portal and feminism - chell!

I usually wouldn't post fanart as "official title art," but I love this drawing. It's absolutely Chell: pissed off, determined, smart and tough. I also like that she's not sexed up or cuted up. Also, a Chell screencap from the game is 100% uncanny valley shit.

Okay, so that was more than a day. Mainly cuz -- well.

1) I didn't know where to begin!
2) I went back and replayed both games, Portal 1 and 2, so it was all fresh in my head before I began.

Now that I've finished playing both -- JUST NOW, in fact, like 10 min ago -- I'm back! But #1 is still true. Nonetheless, Kai made the very good point that a lot of times if you don't know where to begin you should just start with the first thing that pops in my head, so I'll try that.

So.

Hmmm.

I guess I'll start with the plot itself and the characters. I think even within the scope of the game, there's a lot of feminism -- or rather, feministic themes. It's not at all a game that shrills at you or clubs you over the head with Girl Power. But those themes are definitely there, and underpin the entire plot. So let's start with the protagonist.


Chell

Stripped down to generalizations, Chell's journey runs like this: she wakes up totally beholden to a system that cares very little for her as a person. She is instructed to perform one task after another. She complies, and receives empty promises and formulaic, meaningless praise for her efforts. She also proves surprisingly adept at her job, and as she outperforms expectations over and over the system begins to turn against her, setting her up to fail while ensuring maiming and death if she should fail. Finally, the system attempts to murder her -- at which point she rebels against the system, breaks out of it using her own wiles, neutralizes the head honcho (it's worthwhile to note Chell never actually kills anyone) and escapes.

Curiously, her story almost doubles itself from Portal 1 to Portal 2. The overall arc isn't so much an arc as it is an ascending spiral -- retreading much the same ground, but progressing. In the first game, the story is more simplistic and obvious. GLaDOS -- or perhaps more precisely, Aperture Science -- plays the role of dictator and oppressor. Chell runs through increasingly dangerous rooms; GLaDOS eventually tries to kill her; she eludes GLaDOS, neutralizes GLaDOS, and escapes.

In the second game, Wheatley fills the role of dictator/oppressor. It's Wheatley that wakes her stasis and urges her into the facility in the first place, and Wheatley's instructions that Chell obeys for the first part of the game. Even after GLaDOS reawakens and takes Chell hostage again, Wheatley makes cameos to urge her to do as told while promising to get them out of there.

Ultimately, just as before, the dictator/oppressor never really makes good on his promises -- Chell does all the work, mentally and physically, and the minute true power is in his hands, and the minute Chell becomes a threat to that power, he turns on her and attempts to kill her. The second half of Portal 2 essentially parallels the first game: we see Chell rebelling against Wheatley, eluding him, neutralizing him, and escaping. However, there are two notable differences:

1) Chell forms an alliance with GLaDOS this time against Wheatley, and

2) In Portal 1, even after having escaped, Chell follows instructions scrawled on the wall by a mysterious "Ratman" that lives in the bowels of the facility. In Portal 2, Ratman is long dead, and Chell is -- for the first time in the series -- genuinely independent and acting on her own will. Wheatley is unaware of her for much of the second half of the game; GLaDOS, interestingly, seems to trust Chell to do what she does best and survive. Although there are prerecorded messages from Cave Johnson to establish backstory and further the plot, Chell's not doing anything because someone's telling her to, but because she wants to. It's also significant to note that the path she chooses for herself leads, finally, to genuine freedom.

Now, while neither game is absolutely in your face with the feminist rhetoric, I think it's pretty easy to see the thematic parallels. Replace Chell with "a woman" and the system with "modern male-dominated society" and you've pretty much got a feminist journey from oppression to self-actualization and independence.

I think it's also entirely important that -- particularly in the second game -- the voices directing Chell about are exclusively male. Even while GLaDOS is in control, she spends most of her time taunting Chell rather than actually providing any direction. Furthermore, the one true alliance Chell forms is with a female entity -- against what my women's studies professor would have called the male hegemony.

All that said, Chell, despite being "you", is actually the less well-rounded and interesting character in the game. So let's consider GLaDOS ...

... next time!

portal and feminism - plot!

she's still alive!


I really love it when pop culture actually makes me think. TBH, when I first heard of Portal, I didn't think it sounded all that interesting. And when I first heard of all the "Portal as a great feminist manifesto" buzz surrounding the game, I was like WTF, people take this shit way too seriously. Having played both Portal 1 and 2, I can now say: in both cases, I was so very wrong. And now! I want to yak at length about my thoughts re: the game, the characters, and, yes, the very awesomely (read: non-shrill/militant/batshit/beat-over-head) feminist subtext in the game.

Now, first things first:

1. THIS POST IS FULL OF SPOILERS!

2. If you haven't already played Portal and Portal 2, or at least seen some youtubes of choice moments ... please do. It's amazing.

3. Seriously, go play it. Or watch some clips.


Plot Summary

Okay, so! First ... er, second thing I should probably do is actually give a rundown of the plot. So, uh, again. SPOILERS AHEAD. This plot summary's gonna be put in in-game chronological order, which is in fact wildly out of playthrough order, but will allow the rest of this post to make more sense. I'm also going to try to be as factual and non-opinionated as possible here.

Without further ado, here's how it all happens:

* Pre-1950s - Cave Johnson, this very stereotypically jolly-macho-50s-guy starts up Aperture Fixtures, which manufactures shower curtains. Hence the logo -- it was originally the aperture on the shower curtain. He makes big bucks.

* 1950s/1960s - Having made a zillion bucks, Aperture Fixtures becomes Aperture Science Innovators. Gradually, Cave Johnson becomes fixated on Science! and starts running experiments. Possibly around this time, Caroline becomes Cave Johnson's assistant. Cave obviously has a very "behind every great man is a great woman" outlook -- in other words, despite repeatedly praising her intelligence, Cave expects Caroline to always play second fiddle to himself. Mostly, she gets praised on her ability to follow instructions, perform as expected, and look pretty.

* During this era, test subjects are recruited from the best and brightest: astronauts, war heroes, etc. Always lagging behind his direct competitor Black Mesa, Cave Johnson becomes increasingly obsessed and cheerfully sociopathic. As part of his experimentation, portal technology is developed. Halfbaked experiments result in test subjects getting injured, maimed, diseased, and dead. Aperture Science Innovators gets dragged before Senate hearings, goes bankrupt.

* 1970s - Aperture becomes Aperture Laboratories/Aperture Science, Inc. Cave continues running batshit experiments, now on transients and bums. He's clearly growing more shorttempered and embittered. Caroline sticks by him.

* 1980s - Having contracted cancer from his own experiments, Cave Johnson is now dying and continues frantically performing experiments to try to save his own life. Caroline is still sticking by him. Employees are required to undergo mandatory testing. As a result, employees begin quitting en masse. Cave Johnson begins developing sophisticated AI to replace human test subjects.

* Around the same time, in a last-ditch plan to preserve himself, he researches uploading his personality into a computer.

* Ultimately, he dies before he can succeed. However, his research eventually bears fruit: the supercomputer GLaDOS (Genetic Lifeform and Disk Operating System). He also leaves instructions to upload Caroline into the computer's personality if he's dead, and to let her run Aperture Science. Additional personality cores are attached to GLaDOS to regulate her behavior/performance.

* Sometime in the late 90s, Aperture Science holds Bring Your Daughter To Work Day. Kidlet Chell is brought into work on that day. It's claimed (by GLaDOS) that Chell was adopted; there's some speculation that she might be Caroline's adopted daughter. Also on that day, GLaDOS is booted up for the first time.

* Within a picosecond of bootup, GLaDOS becomes self-aware and floods the facility with deadly neurotoxin, killing a lot of people.

* Engineers manage to attach a Morality Core to GLaDOS to prevent her from directly harming the facility's employees.

* GLaDOS presumably continues to exhibit hostility, albeit in a passive-aggressive form.

* At some point, unable to regulate her behavior, engineers attach an Intelligence Dampening Core (Wheatley) to GLaDOS to dumb her down and make her behave.

* Eventually, GLaDOS succeeds in killing and/or placing all facility occupants into stasis.

* About 10-15 years later, in the early 2000s, GLaDOS wakes Chell up from stasis and runs her through experiments. Chell performs remarkably well; GLaDOS becomes increasingly passive-aggressive-hostile while promising cake, grief counseling, and victory candescence. There are also a few signs of weird attachment ("When testing is complete, you will be ... missed!").

* As part of the testing, Chell bonds with a "Companion Cube," told he's her best friend, and then is forced to incinerate it to continue.

* Eventually, at the conclusion of testing, GLaDOS attempts to kill Chell. Chell escapes, travels through the bowels of the abandoned facility, and confronts GLaDOS.

* Chell knocks the morality sphere off GLaDOS. GLaDOS's voice changes subtly, becoming more human. At the same time, GLaDOS turns on deadly neurotoxin.

* Eventually, Chell knocks all other spheres off (Anger, Curiosity, and Logic/Cake) and tosses them all in an incinerator. GLaDOS shuts down, the facility blows up, Chell lands on the surface, unconscious... and is dragged back below and placed into stasis by automated robots.

* Without GLaDOS regulating the facility, things go seriously awry. Chell is awoken automatically after 50 days in stasis ... and then not again for hundreds of years. When she's awoken again, the facility is in shambles, the upper levels taken over by nature again.

* Wheatley -- who hints he may have tried to escape with other test subjects and failed -- comes to get her help in escaping. Together, they head for the surface and get there ... but wake GLaDOS in the process.

* GLaDOS immediately puts Chell back in testing while cleaning the place up. There's plenty of gloriously PA insults here. "Fat" "ugly" and "adopted" are GLaDOS's favorite insults.

* Chell escapes again. Accompanied by Wheatley, Chell sabotages the gun turret production line and the deadly neurotoxin. Then they go confront GLaDOS and succeed in switching Wheatley's personality into the mainframe.

* Now all-powerful, Wheatley promptly turns on Chell, preventing her from leaving and lumping her in with GLaDOS. He also puts GLaDOS into a potato battery.

