A song came on Pandora while I was driving into work this morning. “Career Day” by the Format. It took me back a couple years to when I was working at Safeguard with my best friend, Ryan. I remember we were outside the main building, around the back, smoking cigarettes and tossing back ideas, as we used to do when we were younger.
We both liked to write. Well, I loved (still do) it and I think he thought of it as something to do to pass the idle times that find us here and there. Back in high school we had both tried collaborating on a writing project. Some fantasy drivel about warring kingdoms and a religiously persecuted people. A dramatic tale of brother’s separated at birth and destined to face one another in combat. Terribly cliché, I know, but it was fun stuff. It was fun to sit around and talk about what our characters would do and say, their actions limited only on the imaginations of teenage boys who played too many video games, watched too many cartoons and read too many books. Boys, who had, back in grade school, ran around the playground battling dragons and zombies and plotting the ways one could assail the chain-link fence to escape the dreary prison that was the school.
Somewhere along the way the co-written piece dropped out of the making. I attribute it to the fact that he unexpectedly moved away to New Mexico and left me in Arizona to work on in myself. Which, I found, I could not do because, despite knowing him so well, couldn’t plot out everything that was happening on his side as he would have wanted it. So it was abandoned and time took to it and covered in a blanket of dust. We both moved past it and that was the end of that. Until that day.
While we were trading stories and ideas and general randomness, I asked if he might like to try and collaborate on a project. No, not some fantasy flub of our youth, but a more dramatic, serious piece of writing. . A screenplay. Neither of us had ever written anything in such a format before. Where would we even begin? How does one go about writing it? It’s a mostly dialogue sort of thing, isn’t it? We batted these questions around to one another, both our minds starting to open and take in everything that we could possibly write about.
We were no longer in high school, 3 years removed from it in fact, and both had come to experience very different things since then. My idea, my drive for writing this screenplay, had been to express those experiences and feelings. When you’re in high school, you’re exposed to a very limited “Life Factor”. That is, while you’re given a little leeway to do things how you want, much of what goes on is very scripted and organized. Your day operates on a schedule and, aside from an upcoming test or college admissions (if that’s your bag); you didn’t have much to worry about. Worries tended to revolve around one’s social standing, which truly amounts up to nothing once you’re handed a piece of paper and toss an overpriced, cheap cap into the air. And even then, the change isn’t quite immediate. It’s what I call a “slow burn”.
From 2004 to 2006 (the tail end of which is when this conversation took place), I had gone through some pretty defining moments, or moments that seemed to be defining compared to anything else I’d gone through. He had his own fair share of the Life Factor to relate. And there it was. An untitled project formed. We were going to take three characters and follow the course of their lives, starting with the tail-end of high school and ending…well, we never really talked about and ending. We both agreed that we would just stop at a point when the characters had sufficiently expressed what it was we were both trying to express. I wanted to make sure that it didn’t end, end. It would have no real, concrete resolution because I had come to believe, back then, that so much didn’t truly end nor have a resolution. Especially when it came to relationships with people. Life is not final until you’ve drawn your last breath. That was what I wanted to wrap around everything we were going to write about.
Since we were writing a screenplay, we also thought it would be a good idea to try and tie in songs to certain scenes that we’d already envisioned in our brains. Enter “Career Day”. We both thought it would be the perfect way to introduce the three main characters and show their morning routine, which, naturally, spoke of their personalities. There was a character based on me, based on him and one loosely based on our friend Rob, who was, out of all of us, the most unfocused and lackadaisical, and also the one who stuck with college.
We had the conflict of the three main characters loosely threaded. My character would be the one who tried hard to please the desires of his overly religious, conservative family, all the while coming to terms with how all of that conflicts with everything he is. It was to ultimately culminate in an explosive confrontation with his parents, who disown him and he is left alone. Ryan’s character would come from an already broken home, parents who care next to thing and he would find solace in a mentally unbalanced girl whom he ultimately impregnates and then has to put his dreams and desires on hold to take care of this family he’s created, because he doesn’t want to end up like his own. And lastly, Rob’s character would experience a downward spiral once hitting college. Drugs, sex, booze would all take hold of him. All three friends would split apart during these experiences and ultimately come together near the end, each realizing something important. I had pictured some sort of rooftop conversation, just before sunrise. They’d speak softly to one another, each a broken person in their own right. They’d make half-hearted promises to one another to be there, since they’d all sort of forgotten one another since entering college. And then the sun would start to rise, and they’d stare out over the city and each would wonder what exactly they’d do now. And one of them would smile because, despite all the terrible things that had happened, there is always hope that tomorrow will be better. And then aliens come down and blow everything up. Roll credits.
It’s all cliché, I know. We weren’t aiming for anything original. Our thinking at the time was that while many of us are built (or made) to look unique, the things we feel and experience are decidedly not. Cliché is life, because everything has been done before. It wasn’t about being edgy or different. It was about expressing these new feelings in a way that we could relate to, and hope others could relate to as well. So yeah, it was typical, but it was ours.
As it turns out, the whole thing was moot because it never happened. The Life Factor intervened again and the story was left to the wayside. The next time we ever talked about collaborating was when we discussed making a video game. He’d program it, I’d write the story behind it. That too, never happened.
And while our screenplay might not have ever been written, it did give rise to something. Which I’ll write down in another entry, because I feel like this could ramble on.
Amazing what comes to mind from some simple song.
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