Know Future

Wow, shoot. It's been a week already, huh. Sorry about that. I'll have you all know, however, that it's difficult coming up with something entertaining every week. Despite all your flattering comments, I'm not actually a very good writer.

Which is too bad, because I have rather a project coming up this weekend. This is vacation weekend in Korea, and it means four days off from work. Now for most people (including me, in most circumstances), this would be cause for celebration. But, as I've said, I'm broke and effectively illiterate, and I live without basic necessities like television; so this is meaning four days of sweet f. a. for yours truly.

(Actually, I've been invited to the beach at Haeundae this weekend "to dip my toes in the South Sea." So I'll be doing that, I think. Unfortunately, since Korea is shutting down for the weekend, so will about six hundred thousand other people. I give it about ten minutes before the claustrophobia sets in and I go back and hide in my apartment. Or start swimming for Hawaii. If I don't post next week, you'll know which direction I went.)

Fortunately, I've sort of got my computer working again. I still haven't gotten the transformer I'm convinced I need, but I have pursuaded my plug adapter to work, finally. I'm still offline, of course, but I'm not entirely without entertainment. For one thing, I have the Spore Creature Creator, which is the second most entertaining thing in the universe. (The most entertaining thing will be coming out this fall.) The other wonderful thing I have is "Max Headroom."

I'm sure most of you have at least some residual memory of Max. This should help, I'm sure. Now, those of you who are my age or older may recall that Max had a TV show on ABC when we were kids. It came on after "Moonlighting." Max is a computer-generated simulacrum of an intrepid investigative journalist (Matt Frewer, who also played Max -- you young'uns will know him as the obnoxious neighbor in Honey, I Shrunk the Kids or the guy who gets bitten by the zombies in the remake of Dawn of the Dead and wants "every last second of it" when he dies before he turns into a zombie and Ving Rhames has to blow his head off), who works and lives in a hellish future where TV and consumerism are all that matters, and gigantic media networks rarely think twice about offing people if it means getting their ratings up. Ripping good 80's dystopian sci-fi stuff. Punks with scary hair. Computers with tiny screens and huge, blocky keyboards. Rollerdeathball -- with spikes. Tongue planted so firmly in cheek it's taken root and grown into a great, green Tree of Cynicism that blooms every spring and drops irony berries. Naturally, it got cancelled after twelve episodes. That show was some ballsy noise, and the surprising thing about it is not that a show that great came and went in under a season, but that a show that cynical and critical of TV was ever made in the first place, let alone shown on primetime, by a major network for as long as it was. I miss the hell out of that show. Turns out, there are a number of other people who do, too (Thank you, Dan).

So I've decided to bring it back. I've mentioned this to a few of you, the handful of you geeky, nostalgic, and bitter enough to care. I think we're all agreed that the last few years (Let's pick a random number liiiike...eight. For instance.) have been pretty shitty. Ecomony blah. Environment blah blah blah. Bad guys blew up New York, and we, ya know, didn't do anything about it. (Oooh, I know I'm asking for it with that one.) And you know my favorite thing to do is complain. I figure, times is ripe all over again for Max Headroom and a little snarky, self-righteous satire.

So I've been taking notes, and I'm gonna write me a pilot. Two-part miniseries. One of the things I'm wanting to do out here is write, and this weekend it's gonna happen. Do I know the first thing about writing a teleplay? Well, no, but I said the same thing about teaching, and I still have a job. I figure I can at least pound out a first draft.

And hey, maybe (maybe) it'll be good. Maybe (maybe) I'll shop it around. Maybe (don't bet on it) something ("something") will happen. Mostly, I'll just be pleased if it turns out I can write ninety consecutive pages about the same thing and it doesn't all suck.

Oh, also -- because I know you're all wondering -- I think I'm going to do some laundry. Like I said, I have four days off.