Breaking your head in Hollywood
a dispatch from bewilderness
Once I had a job. My job was words. They could not be too long, too short, too fast, too slow. They had to be just right for Goldilocks. I mean for the editors.
A train of thought that leaves at the right time for the right place and gets there in style. The right context, the right content, the right voice and tone. I was a writer for TV and magazines as well as a part-time ghost.
Then – in an instant -- I was a former freelance writer and a former freelance ghost. This was due to a drunk with a truck.
In an instant, I had a funky grasp on language, which is called aphasia, and a funky filing system, too. This is called amnesia. I confused things like whether someone was pregnant or poignant. That is called you’re screwed up.
But there’s breaking your head and breaking your head in Hollywood, which requires the most tangential relation to reality, or not even that. In Regarding Henry, one of the first brain-damaged films, Harrison Ford plays a lawyer with greased-back hair who gets shot in the head. This improves him enormously. He stops greasing his hair and quits being a jerk.
Then there’s Matt Damon as Jason Bourne, a professional assassin who is pulled from the sea with no idea of who he is or how he landed there. Turns out he was a spy with amnesia. He’s lost any clue to his identity, yet he can read, write, add, subtract, make coffee and spin-kick crazy creeps off balconies.
It’s hard to divine your deficits when they're constantly shifting. I had “more or less aphasia” combined with “more or less amnesia” at any given time. The boundaries between “able” and “disabled” are fluid, not fixed. Sometimes you’re able, sometimes you’re not.
That’s when you might want to become someone more like Jason Bourne, who was Bourne again in a few films. You can achieve this by upping your “situational awareness,” or for folks like myself, upping any awareness at all. Add military secrets to surviving stress and learning to think like a Navy SEAL. Or learning to think at all.
Also try: 6 practical homemade booby traps and spy secrets to save your life, but do NOT ever try spin-kicking anyone anywhere.
Your observations are a testament to persistence. Gives me necessary perspective on the tiny indignities of aging (what is this person’s name to whom I was just introduced? When did that event happen? How does 10/20/30 years condense into a few recollections?). Thank you for so hilariously and poignantly relating your experience. I keep my fingers crossed for you, since any hope that prayers are useful fled in adolescence. Xoxoxo
Your writing is so very helpful! By reading your work, I begin to understand how to practice mental hygiene and how to use what brain remains. Reading your writing is a true joy.