Emo Day at Lifting Fog
Listen, I came this close to emailing you guys a *poem* so what follows should honestly be considered a nice reprieve
Oh hi! Three months ago I wrote with a poet’s zeal about the benefits of dislocation, of not having a job, blah blah blah and while in the abstract I still subscribe — will always subscribe — to that sort of reckless armchair idealism, it’s currently playing second fiddle to more pressing financial and emotional realities:
The transition from “recent unemployment” to “long-term unemployment,” an ever-so-subtle shift not dissimilar from realizing you’re finally saying “Los Feliz” the correct way after years of mispronunciation, and have settled into something more permanent, seemingly endless
The transition from “dating someone I really dug” to “dumped by someone I really dug,” the dumping of which suggests presumably disparate levels of diggage
Transitions aplenty!
Listen, point #2 is barely interesting enough to warrant even a cryptic Instagram post. We’ve all found ourselves heartbroken at some juncture in our lives; cast aside by someone you’d really felt something for and left to mourn the loss of some beautiful alternate future1. “Here’s what I’m feeling,” on its own, offers about as much entertainment value as “I had the craziest dream last night.”
…But because this is My Newsletter™️ for which I receive no compensation (see point #1), and therefore should feel beholden to absolutely no one, there’s nothing stopping me from elaborating on it for at least a few paragraphs!
“What is this salty discharge?”
We met at a gas station, weirdly enough. Big Zippy had enough in the tank, sure, but my windshield was just caked in dust and debris and I figured why not lay in a nice squeegee sesh with a side of tank-topping? I pull into pump 7. It’s just another moment in time, another hum-drum errand until I look over at pump 6, and there she is: this girl, this luminous Exxon angel, trying with all her might to swipe a card the machine simply refuses to recognize. She’s frustrated, and lets out this…I can only describe it as a harumph. It’s the cutest thing I’ve ever seen at an Exxon station; she’s the cutest thing I’ve ever seen at an Exxon station. “Shoot your shot, Hendog,” I think, then actually say out loud (but not too loud). I offer to pay for her gas. She looks me up and down. “Fine, sure,” she says, “if I can pay for Penicillins later at Little Dom’s.” Swoon.
…I’m kidding, we met on Hinge.
Now, to call it a “break-up” might be excessive when you’re talking about someone you’d only been dating for two months, but she was a person who quickly came to mean…quite a lot to me in a short amount of time. Actually, fuck it — I knew the first time I spoke to her on the phone that this could really be my person (one of them, anyway), psychotic as that sounds, and that feeling only grew over the time we spent together.
I liked everything about her: the way she chose words like a pro golfer selecting clubs, her dedication to issues of social justice, her curiosity, her hair, her laugh. I could write you a whole essay2 about this stuff, how it affected me, and the ease I had imagining both a near future with her (burger tour of LA) and a farther off one (Bingo night at the nursing home — twist, I’m a ghost). She told me she felt like she’d known me forever; that she could “picture sitting next to me on the couch, watching ‘Julie & Julia’,” which I suppose in another context could mean “I see you as sort of a gay BFF” but I only took — correctly, I hope — as a projection of very specific intimacy. I melted. Lacking full ‘Black Mirror’-style brain-screening technology but feeling pretty good about the things she was saying and vibes being projected, it seemed like we were moving in the same direction. I hadn’t felt this way in a long, long time.
“What happened next, Grandpa?” our grandson Gilgamesh, from another reality, asks me. “Did things work out for Henning-35 and [Redacted]?” Henning-69 (nice), who has eight heads and a bionic penis for some reason, shakes his head. “Not all realities are as nice as this one.” 😢
She called things off, saying she “didn’t feel a spark,” which both gutted and confused me. No spark? After two months and like fifteen to twenty things you said and did that were all frankly board-certified spark material? Come on now. I concede she could have been a robot, or possibly working at the behest of a Miss Havisham-like crone, exacting her revenge on young(ish) suitors, but neither scenario seems very likely. As it stands, relationship cause of death is just listed as ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Anyway, it doesn’t matter now, the forensic evidence of it. I’ve already gone over it with friends and mental health professionals like 87 times, and none of it changes the result: a connection I really believed in didn’t work out. Tale as old as goddamn time! This is not a post about that. I actually have no idea what this post is about yet.
This Santa’s Got Claws
Let’s pivot. I may have already told you guys this, it’s truly impossible to know, but I’m currently unemployed. And when you’ve got a lot of time on your hands — compounded by all the feelings described in the above paragraphs! — well, that’s just a perfect breeding ground for unchecked, potentially batshit creativity.
