Here's a thing that i didnt end up using as part of a larger thing, but it's some dialogue you can choose to read with little to no contextual bearing, or, perhaps more wisely, ignore altogether. So, that's what this blog is now, i guess.
Chelsea walks through one of several revolving doors, coming off the morning street just as her phone rings and she fumbles for it, shifting several papers to a hand already occupied by a hot beverage container. She grimaces while answering.
She fights her way through the lobby, up a glassy, modern staircase. She makes a harried gesture of greeting to a colleague while listening on the phone, occasionally making non-committal sounds of listening.
“So... Todd, TODD. So, It’s tonight? Oh, LAST night? Well, I’m sorry but I’m 3000 miles away. Which, you know.”
She keeps listening, struggling to open a door with her hands full, rolling her eyes vigorously.
“Maybe just tell me what you’re really angry about?”
Another lull as she listens, moving steadily down a hall with one or two other workers, and turns into a large open office area.
“I didn’t RSVP to your event? Did you send me a thing? Invitation?”
Dickie Alberta, all grey hair and limbs and enthusiastic anger strides up from the opposite direction, parting a sea of cowering interns. Chelsea puts her semi-free hand up, futilely demonstrating how busy she is, which Davy ignores with a broad, foreboding smile as he stops right in front of her, holding a piece of paper.
Her look wordlessly asks “not now?”, he shakes his head, smiling, and she goes back to the call.
“On facebook? Look. Todd. I’m not going to... Todd! I’m in New York. It’s first thing in the morning and... What time is it even where you are? Why are you awake?”
Dickie glowers at the general surroundings for a moment while she talks, gives an exaggerated shrug and tears into his own monologue, bringing a loud, acidic bombast to his words in an attempt to become the dominant conversation in Chelsea’s life
“Chelsea, good news! Now I know why your essay on that twitter rapper from the Bronx was four days late! You were inventing a new language! A new, surreal cadence. Free yourself from other obligations,” He mimes a phonecall. “And let me read to you a no-doubt familiar passage”
Chelsea shoots Dickie a pleading look, and half a sentence of protest to go with it.
“Dickie, come on- WHAT Todd. Look, I didn’t show up to your, fucking, ‘Artist’s Exhibition’, which is a BOLD fucking name for an event that you ADMIT is taking place in your ‘SURFER BUDDY’S LOFT.’ But: next time you invite me to some infantile nonsense vaguely near L.A. , I’ll call you first so you can hear me rolling my eyes from THREE THOUSAND miles away.”
Dickie studies her silently, the very picture of perfect impatience. He reiterates his earlier request.
Chelsea shrugs at him with nuanced aggression.
“Todd. Shut- Look, I’m at work, I gotta go. No, DON’T call me later. This is me, RSVPing to that idea with a brutal, serious, no.” She hangs up the phone, scowling.
Dickie smiles, a white crescent of insincerity.
She still is lost in the blank screen of her phone.
“Yeah, I mean, we were never really together to begin with, we just stayed close after college and-”
Dickie’s voice tramples over her.
“ Ok, nope. Look, being ‘wistful girl in the big city’ may be fun, but wistful boss in the big city is the one who’s running the show from now until the next...”
He icily checks an imaginary watch.
“Oh, looks like the rest of his life. Which is a long one, because the Wistful Boss In The Big City has a tremendously zen attitude which is only threatened in times of great unrest, such as when his employees don’t let him read things.”
He glares at Chelsea who now grudgingly motions for him to continue.
“Ok: YOU wrote “The absurdist haikus of this Outer- Borough Buddha are treated as holy scripture by a trendy, obsessive underground fanbase of his true believers nationwide.’ Ok. So. Lets, I guess, start with how you make this guy sound like the leader of Hip Hop Jonestown-”
“Hip Hop Jim Jones, then?”
But she’s immediately silenced by a finger of reproach as Dickie continues unabated.
“And then, after we slog through that quagmire together, I will try to at the very least reacquaint you with some of the broader ideas concerning the notion of syntax. This is a culture website, not ‘Finnegans Wake’! There are rules here, Chelsea!”
She acquiesces then hurries past her concession, to a new topic
“Ok, it is... Yeah, it’s too much, it sounds fanatical now. Dickie. The new assignment, the thing about the relationship between the two cooks from the 20’s-”
Reminded, he cuts her off.
“Oh yeah, fuck that. I took another look at it last night, and dumped it. It’d play too much like the Food Network version of that movie with the love letters and the psychopath and the old people.”
“Love letters and the psychopath...”
He elaborates, speaking in halts and starts as he remembers.
“Yeah, the... fucking, the guy jumps off a ferris wheel and then he, like, lies down in traffic because the girl from the Muppets wouldn’t go out with him. Or whatever. The mother was the the bad guy in the Bourne Supremacy.
“Dickie, I really don’t...”
“There was a lot of old people holding hands and failing to remember things. Come on, it’s like a thing for your type.”
A vague, all encompassing gesture.
Like, in your twenties, the whole thing. Half the movie is the crazy guy renovating a haunted house wearing a poor-person Charles Dickens hat.”
“That’s it. Goddamn. That’s the one. Made me wish I was the one forgetting my memories or dying or whatever.”
Chelsea makes a disapproving noise, then there is a pause, then she realizes something.
“She wasn’t in the Muppets!”
He shrugs past this, absurdly grave as he says:
“Muppets are not the issue here. Your new thing is. Assignment.”
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