Saturday, Nov. 23, 2002
community is a strange thing. it seems everyone wants some piece of it, but only on their terms. I look at life from a paranoid perspective. whether thats nature or nurture is debatable, but that I am aware of all my ideosyncracies lends a bit of perspective on this world of ours.

I'm almost never the first to start a conversation, unless I've got nothing to lose. Or if i don't care what i lose. but what's with this losing? what has any of us to lose in starting something new? How can time be wasted by doing something? With as little of it as we have, it seems doing nothing, even sleeping is such a waste.

I do a lot of nothing. I bring books to the coffee shop and read while everyone around me chatters on about their lives. Babies are passed from one set of warm embracing arms to another. Friends talk about rent, food, cigarettes, photography and chess. I've got a script in front of me. Not a very well-written one, but it's mildly interesting. I imagine the lines as Al Pacino would say them, as I would say them if I were fifty; or how they'd sound if I were directing them. Every third of a page my imagination is inturrupted by all the people around me. Then I imagine how lonely and rather rediculous I must look. Why does anyone go to a crouded public place to do something so solitary? Everytime a cute girl passes by my eyes would dart after her. If she was wearing a plump, bouncy butt, I'd even raise my head to watch.

Sitting in front of me was a gang of regulars, skaters, highschool dropouts, pizza flippers (ever notice, at least in portland, that there's a distinct cultural difference between the burger flippers and the pizza flippers? Hmm...everything is a script, isn't it?)

One of these kids, early to mid-20s was watching me. My time at the Green has gotten me used to it. i look like a sloppy off-duty cop, at least to these guys. Then I thought maybe he was checking me out, and I suddently remembered how much I miss Josh, shakin' his boney dancer's ass down the hallway. I am acutely aware that this kid's eyes are on me everytime I look up. Elyssa is right; most guys confuse attention for interest. Back to the cop's posture. I don't know why; might as well give him what he expects. Another few pages into the script and I've forgotten all about him.

I'm not really into reading this. It's a mildly interesting story, and I'm sure the finished movie is great. Has Pacino ever been bad, except in the redundancy of his cop roles? But the writing is so mechanical. I must have downloaded a shooting script instead of the screenplay. I like it, though, just the way it is. It's serves just as well to study something done poorly as something done well.

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