Ink Tea Stone Leaf

Greetings, passers by!

A little while ago, I made a personal commitment to have something posted to this blog every weekend. I wanted to keep in practice, feed the fire as it were, so that someday I could look back at all the words I wrote and say, “if nothing else, I sure could keep to a schedule on this one particular thing.”

Well, I had an idea for an interesting short essay to post this weekend, but to really make it work I think I’m going to have to take another week to work on it. I’d like it to go out into the world with a modicum of polish, and as it stands now it’s not even a third finished, much less polished. I started too late, I took too long nailing the intro, and I had too many other things distracting me. Way too many things.

My daily schedule fills up rather quickly, it’s sad to say. Today for example, I have to clean Yoshi and Sherbert’s cages, keeping these birds from living in filth for another week. Before I can do that, I have to wash the dishes, so that there is space in the sink to fit all the cage parts that need a good scrubbing. By the end of all that, the baseball game will be on, and the Padres are kind of heating up right now, so I can’t very well ignore that. Fortunately, I can watch the game while easily fitting in two thirty minute sessions of peddling on the elliptical machine, and I can probably squeeze in a shower before the ninth inning if I’m diligent. After that, I have about fifty pages left to finish of a book, which I feel compelled to crush once and for all. Then I have any number of video games or TV shows that require my attention, which must be balanced against my desire to just put on a record and embrace the siren’s call to inactivity. Before I go to sleep tonight, I’ll also want to find time to write in my weekly journal, so I don’t end up going two months without doing that again. At various points, I will also need to eat.

Ordinarily, on a summer Sunday I’d also want to fit in some time to go outside and cut back the encroaching brambles of blackberries in the yard, but it’s going to be over a hundred degrees today and I am staying inside, thank you.

As for the matter of that essay, I did call it “interesting” a few paragraphs earlier. What I mean by that is that it interests me, but I have yet to succeed in convincing myself that anybody finds anything I do or say interesting at all. This is a pretty serious obstacle to writing anything, and is more likely to cause hours of staring into space and wondering how you could possibly think to make anything at all out of owning a keyboard and a WordPress account when your brain is made of ADHD and everything you think about is deeply lame. Trying to force a couple of hours today to shove my little ideas through a sausage grinder and into a bad essay just to meet an arbitrary self-imposed deadline seems like the opposite of fun, so I’m not going to do it.

Instead, I’m going to tell you about a little character I dreamed up. I say dreamed up, because he did in fact come to me in a dream the other night. He wouldn’t be worth telling you about, except that on waking I realized it was the second time this character had popped into my head at night. He’s not very fun and I have no plans to use him for anything, but I thought you might like to get to know him.

Imagine a yellow five pointed star, with just the most pathetic cartoon face you can imagine in the middle. He looks like he’s always living with bad news, and he’s convinced you’re about to give him some more. Instead of being symmetrical, he looks like he’s been squished down slightly from the top. The top arm of the star, the one that would go straight up above his face, is skewed a bit to the left. His upper right and left arms are such that their top edges together form a straight line. He’s small enough to fit in the palm of an average hand, and in fact has to be carried around in most cases.

Where did he come from, and what is his deal? In the swirling confusion of my subconscious, he was the product of some character design brainstorms at DreamWorks Animation around 1997. Somebody in the creative works had had the crackerjack idea that the studio needed a “signature character” who could be featured in a supporting role in every film, beginning with their 1998 epic The Prince of Egypt. There would be no effort made to explain his presence in the world of each film, as audiences would just accept him as that little sad sack Star Guy from DreamWorks, which would build brand recognition and help distinguish the studio from competitors like Disney. As stupid as this whole premise is, I can honestly say that I’m confident it would at least have accomplished that.

The Star Guy would be subtly written into most major scenes of each film, and his overriding purpose would be to bring the action to the halt with depressing commentary and cringing expressions. Every time he opened his mouth he would look like he was worried that somebody was going to hit him, even though the movie’s actual characters were usually just trying their best to ignore him and perform the story as if he weren’t there. He would do these things because the hapless character designer who dreamed him up thought that it would be really funny. Consistently, uproariously, brilliantly funny. Somehow, the executives at DreamWorks could not be made to agree.

The thing about me is that, when I woke up and realized I’d imagined that little dude in my dreams on no less than two occasions, I also thought he was consistently, outrageously, and brilliantly funny. I wanted the Star Guy cut of every DreamWorks picture to exist. I didn’t want to write him myself, but I wanted the hapless character designer who created him to have existed and to have fought for his vision.

I didn’t actually want these things, because what I’m describing is more akin to sketch slotted into the final fifteen minutes of a weird episode of Saturday Night Live than anything that should be inflicted on general audiences during daylight hours. There is comedy in ruining things on purpose, but jokes have their place and sometimes it is actually better to make what you want than to deliberately undermine it for cheap laughs.

So in any case, I am going to go handle my other responsibilities, and then take another week to work on that little essay, rather than force it out in a rush and try to forget about it. I can’t promise you’ll find it as interesting as I do, but I guarantee you’ll like it more than Star Guy, who exists to ruin things and be unpleasant.