then get up and be it

okay, here it goes, opening scene, ready?

open to the first credit, somebody presents something or something, then blink to an alarm clock at 6:00 am and a song starts. obviously what song it is is very important to me; it has to set the tone for pretty much the rest of the whole thing. i thought about it all on the way home tonight, and the only thing i've come up with so far is ted leo's "me and mia," which is actually pretty good, i think. really though, this is pretty important, maybe even the most important thing in the whole movie. it needs to be upbeat but somewhat melancholy. other options: sparta's "sans cosm," the shins' "kissing the lipless" (problem: probably too zach braff), rilo kiley's "spectacular views" (i think that may have taken the lead).

okay, new plan. blink to the alarm clock displaying 6:00 am and the pixies' "cecilia ann" starts playing for about five seconds, then a hand comes down to hit snooze and we blink black again for the next credit, which i imagine would be the director. blink back to the clock, nine minutes later, another song, hand again, black again, repeat two more times. at 6:36, "spectacular views" comes on. our guy wakes up. credits montage continues as he showers, brushes his teeth, shaves, gets dressed, opens the fridge and frowns and closes it and walks away, then gets in his car, looks frustrated (traffic), gets out and goes to work, gets back into car looking much more tired and dissheveled, looks frustrated again (traffic), then comes home.

let's call him wes. why? no reason, we can change it later. wes lives with his friend nick and his former best friend dan. wes is 24 years old, two years out of school, for the sake of argument let's call him a political science major who doesn't really know what to do with the rest of his life. he works in, oh, let's say a research institute on the campus of a large university. honestly, it doesn't really matter where he works, just that he hates his job because he is completely undervalued and terribly unchallenged. nick is the lead guitarist in his latest project which he thinks is really going somewhere but is in reality completely awful and he knows it, and dan is an accountant who isn't terribly unsuccessful but is easily bored. he will also happen to be dating wes's ex-girlfriend--though they only dated freshman year of college and have been strictly platonic but very good friends since. wes is, of course, for the sake of extra drama, in love with her, always has been and always will, he thinks. let's call her jenny for right now, because she should be played by jenny lewis, which, trust me, is much better than calling her scarlett.

it's important to understand that while this wes character does have a job that relates to me, and as the main character will probably have several other traits that we share, he is not supposed to be "me." this is a story about a group of friends who are angry and disillusioned by the real world and so decide to become professional criminals, and i'm not going to do that. i mean, sure, i've thought about robbing banks to make a living--if i hadn't ever thought about it i probably wouldn't be able to attempt to write this--but i'm certainly not about to go and do it. anyway, i'm going to bed, because i'm tired. maybe i'll keep going tomorrow.