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Can you imagine Mex Chix in the Chex Mix? Can you envision a tuna fish sandwich biting back? Can you imagine not having hot water? How would you cook your ramen if you didn’t have hot water? How would anyone clean themselves? Have you ever seen a drowned fish? Have you ever seen a spider go pale? So scared it couldn’t hold its color? How does a mouth run when it runs on? What are the three things you need to survive on a deserted island? What if you had a map to all the deserted islands everywhere? What if you had a rock concert near your house every day? Then, what if you were the drummer? How do you feel about fog? How does fog feel about you? If nothing is impossible, then how are we talking about it? Nothingness must be real because it has a name, right? Can you imagine all the unreal things suddenly becoming real, and yet fitting inside your pocket? Can you imagine a girl who is stronger than you? That’s real—for everyone. Can you imagine a squid magician who is a squib? He’d be a squid squib. What is Radish? A foreign language? Can you imagine the people who speak Radish? Would they be Radites, or Radians, or maybe Radicals? What if the sky was the ocean? What if you could fall up? How many two-year-olds can grow a mustache? Is this why old men consider themselves superior to two-year-olds? The ability to grow a mustache is feeding the old men’s egos. Can you imagine a deer with a mustache? Somewhere in the wild, there’s a stag wooing the does with his manly mustache. Can you imagine turtles and snails comparing shells? What if dentures looked like real teeth? Tinted yellow. What if you had to wear medieval armor to do your job? Could you still do it? How fast can you chant, “Big Brass Breastplate”? Next time you hear someone cuss, tell them they don’t know ALL the four-letter words. Watch them try to wrap their mind around that. Are there any good vices? Miami Vice? What are the chances that a Pope ever spotted a homeless man a fiver? Yodeling fell out of favor with people in the Andes because it scared the llamas. How many yo-yos have walked their own dog? How many yo-yos does Yo Yo Ma own? How does your brain make the electricity for your heart?

Of Archery And The Screen

Short screenplays can be fun to write. They don’t take much time because you can decide how much you want to show, or how deeply you want to dive into each character’s attributes, traits, and attitudes.

There’s no need for an in-depth plot, so you can make it as comical, fanciful, or impossible as you like.

Short subjects can be as lengthy or brief as you feel is necessary. The “screenplay” below would be less than a minute of entertainment if made into an actual “movie”.

By the way, archery can be a fun sport, but how much more fun would it be if you got dressed up for the occasion?

EXT.—DAY—FIELD

A tree with an arrow already in it gets struck by another arrow. Across the open space of a forest clearing, a man in blue rags LAUGHS. In his hand is a wooden bow. Next to him, a man in yellowish-brown rags holds a metal bow. As this one speaks, his hands are animated, the metal bow in his hand is throttled up and down with every word.

SPIDER

You can’t possibly hit the target behind a tree.

FREEMAN

On a day like this? Of course I can.

Freeman looks in the sky like he saw a loved one up there. The WIND RUSHES, blowing his shoulder-length hair about his head. His dirty blue rags FLAP in the wind.

SPIDER

Show me.

Freeman nods, looks to the tree with its two arrows. He looks up to the sky again, slowly nocks an arrow, then draws his bowstring steadily back. He licks his lips, blinks twice, and lets the arrow fly up into the sky. The arrow flies high and takes a windblown arc down sidelong to disappear behind the tree. A THUNK and a muffled OOF follow.

SPIDER

Beyond amazing. Now let me show you how I

hit the target rather than the tree…this time.

Freeman bends at the waist with an extended hand, to show Spider deference. Spider rests an arrow at the ready and holds it with the same finger holding the bow’s grip. He scans the field, crouches slightly, then takes off at a run. Despite his speed, he is remarkably silent.

FREEMAN

So quiet.

Spider reaches a point near the arrow tree, leaps laterally, and launches his arrow. His arrow disappears behind the same tree. There is an exclamation of PAIN from behind the tree and a comical character emerges. A set of knight’s armor, apparently stuffed with straw and a human, comes waddling out to the open field. Two arrows are in the straw.

