better tomorrow

If you start thinking about time, you will either long for the past or yearn for tomorrow's promise. Nostalgia versus blind (and always cruel) hope.

When I am swamped with things to do within an amazingly brief amount of time, I occassionally find myself longing for the day or week after next (I was never too great a fan of my personal past because there's little I would change, including the horrible times, because they were instrumental in creating the "I" that I am today - but the future is anyone's to create).

So I escape for a bit.

I think about the Hellboy movie the gang and I are watching soon. Then Kill Bill Vol. 2. Then The House of Flying Daggers (Zhang Yimou directs Zhang Ziyi as a blind martial artist who falls into a precarious love triangle, in a war between assassins and royalty).

I think about the books and anthologies I ordered, of sitting in some cool place with a coke and a cigarette and diving into someone else's world for a breath of exotic air - thrilling to Chabon's collection of tales, bouncing on Link's Trampoline and so on.

I think about writing, about setting down the new stories that are popping into my head (in lieu of the film script that I'm presenting to Singapore). I'm imaging Sedna cloaked in darkness and the solitude of the Kuiper Belt, the epiphanies triggered by gravel and of coffins that turn invisible at the most inopportune moment. I'm hearing a new play's dialogue in my head, and the speaker (still sexless and nameless) is invoking a storm of tears.

To get to do all these things, I just need to force today's sun to set and race the hours past midnight. I need to slap today silly, stun it with my speed and work ethic and wit, and make it concede in abject surrender.

It's not so bad, as long as I get things done.

And look, it's almost lunch time.