Well, I like Preamble better.
I assure you, that's the last of the jokes. This is a very serious "story", and I mean that. I'm not going to be snarky or sarcastic, if I bring up something funny, I'm not going to try to make it funnier. It's not even necessarily written for you to laugh at. It's just what happened, and I'm writing it.
Before I go any further, I'll explain a little bit. And before that, I'll mention that this blog will be a mess, and I will get more into that once I explain the former, which is, the point.
I've been graduated from college for nearly a year. Does that make sense? I wrote that sentence as if it did. I don't know, but you understand the information I'm trying to send. I met a lot of great people there, and overall - despite what I'll say sometimes - I really loved the school. It had it's shortcomings, of course, but what is ever $35,000 a year good? The friends and experiences are priceless, of course, but still. What a price that is. Anyway, I had one friend named Derek. He was a complete joy and we were good friends. However conveniently, with only a month and a half left of school, we had a falling out. A really strange one, one that I still can't understand. We never spoke about it, but we should have, and now it can't be done.
Since school I have been writing, reading, and thinking a lot. I took a bunch of dead end jobs, that always being the plan, and I'm still at one now. It doesn't matter to me, so long as I pay the bills and have time to write and film. Close friend Ryan Sartor has become my writing partner, and together we write nearly every day. We've got a lot accomplished, and some really awesome stuff in the future. He once brought up that we should do something personal, and I got defensive. I said that the feature we were working on was extremely personal to me, and I felt that he didn't think that. Maybe he did, maybe he didn't, it doesn't matter, what does matter was that although he could relate to it, it wasn't personal enough. It wasn't bleeding. It wasn't Synecdoche, New York.
Which is brave. And why shouldn't we write something like that? It's difficult, though - making something that personal is one thing, but having TWO people do it... Ryan and I played with the idea of making a documentary in Spring, trying to find Derek in his home state, Vermont. We'd interview people at school, teachers, try to get as much information about his location as possible. As good of friends as we were to him, he was a very private person, which is what you'll discover in the later entries. It's also the reason why I changed his name.
The documentary seemed exploitative to me. Self-indulgent, intrusive. I was very uncomfortable doing it, but I encouraged him to do it. I think. Maybe I thought to but never brought it up. In my line of work (Retail Loss Prevention) I do a lot of thinking. This put me in a terrible down. Because of that thinking, I applied it to other projects and started losing interest. This was me taking advantage of my grandfather, this was me being pretentious, etc. etc. Eventually it passed, and I recently read A Staggering Work of Heartbreaking Genius (which was great, did I miss that trend? Either way it's better than your Twilights) which put everything nicely - every one wants every one to know about them once they step out of the door by every action. If you're an artist, even more so, so it's best to just come to terms with it. And while I do think that it is something to be wary of, I'm less nervous about it and I won't let it hinder any personal projects.
So I suggested that the documentary idea - finding Derek - should be a feature length narrative. He seems down. He always is. Very supportive. Great guy, couldn't ask for greater. Us being swamped at the moment with current joint-projects and personal projects, and probably knowing a little bit about the endeavor at hand, we put it on the back burner. Something for Fall or Winter. Winter is most depressing. Probably Winter.
We always spoke about Derek's disappearance, not being able to figure it out. When he brought up writing something personal that we both knew about, it fit too well. I've tried to talk to others about it - Maxine gets it, she gets everything - but people who know him mostly just say "That's Derek" or don't seem to think of it as a huge deal. So why do we think it is? Not to put the others down, as I have lost friends and gotten over it, or I have lost friends and have not even really been under it. It happens. But Derek's disappearance is something I couldn't really shake, mostly because it made little sense to me.
It crossed my mind every so often after graduation. That summer we came up with the documentary idea. Then in winter we came up with the narrative idea. Still, while it deeply bothered me, I had no problem waiting to write it. We were both passive about the whole thing, in a way, in a weird way. I think one of us would think about it, say something or do something, and the other would listen and understand, but it wouldn't be on their mind in the same way. Really, though, what could we do to contact him? When I say that it crossed my mind every so often, I mean that for Ryan too, and I also mean that every time it crossed our minds, we tried to call him. And it always went to his voice mail. And we texted him, and he never responded.
The other day it crossed Ryan's mind, and brought it up to his girlfriend Sarah. While together, they phoned him.
His phone was disconnected.
Yeah, cue the music, but seriously. That was our last connection to him, aside from e-mailing (Which, now that I think about it, we did try, though only once), and it was gone. We had nothing else.
This bothered me.
A few days after that, Ryan said he figured something out, and he looked up Derek's full name on some website. It might have been this website that I had been shown by my friend Pete, it might not have been, that's not really the point so let's not think about it. Ryan looked up Derek, a very private person with a private family, and found his work number. We were a step closer. Ryan said he wouldn't call, but I encouraged him, and he complied. "Tomorrow" he said.
It didn't happen. Why would it? What would we even say? We were snooping around on the Internet and found your number. etc. etc. All the obvious weird stuff. And how far can you go to try and talk to someone that has cut ties with you?
It's all too confusing. We have the number, and because Ryan won't do it (and I don't blame him, yet..), I volunteered to do it. Not entirely gung-ho about it, though - I don't have the number, and when I said "I'll do it" he said "Okay" without me asking for the number or him giving it to me. I talked to my grandfather about it, and he mentioned something about legal action, which I wouldn't rule out at this point. He also had some extreme ideas as to Derek's sudden change in behavior and sudden reclusiveness, but as cliche as those ideas are, they're honestly the only things that really make sense to the situation.
At work, all I could think of was Derek and the times we had. So, I'm going to write about them. In detail. If something was funny, then it'll be funny, if it wasn't then it won't be. A part of me is like, it will become an Internet hit and he'll find us and it'll work out. A part of me is we'll write this script and shoot it and take it to festivals and he'll find us and it'll work out. And then there's this part of me, this part of me, it goes he'll find out and then he will send an e-mail saying to stop. Or take that legal action that my grandpa thought of.
And I wouldn't put it past him, not at this point. So there's questions like how far can you go when someone doesn't want anything to do with you anymore and is this exploitative? Is this self-indulgent and unfair to others that aren't you but there's also how can you call someone a good friend when you really don't know anything about them.
I don't know if there will be an end. I don't know when or if I'll finish. I really don't know what's going to happen or how often I'll do this, but when I started thinking about it, I covered a whole sheet of times with Derek. Small stuff. But it's something. And the more I wrote down, the less I understood.
Keeping my promise, as in, this whole thing will be a mess, I will leave you with a description of Derek, something I should have posted right away.
Derek is tall like you thought you'd be when you were in the back row in your kindergarden class picture. He had long hair, to his friends at home it was weird (this is the only thing we know about his friends), and he usually covered it with a hat. The hat was usually an RDA production, but towards the end he found love in Ed Hardy. Always very nice and tidy, he'd stick around the film building (who could blame him? the first was very cozy. The second? Habit.) and meet everyone. Everyone knew him.
Which makes this even weirder to me, but
He made jokes a lot, then at a certain point he didn't want to. Then at another certain point, he decided he wanted to again. It was all fine. He disappeared a little during his last month at school, and there he is now. Well, gone.
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