The Challenge of Three Wishes

George Miller’s 2022 film Three Thousand Years of Longing revisits the tale of the genie granting any three wishes, which apparently can only lead to ruin and was food for thought on my recent hikes.

I started with the obvious…1. Wealthiest person in the world 2. Power of Invisibility 3. Crazy fun sex with a multitude of gorgeous women. (Which would be good for at least 10 years. Maybe even more?)

I reconsidered and focused on more of who I am. 1. Publish several novels to critical acclaim 2. Produce several films to popular acclaim 3. Lots of crazy fun sex, etc.

And then I realized that maybe I had fallen into the trap of this game and tried to dig deeper…1. Rediscover the wide-eyed rapture of life 2. Not feel like I always need something else to be happy 3. Help society in a more fulfilling and less self-destructive direction.

The satisfaction with the last set lasted all of a minute and I returned to my first try. Being invisible with lots of cash, and, yeah, you know the rest, that sounded good to me.

The Miserable Insanity of Writing

Writing is a misery because the magic can be there, perfect and exact, and then it’s gone. One moment every word is right there, waiting to be transcribed, every detail noted, every moment caught, all right there. And then it’s all gone. To have it and then not have it, back and forth, in and out, like a lunatic in the asylum. And worse than that, much worse, to find that the very next day, all the writing that seemed so perfect and exact is in fact inept crap.

Maybe not inept crap as much as undeveloped sophomoric shit. Or is that just the same thing? Perhaps it’s not a misery as much as a mental disease, that of schizophrenia. And it isn’t just the mirror-world thinking, never knowing when it’s the backwards world or not. The wonder of writing is getting into that world, living there, and hence not being here. It makes simple conversation next to impossible. I mean, you aren’t even you. You’re worse than a gutted actor. You’re a nothing, a driveling idiot.

You’re left outside, staring at things, not even looking at them. And then, in time, there’s something to notice, to wonder what it might mean and how it could be used, how it might mean something in a story. It begins again, when the idea of writing the thing goes around and around and gets louder and then quieter and louder again, and the words are unintelligible and wild, pure and magical like that.

Those words of not knowing anything and will never understand, even it could be sorted, actually with the sorting making it worse, farther from the goal, because even with the sense of knowing, it’s nothing more than liking booze and sex, realizing there is nothing smarter than that. Yeah, that’s the book I’m thinking about now. A big seller that.