I stood beneath a tree today with my brother and we talked about how small the tree used to be when we were younger. We looked at its branches and how long they stretched now, and stared at the roots in awe. They too reached out from the base of the tree, like a child becoming an adolescent becoming an adult, moving out into the world, finding out what how it processes and perceives the world. And then I thought about chopping the tree down, and how I could never do that, and how even if I were to take an axe to the thing, maybe the stump that was left in the ground as a reminder of the tree's brilliance would go on existing for thousands of years. The basic matter of the tree would remain in existence into infinity, and so maybe the tree itself would, too. And this lead to me considering the minute, sub-atomic ways in which we are only now learning that the human species receives and processes information, and that in turn forced me to consider that maybe, perhaps, in some way, after the human brain ceases functioning and we die, maybe we still continue taking in stimuli and processing it. It is an extremely biased, anti-intellectual stance to say that the human brain can detect and process every bit of information we receive from every dimension of reality. Maybe the remotest parts of our being, the very smallest pieces of genetic material we consist of, goes on into eternity. Maybe we all get to live forever in ways we never even came close to dreaming were possible and our every anxiety about death and destruction is wholly unfounded. Maybe (probably) we are all wrong about reality and the truth is something that we could never even hope to conceive of (yet). Regardless, it occurs to me that the only way to obtain this knowledge is through science. Religion is static, the most conservative, concrete way of thinking possible, and it is nearing irrelevance. To me, anyway.

Zzzzimilies

The eternal debate rages on; do people prefer to sleep "like a baby" or "like a rock"? (If you're one of those "sleep of the dead" people you can fuck right off, weirdo.) People have been arguing about this for years, but it's time to settle the score. Travis Martin is setting the deal straight once and for all!

First off, I'm not all that familiar with what babies sleep like (I only sleep next to, like, two babies per year), so it's a little hard to be impartial. But my impression is that babies sleep the sleep of the deranged, waking up every hour, crying, screaming, evacuating their bowels and bladders without a care in the world. In other words, if you sleep like a baby, you sleep like a retard, jack, and I don't want that simile in our lexicon any longer. Who would want to sleep like a baby? Only a sick culture, one that reveres the rights of children above those of adults, one that places a premium on stupid, fleeting youth, could invent such an inane expression. Slept like a baby. As if!

I wouldn't take this so personally if there wasn't a perfect expression floating around; sleep "like a rock". What a lovely turn of a phrase! What a sort of Zen like image to ponder and use in our conversation. Sleeping like a baby is a regression, devolution, a return to the cradle. When one sleeps like a rock, however, one alters their genetic make up entirely and becomes like a rock, unthinking, uncaring, immobile. Peace. Americans don't want to think about negation, deconstruction, about the quiet and solace that comes from nothingness, losing yourself in the abyss. We would be happier if we learned to accept the void. Give up control. Stand in awe before the all-consuming mouth of pure light and color and experience. Allow it to engulf you. Analysis is for the deathbed and the fearful. Step into the wilderness of the soul and be made into something new. This is what I'm doing, and it's the only thing I've tried that brings me any semblance of peace. I want to bathe in white noise. I want to be cleansed by the static. I want to become the void.

I will become the void.

it lives!

October is just around the corner, and you know what that means. 31 nights of horror films, for the third year running. Last year's writings are somewhere on a message board I never read anymore, but all of the stuff I wrote from 2006 is still archived here (and MANIAC is, i think, the best piece of film analysis I've written. Which is not to say it's any good, or original, or whatever. Just, y'know, saying.)

This will continue to be pretty much just writing about horror and other types of cult cinema, but I'll most likely post some original fiction stuff that i've been kicking around. I am in the midst of finishing my first screenplay and I imagine bits and pieces of that will end up here at some point. But this is all probably bullshit and I'll just continue to write movie reviews for 3 months till I get sick of it. (Again.)