travisezell

Martha and I wandered into the Lloyd Center B&N looking for some crime thriller mass market she was curious about, but we accidentally stumbled upon a sale. All Criterion releases -- DVD, Blu-Ray, box sets, Janus releases, Eclipse sets -- were half-off. Admittedly, this brought the $40 titles to $20 and the $100 box sets down to $50, but sometimes that's enough. Loaded with extras, amazing transfers, and let's face it, the prospect of having a sexy copy of some of the greatest films ever made on your shelf... sometimes 50% off is a good deal.

One of the easiest choices was the most expensive: the four-disc, three-movie box set of the Films of Hiroshi Teshigahara, whose amazing collaborations with one of my favorite novelists, Kobo Abe, directly influenced my first feature script incredibly. Pitfall and The Woman in the Dunes and The Face of Another, definitely something I wanted to own.


Jean Renoir's The Rules of the Game is one of the most watchable films I've ever seen, and the inspiration for most of Altman's work as I understand it (most especially Gosford Park, very nearly a remake). I just love it. Why don't I actually have it? I'd watch it enough to be worth owning. Well, shit... I own it now, don't I?


The one I waffled on the most was whether to get Louis Malle's Elevator the Gallows, Truffaut's Shoot the Piano Player, or Melville's Army of Shadows. Obviously I had to get something from the French New Wave masters. In the end I picked almost at random, at the last second, remembering how much fun I had seeing this one at Cinema 21 and figuring that of the three I would probably rewatch this one the most.


And then lastly, I did a curious thing. I decided upgrading my boring old feature-light DVD of Wings of Desire for a half-off Criterion Collection version was worthwhile (what I think of as "the Chungking Express move"), but for $5 more I could upgrade from DVD to Blu-Ray. And so I did. Thing is, I don't have a TV that can handle Blu-Ray, and I don't have a player that can play Blu-Ray. Yet. I've promised myself this for Christmas and/or as a reward for finishing ERIE and Open this year. Until then, it sits on my shelf mocking me and my conspicuous (and compulsive) consumption. Ah, well. We all have our vices, mine is cinema. Can you even pretend to be surprised?

The sad truth is, I already had inferior copies of every single one of these, but did that stop me from wanting to actually own them? Not one iota.

So tempted by the Nikkatsu-Noir set; any number of Kurosawas, like High & Low or the big Seven Samurai box or The Lower Depths double-feature; the Melville and Truffaut films I named above; or the spendy/awesome John Cassavettes box set. Off the top of my head. And, you know, like every single other release on the shelf.

Barnes & Noble, you fuckers. So much for Ikea this paycheck.

Don't get the wrong idea. I totally know this post is weak and lame, both, in that it's tantamount to bragging about purchases I've made... really though, it was an excuse to look at stills from these films I love and write two sentences each to myself about just why I love them. You know me, I'll rant about how neat a thing I love is at the drop of a hat. And the fact that I just picked up six films in four packages and they're all black & white? Mostly coincidence. (Also, Wings of Desire isn't ALL black & white, so there.)

Anyway. Yeah. Movies are neat.

I don't really remember... I dreamt I took a shower and I kept forgetting or misreading the hour on the clocks and eventually I was two or three hours late for work (or school), but somehow that was okay because I was on the brink of such success... as a writer? I think.

I woke up after two hours of hitting the snooze (good thing I set it so far before I had to get up for work, huh?) with a song really, really stuck in my head. "If you wanna be you, be you, and if you wanna be me, be me..."

It took a little googling to find, and as soon as I read the name Cat Stevens I knew that was obviously it. The song's called "If You Want To Sing Out, Sing Out," for the record.

Okay. I showered. I ate oversweet maple-syrup-and-peanut-butter-eggos. Tonight is Jon's birthday. (I'm still at least one day from drinking, alas.) My cat's had her food and though she's a little starved for some play time, she'll have to wait a little longer. After work maybe, little one, before Jon's thing.

