Coping With Solitude

DISCLAIMER: I know the Coronavirus Pandemic is serious. People are suffering and dying. There is nothing funny about that. However …

Like everyone else stuck at home with internet access, I have thought up three ways to keep busy while waiting out the disaster.

1. Practice French braiding your hair.

Corey O'Brien

I have watched 100 YouTube videos of young girls with thick flowing locks instructing the rest of us on how to do this. So easy, they say.

meh.

2. Depending on availability and climate, enjoy the sun. It’s spring. Even Montana’s been giving us a break.

2b. If you have a dog, play with him. He’s probably wondering why you’re sitting around the house so much. There’s a chance the dog will remember the Coronavirus Pandemic 2020 as the fetch marathon between cold-cold and out-out.

3. Write a screenplay.

I saw this one on multiple other websites and I have to say, think again. 

It’s not just that among the things the world doesn’t need is a thousand more spec scripts; it’s that there are easier, faster and cheaper ways to break your heart.

But I won’t stay don’t, because even now I’m waiting out film festival notification for a couple of my scripts. Although the festival has been postponed, the announcement day was still today, but apparently not today at 8 AM which is when I started checking the website.

We’re living in interesting times, friends. 

Last week, staring at the empty toilet paper shelves in Albertsons, I found myself having a conversation about bidets with a stranger in overalls and a gun brand gimme cap. 

Interesting times.

Good luck. Keep warm. Stay safe.



-- THIS JUST IN --

Finished as a Finalist with a horror script,

WOLF CON.

The Play

I was once stranded in Amsterdam by a volcanic eruption. Had to have an emergency appendectomy in Scotland. Now, the full-length production of DRIVER'S ED is postponed due to the Coronavirus.

Of course, the virus is serious and people have died, and we all must do what we can to help stop the spread.

But who has this luck?

Three Months In

So, three months in and I'm still managing it. Seems like the only thing that has changed is -- well, okay two things -- one is I'm interacting with the blog more than I have in forever. For better or worse.

And two, I'm thinking about SEEING more than I have in quite a while. 

I always carry a camera, either the Go Pro, the Osmo, sometimes the Oly. And of course, I always have the camera I like to call the fukin' phone. But I haven't really been thinking about SEEING what I'm looking at for awhile, and this project has changed that.

New Rules

Photo by Earl Webb

Social distancing means never having to say, sorry, not a hugger.

The Play

Sometimes a writer is lucky enough to be at the confluence where ideas bang into each other and a story is born. Driver’s Ed is one of those projects.

I wondered as I moved from my college idealism into the real world of paying taxes, making do, and getting by, how would that idealism fare when I had the opportunity to send a fresh soul into the community? If I prepared my child for the world that should be; you know that world where equal pay exists for equal work, and if one acts like a lady one is treated as such. Will the world that exists defeat her? This caused the odd situation that sometimes when I knew exactly what I was supposed to say as a parent, what I really wanted to say was something completely different.

Then in child-rearing, there’s that eternal letting go. From the time the doc cuts the cord to when you release the back of that two-wheel bicycle the first time to the moment you’re in the passenger seat and they’re behind the wheel, parents live through years of just waving bye.

And then it comes down to sex. If it’s not splashed across the headlines as some politician’s misbehavior, it spills out of a health class textbook where denial and death deal the facts. Someone may still dream about romance, but that first talk is always mechanics.  

Idealism, driving and sex bumped together to make a story about a Mom who learns it’s okay to be her true self while she’s teaching her teenage daughter to drive, resist peer pressure and become her own best person.

Driver’s Ed. 

We’re going for a ride.