Where I come from (and by that, I mean writer land), if you mention something in a story, if you write about something happening in a film or a play, it has significance. Because the time you’re allotted is so short, EVERYTHING has to mean something. I mean, Chekhov himself said “If in Act I you have a pistol hanging on the wall, then it must fire in the last act”. Otherwise, what’s the freaking point?
When you’ve spent years of your life making, quite frankly, mountains out of molehills, it’s no wonder writers are so monumentally fucked up. But you know what? EVERYTHING has a story. There’s subtext behind every single freaking thing in that happens. It might seem random, but there’s always motivation of some kind, and I can’t stop analyzing and trying to find out if a cigar is, in fact, a cigar in any given situation.
I can’t stop this fascination with subtext, with finding out other people’s stories, other people’s issues, other people’s business. Call it nosy if you will, but I really think it’s got to do with having a better understanding of the world around us. Maybe we’d be a more sympathetic world. Probably not. I’ll take off those rose colored glasses now.
There is a problem with this whole obsession with what’s happening underneath the surface. I start to think that everyone reads as much into things as I do. Which, come on, is almost completely impossible. But, thinking that everyone reads as much into things as I do has paralyzed me in the past. Because if someone else figures out the subtext I have placed behind that seemingly innocent token or thoughtful act, they’ll know I’m madly in like with the most infuriating man on the planet, rather than just being infuriated by how mysterious he thinks he is.
But there’s the rub. Nobody else (at least, that I know of) is inside my head, unless J. Edgar Hoover has been tasked with wiretapping the thoughts of the universe from the great beyond. So nobody else (except for a select few friends whom I let into a small receiving area of the giant ball of neuroses and spastic synapses that is my brain) knows that the reason I want to buy someone a jar of olives is because even before The Olive Theory made it to national television, I had the same idea. And to meet someone who wants to eat my olives (no, that’s not a euphemism) instantly means more to me than the kind courtesy of relieving me and my greek salad of kalamata-osity. Or, you know, an anecdote that didn’t happen.
Then again, part of it is that I’m a thoughtful person, I guess. I dig nothing more than remembering something small a person said and then doing something that recalls that day, that moment, that whatever. Could that be my love for the good old comedic callback?
I’m not even sure this post has a point anymore. Bottom line: I feel too much, and I think even more. Even if nobody who looks at me has any idea that any of this is going on underneath the surface. I’m such an iceberg, it’s not even funny.