What I’ve Been Thinking About…
I want to tell you about two unrelated events that wound up colliding in a spectacularly horrible fashion.
My friend Amy’s dad died during our sophomore year of high school. She was pulled out of class one morning and as the day went on, word began to spread about what had happened. To say it was unexpected would be an understatement. Her family was stunned and traumatized. That was the first event.
The second was the afternoon my Biology lab partner Jess introduced me to the phrase “fuck buddies.”
I told you. Completely unrelated.
A less crude way to put it would be friends with benefits. And just in case you’re as naive as I was back then, it’s when two people regularly have sex, but without the expectation of any sort of deeper romantic relationship. All the perks, none of the drama.
I was 15, so this subject was a lot more interesting to me than whatever our assignment was that day. I listened with rapt attention as Jess laid out some of the ground rules for this type of arrangement….
Always use protection, establish boundaries, be discreet, etc.
As she went on and on, I joked that this was all starting to sound surprisingly complicated and that maybe we should put together a helpful pamphlet to pass out to our fellow students.
Jess thought that was hilarious. She ripped out a sheet of notebook paper and wrote at the top:
Rules For A Fuck Buddy
And then under that…
Rule #1: Always Use Protection
She passed it to me and said there should be a picture to go with the text. So I thought about it for a second and then sketched someone wearing a full suit of Medieval armor that covered everything except their naked genitalia. I slid it back to Jess and her eyes went wide. She covered her mouth to hold in her laughter and then excitedly wrote down the next rule.
And that’s how we spent the next couple of days in Bio. We just kept passing that piece of paper back and forth, trying to make each other laugh. She’d come up with a new rule and then I’d pair it with a doodle that wildly (and often, offensively) misinterpreted the information. Both sides of that piece of paper were absolutely stuffed to the gills with the sort of repugnant vulgarity that teenagers mistake for edgy comedy.
You’ve heard of Chekov’s Gun? Well, consider this Chekov’s Fuck Buddy Brochure.
Here comes the collision…
When Amy returned to school, I knew I wanted to tell her how sorry I was about her dad, but I was also nervous about tripping over my words and saying the wrong thing. Since I’d always been better at expressing myself through writing, I decided to offer my condolences in a note.
Yeah. You can probably guess where this is going.
Amy and I would always pass each other in the hallway after third period. So on this day, I reached into my pocket, pulled out that note, slipped it into her hand, and with an appropriately mournful expression said, “I am so sorry….”
But of course that wasn’t the only piece of paper I had folded up in there. So when she got to her next class and opened it up, the first words she saw were…
Rules For A Fuck Buddy.
So.
Let’s break this down.
From her point of view, my response to the death of her father was an illustrated guide about the protocols of no-strings-attached intercourse.
I realized my mistake once I got to Biology and passed the other note to Jess. She unfolded it, stared at it for a few seconds, and then spoke two words that completely upended reality…
“Who’s Amy?”
I grabbed the piece of paper back and as I read through the first few lines of my heartfelt declaration of sympathy, a nervous hot flash erupted in my chest and quickly spread out over my entire body. I tried to reject what I was seeing, even as my internal monologue spelled it out…
“No.”
Yes.
“I can’t be reading this.”
You are.
“But if this is here, that means…”
Oh yeah.
A wave of terror crested…
I GAVE AMY THE WRONG NOTE!
…and then broke.
OOOOOOH FUUUUUCK.
I can’t remember anything else from the next few hours. Teachers taught their lessons and friends tried to hold conversations, but I just stared catatonically into the middle distance. I wasn’t actually there. My soul had gone supernova. I was a piece of debris floating listlessly in a sea of shame. A sad Ben Affleck meme.
Even if I explained the mixup, I was still going to seem like a complete degenerate. Amy would never look at me the same way. And as awful as that was, it was only the tip of the iceberg. Because she had probably told everyone we knew about that note. Worse yet, she had probably shown them.
I’d have to find a new route after third period, that much was certain. I’d also have to cut off communication with any mutual friends Amy and I shared. A callous move, but what choice did I have? And oh God, what about the cafeteria? Where would I sit now? I knew there were some socially awkward kids who would hide out in the library during lunch, but was I really prepared to become one of them? A library lizard?!
When school ended that day and we were all standing around waiting for our buses, my friend nudged me and nodded over my shoulder. “It’s Amy,” He said. I closed my eyes, turned to face her, and struggled to come up with some way to salvage my reputation.
“Oh hey, Amy! Did you hear about this underground cabal of perverts that formed while you were away? Yeah, you should be careful. They’ve been running around slipping these disgusting drawings into the pockets of innocent kids.”
