None Of It.
Saturday, January 17

Then life intervenes.

I had a perfect moment right after the movie where I found myself in no hurry, with no place to go. I was in a place I'd never been before surrounded by people who didn't know me. The air was chilled, but not freezing. Just set in its way enough that you don't fight it. It was welcomed and endured gratefully. I crossed the parking lot to go to the car when I noticed beyond the gate backing the theater that there was a drop off to a parking lot below. Another little strip-mall closed down and abandoned. A central store, large and corporate, probably a Rose's, flanked by four or five other buildings generic in nature that too were closed down and empty. It reminded me of Hollywood. That was some kid's Hollywood, that was his clubhouse. He made friends there, fell in love there, another lower middle-class goon wasting his efforts in a run down retail job waiting for something better to come along or an opportunity to arise. I know that guy. I was that guy. I wouldn't trade those memories for anything. Even now I can close my eyes and remember summer mornings I spent watching out the window, lazily choring away the hours until someone came in to tag me out. I hate to say it, I hate thinking it, but that place was perfect. I was a slacker. I got to be, a genuine, real life slacker and there wasn't anything anyone could do about it.

So there it was, the skeletal remains of someone's perfect, and it was staring up at me as sadly as you can imagine. Someone fell in love there. That's all I could think about.

Every time I drive by Hollywood I paint over the concrete and gutted ceilings with still memories in watercolor running together. Kory and Haney running through the aisles throwing movies back and forth, Jason and I outside talking about nothing.

While I thought, perched on the guard rail, a truck entered the scene and traced through the parking lot. Some guy. Chaos.

Then life intervened.

 

A Map Of Virginia.
Wednesday, January 13

Tomorrow I will be visiting North Carolina for one week. This may come as no shock to you, this may disinterest you quite a bit actually. However it is a great pain for me to visit North Carolina. It involves my least favorite activity in the world and combines it with one of my least favorite things in the world. Driving and The South respectively. I've spent a great number of years of my life pretending (and even boldly lying) that my affiliation with the south is purely circumstantial and that my presence here is one of least import to me. When I'm in New York, for example, and someone asks where I'm from, I tell them Canada. Sometimes I'll tell them that I'm a homeless clone and get offended when they don't believe me. Living in the south for so long has not made living in the south any easier. Everyday I wake up and wish I was in Norway. Every four-leaf clover or lucky cat I run over is another wish in the bank that I will hopefully be able to cash in for a one-way trip to "somewhere the rednecks can't pronounce" like Oregon. "What is 'oraygonie'?" Nothing you skidmark, nothing at all. Unlike chinese restaurants and China, all you need to know about the south can be learned at your local Cracker Barrel. The fat ladies playing giant checkers outside on rocking chairs, is pretty much the pièce de résistance of southern culture. Bless the stars if they happen to have all of their own teeth present.

In some parts of the world, i.e. Virginia, the simple mudpeople are under the assumption that Virginia is on the cusp of southern culture and that some parts are no longer considered southern in nature, some would jest they are considerably progressive. Terribly mislead, and probably retarded, this asinine disposition is just another fabrication elicited by feeble frog peoples in a desperate attempt to shroud the harsh reality. Virginia is most definitely southern. So is Maryland. West Virginia. And most of Pennsylvania. If you own a pickup truck that you drive around in mud for fun with, you are a redneck and so is your state. Thems the rules.

SO, heading even further south just diminishes those lofty ritzy dreams about waking up in Norway ever so much. Pulverizes them in fact. Every doorknob turned sends a cold chill down my spine as I fear that the person on the other end may offer me a boiled peanut, or suddenly scream at me "CHESTER IS THAT YOU!?" I venture into familiar, but chaotic territory. Virginia boasts probable the highest cognitive state per square mile in the entire south east coast, and I've become comfortable, spoiled, with it. The only reason Maryland doesn't obtain this honor is because all the smart people driving down the seaboard stop in Maryland ONCE, see someone with wooden eyes, and then speed off down the interstate praying that nuclear fallout hasn't claimed too much. Turn the wrong corner in North Carolina and BAM!, you're in South Carolina, and then sir; you are fucked. There's no coming back from that. Once you hit South Carolina, you might as well roll up your sleeves and start eating your wrists. Death is the only surefire way to flush out the hideous sights to behold in South Carolina. Beautiful, sirene, empty, Death.

 

No Signal!
Monday, January 09

It was the image of the girl burning and crumbling to bones that shook me the most. Movies nowadays are making me aware of my mortality which is not what they're supposed to do and not what they used to do at all. I used to use them as escape, as a sanctuary. Away from life, hidden in this pocket universe where I could watch other lives unfold before me. Worlds I cannot disturb, stories I cannot change with timelines you cannot alter. Your mortality should never come into question. Movies bestow upon you the title of The Watcher, a cosmic being sworn under oath to never agitate the fabric of time, merely present to observe and report it. Less than a fly on the wall, you are the wall.

