journal page 5

they formed a club so you couldn't join.
october 19, 1999
way past your bedtime
i saw that scary woman at jack in the box again tonight and i started to realize that maybe i shouldn't eat at jack in the box so much. so some of you have already heard this next story before, but you are spoiled and fat with german hot cream and will have to hear the story again. because i can't think of anything else to write.

i was rewriting this 114 page script in my computer saturday night and as i was saving the final file to floppy, mr.computer makes a sudden series of horrifying choking noises. i yell, "no, do not do that." and the screen starts freezing up and the drive is making sounds like this: gah? gaaaaahhh! gaaaaaahh!! errors and confusing lights and big confusing numbers that confuse don pop up everywhere. don panics and is unable to yell out words that contain consonants. he makes a loud noise not unlike, "ooooeeeeeeeeeee!!" and starts beating at the monitor with a little stick. the entire system shuts itself down. the drive has crashed before, but not taking down 114 pages of unsaved feature script with it. don spends several minutes staring at the blank monitor not really wondering anything. also containing residual anger from when his neighbor was playing that britney spears song very loudly over and over causing don to hate all of mankind and throw chairs out of his window. don reboots the computer, dreading what he already knows. script gone. mass simmering. don checks the floppy disc. and it's somehow THERE. this makes don happy. he bounds around and consumes salted foods. he finds them salty and crunchy. don re-copies the file from his disk and keeps writing. it's getting later and he's tired and dizzy. the ground starts moving. at first he's not aware of it because he assumes he is hallucinating. he hears rumbly noises.. 'wow this is either an earthquake or i'm about to pass out.' earthquake it was! before don can enjoy the mass destruction, he realizes that all that he has just re-written had not been saved yet. for the love of god and all that is holy. pumped with panic and adrenaline and a fight-or-flee metallic taste response forming in his mouth, don fumbles to hit the magical ctrl-s save button, but his panicked hand only manages to form a hammering fist and types, sawqssadda. the power goes out and computer goes blank. darkness. this time, don makes a noise not unlike a little girl sobbing. the earthquake continues, the very plates of the planet mocking him. don goes to bed, deciding that god doesn't want him writing anymore tonight.

have any of you been to the amusement park but they turn it all into a big bunch of ghost house mazes with fog pumped thru the whole place for halloween? i think i am going this week. but i guess they have these people in makeup running around the park popping out of shadows and chasing you and i hear that they even come up and grab you and stuff. like sometimes in the bathing suit area

i live in a giant bucket.
fully functional sideburns
october 14, 1999
one would think that with months of all-night animating finished for the time being, i would take a much-needed break from the screwy work schedule. yet in heldover full twitchy-mode, clawing around the apartment in a flopping mania of nothing-to-do, i just inexplicably wrote a feature length screenplay. jittery boy pounded out 100 pages in four days. i'm still trying to figure this one out myself it sort of poured out me unstopably. is unstopably a word? that looks like a little town in southern england. i think maybe it's 'unstoppably'? anyway, it's a live-action science fiction sort of thing. i haven't read back any of it yet so it could all be garbage but it sounded sort of interesting. i think i need a vacation.

i recently got a hair cut because it was coming out of my head all long and people were pointing and things going, "your hair is coming out of your head all long!" and i'd say, "and how!!" but now i'm like a freshly shorn little lamb out scampering in the sunlight. so there is less hair hanging off of my head but it is still growing like nobody's business. hmm. i guess you may have well just skipped this paragraph..

there's a homeless old woman who is constantly pacing outside of the jack in the box every time i go there. she is practically blocking the door sometimes and is sort of just wandering around the entire perimeter smoking a cigarette. she's always moving her mouth around as if ranting to herself, but no sounds ever come out. and when she gets wet she is angry. but she is almost always right next to the doorway, looking into the windows. i bet that jack in the box is wondering why 90% of their customers are drive-thru. and that's funny. not because homeless people are funny but because jack in the box is probably really bad for you.

