Junk

My twelve year old self commanded my 27 year old body this evening. The girlfriend has grad school class on Wednesday's, meaning I was without her dazzling recipes and on my own for dinner. I had pizza, popcorn, and Moosetrack's ice cream. The type of shit we'd say we'd eat for dinner when we were kids, dreaming of living on our own.

Then I proceeded to do my laundry, tossing whites in with colors and overloading the machine.

I'm an adult.

Quick Trip to End the Week

The other day on the bus the guy in front of me had wildly greasy hair, and I wondered, like the oils oozing from the leaves of plants, could a person have certain intoxicating properties layering the space between their mane? Much by accident if a single strand of hair were to trickle down into my coffee, and the oils dissolved into the cooling beverage, I may find out in an unsuspected trip.

Meanwhile to my right, Cabrini Green's last tenement is coming down, looking like a half assed swipe of a McVey bombing.

The bus driver is in a jolly good mood. He's whistling old TV theme songs; The Andy Griffith Show, The Twilight Zone...and moves in and out of others; Pink Panther and hits of the 80s and 90s.

Refresher Course

It's Wednesday and I'm feelin' like a dullard!

Thinkin' I might try the following things to recharge my spirits. Visceral shit.

A) Allow myself to be soaked by an April rainstorm.

B) Take some valerian root, lie down on the couch, listen to a trippy vinyl record.

C) Laugh really fucking hard.

D) Call up a long lost friend.

E) Share an intense piece of cake with my girlfriend.

The Float Down

Last night I had many vivid dreams, yet the one that stuck out the most involved a climb into outer space. My memory of this dream segment began with me floating down from an orbiting space craft, through the deep blue atmosphere, diving slowly, downward, immune to the normal scorch of objects screaming down toward earth. My space friend, also wrapped in thick space garb floated down with me, impenetrable, keeping me company, to see me down safely. Both of us still tethered to space craft.

Once upon the ground, he coiled back upward, wishing me luck.

I entered into an old battered building, looking to be an old factory, although quite tall, possibly 80 stories. I made my way up through the deteriorating floors, through stairways and winding lofts, still dragging behind me the long long tether. People entered the building and watched and cheered me on.

Eventually I made my way to a small house built upon a sprawling floor on the top story. Old rocking chairs and junk were piled on top of its flat roof leading up to a hatch that opened up to the blue sky. I climbed this treacherous pile, balancing wonderfully. People still cheered. I made my way up to hatch, opened it, and waded with my arms back up to the sky, slowly, gracefully, as through water. The tether continued to trail me.

I came to the brink of the Earth's atmosphere, into outer space. The space craft trickled by. A new tether was lowered to me. I hooked onto it, released the old. It fell back to the Earth like a quick swift dart. I trailed behind the space craft in a soothing free float.

What was most interesting to me about this dream as I reflected on it when I got up at 4am to pee was how real it felt, and looked. Perhaps much more vivid than the lens through which I have been seeing everyday life as of late. And the feeling of weightlessness, how weird. What an overwhelmingly cool feeling. I never felt anything remotely close to that, not even floating around in a calm pool.

Perhaps far fetched, but I do wonder if while we dream, we visit other planes of existence, the spirit realm. I have been reading a book lately about ancient fermentation in research of the pre-industrial brewing methods to add more layers to my Whiskey Pike feature length screenplay. I find it very interesting how mindful ancient tribes were of the spirit world, in plants and even in inanimate objects. Nowadays with our pre-occupation with materialism and dismissal of the "gods" in things, life kind of takes on a bland coating. Things are just objects. Plants are just there, making oxygen for us. Studies show that talking to plants aid in their growth. Science can explain it as the exchange of carbon dioxide. But what if plants, like people, needed attention, for emotional growth which bleeds into physical growth? We really have no relationship with plants. We eat them. We breath them. We take them for granted. There seems to be a magical thinking in the days of ancient yore. I can't help but think how finely tuned their imaginations must have been in seeing a god in a flower or a bug. Our imaginations seem to be growing stale, atrophying a bit. We trade books for screens, less exercise for the imagination. The spirits may be abandoning us. We control the day with the ticking clock, with deadlines for production, for commerce. Nature, which has its own clock, we no longer listen to.

