Like Jack, I guess I will write something before the site takes my name off the list. Actually I was out of town for a couple weeks so there’s my excuse. I wish I could say I’ve been writing the next great novel or screenplay, but I haven’t. I have been thinking about it though.

Have you ever seen that movie the Money Pit? It’s that one with Tom Hanks and Shelley Long, where two lovers buy a great big house for a bargain. They have romantic, starry eyed aspirations to put all sorts of love and money into fixing the place up so it can return to its former glory and be majestic and beautiful, and then they can grow old together there and have babies and shit. But of course, the place is in much worse shape than they thought, and as they try to fix it more problems keep popping up, and they realize they’ve bitten off way more than they can chew.. Sound familiar?

It’s a tragic story but of course it’s also very funny because Tom Hanks falls through the floor and I think a staircase collapses too. It reminds us that life is absurd and sometimes the most well meaning people get fucked over, especially when they choose to do what’s in their hearts rather than what would be a more sound, rational decision. And absurdity is funny. To me, at least.

So if I were to write the next great novel or screenplay, it would be a lot like the Money Pit. Except it would be about Post Katrina New Orleans, and instead of lovers you’d probably just have a single guy or maybe a family that’s always fighting because their lives suck and they live in a FEMA trailer. They’re trying to fix up their house but they can’t afford to hire contractors because the bank made them spend all their insurance money to pay off the mortgage, so they’re fixing it themselves. And they can’t work on the house all the time because they have full time jobs, and when they aren’t at work they’re standing in line. Maybe at McDonalds, maybe at the permitting office at City Hall, maybe at the Home Depot or something, but they spend lots of time standing in line. I find long lines to be particularly funny.

When they actually do find time to work on the house, they don’t really know what they’re doing because they’ve never fixed up a house before. Maybe they hook the water lines up to the sewage with hilarious consequences, because you can’t have a comedy these days without someone getting sprayed in the face with feces. Or maybe they just electrocute themselves, I don’t know. A guy’s head will go through the newly hung drywall. It will be like that show Home Improvement, which is to say something incredibly funny will happen.

Then there will be a conclusion, where the final punchline is delivered. They finish working on the house and move in, only to look around and realize they’ve spent all this time, money, and effort fixing up a house that nobody will want to buy in the middle of a stinking, primeval shithole. Maybe the guy could be waking up after spending the first night in his newly repaired house, he goes onto the front porch to stretch and get the newspaper, and looks around and realizes nobody else is there. Everyone is gone, even the people who had come back after Katrina are gone because they couldn’t afford the insurance, the bills, they got laid off or they couldn’t stand the crime and the stagnation and the uncertainty. Unable to sell their houses, they’ve boarded them up and hit the road. The street is desolate, save for a flock of pigeons that are all sitting there laughing at him, but sort of cooing-laughing because pigeons can’t really laugh. That could be funny in a Hitchcockian sort of way, I guess.

The thing about this conclusion is it’s still writing itself. We’re not there yet. There are a lot of people out there who seem to be drawn to this conclusion, that the sky is falling, because that’s the most dramatic and the most finite thing they can imagine. Nobody wants to see this movie if the guy goes outside and says hello to his neighbor and then has a cup of coffee. That would be boring. And though I’m often guilty of imagining the worst case scenario, I’ve got to say I’m sick of thinking that way, and even more sick of hearing other people think that way. It’s tiring, it’s self-defeating. So if I’ve got to bury my head in the sand, that’s what I’m going to do.

So anyway, this is my New Years resolution: down with doomsday talk, down with fear, down with crybabies. And if you steal my book/movie idea, you’re stabbed.

Related posts:

1. The Case Against Raising Your House
2. I need a “mental health” day
3. Another grrrrrrrreat movie being filmed!
4. Allegorical demolition
5. List of Bad Movies Set In New Orleans