"By BBC News Online Science Editor Dr David Whitehouse
In what is bound to become a much debated and highly controversial experiment, a team of US scientists have wired a computer to a cat's brain and created videos of what the animal was seeing. According to a paper published in the Journal of Neuroscience ...[scientists from] the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology, University of California, Berkeley, have been able to "reconstruct natural scenes with recognizable moving objects". The researchers attached electrodes to 177 cells in the so-called thalamus region of the cat's brain and monitored their activity. The thalamus is connected directly to the cat's eyes via the optic nerve. Each of its cells is programmed to respond to certain features in the cat's field of view. Some cells "fire" when they record an edge in the cat's vision, others when they see lines at certain angles, etc. This way the cat's brain acquires the information it needs to reconstruct an image. The scientists recorded the patterns of firing from the cells in a computer. They then used a technique they describe as a "linear decoding technique" to reconstruct an image. "To their amazement they say they saw natural scenes with recognisable objects such as people's faces. They had literally seen the world through cat's eyes. Other scientists have hailed this as an important step in our understanding of how signals are represented and processed in the brain. It is research that has enormous implications..."

i will let you all discuss the ancient conflicts between the objective world and subjective perception on your own. wonder how long before we can wire up the subconscious regions of the brain and record dreams as tangible imagery... you just know some grad student's out there right now cooking that one up. we can trade each other's dreams on video tape on the black market. they will probably be better than drugs. poor cat. i am eating chocolate.

i just did another phone interview which are always awful because you never really know how these articles turn out, because i not talk well as good as me write. i did this one interview several months ago with this woman and i ended up giving her 2 whole hours on the phone, talking about film and animation and aesthetic theory and this and that and she's like "uh huh. uh huh. oooooh. mmmm. uh huh" and you can hear her clickity clack on her typewriter on the other end so you know *something's* getting through, so after the two hours i hang up thinking, well hmm that's probably going to be one hell of an interesting article i hope because i am just so very brilliant, ha ha. a couple weeks later the magazine or whatever it was comes out and somebody sends me a clipping - a paragraph summary of the film festival, a brief synopsis of whichever film it was of mine (i think it was lily?), followed by this:

zzzzzz
october 6, 1999

ok here i talk about death again for the moment. one of the few things i ever watch on tv is hbo's "america undercover" documentary show which usually features autopsies and dead people. or naked people doing odd things. or dead naked people. or people riding in taxis talking about stuff. so anyway they just premiered that new one about life after death theories or whatnot and i missed the first 5 minutes but anyway i was thoroughly disappointed in it because it allotted the psychologists and doctors who actually had interesting things to say very little time to talk and mostly featured these psychics/con men who capitalize off of these mourning old people by pretending to be in contact with their dead relatives..

so they'd start off, "yes, i see a strong... is it a male figure? yes it is a male figure.. possibly your husband, brother, cousin, father, or nephew...? is it your nephew? yes it is your husband..." and of course the poor woman is all tearful and blubbery because she wants to believe so very badly, overlooking all of the names and dates he proceeds to throw out that have no relation to her. "did he have a special tattoo? no? did he like to play in the sand? i'm getting a strong sand reading... ahh he liked going to the beach? were his feet attached to his legs?"

it's called cold reading and is the oldest con in the book. he follows her leads well enough, inevitably hits upon something by chance, and she gives him her money. so he says, "yes your husband is coming forward now. he is full of liquids." and she goes, "yes!! that's him! he was leaking internally before he died!" and he says, "ah hah..! and hmmm, he is not saying anything to me at the moment.." and she's nearly crying again and says "of course! he had a tracheotomy!"

so this poor bastard is a dead ghost yet he's still wandering around full of liquids with a tracheotomy pipe hanging out of his neck. the afterlife sounds great!

people obssessed with worrying about tomorrow so much they forget about today. speaking of which, why are you even sitting in front of your computer on such a pretty day? put down that latest issue of "asian slut moose" and go run around. because eventually you will be all cold and gray and a lot less interesting than you are now. well, probably a lot less interesting. and then nobody will play with you because your bits will be falling off your pieces and you will just lie there with a dumb look on your face. and i just wrote about death for like the millionth time in this forum and i swear i'm going to stop that. OH WOE BE THAT DEATHING DEATH OF WHICH ALL YE MORTALS FACE UPON THEIR DEATHLY SHROUDS OF BLACK DEA.. sorry

