for
3/18/2000
I'm still trying to put it together. It seems to be a wreckage of some kind, sheets of ripped metal that were, at one point, perhaps part of a fuselage. They are all wrapped up in a place with no edges, but that might be a cylendrical room of ambient plastic not much larger than the debris it contains.
It's frantic. There are things that need to be made out of this stuff, fast. Other people are doing it at the same time, apparently. I never see them unless they've finished. The last one I remember was a shiny woman who had fashioned a tv news studio--at least as much as can be seen by the camera--out of the... whatever. To sleep was frantic because I had to make stuff out of what was available. I don't even know what I had to make.
The symbolism is apparent. Let me explain the background first.
I am at home, trying to recover from a sore throat which I'll have had for a week tomorrow. It cropped up the day my antibiotics ran out. I seem to have segued from one illness to another. It hurts to swallow. Sometimes it even hurts to breath.
I was trying to put together a film this weekend. It was a stop-motion film; three frames of film would be used for each pose of the props. Each shot would last no more than a couple of seconds, and its props would likely never be reused. Even though the plot was shaved down to its bare essentials, it was a lot of work--even more than I ever suspected. My materials took up most of the third floor work room.
My first task was to make a hand. I carved the glove out of foam rubber, pushed wires through the fingers and thumb, and touched up the top with paper, tape and mylar. It didn't take long, and the prop looked good. My project was off to a good start.
The second object was a mess. Meant to visually allude to a DNA double helix, the main space ship was a long, brittle affair, built out of pieces of wood, cardboard, plastic, and whatever else I'd found at the Boston Children's Museum recycled materials shop. The ship was hot glued together, material to different material, and brittle as anything. The long hard-plastic straw that it was constructed around had to be hung from the ceiling on dental floss. Yawing freely and rolling occasionally, the ship was a bomb. If it fell, it would shatter. I was all too aware of that.
It did fall. I went to move it after I'd finished the piece, Friday night, and wasn't careful enough. I left a little note in the wreckage...
Yes, I know.
-Matt
...went into my room and just sort of sat, on my haunches, for quite a long time.
Friday night I had a lot of trouble sleeping. My throat was getting pretty bad. Saturday, I worked and napped, worked and napped, wearing myself down quite badly. I knew, when the ship fell, that my vision of how the film could be pulled off in the time I had, if at all, was no longer. I was working without a view to a kill, ignoring my other work, and getting sicker and sicker.
After all but failing to sleep Saturday night, shredding myself on the wreckage dream, having trouble breathing in the dry air of the dorm, I had a breakthrough. I saw, very clearly, that one of us, the project or myself, would not make it. I thought very seriously about going out into the work room then, in the middle of the night, and destroying every last thing I had built--a preemptive strike against that which was plotting my demise.
I was not exactly clear of mind at that point.
When I got back from breakfast the morning after, I could smell sickness in the stagnent air of the dorm room. My plan of killing the project in a literal manner was quite forgotten by that point, but I knew what I had to do. I was working myself into the ground, and I couldn't go on that way. I resolved to quit one of my jobs at the school, and go home for a doctor's appointment and a rest. The work room was cleaned up, my film sent back to its proverbial corner of the ring and a bag packed. I called home, took the T to South Station, and was on a bus for home before sunset.
What I called the "wreckage dream" seems to be fading now. I may get a reasonably peaceful sleep tonight. The sickness remains, but I have an appointment with the doctor tomorrow.
I've made some tough decisions in the last week. The cards haven't yet settled, so I can't say which were smart and which were not. Taking on the film this weekend may not have been smart, but it was courageous, and such leaps of faith in my abilites can pay off--much better than playing it safe, anyway. I guess I don't have any answers right now: no morals, no neat wrap-up, just the facts as I've presented them. Such is the sort of ending I prefer for this.
Touch the Toast