Words’ End

From NBC:

Exclusive Heroes Webisodes Coming Soon!

On July 14th, Heroes unleashes its first ever web series, “Going Postal.” The trilogy of online-only videos introduces us to Echo De Mille, a seemingly ordinary mailman with an extraordinary ability.

The three-part series is written and directed by the same creative team behind the award-winning TV show. Part one, “A Nifty Trick,” premieres Monday, July 14th, with new episodes rolling out on subsequent Mondays. Visitors to this year’s Comic Con, will get a sneak peak at the epic conclusion at the Heroes panel on Saturday, July 26th.

Here’s the trailer, if you’d like to see it. As usual these days, the links are to pretty processing-intensive pages.

Penultimate drum-and-dance of the year in South Amherst yesterday. I brought my drum, even though I don’t have a bag for it yet and it was raining a little – but Molly and I threw garbage bags over the drums, and I’m very happy we did. By the end of the evening my hands were somehow hurting and a little numb at the same time, and I could still feel the just-played drumbeat in my ribcage.

I did better than had seemed possible, given how out of practice I’ve been with things that require sustaining a regular rhythm with my hands (drumming, juggling, playing the guitar which I haven’t done in any sort of sustained way since my first year in grad school). Concentrating on picking out, playing and sustaining relatively simple rhythms for several minutes at a time was great practice.

Molly and Natalie and I stayed over at our friends’ place in Hadley (Inspirit Common), and had breakfast at Cafe Esselon there. Natalie kept feeding us pretend food. The more ridiculously we reacted, the more giggles scattered, sparkling, across the table.

Thing I learned today: Equality Now was founded in large part thanks to (by a student of) Joss Whedon’s mother. No wonder he’s such a brilliant feminist. I just ran across this video of Joss’s acceptance speech when EN gave him an award in 2006.

I love this eloquent, witty, heartbreakingly stunningly kind and passionate man.

Excellent feature of seeing housemates’ music libraries through the local wireless network: listening to Erasure for the first time in, like, seven years. And dancing like a madwoman.

Life’s not turning out to be anything like I’d imagined, but I can feel personal growth in my bones. Despite the various goodnesses below, I’ve been hiding from the world lately. Take this post as a periodic hello. Hello, the world!

I tend to remember dreams more vividly when it’s a short night’s sleep. This past night I was on my way to see my mother by public transport. In reality this means commuter rail, and it was in the dream as well, but the lines were all wrong, un-Boston-like. Plus, for whatever reason I didn’t really know where I was going; it wasn’t clear that I was meeting her at her house.

Quite far from the hub station in the city center, I realize I’m on the wrong line. Still going east (never mind the ocean in the real eastward direction), but way too southerly. I don’t even know which line it is, so ask people, who don’t know. Hop out at the next stop, ask someone else, and that someone else turns out to be Allison Janney, who tells me to get back on the train because I sure can’t get there from here.

Just before the alarm chirps, it turns out that there’s a “bridge line” that’s coming up, that can take me northwards to more or less exactly where I want to be. Convenient!

This fits into my week perfectly; it’s been a strange one so far. On Monday I went through the entire gamut of emotions; surprisingly (or maybe not), they were overwhelmingly on the positive end of the spectrum. I also discovered that if there’s red wine with a penguin on it, it’s probably well worth a try.

On Tuesday I went to see a concert with mom and a few others. Veronika Dolina was playing in Natick; she’s a singer-songwriter, chick with guitar, except now she’s a 60-year-old lady with guitar. I grew up with her quiet, unassuming songs being both played and sung in my house. She takes the quotidian to new levels of lyrical sensitivity and doesn’t philosophize heavily (both good things). The concert itself was… a disappointment. She played mostly newer stuff I don’t know, saving the few older songs for the end – but that would’ve been fine, had she not seemed a bit out of it. Talking in fragments, not really holding melodies, she was tired and not connecting with her audience, and I was glad that I have old recordings of hers still.

Then Wednesday, yesterday, I got good news – the first piece of a puzzle that will hopefully come together soon. And throughout the week-so-far, I’ve been painting for my rent and hanging out with friends (two years of age and up) and thinking about my life on a longer-term scale, which feels unusual, and that in itself is strange. I tended to live in the future before, see. Whatever I was doing, my mind was on the next thing – this is why the Buddhists have been so appealing and helpful lately, with their in-the-present-moment-ness. But this past winter I found myself holding on to every day, being unable (unwilling) to make plans more than a day or two (or sometimes several hours) in advance, feeling the present moment all around me.