Outlined some. Still need to write. Recaptured Open, so picture is ready to be laid off as a FINAL MASTER to tape just as soon as I complete/figure out my credits and titles.

Okay. Laika calls.

And now Every Room is Empty has run its course, had both its showings at the NWFVF. The second went well, attended by myself, Kelly, Cassie, Jon and Jess, Duncan, Megan and Talina, and my mother and Brendon. Plus Enie was there independently. It was nice to have so many people there, I have to admit.

Andy is helping me devise a Festival Strategy for both Open and ERIE. Going to start submitting both simultaneously (this will get expensive fast). To that end, I've spent the last five hours or so trying to figure out Wordpress and re-do ice9films.com. Tomorrow, more of the same and digital press kits/withoutabox entries for both films.

My cat is obnoxious and adorable in roughly equal parts.

I am tired and cold and coughy in roughly equal parts.

Good night.

This is the song I woke up to stuck in my head. Seriously. I don't know why.

But it's a safe bet I sang it to Spacecat. Because what the fuck, why not? She's cute.

I'm trying really hard to piece together the couple of sparse scenes I remember from my dream.

Readers who actually read posts about my dreams should be warned, this one is all dark ewwy stuff. I don't know why. I saw the opening to the terrible serial killer movie Suspect Zero yesterday, and most of The Hudsucker Proxy, and then went to bed thinking about how to logline-ize Mexico, but honestly I've been in a pretty decent mood, not a very dark place. Dreams are just dreams, you know? I don't pick them.

Anyway this one featured character actor Roy Brocksmith as a bad man, a creepy businessman who raped strippers in their club. Somehow he had the money or the connections that this was overlooked, that he was never punished. Then my friend (loosely Brie in the dream, though also others) was going to have some interactions, no wait I think did, and she wasn't assaulted but she was creeped out, and (god I wish I could remember details) she was dreading future encounters with this man.

So I went to this club and I went into the back room and I went up to Roy Brocksmith (or maybe it was the actor from Suspect Zero, Kevin Chamberlin; probably it was a conflation of both), and I took a sharpened chrome chopstick which I cannot tell you why I had, this thick skewer, and I delicately and calmly shoved it through his throat and out the back side, then watched him drop and wheeze blood and grow still. And then I calmly walked out.

I got sort-of-Brie and put her in a car and we drove casually away from the club down what I think was Hawthorne, as cops and civilians all started racing toward the club to see the carnage. She had no idea what had happened in there and we didn't speak of it, but when I told her she wouldn't have to go back and deal with him she was too smart to not know what had happened. I remember knowing that we had a good chance of getting away without even an investigation because so many people hated this guy and wanted him dead, had motive and opportunity, that they had no reason to come all the way down the food chain to me. Still, I didn't want her to know anything so she wouldn't have to deny anything if we ever did get caught. We were on the run now.

And then we went to a buffet! I mean, naturally. Why wouldn't we? She really wanted cake, and I really wanted cake, and we went to this Country Home Buffet style restaurant with ten different kinds of cake and we cut ourselves slices, but the idea of the buffet was, you had to cut the most paper-thin slice you could manage, and I remember how difficult slicing the pieces thin enough was, and how long I spent trying to decide between boysenberry ice cream cake and some kind of raspberry cream thing. I think I went for both, but when I dropped my knife in the super-disgusting dumpster-smelling garbage slot beneath the cakes (!!!), so I didn't get the second slice.

I think the police showed up, or someone showed up, and they wanted to take me in and I knew it was over, but it was all very vague and all I felt was relief that this girl who wasn't quite Brie had gotten away. I don't even know my relationship to her in the dream. Lover? Friend? Hell, sibling maybe?

It's hard not to look at this dream and wonder if it could translate over to the inciting incident/opening of Mexico. I laid in bed repopulating the dream slightly, adding Carter to the strip club or even making Carter someone Martin ("I") would hire to dispose of this Brocksmithy guy. I didn't know why running to Mexico made sense. Maybe Carter was going into hiding? Maybe Carter was hired to get them across the border, a sort of ferrier? And I don't know how the characters would develop the central-to-the-story pipedream of living rich south of the border, either. But all in good time.