* GLaDOS recognizes Wheatley as her Intelligence Dampening Core and denounces him as a moron.

* In a fit of rage, Wheatley punches them both into a Very Deep Pit. They're separated (GLaDOS is abducted by a bird).

* Chell ends up in the cavernous, sealed-off underbelly of the facility, where tests were held in the 50s, 60s, 70s, and 80s. Gameplay note: these were some of the most impressively huge gaming environments I've ever been in. The size of the world was just mindblowing.

* Moving up through this area, the history of Aperture is gradually revealed. About halfway through, she reunites and forms and alliance with GLaDOS, who explains that Wheatley was busy running the place into the ground -- almost literally -- and that everything would blow the fuck up if they didn't stop him.

* While continuing to journey up, GLaDOS eventually comes to realize the role Caroline plays in her own personality.

* Eventually reemerging into the main facility above, Chell's immediately taken captive by Wheatley again and forced to run through more tests. At first he seems to experience, uh, gratification through her solving the puzzles. That quickly wears off -- as GLaDOS explains, the computer mind builds a tolerance. After that, Wheatley starts insulting Chell a la GLaDOS in an attempt to motivate her. GLaDOS effectively stuffs Wheatley in Chell's defense.

* Wheatley attempts to kill Chell and GLaDOS. Chell escapes again and begins to move ever closer to Wheatley's lair. Along the way, they discover a stash of corrupted personality cores, which GLaDOS suggests they attach to Wheatley to force another core transfer.

* Prior to confronting Wheatley, GLaDOS has a brief heart-to-heart with Chell where she assures her that she won't betray and attempt to murder her again. GLaDOS goes on to explain that all her life she's heard voices of various personality cores designed to modify her behavior, but that now she's hearing her own voice for the first time, and that voice has a conscience. Immediately prior to the last battle, she pep-talks Chell rather memorably: "Even if you still think we're enemies, we're enemies with a common goal: revenge. You like revenge, don't you? Everybody likes revenges. So let's go get some!"

* They go up; GLaDOS hacks the system to give Chell cores, and in a poetic reversal of prior events, Chell attaches cores one by one onto Wheatley and forces another core transfer. Cores are: Space core (SPAAAACE-obsessed), Macho core (endlessly regales Chell with his manliness/hits on Chell/tells Chell to get back in the kitchen, figuratively, while he takes care of business), and Fact core (totally retarded; gives out grossly inaccurate facts).

* Wheatley boobytraps the core transfer button! The facility, by this time, is about to melt down; the ceiling caves in and exposes the moon. Injured but not dead, Chell opens a portal ON THE MOON.

* Space vacuum sucks Chell, Wheatley, and the Space core out onto the moon. Space core is ecstatic; other personalities, less so.

* GLaDOS successfully takes over again, knocks Wheatley into outer space, hauls Chell back in, and closes the portal. Hours later, when Chell wakes up, GLaDOS explains that she's realized Chell is her best friend, and that she experienced a surge of compassion whilst saving Chell's life. She also explains this surge allowed her to pinpoint Caroline's imprint in her memory banks, and promptly deletes Caroline.

* GLaDOS then makes good on her promise and lets Chell go -- rationale being it's easier to let her go than to try to kill her again. On her way out, Chell is regaled by a turret symphony singing an opera that essentially says "Goodbye, my beautiful child; why don't you stay away from science?"

* Chell emerges on the surface. The companion cube, charred but otherwise intact, is hurled out after her. Door slams. Game ends!

OMFG, that summary was like 2394872398798x longer than I thought it would be. A LOT OF SHIT HAPPENS, OKAY.

Now I'm too tired to finish this rant. I'll muse more tomorrow!

fox woman.

I wrote this while on a plane from Houston to Raleigh ON MY CELL PHONE:

--

While I was in Chicago, I had the good fortune to rent a car with XM radio. Now, I don't think I'd ever subscribe to xm radio myself since I rarely listen to the radio, but it was really sweet to have a radio that would play something other than top 40 while I was scooting around the city and its suburbs.

Anyway, while I was zipping about taking a gazillion pictures, I pretty much kept the radio tuned to xm's chill station. As I was driving out to Stickney, Fever Ray's "Keep the Streets Empty for Me" played. It's an amazing track - a very deliberate, subtly echoing beat underlying this sort of ... barren, minimalist soundscape, and all of it overlaid with vocals that are at once poignant and raw. Anyway, the road, the snow, the grey skies and this music fused into this remarkable, singular experience that instantly rocketed this song into my all-time favorites list.

So of course when I got home I downloaded it, and now I pretty much have it looping whenever I have a spare moment to listen. The more I listen, the more it reminds me of that old japanese folk tale about the fox woman. Wikipedia relates it like this -- a very sparse bare-bones retelling that nonetheless is way better than any I could put together:

Ono, an inhabitant of Mino (says an ancient Japanese legend of A.D. 545), spent the seasons longing for his ideal of female beauty. He met her one evening on a vast moor and married her. Simultaneously with the birth of their son, Ono's dog was delivered of a pup which as it grew up became more and more hostile to the lady of the moors. She begged her husband to kill it, but he refused. At last one day the dog attacked her so furiously that she lost courage, resumed vulpine shape, leaped over a fence and fled.

"You may be a fox," Ono called after her, "but you are the mother of my son and I love you. Come back when you please; you will always be welcome."

So every evening she stole back and slept in his arms.

I don't know what exactly about Keep the Streets Empty For Me reminds me of that story. Everything about it, I guess. Some distinct parts of the lyrics ("I'm laying down, eating snow/my fur is hot and my tongue is cold/on a bed of spiderwebs/I think of how to change myself"; "take me home before the storm"; "morning, keep the streets empty for me"; "uncover our heads and reveal our souls") definitely struck a chord, but more than that, I think it's just the sound of the song -- a little bit lonely, very poignant, a little bit alien, and just a touch erotic. The almost-feral rawness of the vocals, too, strewn over that wintry beat.

Anyway. I definitely associate it with fox-women now. :]

Listen here:

inception theories!

i'm not even gonna bother talking about how it's been a long time since i've posted here, so busy, too lazy, yadda yadda. i'm just gonna get right into the one thing that seems to have dragged me back to blogging:

Inception.

yep!

needless to say, spoilers ahead. if you haven't seen it, go see it. awesome movie, and you don't want it spoiled for you. however, if you have seen it, read on, because you'll need some basic knowledge of the plot to understand any of this.

--

so, when i first watched this movie, i ended up 100% sure he'd woken up completely, got home, yay, all happy! i think it's mainly just... such a feeling of affirmation and "YES! W00T!" at the end of the movie. it's interesting that so much of the movie revolves around the idea of catharsis. fischer's catharsis is explicitly referred to, yes, and it's significant that this is discussed in-movie in terms of "the bigger the problem, the bigger the cathartic payout." well, there's catharsis on a second level too: cobb's catharsis re: his wife. and if we're talking payout, poor little rich boy's daddy issues are small fry compared to dom's guilt over causing death of wife and loss of kids.

but then there's actually a third level of catharsis, and this is where the movie gets a little sneaky. the REAL catharsis behind all this is the viewer's catharsis: your 2 and a half hours of tension, relieved at the end with all these loose ends tying up beautifully. while the "problem" of watching a puzzling movie is hardly a big one, the thing is YOU'RE actually watching it. you're emotionally involved. so in the end, the biggest catharsis of all is your own, personal one.

so - yes. that's one point i wanted to make early on. keep it in mind, because i need to come back to it later.

back to the events of the movie, then. if we believe in this "cathartic ending" where everything works out -- fischer comes to terms with his father and believes his father was just disappointed he kept trying to follow in his footsteps instead of doing anything for himself (note: this is probably not even true in the "real world" of the movie. it's an idea created by dom's team in order to convince fischer of what his father actually wanted for him, and by doing so, convince him to break up his father's empire). on a thematic parallel, cobb comes to terms with his guilt over his wife's death. there's really no true/false there: his guilt is his own, and ultimately his acceptance/moving-on-ness is also his own. so, yes, if we believe in this cathartic ending -- then we believe the following:

1) prior to the events of the movie, dom and mal explored the world of the subconscious, delving deeper and deeper in to nested dreams.

2) something goes awry; they end up in limbo.

3) decades of perceived time go by. eventually mal resigns herself to staying and locks away her totem, choosing to believe her world is real.

4) dom practices inception for the first time, implanting the idea that her world is not real.

5) dom and mal commit suicide to escape from limbo. afterward, the idea that her world is not real remains embedded in mal's subconscious. finally, she commits suicide and frames dom in an attempt to get him to join her.

6) instead of joining her, dom flees abroad.

7) some undisclosed amount of time passes; he uses his skills to become a dream-thief. eventually, he lands the saito-fischer job.

8) despite difficulties, and despite actually dropping back into limbo, cobb successfully completes the job, escapes from limbo and all three layers of the dream, lands in LAX, and returns to his family.

--

now, honestly, this is the ending i WANT to believe in. it's the simplest, smoothest explanation, and therefore, by occam's razor, the correct one. beyond that, it's also the most emotionally fulfilling one. there's such a sense of ... lightness of the soul, or something, at the end of the movie. the music! his crack team, assembled for this one last uber-heist, now going their separate ways! his father in law welcoming him! his kids! the wobbling top! and the first time i saw Inception, i was dead sure he'd escaped from the dreams, he'd made it back to his family, fischer had worked out his own personal demons, and everyone was happy.

then i watched it another two, three times. and every time i watch it, the more i doubt this "happy ending." it's masterful, really: the movie implants hints and suggestions that perhaps all is not as dom cobb would like it to be as subtly and as deeply as the inception referred to in the movie itself. you'll notice there's a phrase in italics there. that's because i think that's as central to the whole idea/structure/theme of the movie as the idea of catharsis. in fact, these two things are linked -- but more on that later.

for now, let's consider the possibility that the happy ending is actually in some sense false. there's still some dreaming going on in there. now, i think in general the debate out on the great wild yonder of the internet tends to rage between two possibilities: 1) all happy (as stated above), or 2) dom gets stuck down in limbo after going in there to retrieve saito.

i actually think there's a third possibility, though. currently, i'm torn between these two options: 1) the ending i want to believe (happy ending), and 2) the "third alternative" i think is actually the case. it goes something like this. the first five steps are the same as in the happy ending:

1) prior to the events of the movie, dom and mal explored the world of the subconscious, delving deeper and deeper in to nested dreams.

