.) Or if a character in a movie—at any point in the movie—says something about wanting to “go home,” and at the end of the movie they walk through their front door and say they’re “home” and the music swells and the credits start rolling, I’m a goner.

In most every movie, the emotional climax comes with a montage of clips from earlier in the film, bringing us up to date and sending us along with the hero towards the repercussions of their fateful decision that will save the world, or their relationship, or their job. Or the emotional climax comes when the hero, who has felt apart from the world for so long, at least the first half of the movie, walks down a crowded street and espies happy couples and children and watches all the little things of life that he or she has been missing out on for so long.

Here’s that precise scene in the movie, “A Thousand Words,” an Eddie Murphy vehicle that did poorly at the box office:

I may hate the film, I may despise the performances, I may have been on the edge of my seat about to walk out from the first minutes, but these predictable, tear-jerking scenes will always do their work on me and jerk some tears.

Ceremonies get me, too. Graduations. Weddings. Funerals. Thus if a movie would depict a new graduate going home after a funeral, that might be the most teary-eyed you will ever find me.

So I guess if one would could combine these elements: advertisement and graduate going home, that would really get to me. That should be the topper, right? And indeed, the trailer, the ad, for “The Theory of Everything,” the soon-to-be-released film biopic about the cosmologist Stephen Hawking, provides us with an experiment for my theory. Yes, I have cried, well, teared up, watching this:

Worse, I tear up at the ends of things, whether or not they are tear-worthy. It could be a goofball comedy, but once the credits start rolling, I feel like I am about to lose it. Maybe I feel like we, the audience, are now graduating together from the experience of watching this movie together. Maybe it’s just me.

I possess a big, bright red EMPATHY button in my psyche, and most everything in the culture seems to stomp on it like it’s a cockroach at a square dance. I suppose I can blame my upbringing for installing this tear-jerk response, the fact that I can answer Yes to the WordPress Daily Prompt for today, September 5, which asks, “Do movies, songs, or other forms of artistic expression easily make you cry?” (Yeah, they do. They sure do.) It goes on, “Tell us about a recent tear-jerking experience!”

I had not cried for over a decade by the time I got sober in 2010. For years, I did not cry over anything that happened to me; neither professional, personal, or romantic success or personal, professional, or romantic failure moved me. I claimed, for the sake of getting dates, to be “in touch” with my emotions and “easily moved,” because I read somewhere that one ought to be and I thought that getting teary-eyed every so often counted. (Like many humans, I, too, possess ocular salt water in my head and it has to leave somehow, at least once every year or so.) Usually, when a famous ballplayer would retire, that would move me to tear up, especially when they were from my generation.

That Eddie Murphy vehicle that I showed a clip from, that bomb of a movie, “A Thousand Words,” broke my streak and my shell. The premise is clever enough: a typical rattle-mouth Eddie Murphy character is cursed and learns that he has precisely 1000 words left to speak before he dies. The longer it takes him to not get to words 999 and 1000, the longer he will stay alive. A tree grows in his yard with 1000 leaves on it and one leaf will drop for each word he speaks. When he speaks the last words, it and he will die.

The movie flopped because of the misfire of casting speed-talking Eddie Murphy in an essentially silent role, as his character continuously avoids speaking, but that question resonated with me: What will my final 1000 words be? (Uh oh, gonna tear up now.) When one is an emotional kindergartner, as I was in early sobriety, this is the kind of question that is going to feel vital and deep. Once upon a time, my last words were going to be, “I’ll have another” or “Can I crash here?” What will they be now?

I watched the movie with my girlfriend in 2012. I will not spoil its ending, even though it is easy enough to guess. But Murphy’s character’s last few words (of course the filmmaker frequently cuts to shots of leaves falling from an ever-barer tree branch) got me; I was gone. Tears successfully jerked, I was bawling like a kid. In front of my girlfriend. (She remains my partner to this day, a couple years later.)

Sometimes, even a movie you do not think will, can, or should do it will surprise you by being a real jerk.

