RIFF MARKET

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All you internet Homer Simpsons out there get your heads out Veronica Belmont's donuts, it's the BIG DOH REHAB here on the SEVENTH DAY OF SPIDERRIFFMAS:


Each contributor to the 12 DAYS OF SPIDERRIFFMAS was told: OK I'll let you jump on a record, but listen Kite Runner! You got 35 minutes max. Because I do not want no Bonfire of the Vanitas like last year. So the only rule was: Thou shalt not write more than 35 minutes--capito?

Also if anybody knows what happened to my man Don Pollyanna get at me! Also if anybody knows a good dentist

FANG

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YEAR IN RIFFS: MIKE SCHUR
A Garbage-Filled Room w/ Shitty Drop-Ceiling

Writing is a dark and dank profession. Either you sit in a room alone, miserable, and self-doubting, and think about how you’re a fraud whose best ideas are both behind you and weren’t even that good to begin with, or else you sit in a garbage-filled room w/ shitty drop-ceiling with twelve other people who are all trying to make jokes to hide the fact that they all think they’re frauds whose best ideas are behind them/weren’t very good to begin with. So: the strike, which is relentlessly terrible and is putting thousands of people out of work because six of the largest companies in the world refuse to acknowledge the somehow controversial fact that a computer is just a differently-shaped box you can use to watch TV shows, might afford me one possible good among its many evils, I thought, a few months ago: the chance to rebecome a human being.

This would include, I figured: walking around, meeting friends for dinners, seeing types of doctors I hadn’t seen this century, and most of all, interestingly, writing something. Irony of ironies -- the only way I figured I would write those short stories I had always talked about, or that small little movie idea, or the novel that is definitely in me, might be during a writers strike. So then we went on strike, so then: here we go!

Except that it turns out there’s a real “Iceman Cometh” aspect to the strike that was not anticipated and is not very cool at all. While I work at a show, all I dream about is all of the other wonderful kinds of writing that I could be doing if not for this damned job that I have. And now that I have all the hours in my day, I can’t do a fucking thing. I can’t even open a document. I picket in the morning, and then I just kind of sit there. I pass hours. I watch “Around the Horn” unironically, because it is better than having to write. And apparently it has become crucial for me to check the same 12 websites continuously, on a rotating basis, in case anything new is posted. (One of these sites is my own blog.) I’m not lying when I say that I accepted NBS’s assignment, here, because it would force me to open a document and type words.

N.B. that I did not have this problem pre-strike. When I was writing, I could keep writing on other projects. It is the absence of regular writing that has led to me not being able to write other things. Which is interesting in some psychological way that I can’t quite parse.

I read in The Omnivore’s Dilemma that in order to counteract the horrifyingly cramped quarters in which hens are forced to live on conventional farms, organic hen farms also have to have a small outdoors area where the hens can run around and play and be hens. But the thing is, hens just hang out where the food is, and since the food is distributed in the horrifyingly cramped quarters in which the hens live, they just ignore the outdoor area, because they’re forgotten how to like relax and hen it up. I think you see where this is going. It turns out I love and miss and crave the shitty drop ceiling and the garbage smell and jokes made by other fear-sublimating writers on the staff. I want to go back to my hen house. It’s weird and cold and lonely outside.

So that’s why the strike should end. Is that what I’m supposed to be writing about? I’m 33 minutes in, so it’s too late anyway. And by the way, lest this document fall into the wrong hands and in any way be used as agitprop about how weak the WGA is and how we’re all going to crack, allow me to add that the companies are being greedy disingenuous dummies and I’d rather watch 50,000 Around the Horns than sign their crappy deal and trade the future of union labor in this country for $250.

One piece of good news = I have seen a lot of the doctors I wanted to see. I have five cavities and my vision has gotten worse since 2002. But dermatologically, we’re good.

97 S'FANGS

Labels: year-in-riffs-2007