2) something goes awry; they end up in limbo.

3) decades of perceived time go by. eventually mal resigns herself to staying and locks away her totem, choosing to believe her world is real.

4) dom practices inception for the first time, implanting the idea that her world is not real.

5) dom and mal commit suicide to escape from limbo.

-- but at this point, things are no longer as they seem. dom thinks they've escaped the dream completely. mal thinks they're still trapped. dom thinks she's insane, and we as the viewer are essentially seeing this story from his perspective. ergo we think she's insane too, but what if dom is an unreliable narrator? what if this is actually the case:

6) dom then gets trapped in a higher, but not fully waking, level of consciousness. he refuses to believe this world is not real.

7) mal makes a last-ditch gamble to force him to surface. she departs the dream world; dom does not.

8) after her departure, she presumably gives up on him (or simply hasn't returned yet -- given layered time dilation, a few days in real time could be weeks, months, or years in the dream). the mal we see in the dream is cobb's projection, which due to his own grief, guilt, and possibly some hidden anger at being abandoned and trapped, becomes this twisted banshee hounding his steps.

9) everything that happens in the movie -- everything -- is in fact a dream. we never see the real world at all.

--

now, i think that's a pretty radical interpretation, but i think there's a lot of evidence supporting it. i.e.:


1) the kids don't age.

this is probably the biggest point that can't quite be explained by the all-happy scenario. IF we believe that the "waking world" in inception is in fact the real world, then we never find out how long he's been a fugitive, but we can infer that it's been some time. we also know that he was originally perhaps something more akin to a scientist or an explorer. he was michael caine's protege --

(wtf is his char's name? michael caine is like morgan freeman: he only ever plays himself, but it's an awesome self *LOL*)

-- but after becoming a wanted man, he made his living as an extractor. that's made very clear in the movie: in that paris dialogue with michael caine, he says that his skills only had a few job options after becoming a fugitive. that implies he was not an extractor before the whole mal anniversary incident.

however, by the time the movie starts, he's been an extractor long enough to be "the best"; long enough to be an old hand at these jobs; long enough to have forged all these connections with semishady characters; long enough that one semishady character, the brit, can mutter that he's "still" working with arthur; long enough to call upon a shared past of experieneces/plans with arthur. there's an implication of months passing at the least. it feels more like years.

so how is it his children are still so young? the girl looks maybe 6; the boy is a toddler. kids grow fast at that age; their clothes change, their hairstyles change, their sizes change. yet when cobb goes back to them, they look exactly the way they looked in his memory.


2) shadowy mega corporations and assassins. really?

it seems a little weird that dom jets around the world working for these shadowy mega-corps with no explanation of how they get in touch with him. it's pretty bizarre that saito hires him to break apart a rival corporation For The Good Of Mankind. even weirder is when a previous, jilted corporation starts sending nameless, faceless, interchangeable assassins after Cobb in exactly the same way a militarized subconscious would were he dreaming.

of course, we buy into the idea that maybe he just lives in a near-future world where these extraction is an accepted fact and corporate espionage leads to violence and murder because we're used to suspending disbelief in movies, but this one in particular makes the point -- several times -- that our normal rules of moviewatching don't apply.

in fact, inception deliberately plays with our assumptions re: movie language. more than once, it uses cold-opening into a scene -- something we're very familiar with from any number of movies -- to actually insert us into a dream world where there was nothing before that instant we enter the scene. so what we see and don't see on screen does matte.

getting back on track: the point that dom's "real world" is suspiciously dreamlike is, in fact, explicitly made in the movie by the mal-projection. ultimately cobb rejects this suggestion (or rather, ignores it), but the significance of this suggestion is that mal is not real. mal is simply cobb's subconscious projected onto the image of his wife. thus mal's devil-advocating is really cobb's own doubt reflected at himself -- or, perhaps, his own knowledge that he's dreaming, which he has buried/lost, cropping up to remind him of what's real and what's not.

all that's a nice segue into:


3) subconscious warnings?

one of the weirdest scenes on the first watch for me was the one where the chemist, yousef, takes cobb to see his little subterranean opium den of dreamers. it just seemed out of place: a random slowdown featuring some random creepy old man in the middle of all that taut narrative. when i watched it a few more times (heh), though, i started to wonder if it wasn't a subtle message to the viewer. random-creepy-old-man makes a pretty big point of appearing out of the blue to say the people dreaming down there had made their dream their real world. then he directly addresses cobb:

"Who are you to say different?"

check out the look on cobb's face then. sure, maybe he's just creeped out by creepy old man. or maybe those words strike a chord in him.

if we then go with the idea that cobb's "real world" is, in fact, a dream, then the creepyoldman becomes just another projection of his subconscious -- and, therefore, another subconscious intrusion of his underlying knowledge that his world is actually not real.


4) people show up right when they're most needed for the narrative.

this is sort of linked to the above point. inception isn't a careless movie. the plot is smoothly and masterfully told. the film takes care to explain things and clarify things. deus ex machinae are used sparingly if at all once the main narrative gets underway.

yet before the whole dream-heist starts to unfold, shit just magically falls into place in the "real world". observe:

the movie opens -- okay, it opens in limbo, but the main story opens in japan. then as he's fleeing after a botched job, saito miraculously catches up to him -- supposedly because the architect betrays them -- and gives him a lift out of there in a helicopter.

then he's suddenly in paris. recall from earlier discussion that what we see and don't see in this movie actually matters. it's never explained how he gets to paris; he's just there ... where his father in law conveniently works as a professor of ... dream theory? at the university of paris. never mind that his mom in law is in LA with the kids; never mind that by the end of the movie he's there in LA to greet Dom. annnd, just as Dom needs an architect, his father in law happens to have the perfect suggestion: ariadne!

and then we're somehow in mombasa, and he's getting chased by projection-like Bad Men, only to be saved at the last second by Saito, who's also somehow in Mombasa. explanation for this massive deus ex machina? he's watching over his investment. CEO of a multibillion company is spending all his time secretly tailing his investment.

finally, we end up in australia, where fischer sr is dying, and despite all the corporate espionage and security and whatnot, this guy from off the streets manages to sneak all the way into the inner circle to get not only a look at the godfather, but also dad and son.

i'm not point all these things out to suggest that inception was poorly plotted. i think it's quite the opposite, in fact; i think these apparent leaps-of-faith are very deliberate, and underscore how oddly coincidental dom's "real world" is.


5) how deep was he the first time?

i.e., the first time he was in limbo. we know he had to have been at least two layers down: real world --> dream --> limbo. regardless, it was more than one; yet we only see him awaken once when the train hits him.

this could be simply a matter of streamlining narrative -- but then the movie is always careful to show the same number of awakenings as there were levels of dreams. and, as mentioned repeatedly above: what we don't see is as important as what we do see in the movie. so if we only see him awaken once out of limbo, then it's possible that, in fact, he did only come up one level -- which suggests the entire movie occurs within a dream.


6) inception, breaking into one's own subconscious, and The Whole Point of the Movie

so if we do believe that dom never woke up at all from the first trip to limbo, what's the point of the events of the movie? one possibility is that it's just the figments of imagination a trapped mind spinning its wheels to amuse itself churn out. but i think it actually goes deeper than that.

first, recall that if we believe that dom never woke up at all, then he's in his own subconscious the entire time. we know it's his and not mal's because mal was able to wake up without shattering the dream. as a result, everything he sees is his own subconscious reflected at himself: simultaneously, as he says early on, creating and perceiving his world so perfectly that he doesn't even realize it.

furthermore, through the course of the movie, he's actually doing what he thinks robert fischer is doing: breaking deeper and deeper into his own subconscious until he ends up in limbo again. and once he's there, what does he do?

he lets go of his wife's memory.

now, recall that Mal has always been trying to convince him that he's dreaming. the real Mal wanted him to kill himself to wake up. Dom's projected Mal wants him to stay in dreamland. either way, though, Mal is aware that Dom is dreaming. by letting go of her down in limbo, he's essentially implanting a suggestion in himself. he's doing exactly what the real Mal did in limbo so long ago: choosing to forget that his world isn't real.

so that's what the movie's actually about, if we follow this theory. it's about incpetion after all, but not mal's inception or fischer's. dominic cobb is unknowingly performing inception on himself: convincing himself to forget that his world isn't real. convincing himself to let go of the real world and his memories of it once and for all, and convincing himself to give in to the dream world he's created.


7) the totem!

last thing, then. no discussion of inception is complete without an analysis of the totem and the final spinning top scene. i actually have very little to say on this point, though. whether the top spins endlessly or not, whether it's even his real totem or not (since it was originally mal's), and what his real totem was if it wasn't -- all that is ultimately unimportant, imho. the totem is simply there to make us question whether or not dom "got out". the exact nature of its behavior are, in the end, dictated by the dreamer's beliefs. that is, it's only valid as a test of reality as long as the dreamer still has some subconscious idea of what reality actually is. mal was able to disregard her totem altogether; if dom was indeed still in a dream, whether his totem spins or topples is, in the end, dictated by what he believes.

i will also put forward the notion that since the top was mal's totem, not dom's, then perhaps dom's totem was actually his children's faces. up until the very end, he never looks at his kids' faces. he wants to, but he wants to see them "up above" in the real world. at the very end, everything seems perfect, and at that point, mal looks at his kids.

if we believe that dom never woke up at all from limbo, then the events of the movie have successfully implanted the suggestion that, in turn, allows dom to let go of the last piece of his subconscious reminding him his world is not real. by doing so, he allows himself to finally see the faces of his children in his own subconscious -- which is, in essence, that final act of "choosing to forget".