Is it me? Or are movies trying harder to provoke us into feeling something for once? Is there a movement among filmmakers to obtain a genuine mortal transaction with the audience member? I have to say, as a screenwriter, I too find my interest piqued with the concept of altering the mind of a pupil. Shaking them to the core, stripping their brazened "aptitudes" like paint in a hurricane until their minds are blown and their innards bared for the elements. Let's subject these casques to the might in the face of a god. I want to see how they hold up when their comforts are stolen. If they have no lies to hide behind, no faces to sell, what do they look like when caught off guard? Where do they go?

I want the insides out.

Out on the floor, so they can feel embarrassed and ashamed.

Sweetheart, let's hold hands on the eve of annihilation when the seas open up and the cosmos peels back the sky to fill our sunken hearts with the hatred of ghosts.

 

Servitude In Space.
Monday, January 04

Dust needs one of those moments, one that gets everyone talking. One of "those" moments usually occur near the end of the film, right after the climax. The Nazi's eyes melting is a good example. It comes after the crescendo, right after the audience thinks it's okay to let the covers down. It's a one-two punch situation. Big moment, big moment, big moment, big moment, okay, here we go, big moment's over time to reel for a little bi-OH! HOLY FUCK. DID YOU SEE THAT SHIT. OH MY GOD. MY ASSHOLE JUST CLENCHED SO HARD I THINK IT ATE MY UNDERWEAR." It's not enough that the Ark of the Covenant has been opened and Indy's screaming "DON'T OPEN YOUR EYES!" and there are ghosts and demon shit climbing out and getting sucked into Nazis, that just gets their panties wet. You need the eye-melting Nazi to seal the sweet-ass deal.

So, I'm thinking of it like this: Things lead to things, whatever, whatever, Hart has to sacrifice himself to get the others out in time (which will probably be changed to "Hart sacrifices someone else to save his own life.") and then he barricades himself in booth. The zombies are clawing at the walls trying to get in and eat him. Desperate, heart still pumping, he grabs a hammer he sees on the tool bench and starts going to work. He just starts swinging like he's chopping a tree, just puttin' holes in as many heads as possible. Finally real blood and guts. He gets scratched, grabbed, pulled, but he fights his way through the crowd and caves in tons of skulls doing so. He then lands himself in the fate-sealing closet where he'll write his manifesto in permanent marker on the walls (finishing with blood). The climax (the sacrifice scene) has got to be brutal as well, something for the audience to eat before you shove the desert down their throats.

Can you imagine getting a hammer swung up under your jaw knocking you off your feet?

THAT'S WHAT I'M TALKING ABOUT HERE PEOPLE.

 

Fireworks Factory.
Sunday, January 03

It's like every window in this city knows that he's been up for two days. It's just one lousy doctor, why can't he find him? Or maybe it's a her. It can't be a her, luck hasn't been running that way on this continent. He feels like Alice or Dorothy--why isn't there a long lost guy in any of these stories? The neon tonight is his world's yellow brick road. There are two many people here for anything magic, anyway. He would be next to a Chinese place, that fucker is always eating Chinese. And his place wouldn't have any open...windows.

Bingo.

There, down a ways, steam escapes an alley. The pavement is greased, slicked to shine. Across the street, sure enough, is a fucking Chinese place. And it looks like one of those Chinese places where the scraggly old bastard behind the counter, AND his wife, both speak complex Mandarin and not a spot of the King's. So asking them if they've seen a witch doctor he's only heard about and never seen himself would turn into a two-hour fiasco that ends with him screaming and them cursing. Complexly. In Mandarin.

So, he's going to do the next best thing and magic up the place. Word is that where this doctor goes, mad magic follows. "Miji dek-dedellum", a whip of two fingers. His vision twists and he holds the four fingers on his left hand up in front of his face. Magic hates being spied on, prefers to show itself on its own terms, and what Bobby here is doing, is spying. He's peering through his fingers out of common courtesy.

An electric green heat boils off the things around here that have been touched by magic and this damn Chinese place is boiling.

 

Arguably The Most.
Saturday, January 02

Sleep doesn't feel like an option right now. Getting up is too awful of a venture to invest in with something so precious as sleep. It's like putting your hard earned money into paying a complete and total diseased stranger to kick your ass. If only I could get my hands on some of that fucking Propofol, again. I want to be so rich I can pay an anesthesiologist to tend bedside and administer some rich Milk of Amnesia right into my arteries every night. Perhaps get a little cap installed in the crook of my arm so an injection won't be necessary every time. Just some prep, then the tube, then the best rest you've had in your entire life. The worst part? There isn't any. The only real side effect of Propofol is you MIGHT remain conscious and paralyzed for a rather lengthy amount of time. That's fine. I'll just be sleep-awake. Get a chance to focus on my thoughts without any of those pesky corporeal binds.

Every time I wake up, my sinuses are fucked up, I feel like shit, I have to crap, my body doesn't work and my hair and face are greasy. Waking up is a highly overrated stipulation of the contract of sleep. It's like ice cream. Wonderful in every way, but you can't eat too much of it or you'll get fat. Can't sleep too much or you'll oversleep and you'll wake up tired. WHICH SHOULDN'T EVEN BE FUCKING POSSIBLE.

Nothing is truly great.

