When the Bus Comes etc

kay, so the short play I wrote (When the Bus Comes) is starting tomorrow. It's playing with the four other winners in its category, at Barracks Square in Fredericton, every day at noon from tomorrow to Friday.

Been thinking a bit about plays and so on and thought I might attempt a longer piece at some point in the future. I had an idea for a lengthier play - it was going to be called Quarantine and be about a small group of people quarantined in their apartment due to the outbreak of an extremely contagious plague. I came up with this shortly before the movie Quarantine hit theatres.

Ironically, the idea for the play itself was lifted from "Pleasureland" by Kate Atkinson (from Not the End of the World which is a pretty sick book. I recommend). Obviously I changed it a lot but I got the inspiration from that originally. But fuck, maybe I'll just do it anyway. The thing I'm writing now is basically just a riff on "The Yellow Wallpaper" - in "Yellow Wallpaper" a sickly woman and her husband go out to stay in the country for a while, she sees women lurking in the wallpaper, and goes crazy; in my story, a sickly man and his girlfriend go out to stay in the country for a while, he sees men lurking in the orchard, and goes crazy. It's essentially the same story but with the genders reversed.

Honestly I'm not sure why I chose to reverse the genders. I just felt like writing from a male perspective I guess. I often do.

Anyway. What is the point of this post? To say that I am a hack. Who is reading this post? Likely no one. It will spring forth into the cold void of the internet and lie there until... okay. This is getting weird.

Here's a sample of what I wrote yesterday (I know I shouldn't post my work on the internet but my shit isn't really worth stealing. However, if this should ever come up as a court thing, my name is Andrea Gigeroff and I transcribed this at 3.21 PM, July 26th, 2009):

"Rob was out on the porch again when Myra came back. He had gone back out as soon as the sun came up. Somehow the orchard was not quite as disturbing in daylight. Besides, there wasn't much to see after dark and what good was that?

"In the daylight, he saw so much. He saw birds swerve to avoid flying over the trees. He saw the leaves moving when the wind had stopped. He saw the same shadowy man creeping around behind the first row of trees*. And then he saw more of them. They were milling around back there, walking back and forth, crossing one another, occasionally stopping to peer out at him.

"It was a ripple of movement, a shudder. Disgusting. It made his skin crawl. There was something vaguely insect-like in their motions, the way they crept around. Bulbous bodies on spidly legs. He was sure they had many eyes.

"It made him sick to watch them but he knew that if he stopped watching, they would come forth, a wave of them, crawling over one another, rushing towards him, overtaking him, consuming him, the very second he let his guard down. He had to blink one eye at a time. It took a great deal of concentration, keeping his eyes open and focused, his brain in the centre of consciousness"

So a little bit of weirdness for today, from me to you. I can't even remember what the crap this post was supposed to be about. Oh yeah, When the Bus Comes. Uhm. I hope I'll get to see it tomorrow but the chances of that are not especially good. I will just have to work something out. Also, my dad's play is showing tomorrow night. I will probably not get to see that either which kind of sucks. I just keep thinking that if I did what I said I was going to do when I said I was going to do it, I would have a driver's license by now instead of just this lousy learner's permit. Suck.

* "There are things in that paper that nobody knows but me, or ever will. Behind that outside pattern the dim shapes get clearer every day. It is always the same shape, only very numerous. And it is like a woman stooping down and creeping around behind that pattern. I don't like it a bit" -- The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Gilman