Try This: Make the Incredible Mundane
This can be a writing prompt as well
Prepare to be miserably disillusioned…
In 2019 I spent much of the year in Los Angeles pitching ideas to streaming services and film studios. Yes, I pitched the Prayer story to everyone, including Disney… “Yes, it’s about unprotected anal sex, but we’ll never say anal sex.” And people just stared at me like I was a lunatic. A situation I kind of liked because it made me feel like Charlie Manson pitching record labels in 1968. Across each conference table was always that same mix of fear and disgust.
Anyway… as I trekked from Amazon Studios to NBC Universal to Hulu, I saw something in common between all these glam workplaces. Did you know that HBO has “Bagel Fridays”? And that 20th Century Fox has “Sushi Wednesdays”? All of these places where people dream of working, they all have some version of Taco Tuesday.
Hell, at Freightliner we had Taco Tuesday, and people were manically excited to get a deep-fried tortilla bowl full of taco salad. To see people at Netflix and Apple and EPIX yammering with joy over Taco Tuesday or whatnot, that broke my heart. It seems to prove that no matter how high-status a career looks from the outside, it’s still the same old day-to-day on the inside. Free Red Bull! Free toilet paper! While I was aboard the nuclear submarine, the Louisiana, the crew talked endlessly about the food-specific days they celebrated while at sea. Prisoners frequently write to me and describe the same thing. Pizza Thursday! Yes, they have Taco Tuesday in prisons and at Freightliner and at Netflix. The White House no doubt has Taco Tuesday. Buckingham Palace, too.
And—here’s the crushing part—when we eventually travel into outer space and orbit in slow-motion space stations and colonize Mars with Elon Musk… there, we will also have a Taco Tuesday. And we will all yammer in excited voices, and not even the presence of Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg at our elbow will make Taco Tuesday in Space any less sad.1
It’s like I yammered about on Joe Rogan: Outer space is going to suck just as bad as here. We loved the film Alien because it demonstrated that very point. Instead of the Space Needle and The Jetsons, we were going to be working Amazombies in a dirty Nostromo sniping about our pay and deep-throating aliens and yearning for… Taco Tuesday.
Okay, now the upbeat part…
This is exactly how to make the incredible seem credible. If you want to create a “real” sense of life on a Mars space colony, give that world the same Fish Stick Friday that every high school in America “enjoys.” Use the familiar mundane to ease your reader into the incredible (yet still mundane) distant future. In fact, open with the excitement about Taco Tuesday, then gradually introduce elements until your readers see that this is Taco Tuesday 2055. On Jupiter. And everyone is relatable, and no one remembers what a taco really is because now it’s farm-raised crickets fried with spice. But keep the deep-fried tortilla bowls. Only then you can you introduce the space aliens or whatever.
Use the familiar, well-known aspects of our lives—again, from prisons to Disney—to ground us in incredible circumstances. It’s depressing but relatable. And it will give us a sympathy and a bond with the working stiffs of any distant, seemingly glamorous future. Or past… perhaps Alexander the Great’s army had a Taco Tuesday. Or a Falafel Friday. What matters is that readers will recognize the convention and buy into it.
You can weep openly, or…
Be aware than only paid subscribers can participate in this week’s quiz.
Recently someone who works at the elegant, glamorous Amazon headquarters wrote me here to say that he and his coworkers referred to themselves as “Amazombies.” At that I felt a similar defeat. Until then I’d envisioned them snorting blue-quality blow off of Bret Ellis’s naked body. I so wanted someone, anyone, to be having a glorious life beyond the sadness of Taco Tuesday. But… Amazombies. The book 21 Dog Years made it all sound so appealing.
I used to work in compliance for the largest drug testing provider in the country. This was a health tech company with a bunch of angel investors that struck a gold mine when they figured out how to have someone piss in a cup and have the result show up on a manager’s computer in ten minutes. My job in compliance was to control random drug test selections for about 20 million people across every major US employer you could think of. It was about five to six thousand accounts I was controlling. Me. Just one guy.
The funniest part was these companies would transmit all this sensitive data to me for selections, many of which included spreadsheets with tens of thousands of social security numbers. While my job hardly covered my bills (I had mega credit card debt while working there), what I controlled accounted for about 55% of the company’s revenue. They thought they could pay me shit and I’d never leave. No promotion was in sight -- I was totally pigeon-holed.
To make the pain worse, they would bring us in to their town halls and show use their $100 million quarterly profits -- all the while hiring temps and dishing out mega bonuses to executives. Most people made less than $20 an hour. Our reward? Fucking Chipotle and pizza. So, I bit down hard and oiled the hell out of my position -- making every testing pool run like a goddamn Rolls Royce.
Then when they least expected it, I bailed for a 50% pay increase five days before end of quarter with nobody knowing how to do my job. The reason end of quarter is horrible timing is because every single pool for every single customer runs and each one of those pools had to be scrubbed and updated with their new employee data -- which nobody knew how to do. In the folders that had instructions for each customer, I printed the this meme and left them inside. My dickbag manager texted me the next day while I was in training at my new gig. He was not amused.
https://images.app.goo.gl/YEBdetiWMHq9Qte88
I interviewed at a place that had Waffle Wednesdays. And a Frisbee golf team. 🙃