It's morning. Despite my disturbing dream, I'm hungry.

When I got the RACC grant to post-produce Open, they told me I couldn't do any work on it at all, not even editing, before January 1st, if I wanted any compensation from them for that work. So I shelved the entire project (a move that cost me well more than the three months I'd anticipated; I didn't get rolling again for almost a full year). To take my mind off the multi-thousand dollar production I'd just paused, I started talking to Jeff about doing another "sketchpad film," a one-day shoot based on a rushed script, using unrehearsed actors and a single controlled location. I'd done several of these before -- my Godard knock-off Love is Suicide ("#1"), my Theatre-of-the-Absurd knock-off Short Film ("#2"), my film built out of improv 1000 Pieces ("#4," since my attempt at #3 fell through), and my split-screen kinky silent film Bathwater ("#5"). I had months to kill, no steady job and no production in the works. It was time for #6.

It actually took over a month for things to fall into place, which is unusual for the sketchpad films, and the script was somewhat more complex than its predecessors -- so much so that the one-day shoot bloated to three before it was complete -- but the end result was Every Room is Empty, whose title I believe was a phrase from a dream, though I'm not sure anymore. Maybe I just made it up.



Many of my films have played to crowds larger in theaters grander, but none of my films have played in a legitimate festival before tonight's screening of the Northwest Film & Video Festival. Every Room is Empty, something I threw together to keep myself (and my comrades) busy while I waited for the year to roll by so I could return to a larger project, was the one to finally break my festival cherry.

The screening went well. I think it was one of the better films in tonight's shorts showcase, but I'm hardly objective. I'm pretty sure it was the strongest straight narrative work. In fact, I think I can safely say it was one of the two best films in that program (by far its strongest competition, a film called Passenger about a coyote riding the MAX, suffered only from its length). No offense meant to the other filmmakers, obviously.

I did have to go up front with many other filmmakers and talk about the film, and I cannot say I excelled at that portion of the night's proceedings. I was more prepared for Q&A than I was to just tell people what it was I'd made. I felt the story of making it on a whim and with poor preparation would sound self-inflating and falsely modest; I felt the story of losing nearly a third of my footage and having to improvise a third act in the editing would sound like apologetic backpedaling. So I mumbled something about writer's block and writing a story out of the inner monologues and inner dialogues that fill my head when I face the blank screen/page, and I handed the mic away as fast as I could. Like I said, I think I could have done a good Q&A session but nobody had questions; Thomas just asked us to tell the audience "something about our work," and I had nothing prepared to say. Plus, public speaking, yikes.

But otherwise the event went well, the film seemed well-received, and I saw some faces I don't see as often as I'd like. It's funny, I'm working on completing my eighth or ninth short film (depending on how you count Avalanche) and this will be my first "official selection" credit. And "official selection" isn't even that big a deal! Not like I won an award here.

Anyway, all that happened. ERIE is out there, did something, and has a second screening. That means if anybody reads this you have one more chance to go see my film, and please do. Friday night at 8:45pm at the Whitsell.

Maybe I'll be better prepared to speak to the group after. But I'll be honest: probably not. I'm a lousy self-promoter. Ask anyone. It's probably at least 50% of why I've been single for so long. But boy, that's a conversation for another night, eh?

Friday I worked. This is only novel because half the week was spent in a headcold daze, either not at work or half out of it while at work. Friday felt like a normal day again. Then, dinner with Brie. Then, movie marathon with Brie, Martha and Spacecat. The theme: buddy movies! We watched Midnight Cowboy (to be fair, Brie and I only caught the second half), then See No Evil, Hear No Evil (the mostly forgotten hilarious/awful comedy starring Gene Wilder as a deaf man and Richard Pryor as a blind man who are wrongly accused of a murder), then Planes, Trains & Automobiles. Decent day, good fun, all around.

