"Eyes Widening, Grip Tightens"

hello, stranger -

let me tell you about the dumbest thing i've ever read:

when i first washed up out here i had to work as a tutor for a while. mostly i taught math – don't ask me why in the hell 21-year-old design students needed to know quadratic equations – but on this one occasion i was asked to proof read a script that a student had written for a film class.  the person who’d originally been charged with the task had given up after about six pages, which was obviously was a big red flag.  but i was tired of pretending that i knew or cared about algebra, so i told her i would give it a whirl.

i maybe got about a dozen pages in and realized i'd been at it for over an hour and a half. there were so many red marks on the pages i remember texting my supervisor and asking if i could get paid by the correction rather than hourly. i would've made a killing. she said no.

is English this guy’s second language? I asked.

no he's American, she said.

does he have some kind of mental disability or head injury or something?

nope.

i just couldn't quite wrap my head around what i was seeing on those pages, but she reminded me i was being paid hourly and that i could take my time with it, so onward i pressed through a sea of typos, spelling errors, punctuation mistakes, run-on sentences and grammatical blunders so blatant that it pained the mind.

frankly, it was amazing. but it wasn't just the total lack of ability to master even the most fundamental basics of written language - it was the content itself that was somehow even more lazy-brained than the attempt to express it:

the script was about an assassin who is pretty serious bad ass, made apparent from the way he's described while he's killing all these dudes in some driveway for some reason that’s never explained. that opens scene 1.  then he receives a mission - from his evil boss - to go kill a girl, apparently without any explanation either.

but plot twist!   he ends up falling for the girl, for some other unexplained reason, and turns against his old boss in order to protect her, resulting in a killing spree of head smashing and dropkicking of literally countless villainous henchman.

on day two of trying to plough through this piece of shit i was tempted to give up. it had become clear that in the script time was not bound to the same sort of linear realities as we experience in real life, and i was becoming all too aware of what a waste of mine this was. but something kept me pushing on through those 120 pages of this grammatically and imaginatively stunted fever dream, and i became determined to finish it.

and then, somewhere deep in that sea of red ink and wasted paper, was the sentence that struck me like a diamond in the mind, and i haven’t forgotten since: our hero enters the building looking for the damsel in distress, and – shockingly – is conked on the back of the head with a gun. he gets knocked out, and when he awakens, the script informs us:  He to move and but can't.

i pondered those words for quite a while, and when my work partner came over i let him read them too.

hmmm, he said thoughtfully. he was a Samoan guy, with a kind, chubby face and when he stared off into space to let his mind try to absorb the sentence i couldn't help but feel like there was some kind of Buddhist riddle wrapped up in the jumble of words, buried deep here in this bizarrely violent and incoherent action script.

i know, i said to him. it's like some kind of fucking haiku or something, right?

i saw the professor who taught that script class at the bar before i finished the assignment. we didn't know each other at the time but i went over and introduced myself and told her i’d finish proofing the script on two conditions; that i would never, ever be put in a position to have to meet the young guy who wrote it, and that she would pick up my bar tab for the night.

we've been friends ever since. in fact, before i graduated that school i created a calendar inspired by the script and gave it to her for Christmas. there was a line in the script that is used repeatedly whenever the assassin is about to kick box someone to death: Eyes Widening, Grip Tightens. so i made that the title of the calendar and created something that i felt like might speak to this next generation of action enthusiasts.  she still keeps it on her fridge.

i bring it up only because i hadn't thought about that script - or the kid who wrote it - for a long time until a few weeks back when i was traveling. i was on a flight and the young man in front of me started swiping through his phone at full volume, no headphones or regard whatsoever about the noise level to the people around him. we were all just subjected to whatever TikTok dance or Instagram hoochie-mama was testifying out of this guy’s phone at full blast, until after what seemed like a hellish lifetime the stewardess came and told him to use headphones like any other decent human being.

what struck me, as i sat there looking over this guy’s shoulder – besides how badly I wanted to punch him in the back of the head – was how incredibly fast he swiped between different videos and clips and tinder profiles and whatever other garbage was passing through his screen. it was fascinating in a way. i don't think he spent more than two seconds on any one thing, and yet he kept swiping instinctively for the next one - and the next, and the next, and the next. this mutant couldn't have been more than 23 years old, but this was obviously just how his brain was wired, and likely would be for the rest of his life.

and why do i bring him up, you might ask? well, my friend, it's a rainy and dreary Sunday night out here in the Old Pueblo, and as i sit here on my porch with a glass of wine listening to old blues and the rain coming down, the thing i don't hear tonight is the usual sound of the muscle cars and jacked up trucks cruising by, or doing donuts on the intersection down the road. i guess they don’t like driving around in the rain.  the fad lately has been to invert the muffler to make the vehicle as loud as possible, so that even people miles away can enjoy the angry wail of the tailpipe.

it is - in the most literal sense - spectacularly stupid.  and if you follow the breadcrumbs, maybe you'll find some common threads that weave a little deeper than that, between the author of that shit-ass script, the troglodyte on the plane, and the angst-ridden teeny boppers with their window-rattling muscle trucks.

draw your own conclusions for yourself, but for my two cents it seems pretty clear that the better angels of our nature – as Lincoln once put it – always had an uphill battle to fight, and that being bred with a screen in your face doesn't promise to do much but make that fight all but impossible.

thinking of it now, my mind travels back East to this butch lesbian i used to know from the pub. she was smart and tough and never pulled any punches. we’d joke around pretty good but we're never too tight, so when i ended up out here i was happy to see she friended me on facebook. i think she had like 27 friends. under her political affiliation all she wrote was: i see dumb people.

i see dumb people too, my friend. tonight is a good night to write because it's quiet, and calm, and i can hear Miles Davis from the speakers inside. but tomorrow the muscle trucks will be back, filling the air with the smell of burnt rubber, and beating their metaphorical dicks against my very real eardrums, as i try to navigate this life i find myself in, and face a future that seems to be getting dumber by the day... with Eyes Widening, Grip Tightens.

for now though i'll take the quiet night and hope you're finding some peaceful times yourself.

sorry I'm late on writing this week, it’s been a shit time lately, but i hope to be back on track again soon. be good.