September 16th, 2010 Charlie Huston
So it turns out that getting involved in TV production is rather like falling into a black hole.
Nothing can escape, not light, not even time.
Everything is sucked into the vortex of reality actively collapsing into fiction.
Time stands still, races ahead, and becomes fluidic.
“On the day.”
Everything will happen “on the day.”
Any problems that surface in pre-production are either problems that must be solved days ago or they are problems that can be solved “on the day.”
The “day,” however, never seems to arrive. Or, rather, it arrives and then recedes into the future again. It can come days from now, or minutes, seconds, anytime.
[...]
Meanwhile, time telescoped, images I created as words, the black marks on paper thing, become physicalized. Imaginary people walk past me in clothing I dreamt for them once, years ago. A bus with a bullet hole in one window, blood dripping from the crack glass, drives by. Less than half a mile from my front door, yellow signs appear, directing crew to a location from page 126 of one of my books. In a downtown flophouse, a young man in a blue Tyvek coverall edges through the meticulously created apartment of a fictionally dead hoarder.
The storytelling part of me, so much of it drawn from places I barely recognize as me, walks and talks and occupies physical space.
A blood mortar sprays red-dyed banana and clumps of hair at a wall in a PCH beach house.
Is this me?
Are these the stories I’ve been telling?
Jesus, why didn’t anyone tell me it was like this?
Production irises shut, natural forces take over, everyone is hurdled into the gravity wells of their real lives.
The list of things I never expected to happen in my life is getting longer, and stranger.
Never know for sure.
Figure it on the day.