Readathon

it's been awhile but since i last posted i started teaching 7th grade english. hi! first of all, it's awesome because these kids unload their energy onto you right when you don't have anymore to give. second of all, they crack me up. third of all, teaching them about writing is making me write, so that's cool. so 'readathon' is currently taking place around me at hip-height. you can learn so much about society just by having a group of 7th graders bring in head lamps, candy, books and sheets/blankets for a 2-period block of fort-building and lights-off reading under tables. it looks like burning man at whoville in here. little domed hurts are glowing from the inside, candy is being crunched and suspicious whisper-giggles are floating about. there's the wannabe makeout corner with the smart, precocious kids we have to keep checking on. there's the pairing off of two kids i now realize have a whole undercover romance going on. there's the 3 reading-challenged kids who paired off together. there's the two rebels who didn't build forts or bring lights and are now sitting next to each other in chairs with flashlights. there's the loner who tried to claim all the existing blankets and pillows as his own and then reinvented with one blanket and a lot of duct-tape. and there's the 12-going-on-65 smart kid who is hunched under a too-small desk reading steven jobs' biography (for the 3rd time) because we won't let him check the post-electoral vote recounts on abc news on his ipad. that's him in the picture.

Dear Future, from Your Past

Hello. I am a pioneer.
Please don’t judge me for what I don’t know. You see, we knew so little then, but we did the best we could with the little we did. Just starting out onto this new frontier of the mind and all, the way we were.
It may seem silly to you, but my grandparents looked on their grandchildren in wonderment at the idea that they, these two year olds, seemed to know, innately, the mechanisms of a rotary phone.
The same it was for my parents’ bafflement at grandchildren with their IPhones, IPads, IPods, though no one was using those much, as a single unit anyway, by the time my children were born.
Yes, it may seem silly to you that I can only understand that a shift is coming - indeed, is already here - and that it will entail a completely unfathomable as of now, and yet so logical in retrospect, quantum shift from perceiving time and space - same thing, Einstein says, I know that much - to being time and space, each creature together, yet onto himself.
I can only grasp in the dark at such notions, but I know you, dweller in the thousand years of peace, as my distant relative and yet unrecognizable humanoid, have been blessed with the spiraling surplus of knowledge in such a way that my own humble graspings are as fundamental and retrospectively apparent as Galileo’s realizations.
But there is something we have in common, you and I, besides a mutual knowledge that the only things America was / will be remembered for are the atom bomb and state park preservation: you and I, we are both, in the grand tradition of our ancestors, within whom the spiraling helixes still turn on the flat, micro plane of recycled time, we are all, in our own exponentially contributing rights, pioneers.
Hello, my future DNA. And again, sorry for how bonobo-at-a-water-pump-evolutionary I must appear. I am doing the best I can, with the collective knowledge I’ve been given, thusfar. The oak that created the small thrift store desk I’m writing to you from now, probably was grandfathered by a tree that grew in the Dark Ages. We are so young, hovering here in the Mayan end of days, so young and yet so bloated with the foolishness of ego.
Yes, probably approximately five lifetimes / five months for you in a virtual reality hub if that’s how you choose to spend your time - and who wouldn’t? From here, that’s as distant a time ago as the discovery that Mars does have pyramids, will probably take.
So here I am, projecting this sheepish, humble hello to you, in the attempt to explain our conduct and maybe, even maybe, to get a response back.
I’m dying to know what it’s like out there in the future, after all this shit goes down, down, down.
And hey, please bring me forward for a visit, if you guys have that time-space manipulation thing down by the time you get this.
And if you can project a covered wagon hologram while you’re at it, why not, let’s have some fun with this, bring some humor into it.
I mean, there’s definitely humor in the future, right?
It’s one of the funniest - yep - things about this whole creation mystery, I think: the realization that this contracting, expanding, beating heart of a universal hologram we’re all floating in, here, incorporated a sense of humor into the whole equation.
If the universe is a cheek, we’re the tongue sticking in it, that’s for sure.

koreatown

The animal noises, and the restless heat and the sounds of distant fans reverberated through the sticky concrete streets like a symphony to struggle. She lay in her bed and tried to imagine a time when writers knew what to write, when the voices in their head were mightier than the societal tapeworm of reality TV and short-term attention spans, but such a time seemed almost mythical, like the Crusades or non-PC 70‘s shows, or Jesus.
She was living in a part of Los Angeles theoretically known as Koreatown, although the signs on Beverly and Temple read ‘Old Filipinotown.’ However, despite a lack of signage, most of her neighbors were El Salvadorian, even their dogs and children howling in what sounded like Hispanic accents. And yet, somehow, even in this mishmash of ethnicities, she’d managed to land in a ramshackle enclave where only white people lived. It was purely by accident, she liked to surmise, but her roommate, also white, said it was a subconscious decision, even without having seen the other white people. He said these decisions were based on things like smells.
Whatever the case, the private lives of everyone around, regardless of ethnicity, was up for neighborhood grabs. The big black guy on the other side of the fence had a bunch of mama hoodrats creepin through, a basketball hoop rendered useless by the car lean-to since built under its net, and an upstairs to his house that had been shut off by yellow police ‘caution’ tape since before she moved in. The ancient Filipino lady on the other side of the alley swept her barred driveway in the same flowered kimono everyday and had a son that kept his motorcycle there, covered by a pink blanket, also flowered. He also parked an insulting BMW there, behind the bars, between the potted cactuses, alongside a deaf outdoor cat that meowed pitilessly and without ceasing. The barely pubescent skater boys upstairs had pretty Malibu girlfriends, a penchant for all-nighters and didn’t mind blood, while the persnickety gay white guy in front sold weed and drove a rattly little Camry painted like a brown and gold Louis Vuitton bag from bumper to bumper.
She sat, with her ugly, clunky writer’s block, and listened to the sounds of all these people coming and going all day, and read and reread a quote by Albert Camus that gave her a queer - meant in the sense before it was co-opted to mean a subculture - but reassuring sense of purposefulness: ‘the only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.’
And it was in this proactively detached headspace that she and Armando’s similar lifestyles first became apparent. Armando may or may not have been mentally retarded. This was never established for certain, and even if he could or would have answered such a question his English wasn’t much better than her Spanish. Their acquaintance stayed at ‘hello,’ ‘hi’,’ and ‘hola.’ Eventually he upped the conversation to include ‘good morning,’ and then, later, her name. Most likely, he had a crush on her. There weren’t many other girls around to look at other than Hispanic mamas and those Malibu girls, who mostly stayed, shrieking and chain-smoking, behind drawn day blinds.
Armando threw up once a day, on the side of his house, in great, horrifying heaves. Afterwards, he’d wipe his eyes, shuffle off and turn the oldies back up on his porch partner’s - a cheerful-enough, lame old man prone to bouts of sudden sleep - handheld radio.
She didn’t realize until later that she, also, was throwing up everyday, because she was in denial about the fact that it wasn’t just because she had a sensitive stomach and that therefore, it wasn’t really happening since it would surely cease soon.