--

so those are my reasons: why i doubt the all-happy ending, and why i doubt dom's world is real at all. if i had to put my pet theory into a nice neat box, i'd say i think there's a good chance mal was right all along: dom WAS trapped in a dream, and while mal eventually abandoned him and got out, he stayed where he was and became the ultimate unreliable narrator. rather like mulholland drive or jacob's ladder, the entire film exists in the mind of one of its characters.

therefore, everything in the movie is seen through cobb's eyes. everyone in the movie is a projection of his subconscious. some represent aspects of his subconscious that try to help him heal/find closure/move on -- ariadne and most of his team, etc. others represent his own guilt, anger, and grief -- primarily mal. still others represent the small piece of him aware that he's dreaming, attempting to wake him -- mal, again, but also the creepy old man, and perhaps even kobo international's operatives.

but ultimately, inception is about dom's personal self-inception: the (successful) attempt to finally convince himself that his dream world is real, and by doing so, find peace. the reason everything revolves around fischer's catharsis is because that's essentially a projection/parallel of his own issues getting worked out. in the very end, his resolution is to completely seal away all reminders of the unreality of his world and to find his own inner peace.

... which sounds depressing, but i don't think it actually is. taking a step back from analyzing the movie and its meaning and What Really Happened, i think all that i've said so far is, in the end, utterly unimportant. i think the wider "meaning" of the movie, if there is one, is that it doesn't matter whether cobb's world is real or not. his catharsis is real. he began the movie a tortured man, uncertain of reality, determined to find the truth. he ends a much, much happier man -- even if that happiness if based on a delusion. his reality is what he makes of it.

this is closely linked to the idea that the totem is ultimately a reflection of a core belief. just as the totems show the characters the truth they want it to show them, or at least the truth they're capable of accepting, so too are they willing to believe in catharses that they want to believe in. and that gets back to my very first points on catharsis. fischer's catharsis is ultimately rooted in fiction: there's no evidence at all that his father wasn't, in fact, utterly disappointed in him and thought his son was a pale shade of his own glory. that doesn't matter, though. he wants to believe this. not only that, he's better off believing it. after going through his layered dreams, fischer achieved a sort of closure and inner peace that he'll carry with him no matter what. he's happy. he resolved issues with his father that might otherwise never have achieved resolution.

along the same lines, it doesn't matter whether or not cobb is dreaming or awake; whether he's really gone home to his family or if he's lost in his own subconscious. at the beginning of the movie, he's a tortured man. at the end, he's happy. whether or not his world is real, he wants to believe it. his emotion is real; his catharsis is real. that's the character arc he takes.

and, ultimately, that's our arc too. the greatest catharsis in this movie is the viewer's own sense of catharsis at the end: that feeling of affirmation and release. and, just like fischer's and cobb's, our catharsis doesn't depend on fact. it's a movie, in the end: by definition, a work of fiction. it doesn't matter what "really happened," just as it doesn't matter that the story told was not real. we want to believe it. we want to believe in it and its happy ending. in the end, fictional or not, we still get our emotional payout. and in the end, it's still one hell of a movie.

formative experiences, and the ones that got away.

2010 note: you know, you'd think this would be one of the OMGCRINGE posts for me? but oddly it's not. maybe it's cuz the stuff i'm talking about is so long ago/far away that it matters less now!

--

broke up with bri. somehow this train of thought leads into the categorizing of my formative experiences with chicks. how they affected me, how they affect me. blah. then again, it's probably cuz i was having this convo with a friend of mine. two, actually.

***

earliest experiences i had with chicks as objects of worship was the incident with the porn mag. i was, what... 10-11? and i found a little porn mag in my parents' room. STRICTLY softcore, very tame, but back then it was SHOCKING. i mean, i'd had sex ed and all, but sex ed basically teaches you "the guy sticks the penis in the girl and THEN THE GIRL GETS PREGNANT THE GUY GETS AIDS AND THEY ALL DIE. the end."

not very informative.

so it wasn't until i found the porn mag that it even BEGAN dawning on me that sex was something you want to do. i couldn't even begin to describe the experience now -- the way it started unfolding to me, in pieces and parts. not all at once. it wasn't like i woke up one day and knew all about sex. i couldn't even tell you when the pieces all fell together. but that was definitely a start: staring at pics of mostly naked chicks looking all wanton in the arms of more or less faceless men, and wondering why the hell i was fascinated.

the articles helped, too. smut, to be exact. i think that's where it first occurred to me that sex was supposed to be pleasurable.

the weird thing is, when i first flipped the mag open, i literally had NO idea what i was looking at. the pics were too non-explicit. just posing. you couldn't see dick-in-pussy or anything like that. it just looked like ... weird hugs. nakedly. and yet immediately, without a doubt, i was certain this wasn't art. i just knew, instinctively, that this was taboo. it's weird how kids have an instinct for that.

***

then came the girls on the wavy channels, when i was maybe 11 or 12. you know that infamous hentai flick, La Blue Girl? well i know exactly why it's called Blue Girl. or at least, why it should be.

see, on the wavy channels -- aka playboy and spice, scrambled -- you get perfect sound. but the picture is distorted. most of the time, it's "wavy". you can't see anything, except for the insinuation of motion and the lurid color of flesh. it was infuriating, and so maddeningly compelling. i think i was turned on by the noises. i couldn't for the life of me figure out why, though. and i do remember being frustrated that the turn-on only went so far. i hadn't figured masturbation out yet.

but once in a while, the wavy channels would suddenly clear up. the picture would still be fucked up. but instead of waviness, you'd just get everything in a negative color. eyes would be gleaming white dots floating in black. mouths were black teeth in a void of white. and skin?

heh.

skin was blue.

and oh god, let me tell you. those blue girls of my early youth? goddesses beyond compare. part of the allure was the sense of taboo, and the scandal of it. the other part must've been their rarity. i remember coming home from school and leaving the TV on for HOURS between 3pm and when my parents got home, usually around 6-7pm. i'd sit there "doing homework", very distracted, while hoping for a glimpse. and when the picture resolved, it'd be like a glance into this whole other WORLD, especially with the eerie coloration. and i'd sit there rapt, hoping it'd last, literally treasuring every second -- until it flickered back to wavy.

they say you never forget your first woman. actually, mine proved rather forgettable. but really, the blue chicks? they were my first, in a way, because in all and absolute honesty, nothing could ever compared, then or since. nymphs of the wavy channels! so rare! just seen in glimpses, and heard, doing all manner of shit i'd never even imagined (and holy shit, had i just seen her put his dick in her mouth?). talk about your forbidden fruits of knowledge. when finally i got free and unlimited access to porn in college, it was too free -- too cheap. i could see it whenever i wanted. and missed that bit? go back, watch again. just flesh for sale, bare and full of imperfections, luridly pink and tan.

ugh.

***

first true sexual experience outside of wet dreams: the first time i jerked off, circa age 12 or so. if it even counted. i didn't know what the hell to do, so i think i was just grabbing and squeezing -- experimenting. well, it worked. but for the longest time i resorted only to grabbing and squeezing to incite a response. it's amazing i didn't cause permanent damage. then for an even longer time i was convinced that the moment of orgasm was just the start of what sex was supposed to feel like. i mean, it had to be, right? why else would porn stars moan like that, when i'd managed to stay quiet? it wasn't until i was 13 or so that i'd heard of orgasm (i'd heard of ejaculation, but come on -- the way sex ed taught it made it sound like it was just automatic response to insertion, and it wasn't like i could see well enough on the wavy channels to know differently. i guess i thought sexual pleasure came AFTER ejaculation).

***

first gf i ever had was when i was like. 13? 14? seventh grade, i think. end of seventh grade. i was still a kid! it hardly even counted. it was a slightly fucked up relationship. met her at my very first party, where i got smashed for the very first time, and she was like... a high school junior, like 17 years old. so i was so flattered by it all that i sorta fell for her, only i never even fell for her. i was just flattered. there was no feelings there, and i barely even knew her.

and it was pretty messed up. she was ... eh. weird. i couldn't say exactly why. it was just a creepy feeling i got. slightly pedophilic, probably. heh. i remember the first week i was so flattered i didn't care. then we went to a movie together, along with two of my friends, and i think, in retrospect, she was trying to give me a handjob or something? but her hand was squeezing somewhere in the vicinity of my thigh, so it was doing nothing for me. i had no idea wtf she was doing at the time, so i was like wtf are you doing?

it mighta been that, that tipped me off. or hell, maybe she was just shy and untutored? who knows. anyway, after that things went downhill.

the over-16 high schoolers with cars could go off-campus for lunch, so she visited me in my junior high. first week that was great. second week, post-movie-experience, i started avoiding her. so during lunch i kept dragging my best friend into various classrooms to hide from the creepy older chick who i was, quote-unquote, dating. then the week after that, one of my friends ratted me out, and then she found me. and so i told her to please stop coming around because she should hang out with her own friends in high school.

and that was that. i came out of hiding, and i figured it was over, amicably. until, of course, the NEXT day, she showed up again. and i LOST it. "in true damon style" was how i put it the first time, and in true damon style was, indeed, how it was.

you gotta remember that at the time, i was still a kid. i still was only vaguely aware that people other than me also had hopes and fears, feelings and hurts. so, when i got mad, i let loose. and in front of all my friends, i started yelling at her to get out of my sight and never come around again because i never wanted to see her again.

the sort of shocked, frozen smile on her face (she'd shown up with a smile) was the thing i remember best about her. the actual break-up i in fact forgot all about until my best friend reminded me years and years later. i felt quite bad then. but that i have no memory of it myself, or didn't until reminded, probably says something about how much that whole affair meant to me.

***

so.

before joanna, in early 7th grade, i had SUCH a crush on Amber, the bad girl. we were in the same PE class and she was SUCH a rebel. i had such a crush on her, drawn to her badness. she was dirty blonde, and already kinda heroin-chic from smoking pot and dropping acid all the time. she had a boyfriend (actually, several during the course of the few months i knew her), apparently fucked all the time too, and knew everything there was to know. or, you know, at least pretended to. she kept lecturing us on techniques and special moves and how they blew her bf's mind, or bfs' minds, and i was SO in awe. i kept hoping she'd demonstrated her reportedly mindblowing bj techniques on me, but alas, no, it was one of those later on anonymous jr high flings that got me started on that.

anyway, Amber flunked all her classes because she flouted the authority of her teachers and simply refused to work. and in PE she walked all the miles and shit. so prior to that, i was always great at PE. and after that, i was always great. but that one year, i was like, flunking PE with her because i'd walk all the miles with her (along with this other guy and this other chick, all of whom were wowed by her bad-girl-ness) and talk shit about everything. i think that year was the year i learned to cuss like a sailor.

then she got expelled. she got sent to like the special school for rebel children, and that was that. i'm sure some part of me still looks for her, though. rebel bad girls. see, the burgundy haired girl rant, somewhere in this jumbled journal.

