 Our sales
manager came back from a party with a bunch of lawyers and told me that the
lawyers loved the Edition but that
one said he didn't want to read about my "navel flint." I laughed scornfully.
So now these lawyers say that I'm writing that I have a flint in my navel. So
now they claim that I say that I can press the sides of my belly button
together and produce flame. What a joke. As if I'd try to pass off such a
transparent lie. Lawyers make extravagant, nonsensical statements, so they
assume everybody else does too. But I'm telling lawyers: Don't include me in
your little world! I've got plenty to deal with in the real one!
Then again, our
sales manager might have mispronounced the word "lint" as "flint" while
relating this incident to me. The more I consider it the more I think this is
the likely explanation, since our sales manager is kind of . . .
well, you know . . . a sales guy. "Navel lint" makes much more
sense within this context as the lawyer may have been referring to my habit of
speaking about personal matters in this column. I would like to state here that
I have never once written a column about my navel lint, though I have written
about lint screens in dryers, which might easily have confused this lawyer.
Yes, I know it seem ridiculous to confuse a dryer with a human navel, but this
is a lawyer we're talking about, not a rocket scientist. Try to have a little
compassion.
Anyway, what
does this pinhead lawyer want me to write about? The environment? Andrew Dice
Clay? The school board? The Winbush controversy? Plenty of people will write
about that stuff, not to worry. It'll get covered without me putting my two
cents in, and believe me, that's all my opinion is worth on these subjects. The
essential question is this: If I don't write about myself, who will? Stop and
think about that for a moment. If you do, the answer you must necessarily come
up with is this: nobody. Not one person. There are no major biographies in the
works at publishing houses. No movie deals! Nothing! Is it any wonder I do what
I do?
Having said
that, I realize that perhaps my life story may not be marketable worldwide.
Consequently, I've begun to try to think of other money making projects. Why
should all those other writers cash in on their stupid stories while I sit her
grousing about lawyers? What have they got that I haven't got?
Saleable ideas,
that's what. Ideas about atomic terrorists, robot cops, baseball-playing
ghosts, Batman, Dick Tracy, hookers and stockbrokers. The best I've been able
to come up with so far is "The story of a young man . . . " That's my big idea.
When I'm really cooking, I get as far as "The story of a young man who . . . "
and then I'm stumped. What does he do, anyway? Hold Washington D.C. hostage
with an A-bomb? Embark on an elaborate scheme to con Qaddafi or Saddam Hussein
out of a couple billion petro-dollars? Track down a serial killer who switches
his victims' body parts? Be the secret Allied operative who, posing as a Nazi
general, convinces Hitler to invade Russia,
thus changing the course of World War II?
These may seem
like hot ideas to you, but they don't do me any good, because I know I'm not
going to write them. I'm more likely to write a story about a young man who
steps into his TV, into an episode of Green
Acres. What he'd do from that point I haven't the slightest idea.
Unfortunately, the Green Acres idea
is more my speed that the lucrative mass murder-Nazi-Middle East-hostage market
I wish I could break into. But my brain doesn't work that way. I think more
about crackers and cookies.
Really, the
ideas I'd feel comfortable working on-ideas that let me write what I know-I
just don't see making my fortune. I mean, I just thought of a story of a young
man who sprays Formula 409 on a phone and ruins it. How am I going to sell an
idea like this? Maybe if I souped up the story, like having the guy spray Formula
409 on Qaddafi. Oh, forget it. You see where my ideas head. Right. On the fast
track to nowhere.
I'm going to
stop thinking about this. You see what comes of listening to the babble of
lawyers and sales managers?
|
Quirkee Voices 
(0 vote)
