Day 31: What If...?

If there's one thing that I've hung onto from my youth until today it's my love for the hypothetical question. Because 90% of my life is actively spent in my imagination, I'm all about the myriad impossible possibilities of existence. (Kind of like Stephane from Science of Sleep, a film that I loved when I first saw it, but watched recently and while it remained a fantastic film I was SERIOUSLY bummed out by it. Like enough to write a blues song or something. A sad, sad, sad movie, it is.)

There's this awesome scene in Richard Linklatter's Slacker where a guy (played by Linklatter himself) hops into a cab and talks about an alternate dimension in which all of the choices that we didn't make in life and the consequences that would have resulted therefrom have played out. This has always been a fascinating idea for me. Being dubbed "too careful" and "too cerebral" by friends of mine (you know who you are), I'm sure there's a Proustian epic filled with chances that I didn't take and decisions that I didn't make in an alternate dimension. Maybe there's something to be said about mulling over an issue to the point of inconsequence though. This will be the topic of the first book of philosophy that I write. If I garner enough followers I may start a political party that will eventually be dubbed incendiary by a senator from Wisconsin for its Un-American logic. My career in film will be ruined when I am called before a congressional committee and blacklisted.

Anyway. I'm not quite sure what my original point was. I think I began writing with an entirely different objective in mind, got on the topic of movies, and began typing Beckettian nonsense as it emerged in my exhausted mind. Cool, no? Why not continue...?

is this real life?

What if I wake up tomorrow and the production period hasn't even started? I haven't written the script for my film yet? I'm not an NYU student?

What if I wake up and I'm back in Michigan?

What if The Godfather, Breathless, Stranger than Paradise, Do the Right Thing and West Side Story were never made?

What if Coltrane, Vonnegut, and Truffaut were still alive and I could have coffee with them?

What if...?

What if...?

What if....?

Boom operating puts me in a strange mood.

Ryan the Sound Guy