***

first true non-solo sexual experience: after joanna, first psycho gf, came a normalish stormy-jr-high-affair. hanging out, doing homework, walking home, screaming matches. i don't think we even made it to heavy petting. the gf AFTER that, or maybe the one after that?, we indulged in experimentation. she'd had an older bf before, so she knew a few tricks that hadn't made their way into my knowledge store yet.

right around then my dad had a little red celica, a sexy little manual sports car, and we'd go sit in it (parked in the garage!) all the time so we could turn the lights on and off, flick on turn signals, stomp the brake and pretend to drive. god, we were just kids.

but of course, soon enough we figured out cars were good for other things. so one thing led to another, and then one day she blew me in the front seat. i lasted about 30 seconds, and didn't reciprocate. didn't know how! but heh, it certainly made that car unforgettable.


***

after joanna, and after the normal shortlived jr high relationships, came the jr high prom. and man, this 7th grader asked me to go, but for some bizarre reason i said no (probably thought it wasn't cool to go w/ a 7th grader) and the irony is, i really liked her. i mean, i really really liked her. i thought she was really cool. it was just... at the moment i had a brain fart, said no, and then it was too late to renege. gah! such regret.

anyway so i ended up going with this 8th grader chick who was kinda a friend of a friend. and to put things into perspective, at this point i had had a few kisses, some pawing experience, but strictly above the belt on a girl. it was just a month or two after my very first bj experience, and still like... almost 2 years before i actually lost my virginity. so i had like. VERY LITTLE IDEA of female anatomy and physiology.

despite all that, kids were pretty, er, daring. so heh. at the prom, EVERYONE was grinding up on everyone else. and during this one dance my date was grinding against my thigh, wearing this short, pretty silverish dress, and i felt a certain moistness on my leg, through my slacks? and i swear, i had no idea wtf i was feeling. my first thought was, the fuck, did she piss on me? i think i didn't figure it out until i was thinking back in like. college.

man, this is turning into a litany of sex!

***

one more purely sexual landmark and then we can pass into the realm of The Ones That Got Away, i think.

anyway: first hands-down unequivocable sexual experience: the week after i turned 16, i drove my car to my very first REAL party. even the one where i met joanna didn't really count. my parents dropped me off, and my parents picked me up -- same with everyone else. we had to hide the beer in the morning. this one? the parents were off for the weekend, there were college kids there -- it was Sodom and Gomorrah.

so i met a chick there, who was a bit older. actually i never knew her well enough to know just how old, but my guess is 17-18. a few drinks went down, we went somewhere private (my memory has it as outside against a tree -- sounds exciting, but wasn't really -- but then my memory could be alcohol-fogged, and i also remember a case in one of the bedrooms. might've been two different parties, who knows) and got it on. it wasn't my first time with a chick, if you count bj's and hj's, but it was my first time. i think most first experiences involves 10 second timespans, but mine was kinda opposite. i was so nervous (and so drunk) that i had trouble getting going. heh. but, eventually things worked out, and that was the absolute end of my innocence.

afterwards we saw each other for about a week, but we never really hit it off while sober. so soon enough that evaporated.

***

roundabout the same time -- early high school -- i developed two major crushes. one was on my french teacher, who was about 26, and was tall and sleek and, well, FRENCH. god, i had such a crush. and it wasn't fair! she was so young and hot! and word had it her hubby was like 57 years old or something.

so, our high school was too big for the cafeteria, so we ate all over the school. me and my friends sat in this circle of benches set into a hill (the hill sloped up behind the bench, but was chopped away and bulwarked with posts, against which the benches were nailed -- if that makes sense?) around a big oak tree. it was a pretty unusual place because, as high school goes, cliques associate by geography, but "the circle", as we called it, was right smack in the center of several major avenues in the school. so my friends were really a minicross-section of the school. mainly, this was because my best friend was such a social animal, and made friends with everyone.

anyway, point is, the circle was also just outside the teacher's lounge. so every day without fail (except the days i wasn't there b/c of extracurricular crap or whatever), when the 10 minute bell rang, i'd be sitting there in my corner of the bench, up on the posts, waiting for la mademoiselle Clevenger to walk out.

i had french for 3 years, so sophomore year, i was still bright eyed and bushy tailed, scrawny, and it'd be a peppy "Hi Mademoiselle!"

then by senior year i was cool, man. i'd grown up by then, had my growth spurt and all, and varsity beach volleyball had packed some muscles on. and i was always kind of a ringleader among my friends, so i was way too cool to be peppy. but not too cool not to say hi. so she'd come around, and i'd have it down: this cool-as-arctic-ice nod up of my chin, and this slurred "suuup, ma'amselle."

i wonder wtf she made of all that. heh.

(and yes, those of you who've heard me tell the story before: i KNOW i always say that!)

***

after i hit my growth spurt in sophomore year and got on the varsity team my junior year, gfs came a little easier. ironically, though, the one girl i remember best out of high school -- well, okay, one of two -- was never my gf. never even close. but i was completely in love with her.

in my sophomore year, there was a girl in my 6th period class named evangeline. this is probably why i've always liked the name, and will usually give a girl named evangeline at least a second look on account of name alone. i used to think it was such a perfect name for her -- evangeline, angel. unusual, too, not too flashy -- not one of those pop names so popular at the time.

anyway, she had some sort of health issue. neurological. she wasn't nuts, but she did have terrible headaches that caused her to miss school all the time. when she was there, she was quiet, frail, and maybe because of her difficult situation, always seemed far and above everyone else around her. dignified; so mature. i felt like there was a wisdom to her, and maybe there was. she sat across the room from me and i spent most of my 6th period trying to catch a glimpse without looking like i was gawking. i'd invent excuses to look her way: maybe i was staring at the bulletin board behind her! or looking out the window!

i don't think i ever even spoke more than two words to her. she was a senior, so she was way out of my reach even if she'd been at school more. add her health problems to that, and she was just completely unattainable. i think i remember her best from this one sunny spring afternoon. the classrooms were arranged in rows lengthwise, so that there were no windows on the shorter walls, but windows on both the longer walls. on one wall they were big windows; on the other, little windows up high. the way the classroom was set up for this class, half the chairs were in rows 4 deep against one of the longer sides, and half against the other. there were also short rows against one of the shorter sides and the other short side was the "front" of the class. our teacher usually lectured while walking around the middle open area, though, and he was an awesome lecturer. it was a literature class.

digressing.

point is, she sat on the side of the class with the big windows, which faced the west. so in the afternoon the sun would shine in. the way i remember her was from this gorgeous spring afternoon -- one of those days where the sky is shatteringly blue between these big puffy white clouds, because it had just rained. and she was sitting there in this off-white sweater, one of those with long strands of thread coming off so it looked kinda furry. she was blonde, not yellow californian blonde, but this gorgeous, layered blonde that ran the gamut from pale to honey. her hair wasn't totally straight; it had a soft natural curve to it, waves, and she wore it slightly in-curved at the tips. her skin was porcelain-pale, totally flawless, taut over her cheekbones and fine jaw, though this probably had a lot to do with the fact that she often didn't feel well. and -- god, can you imagine it? the sun hitting her from behind, through the window, just lighting her up like that, incandescent? it was unforgettable. she was luminous. she glowed. i gawked.

oddly, i don't have any memories of her past that. i'm not sure if the semester ended and she went to a different class, or maybe if she left school due to health problems. anyway, i still remember the way she looked perfectly. it's the ones that got away that stick with you, and if you look through my writing, and look at the women i'm attracted to, or the women i dream up, and you'll see plenty of luminous, achingly lovely blondes who don't say much and seem to know a lot more.

***

last formative experience. most of my real experience with women has been in college and after; somehow, it still feels like these were the ones that shaped me, more or less. anyway: kelly. that's not how she spelled it, but name changed to protect the innocent.

every school has its popular clique, right? and at the top of the popular clique, the alpha female, around whom the school orbits. i mean, yeah. everyone hates her. and yeah, her popularity was probably secured by the popularity of her boyfriends. but when push comes to shove, it's the chicks that play the popularity game, and it's the chicks that really determine the pecking order. we were just the prize bulls they fought over, most the times, though sometimes one of us, by rejecting the top chick hard enough, could cause her to fall.

kelly, though.

heh, kelly.