This space dream I found incredibly cathartic. As though I got to take a break from gravity, maybe even from my body? Astral projection theories often describe a string of sorts trailing the body...was this my space suit tether? The climb through the intricacies of the old factory perhaps resemble wafting through mental gunk of the day to day operations of being a person.

I've had a space dream before, floating outside of a space station. This was awhile back, but also incredibly vivid both visually and to the touch. One of my favorite dreams, like a favorite movie?

Ghost in the Bathroom

I dreamed that I was on some road trip, stopped off at an old hotel to take a wizz. I followed the signs to the lobby bathroom, which took me into an old wing which used to a hospital. The lights were out. I flicked them on and saw some old florescence trickle on down one side of a long room, with old beds and gurneys. I hustled to the far end where a trough ran the wall. I unzipped, yet was startled by my periphery - an old man in a hospital gown stood at the end of his bed, smoking a cigarillo. We made eye contact. His eyes were a deep black. I shivered from a wave of chills that over took me. I had no doubt that he was a phantom as he appeared out of nowhere. I could no longer pee in such conditions. I took off sprinting down the left side of the room, between the wall and a long curtain. I peeked out at one point, about where the old man phantom would be, and he had moved in closer, about to reach for me through the curtain...

I awoke at this point, chilled out of my mind. My girlfriend informed me that I had been whimpering moments before in my sleep. Damn ghosts.

Drippy Mornin'

This morning had that tinge of apocalyptic ambiance. Very dark this morning, with the clouds and the rain, and still catching up to the daily savings time shift which puts us at an orbit making the bright and early, black sky and early. Had a troublesome time awaking this morning, I was still in the half dreaming state as I was leaving the house for work. Still dark. Because of the clouds. And the coming rain.

The bus I was riding scraped the shit out of a stop sign while making a turn. At every stop, panicked latecomers charged at the doors as they were about to closing. Cruising through an intersection we were nearly side swiped by a screaming fire engine.

I've started carrying around an old pocket watch, as sort of a good luck charm. I like the feel of it in my pocket. The battery has long since burned out. I suppose I could get a new battery inserted. But I'm not really interested in its ability to tell me the time of day. I just like the feel of it. I like fiddling with it. And I appreciate that it gives me subtle permission to dismiss the tyranny of ticking time. Time seems to slip, slip so quickly these days. Anxiety seems to show up and linger as the end of each week, the end of each month zooms along. This time-still pocket watch reminds me to chill the fuck out.

ITB 6

We put up a new episode of Inside the Barrel last week. We had some fun conversations with Ted Tremper, a comedian, and winner of a Vimeo Award for his webseries "Breakups." We also have a short sketch on there I wrote called "Bikers and Cars" which plays with the seeming rivalry between hipsters who bike about town and the people who drive. Definitely something I see both sides of, and I do applaud anyone who rides their bike, I know I'd like to ride mine more about town, but I've encounter much too many bikers who believe they are above any rules of the road. So this piece was inspired by that. I also wrote and we recorded a sketch called "Furrocious" about a father/son hunting trip, and the son reveals he's a "furry." It felt funny as we recorded it but editing found it didn't work as a comedic piece the way it played out, so I'm back to the writing table with that one.

