and it all came to me the other night while i was lying down waiting to fall asleep. i’m not sure exactly where it came from, but it was the phrase “did does doing” that got it going. i think i also stumbled upon some sort of tag line (that you may have heard before): “if nothing changes, nothing changes.”
i was thinking about other languages and that got me thinking about all the different verbs and forms of verbs that we have completely memorized. it takes us fractions of a second to retrieve a single form of a single verb to fit in exactly with what we want to say at that exact moment. amazing.
and for some reason, the verb “to do” was the one i was focusing on: did, does, doing. that about cuts it, right? he did something in the past, he does something in the present, and he’s doing something in the future. or something like that.
anyhoo, i imagined it would be very braff (which is a new descriptor [kind a like, "funny"] that i’ve invented), but directed at a larger audience. the basic plot line is this: a child grows into a young man who then grows into an old man, but, in reality, doesn’t change: instead he just does the same things in different ways.
the movie would show him making similar mistakes, achieving similar successes, but being so damn human in the process that you can’t help but wish him the best.
he will do the same things over and over. ‘do’ is also sometimes used. and he hase done something.
so that makes.
do, doing, did, done, doing
and “Oh I know you didn’t.”
exactly.
This is something of a coincidental post, Eli. I wasn’t really thinking about verbs at all, but I am almost finished with this short story I’ve been writing and I was wondering what to work on next. I didn’t come up with anything concrete as far as a plot, but I wanted to play around with some kind of passage of time story that centered on one person. I even came up with a title I kind of like: “Four in the Morning, Two in the Afternoon, Three at Night” based on the riddle of the sphinx about man’s lifetime. That’s as far as I got, but I was thinking this just yesterday, probably at the same time you were writing this. Pretty interesting. Also, your post reminded me of a saying that this priest I liked used to say. It was, “if you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got.” I really like that.
indeed, drew, indeed. i was thinking that it might be fun to try and actually write a script, or at least a treatment to get things going. i mean, there really are people out there who just write scripts. it’s a hard line of work to get into, but you gotta start somewhere.