When a coworker premiered his film short last month, there was talk for two days as to what he should do next. I said I’d take a stab at writing something in Final Draft, e-mail him the result. But all it took was one dinnerbreak with other coworkers (I declined to go) to irrevocably monkeywrench that feeling of creative excitement and possibility for me; when they came back from the steakhouse, my friend showed me the pages they had brainstormed over gristled bowls of gravy. I read them quickly--without the deference which Anthony Quinn might have shown Fellini’s scribbled pieces of paper that were to later be “La Strada”--because as I did, he tried to explain it, adding the words “Tarantino” and “Pulp Fiction-y-esque”, which was a sure sign for me to forget all about it and write for myself. I know it’s not his problem that he didn’t go to film school (in fact, he’s better off without it), but any project that even needs to mention those words in its synopsis, to me, just screams amateur. So I told him I didn’t have the time, afterall, to work on something with him and the others; or, as usual, I just let myself fade apart from the collective conscience. I wonder which one of us it is who really knows better, like it could possibly matter. This was roughly the past two weeks or so.

Yesterday I finished “In Evil Hour”, on Tuesday picked up “The Tortilla Curtain”, the inside of which still smells like the last reader’s patchouli. First few pages containing at least one bum’s booger (i.e., shelf life of any book from the downtown library not dissimilar to that of a kleenex box’s), the librarian telling me what a great book it was, how T.C. Boyle was in town last month.

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