For the past few months, I’ve been working with my friend Clay on a feature-length screenplay called ‘Sleigh Queen’. Many of you have already been subjected to a soft pitch of this idea, even a full-chub pitch, but for those who’ve managed to avoid either until now: ‘Sleigh Queen’ is a hard-R Christmas comedy about a veteran drag queen named Rhonda Civic who, after a chance run-in with Santa Claus, takes over Christmas duties while Santa joins the New York drag circuit. Here’s the title page:
Without fully elaborating on its plot or themes, I understand that ‘Sleigh Queen’ might sound like a cynical effort. And it 100% was, to start! The title came first, then a joke tag line (“this Santa’s got claws”). I definitely thought “this is a slam dunk Netflix holiday movie” long before giving any consideration to stuff like “so what happens in it?”
But over the course of eight months, and many overpriced cups of third wave Silver Lake coffee, what started as a joke has transformed into a…surprisingly deep comedy about finding your identity and defining your own story, that nevertheless includes a Christmas Eve competition called “Deck the Balls” and a scene where Santa learns how to tuck. I love our characters! I love learning new wrinkles of theirs well into a 133 page second-draft. I truly believe that someone watching this (very hypothetical) movie one day will laugh their asses off, then wonder why in the hell they’re suddenly crying. This is the kind of emotional whiplash to which we aspire.
I’ve felt crazy sometimes when I sit back and tabulate the sheer volume of work we’ve now devoted to something that 1) no one asked for and 2) no one may ever pay us for. But at the same time, working on ‘Sleigh Queen’ has just felt so… right (you may feel differently, Clay!) — and whatever the ultimate outcome, a frankly spirit-saving exercise. I hope ‘Sleigh Queen’ turns into something; I hope we’re paid for it, I hope it bolsters our creative reputations, I hope it transforms from words into performances into screenings and finally into boring “so what are you watching?” dinner party chatter, the end goal of any artistic venture. But even if it becomes NONE of those things, well…
Yup, there it is, I figured out the connective tissue
You see it too, right? It’s so trite it may as well be the the first half of this latest season of ‘Ted Lasso’3. I’m talking about belief4.
Would-be relationships fizzle out (again, possibly due to the unseen machinations of Miss Havisham-esque figures operating in the shadows). Creative projects fail to gain any professional traction. But until the hammer drops — in whatever world that hammer-dropping’s taking place — I see no point in assuming it will. I believed in that romantic connection like it was goddamn Tinkerbell and no, it didn’t work out… but does anticipating failure from the jump do you any favors? That emotional wall you’ve erected might be protecting you, sure, but as the 2001 Jake Gyllenhaal classic ‘Bubble Boy’ proved… it’s also keeping the good stuff at bay.
It is exceedingly possible that ‘Sleigh Queen’ won’t work out, either; that in the end it will have been just a fun project for which we generated far too many Christmas puns and drag names5. We’ll cross that candy-cane-buttressed bridge when we get to it. But in the meantime? I’d rather believe it really is the “so dumb it’s brilliant” idea we think it is. And also share it with people — specifically this lucky mailing list — on the grounds that telling you about it is, on some level, its own form of belief.
“And believin’s somethin’ y’all should never stop doing. Don’t. Stop. Believin’. That’s some rock and roll with a big ol’ slab of truth butter from Journey’s Steve Perry” - Ted Lasso, probably
The moment you take some wild hope out of your brain and expose it to oxygen, you are setting yourself up for disappointment. But you’re also setting yourself up for greater joy, for shared celebration, neither of which would have been possible if you’d just kept this shit to yourself6. Believe, goddammit! You’re up a tree with no guaranteed outcome, no pre-ordained ending, just the blind optimism that got you up there in the first place, and maybe a few easy Ted Lasso-isms to snack on while you’re waiting. ⚽️👨🏻🇬🇧 Belief in the thing, not the thing itself, being its own stupid reward.
PS - a reminder that you are free to unsubscribe from this LiveJournal whenever you want!
Anyone who hasn’t is an absolute goddamn psycho and I don’t know how you got on this mailing list to begin with
I mean I don’t know what exactly you think *this* is, Henning
‘Ted Lasso’ is fun and I watch every week but can we please just acknowledge that shows need narrative conflict and “this Christmas party needs more tables” doesn’t count
Originally I wanted to say “the power of trying” but that was bending over backwards to make a joke about the little-seen show ‘Trying’, which is also on Apple TV+
“Gerri Mandarin” might be my favorite that we’re not going to use. Yours if you want it!
If all of this sounds very Brene Brown-y, well, I’ve been reading Brene Brown. Who honestly sounds *a lot like Ted Lasso*