Got my ass out of bed, trekked through zero-visibility motherfucker rain to Petco, got Spacecat some actually-good-for-her dry food (I'd been out, poor girl was living off delicious canned food) and clippers for her claws. Martha and I (and a towel burrito) worked together and we clipped my girl's claws for the first time. She didn't love it but she didn't freak out either and was a very good kitty. (We rewarded her with some of my canned chicken. She's gonna get fat!)

Woke up too late and a little sick and didn't go to the NW Film/Video Fest's "BarCamp," which I'd wanted to, but made it with Martha and her beau to "What Is Wrong With This Picture?", in which a critic hilariously and unapologetically goes through some volunteer rejects from the festival and explains why their films sucked. The tone of the thing was somewhere between MST3K/RiffTrax and Writing Group. It was worth attending.

Went over to Laika and Leif laid Open rushes out to HD tapestock for me. The Downstream color timing session went really well and I'm happy with the final footage quality (though it was somewhat more expensive than I'd hoped. So it goes!), but we found out today there was some sort of timecode fuck up on Downstream's part when laying my clips out to my hard drive. So unfortunately tomorrow I'm going to try to spend a couple of hours minimum at Laika conforming my edit by hand. I have approximately 48 cuts that will have to be synced by hand, visually, to my rough edit. So it goes!

Tomorrow evening will be my first (real) festival screening, Every Room is Empty plays first in the Short III program at 7pm at the Whitsell Auditorium. Hope to see you all there? Aw come on.

I've been so busy between Open and Every Room is Empty I haven't had any time to write in the last couple of days. (Admittedly, that and recovering from a shitty shitty cold. Still have a phlegmy throat.)

Oh, and the medicine Mr. Doctor gave me? He told me I'd take a pill a day for 20 days and in 2-3 months there's a 50% chance the splotches would clear up, so I wasn't even looking to see if there was a change in my condition. Well if you look real close you can still kind of tell it's there, but my skin is entirely skin-colored again and I look like a regular naked dude (who could stand to lose 15, 20 pounds) when I take my shirt off. So, holy shit, how about that?

Travis Ezell: movie watcher, kitty-daddy, busy filmmaker who wishes he wrote more, and regular naked dude.

That's me in a nutshell.

In one day Willamette Week runs two articles. One article lumps Every Room is Empty into a broad category signified by "violently bad acting, makeshift sets borrowed from mom and dad, and criminally dull subjects." And the other suggests my dayjob is tanking by downplaying the $120M hit film we just put out and, um, up-playing the departure of Henry Selick and some outdated and incorrect news about lofty plans to build a campus.

Meanwhile, my trip to Downstream today lasted all of five minutes and consisted of putting my hard drive in the colorist's hands. The rest of the day was spent lying in bed watching The Office, not-so-gradually coming to terms with having a pretty bad head cold, and waiting for a phone call I was assured was two hours away. The phone call came more than six hours later, and the short version is I am rescheduled for tomorrow morning at 8:30am. I get that Downstream doesn't do much film these days and my understanding is they aren't actually set up to just up-and-go when someone wants a transfer anymore (bad sign, but there it is), and I wouldn't even mind the twenty-four hour delay at all -- I'm not in such a rush -- but the disorganization and lack of phone calls or communication kind of bummed me out. Well, so it goes.

So, I'm sick. Sitting at home. Out of Office episodes to watch. Too stuffed up and headachy to write. Missed a whole day of work waiting for a phone call, which means I really have to be done with the timing session by noon tomorrow to make it up to Melissa. Oh, and I'm fucking sick.

So, awesome.

I have an appointment tomorrow morning with Downstream. Color timing and transfer. At a guess, next week I will have the picture laid out to tape and finalized. I bought a new hard drive for the transfer. A terabyte is overkill for twelve minutes of HD footage (estimated damage: under 4 gig) but I wasn't going to buy a drive without FW800 and the cost difference between 500GB and 1TB was $20. Welcome, Turophobia, to the cluttered and mismatched family of external drives. (Joining Ice9drive, Joyrider One, The Astronaut, Sterling Hayden, and the boringly named Travisezell [no offense mom and dad; it's a brilliant name for a kid, just a lame name for a hard drive].)

