Wishing you were here to talk to.

Wishing I felt better about a bad day turned good.

Wishing a happy m-day to whoever wants a happy m-day.

Wishing there was nothing to worry about.

Wishing I could steer the tortoise I’m fated to ride into eternity.

Wishing there were no better way, so everything would be stupid and easy.

Much yard work today. We generated and hauled away three pickup truck loads of sticks and twigs and general yard ‘waste.’ I always hate to see such stuff end up in a landfill somewhere, when it could be composted, but we’ve already got a big ol’ pile still in the throes of decomposition.

We’ve lived here for three years, and only now are we getting around to pruning some of the trees that needed pruning. In my case, the apple tree in back, and the plants surrounding it, which I’ve been working on here and there for the past week or so. It still needs a lot of work, but it’s getting better. It’s a little late in the season to go too far with it.

I realized at one point, though, that I was trying to find places to prune so that I could have an excuse to be up in the tree. So I just sat in the tree for a while. It branches out in many directions at one fairly low place, so it’s a natural seat. Maybe I’ll ‘blog from there sometime soon, with the laptop.

It’s interesting how everything today seemed to flow around working. Everyone just sort of fell into doing the work that needed to be done. Now, if we can just get ahold of a sledge and a wedge, we can split the logs in the garage and actually use them next winter…

Waking Life is excellent. Too tired to write; will dream about it in full later.

Tonight’s first movie: Mulholland Drive

Typically, movies are understandable. They have a plot, with characters and conflict and resolution. Someone is the good guy, someone’s the bad guy. Good and bad fight. One wins. Hoo rah!

Dreams, on the other hand, exist outside of these rules. They happen, and then they happen some more. They have some kind of meaning to some part of us, but the bits that manage to surface into the conscious mind seem illogical and disjointed, and yet we feel a resonance with them.

I forget who, but some filmmaker said that movies are dreaming out loud. I disagree, and think that statement is an insult to dreams. David Lynch’s movies, however, are dreaming out loud, which is why they’re so attractive and annoying at the same time. Mulholland Drive is no exception. It leaves you scratching your head while your conscious mind wonders if you just wasted your time. The rest of you, however, the part that does the real work of making you you, knows you didn’t.

There’s no point in trying to explain this movie’s plot. It’s ostensibly about two women, in Hollywood; one an amnesiac after a mysterious car crash on Mulholland Drive, and the other an optimistic newbie, dreaming of being a star. The latter is helping the former reconstruct her memories, because that’s what would happen “in the movies.”

After a little while, though, we begin to understand that this narrative is just a crutch to get us interested in the real point of this movie: That constructed illusions carry a price. The fact that this point is presented in the form of a constructed illusion is not lost on Lynch, which is why there’s even a plot at all.

Up next: Waking Life

Interesting site: No Media Kings. Quite a bit about self-publishing a novel, a bit of conceptual art where the author of a novel retroactively invoices large corporations for product placement, and some serious geekery, namely a text-adventure game called Punk Points.

I have a question for the general populace:

If one is critical of the policy of the federal government with regards to the cause of international justice, where is a legitimate forum to voice such criticism?

The letter to the editor won’t do it. The letter to the elected official won’t do it. The letter to the TV network won’t do it, the letter to NPR’s ‘All Things Considered’ won’t do it. The public access cable show won’t do it. Standing on a streetcorner shouting won’t do it. Publishing a book about it won’t do it.

Where then?

Floobie states unilaterally that I’m too good for language.

Thanks for the compliment, floobie, but really, you should let the grownups play with the big words, so you don’t get hurt.

Given the limitlessness of human imagination, the sheer vastness of human consideration, the seemingly unbounded geometry of thought-space, it seems ridiculous that we’d create such a tiny linguistic pipeline of expressive means through which to communicate the richness of experience we wish to share, and, any 900-page novel (not to mention this run-on sentence) should be considered no less a constricting discipline than 5-7-5 haiku.

And that’s always been my problem with writing. Reading bores me in the same way that talking to someone with a small vocabulary is tedious. As an example, imagine you’re stuck listening to a stoned hippie talk about interconnectedness. He thinks you don’t get it, but you do. You were there when it was all created, you’re a god, you’re an enlightened zen master, and this stoned hippie is telling you that you’re interconnected with everything. Reading bores me that way; it’s a constant exercise in compassion.

