I want exactly 2 hours and 29 minutes of my life back. I watched “Inglorious Basterds” and I want to thank you for making a truly inconsequential film, a film which neither challenges nor engages it’s viewer, a film that does nothing other than rob the audience of time. I thank you because it strengthens my resolve to make your antithesis. I hate you and I want my 2 hours and 29 minutes back… you can keep the 4 bucks, buy a box of razor blades and slit your own fucking throat you old, useless, boring and typical cunt.

As I walked out my door this afternoon a couple of paramedics scrambled while they walked on eggshells around a young woman. She had freshly hacked to hell and not so freshly dyed hair, tattoos, track marks, tears tracing a wrinkle in her trembling and too old for it’s age face. She chose my doorstep to stop and tell the world her trouble… To shout at my red brick parapet walls her despair and her intent. To bluff her way into more trouble than she feels she is worth. Maybe she is right… I do not know. The blue and red dragon on her inner forearm was faded and pulled all out of proportion with pin holes new and old and scars of previous nights misery apparent.

The short blonde cop passed me on the sidewalk and being a pest, a vampire, a preternatural peeper of pain that I am I asked “I live here. Anything I should know about?”. Her stride unbroken she replied in a tired and nonchalant voice, “She’s just threatening.” and as an after thought, “suicide”. As if I mightn’t know what threat she spoke of…

I made a creep of myself and watched a while while the cop did her book routine for such a mangled piece of machinery as this girl come down her quality control line. I watched the Med Men load the broken girl onto the sterile flat plane of assistance. I watched as the fat cop in the high hat pulled up at the last minute to make sure broken girl was taken care of, discarded, replaced, whatever… And I watched them wheel her into the back of the wagon, to be taken to her new home where I have to surmise her life’s troubles will all melt away under the weight of her new found troubles and in the wake of common elements and noxious chemicals fed to her.

I wish she had been less a braggart and more a success in her venture. I wonder if she wishes the same. Mostly though I wish her well. I wish her a rebirth. I wish she could be someone else, someone new, someone that she can love and respect on her own.

I walked on as the Med Men drove with lights and sirens… I had little things to attend to.

Broken in a second. Wasted on an eternity.

Mitch fell to his knees. The salt on the snow burned his knees. Odd he thought that he should notice that now. Now, while he waits for the sting to kick him in the chest and then it’s all over. But the burn surrounded by cold snow… that stuck. A second passed, and another. A creaking crunch. Behind him. Fucking salt burns. Nylon sliding on nylon. A wind-break. silence. Water creeping into the toes of his shoes. Still the silence. He could hear the salt burning his skin. The bag on his head filled with condensate. No sign of Mook. Just the occasional nylon zzzzip to let him know she was still there when the wind picked up. Mitch wanted to be a bird. A seagull in a city park or a TWA metal job. Buzz high and low and never see a sign of Mook again. He saw himself fleet of foot on red brick. Past the faces that put him here. Opened armed Mook. Dive man dive! And airborne anew as a white seagull. Crack! His knees didn’t hurt anymore. He could be anything he wanted to be.

To make the official announcement… Some of you will doubtlessly recall a series of strange and poetic posts here over a year ago while I was on the Road with Linas Phillips as a producer on his film “Bass Ackwards”. The posts were overly obtuse and the memory is very hazy of taking the wheel across the country and making the acquaintance of far too many people to even try to recall. To the point… The endless days and miles of temporary insanity have paid dividends at last as the Film has been accepted to Sundance 2010. My hat’s off to Linas, a genius in his own right, for having me along to try to hold it all together on that leg of cinematic history.
If anyone out there in the dark void of the internet is reading this and is heading to Park City, look for the one guy making an ass of himself in a very different way than all the rest on the red carpets and in the frozen air of Redford’s town… That could only be me.
Lastly, of course, congratulations to all those people I worked with on the film, to all of those that I met along the way, however fleetingly and of course to Linas… Thank you.

It comes to mind to this doddering old fool that the only people in my life that have failed to let me down have been those who were essentially non-entities in my life. Shall we strike this up to the fact that I knew them such a short time that they had not the chance to abuse a built up trust? Shall we say that they were non-entities because they had not the strength of character or persistence of being to disappoint me? Perhaps I did not take the time with them to discover the fault? If the latter is the case then I am sorry to all of you I have known that I did not allow the closeness to hurt or the personality to reject. To those in that category I wish only to meet you under more opertune circumstance so that we may do harm to one another and go our separate ways in disgust. I am built to be disappointed and I only hope to one day meet each and everyone on this planet and be terribly underwhelmed each and every time. We, Dahlia Films… We, Jack Bennett and Co… never sleep, we wait for the unsuspecting to come and change our lives… We wait for nothing to happen and the fault lies with us… and with you.