Imagined Conversation In Starbucks 1/9/2014

What do I do? Well, I know how you want me to answer that question, you want me to tell you what I do for money. What I do for a living. What a bummer that phrase is, right? ‘For a living?’ I don’t do anything ‘for a living.’ I just live. Aren’t I more than my job? Aren’t you? Are you just a lawyer, or are you your hopes and dreams, your experiences, you service, everything? Isn’t the thing you do for money the smallest part of who you are?

Sorry if I’m making a big deal out of this. I’m coming off as kind of intense, right? Yeah, sorry. But see, now it’s awkward, because now I feel like I’ve gone too far and I can’t just circle back and tell you my job, because that would be like submitting to the machine or whatever. I’ll tell you one thing, I’ll never be a cog. Not me. My dad, he spent the best part of his life grinding away at the office, strapping braces on kid’s teeth for little more than 300K a year. I’d be out in the yard and I’d see his Bentley slide up into the driveway, and I’d watch him step out of the car and he just looked so tired, you know? So tired. He’d barely have time for cocktails and dinner and little  tennis before he had to get to bed and start the whole thing again in the morning. So I always told myself, you know, I’m going to really live. I’m not going to be like my dad. I’m going to make my life count.

I shouldn’t be so hard on my dad, I guess. He’s helping me out with rent while I’m finishing my screenplay. I don’t really like talking about it, but…well, okay. You know Pokémon, right? Gotta collect ‘em all, right? Well, here’s my question, why hasn’t anyone ever done a thing that, like, really took the whole Pokémon thing seriously? Think about it, you got these people that are, like, literally unleashing these demons that they keep bottled up to do battle for them. Sounds like my parents marriage, right? I mean, the whole thing is very Freudian. Or maybe not Freudian, but psychological, you know? So that’s the idea. I guess I’m just, I’ve always been a kind of sensitive guy, which has been difficult in a lot of ways. But anyway. Should we order something? I could definitely use a cup of coffee. Let’s order something and then I’ll tell you about how I didn’t ever feel like the other kids understood me in Middle School.