NEVER have i met someone else quite like her, and from what i hear from other people, nor have they. she was something else. a different beast altogether. i knew her in 7th grade -- she was already the popular girl then. but in high school, all the popular girls from their own middle schools mesh together and start reforming cliques, which then climb up through the years and, sometime around junior year, clash for supremacy. or i think that's how it usually works. how it worked with kelly: the minute she stepped in, she was under the wing of the most popular clique in the school. freshman status notwithstanding. and by sophomore year, everyone deferred to her. i don't think anyone didn't know who she was. she had this cat look to her. narrow wideset eyes. ash-blonde hair, slightly wavy. and this permanent, slight curve to her mouth, which wasn't by any means a smile. i think in Mean Girls, there was a line about the queen bee -- she always looked fierce? well, that was kelly. she always looked fierce, and she NEVER smiled. except when she wanted something, or was going in for the kill.

my god, she was a bitch. my god, we all hated her. and my god, if she'd ever given me half a chance, i wouldn't have thought twice.

alas, i never rose above the status of peripheral acquaintance with her. i was on the varsity beach volleyball team, which meant i qualified as jock and knew the jocks, but i was also in AP classes and knew the nerds. that alone probably disqualified me. plus, i wasn't on the football team, and the lucky few in her orbit were all on the football team. usually. i think she briefly had a fling with the class president, too, who wasn't on any athletic team, but was wildly adored nonetheless.

so, yeah. i brushed close enough, at least in the few brief weeks in... what was it, junior year? ...that i hung out with them in the jock area. talked to her a few times, but she always smiled more at someone else, or laughed harder at someone else's joke. grrr. and eventually i settled for one of her friends as gf, but that's a bitter pill to swallow when you'd come so close to the center of the (school's) universe. and i've never been good at staying close to what i couldn't have. it drives me nuts. so soon enough the relationship with her friend fell apart, and when that fell apart, i went back to the circle, somewhat humbled.

sometimes i think the truth of the matter is, though, that the perfect woman in my mind? the ice queen i rave about? in the end, it's just the impossible amalgamation of amber, evangeline and kelly. i mean, i can trace out roots in each of those three. the ones that got away, and all that.

ok -- tired of writing now!

dna replication and touching the face of god.

heh -- one of those late night rants of mine. katya was the victim of this one. once in a while i just remember what it was that made me go into biology and medicine in the first place. it's not that i want to understand and take apart and know everything about the human body, really. it's not even that i want to fix all the wrongs. i mean, i know my profession is to fix wrongs, but what REALLY took me into biology in the first place, the real reason behind all this, is because i can't possibly understand everything. i can't possibly fix everything. it's so complex, so intricate, and yet so elegant and so perfect that all i can do, sometimes, is be awed by what little i do see and understand.

so, yeah, this rant is about just a FRACTION of the 31847698769 amazing things going on in your body right this moment.

Damon: actually, heh.

Damon: that's one thing about medicine?

Damon: i mean, you see so much UGLY because people come when they're sick?

Damon: but you also get SUCH an appreciation for how beautiful human bodies are.

Damon: not just -- on the superficial level, either

Damon: in how everything just FITS

Damon: it's like...dude, seriously.

Damon: there is NOTHING like the human body and its mechanisms

Damon: i could name so many things that are just mindblowing.

Katya: yeah well. ayup.

Damon: like -- okay. in metabolism?

Damon: you have the kreb cycle and the urea cycle

Katya: oh. you ARE going to name them.

Katya: ...

Damon: one's for producing energy

Katya: and in words i don't know too.

Damon: one's for getting rid of wastes

Damon: but they just INTERTWINE

Katya: urea!

Katya: i picked it!

Damon: like the "waste" products of one?

Damon: shunts into the other and becomes useful.

Katya: hmm.

Damon: and it's just this incredibly intricate, yet simple and elegant, cycling system that's miraculously evolved by PURE CHANCE

Katya: ....

Damon: it's like MUCH more intricate than any machine we can possibly build.

Katya: people would dispute that.

Damon: yeah, i know.

Katya: see .. thats when pure chance doesn't seem so.. right.

Damon: heh. sometimes i wonder too.

Damon: it's SO complex.

Damon: and SO perfect.

Damon: there's just no waste to it.

Katya: well. you don't have to believe in.. *muse* any religion's god. it sufficient just to believe in something, methinks.

Damon: i mean... the best engine we have, manmade?

Damon: is like... i think about 20-30% efficient

Damon: meaning of all the potential energy you put in, in the form of fuel

Damon: only 20% of that comes out as useable energy

Katya: maybe aliens landed on earth and designed us.

Damon: the body? is like 50-60% efficient.

Damon: and more than that, it's organic.

Damon: it adapts.

Katya: but we churn it all?

Damon: it self-tunes.

Damon: *amazed*

Damon: okay, here's another thing:

Damon: DNA replication

Katya: 50-60% doesn't sound so good.

Katya: ooh ooh!

Damon: at any given moment, i'd guess about 10% of your cells are actively dividing.

Damon: there are TRILLIONS of cells in your body

Damon: so at any INSTANT

Katya: its... C and T and N and..... dammit i forget the letters. :( i'm totally wrong. i remember nothing of biology.

Damon: there are BILLIONS of dividing cells.

Damon: (CGAT)

Katya: ..... how many trillians?

Katya: ooh thanks

Damon: i can't remember *LOL8

Katya: but i can spell it!

Damon: but -- you know the basics, right?

Katya: deoxyribonucleic acid!

Katya: ... i think.

Katya: maybe i spelled wrong.

Katya: yeah.

Damon: DNA is a chain molecule, with a sugar-phosphate backbone and bases (the CGATs) that are attached?

Katya: i remember.. i think.

Damon: so -- the polymerase that goes through and replicates DNA

Damon: has an error rate on the range of 10^-7 or something like that.

Damon: 0.0000001% error

Damon: ...god, i can't even remember the numbers

Damon: *goes look it up*

Katya: *peer*

Katya: i think i'm in awe of you when you go on about things well beyond my understanding.

Katya: *muse* of course, it makes me feel dumb too? but.. I think thats because i'm incapable of retaining information.

Damon: okay

Damon: i'm back

Damon: *LOL*

Damon: looked it up

Damon: i messed up: it's even lower than that

Damon: the machinery messes up once every 10^9 times

Katya: 0.000000000000001%?

Damon: ONCE

Damon: in 10^9

Katya: *blank look*

Damon: 1 in 1000000000 times.

Katya: i don't even know wha... oh

Damon: for every 1000000000 bases it adds one

Damon: on*

Damon: it messes up ONCE, overall.

Katya: you should put commas in.

Damon: 100,000,000

Katya: oh. 100 mil

Damon: 1 mistake per 100 million bases

Damon: ONE, KATYA.

Damon: if you were copying

Katya: *laugh*

Damon: by hand

Damon: CGATATGCGTATCGT.... 100 million times

Damon: you would not make only one mistake.

Damon: and actually -- the thing is, it makes more mistakes than that? more like one in every ten to a hundred thousand? (which is still MIND BOGGLING)

Damon: but it's got a built-in proofreading mechanism

Damon: where if it makes a mistake, it'll REALIZE it

Damon: STOP

Damon: GO BACK

Damon: FIX IT

Damon: and go on again.

Damon: and here's the really amazing thing:

Damon: so think of if you were doing this by hand, like i said?

Damon: the human genome is... *thinks*

Katya: *peek*

Damon: had to go look *LOL*

Damon: the human genome is 3x10^9 base pairs long, roughly

Damon: (so all our DNA is 3x10^9)

Damon: which is... 3,000,000,000 bp's

Damon: 3 billion

Katya: .... mmm.

Katya: *nod*

Damon: so

Damon: imagine if you had to copy all this

Damon: CAGATTGATGA...blahblahblah, 3billion of 'em

Katya: well. i wouldn't, for starters. :P

Damon: i know, but like! just imagine how LONG that would take

Katya: yeah. well. *laugh*

Damon: not even ASSEMBLING it? like if you imagine it as legos, snapping it on?

Damon: not even that

Damon: just... writing it

Damon: or TYPING it

Damon: think of how LONG that would take

Katya: you're in a cesspit of awe, aren't you?

Damon: think of how many mistakes you'd make

Katya: *grins*

Damon: but right now

Damon: i mean. RIGHT. NOW.

Damon: in your body, there are a billion cells doing just that

Damon: and it's doing it so that in all 3 billion base pairs

Damon: it makes 30 mistakes.

Damon: THIRTY.

Damon: and it does all this in 8 hours.

Katya: are they the 'mutations' ?

Damon: 3 billion base pairs copied, with 30 mistakes, in 8 hrs, in a billion different places IN YOUR BODY, right this second.

yeah, the mistakes are mutations.

Damon: but 99% of them are totally harmless

Damon: and the other 1%, 99.9999.....9% of that will just be destroyed by cells watching for it.

Damon: now in the VERY slight chance that one cell gets away with it, and starts replicating wildly?

Damon: that's when you get cancer.

Katya: *hms* see my mind has trouble grapping with... so much acti.. ok i sound stupid. *shuts up*

Damon: *laughs*

Damon: bah!

Damon: well!

Damon: doesn't it amaze you just a LITTLE bit?

Damon: put another way:

Katya: it amazes me!

Katya: but.. i don't understand it like you do.

Katya: and.. it just reminds me of sermons in church. *grins*

Damon: the replication speed of this enzyme that does it, called a polymerase, is 1000 base pairs PER SECOND.

Katya: well not quite. but the allusion to how amazing the human body is, does.

Damon: heh -- i mean, can you visualize this?

Katya: not... your raving.

Damon: you've got one strand feeding into this enzyme, which is shaped like a big ring

Damon: and out the other end comes two strands, perfectly matched except for one mistake every 100 million base pairs.

Katya: mmm. you're almost making me miss my biology classes.

Damon: you've got free base pairs floating around in the cytosol, getting sucked in and slapped on

Damon: little bursts of energy every time one gets fused to the backbone

Damon: and this ring is racing along at 1,000 base pairs in a single second.

Damon: i can just see it, you know? *laughs*

Damon: (this is why i went into biology, heh)

Damon: i mean, honestly, THIS is why i do what i do. because it's just stunning, how it all works.

Katya: i did biology as my token science glass in high school, and did well at it! but... i forget everything.

Damon: *laughs* oh well.

Damon: you go learn your doctrines of human law *grins*

Katya: .. class.

Katya: bleh.

Katya: i find it just as fascinating as you!

Damon: i'll stick with my divine truths of human biology.

Katya: but i guess a little overwhelming?

Damon: it IS overwhelming

Damon: that's the point.

Katya: because i don't know it as well as you do.

Damon: it's like... unimaginable, how fast it all is

Damon: and how perfect!

Katya: well. even the words are overwhelming!!!

Damon: gahh!

Damon: katya, to be totally honest

Damon: (and i'm gonna say something corny here)

Katya: *laugh*

Damon: if ever i believed in... i dunno

Damon: not god? not the way christians believe?

Damon: but if ever i believed in some greater pattern

Damon: something greater than ourselves, that we can't ever understand, but can sometimes see or feel or touch?

Damon: it's when i think about stuff like this.

Katya: yeah well. *grins* sounds like something said by a creation scientist.

Katya: except they know who to attribute it too. *muse*

Damon: it's like when i really think about it, or visualize it, it's like i'm seeing a tiny fragment of something incomprehensibly larger than myself.

