Made For TV Movie (Part I)

(Cue the saxophone. Fade in.)

Gargle tap water and go home hungry. Thousands of hands writing rent checks. Millions of mouths to feed. Four more hands tying knots in ties. Delinquently insolvent and busting at the seams. In the bight of life’s rope. This guy on the radio says, “I don’t want to tell you a story that you know already. I want to say something that will make a difference in who you are as a person. I want to sing. There is too much emptiness out there already. I don’t want to add to it. Sometimes I know that I am not fit for this world. That is okay.” There is a pause here. The pause ends. Then, on the 34-inch plasma screen of a hi-def television, a medium-to-small-sized elf, who has just finished chewing a Chips ahoy! chocolate chip cookie while nodding his football-shaped head to the song 88 Lines about 44 women, says, “So don’t send me away to a nuclear war. Don’t press my suits or darn my socks or mend the frayed ends of my days. Don’t tell me to just settle down.”

(Fade out. Drums. Banjo. Fade in. Then silence for a little bit.)

When the farms are all gone and the fields are bare and the creeks are all dry except that part right over there where the fish have all gone belly-up before the sun has even gone down and the world is a ball of twine.
Wake to an asphalt milling machine on a rampage grinding up the street outside my window.
Laughing House. Looney Bin. Luna. The moon. Selenology. Light shining in darkness.
Nuthouse. Bedlamite. Pandemonium. The capital of Milton’s hell.
Cracking up. Bats in the belfry. A few French fries short of a Happy Meal. Mad. Insane. Batty. Chiroptology.
Nut job. Wacko. Maniac.

(A little zither music. Julie Andrews spinning on a hilltop. Pan the skies.)

We stride through sanity with another Monday in our collective back pocket, lying their steady like a one-eyed jack, or maybe we’re all waiting for Friday’s ace in the hole to come by and sweep us away with a dusty broom towards the weekend, and, like a suicide king abdicating his lonely throne, we are unnerved, and lack the perseverance to chance a glimpse that far ahead at ourselves being the way we will be then.
Cutthroat delinquents, between episodes of spray painting and homicide, stave off boredom by smoking pot and watching old jazzercise videos from the 80s that they acquired dumpster diving.
Diaries are selfish. Dairies are selfishly galactopoietic.
Mood music doesn’t always help your mood. High strung and elusive and making a speedy getaway. Flutes help, but not the sound they make. Flossing with mint-flavored dental floss helps. Jumping over hurdles may not be helpful.
Golden Gate Street isn’t always as pretty as it sounds. Fashionable pessimism is almost as petty as fashionable melancholy, but not quite as seductive. Gutter water comes flowing in all colors. Sleeping in the gutter is rarely meant literally.

(Cut to a random fast-moving splice of unrelated images, like pigs farting and lawyers crying and waves crashing against large rocks. Play the second movement of Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony, but not too loud. In fact, just make it barely audible in the background. Cut to a cat sleeping all curled up on a couch.)

Romance is something that happens in movies.
Darts make a lot of holes in the wall where the dartboard, which is their target, hangs.
Making a living robbing banks is a risky business. Tom Cruise is a scientologist.
Technicolor is a cop out, but it is nice to look at.
I am stupid. Don’t believe me.
There is a crack at the end of the sidewalk. It trips people. They fall over the edge of the world. Some of them have bow ties on. Some are eating marigolds. Most are not willing to jump.
In the movies John Cassavetes punches Ronald Reagan, and Marlon Brando beats up and kills Timothy Carey.
A killdeer is a bird, not an abridged order.
I am fond of fronds but not always ponds, though lakes can be nice when not covered with ice, and oceans are wry compared to the sky, but the wind still hangs on a careless depend.
Homeostasis can seem unnatural at times. Lockjaw can be detected by a spatula test, and can be cured by a tetanus shot. Getting “back to normal” can often be quite an ordeal. My soul weighs less than a feather but more than a wink.
In the future sleep will no longer be necessary. Eating will be a luxury. Water will be expensive. The world will be as one.
Hoodlums still tend to “huddle up,” though they don’t shout, “huddle ‘em” anymore, which is how they got their name.
Giants would be uncomfortable on earth.
Pin monkeys are a dying breed. People used to win a turkey for getting three strikes in a row at bowling alleys during Thanksgiving. Four strikes in a row is called a hambone.
Soon the days will seem to be getting longer, but really they’ll just be starting earlier. Over the course of their lives it is probably safe to assume that people see more sunsets than sunrises.
Playing fetch is pretty farfetched for somebody who’s never owned a dog.
There are many different ways to say, “okay.”

(Fade out. Put the camera down, but leave it on. Record yourself falling on the floor and making cooing sounds while rubbing your head and patting your belly and kicking your legs up in the air as fast as you can, kind of like you’re riding a bicycle upside down. Do this for about 5 minutes. Get up and grab the camera. Fade back in.)

The middle-aged chain-smoking bookie with the red beret on sat hunched over his pot stickers at the counter of the Chinese café. Some steam was rising in a clumpy mist from the pot stickers and it was getting in his eyes, well, you know, because of the way his face was right over them, because of the way he was leaning over there, like I said, all hunched over on a barstool at the counter, and his dad was dead and his dad’s dad was dead, and his dad’s dad’s dad was dead too, but he was still alive, for now.
A clown named Mr. Lampshade was staring in the window of Bloomingdales when he noticed that his nose had turned red in the cold wind.
Things never seem quite as tempting in retrospect.
Mobile homes rarely ever go anywhere.
When you’re down for the count that means they’ve stopped counting. Science isn’t always so sweet as that.
Push can come to shove, but shoving rarely ever leads to pushing.
It is debatable whether whistling can be taught.
The first broom was called a besom. It was just some twigs tied to a handle. After using it, the floor wasn’t much cleaner than before.