Joe Swanberg Hah
joe swanberg looked at a camera.
he said, ‘i don’t know if this is on.’
he said, ‘i don’t care.’
he made a movie called ‘hannah takes the stairs.’
he made a movie called ‘LOL.’
he made other movies.
everyone who watched the movies thought about other things.
they thought about going to sleep.
they thought about getting in an argument.
they didn’t know who they would get in an argument with.
they didn’t know very many people.
they thought you had to know someone pretty well to get in an argument.
when they thought about the phrase ‘getting in an argument’ they felt a little satisfied, in a part of their brain they never thought about.
they kept thinking ‘getting in an argument’ but it stopped working.
they were watching a movie.
they wanted joe swanberg to know they were watching the movie.
they didn’t want to be watching a movie.
joe swanberg looked at a camera and said ‘i am not making a movie. don’t watch this. it is not a movie. i don’t know.’
he thought that everyone probably thought he had friends and he asked his friends to be in movies.
he thought, ‘i just make a movie and then the people in the movie are my friends.’
he knew this wasn’t true.
he wanted to make a movie called ’swedish blueballs’ and have everyone take it seriously and think it was ‘artistic’ and ‘unsarcastic’ and…
he didn’t know what else.
he wanted to make a movie without anyone knowing he had made the movie and then listen to what everyone said about the movie.
he knew this might be extremely sad.
he felt prepared to be sad.
in his brain somewhere something knew a state of sadness would be healthy and fulfilling.
it would ‘make the work a little better.’
he would become capable of making a movie that captured everything about what was wrong with the relationships humans tried to have with each other.
he felt a great need to watch this movie.
it felt ‘beyond him’ to make it.
he wanted to sit in a chair.
sitting in a chair is easy and making a new movie about relationships was ‘more work’ than he ‘had in him.’
he thought about making three new movies.
he thought about the work that would take.
he thought about how he would probably live many years,
and that this meant he would probably live many days,
and that each day he would have to do things,
and that those things would be the things that he did every day,
and he didn’t know if thinking about this made him feel bad,
or if feeling bad made him think about this.
he sat on a bed in an apartment with a computer and watched movies he had made.
he turned a camera on and made a movie about everything that was happening.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
colin bassett has fiction in both the online and print versions of the mississippi review. he also has work at dicey brown, lamination colony, and no posit. he lives in missouri and once had an email conversation with kim chinquee.
First published in 3:AM Magazine: Wednesday, April 30th, 2008.
