more static for the white noise

After years of wasting my workdays, reading blogs and diatribing in reply posts and the darkness of my own cave, I have decided to prick my finger and do a few cave drawings of my own. Having seen The New York Times devote many pages to the fabulous world of blogging, I am certain that I can finally declare the entire community 'uncool' and join the huddled masses of despondent writers and self-proclaimed fringe and see if there are any brave (or bored) enough to venture into my subterranean hovel of rent-stabilized angst.

For those of you who know New York City from the movies (via Martin Scorsese, Sidney Lumet and/or John Cassavetes), let me be the most recent to tell you that those days are long gone. New York City is holding onto the tattered remains of hipness with bloody fingernails. When I moved to the City 3 1/2 years ago, I envisioned a day where I'd be talking like Serpico, churning out dangerous, provocative plays in East Village basements and doing loads of speed, all the while fending off hustlers and lowlifes with my honed street smarts. Instead, I've been introduced to the $7 minimum drink price and three years of achingly-dull marketing work at Lincoln Center.

Now, I am unemployed and living at the far northern tip of an island called Inwood. Up here, the only cultural advantage is that I can scrawl "New York, NY" on my return mail address... well, that, and a fantastic park. This neighborhood is considered to be up-and-coming because it's the last affordable place technically on the island and the nearest coffee house is 20+ blocks away so its air of desperation is taken for aloofness. I have been hibernating in my cave for the last 5 months, watching Final Draft cursors blink and planning exactly how early in the day one has to crack open a bottle of wine before he/she is considered to be in full posession of a drinking problem. Ten pages of my spectacular screenplay-in-waiting have been hammered out. That averages out to about 2 pages per month. At this rate, a 120 page screenplay will take me 60 months to write. Unless I'm churning out a fantastic adaptation of The Silmarillion (which, unfortunately, I am not), there is a major car wreck around the next bend of my ol' career track.

And now here I am, fantasizing that I am the new Hunter S. Thompson of the blogging world (or at least a Lester Bangs) and dreaming that there are others out there others with a similar taste in music, movies and ideas who are as mindlessly searching the internet as I did only months ago. Being very much my typical self, I am starting yet another project because, unlike finishing a project, I am REALLY good at starting something new.