A Disproportionate Tragedy

Yesterday, right after mailing the 60 DVDs off to the Cruise line, I returned home and encountered Susan and Yofi and after a brief parking conference, went inside for ten minutes to change for Chip Conley’s book signing.
Somehow –– between the mailbox store and the signing, my sunglasses vanished.
The UPS guy remembers me having them on my head.
Could they have fallen into the box and been mailed to the Caribbean?
Did they somehow descend into some bizarre nook or cranny underneath the driver’s seat?
Or did they fall behind something as I changed quickly for the event?
I was able to more or less let go yesterday at the event but today a thoroughly cleaning and search of car and home revealed NOTHING.
Somehow, this translated to an overall feeling of tragedy about my life, one I mostly managed to keep mostly at bay (particularly while enjoying the nicest day EVER in January during Belle and my beach walk with Susan) but still …
I think my resistance was also triggered by my whole Self-Actualization Course which kept hammering that the Opportunity is right in front of me and that if I don’t see it, it’s because of my Resistance.
It was really starting to mess with my head because the private facebook group for the course has people posting all their (annoying) triumphs about receiving surprise checks in the mail and other such sudden windfalls.  IE, it’s ENRAGING, especially when there’s not only not a surprise check at the mailbox store, but your beloved Wayfarers use the locale as an excuse to vanish from your life.
As I say, I managed to mostly keep it together — please don’t call me a Hero;  I am merely a survivor –– but somewhere around 8pm tonight I realized that perhaps my resistance is more about writing the actual screenplay of the novel than some sales call I’m unwilling to make.
Now it’s true that I did translate every scene into an index card format last week and that is MAJOR progress and yet …
I still haven’t actually WRITTEN a single scene.  [Yes, I know screenplays ARE structure –– but you’ve actually got to write out the scenes;  to the best of my knowledge, no one’s ever filmed a stack of index cards, however brilliantly organized.]
Weirdly, these are Bernstein’s notes for MASS created at the Macdowell Colony in 1970.  On their own, just how great do these sound?  I rest my case.
So tonight, I put on the Dinnerstein Goldberg recording, poured a tumbler of scotch and began.  I did it.  Really.
I started with transposing –– and that really is the right word –– two of the novel’s chattiest scenes, since that mostly involves reformatting lines into dialogue format, adding Character headers, and deleting quotation marks along with a few of the narrator’s interior monologue comments.
And it works.  Really well, in fact.
There are now a ZILLION more issues:  how much voice-over do I keep?  Is this too cheesy as a montage?  Where does this blip of a phone call moment actually physically take place?  What about that damn epilogue?
And most importantly, how does 360 pages translate into 120 with crazy screenplay formatting?
But it’s actually not only happening, I’m getting the hang of Final Draft Pro’s quirks (of which there are MANY, particularly when you are converting 360 pages into a new format.)
I feel that the tragedy of my potential sunglasses loss (I’m still not quite giving up hope) is not truly healed yet, but the pain has abated.
Oddly, Dan who is busy consulting with the most far-out spiritual crackpots out there, refuses to ask them about the situation.  I mean, if a channel claims direct access to INFINITE INTELLIGENCE how much of a strain is it to really find one pair of Lost Wayfarers?  Honestly … I’m just saying.
On another note:  madly in love with Arvo Pärt (even that “ä” makes me giddy) and Gregorio Allegri’s Album LIGHT.  How is it possible composers born in 1935 and 1582 respectively can be such perfect genius companions?
The transcendent beauty of the album is really helping me deal with the whole sunglasses situation.
That and listening to all five recordings I have of Handel’s impossibly elegant “Lascia Ch’io Pianga” from RINALDO.
Oddly, there are no sunglasses in the 1711 opera, and the Wayfarers are actually crusaders, and while I have not technically been captured by a cruel sorceress,   nonetheless “Let me weep over my cruel fate” perfectly summarizes my Ray-Ban lament.