Damon: and i know in every discipline out there, there are moments like that.

Katya: *nod* *sighs* yeah it all is. I think thats why I don't think about it.

Katya: like i can admire, and be fascinated and awed and all that.. but don't think too hard about it.

Damon: i mean, astronomers look into deep space and see things that make them feel like they're touching god, or creation, or whatever, just for a second. i just find it within, instead.

*laughs* why not?

Damon: (ok, i'm not getting up in the morning *laughs*)

Katya: because.. i don't think my mind is capable of dealing. :P

Katya: (no shit)

Katya: (i still wanna watch my movie. *sighs* damn you! *shakes fist*)

Damon: (that's why i'm talking to you now!)

aww. talk a little longer? then i'll sleep.

Damon: and heh. katya, my mind is not capable of dealing either.

Damon: i get boggled by it.

Damon: i'm like, moved by it

Katya: and i think a lot of people feel like you do. *muse* well. a lot. no small amount.

Katya: yeah but i'm not capable of dealing with the implications, i guess.

Katya: *grins*

Damon: i swear to god, i think about it enough and i get all MOVED *LOL*

Damon: it doesn't matter to me what's behind it?

Damon: like if it's god or evolution or creation or aliens or whatever you wanna attribute it to.

Katya: happy without your meanings? *smiles*

Damon: it's just that feeling you get that for a second there, the fabric of the world as we know it kinda rolls back and you see something MORE than yourself, or anything you could possibly understand.

Damon: gah! i have a hard time putting it into words.

[end rant]

--Turns out I screwed up my math. heh. it makes one mistake in 10^9 base pairs, so that's one in a billion.

ONCE in a BILLION. 3 times in your whole genome, when it replicates.

i really -- have a hard time putting down exactly why this amazes me. i think the bottom line is because it's right there, inside you. it's easy to be amazed by deep space and particle physics, and things so obscure it takes a lifetime to even begin to understand it. but what most people don't realize is inside their bodies, right now, right this second, any given second of any given day, there's a billion tiny miracles happening.

i mean -- right now, just look down at your arm. look at your skin. right there, what i ranted about is happening. it's in you. it IS you.

you don't need to look at the stars to go beyond the human experience and see something divine. you don't need to witness stigmata and miracles of the church. it's right there inside you, all the time. the very act of being alive is a collection of a hundred trillion miracles every second of the day. and that's what amazes me.

i know my party line about being in medicine is to help people, blahblahblah. but really, it's more selfish than that. it's because if i go into this profession, i work with this stuff every single day. and yeah, most times all i think about is -- how much of this drug to give, what procedure to do, what tests to administer, patients and diagnoses, problems and solutions.

but as long as i'm exposed to this stuff, sooner or later, once in a while, i'll be able look beyond the details and see the whole of it. i'll be able to sit back and look at it and realize, if only for an hour on a monday night at 4:35am, the utter beauty of it all.

and when i do see that, it gives me an utter certainty, somehow, that there's something amazing out there, and in here, and everywhere. this whole secret life of the universe just under the skin of everyday existence, never far away, always within reach, if only i stop to remember it.

if i just stop and consider it, i'll remember, if only for a second, how i felt sitting in a lecture hall learning this for the first time. i'll be able to reach beyond the mundane existence and touch something that proves to me beyond a shadow of a doubt that there's a pattern to everything. i don't understand it, and i won't understand it, and i wouldn't ever want to understand it and take it apart to its fundamentals. because all i need to know is that it's there, and that it's not out beyond the stars. it's not out of reach. it's right there, inside me, if i just stop for a second and remember.

gah. i sound so pompous when i go on like this. i can't help it -- it's because i'm trying to put this down in words, but the words just don't ever come out right, and instead it turns into a bloody church sermon.

ARGH!

it's so frustrating. i just -- can't find the words to explain it. i try and it comes out all wrong.

okay, anyway, i'm gonna stop trying to add to it. heh. maybe i'll try again some other night.

roadtrip rants! (ii)

CA-111 North:

leaving palm springs now, leaving the desert. it's amazing, you can actually get very used to this sorta temperature. it's like a hundred degrees or more every single day, but... it doesn't feel that bad. i think it's cuz it's so dry here. i mean obviously it's still nicer to be at home, like indoors. but the thing is when you're outside and you're not doing anything -- if you run around you're gonna get heat exhaustion -- but if you don't run around, if you just sit there, it's almost kinda enveloping, the heat. so, you almost... i got used to it. i liked it. i think i'm even gonna miss this sort of heat, sitting out there. it's very much a decadent sorta heat, where you can just ... sit, and soak it in.

heading north again, back to the grind and the shit and all that. work. it was very relaxing, these few days. i was always running around, but it was mentally relaxing. all i did was chill. so it was good.

probably oughta a coupla words about the desert. it's this incredible... this bleak land. i mean, you have green, but it's obviously fake, and everything else is just sunscorched tan, kinda like khaki, and everything's that color, the mountains are that color. there's actually a lotta mountains here. i take that back, not all the mtns are that color. when the mtns are in shadow, they're very dark, black. when they're in the sun they're kinda (hic) dust-color. and the (hic) hills (hic) are kinda tan (hic) ugh, i'm hiccuping. so yeah, the ones close to us are kinda this lighter tan, the ones back farther are darker tan, and the ones in shadow are black. the mtns are actually surprising high. we're kinda in this basin surrounded by mtns. very high wind off to my left here as i'm going north.

jagged mtns, kinda rocky looking. no plant on them. very barren and scorched, flat under the sky. which is actually dusty. it's not a clear blue sky, very dusty -- my car is full of sand.

what else can i say about this land? it's HOT. something you can't ever forget. every minute you're

outside you're conscious, constantly aware of the heat that just envelopes you. it doesn't feel a hundred the way it feels a hundred out on the coast where it's hot and humid, but it's definitely still there, like this weight on you. if you don't move, if you just stay still, it's actually very comforting if you just let it surround you. it makes you very tired, sucks all the energy out of you. so you just lay there. i suppose if you kept laying there you'd eventually die (laughs) -- so i'm gonna get outta here before that happens to me.

definitely a desert here. mile upon mile of open desert land. i wish i had a camera. turn around and take some pictures. instead of a camera i got this little recorder, which is much cheaper.

102 degrees -- ridiculous, isn't it? 102 degrees outside (laughs) i take a shower that hot.

the thing about the desert, everything's bleached. sunbleached, windblasted, sandblasted, faded. even new things start to look old after a few months. freeway signs barely have any color left to them. people are the same. i mean you get tanned, but your hair gets bleached, eyes get bleached.

if i take my sunglasses off, this place is just white light under a blue sky. dazzling white light. i think it's some aspect of having no humidity in the air. and you can see these scars on the mtns, these roads, paler lines on pale. and just... desert, everywhere.

wish i was riding a train.

these mtns ring you all around. 1000 ft high? tallest peak, closest to us, i'd get 2-3000 ft. but there's one little pass in the west where the highways are coming through. at night when the sun sets it's absolutely beautiful because you'd have these colors, these mtns, and they'd be layered in shades of purple and grey and blue. the sky behind will be just a fire, one of those so-cal sunsets that you really don't get in the north. i miss them a lot, those sunsets. i remember everytime i come back to so-cal, it'd look like... i'd always think it was some spectacular sunset that night, but it's not. that's just how it is. the southern sunsets are redder than the north. and you forget that, because you start thinking the ones up north are beautiful, but they're nothing like the ones down south.

the mtns, the shape of them are very ridged and defined. rumpled, kinda wrinkling up out of the earth. the hills are sorta rounded, but the shadowy mtns are definitely ridged. that's something i should try to remember too.

--

I-10 West:

Aw shit, freeway looks crowded.

Took my sunglasses off and you can't even keep your eyes open. if it's not the sun it's the wind if it's not wind it's the sand in the air. i can feel sand between my teeth, and i don't even know what from. all the windmills are going today, the windmills in the pass between the mtns. the big mtns on the left, the big ones on the right, this gateway to this desert land. through it, far away, the ocean. is it my imagination, or is the color of the sky different there? probably imagination, i'm too far away from the ocean to see it.

mtns on either side road in the middle flanked by all these windmills moving, not all in the same direction but all swinging with the same leisurely movement, and the freeway in the middle, cruising through. cars, the meandering freeway -- it's like a river.

right by those big mtns now, rearing up way high into the sky, and the rivulets where the rain -- i guess it does rain in the desert -- the rain in the desert has carved into the flesh of the mtn, laid it bare to the chalk bones beneath. curtained ridges at the bottom, folding up. always reminds me of some giant, the knees of it bending up its clothes.

climbing through the pass now. pretty low pass. coupla clouds in the sky, but mostly a sheathe of white, blue behind it.

here's a sight to remember. you come through the pass, and what you see -- you expect to see the ocean behind it. you do see something flat almost like the ocean, but it's not, it's the desert. and i think millions of years ago this was probably the ocean, 'cause that's what it looks like, and you can imagine these mtns on either side as islands. just this flatness, flat lands stretched between. road through it straight as an arrow. the bushes almost like ... i dunno, almost like patterns in the cloth. optical illusion makes it looks like they're strung out in lines, and you have more of those windmills turning.

distance here is deceptive. it's probably much farther than it looks.

you can see the pale veins in the mtns really are the rocks beneath. 93 miles to los angeles.

well, first traffic jam of the day, 3 o'clock, barely what, 20 miles outta palm springs? i think it's all these fucking people coming in from fucking, you know, whatever. brush fire off to my left here. 87 miles to los angeles. i'm pretty sure that's why we're stopped here, fucking tourists gawking at a fucking fire.

if it's like this all the way to LA, kill me.

okay this ROYALLY. FUCKING. SUCKS. i'm stuck in a FUCKING traffic jam on the I-10, far as i can see it's moving at this rate. this is the only way out of the desert. pretty sure we're in a jam right now because some FUCKER decided to look at a FUCKING fire outside. what the fuck, never seen a fire burn? i'll light your ass on fire (laughing).

well, out of the traffic jam suddenly. no reason to begin, no reason to end.

out of the desert now, brushland area: riverside, east of LA. 80 miles to LA central, maybe 75? through mesas and canyonland, very southern california.

huge interchange right here where the 10 goes under 1,2,3,4 levels of different freeway overpasses -- junction at 215.

you know you're going to LA when the sky gets overcast and yellow. LA: it's alll about the smog.

i really don't understand why american men are all fat, ugly, and have goatees these days. and they drive HUGE suvs. every huge SUV you see is gonna have an ugly fat american male in it. it's ridiculous. it's a fucking plague of them!

