trains on parallel tracks

The start of Stardust Memories. In many ways the perfect embodiment of how I've felt most of my adult life - a much better time is happening just across the way and I am not invited, per circumstance or per some deficiency unbeknownst to me (or worse, well known to me). Part of this is just part of my internal chemistry but another part was wholly exacerbated by the BT in 2005 and all subsequent years. The me in this world split in two, co-existing in what appeared to be the very same place but in which was in fact a replica minus myself. Nobody could/can understand really.  [This idea surfaces to a degree in    
 the black sea]. I could use words to explain it - as I'm doing right now - but they can only approximate shades and tones, meager percentage of the whole.

As I approach a decade out from this it's slowly becoming clear that this -the separate existence, the parallel tracks, wanting others to comprehend the incomprehensible - will endure. If that's the price of not falling prey to oblivion I'll pay it every time but if I am truly honest the price also contains a deep isolating sadness. Explicating the inexplicable - even if it were remotely possible -  will not unlock the way home.



Also, Requiescat in Pace Gordon Willis

over and over

up early Sunday AM, down Hawthorne Blvd and SE 37th w/ coffees and scones and 2 young kids to watch an old friend passing nearby in road race and a surging tide of runners pass in great swells, expelled from some great bottomless ocean. I am suddenly overcome as I watch - the sense memory of running/training-for several marathons myself, starting with 3 I trained for a million years ago in Los Angeles and in particular one in 2007 meant to demarcate my survivorship after my brain tumor enterprise and all parts therein in 2005 - as well as the simple metaphor of standing, participating, moving despite odds, body, history, as well as the non-stop nature of the bodies: Bodies running, then more, then more, then more. And a line from a song I used to listen to frequently once upon a time loops through my head as I stand holding my son (who's watching the 4 white guys play rasta music out of the rain under their small canvas tent) "...over and over we die one after the other..." and the bodies are all at once confirmation and defiance of this.



later, I have 2 hours to myself so I see Sunset Boulevard at the Laurelhurst, a film I am very familiar with but it too is bottomless. my past and present intersect on and off screen, the aspirant screenwriter who lived in LA a million years ago reads the film different than the non-LA based director of now, but then there has also been time/space in between, and I am exactly between Joe Gillis and Norma Desmond now, so I understand her in different ways, her delusion once so grotesque now more comprehensible and human and hence more tragic. Also, the precision and perfection of some of the shots and tightness of script and casting and score - all a marvel as per usual

There is connection to be made between these two events, these two paragraphs but I don't know how to say it or even really what it is but I can feel it. Something about perspective and sheer luck of being able to have it. Forward and backward and forward and over and over one after the other.