I met with Jon and Pat this morning, giving them a copy of the sound to work on, and hopefully around Thanksgiving we'll be about done with sweetening and design. Before buying the hard drive I had to buy a thumb drive for quick transfer of the media, so also welcome Buttersmell, now a thumb drive dedicated to film (Sputnik-4 is really dedicated to writing).

Meet with Cassie later this week.

Andy is on it already.

I need to design some kind of a poster thing, maybe. Hmm.

Yes, that's right. I just made a post about my new data storage devices. Suck it.

( +7 )

While outputting some files to a thumb drive for tomorrow's sound design meeting, I went through the old, unutilized production stills and took a little trip down memory lane.

I want to take some kind of whizbang kickass worked-over-and-perfected script and the energy and crew that went into Open and make my first feature. I am chompin' at the fuckin bit here. Good thing I put a high premium on a good script. Or maybe good thing nobody's walked up and offered me $100,000.

Alas.

Pat has agreed to do some sound-sweetening for me, as well as sound design. Jon, in fact, has expressed an interest in being a part of sound design -- which I'm thrilled about.

Jon is also of course supervising the color timing and transfer with me, as soon as I get an appointment at Downstream.

Cassie has agreed to help me handle music licensing and (more importantly) music supervision/selection for both incidental and light score (over perhaps title and/or credits).

Andy has eagerly agreed to help me figure out a screening venue and put together a reasonable program of like-styled or -minded films for sometime in December.

It's all in who you know, and at this rate there is still a chance I can finish Open by the end of the year and satisfy my RACC agreement.

This is all really good news.

Tomorrow I'm meeting with Jon and Pat, bringing them a copy of the pertinent media and discussing sound design options. While there, I'm going to call Downstream, since I haven't heard back and I'll be in the same room as Jon.

Onward and upward.

Last night:

• The Fog (with Martha)
• The Thing (began with Martha, ended with Andy)
• A Scanner Darkly (with Spacecat)
• (fell asleep to) Rosemary's Baby (alone)

Then today:

• (most of) The Shining (with Martha)
• Paranormal Activity (with Martha)
• Magnolia (mostly alone, some with Martha)
• Gattaca (with Spacecat)
• The Tenant (mostly alone)

Went to Ikea. Built a table-and-chairs combo, a little fold-up dealy to sit in the corner and come out when people want it. Browsed for entertainment centers. Daydreamed about HDTVs and Blu-ray players.

Stared at the question, How do I tell story 1? for a good two hours. Did not come up with an immediate answer.

Frustrating.

This was my Halloween weekend.

I woke up with the song "Robophobia" by Electric President in my head. It's a good song. It took me a bit to figure out what melody I was humming; in fact I didn't know until I caught myself singing the lyrics "They can't sleep they have no eye lids/Their bodies hum just like the heaters in our microwaves."

Last night's dream involved being on a film set being directed by my high school Japanese teacher and starring Clancy Brown, who was very patient when Atsuko insisted on rolling dice against a sort of D&D-style table to determine, minutes before shooting, crucial elements of the characters' backstory (specifically I remember we rolled against "How long has he known his wife was cheating on him?" and in the script the answer was "he didn't know at all" but Atsuko rolled and changed it to three years).

This in turn was inspired no doubt because a film playing elsewhere in the Northwest Film & Video Fest is titled Mom by one Kanako Wynkoop, a half-Japanese woman who has a phone conversation with her older, thick-accented Japanese mother. For four years I and all my high school friends were taught Japanese by an older Japanese woman named Atsuko Wynkoop, who'd obviously married into that name, and it was hard to believe it was just a coincidence. I mean, how many Wynkoops could have married (and bred with) Japanese women? Well apparently at least two, because I contacted Kanako, and she seems very nice but her mother isn't named Atsuko and her mother never taught English to a bunch of unruly High Schoolers, in McMinnville or elsewhere. So, that's weird. Anyway the combination of my old high school Japanese teacher and filmmaking obviously came from here.



