Surely you had noticed it had become eerily quiet of late — the sound of your own thoughts had peacefully taken up residence in your head again. Your breath had calmly slowed, your pulse returned to a pleasantly dull rate. You weren’t sure what it was — what caused the strange, but welcome sense of calm and well-being that now permeated your very soul, but you were pleased at the feeling and were happy that the many mood enhancers and doses of Vallerian Root and melatonin were again at a minimum.
And then some very disconcerting news flashed before your eyes.
All at once you felt your pulse quicken. Where for two whole months, you’d heard not a peep, it seems, James Franco had made a little film. About James Franco’s participation in daytime soap opera “General Hospital.” The film was called “Francophrenia” and it was to be screened in the Rotterdam Film Festival — as if it were a serious artistic undertaking and not simply a shallow vanity project. This was terrible news, but this was not the worst news.
You then were also informed that Mr. Franco was in talks to star in a movie version of “The Game,” Neil Strauss’s guide to picking up women. Franco would star as Mystery, a celebrated “pick up artist” who later received his own VH-1 show advising other loserly men on how to creep women out at bars.
The world was folding in on itself. You needed a bottle of wine. And some drugs. Immediately.
