Cleaning Out My Closet

I know it has been a while since I've made a substantial post, but I've been in sort of a transitional funk.

The representation hunt is rather frustrating; turns out that even semi-ing in the Nicholl Fellowship won't get people to read your script particularly fast, though it's out there.

I finished a just-about-done polish of my supernatural thriller, which is sitting on the window cooling; I want to read through once more before I deem it ready to give to people. Hopefully by then someone will actually want to see it.

Meanwhile, I'm cleaning out my closet, and throwing stuff away. This has long been a problem for me; I'm a major packrat. Among the things I had boxed up in my closet are several hundred old cassette tapes, tons of TV shows and movies taped off TV in the 1990s, old paperback books, copies of coverage that I did before I had a computer, and of course, every rough draft of every incarnation of every script I have ever written, and every note I ever made about it on the way.

It's the last two stashes that have been going first. The coverage has already been disposed of, though I thoughtfully (anally?) shredded the cover page of every single one. Aside from a few early notebooks of script notes, all the loose pages of notes and all the extra copies of intermediate drafts are going. I'm keeping several drafts of all my scripts, but when a box of stuff can be boiled down to a script or two, most of that box has to go.

I've also uncovered some writing that I thought was lost, or that I had completely forgotten about, including a pair of puppet shows I wrote for my roommate in Manhattan in the 1990s. One of them was even performed, to a happy audience, though the videotape of that performance, which I wasn't at, is amazingly dark and inaudible.

I also found some sketches that I wrote for a sketch comedy troupe that I belonged to in Manhattan, several of which were performed during the troupe's one performance, before they gloriously imploded. I wasn't at that show either (I was a writer, not a performer).

I need to stop missing the few minor successes I've had.

Needless to say, when you clean out your closet, you find yourself reliving your past. I found a big envelope full of letters from friends to me at camp and college, back from the day when people actually wrote letters. I found a box containing every Playbill from every play I ever saw in Manhattan (when I spent a couple of years reading for a Broadway theater in exchange for free tickets to pretty much everything).

I found my old Rubik's cube. There's a box of old 45s, and some comic books, and some trading cards, including a complete set of Mallrats cards, even though I wasn't a big fan of the movie.

I found all my old mathletes awards. Damn, I was sort of a nerd.

The really sad thing is is that I lugged all of this stuff across the country, and then from Pasadena to Glendale to Woodland Hills. Most of it should have been jettisoned long, long ago.

Some of it I'm keeping, still. But I'm trying to toss anything that doesn't have sentimental value, or which I'm unlikely to watch or listen to anytime in the next 20 years.

If I find Jimmy Hoffa's body, I'll let you know.