I want to write a book about my alien idea. Turning it immediately into a script feels cheap and restricting. Not enough time in a movie to go over all the intricacies and importance. Actually, with some extra work one could pack that damn thing so full of narrative that the script could feasibly distend time. Which is definitely different. The characters have to be so pronounced and established early on that the audience no longer have to worry about their well being, can become comfortable, listen to what they have to say. This way you can get away with showcasing dialogue, transactions between characters without their being any explosions or titties. But, of course you follow up with an explosion and some titties to create a reward system that'll entice the audience to hope for more, expect more.

First matter at hand: figure out a way to get more titties into this alien movie.

 

Sweet Lemonade.
Friday, January 01

I just want to put it out there that "010110" translated into Base64 is "Fg==". We'll, never, know what that means for today.

Today, though, as a first day of the end of a rather formative decade was wrought with conspiracy theory and paranormal research. I've been alien crazy since I woke up this morning. I think it has something to do with that god damn spiral light over Norway on December 9th. The Ruskies are owning up to it being a missile that blew a tire in the third stage. That works out just fine, I guess. One DOES choose to wonder why the Russians were arching missiles over Norway (when they are generally separated by about 900 miles and two countries) in the first place. Whatever, I hope it's aliens. Which is what brought me to my alien induced paralysis all day.There is some remarkable, unsettling, but remarkable stuff out there on YouTube. And before you get your futuristic panties all screwed up in your ass, I know that using YouTube as a reference in the same as using "my brother's friend's sister's teacher", but whatever the fuck, it's video and I believe video. You believe video, your life relies on video. September 11th, in all it's doctored upfuckedness, was made possible and powerful through the use of video. And before you one day learn the truth you will swear up and down that what you saw that day and have seen since is absolutely 100%, USDA certified reality; and I bet you're willing to die for it. Redneck.

BUT THIS ALIEN SHIT IS CRAZY.

If you need any quick convincing, or a crash course in "The Top Reason Everything You Know Is Wrong" just go out and check out the video the world has dubbed "The Tether". That's the smoking gun, to me. Roswell metal? Malarky. Alien autopsy? Horsefeathers. Abductions? Potato salad. It's all about that motherfucking tether. Everything else, short of a head on my desk, I can write off with enough convincing and goading. Nobody, and I mean nobody, can write off the damn tether. Aliens (or at the very least, space-bats) exist kid and they have been showing up for years. Probably for no reason, too. Now wouldn't that piss you off to no end. Hundred years from now, some aliens roll up and get themselves shot up by Dale and the boys who were out "shootin'" that morning. One dies, the other survives and we interrogate its shit until it gives up the goods and divulges the "big picture" to us. And it reveals that all these years they were just stopping by on their way through, no reason, they stop by millions of planets, this one was just interesting at the time. Ouch.

So, I think I've come up with some science fiction epiphany. An alien story that also works as a portrait of man's regression as a creature on this planet and how all life is cursed. One day we get visited by a wave of intergalactic jellyfish, basically. They come from a broken world where the atmosphere is unbalanced and they're often exposed to the vacuum of space so they can travel and exist in it. They're made up of tightly wound electric columns, one main trunk and wisping tendrils coming off and constantly feeling. They sap electricity and static from the charge in the atmosphere and things they encounter. No imaginations, no souls, no mind, they just exist. They come from a world where there is no hate, no war. Just constantly curious. Eventually we become terrified of these creatures as people start to realize that all religion is wrong and begin to panic and inventing whatever excuses they need to keep from coming unglued. Til' someone eventually touches one of the things and is instantly killed. The human brain, and all it's activity, is done with electricity between cells. These things are such powerful sources of electricity that a mere touch kills the response between the cells in our bodies and we pretty much turn into living cancer and die. So, horrified, humanity reacts violently and do whatever it is they can to kill these things. Eventually it's found that they have to be overloaded to a point where the membrane that surrounds them can't hold the energy anymore and they explode, like breakers at a breaker station, arcs of electricity into the air. The news finds their angle and broadcasts the slaughter to the world where the peaceful chaps get up in arms and try to stop it all. In the fury and mania of it all, while manity is shedding what little decency and stability it had left, the world does a funny thing. Turns out, so many of them are killed that it overloads our atmosphere with this living electricity and somewhat severe lightning storms start occurring randomly as a way for our atmosphere to shake the tension. The remaining creatures are attracted to the lightning and leave into the sky to be struck and absorbed by it. A mass suicide ensues as the last of them disappear into the sky. The Earth is forever changed and we realize for the first time in our lives that our actions are truly trapped and isolated here on this planet and that everything we do eventually comes back around to affect us one way or another. So the Earth becomes awash with lightning storms, mild to severe in nature and they happen everywhere at any time. Since these creatures cannot leave they are constantly being released and reabsorbed into the atmosphere. The story closes on an ominous note as the Earth will permanently have intermittent lightning storms and the philosophers get to reach out to the confused and angry public. Someone finally realizes that, instead of fighting them, we could have somehow worked on coexistence with them, even perhaps harnessing them and their seemingly limitless energy to fuel our world and take the burden of economic crisis off our chests. Alas, it is too late and there's nothing we can do.

We suck.

THE END.