Well, OK, I WAS joking.

No, not a documentary. Maybe some documentary angles, a bit like my original model film, for lo these many years, Hedwig and the Angry Inch. But to get the feelings I want, a documentary format would be too cool, detached, historical. We have to have a sense that this is happening now, and not long ago. Biographical material might be presented in the doc format, but for the more present-time story-line, we're going for a kind of exalted mood, sensing and feeling a kind of relationship that never existed before.

And if something never existed before, it can be hard to see.

We're also crunching the shooting time down. Good God, could we get this done by Christmas? And then take a break?

Not likely. At least not the "break" part.

Shirley, you must be joking.

OK. Course setting done for now.

In six months, we have a movie: a documentary about The New Death, and its fascinating CE. Chief Executrix, that is. Talkin' Dorothy Truth. My guess is we'll go for something 20-30 minutes long. Much constrained by lack of locations, actors, time, and money, and so on, we'll be trying all the guerilla video tricks in the book.

I would say roughly that the second half of the book will be the first part of the movie, and the second half of the movie will be devoted to Dorothy's reign as the new death, and what it all means and what it will be like to have a New Death, administered by a caring and hot (if you're over 70 years old) gal.

The movie I'm thinking of right now, for tonal qualities only, is parts of Being John Malkovich, the parts with the documentary feel, and the weird science parts. Will take a look at it tonight and see if there's anything in there to STEAL.

The expected post-partum feeling that came over me when I published the book is now gone, and we've got a new project on the line now. Pretty soon there will be scene notes, dialog ideas, notes, pix, and so on taped to the wall. This = FUN.

One of the keys to breaking open the idea has been getting ME out of the story. Distance, simplification, and fidelity to the real goal of the vid result. And I can do the VO and not get complications from referring to myself. I'm just a writer, man.

We Cannot Distinguish A Compulsion From A Call

Hillman"s The Dream and the Underworld: "Our modern word unconscious has become a catch-all, collecting into one clouded reservoir all fantasies of the deep, the lower, the baser, the heavier (depressed), and the darker. We have buried in the same monolithic tomb called The Unconscious the red and earthy body of the primeval Adam, the collective common man and woman, and the shades, and the phantoms, and ancestors. We cannot distinguish a compulsion from a call, an instinct from an image, a desirous demand from a movement of imagination. Looking into the night from the white light of the dayworld (where the term unconscious was fashioned) we cannot tell the red from the black. So we read dreams for all sorts of messages at once—somatic, personal, psychic, mantic, ancestral, practical, confusing instinctual and emotional life with the realm of death."

This is crucial, and involves much more than Hillman is talking about here, which is the proper interpretation, or use, of dreams.

No, this is about how we've taken several different worlds, or realms, or whatever you want to call them, and put them all together into one thing which we call the unconscious. But this is worse than, say, thinking that everything south of the Mexican border and on down to Tierra del Fuego is like Tijuana. No discrimination at all.

Now this wouldn't have interested me not too long ago, as it didn't seem to have any relevance to my life. But now things happen. Things that I cannot explain and can barely describe. They imply other realms. More than imply. But in my attempts to understand what happened, I came up against the situation that Hillman describes. What little I knew (and know) was nonetheless extremely confused since I was confusing different realms. Like getting a psychiatric evaluation when an engineering diagram is what is really needed.

We all use the tools we have in hand and are comfortable using, even if they aren't the right thing for the job. So it was—and is—with regard to my cross-realm adventures.

Echoes of the Future

I think I'll be doing this again. I got a clue, you know, when they say, "get a clue"? Like that. But it wasn't me; I just had the moment where it became blindingly obvious to even me that I was in dire need of a clue.

And then, walking home, there it was. A young woman who had been to one of the Death As A Salesman performances, walking down the street. She recognized my voice, I think, and asked, "hey, didn't you do that show?" She had emailed me to tell me how much she liked it. I remember things like that.

"That Death As A Salesman? Yeah, I did that."

Guess I'll be doing it again. As always, resistance is futile. We just like to think we have an option.

Is It Going To Storm?

I was in a funk on Sunday; it was one of my "I've failed at everything" moments. These are usually such terrifying moments, contemplating that possibility, that I change the internal subject as quickly as possible and fervently hope for the best. This time, I let the thought continue, and tried to confront it. What if I have squandered all that was given to me, made the wrong decisions time after time, missed opportunities too many times to count? What if I get the official letter, the Certificate of Complete Failure? Well it reminds me of something someone once said to my friend Jackson, who was having a very hard time; he'd been in prison, got sick there, anti-psychotics ravaging him, all kinds of problems. His uncle once told him, "Jackson, you're lucky, you've totally failed. No one expects anything of you any more." The thing is I'm not so worried about others' expectations as I am about my own. But I started to consider, what do I do if I get this letter, this Certificate? I'm a failure, my life didn't work out, but still here I am waking up every day. So far. So what do I do now? Do I change my plans now that I know none of them will work out? No. Just keep doing the same thing. But without the possibility of any kind of benefit, to me, others, or God. I'll just keep on doing the same thing, even tho....

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Onward Through The Fog

Hillman's The Dream and the Underworld: “

Admittedly, the dream-ego and the waking-ego have a special “twin” relationship; they are shadows of each other, as Hades is the brother of Zeus. But the “I” in the dream is no secret stage director (Schopenhauer) who wrote the play he acts in, no self-portrait photographer taking his own snapshot from below, nor are the wants fulfilled in a dream the ego’s wishes. The dream is not “mine,” but the psyche’s, and the dream-ego merely plays one of the roles in the theater, subjected to what the “others” want, subject to the necessities staged by the dream."

A secret stage director would be nice.

There's a point in Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow where Slothrop, the protagonist, realizes that, much worse than the paranoia he's been suffering, there is no one watching, that he's alone Out Here.