I've taken a few weeks off from San Francisco and the noise of the City to get some writing done. Specifically to get the 10th draft of my 90's action/comedy, ninja/heist script in the books. All it was really missing was some fine tuning of the mise en scene and some punching up of the dick jokes.
Getting out of the city and off to a few acres of pristine, militia protected Oregon countryside is great for the creative spirit. There's a special zeitgeist that occurs at the intersection of dirty hippy and meth addled redneck and as long as you're armed, it's great ritin' country.
But when you silence the sirens and traffic and general mayhem of schoolgirls and crackheads, you have to be prepared to deal with your own thoughts. It is what you wanted and they will seep in. Just ask Kaczynski.
It's easy to start questioning projects, losing sight of the promise of the premise and generally wondering if there really is any point to any of this so called "art." That's the point at which it's necessary to take a break, take a long walk or at least a trip to the batting cages.
I've been hitting a few days a week at Medford's local family fun center and it was there that I realized I had to actually pull the trigger on one of my languishing art projects.
I'd paid for a half hour in the cages and the polite and businesslike young woman had set me up on a cage and given me the generic run down of, "here's the start button." No less than four pitches in the machine jammed.
I waited a few seconds hoping that the shoddiness of the machine feed's own construction would cause it to vibrate the ball jam loose. Nope. As I was about to head back inside to grab someone, I saw the girl who had helped me enter the cage next to me. She threw on a helmet, nodded at me and said, "I got it," and ran out into the middle of the live batting cage.
At his point there are at least four other people hitting and she didn't flinch, she just did her best corn fed Indiana Jones impression and timed the hitters and dodged through traffic, around the nets, unclogged the jam and ran back.
I was impressed and thanked her as she came back to the safety of my cage and said, "holler if it happens again."
So in honor of her and all the other folks that I have run into and will run into in the future, I had 500 of these cards made up and have been giving them to anyone in any instance that inspires the term on the card.