Redshirts

AW

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Wow, so that didn’t take long at all. The first response. E-mail posted below:

XXX XXXXX via gmail.com          show details 4:33 PM (0 minutes ago)

Dear ANON-A-WRITER:

Hello, I’m XXX XXXXXX, assistant for XXXXX XXXXX. We received your query and wanted to know whether it was some sort of creative or interview project you’re doing for a major magazine or newspaper. Please let us know.

My response:

Hello, XXX XXXXXX. No, it’s not for any newspaper or magazine or blog (well, it might be for my own personal blog). It’s more of something I’m asking for my own information. Thank you and let me know if XXXXX XXXXX has time for a chat. It would be very useful to me.

The assistant’s response:

Unfortunately XXXXX XXXXX doesn’t have any availability at this time. Thanks for your interest and good luck on your project.

Translation: Your crazy would be fine if it was for People magazine, or maybe even Us, but if it’s freelance crazy, we don’t want anything to do with you.

Sigh. There was a time when freelance crazy was respected in this town! I think it was the early 80s. David Lee Roth was hanging out at the Whisky then. Or so I have heard. I was, like, six at the time.

One down, five to go.…

AW

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New response. This is kind of awesome, actually.

To: ANON-A-WRITER

From: XXXXX X XXXX, Esq., partner, XXXX, XXXXX, XXX and XXXXX

Dear Mr. Writer:

Your e-mail query to XXXXX XXXXXX was forwarded to us by his assistant, as is every letter for which they feel there is some concern about. Mr. XXXXXX values his privacy considerably and was greatly unsettled by your e-mail, both for its content and because it arrived in an unsolicited manner at a private e-mail.

At this time our client has decided not to escalate the matter by asking the XXXXXXX Police Department to investigate you and your e-mail. However, we request that you do not ever again attempt to contact our client in any way. If you attempt to do so, we will forward all correspondence both to the XXXXXXX Police Department and to the FBI and file for a restraining order against you. I do not need to tell you that such a request would instantly become news, severely impacting your career as a staff writer on XXXXXXXXXX.

We trust that this is the last we will hear from you.

Yours,

XXXXX X XXXX, Esq., partner, XXXX, XXXXX, XXX and XXXXX

Whoa.

Just for the record, the e-mail I sent did not begin: “Dear XXXXX, as I happened to be standing over your bed last night, watching you sleep…” It really didn’t. I swear.

Either this person gets more crazy e-mails than usual from people who dress up as their cat and then stand outside their house, or this person got spooked by this e-mail for an entirely other reason. Hmmmm.

Is it worth getting the FBI involved to find out?

No. No, it is not.

Not yet, anyway. Still curious.

And now I’m fighting off an urge to dress up as this person’s cat and stand outside their house. But it’s early yet, and it’s a weeknight. Maybe after a few more gin rickeys.

AW

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From the comments:

I’m not entirely convinced you’ve seen your characters come alive, but as someone who suffers from writer’s block all the time, it’s amazing to me that you can joke about your situation as much as you do on this site, especially when your actual job is on the line. If I were you, I would be wetting my pants right about now.

Oh, trust me. I am. I so very am. My local Pavilions is entirely out of Depends right about now. I shop for them at night, so my neighbors won’t see me. And when I’m done with them I put them in my next door neighbor’s trash can so they can’t be traced back to me. I’m not proud. Or dry.

I’m going to let you in on a little secret, Internet: Part of the reason I’m writing this blog right now is in fact to keep from shitting myself in abject fear. The last time I went a week without writing something creative was when I was in college and I spent six days in the hospital for a truly epic case of food poisoning. (Dorm food. Not always the freshest. I wasn’t the only one. For the rest of the year my dorm was known as the Puke Palace. I digress.) And even then, when I thought I was going to retch my lower intestine right out past my tongue, I was plotting stories and trying out dialogue in my head. Right now, I try plotting a story or thinking about dialogue for a script and a big wall comes down in my brain. I. Just. Cannot. Write.

This has never happened to me before. I am absolutely terrified that this is it, that the creative tank is all out of gas and that from here on out there’s nothing for me but residuals and occasional teaching gigs at the Learning Annex. I mean, fuck, kill me now. It terrifies me so much that there’s only two things I can think to do at the moment:

1. Make a special cocktail of antifreeze and OxyContin and then take a long, luxurious bath with my toaster.

2. Write on this blog like it’s a methadone treatment.

One of these options doesn’t have me found as a bloated corpse a week later. Guess which one.

As for the joking, well, look. When I was twelve, my appendix burst, and as they were wheeling my ass into the operating room, I asked the doctor, “How will this affect my piano playing?” and he said, “Don’t worry, you’ll still be able to play the piano,” and I said, “Wow! I wasn’t able to before!”

And then they gassed me.

My point is that even when I was about to die of imminent peritonitis I was still going for the joke. Failing, but going for it. (Actually, as my father said in the recovery room, “All the jokes in the world you could have made at that moment, and that’s the one you go for. You are no son of mine.” Dad took his jokes seriously.)

Shorter version of all of the above: If I actually wrote in a way that indicated how bowel-voidingly scared I am at the moment, you would have all fled by now. And I probably would have gone to play in traffic. It’s better to joke, I think.

Don’t you?

AW