Rewriting and"She's Having A Baby"

Sometimes it's encouraging when someone you(mostly) respect as an artist has some of the same problems as you.That is probably why I was so psyched to watch John Hughes' comedy about marriage and infertility "She's Having A Baby" when it was on cable the other night.

Granted, I am always working on a smaller scale, but I've really struggled for years with finding an adult creative voice when my life...really lacks most of the signifiers of adulthood.(Not that the suburban Shermer image of a job that forces you to grow up by being your one, well-fed, straitjacket doesn't feel sort of antique anyway, given how many side jobs people I know have just to keep going...I'm not sure how many people were living like this when he wrote like that, honestly, but very few are now.)

Anyway, I had some early luck writing about snarky teens/twenties crip outsiders and what they saw on the periphery, and blah, blah, we're all the same down deep, two parts struggle to three parts wish-fulfillment but feeling like a persecuted artiste because I had to fight for the main character's right to...I don't know, say "shit!" when she jams her thumb or something.(Like I would really do, but the most common feedback I got from my crip-focused writers' group was always that I was "comfortable with the male perspective" because of the expletives.)

  I guess I could have frozen a character in amber and eventually...I don't know, given her a you-tube channel or an instagram to post her scars on, but somehow my heart isn't with that kind of lightness anymore. I would love to have an "It Gets Better" story for the yutes, but it hasn't, at least not enough that I can place a reassuring hand on someone's spiritual shoulder and tell them how great being different is supposed to be.Everything that I have accomplished, such as it is, has taken me SO LONG that I am probably only twenty-five in work years/

Not really sure what's wrong with the movie, even when I didn't pick it out in the video store because it was the  latest from "the Ferris Bueller guy" and that meant spending a long-ago bright autumn afternoon watching a movie with sperm-count jokes with my father..The cast is pretty good, with Kevin Bacon and Elizabeth McGovern as newlyweds, and a lot of "Hey, it's that guy/ gal!" Chicago actors that you would recognize from a lot of shows in the 80s and 90s.(weirdly, including actor Dennis Dugan who made the cast of "Hill Street Blues" call him Captain Freedom all day so he didn't break character--no word on whether he expected everyone to treat him like an ad exec for this one!) Maybe it's just that they tell us Our Heroes are So In Love but what we really watch is a lot of picking each other apart...maybe it just that it never decides if we are supposed to root for them fitting in their neighborhood or not.

Sometimes I think I am(comparatively) fine...

-but the digestive distress starts again, or the skin stuff, or the insomnia.More niggling than a true disorder, but not great. Learning a lot about fiber in common vegetables, though.

-Feeling a bit better about our state since some more Dems won, I suppose, but our problems are not solved..also, getting Sinema just means we get the Heitkamp instead of North Dakota. Yes, I can vouch for her being smart and personable and *looking* modern, but her ideas about politics are old-fashioned...not really getting sucked into the Krysten Cult again.(I hope she wows me and next year at this time, I just race to take this back, but I so doubt it. I didn't give her a nickel and I feel kind of proud about that...she's too "independent "for my Dem Socialist ass anyway. Also, how much did she spend on those stupid ads about"having the desert in her blood." What?I need my money more than anyone needs to get paid to write that.

- Already feeling some good effects from the feedback I bought from "The Masters Review" as I take another look at "The Wedded Twist"

Arizona Punked Itself Yesterday-- A Screed in Many Parts

Ok, I know the drill. I have read enough posts aboutwriting and rejection to know what people expect me to say right now(this one, chosen somewhat randomly, even could have a political analogue, wherein the organizer with the holes in his shoes who gets the door slammed in his face because of his funny name and membership in a minority group gets to be(expectant pause) BARACK OBAMA.(Which has sometimes sincerely cheered me, even though I don't expect to reach his heights)

I'm supposed to say this spurs me on, and talk about working harder and faster, and do the whole recent-memory-Cubs thing(it's true that if sports had taken root in me, I probably would have been a Cubs fan both cause of ties to the region and my tendency to swing for the fences and get thwarted...cute mascot, too) and act like Arizona is a struggling franchise entitled to a few rebuilding decades.Maybe someday I'll get back to all that, but not for a while. I beat myself up for a while last night just because that's my most consistent hobby, but I did my job, you know? In my view, the electorate didn't do theirs. Even though, you know, you always think there is more time and money you could spend(although even when you win, you don't really "get it back" in the same way you put it in...that's just for utility companies.  Nope, not funny yet.)Although I don't really think I'll abandon organizing for sloth and/or a drug habit as part of me wanted yesterday.

I think even self- blame is probably going to be useful than the lesson that the party might take from this in attempting to dig up some ex-governor from territorial days to try to appeal to rural regions or something. Of course there are the consultants who see everything as a game of Risk or some bloodless thought experiment like "How many AHCCCS recipients fit on the head of a pin?"To me, even if I make money from this one day, politics will never be that. I have to live with knowing how many of my neighbors don't care about my health, at a minimum. Don't care about kids, except to demonize the ones seeking asylum...teenage me, in her pink sweater, didn't want to believe it, butPublic Enemy was right about this place.(Also, I didn't learn about labor in school...had to reclaim that history as an adult.)
Definitely faced both the power and the limitations of electoral politics yesterday. Even with good candidates and no unopposed races. Not sure I can lay the civics-fairy pitch on so easily, even though, of course checks on Cheeto Benito are essential.Arizona may have to face the kinds of crises that beset states like Michigan and Kansas to learn that low tax rates and business incentives don't save people. I'm scared about that and not sure which one it will be.