Daily Prompt: Casting Call

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

The WordPress Daily Prompt for September 4 asks, “You’ve just been named the casting director of your favorite television show (or movie franchise). The catch: you must replace the entire cast—with your friends and family. Who gets which role?”
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Molly Bloom in “Ulysses” is James Joyce’s beloved wife, Nora Barnacle. This bit of casting was no secret, even while Joyce was at work on his masterpiece. Several voices in T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” are said to be quotes of some of his wife Viv’s statements, and some women’s lines in the poem were written to meet her editorial suggestions. Thus she knew till her dying day that she was in a great work of art.

These are two of the exceptions in literature. Many characters in famous books, plays, films, and poems are “based on” people from their creators’ lives; imagine the havoc that would be visited on those creators’ lives if the real people knew which creations they may have been the inspiration for …

What if Gollum was based on a schoolmate chum of J.R.R. Tolkien’s? Upon learning of this, that person would never have let Tolkien leave the house without forcing him to rewrite every scene Gollum appeared in.

Say that “The Matrix” franchise is your favorite set of films and your family and friends learned that you were hired to “imagineer” a re-boot, at least for a writing assignment like this one. Every one of your nephews and brothers-in-law would be texting and instant messaging you, auditioning via annoyance for the part of Neo. No work on the reboot would even get started as you handled all the messages, and you would be fired.

An even more difficult conversation: How do you, a happily married and suddenly important casting director in your imagination, explain to your wife that she is not your Trinity?

Everyone who hears you are a writer/casting director/stagehand imagines himself the hero of your forthcoming Hollywood epic. Today’s question from the Daily Prompt prompters presupposes that being something important like the casting director is what matters to family and friends who learn you are going to Hollywood, even only in your mind. I once worked with someone whose best college friend wound up as a personal assistant to a famous, Oscar-winning director. It was a strong enough connection (read: college friendship) that my co-worker actually attended the Oscars a couple times and met some famous famous people. It was not a strong enough connection to get movie ideas sent to this busy Hollywood director, or auditions booked with him or his people, no matter how many attempts I watched people make. (We were clerks in a college bookstore, and when this matter became known every so often, impromptu auditions would happen at the checkout line. I did not audition, as I was too busy trying to unimpressively impress the writers who would come through.)

Everyone thinks of himself as a star in movies they are not making.

I have experienced this in reverse, too. A couple of years ago, a friend of mine and I were introduced to a film actor. My friend has a life story about which everyone says, “That sounds like a movie.” Upon hearing it, the film actor said, “That sounds like a movie.”

“How soon can you come out to Los Angeles?” he actually asked, out loud, with words. “I will be there next week, shooting” (insert name of television show) “and I’ll talk with” (insert name of famous famous actor whom he knew very well) “before you come out here. Of course,” (famous famous actor whom he knew very well) “will want to play YOUR part, but I will let him believe this, so it will get fast-tracked.” We exchanged phone numbers and handshakes and hugs and my friend and I got to work. “I will be back here in New York the week after next and let you know how it went,” our friend told us. “Be ready to fly out at a moment’s notice.”

I was sure that I was going to be in Los Angeles for the first time ever in a matter of weeks. I wrote an outline and emailed it to our important but close personal actor friend Captain Hollywood. No reply came. I expanded it into the bare-bones start of a film treatment, probably a very unprofessional one, but does the look of a PDF matter when the story “sounds like it ought to be a Hollywood movie?” Captain Hollywood was going to handle the formatting, anyway, and also serve as our personal key to unlock the Golden Door. No reply came to that work, either, and the promised return from our friend “a week or so from now” came instead six months later. (His television show had been picked up for a full season, so he had been busy.)

When we saw him again, he did not mention our shared project. I half-heartedly brought it up, and he replied, “You’re still working on that? I remember that one. That’s a good story. It sounds just like a movie. If you get anyone’s attention in Hollywood, maybe I can help you find a place to stay.”