Untackled

Sometimes, the ideas I have just wouldn't work.

These concepts that come to me, for stories, novels, shows, movies, media, most of them don't belong in reality. Some of them fall within reason and I follow them, see where they go. But most of them couldn't be pulled off, or it's just because they're funny, or they'd take too much patience, or funding, or six people would enjoy them and the rest of the people would be shoving pitchforks through my windows, lighting Molotovs for having their time wasted, their brains jostled. And they'd be right, I suppose, so I'd have to let them in.

Here's a partial list.

I'd love to write an incredibly long and elaborate Victorian novel about honor and nobility, full of sweeping panoramas, fanciful dinners, aching romances and marriage proposals, and title it The Cum Fuckers. Or ditch the name, keep it dignified, but on the last page every character in the book commits ritual, orgiastic mass suicide.

I'd love to make a movie, plot and genre unimportant, centered around two people. One person would whisper every single line of their dialogue, just barely loud enough to be heard. The other would scream their words as loud as a person can scream. No explanation would be given, and no mention would be made of it at any point.

I'd love to produce a completely vapid television series. One of those like Gilmore Girls or The Hills or whatever. It would run for six seasons as expected- gaining popularity as it went as reward for it's predictability and ability to cater to the basest of audience needs- then, three episodes into the seventh season, the zombie apocalypse would set in. That or a gateway to Hell, or a brutal alien invasion, or some other survival horror scenario, and viewers would watch in shock as half of their favorite characters died within minutes, leaving the rest of the witty, self-centered gang to fend for themselves within this crumbling and fiery version of the town they've come to know and love. The next morning in workplaces across the world, water coolers would explode. A huge portion of the viewersheep would instantly abandon the show while a whole new audience would flock to it, run to stores to purchase DVD collections of the first six seasons to catch up and understand. And hopefully, some of the original fans would stick around, too, exposed to a kind of story they never would have sought out actively.

Some ideas could work, if I had skills beyond an overreaching imagination. For instance, I think an entire story could be told in a real-time format through updates of blogs, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and maybe a few other outlets. Something multimedia and modern, something that can be experienced somewhat out of order and still make sense. People would experience it "as it happened" to the characters that owned the accounts. The amount of planning it would take is staggering, though, and the real trick would be getting people to watch from the start or close enough to it so they could get the true feeling of it, instead of the after effects.

There's more, of course. There always is. Most of this stuff, I just live with it. I use it to laugh when there's nothing else to laugh at, or think about when the going gets gray. They're the things I usually don't even put in my file of unused ideas. Which I do have, and it seems to get staler and staler. For instance, the idea about a story told from the first-person perspective of someone trying to figure out their indecipherable, oddly gesturing captors that reveals at the end to be told by a dog, it just sounds dumber the older I get.

Maybe a few of them will cough to life eventually. Until then it's as the song says. And All That Could Have Been.