MAN IN ARMOR

Here the competition ends! Both have struck home

in the target, so now the target must strike out—

for home!

FREEMAN

Get back behind that tree or I’ll shoot you

where there is no straw.

The gauntleted hands of the man in the suit of armor immediately go to cover his behind. He keeps his hands there as he waddles quickly back to his position of hiding.

Picture of Teacher

When did I last feel this bored?

I recall sitting through many government sanctioned lessons, dreading every next minute except the last. As soon as that bell rang I was racing away.

Every moment I was there though, I was waiting for something interesting to happen. Art was one outlet. Art was a way to relieve the symptoms of boredom. I suppose it might have looked to most of the teachers as if I was taking notes.

One time I drew one of my teachers while he was lecturing and pacing. He started wandering around the classroom without me noticing. It wasn’t long before he was looking over my shoulder watching me draw him. I was surprised when I saw him and of course I thought I would get in trouble, but I must have done an okay job at capturing his likeness because he just nodded and continued lecturing…and wandered away. He didn’t stop me, or yell at me, or confiscate my art.

The reason I’m writing this post is because I’ve been commissioned recently to write an essay about…NOTHING.

I’m not kidding.

Writing it is as boring as Junior High, when you’ve been sucked in to that recessless world that isn’t as imaginative as Grade School or as authoritative as High School, it’s a vampiric in-between…a Middle School, if you like. Boredom is unavoidable in such a setting.

One thing to note about the immersion into boredom is how motivation takes a sharp dive. Increased boredom, decreased motivation. They’re directly inverse to each other. When interest is peaked, motivation climbs. When the interest factor is taken away, nothing starts to look pleasant. I should rephrase that. It’s not “nothing”, but “nothingness” which begins to beckon to you. If boredom is being in view of most everything, but barriers surround you and prevent you from getting to it, then nothingness would be access to none of it while barriers are lifted??? What a weird contradiction.

Anyway, I better get busy before my chance to get money for NOTHING runs out.

The What If Game

The “What If…” game has been around a long time. For writers, it’s one of the most highly valuable tools for creating the next great novel or the next fantastic screenplay. For children, it’s a sure way to expand the imagination and explore the world as it might be rather than how it is.

For anyone who wants to deconstruct a novel, the “What If…” game is an interesting way to discover the possible seeds of how the novel was begun. How did it grow from the writer’s mind? Let’s try a few books made into movies and see.

What If…video games were really only military training? (Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card)

What If…an old fisherman finally got the catch he always wanted but the whole ocean was against him? (The Old Man And The Sea by Ernest Hemingway)

What If…a corporation held the key to triggering all your memories? (from the short story “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale” by Philip K. Dick—which became Total Recall in the movies)

I picked the above because they were apparently influential enough as books to be made into movies. Here are a few more. Only this time, I’ll put the What If out there and you try to guess the book made into a movie.

1. What If…someone in the South actually wrote about and stood up for the African Americans who were in low-paying service jobs?

2. What If…a love story had pirates and sword fighting and giants and six-fingered men in it?

3. What If…there was a magical item so powerful it could rule the world and someone decided to throw it in a volcano?

Did you make some guesses? Were they too easy? Too hard? Regardless of whether the sources were obvious or not, the game is effective, right? You can break down any book or movie this way, then go about making your own. Here are the answers to the three above:

The Help by Kathryn Stockett
The Princess Bride by William Goldman
Lord Of The Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien

And what about these classics?

What If…a child survived an evil curse and grew up to battle the one who tried to curse him? (Harry Potter by J.K. Rowling)

What If…some super intelligent children were formed into a team to battle a super intelligent bad guy who was trying to prove his superiority by making everyone in the world wear berets? (The Mysterious Benedict Society by Trenton Lee Stewart)

What If…there was a visual example of the events during the time of Moses? (The Ten Commandments by Cecil B. DeMille based on the historical record of the Bible)

That last one is a funny one, because it is definitely the book with the most movies made about it.

