When the day goes awry the times I spend with my Dad he repeats a familiar complaint in a familiar sing-song voice “We haad a plaaan”. Usually we are miles from home lost on a drive to some – I dunno – comic book convention at the VFW hall that may be happening at a VFW that may exist – somewhere in the state we MAY be in? Regardless, does this ruin the day or does it mean that the plan is there and that we are both aware, in some sense, that at least there was– is? — a plan?
Consider my idea to write some transcript for a new video podcast for the end of September. It was going to be a mixture of commentary on a number of things, – the film ‘Capote’, a biographical film about Truman Capote featuring one of my favorite actors Philip Seymour Hoffman. The idea of mixing fact and fiction in a new form of literary novel experiment, with an author who is an effeminate man tackling a brutal horrendous crime? Yes please. Oh, and he either – or / simultaneously – falls in love with one of the two men who killed four people ‘In Cold Blood’ – or is he effecting sympathy… empathetically connecting through sharing his personal story and the realizations of its relations to this young man’s upbringing – his own life intertwining – merely to get a story like a reporter photographing a drowning man?
And how does it end – this poetic tale of a writer, with its own blend of fact and fiction and brilliant writing – with a bang? with a whimper? Or with some breakneck reprieve. Or none of these, but only an author and a story, becoming known.
And for some reason I experiment now with my life and the art I am exploring as a way to continue creating as it feels my own life is falling apart. Barely able to continue some semblance of narrative… I think the first season of ‘Star Trek: Discovery’ has some intriguing topics that may chill this drink with their deep space sensibilities and cool nebula surfing seeming breezy refresh of this favorite series. I am getting into it. It is pretty good, but very different. And then the post traumatic stress disorder hits – one of the characters in the show that is. And it is the strong character, the one who had given the main character their stabilizing force in the first 7, 8, 9, I don’t – episodes… and the dream of skipping the new type of warp ship around via a human linked through the mycelium network has been fun also… But all of a sudden it turns pathological as it drives the engineer out of his mind, just as he was slated to head home for a well deserved rest. And then, and I had to step away, because that engineer’s lover, a gay couple, by the PTSD’s unlocked Klingon mind-virus deally when his former torturer/lover becomes a prisoner aboard their ship – makes him a hidden danger. A wild card posing as a threat that one should take the chance of trusting because it’s just us out here – so we can’t risk playing it by the rules –
Suddenly this stable force snaps the neck of the Doctor, the gay companion of the engineer- and at the end of the episode, I realize days later. Literal as I write this I am realizing this days later… I have been avoiding the show which I had been careening through – I have been reeling… Wanting to believe immediately after and still that the broken neck was a dream.
Capote ended with a hanging of a sympathetic murderer in a system one understood blankly but fully in tone and reverberation. The discovery has until now ended with a broken neck with no reason, no meaning, within a system promising new worlds and also a safe trek home and love and individual fight on equal terms with the collective.
It’s the same story.
I have been off caffeine for about a month and half? I have a hot cup of decaf in my hand. To quote Jules in Pulp Fiction I believe I am having “what alcoholics refer to as – a moment of clarity.”
Cannot believe the day and week I have been having and I cannot believe Saru had ANOTHER F(V)ulkin’ student dissed by that Vulcan academy like my boy Spock in the first Star Trek reboot which was a legitimately good offering, not so much the other ones.
This school insults me to my face. So I’ll say this with a certain tone in response to the art and truth you find me faced with, dear tribunal – and I have never meant this more and truer words never have been spoken:
LIVE LONG AND PROSPER.
The Haunted Typewriter 