Word count: 30,975
I’m tired of this. I’m never doing it again. But I am definitely making it to 50,000.
More gems. Sometimes you go a little crazy padding your word count with a psychedelic dream sequence…
You can blame Phil Plait for this.
In the dream there’s a picture. You know, like from the Hubble, the telescope they have up there? The photo is like this cosmic abstract painting with lights and colors everywhere, like someone who dreamed about space and didn’t only see cold white stars. No, this was a fucking…volcano, a sunset, klieg lights, little LEDs, snow, fog, haze, smoke, pulsating police lights, waves of fire, blue and red and orange and purple and pink and yellow. Just a total fucking amazement of color and shape. And you know what it was? This was the center of the whole goddamn fucking galaxy. The heart of the Milky Way. The vagina of the Milky Way. So much life – not like trees and shit but cosmic life, the life of objects in space and all of them either just born or about to die or the remnants of something that blew up.
…and sometimes you just don’t have time for that perfect simile to colaesce.
…looking out at Alcatraz sitting in the bay like a big rock…
I have to learn not to try to be funny while I’m churning this stuff out. I only embarrass myself.
There was a long silence in the room. Dana gave it a very high rating in the category of “Awkward Silences During Hotline Training.”
From the “Ya think?” files:
In the meantime, people were horrified to have the dangling corpse as part of their view all morning and through lunchtime.
Finally, here’s a little excerpt from a long scene I wrote when I decided to make one character an atheist and another one religious. Dana’s scenario with the two callers happened to me exactly as she describes it.
Dana contemplated a pretzel as they walked by a vendor, but decided she wanted her hands clean for the Musée [Mecanique]. “God made the hotline happen.”
Mike looked at her. “You’re not serious.”
“Yes, Mike. On the third day He invented the multi-line phone system and saw that it was good.”
“So what do you mean?”
“I mean that’s how your religious caller sees it. God created the hotline and put you and me there to answer calls. This person is grateful to God for that and also to us. Isn’t that a good thing?”
“It would be better if they eliminated being grateful to their imaginary friend.”
“So, what, they’re not grateful enough to you now?”
“No, I don’t care about that. I get called a dick about as much as I get called an angel.”
Dana laughed hard and had to stop walking for a second. “Oh shit, I completely hear that. One night I had someone call me a bitch and say I had no business on the lines, and the very next guy, I swear, told me I was doing the Lord’s work.”
“Which one do you think is true?”
“Both, definitely.”
Okay, enough of that. Not sure what I’ll have for you on Monday; it’ll either be written by someone else and fascinating, or written by me and sub-par. (I don’t have an awesome blog post in me while I’m clawing my way to the end of this project.) For now I send you off with an awesome and trippy little stop-motion piece, which I saw thanks to Ze Frank.