Thus, the process of reacquiring a longer-term perspective snuck up on me. It is only because I am surrounded by such excellent, supportive, understanding people that this doesn’t scare me witless. In fact, it’s about time.

And it’s almost time to go feel mighty by picking up heavy things and putting them back down. Have I mentioned lately how good weightlifting has been making me feel? Very, very good.

What has been making you feel good lately?

Neil Gaiman writes: “Probably nobody except me thinks Moby and Lou Reed playing Walk on The Wild Side together is as cool as I do…”

You’re not alone, Neil. American Gods, indeed.

…

I came home today and promptly crashed for something like five hours. Guess, life resumes tomorrow.

Neil Gaiman’s blog readership has spoken, and Harper Collins has put the entire American Gods online for free for a month, starting yesterday. If you have not yet read it, I highly recommend it; but then, I’ve never failed to like anything Gaiman has written. Some of his wor[k|d]s leave more of an impression on me than others, of course; American Gods is right up there at the top.

Of course, the publisher didn’t go so far as to allow you to download the thing; as far as I can see, you can only read it on the web. So it goes, step by step… at least they’re making it free in the first place!

Insomnia is no fun at all. Or, I don’t know – what do you call going to sleep utterly exhausted, then waking up five hours later feeling reasonably rested but knowing that that’s an illusion, and yet staying up because if you go back to sleep then you’ll have to deal with the emotional repercussions of the dreams you’ve been having?

Yeah.

On the brighter side, a few daya ago my housemate found my favorite Russian cartoon, “Hedgehog in the Fog,” with English subtitles so I can share it with you! It has won all kinds of awards since it was released in 1975, including several years ago best piece of animation of all time at a festival in Tokyo. It’s just about ten minutes long.

Sometimes I feel like I’m in a temporal fog. The furthest I can see is a day, maybe. Maybe several hours. Maybe a couple of days. Certainly no long-term clarity (which tends to be an illusion anyhow). I make tea, sit down wih the mug, close my eyes and breathe.

It’s snowing white all over and so, so quiet outside.

This past Saturday was Frostbyte’s memorial auction. I arranged food for what probably ended up being a couple hundred people over the course of about 24 hours. Didn’t really cook, except in a minimalist sense. Still, it was lovely – several times that day people asked me the requisite how-are-you and I would answer, “in my element.” Providing good food for people, even if I just shop and chop veggies and open cheese and get others to help me, fills my soul like nothing else does. Especially when people I don’t know take note of the food and are pleased with it. Especially-especially when I get to participate in a group effort such as this was, two years in the making (by others: I only came to it within the last month). Labor of true love, it was, despite the complexity and frustrations of the organizing process. The next day, as we were finishing cleaning up, one of my co-organizers smiled at me and said, “You’re a new old friend.” Burners’ spirit of instant community is priceless.

(I don’t actually know whether the person who made the above remark has gone to Burning Man. But he’s old-school TEP, and I gather that’s pretty close in all the relevant ways.)

Saturday evening I sat on a couch in front of Tensor, weaving slow conversation with the human beside me into its constantly changing color-light play. A swing hung between us and Tensor. Its shadow in the bright lights, sometimes swinging empty, most of the time complete with people’s silhouettes, was the narrative of remembrance unfolding. If the mark I leave on my community when I’m gone even approaches Kevin McCormick’s – he died at just 29 – I’ll have done well.

Yesterday I spent a few hours with a sweet, social two-year-old and remembered how exhausting and satisfying it is to live only for the present moment, all the time. I remembered the realization I’ve been coming back to over the last couple of months: the kind of family I want, the village that it takes to raise children and be the change I/we wish to see in the world, is already there. Here. All I need to do is participate in it.

Last night another new old friend, the luminous human with the Tensor-side conversation, brought me a present, a square of squares of color-cycling light. It is making slow progress in its simple programming as white snow layers itself onto the skylight, sounding like grains of sand falling. White cat at my feet, I watch the color cube and feel his still calm.

Have you read and liked Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere?

Then run don’t walk to read “The Invisible City; or, Dick Mayhew and his Marvellous Cat.”

I don’t remember ever recommending “fan fiction” to anyone. This kept me glued to the screen.