Drink the Kool-Aid

When all else fails, I write in front of the television.

On the couch, coffee at hand, laptop fired up, TV on. I need all four things -- the TV on when I'm at my desk just makes me turn around in my chair. On the couch with no TV and I surf the internet for hours. No coffee means I have to go get coffee. Laptop, obviously, because Final Draft doesn't work with a legal pad.

I'm not proud of this. I know better than to work in front of the TV. But no kidding, it works. I should stop fighting the idea that it's wrong and just give in -- maybe I'd be closer to 90 pages now.

But it also has to be a very specific kind of television. It has to be something I actually want to watch, which unfortunately for MG rules out football and UFO documentaries. Entertaining but not especially good movies on HBO are best. I did three pages watching "The Departed" and seven pages watching "Live Free or Die Hard."

(You may be saying to yourself, ten pages in four hours of movies? That sucks. And my grown-up brain agrees with you. It's not great. But its a fuckload better than zero pages in four hours of sitting at my desk, which is my grown-up brain's idea of a good work space. So I'm gonna go with my nine-year-old brain's idea of a work space for now.)

Some television I refuse to watch while writing -- "30 Rock," "House," "Reaper." Shows that I intend to watch with complete focus. And some shows, even though I don't like to admit it, are a little too terrifying/enjoyable to keep me company at the laptop.

Specifically, "Project Runway." I must have mentioned this before, that Tim Gunn is like the boiled down concentrate of every departmental chair, every professor emeritus of every MFA program in the nation. He's serene but interested, wise but fallible. (I read in the NYT, shortly after Liz Claibourne hired him as creative director, that the job enabled him to finally move out of a typical small NY apartment, which fits as well.)

The writers... I mean, designers, break my heart. They have such hopes for the future; they know what they do well; they know what they love. And they do the best they can to meet the challenges, never knowing if they've succeeded until the moment of truth.

Virtually every designer smiles and nods at his/her model on the catwalk, momentarily in love with their work all over again. The smile doesn't slip away until that horrifying moment when Michael Kors looks you in the eye and asks what you were thinking with the six foot long train.

Still more horrifying are the interviews with the designers who are OBLIVIOUS to the giant mistake directly in their path. Their colleagues see it. Tim Gunn sees it. But the smitten designer is so in love, so consumed with their plans, that they're blind to any and all possible problems.

Those moments send me reaching me for the Tivo remote, because in my frail state, I can't really take too much of what, bluntly, is full-on Kool-Aid Drinking. In fact, all creative endeavors contain hours and hours of Kool-Aid Drinking, but you don't know it at the time. And for all we know, it will turn out to be delicious, tasty Kool-Aid that will make us the envy of all our friends.

But, alas for reality television, you can't make an hour-long show out of nothing but calculated gambles that pay off brilliantly. Somebody has to fall on their face. And what every creative person fears, as they sit on their couch, typing away; or stand in their studio, studying the canvas; or strum a few chords and look at the scribbled lyrics they've got so far --- what we all fear is that this is the time we fall on our face. Yet if anything is gonna get done, we've got to set that fear aside and do the next thing. And the thing after that. And the thing after that.