Language is like a straightjacket. Spoken language at least can have inflection, body language, nod and wink, life-situation context. Written language is like (and relies on metaphor) an interstate highway that goes through 237 miles of wide-open desert with no stops. You have to gas up to make it through, and the only way to get through it is to just continue to drive. That’s all you can do. Sit in that seat, press on the pedal, make steering corrections, try to occupy your mind by imagining that this desert is more interesting than it is.

Someone asks me if I’ve read Stephen King. I read ‘Cujo’ when I was in high school. “Oh, but you should read ‘The Dead Zone.’”… Saw the movie. “But the book is sooooo much better…” How? “Well, it goes into so much more detail.” There’s no detail to go into. The guy can see the future. He sees the politician destroying the world. He has to choose between maybe saving the world, or murdering a man for something he may not actually do. The politician’s own corruption betrays him, though, so the hero squeaks by, and King squeaks by having to give us a satisfactory ending. What more detail do I need? “Yeah, but the writing is really good…”

No, it’s not. Well, some of King is OK, but overall, I’m sick of reading things. I picked up this Ballard book and realized what utter literary crap I’ve been considering to put in my brain. Ballard and the new issue of ‘Adbusters’ have really gotten me agitated.

What am I settling for? What kind of crappy excuse for a culture am I complicit in?

Off and on, I’ve been reading a book by J.G. Ballard called ‘A Users Guide To The Millenium.’ It’s a collection of essays and reviews, most for magazines and newspapers.

One is called ‘Project For A Glossary Of The Twentieth Century.’ A magazine sent him a list of topics to choose from, and rather than write one article, he wrote tiny capsule essays for each one. Here are some of them:

Typewriter It types us, encoding its own linear bias across the free space of the imagination.

Zipper This small but astute machine has found an elegant way of restraining and redicovering all the lost enchantments of the flesh.

Telephone A shrine to the desperate hope that one day the world will listen to us.

Trench warfare The body as sewer, the gutter of its own abattoir, flushing away its fears and aggresions.

Pornography The body’s chaste and unerotic dream of itself.

Hallucinogenic drugs The kaleidoscope’s view of the eye.

Phenomenonology The nervous system’s brave gamble that it exists.

Suburbs Do suburbs represent the city’s convalescent zone or a genuine step forward into a new psychological realm, at once more passive but of far greater imaginative potential, like that of a sleeper before the onset of REM sleep? Unlike its unruly city counterpart, the suburban body has been wholly domesticated, and one can say that the suburbs constitute a huge petting zoo, with the residents’ bodies providing the stock of furry animals.

Miniaturization Dreams of becoming very small predate Alice, but now the probability grows that all the machines in the world, like the gold in Fort Knox, might be held in one heavily guarded location, protected as much from themselves as from the rest of us. Computers will continue to miniaturize themselves, though, eventually disappearing into a microverse where their ever-vaster calculations and mathematical models will become one with the quarks and the charms.

The Vietnam War Two wholly incompatible martial systems collided, with desperate result. Could the Vietcong, given a little more TV savvy, have triumphed sooner by launching an all-women guerrilla army agains the Playboy-reading GIs? ‘First Air Cavalry ground elements in Operation Pegasus killed 350 enemy women in scattered contacts yesterday, while Second Division Marines killed 124 women communists…’

Body-building Asexual masturbation, in which the entire musculature simulates a piece of erectile tissue. But orgasm seems indefinitely delayed.

Fashion A recognition that nature has endowed us with one skin too few, and that a fully sentient being should wear its nervous system externally.

Personal computers Perhaps unwisely, the brain is subcontracting many of its core functions, creating a series of branch economies that may one day amalgamate and mount a management buy-out

Went and saw Spiderman today. Good entertainment, stupid movie, no grace. There’s a moment during which Willem Dafoe is crawling on the floor towards a chair that has his Green Goblin mask on it, talking to it as his externalized evil half. This moment was, for me, the weak link that broke the chain. I was willing to suspend disbelief (I mean, I’m watching a movie about a guy who gets super powers from a genetically-modified spider, who’s fighting a bad guy defense contractor who got his superpowers by breathing a mysterious green gas), but that moment just cracked the camel in two.

They showed the trailer for The Hulk, which is directed by…. Can you believe it… ANG LEE.