How many more times?

Makin' me feel the way you wanna' do.  This is the first of possibly many posts that begin with Led Zeppelin.  Bow down to the glory of, please, everyone.  This is also possibly the first of many posts that begin with Led Zeppelin but don't actually have anything to do with them.  Sorry bros and bras, mangs and melons.  This blog is, instead, about how many more things I can fall in love with that are about writers.

Let me list a few, in no particular order of greatness or incredibility: Californication, Mad Men, Bored to Death, The World According to Garp, Dead Poets Society, Shakespear in Love, Castle....my mind begins to lose steam, wheels slowing.  Funny how an idea can seem to incorporate every little thing you do and see, and then when asked to list it on a blog just a few atoms come up.  My point, and I will elaborate a few of these to make my completely random claims, is that as a writer, I absolutely LOVE media that has to do, specifically, with writing.

The first conscious awareness I had in this realm was Californication.  Here's a show about a lot of things (sex and David Duchoveny mostly...wait are those different? ZING!), but it is, at its core, about writing.  I stick to that honey laden Showtime wonder like a bee eaten by a bear.  The first season is an endless amount of Saturdays wasted for me.  And then, round two, season two, they cut the writing.  It is dramatic and sexy and lewd, but Hank the writer does not do all that much writing and doesn't seem to care that his book was stolen.  I realized as this second season fell into an abyss of suckiness what the writers (ironic no?) had forgotten.  A novel.  A new book.  Not a memoir of a rockstar.  Hank is almost literal fiction, an excellent genre, and they moved on.  

Then take Mad Men, the best (yes Dad, THE best) show on television as of yet.  It's about booze and women and secrets, but Donny D, the main man, is at heart a writer.  He has a book of creative work, he needs pencils and paper or he's screwed (too bad Iphones weren't around in the '60s), and he takes to heart what the world looks and feels like.  They may be working for the man, but the better part of that show is the creative acts of a new generation, and that will always be interesting.

I think the real thing that cemented it for me, even after these brilliances, was Bored to Death.  I am now realizing that all of my expanded examples are T.V. shows.  I clearly have too much time and an excellent internet connection with which to torrent.  Bored to Death is me: it is funny and abstract, it is heartfelt in a random act sort of way, and it is actually about a struggling writer.  Hank Moody has his books made into movies.  Don Draper...well it's quite obvious how amazing and well-respected that guy is.  But in Bored to Death, a young Jewish writer has completed his first novel (soon to be me?? hopeful eyes), works for a literary magazine, and is desperately trying to finish, a.k.a. start, his second great work.  He struggles and ends up being a private investigator via craigslist, a career-path I have yet to choose, but all the elements are there.  After watching that show I seriously thought about how dope it would be to work for a magazine and get paid enough to live and then try to write the great next thing on the side.  Or in the middle.  Or wherever, hopefully in New York, just like Ames and his wild antics.

Side note: another serious theme for me and this subject is the undoubtable presence of New York, the city of cities in this world of metropolistic future.  I love New York and I want to live there, write in the snowblown winters and dark maroon falls, thunderstorm summers and Central Park.  New York is a siren of old.

Anyway, I decided to talk about all this because I watched Wonder Boys the other night.  Never heard of it, never saw it, did not blip on my radar.  And then suddenly we are plunged into the world of academia and writers and publishing and funny stories that happen with dogs and fake capguns. And I am transfixed for an hour and a half and want to watch it again.

Possibly there is something in the adventures always told in the stories about writers; their lives tend to take random chance, danger, and a lot of substances and come out on the other side with something interesting.  It makes me wonder if I should take more chances, if I should go out in the dark night with a gun and flashlight and just see what comes at me.  Maybe even without the flashlight.  Or get in fistfights or answer weird craigslist ads or talk to strangers.  But even more possibly, I am semi-certain that the strange in life does come through me, that it blows and whispers and spikes the well of my creative water, and that my work does reflect this in a way.  Sometimes I just feel as if I need more.  Travel was good for that.

Oh the stories we all tell ourselves.

p.s. i don't have an idea for this one but I like the tradition of post scripting.  It comes from the latin post scriptum and means "that which comes after writing."  (Thank you wikipedia, thank you NOT Britannica, viva la revolucion technologica).  Isn't what comes after writing just life?