september 28,1999
oh so very late
saddest sound in the world
spent last 10 days drawing until 5:30 and 6 in the morning. things are getting really blurry around here, but it looks like i'm in the home stretch of animating. been spending my "days" staggering around for bare necessities like an eternally jet-laggedry zombie with a gray headache and burning eyes. i just made up the word, "jet-laggedry." it's very odd going to bed when you hear people running their morning showers in the other apartments or falling asleep as they start their cars to go to work. and it seems my short term memory has been totally shot - forgot to put the food away, forgot to pick up the laundry from the drier, forgetting to call people back, etc.. and sometimes i even forget what i write. and sometimes i even forget what i write. and sometimes i even forget what i write. so very sleepy. this entry is going to make minimal sense methinks..

i read yesterday that when you're dying you lose your vision and movement first, while your hearing is the last to go. therefore i guess a lot of people like to listen to their favorite song as they prepare to die which seems like a nice idea. i don't know though. i get really annoyed all day long if i listen to a song in the morning but don't get to hear the end of it. sometimes you don't even want to get out of the car before the song on the radio ends, you know? so what happens if you're DEAD before your happy song finishes?? you'll NEVER hear the rest of it! how irritating is that! so you'd have to time it just right on the death bed and hit play right when you think you're going to die in three or four minutes. but then if you hit play too early, you're waiting around for a good minute or so in awkward silence after the song ends, thinking "fuck i should have pressed play a bit la--"... or worse, the NEXT song on the album comes on, one you don't like at all, and you end up dying to the first thirty seconds of that one instead, all pissed off - or spend your final earthly moments struggling to hit REWIND. i mean, what are the odds that the instant you die is perfectly synched with the ending of the song? i bet 99% of the time the dead person is severely annoyed. that's just way too much stress for me to deal with, thank you very much.

before i forget, a special message to the person(s) who sent me the country music cd. i am intrigued. i ask, "..why?"

i swear i had more to write, but there you go with my memory problems right now... OH YEAH!

as a result of my unhappy sleepy time schedule, i have been having more awful dreams. first i dreamt there was this big auto accident at night and there was a dead body hanging from a tree. i don't remember anything else. so i woke up all like, "wha??" and when i slept again i dreamt i was living in this really messy apartment. just papers and junk cluttered everywhere. and i had a pet parrot and a little kitten. but the place was such a mess that i rarely saw them and i could never find them in all of the junk to feed them. and i really wanted to feed the stupid animals but it was impossible to find anything. and half the time i forgot i even had them. so after weeks without food they would pop up every now and then all ratty and more and more deformed, and scamper around gnawing on things. after a longer time i began to wonder if they were dead yet and i just couldn't find the little bodies in all of the mess, but sure enough they would momentarily show up again all starved and crazed and nasty.

i remember hearing all sorts of stories from a friend who i don't remember who it was right now and my god this sentence structure sucks but anyway she told me about these aquatic pets she used to have, one of which i think was an eel in a big tank. the happy eel lived in the tank and they fed it. one morning they found the big tank empty. which is quite unusual to say the least. they double-checked the tank for mr.eel as well as the surrounding area around the tank but no sign of eel. it wasn't until almost a month later that they discovered eel, who was behind the family room couch three rooms away, all dried up and dead. somehow mr.eel managed to hop out of the tank in the night and wriggle down the hallway and through three rooms. this is probably one of the creepiest things i have ever heard, mostly because it sure seems like mr.eel had some sort of determined INTENTION for performing such a feat. and how does an eel leap out of a water tank, anyway?? there's something creepy about dead animals under your bed or your sofa or places you frequent your time without knowing it. or does that go without saying.

i had a goldfish in a bowl when i was little and for a week he started acting sort of weird and half dead, like swimming sideways and blubbering around the surface of the water. finally i found him floating on top, so i scooped him out, put him in a napkin and prepared to bury him the yard. so i go through the house to the garage, find a little shovel, go around the house to the backyard and when i get all the way back there, fishy starts throttling around in my hand making gaspy wheezy noises, suddenly alive! i jump half out of my skin, scramble back around the house, through the garage and back into my room and dump him back in the water and he swims around like nothing happened, all half-retarded again. my fish/astronaut made a good 5-7 minute trip to the nether regions on a near-death-experience napkin and returned safely home. but later i think the cat got him.

don