Present Imperfect

Sick Leave | March 28, 2004

I know this looks really bad, but I have a good excuse this time: I've got consumption! Okay, it's probably just a chest cold, but it jacked me up for an entire week and I'm still not done coughing up parts of my insides. Anyway, I promise to do better this week.

Last night I dreamt an entire movie. I woke up at 4 a.m. thinking I was a genius, but at 9 a.m., that seemed a little less likely. It was about a kid who was abused on an annual family trailer camping trip, and the kid tells the entire story in first person in yearly installments (though not chronologically), in and around the trailer. The best line went something like "Why does everyone think I forgot what happened when I got older?" Okay, now, that looks stupid, but imagine it uttered into the camera at dusk in the desert outside Albuquerque by an eight-year-old who is doomed to be sexually abused at 11. Harrowing, yes? Especially in a really grainy, jumpy, digital print. In my head. At 3 a.m.

I had this dream for two reasons. First, I read two reviews of a play I will probably never see, "Frozen," which is about a woman whose daughter is kidnapped and murdered, a criminal psychologist and the criminal who did the kidnapping and murdering. Second, I am reading the His Dark Materials trilogy by Philip Pullman and I am saddened that these books weren't around when I was a kid. Holy shit, they're good. That's probably not going to make it as a pull-quote on the back of the next printing, but that's how I feel. They're basically guidebooks for the practicing agnostic. Plus, you know, ripping yarns.