Can You Read My Mind?

The arts aren't for everyone. They're for me maybe slightly more than most on average, but usually in the personages of the people I've dated since my divorce lo these 12 years hence now. I'm sure there's some neither-deep-nor-surprising analysis to be made about someone like me, with an artistic bent but a poor-kid's unreleasable mania for stability first, finding not just the presence but the courage of the art spark both inspiring and attractive all at once. Put that inside the radius of a reasonable driving distance (varying by traffic patterns and gas prices) and I've got myself the makings of love-match. I'm just that kind of an unhinged romantic.

Even if they were regular day-job havers, it became less and less surprising when I would visit their homes early in the dating cycle and I'd be introduced to the room with the laid-out canvas floor cover or the rack of directional lights or the standing easel desk or the lone stool where the sculpture/painting/drawing/pottery/writing/cello-playing would take place. It's an act a vulnerability and trust to open up that sanctum, as all art is judgment, eventually. It's expression that cannot be depersonalized or depoliticized. It's exposure, even when done cynically or with calculation, delineating (at the very least) the artist's capacity for cynicism and calculation. And for the GenXers like myself (and the people I've dated) largely allergic to earnestness, there's always some element of those present, but reading between those lines of offer and retraction is part of the fun of getting to know someone anyway. It works.

If you're an OK-enough ex-boyfriend (and I have my triumphs and humiliating regrets in this area, like most non-sociopaths*), understanding boundaries and the healing power of time, relationships can flow from romantic to platonic and those shared interests can remain in place, just with a lot less handholding in public. Which, it turns out, is very achievable, though slightly more dangerous when crossing busy streets.

Recently one of my favorite people, already one of the bravest and most persistent, talented people I've ever met, has invited me to participate in her side-hustle transition from actor to actor-screenwriter. It's been one thing to be an observer and supporter and cheerleader, but at some point in the 12 years we've known each other, I may have let it slip that I fancy myself a writer of some description, so I've been enlisted to proofread and critique and dramaturge (to participate in!) someone else's creation in the throes of long gestation and birth.

And hoo dang, that is a ride. First of all, you want to be helpful. But if you've never been screenwriter (or really never even read an actual screenplay), you don't know what constitutes effective or helpful feedback. You want to support someone you love, to reward their trust, so no platitudes or blind encouragement, but don't be harsh to overcompensate or milquetoast to undercompensate for possible overcompensation...

But if the trust is really there, when you actually get into the work, the beat-by-beat responses take care of themselves. What comes out will be honest, the good and the critical. Though I acknowledge this advice works way better if the thing they present is actually any bloody good.

Luckily for me, it is. A tremendous and profound relief, to be sure, but no guarantee. The business is fickle and cruel, so who knows where it will go? But she tells me it will get made in one form or another and, as far as she's come, I dasn't misbelieve.**

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*Understanding of course that self-proclaimed non-sociopathy is a 50-50 prospect at best.

**All this might lead you to think "hey, it's great you're helping out someone else. Maybe observing her process to inspire you to write something!" To which I would say: "bish, what do you think this is?"

I picked this thing up in 2008, and the old blog in 2004 before that. I've been at this coal face for 18 goddamned years. Sure, it's aimless and pointless, a series of castoff thoughts barely considered and almost immediately abandoned, but I think you'll agree at this point, even if it's just by an accident of accumulated agglomeration, that it constitutes something. It's a joining of things I dropped as we walked, without realizing a forming pattern or a path; maybe the way dustbunnies, if left to collect, might eventually form an actual rabbit. Statistically and metaphysically unlikely? Sure. But I guess it depends on how far back you're standing and how hard you squint.