Having incredible flashbacks of 1992 today. I was lying in bed, and the heat and smell of the air and desolation almost transported me there. I started thinking about details I’d forgotten, little things – the voice of a long-gone summer fling, the constant spin of the box fan in my room, the lazy emptiness of sitting around, not having a job the next day. It made me think I could put on some shorts and a shirt and go to Kirkwood and catch a WQAX streetdance on my way to CD exchange or something.
I guess going nuts over the past is permissibile, considering that I’m writing a book about it right now. I put down a few words last night about the same deal, about never really being able to touch your past again. Sometimes you can get so close – you can find that note from an ex-girlfriend and read it and get transported back, and touch the paper and know that she touched the same paper 5 or 10 or 50 years ago. It’s like when that dude from Quantum Leap went back to his own family when he was a kid, and he couldn’t tell them that his brother was going to die in Vietnam, and even when he did, it didn’t change anything. Even though my book uses the most lax, taboo, and destructive time travel methodology, it’s still impossible to go back to your own past and get what you want. All but the most devious are limited to being only observers.
Had a weird dream that I was hanging out with a few different women in Wright quad back at IU – no real prospects, just friends. Maybe I was living there? Anyway, Jenny McCarthy was going to college there, and was friends with one of the girls. One morning, I was sleeping on the floor there, and she came in completely naked, wanting to borrow something. It was very awkward, and I wanted to tell her “I loved your CD-ROM” or something else to piss her off. Later (or maybe earlier) she called the room and I answered, and she said “This is McCarthy” and I said “Joseph McCarthy?” Also in the dream, I got into a huge ethical discussion with her and the roommates about whether or not it was safe to go to a college class if it’s three weeks into the semester and you haven’t attended once. When I woke up, I was still thinking about cover stories that might work for this (clinical depression, father was sick, allergy attacks…)
I think I’m going to go see the X-Files movie after a hit of lunch…
06/21/98 22:01
I don’t want to slag the X-Files film on the off-chance that Gillian Anderson is stalking me, reads this, and then decides not to suprise me. I’ll say this much: Scully=good, Mulder=good, all of the other characters=what the fuck? Everyone else was a caricature of a caricature. And wasn’t this black oil alien already discussed at length in the series? Why didn’t Mulder know about it, if he was infected with it in that Russian gulag? Am I hallucinating? I don’t know. It was nice watching the X-Files without commercials, even if it seemed like a padded out 1-hour epsisode. They didn’t cut it off in the middle or end with a To Be Continued. And it looked and sounded great. I dunno – maybe if they would’ve divided the movie into 4 continuous episodes, like the Twilight Zone film, and gave each episode to a different director. Then you’d get a little of humor, a little high-tech angle, some more about the other people, etc. Oh well. Worth $4 and the bullshit involved with so many people and having to sit in the second row.
Beautiful day today. I got home, opened the window, and sat in bed, with a nice breeze coming over me. So nice, that I fell asleep and awoke to darkness.