At first I thought that would make a great name for a personal experience column, but looking at it now, it seems way too creepy.

Like I am going to overwrite your life with mine.

Anyhow, hello gentle readers. Time for the biographical update. Not much up in my life right now. The only exciting thing to happen was almost getting a zero on my screenplay, and I covered that yesterday.

I did realize something today. There’s never going to be a second draft of my movie. At least, not unless I decide to do it on my own. The second draft normally would come in the next term, but only if I chose the film track, and I am TV all the way.

I want a job, and a salary, and a high pressure environment, dammit!

So in a sense, it’s goodbye to my movie. I think. I mean, I still have the class to attend where we workshop one another’s scripts. And I can’t shake the feeling that there must be some sort of final project. But I can’t figure out what that would be except for something like a finished version of your movie.

Oh well. At least I know that I will get to finish my Bob’s Burger episodes. The final pages are due two weeks from now, and I will get a mark on that.

Aaaand next term I will be developing my own brand new TV series and writing the pilot and maybe more for IT.

Frankly, I am terrified. But I know I will come up with something. That’s going to be the hardest part, coming up with the idea. Once I have an idea firmly in place, everything will flow from that and it will get a lot easier for me.

A very “sign of the times” kind of thing has happened to me twice now. Every school day, on my way into the Skytrain, I always grab a paper from the fellows handing out copies of Metro and 24.

Because sometimes they have crossword puzzles in them, and I love doing a crossword puzzle on the Skytrain. It’s the perfect warm-up to the day because it stimulates my mind and wakes me up, as well as revving up my engine, so to speak. So it’s great.

But twice now, in between the two fellows handing out the free papers, there’s been a third person, a rather stressed out looking woman in her late forties, handing out copies of the Vancouver Sun, an actual, big time, real newspaper.

That’s how low the newspaper biz has fallen, folks. They are just giving the paper away.

Actually, while at first I assumed that this woman worked for the Sun, it occurred to me today that maybe she doesn’t. Maybe she is simply someone who is passionately concerned about the fate of her favorite newspaper. So concerned, in fact, that she buys a bunch of copies from one of their vending machines and simply gives them away so that people will see how awesome the Sun is and maybe even start paying for it.

Heartbreaking, isn’t it? My mind comes up with the saddest things sometimes.

Myself, I have no practical or sentimental attachment to newspapers. The closest relationship I ever had with them was when I delivered them. Aside from that, for most of my childhood, they existed to me entirely for the funny pages.

My news, I got from TV. Much easier to understand for me, plus I didn’t end up with ink all over my hands. For in depth stuff, I read magazines.

So while it is, of course, sad to see a whole lot of people who are writers like me lose their jobs and to see mighty institutions which played a huge role in history die,  I am sure that the important functions of a newspaper can be taken over by the Internet in time.

So what newspapers do will still be done. Just not by newspapers.

I’ve also been watching a series called The Get Down, which is about the birth of hip hop and rap in the battlefield of the Bronx in the late Seventies.

That was pretty much the worst time for crime and violence in the Bronx. There was an average of a murder a day in the summer. Gang violence peaked when cheap guns turned the usual arms race deadly. Cops were afraid to patrol because they might just get surrounded by a mob and killed. Even in a car. The mob would flip the car over and drag the people inside out. And building burned for weeks because the firefighters were scared shitless too. It’s bad enough to lose everything you own in a fire, but to have society completely ignore your plight has to be a crushing blow.

What I enjoy most about the show is how amazingly Seventies it is. It feels like the Seventies, and I was a kid in the Seventies, so I know the vibe when I feel it. And that’s also why the show is so incredibly nostalgic for me.

I mean, I’ve talked about my happy sunshine-drenched memories of the Seventies here before. All from before I went to school, when my mother was home and we did stuff as a family in the summer and I was just a happy go lucky little kid with more brains that he knew what to do with and a friendly, sunny personality that bore absolutely no fear of adults. The combination of brains and personality made me catnip for adults, who found me incredibly amusing and bemusing.

So the show basically takes me back to my early childhood. Far fucking out, man.

And it’s also an awesome show. Great writing, the young actors are amazing, the set design is insane in how thorough they are about getting everything right.

Nostalgia alone could not get me to watch a show that I didn’t like.

But nostalgia plus a great show?

I am all the way down with that.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

.