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at dusk
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The guy down the hall from me just moved out, and left me a microwave oven and his big Sony TV. So I sat next to it for two days, constantly flipping between the four channels, looking for something entertaining. It was a post-modernist experience: a collage of unrelated pieces with no context or order or continuity whatsoever.
Finally I got a used VCR at the Goodwill store, and now I just use the TV to watch movies. This is becoming habitual, but I consider it part of my education for a possible career. I have five different ideas for scripts that I'm working on. So I put in a movie, roll up a joint, put up my feet and lose myself in other worlds, pausing it occasionally to roll back to the fridge for a beer and take notes on the structure and emotions in the films.
There's no rule that I know of that says work can't be fun.
I was inspired to write screenplays by dreams I had-the actual sleeping kind. During some of my dreams, I actually thought I was watching a movie. Sometimes it was a very interesting, thought provoking one. I am learning that writing a good script is probably analogous to writing a good symphony. This explains why there are so many horrible movies. No matter how talented you think you are, it's damned hard work. It's fun, but in a demented way.
I am beginning to like the city. It is the land of extremes. The hub of the world. My home.
All monetary value is rooted in photosynthesis. The most powerful merely have the largest pipeline to the sun. As it burns, so too burns all our wealth. The past, and all we think we've learned in general, is becoming increasingly worthless. Those who prosper aren't the ones who look down. They look up, like baby chicks in a nest, with their beaks wide open.
I met a stripper online. She's from Las Vegas. She fell in love with my words-rather my ability to choose words. She's convinced that we are destined for each other, and she's flying to the airport anyday now to come and live with me. How did it come to this? It was just a game to me. She hasn't even seen my picture. I can't even afford a taxi to go and pick her up. Yet she's gorgeous. Just twenty-one years old. What am I going to do?
The soil is contaminated. A foul stench lingers in the air. Something isn't quite right.
The caribou are becoming scarce. New technologies, new pipelines, new oil fields are marking, stunting, defining their once illustrious advance through the wild. People all over those remote Northern villages are concerned about their livelihood, their family, their dreams. The cruel, dark hand of want and scarcity is falling upon them for the first time in their lives.
There seems to me to be far too much happiness and love in the world. How many are working to spread the noble values associated with pain, suffering, death and destruction? These causes are crying out for new, bold leadership. Should I be the one to take the torch in hand, to lead people into a new dark night of evil and horror?
Serial killers perform the important function of cleansing nature of excessive, wasteful, polluting decadent human bodies. They keep in check the human tide of destruction upon the world. They are cleaners.
Yet through their eyes, they do it for fun and excitement, or at least they should. They should kill at random, in such a way as to never get caught, and there should be no suicide getaway plan; their own death is the absolute worst thing for their cause. Nor should they be anti-social, depressed, or even emotionally unstable or mentally unhealthy, since this just makes them deperate victims, or even worse- martyrs. A cool killer always has a trademark, like a howl. Or perhaps something ghastly and freakish-something "inhuman", like a bark, or a shriek. This should be contrived, not an expression of the soul, since part of his glory is being a spectator to his own actions. A cool killer is proud to be a monster. Many people are secretly in awe of his fully realized divine power, and he revels in his newfound fame.
Of course this is all just speculation for a character in one of my films.
Well, not really.
It is a new day.
The ground is falling.
The mushroom clouds of hydrogen bombs silhouette against the glowing red clouds of dawn.
There will be more violence, hatred, and fear.
But we will reinvent our cities.
We will regrow the forests.
We will build new spaceships.
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