But as Amy walked over to me, I noticed she was smiling. I barely got a few words out before she gave me a great big hug and told me that was the hardest she’d laughed in a long time. And after I told her the whole story, she laughed even harder.
Turns out, she’d grown really damn tired of everyone telling her how sorry they were. She’d accumulated enough concerned looks, empty gestures, and hollow platitudes to last a lifetime. She didn’t want to be treated like she was made of porcelain, she just wanted to feel like a person again. And to my utter amazement, those stupid drawings had done the trick.
If I’d been presented with two options for making my friend feel better under those circumstances… an outpouring of compassion vs. X-rated doodles of boobies and wee-wees… there would have been a very clear winner.
But if I’d given Amy the right note, it would have been precisely what she didn’t need. It was the wrong answer that wound up being the correct solution.
What I’ve Been Working On…
Earlier this month, my wife and I spent the weekend in New Buffalo, Michigan. We stayed at this cozy little house set deep in the woods. My favorite view was from the kitchen where there were these giant windows and no one else in sight…
On our last morning there, we got up just as the sun was starting to rise, made some coffee, and talked about the short film I mentioned a few posts back.
Whenever I’m working on something that I intend to shoot myself, I usually have to be a writer and a producer at the same time. I can’t put anything on the page we definitely won’t be able to shoot. There’s always that push and pull though, and I’m very lucky that my wife is an amazing producing partner who’s determined to help me achieve what I’m picturing in my head, but without breaking the bank. And so the conversation we were having was about some of the logistical challenges the current version of this story was presenting me with.
At a certain point, instead of fighting these obstacles, I decided to see what would happen if we just embraced them…
Can’t shoot at our main location after the sun goes down? Fine, what if this film is set during the day instead of at night? How does that change the story? And instead of focusing on what we’d lose by making that switch, is there anything we’d gain? Turns out, yes. Quite a bit. We recognized that might actually be better. Not just for the ease of the production, but for the film overall.
And then there was this entire prologue I’d worked out that was starting to seem impractical. It would add several additional days to our schedule and involve a lot of different locations, costume changes, additional actors, etc.
But it felt so essential. I didn’t think the rest of the story would even work without it. Even still, we went through the same process. Don’t have time the time or budget to shoot it? Fine, what happens if we axe it? And once again, we wound up with a better version of the film.
This became the running theme of our exchange, whether it was story issues or the practical challenges of production. What’s the “wrong” answer to the problem? Okay, let’s play that out instead of discounting it and see what happens.
Now, there will obviously be certain elements of whatever you’re working on that you’ll decide are too important to compromise on. But as someone who can be a little bit rigid in that regard (ha, that’s a polite way of saying maniacal control freak), this has been a useful exercise for discovering just how malleable a lot of these ideas truly are. At worst, you reaffirm your original decision. At best, you unlock a whole other aspect of your project.
In fact, that was sort of the genesis of this entire film. One of the lead characters responds to the story’s inciting incident in the exact opposite way you’d expect. That’s what got me excited about it. That’s how I knew what the rest of the film would be and what I could bring to it.
From its very inception, the wrong answer was the correct solution.
5 Cool Things
🎥 RoboCop is one of my favorite movies and there’s a new four-part documentary about the making of it called RoboDoc. They tracked down all of the key players for a comprehensive and entertaining look at how it all came together. I love filmmaking docs and this is one of the best I’ve ever seen.
🎧 Speaking of Paul Verhoeven movies, my podcast Rogues Gallery just released an episode about Starship Troopers and I’ve already heard from a few listeners who think it’s one of our best. Oh hey, look at that — we also have a RoboCop episode!
📃 The Curiosity Chronicle by Sahill Bloom has become one of my favorite newsletters and I think many of you would enjoy it as well. That link goes to the archive so just scroll down, sample a few, and see if it grabs your interest.
✔️ 100 Tips for a Better Life. Pretty self-explanatory. I bookmarked this a couple of months ago and I love that it’s divided into categories because I’ll occasionally go back and re-read certain sections of it.
📚 Looking for a new book to read? I’ve been really impressed with Fivebooks.com. These aren’t recommendations generated by an algorithm. They’re curated lists organized by subject/genre/etc. It’s constantly being updated and the interface is really intuitive.
Take care, friends. Talk to you soon.
If there’s a topic you’d like me to cover or a question you’d like to ask, send a message to chrisfightsdemons@substack.com. If it’s something I think other readers will be interested in, I’ll add it to the list and respond in a future post.
Laughed out loud so many times throughout this story. Bravo, Chris.
Been there with a note getting to the wrong person. lol. Mine didn’t end as poetically as yours!