In non-dream news, I went to the doctor yesterday. Found out about the two unrelated skin things I've had. One is no-big-deal eczema, here's some steroids, will be gone in a month. The other is a slightly bigger deal thing, tinea apparently, nothing uncommon or terribly bad, and I'm on a 20-day program of pill-taking-followed-by-sweating (which I hope will push me into the gym... starting tonight?). During this program I can't have any alcohol (inconvenient more than earth-shattering) and when this program is done, it will be 2 or 3 months before I'll know if it worked, and it works "about fifty percent of the time." Not super-great, since the pink splotches on my arms and the smaller ones on my chest kind of make me self-conscious, and I've always been disproportionately body-conscious to begin with.

But apart from eczema and tinea, I was given a clean bill of health. My blood pressure, my reflexes, all that. No lumps. My bad cholesterol is great, but my good cholesterol is too low, so I'm told to start taking fish oil pills. (In addition, I've noted that nuts, olive oil, and weight loss will all contribute getting my HDL level back up.) It's nice to know I'm mostly okay, though. I hadn't had an actual checkup in at least 13 years, and I hadn't had bloodwork in probably 6 or 7.



So the NWFest fliers are out and Every Room is Empty is all over it, particularly this image. It's on the webpage, too. It's playing as the first piece in the block "Shorts III" (which feels a little to me like the most prestigious spot in the least prestigious shorts-segment, but I know it doesn't work like that). For anyone reading this who doesn't know, it's going to be playing Sunday, November 8th, at 6pm and Friday, November 13th, at 8:45pm, at the Whitsell Auditorium. You should all come see it. Because why not?

That's about all. Waiting on a call back from Downstream, or I'll call them Monday and ask if Open can come in. Writing Group was interesting and deserves a whole post -- I've had a real bug up my butt lately to push WG to the next level, to make us Advanced Writing Group, and to encourage us to take our jobs as writers more seriously. Spawning from that and a rant about loglines and pitches, I gamely agreed to try and pitch my problematic One Day in the Future idea to the group, even though I had no pages, and maybe from it came some ideas... if nothing else, from it came a different way to rewrite it (draft 20 of the first 10 pages, here I come!), but being able to have discourse on the story is going to help me find focus and not lose steam. I think.

Well. One hour before work. I'd better go get ready. Spacecat is threatening to knock over the monitor she's so fucking excited to catch the mouse cursor (it reminds her of her sworn nemesis, the Laser Pointer Dot). Every day this cat is more rambunctious and huntressy than the day before. One day she'll be a chill cat, but right now she's an overstimulated monster adorable kitten.

Today was supposed to be the day for productivity. It wasn't perfect, but it was all right.

I actually did some editing (that is, I recut a whole scene, got an opinion, then put it back how it was) and I have now declared Open picture-locked. I met with Jon and we discussed what we want/need done when we go in for color timing (other than a general matching, not as much as I expected, actually, though definitely some work on some scenes). I gave him a DVD and tomorrow I'm making a phone call.

I broke down and for the nineteenth time rewrote the outline to the first vignette of One Day in the Future. Mr. Blank has been cut, put back, re-jobbed, un-rejobbed, and cut again. I think he may be gone for good. The protagonists's throughline has gone from love to lust to love again, and I think in the end he will be more selfish than in any previous draft. Mat's been a firefighter, a business tycoon, a desk jockey and almost the President. And now I think his job may not factor in at all. The problem is I have a concept and I have a couple of characters whose interactions matter, but how I frame the 10-12 page story keeps shifting radically, and it's really hard to get the thing to settle.

We all went on a big-ass grocery shopping trip for the family household. I bought food and hope to eat at home more. I made a sandwich tonight with meat, cheese and vegetables on bread! And I found that yes, putting just a tiny bit of sesame oil on the spinach was overpowering but no, it wasn't a bad idea; it was delicious.

