Labor Plains
There’s coconut oil currently soaking into my scalp, and I’m waiting to find out if I’ll be allowed to work again. The oil is another attempt to delay gravity’s slow but steady annihilation of my hairline, recommended by TikTok girlies who generously relay their beauty hacks in dead-voiced, narrated videos. These short fi’lms may or may not be the only new films we’ll ever get from now on. This is the future of cinema.
It is possible the writer’s strike could end today. There are negotiations happening under a mostly impenetrable wall of silence. A communication blackout. We’ve been instructed by the guild and its directors to ignore rumors and avoid spreading them. Just be patient. Hold out some more. We’ve been burned in the recent past. But this feels different. CEOS are meeting on a Saturday.
Writers who’ve appointed themselves labor experts on Instagram during the strike are also warning us to Just Say No to rumors. They relay this in self-published, bullet-pointed, viral-hopeful infographics shared to their Instagram stories; most include the direction to breathe or take a walk. I wish they would include “disassociate, watch porn, have stress diarrhea.” These writers I don’t know but share a union with, who’ve successfully turned themselves into Norma Rae through either careful education or just good self-mythologizing. Both are respectable. Both are impressive. Overnight, you who studied English at Scripps College, became an expert on labor ethics. I couldn’t commit to either of those things. I’ve done my best to read up, to understand, but when someone who’s not in the industry asks me about the strike, I full body retch hearing myself explain it. I’ve picketed, I’ve voted. I haven’t Scabbed. I’ve done what I can. But I still don’t feel as active, as polished. I am just in the crowd. There are people in this strike who are Labour. I am simply Labor. I have made peace with that.
Recently at double strike rally, I was asked to speak briefly into a microphone for a podcast. They wanted to know why I was there. I speak into a microphone for my job, but in that moment, I could barely say what my name was. I fugued and blathered out points I’d seen on an Instagram infographic. I felt like I did while doing stand-up at a Sunday night open mic at UCB East in 2012. I asked if I could start over, and ended up saying something mildly intelligible and only mildly cringe.
“I’m here because enough is enough!” I said. And then I burst into flames right there in front of Paramount Studios while Carrie Fisher’s sister levitated above the stage and spoke in tongues.
I couldn’t simply explain that I just want to get paid fairly and on time, that I want everyone in my business to get paid fairly and on time, that I don’t want writers to become day rate mercenaries, that I want everyone to be able to afford health insurance. That I’ve been in a spiritual Gravitron for most of this year at the cataclysmic state of this industry that is currently being plundered by men in their 60s who would prefer if we all lived in tents in a field while Jenna Ortega and a robot dog run every writers’ room. I also want to lobotomize myself so I don’t remember any of this happened. It’s a pickle.
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I was not in Los Angeles this past week, which was the best decision I made all year, other than getting married. I was in Austin, Texas where my husband grew up, and we celebrated his and his twin brother’s birthday at a lake house. I’ve started going to Austin more regularly. In recent years, and especially over COVID, Joe Rogan acolytes from LA and New York fled there to avoid mask mandates and make transphobic jokes in the name of free speech in front of 3% body fat CrossFit bros who subscribe to Wim Hof Method. The Austin Renaissance, birthed from South by Southwest and Big Tech, attracting canceled actors and Grimes, seems to have mostly died down. I was hoping I’d see Grimes walking a turkey vulture on a leash outside of a restaurant AND bike shop called SPOKE. But I didn’t. I did see a seaplane that looked like a drone bomber land on the water next to a sign with a giant QR code on the shore, where a future Four Seasons will be constructed.
Other than that, Autin is peaceful. It could be the Promised Land; I’m not sure yet. I swam in the bath water lake every day and pretended I had always been a Texan. I rejected my New Jersey and East Coast roots. I imagined my life there, away from Los Angeles and the strike and Carrie Fisher’s sister; a life of shrieking cicadas and sad afternoon sunlight and oven hot wind at night from the Plains to the north. The lake won’t be warm for much longer, though. Today is the first day of fall.