Money-Making Scheme

I'm thinking of writing a screenplay, or a novel maybe, about a smart girl who ends up working at a near-truckstop diner with a bunch of nice uneducated people and who writes poems, and who learns to be happy there or who escapes to...well, she doesn't want to escape, but Hollywood might make her have to escape. The third or fourth re-writer will see to that. I would like Zooey Deschanel or Claire Danes to play me, er, the speaker, I mean, the main character. Or Scarlett Johannsen. She's pretty! The goal of all this is, of course, to boost sales, in the world of normal humans who don't read poetry, of my poetry book, which will obviously have been published to great acclaim in the poetry world by the time my verse is coming out of Scarlett's mouth. Ooh! KIRSTEN DUNST! I love her.

I am kind of serious about this actually. When I used to take driving vacations with my family, would would come through all these desert towns and I would wander why anyone would live here. It is beautiful, but it was always summer, and hot and dry, and everything is brown, but now I can see how it's interesting, especially living in a place like Tucson, which is hovering between big town and small city, plus the university, which mostly means there's a lot of drunk girls in short skirts over on 4th Avenue, plus all the snowbirds (a description I love). There's a good mix of people, though, from different classes and backgrounds, but not too much of anyone. Maybe too many people with "America: Love it or Leave It!" bumperstickers; it is a red state. But you have to make do with getting to know the people around you. It's harder to make cliques of just the people you really want to be around, so you have to do your best to appreciate what's good in people you might ignore in a place like LA. I like it, and I want to write about it. I don't know how to do it in a poem. I hate writing autobiographical poems. It feels like cheating and it's too hard to break things up, to get away from narrative and go lyrical when I know how things really happened, but if I'm writing prose, I can manage things better, I think. I'll start writing it soon, and let you all know how it progresses. I know you are all fascinated to see.