nothing and everything but a sparkling snowflake

You know how when you drive past the dog park and you notice a curly-haired guy with a daschund getting out of his car and then two hours later he walks into the coffeeshop where you’re working and you wonder if you’re the only person who notices these things? Or like when a guy comes out his house gate pushing a bike as you walk by and then bikes by your friend’s house five miles away later that afternoon? Do you notice these things too?
These kinds of things kind of torture me, because I don’t know what to do with them. They feel so meaningful in a meaningless way. Like, not meaningless because they have no meaning but so because we don’t yet have the mental or psychological or whatever capacity to grasp what it all means.
Some quantum physicists say the universe is a giant hologram, everything repeating and imitating itself onto infinity. That’s why nature metaphors work so well to describe our lives. Because basically we’re living inside a giant snowflake. And no two snowflakes are alike.
The entire universe, onto expanding infinity, is one giant snowstorm.
When you look at it like that, seeing the same curly-haired guy at the dog park and the coffeeshop feels even more meaningless than before. And yet, and yet, and yet … it’s like that’s all there is. Criss-crossing wavelengths, streaming the eternal question, does it matter? What does it all mean? And leaving a trail of sparkle that reminds us, at least we can look good doing this.
Whatever this is.

The Unhappy Hopi

He was searching for a very specific rock marking the trail, somewhere on the right side along the tall banks, right after a small poplar and a rotting fencepost. She would be waiting in the woods there, still waiting, even though the sun now said high noon had come and gone and come and gone again. His stomach growled and he muffled another rumble with the heel of his hand against his sternum, inhaling sharply as if oxygen were flavor to the concept of a meal.
He was wearing a full feather headress as absurd as such a thing was in such a moment, but he hadn’t worn it the whole journey, only taken it gently out of his pack and arranged it over his braids a short walk back. He’d come this far, and he wanted her to see him wearing it, for her.
He could barely make out what looked like the totem rock straight ahead, the way the sun was reflecting off shiny dark green leaves dangling hot white in his eyes, but yes, that was it, and it also gleamed in the sun, only blackly, in all its majestically muted obsidian promise.
Mating falcons drop-dived at speeds as high and fast as a waterfall, their feathers the same as his, directly over the trail ahead of him, and it was as clear a sign as any ever.
He turned at the marker and entered the cool, dark woods. Something smelled wrong in the air.

She was plain, but she wore it like a garland of poppies. There was a man in a bear fur and he came to her in the night while she waited and she did not ask why of the night sky but only knew that he was, the way the stars were. It was this lack of fear, the not-asking that made her father love her, but it was also why she was now here, in these woods, alone as a fawn whose antlers are still fuzzy with newness.
The bear fur man led her to a cabin that took a river’s crossing and a climb and she followed him because a lover who says he will come then and does not has either betrayed or is weak and it was the cutting of weakness that had brought her this far.
The man’s cabin had curtains made of colorful cloth pieces, stitched together beautifully and she knew he had not made them because his hands were calloused and these had been done with a touch that was not native to his soul but that craved the touch again. This much was clear and he fed her and took her to bed with him and she forgot the one she had waited for.

The man in the hopeful headress stood in the small clearing and knew that the strange smell was danger and not the hope he had hoped for, but it was too late and they were on him, from all sides, and he was dragged back to her village, still panting from thirst. When the gauntlet was done and he was lying, reeking with his lack of shame, in the house of the medicine man, he finally spoke.
‘I did it because it was ordained.’
And the medicine man asked again, why. Why did he betray his own tribe, and come for the daughter of his father’s sworn enemy?
And he could only say, ‘She was worth it.’
And where was she now? He could not say, because he did not know any better than them.
It was only later that he admitted to himself that the falcons had actually swerved away from one another at the last moment. Such is the way that signs are interpreted.

here's what i'm working on lately

rewrite of my script. so much work (and fun!) I finished the first draft and we made a 10 minute short out of it, so that's cool. progress, progress.

keep in mind this was shot in a day with no budget and scenes were added / edited that I didn't write, so I'm not taking responsibility for the cheesy stuff, haha.

Hipster: A Short Film from CynPosner on Vimeo.