I’ve just applied to the Warner Bros. Television Writers’ Workshop. This famous fellowship for TV writers insists that all applicants submit “a short composition, no longer than a page, double spaced, telling us why you want to be a television writer and how your background will add a unique perspective to television.” Here’s mine:
I have obsessive-compulsive disorder. Not the bogus kind that people claim to have when they scream at a party guest for setting a drink on their issue of Dwell. The genuine kind — the kind that leaves you immobile on the couch for hours at a stretch because you’re afraid that if you get up you’ll chop off your hand with a meat cleaver. The kind in which an acid anxiety slowly eats away your entire life while you’re busy thinking you’re normal. Weeks dry up and die in front of you while you busily collect data to determine if today’s the day that the Yakuza will finally use their zero-energy device to trigger the super-volcano underneath Yellowstone. You own a special kind of fear that only you’re privy to. And because no one else is afraid, you worry on their behalf, constantly and extra hard.
Until Homer Simpson looks at the price tag on the matter-transportation device and says, “Two dollars? And it only transports matter?” Then you laugh so hard that for a moment there’s no anxiety. Your laughter drives out the worry like a broom across a clutch of flies, and the fear lights out of you for a few minutes, or hours, or days if you’re lucky. And if you’re really lucky you eventually figure out how those instants of pure, deep laughter nudge you toward normalcy — not the sham of normalcy that anxiety’s strung you out on. And if you’re really super lucky, you learn to tell the difference between the two normals and, with help, grab on to the authentic one. And from then on, even if normalcy occasionally slips away, it never sneaks out of sight.
And maybe even pretty soon your new pal Normal will talk you into getting up off the couch and moving to Los Angeles. Because then you can find a job sitting in a room with funny people who make you laugh and, even better, who you make laugh right back, and even better still, who find a way to make you laugh some more, even harder, big rolls of it pouring out of you and out of the room and finding its way into a TV. And someone watching from the other side of the TV laughs too, just a little. They laugh and never even realize that right then, for a few seconds, they’re not scared of anything.
