A Stranger In A Storytelling Land

To Find Ourselves, We Lose Old Selves

Welcome to a piece “From The Future”. Each week, I alternate between essays or fiction.

My primary focus is completing three books, including a draft for “Book #3, RETRIEVE”.

Future + Fiction is the formula for everything, whether it’s an essay, story or chapter.

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Most pieces are best read online, via the Substack App, when you have fifteen minutes.

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This is a riff about our past and present, familiar and faraway, versions of ourselves.

This is about feeling like a stranger in a storytelling land. I saw a film again, a riff came to me.

In August 2003, the Sofia Coppola film “Lost In Translation” premiered to acclaim. Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson were the leads, as “Bob”, a well-known middle-aged actor who has to do a whisky commercial to make money, and “Charlotte”, a young wife of a music photographer on an assignment. Despite the amenities of a luxury hotel, surrounded by millions of people in a global city, Tokyo, two strangers with “everything” are lonely, and filled with doubt about where their lives are headed.

Stories and story-making are about memories and make-believing.

The film was Coppola’s love letter to a city based on her memories of trips during her twenties. The Park Hyatt Tokyo, the setting for much of the film, was one of Coppola’s inspirations for the story, a capsule submerged in another world. Bill Murray, and only Bill Murray, was Coppola’s choice when she wrote a script based on notes and short stories drawn from her Tokyo trips. Scarlett Johansson was casted for a “Lauren Bacall with Humphrey Bogart” vibe. Maybe there was something to it, Johansson, seventeen at casting, and Bacall, twenty-one in her first role in “To Have and Have Not”, each delivered counter-weights to the world-weariness of their co-stars.

At the story’s core: people bonding over whether their lives are what they really wanted.

A love letter to a city was transformed into a May-December Non-Romance story.

In fact, Johansson’s “Charlotte” early on teases Murray’s “Bob” that he’s having a mid-life crisis but still invites him to a party, make new friends, and connect over karaoke. The story is about two people who “meet cute”, enjoy each other’s company, as a balm for the air pockets they each hit in their lives and with significant others. There is a moment of connection over a song, later an earnest conversation, an argument, and reconciliation. The story ends with whispered words we never hear, a kiss, and parting.

Do their lives change? What was whispered? Coppola leaves it for us to decide.

My “takeaway” is the value of reviewing our “story”, so we can rewrite instead of repeating it.

You don’t have to be in a luxury hotel in a global city to make the time to wonder about your life. You can wander through a quiet neighborhood you’ve known for years, or sit with a still mind in a noisy favored haunt, to explore a great unknown, our next new selves.

Time to move on.

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Why does this riff had to do with me?

An old story of me began to change, even if I didn’t realize it then, four summers ago. Within weeks, the beginning of the end had come for my father. Three summers ago, a second emergency hospital trip accelerated it all.

Two summers ago, Dad had been laid to rest for eight months, and I was in the middle of finishing what turned out to be a first book. It was not my intention to write one. Its story happens a thousand years in the future but it was born in the present.

One summer ago, I settled the last of Dad’s financial affairs, and half-finished a draft of a second book, a “pre-quel”. Today, I’m writing to you, prepping for an edit of “book #1”, assembling “book #2”, and writing “#3”, a “pre-pre-quel”. There was no master plan.

I got lost before I could find my next new self, one where I play with words to build worlds.

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If you’re still reading this, I appreciate it very much, because I know you’re all busy.

What does this riff have to do with you?

I think many of you are already finding your next new self.

All of you reading this, you’re doing different things, going on different quests, with different life stories. All of us, however, have one thing in common.

Inside, we are dreamers.

We imagine what the future could be, what our next new lives could look like if we get, or give ourselves, a moment with our memories - of who we were, what we did (and didn’t) do, and who we wanted to be. We can feel, see, and hear it, can’t we?

A whisper only you can hear is repeating itself, hopefully, you’ll hear it when the time comes.

I’ll end with a quote: “You'll figure that out. The more you know who you are, and what you want, the less you let things upset you.”

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