You know what’s crazy? I’ll tell you what’s crazy™
Californication.
It’s a SHOWTIME production that I’m watching on Netflix.
I’m in season 6 of this kaleidoscope of sex and drugs and rock and roll.
The show is a gratuitous bong hit of Southern California beach life, provocative sexuality, and excess that exceeds.
Californication is mind bending like sniffing glue in a Venice Beach bike shop.
After a day of work, it’s a 30 minute escape from reality.
The T & A is eye candy for the soul. The story lines are an erotic fairy tale where Goldilocks is going down on the three bears.
I watch because it entertains, but in a weird way, it inspires me to write.
The main character, Hank Moody is a writer.
He has amazing success, but like the anti-hero he is, he doesn’t understand what he has and he doesn’t respect what has been given to him.
In last night’s episode, his daughter finished her 300 page manuscript. She is a boring stick figure of bland, but her character wrote a novel, her 1st.
She hands the bound manuscript to her father.
The moment deserves a spot light that illuminates a sultry singer on a stool in a smoky club.
The daughter is nervous as she says “here it is. Read!”
The over sexed scribe stares at her with big saucer eyes and he is surprisingly quiet.
It was a real moment.
For any writer who has ever let go of his writing, this moment was familiar, scary, exciting.
You bang away on the key board creating something that never existed.
The white page slowly fills with black words that form sentences, paragraphs, ideas.
Line after Line.
Page after page.
If you are lucky and steadfast, eventually you will have a manuscript that represents a pound of your flesh, a bucket of your creative sweat, a little piece of your soul.
The daughter is a banal laugh track of a character compared to the neutron explosion that is her writer father, Hank Moody.
She stares at him and suddenly bursts out “you don’t think I’m a writer.”
And then he says what only a writer knows.
“If you keep writing you’re a writer.”
She is mortified.
She wanted him to say “I loved it.”
Instead he gave her what writers often get.
Nothing.
The wisdom was concise. If you keep writing you are a writer.
He tells his daughter to file the manuscript away and write something else.
She is horrified.
She has given birth to this 300 page histrionic chronology of events.
“You hate it,” she says snatching up the manuscript and running away in tears.
It’s tough to bare your soul and hand it to someone else and have them comment on your naked truth.
Opinions are like A**holes. Everyone’s got one, they say.
The key is to keep writing. If your art finds a place to incubate, to make love, to generate a thought, then so much the better.
But if it does nothing more than turn on the individual writer and enrich a private moment between your brain and your computer screen, then you still have achieved something great.
So I am watching this moment between fake father and fake daughter talk about a fake literary work and it strikes me as real.
Writers Write.
I have screen plays and stories and stacks of papers with words filling the page.
All of it is tucked away in boxes that exist in a mausoleum of lost relevance.
What if I dusted off the cobwebs and revisited the stories, I think, as the daughter storms away, her writing pressed against her bosom.
Nah….
Writers write.
What if I just sat down and wrote the great American Novel?
Up to this point, I have never felt I have a great American novel in me?
What would I say?
Is there a Holden Caulfield inside me, hiding in the darkness of his youth?
Is there a character so rich with life that he must over come the prison bars of constraint to touch the fire that burns in the sky?
Would anyone read it?
Would I have the guts to let it go?
After finishing his story, Hank Moody puts on a Warren Zevon song, drinks a shot and fires up a doobie.
He celebrates the conquest of vacuous nothingness.
But then the eyes of those who judge tear across the page like a razor slicing raw meat.
It can be bloody, ugly.
Many can read. Few can write.
But everyone has an opinion.
Those opinions can sting. The thoughts of another can stain the page, even decimate the spirit so thoroughly that sharing the written word with another can retard creative growth.
If writers write, then there must be a purpose.
The words 1st and foremost must satisfy something inside the writer. The words must say something that moves the writer to write.
The words must flow like an angel on one page, dance like a ballerina on another.
At some point in time, the narrative must move forward in a grandiose manner. The main character must chop through the jungle with a machete and wax poetic, sweating beads of jagged glass.
As the scene concludes, the Californication father will stop his daughter from throwing her 1st manuscript in the fire.
“The energy and bond between the father and daughter is real and could be flushed out,” he says.
He sounds less like a dad, and more like a professor.
The young writer looks at him thankfully.
Every writer wants to believe they have something to say, something that others want to hear.
To throw the words in the flame or bury them in a box is death.
Thanks to a fictitious frolic through Hollywood absurdity, I get a moment of clarity.
Writers write.
If they don’t like what you just wrote; that’s ok. Write something else.
If it completes you, if it makes you smile inside, then that’s half the battle.
Just remember that writers write.
Opinions like A**holes can only deflate your spirit if you care enough to let it.
Californication.
So much more than sex and drugs and rock and roll.
Life’s Crazy™