I'm Here Now, Stupid

www.failedminimalist.com

And happy birthday, Dad. Even though you don't read.

Just Woke Up

Just had a dream. The world was dusty. I had a brother and he died from steroids. I lost control of the car I drove, almost ran over children. If only I'd braked sooner. Suddenly, a flash. The world transformed. For a moment, my brother was a zombie. Then he drove off in my car. Shit. I turned around. Shit. What had been a derelict school moments before was now a sky scraping metropolitan unit, tall and wide, shiny silver windows everywhere. People passed, they smiled, and their conversations scared me, because they said nice things to each other. Even men said nice things to the women, and the women said nice things back. This led me to believe I was obviously in a Bizzaro world worth its gravity in deception. I crossed a covered bridge, turned, walked backward to see where I had come from. I recognized nothing. Everything was too futuristic to be happening to me. I turned back around, a river of golden elevators passed up and down before me like spinning jackpots. One stopped and opened. There was my girlfriend. Smiling, in a navy blue business suit, greeting me. She had a loose white blouse underneath, one with a lean pointy white collar overlapping the blazer. But I knew it couldn't be, shouldn't be her. But, God, her golden brown hair, her dark green eyes. I had already lost her, before things changed and I didn't. I heard the bustling city around me, and I stared at her, ruminated, and for once the sounds of a city did not scare me. I stepped onto the elevator with her, we zoomed off. I don't know which direction. She started talking about how life was now, like I understood all these changes and had been living with them as well. I did not say aloud my thoughts, that she had been replaced, that she must have been an agent sent to spy on me, the one who did not change. The exile. The elevator stopped. She wrapped her hands around my arm, I felt something bounce on my thigh. It was a black leather portfolio full of pictures. I did not ask to see them. We stepped out onto a bridge so high up, leading toward another building. We ended up in a hotel room that was a bad facsimile of a cheap room we'd stayed at sometime in the past. Polished hardwood floors and Christmas trees instead of old stained carpet and ash trays. I said nothing, because the trick was so obvious it was laughable. If this was some one's idea of a joke, some one's way to get information out of me, or... She led me to the bathroom. The tub was gigantic and full of bubbles. She took off her clothes. She took off mine. We stepped in, made love like we hadn't seen each other in days, though I hadn't had contact with the real her for quite some time. I knew it wasn't really her I made love to. But it looked like her, so I made love to her like I would have if it was her. I tried pretending it was her, though I knew it was a replacement trying to trick me. I wanted to get over it and trick myself. So I did believe it was her. But I didn't trust it was her. But for a while, I just pretended it was the real thing. It made me happy that I could be wrong, because even though all my senses told me not to trust her, I allowed myself the possibility of being wrong, that this could be good, if I allowed it to be good, and perhaps no deception had to occur, not even deception of the self. Water and bubbles weren't staying in the tub, too much turbulence, too much occurring underneath the surface. Even though the entire world around me had changed into a chaotic metropolis, and I had witnessed my brother become an addict, die, and then turn into a zombie with white-out eyes who stole my car, I still submitted to the love I felt for her. It was good, and I'm glad the dream ended before the sex ended and before the good memories stopped flashing through my mind. Thank you.

P.S. I had two other dreams. One where she called to tell me she was so upset that she smoked three of her father's cigarettes, violating the sacred promise she made to her mother. The other dream involved two Mexican friends of mine running band saws through my house, and though I hadn't moved yet, I laughed about it. But honestly, all the broken glass did make me nervous. Just goes to show dreams are bullshit and beauty (Hey! Just like fiction!)

A case for winter...

Nobody likes the cold, but everyone loves winter. Let's try to think of some slogans that will get people to remember the warm place in their heart they keep kindled for the most sunless of seasons, winter. Here's mine:

Winter! Suffering you can count on.

It's Coming...

A new site... failedminimalist.com

SCI FI SYNTHESIS

"The seeker, who is often the survivor, confronts his or her own fallibility, vulnerability, and culpability as an aspect of confronting the horror object, and either matures or dies."

-Bruce F. Kawin

If anything, the goal of "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" is to frighten. No elements of technological awe or betrayal are obvious. And a recurrent theme throughout science-fiction literature and film is technological awe, followed by its exploitation and betrayal. Look at the whole of Isaac Asimov's works, or Hal in "2001."

