I had this psychotic dream last night. It was really creepy. I dreamed about some weird apocalypse: kind of like the supposed Y2K deal, only the weather turned really weird... There were these massive floods destroying houses and things. Everyone was panicking: my family, my friends... And there was this lady trying to get everyone organized and into the right places where the flood waters couldn't reach us. Of course, I thought the whole thing was bullshit. A couple of people will die, I thought, and everyone else will be fine; there is nothing we can do to prevent this.
I remember some horrible imagery in the dream, though. The woman organizing the rescue effort sent me to an upstairs bedroom of some weird house to save some people; there I found two dead girls, bloated and bleeding. One had a child in her arms, and I took the child so that it wouldn't be contaminated by whatever had killed its mother.
Okay, so it was a fucked-up dream. Big deal - we all have those. But it stuck with me for hours after I'd woken up. I just couldn't shake it. I guess I'm just stressed about stuff, and quitting cigarettes AGAIN isn't helping me out much...
I woke up at 10.30, decided it was too early, snuggled back into bad dreams again until noon, woke up, turned on the computer...
...Learned that Stanley Kubrick is dead...
Fuck.
Okay, here's the thing. Stanley Kubrick is a film-maker. Was a film-maker. Whatever. He made the film A Clockwork Orange -- you know, the one I was writing about just yesterday? I LOVE that film. I haven't seen anything else Mr. Kubrick did, but GAHD, Clockwork Orange is just genius. Pure genius. If you haven't seen that film and you go to the College of Santa Fe, they ex-communicate you. If you have seen it but don't have any theories or ideas about it, you're sent to solitary confinement in the cafeteria for a few days.
It's weird when people you don't know die. I cried when John Candy died. Not that I thought John Candy was brilliant guy or anything, or loved his work, but I DID know who he was, and it was weird that he'd never make another movie, never be in magazines again, never take another famous breath. I didn't cry when Princess Diana died, but I was awfully freaked out. Everyone in the world felt like they knew her. And when Chris Farley died, I was even more freaked out -- this was the guy I watched every Saturday night for HOW long? I wore black pants and my black Saturday Night Live t-shirt all day.
I don't even know what Stanley Kubrick looked like. I don't know anything about him except that he made A Clockwork Orange. It's just weird, is all. His next movie's coming out in July, but he'll never make another movie... I feel very weird about it.
It makes me wonder what would happen if one of my favorite celebrities actually died. I mean, I absolutely LOVE the art of Tori Amos, David Lynch, and Stephen King. I know everything about them, by them, etc. Especially David Lynch: I own all of the films he's ever released, the entire Twin Peaks series, CDs he's produced, soundtracks to the films, posters, t-shirts, etc. I've read every article there is about him, begun a collection of pictures of "Lynch-girls" and information about what they're doing now... I'm the most obsessive fan you'll ever find. And one of his contemporaries bit the big one today while I was in bed having weird dreams about the apocalypse. Maybe it's a sign.
I've felt weird all day -- it seems like something's just gone unimaginably wrong, like it was kind of my fault, like, maybe - MAYBE - if I hadn't had a big conversation about Mr. Kubrick last night with Brian, maybe he wouldn't be dead. (Mr. Kubrick, not Brian...) Maybe he wouldn't be dead if Mike and I hadn't gone to get those postcards. I know Mike feels pretty weird about it too.
Ken and I had a conversation about this once. We decided that, together, we were the most guilt-ridden people in the world. Ken sent money to Indonesia last year, even though he had no grocery money, because he thought he'd caused the tsunami they had there. I told him I was pretty sure I'd caused AIDS. "I know it's stupid," he said, speaking quite seriously, with just a hint of a drunken drawl, "but I couldn't help thinking, if I'd done something different, there wouldn't be any dead people in Indonesia from that big tidal whatever-you-called-it-girl..."
"Tsunami," I replied.
"Sue-whatever." He paused. He thought. He coughed a little. He hacked and spat into a Kleenex.
"You okay?"
"Yeah, girl. And you didn't cause AIDS. When were you born?"
"1980. May. 28. Gemini."
"Girl, it was around long before then..."
"I know, but maybe, somehow, some way, it was my existence that caused it to be incurable... That... Gahd, Ken, if you can cause a tsunami from halfway around the world, I can cause AIDS in utero."
"Oh."
It's snowing now. I still feel really weird. It's like there's some tremendous connection between everything, and I can feel it. I remember reading about something like that in some Pagan book or something - or maybe it was a fantasy novel by Madeleine L'Engle: everything is interconnected. Chaos theory, maybe. A butterfly flaps his wings and a tsunami is indirectly caused by every factor involving exchange of energy, including the damn butterfly. Ken coughs and causes some natural disaster. I dream something weird, and the neurons in my brain move enough things around to cause a breeze somewhere in England which triggered a leafe to fall outside Stanley Kubrick's window, which scared him into having a heart attack or a stroke or something.
Okay, okay, so now I'm just getting stupid.
I'm going to go downstairs and hang out with Mike a little bit before bed. Negative energy seems to be coming from everywhere but him today, which surely is a pretty major change...
Tomorrow will be a better day.
Love,
Helena*
DELTOID: You are now a murderer, little Alex. A murderer, yes.
ALEX: Not true, sir. It was only a slight tolchock. She was breathing, I swear it.
DELTOID: I've just come back from the hospital. Your victim has died.
--from the screenplay of "A Clockwork Orange"