Spontaneous Prose - 1/22/11

Twisted skeletal remains dance in vibration from earthly shudders, just dominating the visual field. My eyes can’t but harness the real activity as the life of these dusty bones makes fear crawl into my spine like a thousand tasty snails. Oozing. Sliming their way into my occipital lobe and I only hear their language. The language of sudden change, the lifespan of a summer, of dirt and mold and rain. The blood doesn’t phase me when I taste it in my mouth. The iron dab on the taste buds is a much needed snap back to reality, the earth is quaking like a dynamic emperor on bad beer. The cave tap dances on my head with little grains of ore as they pass down into the air which is always being stirred and thrashed, making a malt of musty grime that cakes my eyes, now taking the laughing skeleton of a tired, abandoned miner, fade away from my awareness.

The fever is just a fever, an OS code of an ill advising virus, fucking around with my gene structure. Telling my DNA that it is archaic, of a making not ready for the rugged. I shouldn’t have tasted the waters from the underground river that trickled, that looked black in the glow of my lantern, that sucked me in to quench my thirst like a magnetic siren body, tugging at me with unpronounced pheromones.

Living organisms have a right to take what they need. Just as I have right to crawl out into the Autumn light, the setting of dusk as the earth stopped. And to lie there and cry for help until it arrives, pawing away at branches, through the woods, ready to pull my body back to the village and maybe siphon some life back into it, maybe my own life force, maybe that of a demon who was wading in the dark pool and slid down my tongue as I lapped away. There he punches at my belly in a-rythmic sweeps against the freeforall of plate tectonics.

The cave is doomed for curious losers. No treasure is worth biological, geological and spiritual possession. Bring a canteen if you go down there.

Post Privilege

This is a Wood Sugars short film we did for the National Film Challenge, where we were given Fri-Sun to write, shoot, edit a 5-7min short film, using a prescribed prop, character name, occupation, and line of dialogue. Here is a trailer for what we came up with. Please watch the full version of Post Privilege on Wood Sugars Film.

I think its definitely worth setting deadlines for a project and doing it. Might not be our perfect opus but at least we knocked out a new visual story and had the learning experience to accompany it.

Diary Diary

I've been away from this blog for awhile, been pretty active with the Wood Sugars, producing, writing for, performing in a variety show podcast called Inside the Barrel. We're gearing up for some short films we're about to shoot. We're adapting a fun play by Keely Flynn into a film, so that's definitely a good challenge to reshape for the screen and cut down on some of the time constraints we're faced with, a lot of great banter dialogue that we want to keep in there. It's my first experience adapting a stage piece for the screen.

I think I mentioned some time ago that I was reworking a novel manuscript of mine. I've seen begun playing with it in screenplay form. When I wrote the manuscript originally, I wrote it very stream of conscious so some sections easily become tangential and sloppy, and took on the challenge of completing it in a month, sitting down and doing it. It proved to be a great exercise in character creation and point of view. There are some chapters in which I'm quite proud of the language, although as a whole, I don't find it publishable, which is sad on one end, I put a lot of work into writing a novel. But the story itself I'm still excited with and have restructured, redeveloped and got it to a point where its ready to be done again.

I've felt a lot of creative fluidity with the screenplay format recently, for some odd reason. I think it stems from the thrill of writing scenes, and having a form that can hatch performances. I've found it quite rewarding to see actors bring my writing to life, from writing podcast sketches, from the Bosto workshop with XIII Pocket, and in writing Post Privilege with Wood Sugars for the National Film Challenge. I wanted to write more scripts, its exciting to build that text for a group of various artisans (actors, cinematographers, composers, etc) to bring to life, and so in reworking my novel manuscript, it started to come to life again in writing for an audio/visual medium. So I'm about half through the feature length film script which I've molded into a new medium, which I'm finding is strengthening this particular story.

Anyway, I'm probably going to be jotting more stuff down on this blog going forward. I feel like my brain needs it, to spew thoughts on various creative projects, maybe vent, maybe rave about certain excitements. And another excuse to write when I feel like my brain is too drained at the end of the day to do justice to any current story projects. Kinda like a diary, a public diary, which is fine. I have a diary book by my bed but my handwriting sucks and my cat keeps stealing my pens to play floor hockey.