After working on the paper in fits and starts all day – the starts are quite productive but short, the fits just useless time-wasting – and going through lists and lists of Simpsons and Buffy shows... I think about LA and wonder, if things had gone differently, if I might have fallen into another life entirely: that of the hard-working team player on a television or film set, a script editor with a well-paying if insecure job and his eye on a scriptwriter's position or some such.
Improbable, maybe; I don't know. I did after all live in LA for eight years; and a lot of smart people find their way into many niches and crannies in The Industry, who didn't necessarily plan on being there. I would probably not have been very successful, I suppose – my aversion for popular culture was pretty strong when I was young; the truth is, I've only indulged in my enjoyment of it (for instance, for this paper I'm writing) since finishing the PhD. Perhaps until that happened I never would have allowed myself to dedicate myself to anything else; I wouldn't have been ambitious enough to make it, I suppose.
But, imagine it: me as funny but bitchy gay man, clearly aiming my life in so many directions that it was going nowhere, begging for attention but not focusing it anywhere (as I indeed was in my twenties); if at a crucial juncture I'd met some intelligent, charismatic older person who put me into some Industry slot; I might be very busy today – the truth is, all my tendency to catalogue and list and organize could just as well be spent arranging the tangled needs of a film auteur, or perhaps I could have gotten sidelined into a script library somewhere.
Nah. Wouldn't have worked, I think – there probably hasn't been a time before now when I could have seen an Industry life to be as valuable as a university job. Interesting that I can see it now, though: would I have a little stucco hacienda on the west side of West Hollywood, not quite in the Beverly Hills area? Would I be rather brittle and sarcastic, having given up on the intellectual pursuits I respected when I was young – although now I realize one could read books anywhere, I wouldn't have known that a PhD doesn't change anything really, it only changes the world around you. How would I have weathered the AIDS storm, if I had been in the Industry, and thus so busy that I couldn't take time off to be sick? –
But then, if we're going to imagine me as assistant to the director on a film set, we may just as well imagine that the HIV virus never mutated, never got out of the jungle – which requires only a microscopic intervention, almost invisible time travel – and then we get a whole new set of possibilities. Of course I've imagined that one often: who would I be – where would I be....
Comments