I'm No Different From the Morning Birds

I woke up this morning at 3 because I took a long nap after dinner and because I had a nightmare about my shadow incarnate. And it's just me now, in the middle of my messy room, listening to the fan and romanticizing cross-country adventures. I actually googled walk across America, and I found a journal titled "I'm Just Walkin'". I like the sign on his cart and the way he labels things, but I find he doesn't write enough and that he takes too many pictures of plain expanses of land, local bags of chips, and mailboxes. To each his own, but I still admire him, and the apparent congeniality of the North American states.

I've been thinking about it more and more so. How Jules in Pulp Fiction talks about wanting to just "...walk the Earth," and how Forrest Gump did it a little quicker, and how the father and son in McCarthy's The Road never let the fire die, and how adventures never come home. An Australian girl named Jessica Watson circumnavigated the globe in a sailboat, but she was too young to be considered for a world record.

A man asked me for change today on Mineola Blvd. and I asked him a few questions since I didn't initially hear him. What had happened to his income? Why he was there...and so forth. And he rolled up his pant legs and showed me the turgid socks, brown filth speckling through. He seemed to be suffering from gout, and the hospital could only do so much about it, he told me. And I remembered volunteering at the hospital and seeing this type of thing much worse, cancerous growths blowing up legs to incredible proportions.

And I thought and thought about it, his immobility, hopelessness, and is it recklessness to envisage such a journey when others cannot, will not, will never be able to? All my life, I've been keen on documenting my experiences through the idiosyncratic lens that is my written voice, and I wonder about the travel, and is there something else that can be done to make it more, reverential...How can one bring about change through something big and small at the same time?

Sirens and Birds

Here's what the weather's like in Mineola, NY for the next few days.

And it's okay, right? I think the most powerful aspect of Cormac McCarthy's The Road is the post-apocalyptic weather. Constantly gloomy, constantly shrouded in cold wet misery. It's darker than the movie portrays it as well. It makes sense that people would degenerate quickly this way. No more sirens or birds, just cannibals slithering around.

Mom tells me yesterday while we're cooking chicken and dumpling soup that this weather makes her feel miserable and I tell her that it's in our blood to hate this weather--that we need the sun, that spics, especially, need the sun. It regenerates our souls--maybe, who cares.

Dexter is fantastic, of course.

Somebody stole Fallout 3 from my mailbox.

I'm still holding on to The Day the Earth Stood Still because I don't have a raincoat and I'm a little girl and the library only charges a quarter for every late day, I think. This is the Keanu Reeves version, mind you.

I would try to write some sort of comparative review if I didn't think it would bore my blog fans, which are numerous. I just think it's worth mentioning the featured review on the DVD case: "This time there's MORE ACTION, more special effects and MORE MAYHEM!" -Watertown Daily Times

For those of you who aren't familiar with this film, it's about an alien that comes to Earth and appears wholly human and insists on delivering a message of paramount importance to all the leaders of the world simultaneously. Once the alien, Klaatu, realizes the Earth is an impassable bureaucracy, shit starts going down because a machine that was meant to destroy the Earth/defend Klaatu, starts doing just that. But I think this film, the new version of this film about sums it up for us. This shows what we need these days to be entertained. Hyper-entertainment. Look at The Clash of the Titans for god's (of Olympus) sake.

Nothing is simple anymore.

The classics are a homage to this notion.

Two crazy bitches blow themselves up in Russia yesterday. And New Yorkers start to question their daily commute.

I wrote this poem:

Bombing at Moscow Metro

I had a dream that I was the one person to capture the moments

after Moscow Metro was attacked by two human bombs, female at that.

I capture the people fleeing the train from within inside the train,

trailing sideways until I reach the end of the car and swing the camera to what

I see

another woman with a bomb strapped to her and I yell

AW SHIT

and drop kick her chest while I feel my legs melt away

then my hips and chest and arms

but I watch the camera fly past the flames and land

salvageable

--

Today, the Large Hadron Collider finally had its first successful run, and guess what, we're all still alive. And Toaster Strudles still taste just as good.