It—the Bible—is the book with the most short films made about it, the most cartoons, and even some crazy digitally animated vegetables (Veggie Tales). A lot of these are great to watch around Easter.

Admittedly, since it’s a book of books, the Bible has a lot of subject material. There’s a lot there to break down into “What If…” games.

Recently too, there’s The Chosen, which is breaking all the rules of what cinema can be. It’s ruling the viewing public’s time, for sure. Did the makers of The Chosen start with speculation? Did they say, “What if we tried to cinematize the whole New Testament?” Or did they say, “What if people could view the Savior’s life in its entirety, or at least as much as we know about it?”

However Dallas Jenkins, the director of The Chosen, envisioned his product, he has successfully brought the history to the people. What if you could do the same with your stories?

In The Book Drop

Libraries are fascinating places. You can get a Master’s Degree by checking out books from the public library. You can check out items like telescopes and cameras and tablets. You can use the printers, 3D printers, copy machines, and computers. Sometimes, if you’re lucky, the library might have a fish tank. You can stare at the fishies between print jobs.

Not long ago I found out the librarians keep a list of things that pass through the book drop or get left in books as bookmarks. A fair amount of the items are funny. A few are stupidly dangerous. The rest are downright bizarre.

It’s not too strange to find all kinds of playing cards. From the King of Hearts to Uno Reverse cards, from Pokemon to Magic, those seem to make a little bit of sense. Of course the joke, “They’re not playing with a full deck,” is funny here, but even more appropriate for the people who use their credit cards as bookmarks, especially if they leave the credit card in the book when they return it.

It’s equally tempting to laugh at whoever left their concert tickets in a book—before the concert even happened. Then again, maybe you just feel sorry for that person. Possibly maybe you go back and forth between mockery and pity, sort of undecided, like the person who left raw bacon in a cookbook.

Photo by Photo By: Kaboompics.com on Pexels.com

If you ever find out where you land in that cycle, try these: there are people who leave cash as bookmarks, or prescription notes, or gambling chips. Do you have pity, or do you want to laugh in their faces?

At times, people will leave things which seem not only out of the ordinary but also kind of valuable. A bead bracelet? A necktie? A yo-yo? Dentures? Yes, indeed, dentures have been dropped in the book drop. Or were they launched into the book drop? By cough, perhaps?

Librarians have also found things that are worth nothing in the book drop. Things like hair bands, toothpicks, socks (not in pairs), Post-It Notes, gum wrappers, Capri-Sun straws, corn chips and potato chips, and well, bookmarks. They get thousands of bookmarks every year. Librarians are able to look up who checked out a book last, but they aren’t able to do it for every book that gets returned. Sadly, they have to throw away the majority of the bookmarks they get, no matter if it was personalized, no matter if it was your favorite or not. They can’t keep all of them.

The book drop is a magnet for stupidity. People put all kinds of things that don’t belong in the book drop. Things like toys, onions, rocks, reading glasses, and sunglasses end up in the book drop. According to the news, someone once put a live chicken in the book drop. Of course they were easily located since there are security cameras everywhere these days. Once they were located, they were arrested. They probably thought they were being funny, but animal cruelty isn’t funny. Neither is it funny for the poor librarian, or more likely the part-time assistant, who found the chicken.

Even though it may not be cool for the person who had to clean it up, I do think the fact that someone put a sandwich in the book drop is kind of funny. I can just imagine them placing the sandwich on the car seat next to the books, fully anticipating lunchtime and the devouring of the sandwich. They go to the library to return the books, then head off to their favorite lunch spot, only to find an empty seat. They start looking all around. They look under the seat. They check the glove box. They check their pockets. “Now, where did I leave that sandwich?”

Meanwhile, back at the library, regardless of whether the sandwich was wrapped or not, the person retrieving books that day has to throw the sandwich in the trash. No one gets to eat it.

Mind what you put in the book drop.