If I could leave one thing to Port Veritas...

The statement in the title could be misunderstood, the answer is not a long complicated yarn about the hugging and friendship and the good times. The answer is editing. I have learned and relearned unlearning it when i'm reckless before reality wrestles me to the ground and submits me to it, Editing is the most important part of visualizing a piece.

The mining of the idea is certainly important and in that moment when you get it, put it together in your head for a second and then write it out a lot of things can happen. I have met people who just have beautiful minds, they can sit down and come up with something amazing in seconds. I have faith, however, that with time and editing and practice better poetry can be produced. Better anything can be produced.

I'm not saying to trash your original version, keep one and re read it. Try and identify the parts you cant change a bit and the parts that just don't hit like those parts. Create a second version, if you think that one is perfect then go over it one more time. I would say go over everything you do not to memorize it for the stage but just to pick it apart, three times. If you love it that third time roll with it, but if you create alternate versions you can see what you like of each and if you need to do a third try and pick the best from each.

If you don't like to edit, then don't edit. Let your thoughts walk around ass naked. Doesn't bother me none.

Nate is going to kill me for this one...

....but I hope he is fine with it. The social structure we reside in is ever changing but not like the seasons more like how rust changes a car. We need something to look up too and i am not talking about kids i am talking about all of us. For some reason we exist in a state of chasing the lifestyle of people who have it better and not just chasing but digesting them. This is going to lead me to the statement I've wanted to make for a while now.

ACTORS ARE OVER VALUED IN OUR SOCIETY!!! People talk about athletes as over valued in our society saying things like "He just throws a football" or "so what he has a good jump shot" but if you ask most sports fans that is all they say. A Lakers fan wont tell you that Kobe Bryant is a wonderful man changing the world with his career but I know a lot of people would say that about George Clooney or Brad Pitt. What do they do to be called trailblazers or great artistic talents? The director says go and you cry or kiss a girl or shoot someone with a fake gun, yeah that's great. I watch a TON of movies I am not going to lie and some of them are great artistic achievements but who talks about directors or screenplays anymore? Most people only know the star actor and they grasp at his or her image and glamor as the cure for it all.

How much talent does it take to pretend? It takes talent but I don't think it takes any more talent then a stand up comedian who can command and control an audience by himself having written the material himself for 30, 45, or 60 minutes. This isn't one of those rants where I ask you to respect firefighters and soldiers more, good god I wouldn't ask that. Having been a soldier myself I would ask you simply to try and treat them normally and as for firefighters....I'm not comfortable with giving them credibility as being fantastic while we underpay them. A higher social status don't pay the rent.

The president doesn't even carry the gravitas of your favorite actor/actress and just because its always been that way, that doesnt mean it still should be. We should stop it and be realistic. No more Entertainment Tonight no more Inside Edition no more smoking gun.com. Don't even be mad at movie stars who tell you to vote give them the consumers cold shoulder until they exihibit the same neurotic worries about grabbing too much of the spotlight that Nate did the day he proposed. He came out after the show he co-starred in was over gave her the ring, proposed and walked away. Having done the play and the ring presentation for a reason for the subject matter and not the attention.

subtlety won't make you famous

I caught myself about to say the title line in a conversation with my mother about how I could have delivered a joke more effectively. Luckily, I stopped myself knowing that the sentiment is true but nothing a writer should ever say. I feel like after repeating that to yourself for a little while you'd become like the guy working at Hustler saying "Well, sex sells don't it?" What we all agree is wrong will always sell in spades because the presentation of it is taboo and what is taboo is the PERFECT marketing tool. that's not a moral reasoning for anything.

Entirely separate from this I find myself way too deeply involved in the media I take in, I was at the movie premiere of the third star wars prequel and I turned to my friend and said "Just close your eyes and focus on the words, its like a nightmare." The dialogue wasn't just unacceptably lazy but that of a sixth grader experimenting with what imaginary people would say, the special effects could never make up for it. Everyone always tells me I read too much into things and I just need to relax and enjoy it, like taking medicine from Nurse Ratchett in One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest.

The problem becomes a grouping of questions, am I just more aware because I am a writer? If not, am I just paranoid and astonishingly abnormal? If so why don't they have special theaters for the astonishingly abnormal so I don't ruin the good times of the masses? I don't like the first idea, the thought that I'm a writer and so I exist on some higher plain of understanding, its bull crap like that, that has Kanye rapping about Robocop and acting like we are stupid for not getting it. I prefer thinking that I am that special variation of mentally deficient where I can fit in amongst others but paranoia guides me. Its also possible everyone knows that all this stuff sucks, that they are guided and addicted to cheap archetypal sentiments but the understanding of that would sicken them. So they dismiss me. I don't know how I feel about that one.

When you accept the loss of subtle literary coplexities in your movies, music, and TV nodding your head to find in their place the big and splashy John Woo gunfight ideology of every five minutes something visceral will be unleashed on the audience you lose something. It may be small and to some it might not even be important, we got war, planetary climate change, and corruption to worry about after all. With the death of the authors responsibility to intricacy comes the passing away of his great triumphs and that is all i'm always trying to explain to each consumer who looks at me cross eyed.