Curses! La Nina!

The second longest day of the year never reached "daylight" in Boston; heavy clouds and rain all day and night, never bright enough to read comfortably without a light on. Ciro is still in Dallas and miserable with heat and bad transit; he's sleeping maybe three hours a night and spending perhaps five hours a day on buses to and fro.

But work is being done; the front credits are complete, marketing's progressing, graders are calling in favors with other graders, Bruce Faulconer has agreed to do the sound mix for a pittance, which is nice because he's someone I've wanted an excuse to work with for several years. We've met several times at industry events, and he's always struck me as a capital-g Good person who cares about the community of film and treats projects big and small with respect. I suggested Ciro give him a call, and lo and behold not only will he help, but he's a friend of Alex's (Uncle Rex's best friend). I should have known. Anybody in film in Dallas that's a mensch is a friend of Alex. It's like a secret order of white knights with movie equipment.

There are of course video format compatibility issues with everyone's equipment. As always. THIS IS WHY VIDEO IS NOT GOING TO REPLACE FILM ANY TIME SOON. Nobody can even agree on a frame rate, let alone compression. Light through celluloid: instantly accessible the world over.

I myself am not doing much that's interesting, besides consulting with Ciro. I make money. I do a final copyedit of the Daisy Miller, Zombie Killer proof (the Drollerie MS). I eat well; Mom made grits with cheddar and chipotle today. I ponder office paint colors. I think about another round of novel submissions. I am bitten by mosquitoes even though I stay indoors. Life is steady and comfortable.

rescues candy wrappers from landfills and stockpiles them?

Scarlett has recently been marathoning documentaries and reality shows about people with uncommon mental illnesses, which has led to a game where I overhear of a line of a program and try to guess the compulsion.

R: Treadmill hoarder?
S: Exercises 18 hours a day.

The subjects of these inquiries typically have disastrous hair, which may be the true rubbernecking attraction. Exercise woman, for instance, has a double row of gelled bangs - bangs that stick up several inches, and behind that a second, higher ridge of bangs. This must be difficult to style while jogging in place.

(Scarlett actually watches for the same reason she watches horror movies; the people are usually easy enough to identify with, extreme versions of tendencies we all have to some degree, that it's less like point-at-the-freak than "I need to be careful I don't let this get out of hand.")

Conversely, maybe I should stay busy

Acevedo and I were riffing about politics, as we do, and it occurs to me that the one disadvantage of being so busy all the time is that while I make a lot of high art I don't leave myself much time for hijinks. To be fair, I've largely abandoned satire as a medium, because the people I'm after don't tend to have enough self awareness to understand I'm ridiculing them. (I also think audiences assume female comics aren't satirical and therefore can't see it even when it's happening, but that's a discussion for another time.)

In any case, my current grand not-to-be-realized hijink which could almost certainly get kickstarter funding is the "Make it Real" campaign, tagline "It's history if you make it happen." We would take major gaffes of public figures, or conspiracy theories they won't let go of, and make them technically true so that they would have plausible deniability. You want scientists to bury dinosaur bones? We will hire scientists and buy dinosaur bones. You won't have to lie or explain it was a metaphor ever again.

The easiest project in this series would be Paul Revere's ride as narrated by Sarah Palin, by virtue of the fact that I live in an "every Middlesex village and farm." We'd just need money for a name change to Paul Revere and back, horse rental, and maybe flying over some of my British friends. Who are not getting my guns. Partly because I have none.