The "horror object" in "Invasion" might as well have been transmogrifying spatulas instead of jumbo space veggies. No way was this movie sci-fi. The emphasis and attention to scientific minutiae don't show up except for in throw-away lines of dialogue. The emotional crux of "Invasion" for the characters is complete assimilation, loss of individuality. And along with that stuff apparently goes art and music. Remember when they heard music? They thought someone human was out there, but it was only because one of the pod-folk left the radio on. And there wasn't going to be any more puppy love, either. Remember what gave Becky away right before the big chase?

And what happens to Becky? She gets turned into a pod-folk. Could this be punishment for her infidelity? Don't the sinners always get what's coming to them in horror flicks?

A point Kawin makes is that while horror films concern themselves with reestablishing the status-quo, sci-fi films attempt to alter, or progress, the status-quo. "Invasion" is a movie all about saving the human race, which, on the surface, is a very sci-fi attitude. But when do we ever see Dr. Bennell or Mrs. Driscoll lament the fact that the human race might come to an end. These two hedonistic head-cases don't care about anyone else. Sci-Fi heroes are supposed to be so self-righteous it makes us sick!

Take note of the climax, when the Doc is surrounded by highway traffic. He's screaming, warning everyone, and nobody's listening. Every one around him is in a vehicle, therefore dehumanized to a certain extent. He is the only human, but an invisible individual. This is the ultimate death he's been fearing, the death of his ego.

I'm guessing studio execs didn't think the like-minded masses could handle such an ending, one having that cavalier American dream so permanently deposed, and that's why they added on that happy little Hollywood caboose.

Some Have You Ever Noticed...

Say you're putting some water in the kettle or the pot, right? You turn on the faucet. Do you let that first bit of water stream into your cooking utensil? Probably not. You probably let a bit hit the sink bottom first, right? But Why? You think the first bit that comes out is dirty? Like it was just waiting there at the tip of the spigot collecting nastiness and germs and what not? Why do we do that? It's unnecessary.

ALL THESE FICTIONS

All these feelings, all these fictions. She whispers in bookstores. Not libraries, but bookstores. Where people shop. Where I go on my break in uniform and people think I work there. Even though the ones who work there don’t wear uniforms, never have, they still confuse me for someone who can help.
I'm not a woman, but I'm not this thing they keep calling a man. There's no confusion, no searching for identity, no sadness. Just a failing of positioning. It would be so easy to run through a museum of priceless art, and break it. Make Picassos of Picassos. Not a rock anymore, not a man anymore, but an empty space where people still pass and see rocks and men with walls behind them.
All the insides so God damn delicate. It’s this damn cycle creeping up on me every time. Every time it’s unexpected but here is the moon setting its watch to it. I thought it was lunchtime. Here is the moon winking at me, crying for me, taking up all the things I discard. Randomness? And every time it is me who forgets, who needs reminders, who needs the leaves to change slowly, starting with the edges inward. Would my color not start to change from the center out? But the leaves bleed outward in? Then fall? I see a hole in my hand. I bleed out all over my hand. And the waves of embarrassment come crashing against the waves of nihilism, two seas straddling a pile of leaky hourglasses full of shit like manganese instead of sand. Gravity carves joke after joke after joke after joke…Pulls me up. And I look perplexed as a puppy, as Salieri.
He comes in the store, forearm flashing rifles, rippling Confederacy, and I tell him not to talk to women like that, like with respect…It was what he knew, how to respect a woman like that, by only yelling at and flummoxing toward men could he honor woman. And I told him not to. He, three of me. I told him not to talk to my co-workers like that. Me, not a woman, and them so.
I bought a harmonica five days ago, another just four days ago. I wanted to see if they sounded the same. Sometimes they do. I pulled one out in the alley by the store after the man and his wife stomped out of the store. She was big, too. One of them had a beard, big and bushy and tawny, and a shirt that read ‘Big Daddy.’ I’m not so musical, but want to be, so in my nervousness in the alley where I was afraid any next car would be my beat down, I began to play a sad song. I didn’t know how to play, but I put together four simple low notes, waved my cupped right hand, pushed and pulled the silver plates across my lips with my left, and a sad song echoed down the alley.
And then my break was over. I walked back into the store, watchful, vacillating between energized and a need to act with contrition. My boring store life, for a moment, had teetered. But was it self-righteous? I knew it. I asked around, everyone was on my side. I knew it. I called my father later after work. He called the couple idiot rednecks before I even finished outlining. Really, I never know what I’m doing. This, I know, for everybody told me so.