And now, half a board game and a cocktail-and-a-half of whiskey later, I'm putting on Dušan Makavejev's Love Affair, or the Case of the Missing Switchboard Operator and retiring for the night, cursor-chasin', keyboard-sittin', preternaturally-adorable Spacecat in tow.

Tomorrow will be morning phone calls (ugh) and normal work. Will I write? God. I hope so.

When I say I have "sex dreams," all I really mean is I had a dream with sex as a main part of it. Not like a wet dream. Not like a wake-up-aroused dream, even (though sometimes). I've been single a while now, so it doesn't feel like the need for a lover is some kind of major factor here. I think it's just that I think about sex a lot, among other things, and the whole list of things I think about gets mixed into a big jumble and selected at random by some part of my brain I have no control over, and then filtered into my dreams. Sometimes sex shows up, is all. Other times, time travel and werewolves show up.

Nonetheless, I have had two sex dreams in a row now. Two nights ago it was Love-bots. Last night it was someone inappropriate, and we'll leave it at that. And in true dream-logic fashion, when I got that person naked and looked between their legs, I distinctly remember thinking in my dream, "Well, sure, but that's not what they'd look like in real life."

I don't feel the slightest bit responsible or guilty for what I dream -- I rarely feel responsible or guilty for my conscious thoughts unless they start to adversely affect my actions. Still, some dreams I share and some I don't. This I won't. It was weirder than it was hot, but it had some hotness in it, I guess. After all, it's my imagination. I've got a pretty good one.

The money I loaned Andy to make The Adults in the Room happen is coming back to me, finally. Just in time, as I was starting to run low. I had an expensive couple of weeks, involving a new iphone, a couple of ill-timed t-shirt purchases, stripperoke, booze and cat food (now that's a party, am I right?).

I'm going to try to go to the premiere of Rex Carter's Smoke Rings tonight but I have a hunch elements are conspiring against it. Still, I'll try to persevere. Rex is cool and his film is cool. Either way, you should all go see it: a short film in the silent film tradition.

Otherwise, today I want to get writing done. Let's see how that goes, huh?

Poor Andy has spent the last two days -- week, arguably -- trying to deal with an albatross abandoned mattress and box spring. Everybody has someone else to blame for why it was left, why it's still here, and just who dropped the ball. I don't know anything about all that, and I don't want to be in the middle of anything. The bottom line is, Andy was the one who's had to deal with it. This has meant two craigslist posts, a flaky Russian "moving company," barricading our upstairs neighbors away from their back door and basement access for 36 hours so Martha could even move in, and several days of staying home waiting for people to show up who almost never did. It was stressful and it was a headache for all of us.

But it is finally gone. After he and I devised a way to convince craigslisters to be less flaky (it's no secret: you remind them that other people also want this and it's first come, first serve on a free, stained-but-otherwise-totally-good [no smells, no sag] mattress), we finally convinced someone with a truck to come pick it up, and we no longer have to fear the ire of our upstairs neighbors or begrudge the massive burdensome totem to our departed friends and roommates.

While all this was going on, this week, my car's been a bitch, eventually costing me a tow-ride out to Beaverton, $1400 (full disclosure: the parents covered this for me), and the better part of 24 hours, all told. It did allow me to hang out and do nothing with my mother, which I hadn't done in a while, but it was a goddamn hassle, too.

But now the car is fixed and (as soon as I can fucking get into DEQ, which closed Saturday before my mechanic adventures were concluded and isn't open again until Tuesday), that will all be taken care of, too.

So yeah. I've been a little grumpy myself, frustrated with so many little things. But I think it's getting better.

The sense of limbo still lingers, with Martha's stuff everywhere and her not settled yet, with our living room still in disarray and our cats only just getting along and the whole chemistry in the household still (amiably) in flux. It's been hard to focus and write, and it isn't like I'd had that good strong momentum before the Changes.

But -- I think I said this in the last post as well -- things are settling, slowly, and obstacles are removing themselves, seemingly just as slowly.

Well, ... yeah. Things continue to settle.