Day 6, get down on it, Clown Versus Monkey

Pro of thinking/planning/scheming/writing at Starbucks. The coffee. No one bothers you. The con, music pumped in that you have to tune out, no iPod, no luck, though right now Love Train is playing and that is never a bad thing. Want to break out into a musical dance routine, and there may have been a time where I would have attempted it, these days I am wise enough to know that others will not appreciate this and defiantly not join in with perfectly choreographed back up moves. Thus, the bitter pill I must swallow.

Shooting Day 6 of Clown Versus Monkey today, in 3 hours, have to run over to the Wal-Mart and pick up a pillow case, shoe polish, chips, food. The house was still and quiet this morning because the kids are at my parents, waking up to a quiet house is a weird feeling, like you've been punked and the world took a day off, everyone is on vacation or hiding in the next state. There's a SpongeBob episode about it.

Steph keeps trying to show me this video on quantum string theory that puts me to sleep superfast. It is a good video, the problem is we can never start anything until midnight and by then this old man is craggy and been half asleep for the last four hours. Pretty mind-blowing stuff however, Scott Backula is a genius.

If every possibility is… if we are collections of potential energy, can I put that on my resume… but if different dimensions exist and mathematically every possibility is playing out in some reality somewhere, right now somewhere there is a version of me typing this at the Starbucks while wearing a clown suit, or a half man/ half horse, A giant dying jellyfish trying to type this, an underwater Starbucks with the coffee dissipating into the water, fish baristas trying to work an espresso machine with fins ill equipped, and somewhere there are dead people watching me type this on interdemensional cable TV, complete with commercials for amazing interdeminsional products, dead jellyfish remover, and don't these people get board watching our loves play out in real time, without the aid of peppy montages set to Kenny Loggins music. Are they checking us out on something like facebook. Or are they just standing around like in Sixth Sense, or better, the Shining, or do they just hang around in my brain, now that I am observing are they as real as anything else, applied mind makes them exist? Potential energy?

I have seen that the more you apply energy to a thought, the more you wish upon a star, there is something to that, it doesn't always work out exactly as we planned, but if you are looking for end result, there it is, and it took basically some physical actions, but you can make the 90/10 argument, that it was 90 percent wanting it, and 10 percent doing, because boil it all down to time spent, calling someone took five minutes, thinking about the call too two hours, the physical manifestation is the anticlimactic externalization of all that dreaming. The dreaming is where the good stuff is, the physical manifestation is a big time suck of maintenance and… what the hell do you do with it once you have it?

And "why". That is a question I never ask myself. The why is missing, the why for me has almost become irrelevant. I just do and don't think about it. That isn't healthy. Makes me a bit of the moment's little puppet. But my mind is not equipped to delve into that, I trust that my gut knows things I couldn't. It has all those impressions being made on it, every second, and my mind is busy trying to figure out the boring practicalities, so my gut knows the why, shows me the way in the nagging voice, that I picture as a great white shark living in my peripheral vision, always trying to get me to swim in the right direction. I don't ask what direction that is, it is just swim, and don't worry about it. There are times where you can boil things down to list, wash rinse repeat, but not for the big things, too many living systems interacting, not a closed safe room with controlled conditions, and so the gut is all you have. I think there were times in my life when I just would boil it all down to one or two things in live and try to live in those controlled variables. I remember thinking Waffle House was the only safe place, and that I could run my life out of Waffle House with a pack of post-its. And once that proved to be too difficult, now walking into a Waffle House makes me claustrophobic and trapped, like being in a glass box, because for years I was trapped in that glass box, Eventually you have to escape the greasy womb.

But that need for control persists; shooting everything on a green screen may be the current manifestation. But it is the most practical solution. It makes me miss the chaos of a real time film shoot. How everything is there. The next film will be a reaction against this movie. An angry tirade against artifice. I dream of doing a Dogma 95 film. When in summer, we dream of winter, in winter, we dream of summer.

The perfect thing to do today would shoot this movie, and then go see Survival of the Dead downtown. But we will see.

LATER...

Shoot went fine, got lots of hacking up clowns and monkeys, will be a very bloody section of movie. Love working with the scripts, with these actors, on this location, with these artists. All I have to do is show up!

SD