War Synthesis

There is a difference between non-violence and passivity, a difference which Susan Jeffords ignores. Not to fight physically, with force and weaponry, does not mean to not fight or dissent at all. As if a punch in the face or shot in the gut were our only means of resistance?
Is it these Hollywood films’ intent to try to reintroduce Vietnam vets into a passive population? Are they trying to say, “Hey, you probably forgot your demure, docile nature, your inability to affect government policy, the fact that we just don’t take kindly to civic dissent back here, back ‘home.’ So, this is just a friendly reminder that all that violence we had you do over there, well, that shit wont fly back here, back ‘home.’”
But what of Kurtz? When he is told to reform, they are not telling him to feminize himself. They are telling him that his way of killing people is less civilized than how it’s usually done. From the top down, everyone wants full complicity. When a superior doesn’t get it, he gives the insubordinate dredge two choices: change or violent death. Remember when Benjamin Willard (Martin Sheen) is trying to tell the guy in Hau Phat to give them some diesel fuel for the boat, and the guy is being difficult? What does Willard do? He jerks the guy over the kiosk, slams him up against a pole, and instructs the guy syllable by granular syllable, to “just-give-us-the-gas.” He also gets a couple complimentary tickets to the Playboy Bunnies show, an act of final appeasement.
Jeffords tries to tell us the problems of the Vietnam vets, their violence to and ostracism from society, were deflected. She’s saying that those violent actions taken by so many in that war are being treated by Hollywood as a shameful, strange act. But at the same time those movies are saying those acts were not entirely the faults of the soldiers. Jeffords says that everyone is looking at these vets in their violent mindsets as different from themselves, even the vets.
The mistake is the belief that these extreme ends of action (violence and ultimate surrender) are each exclusive to just one of the sexes. To think that a male in his most distilled state is a voracious, insatiable murderer is just as false as identifying females in their most distilled as a passive, subservient underling class of humans.
And as for the bit about “negating social demands…” Well, movies don’t produce or hinder actions. The way I see it, there is no such thing as entertainment that calms and corrects us, pacifies our thirst to change the world around us. It may modify our thoughts, but never our actions. People always find a way to justify actions.

Visit Here Unless. . .

You don't want to care. . .

http://thinkprogress.org/2006/09/22/clinton-fox/

Started A New One

WASTEBAND

manufactured by
Matthew Ryan Vincent



FADE IN:


A bouncing mp3 player, clipped to an elastic waistband.
The tiny square display reads, “Song: National Anthem.”

Joey, late 20s-ish, runs beside a busy road: cars, car dealerships, car washes, Oil change stations, drive-thru only restaurants, drive-thru dry cleaners, drive-thru pharmacies. Joey turns down a side street.

A couple side streets later, all traffic has disappeared, no else is around, not a drive-thru in sight, just empty driveways. Joey stops running. He leans a hand against a stop sign to keep from falling out. He’s sweating like a dog. Panting, too. Joey doesn’t look like he’s going to be on the cover of Runner’s Planet any time soon. He’s out of shape, needs a shave, and as a matter of fact he’s not even wearing running shoes. They’re flat-footed, good-for-nothing-except-twisting-vertebrae Chuck Taylor’s. At least they’re new. But maybe that’s a bad thing. Joey wouldn’t know the benefit of an old shoe. Joey buys a lot of new shoes, but that isn’t important because this is a screenplay, and you weren’t supposed to find out unless I showed you, but then again, that little fact has no import in the following story, so how else would you have found out? Thank me later.

Joey pulls the earphones out with a clumsy swipe. He looks closely into the earphones, grimaces, then digs a pinky into his ear, twists, pulls, examines, sticks out tongue for a second, then wipes pinky on rear of shorts.

A weak, tin cup version of the “Star Spangled Banner” is the only sound of any import on the street. The street is small and unimportant; it dead-ends, the city never repainted the yellow line running down the middle of it since the first job in 1959. Never needed them, really, the yellow lines. The only people who use it know not to pass and which side to stay on.

Joey walks down the street slowly until he gets to a point where the pavement breaks away into gravel. He puts the earphones back in deeply, as to hear every note, and the music is his again, replaced by crunching gravel as Joey resumes his run. But in about five seconds he reaches a set of steps, hops up them, and his run is done. He pulls the earphones back out as he enters a house.

Joey
Whew. What a run.