We were having a conversation that consisted mostly of changing the subject before anything clear or concrete was said. So fragments of half-baked "ideas" flowed easily into stories bearing no relation whatsoever.

Then another story. Engendering another fragment of an idea, but nothing like the one we started with.

When the conversation died abruptly, we looked to a screen on the wall. It was running a cheap-shit dumb-ass cliché action flick, but suddenly, right in the heart of the action, everything stopped and there was a close-up on the villain of the story against a background of a fire or fires burning in the distance. Slowly he began to unwind a 5-minute uninterrupted Shakesperean-style monologue about the nature of crime or death or love or something.

Of course we all knew this scene was not in the script at all. Because we all knew it was well-known that this scene came straight from the actor's contract.

In fact, this highly popular actor who, for unexplained reasons, was always a boon to the bottom line of ANY production, was well-known throughout the industry as someone who would only agree to do a film (especially dumb-shit, cheap-ass, cliché action flicks) if he was given complete authorial control over a 5-minute section of the film, right dead center in the heart of the action, to just stop everything and, against the dramatic background of his choosing, self-indulgently indulge himself in the full range of his acting skills in some Shakespearean-style monologue of his own creation, possibly improvised on the spot out of whole cloth.

So we sat transfixed, watching him stare off, in jagged profile, into nothingness and simultaneously into some modern day stand-in for Yorick's skull, knowing that this meta-story was really what life was really all about. Really.

'Cause life was not really about life, or about living, or about all the surface achievement of all those social milestones that force people to pretend not to despise you for achieving them.

No. Life is not about what's in the script for life. Life is written far away from and well behind the sequential list of fade-ins and actions and fade-outs of each fucking day.

It's written in the contracts that are signed by the actors, directors and lighting technicians who participate in the realization of the scripts of life which, in the end, are really just fronts for the these contracts, which are the real story being told.

That is why there appears to be no logic or reason to life -- because events are caused and determined by hidden clauses in proprietary contracts tucked away in unblowable safes.

For every stupid thing that happens, there is a clause somewhere in someone's contract that says it has to be this way.

Logic and reason are walking down the street and the sun's shining and everything's fine when suddenly a fight breaks out and logic and reason, completely innocent and minding their own vast business, are arrested for incitement to riot -- but it's all been a put up job and the real reason they are taken off the street is because too many contracts cannot be honorably carried out with them around.

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