--

I-15 north:

leaving the 10 now, going north on the 15 to join 210 in a little bit. um... i could be going to SD here too because 15 south leads you right there. another overpass here, 4 levels.

i can see in the near distance, not even the far distance, the shape of the san bernadino mtns in the north. this is actually really familiar to me because when we went skiing when i was little, this is about where we'd turn off and head into the mtns. big bear up ahead, very tall. a shape in the mist right now -- well, not really mist. smog. LA smog.

--

I-210 west:

leaving the 15, leaving southern california, heading north. 210 now, circling the base of the mtns.

ha -- passed this red truck with a MOUTH on the grill, big teeth and a tongue.

circling the san bernadino mtns. they're very beautiful in this... (laughs) smoggy air, because you can see them in layers and layers, the closer ones in greater definition, the shape of their stones. in the back they're outlines, really, smoky against the sky. and in the far distance, you can baaarely see it against the sky. layer upon layer of mtns, and i'll be going through them in about... 30 minutes -- fuck this guy's almost coming over here!

i was talking about mtns there, waxing poetic, and this fucking bitch of a van almost came over in my lane and ran me over. so i beeped 'em.

high voltage wires stretching north to south -- i always wonder if these are the same ones i see later in the central valley.

such a sight to see: the mountains tumbling towards the sea.

weird, during the day you feel no kinship whatsoever to these other cars. you just sorta hate them. this one's too slow, that one's too fast... that one's riding your ass, this one's got a black tinted window so you can't see anything through it. that one's got an ugly american dude inside, this one's got an ugly hispanic dude inside, yaddayaddayadda on and on and on, you hate 'em all. and then night falls and all you see are the taillights, and suddenly they're all the same as you.

heading north now, at last -- i can see the opening, the break in the mtns where the 5 goes through.

fucker behind me. see if i can get him stuck behind me somehow. heh.

i had something of a crush on sarah mclachlan. largely on the tone of her voice, but she is a lovely woman. you don't realize at first, but she is. but yeah, her voice is so sensual. the way she sounds so wanton when her voice kinda... slip-slides and shears apart like that. when she goes into a higher register and deliberately lets it just... slip a little? like a hint that, although she's a respected, i dunno -- i think it's cuz she's very respected and intelligent, obviously, her ability to let it go a little bit like that is slightly seductive. it's almost like -- it's sorta like you think if she lets that go, what else would she do? like she lets down her hair a little bit, just enough for you to wonder.

something awesome and amazing about the freeway just belting through the mountains, curving through it, nothing but barren mtns and bushes on either side, and then 8 lanes of freeway and shoulders and everything just right through the middle. now i can see ahead of me layer upon layer of other mtns.

365 outta san francisco.

finally, golden state fwy. 5. 2 1/4 miles. i like that name, golden state fwy. i know it goes all the way up north, all the way to canada and back, but I-5's really one of those freeways i think of as a californian highway.

--

I-5 North:

time is 4:59, sunday. and i'm once again on I-5 as of right now.

i just cut off this mitsubishi racer type. he's like sitting on my ass, kinda funny.

southbound 5 is MAJORLY stuffed up right here. INSANE traffic on the other side coming south.

so the guy that i cut off came back and cut me off. we kinda slid around for a while, and... then i think he went out of sight.

346 miles to sacramento.

mtns by day are golden brown, very parched and dry -- not quite the golden of nor-cal, more brown. so now we're in the middle of the mtns now, mtns all around, and there's this sense of height even though you can't see the ocean for reference. you can kinda sense it ... kinda in the color of the sky and the shape of the mtns, how they look like high-altitude mtns but they don't rear that high above you.

i remember this one time, coming down from san francisco in the winter. took the train, but the train actually stops at bakersfield and then you take a bus through the grapevine, and another train from LA to SD. i remember, i went through, taking this road in a bus. and strangely enough, that winter it was snowing -- oh look, it's a lake -- anyway, these mtns were just COVERED in snow, and these mtns were like, what, 2000 ft up? the snowline was incredibly low.

feel sorry for these southbound drivers. they have no idea what they're about to run into -- a HUGE traffic jam.

[oh, the irony.]

48 miles to bakersfield, 323 to sacramento.

even though we're 3000 ft in the air, it almost looks like a desert around there. i can see the pass, the opening where the mtns fall into the valley. and after that, the long long drive all the way up to the bay. you have the right side tumbling in first, and then the left -- and beyond that, just sky.

4144 ft, Tejon Pass.

it's beautiful -- golden mtns, and then in the middle you have this little pasture, this little meadow, full of cows.

309 to SF, 308 to sacramento, 38 to bakersfield.

ok, that was a false alarm. this is the true entrance to the valley. 5 miles on a 6% downgrade, here we go. shift into neutral and let 'er ride.

these hills look almost like a pelt, fuzzy almost in the difference between the highlights and the shadows.

wtf is the hurry? there's all these little sport sedans with little fucking yuppies that never had a day of fun in their lives ZOOMING past at 90mph. who the fuck cares, man? you're skimming what, half an hour off your trip? chill the fuck out.

here we go, my first glimpse of the central valley. the opening of the mtns and nothing but flatness ahead. incredible. the golden mtns falling away to both sides, and this basin in the middle, this endless valley. and I-5, straight as an arrow through it. you can see the fields, layer upon layer out to the horizon.

there's always a feeling of freedom when you come through the mtns and you see nothing but valley. amber waves of fuckin' grain, baby, nothing but the yellow of ripe grain. out on the horizon where it fades into indistinction it almost looks like an ocean out there.

just amazing, this flatness -- far as the eye can see. the mtns to the right falling away to nothing, past visibility. and in front of you, and eventually to all sides of you save one, nothing but flatness and farms.

we just split off from the 99 and we're going into the central valley now. 99 actually goes deeper into it, kinda into the heartland of california-- oh shit. (laughs) sudden stop. hope this isn't a fucking traffic jam.

oh, please don't have a traffic jam in the middle of the fucking, central, valley. insanely crowded on the 5. think i'm gonna take an hour's break or so at starbucks. hopefully by then this traffic will have cleared a bit.

this place is dazzling, just dazing.

300 miles of this open space, and that's just half of it. a person walks, what, 3mph? 100 hrs to walk it. if you walk 12 hrs a day, that's what... almost 9 days to walk from LA's side to SF, through the valley.

286 miles to san francisco.

here's the one first hill in the central valley. i always remember this one, mainly b/c it has no purpose whatsoever. i think maybe it's just letting some water under or something.

i remember when i was riding my dad's car i'd always look behind and wait for the moment i couldn't see the san bernadino mtns anymore.

someday i wanna take a roadtrip to the middle of america where there's absolutely nothing but flatness.

7:48 and i'm leaving buttonwillow after an hour and a half pitstop. stopped for some coffee, and apple fritter that's got me kinda sick from sweetness, and finally surfed the internet.

road's looking a lot better, not nearly so crowded. [this is called the eye of the storm.] sun's starting to set into the west, and 250 miles left to go, 3-4 hrs left to drive, if i'm lucky and it stays pretty empty all the way up.

over to the east i can see some thunderheads over the plains.

still pretty warm out there, easily 90 degrees.

this wide open road, this is what a roadtrip's all about.

here's the wires that followed me over the mtns, crossing over the freeway. northeast for them, northwest for me. sun's setting in my eyes.

can't explain why it feels so good, but it does. no cars in front of me or behind for at least half a mile. i'm just cruising along at 80mph. it's like freedom, you know? right now all that matters right now is me, the road, the distance, the sky.

247 miles to san francisco.

as the sun sets into the west you start to get that nice ruddy glow again, that ring of purple around the horizon, blue above, purple shadows of mtns in the west. jet streaking overhead and you see the flare coming off their tails. thunderheads in the east lit up in all those colors, the little thunderheads in the front and the big anvilheads in the back.

8:09 and the sun's about to set over the mtns.

so the san bernadino mtn range is completely out of sight now.

racing the sun in a way -- the sun's setting behind this mtn range, but if i go fast enough i'll beat it to the horizon.

here's a little truth about driving on the highway. if you drive behind a car, it's much easier going. if you're in the lead, you have to break a lot of headwind.

clouds all around lit up in different colors. shadows are the same color as the sky. the entire trip is all about this part of the drive, the central valley at dusk. sights and sounds, images and memories.

207 miles to san francisco, 8:30pm.

i think i just caught up with the vacation-goers again. once again stuck behind a long line of cars.

8:40, 805 miles total, of which 300 were ran today. i'm taking a break because the I-5 is again crowded, and i'm letting it pass. down by the place where 198 comes over. last time it took me four hours to get from here to stanford -- hopefully this time it'll take me less.

full dark now, 196 miles to san francisco, 9 o'clock sharp. and the fucking freeway is so crowded... oh well.

right here is where i came in last time -- 198, coalinga.

this song here, silence, is another one that has lots of meaning for me. it definitely does remind me of -- (laughing, wry) decker and imogen, since this was the song that was playing when that fabulous c'mere scene happened. it seems really appropriate, given the lyrics. when my rage subsides, something, silence, all that, yeah.

ugh, smells like cow around here. kinda pissing me off how busy this road is this weekend. one of these days i'll do a speedrun of the central valley, no pitstops, one end to the other.

stupid fucker had an accident, and stupider fuckers slow down to look.

like 70 fucking miles an hour on I-5, central valley. that's how crowded this fucking shit is, and you look ahead, like a string of red ahead. goddammit, fucking, gah! can't they go any faster? what the hell is wrong with them!?

now we're going 55.

now we're not moving at all!

passing a real beauty of a truck here, all those lights, all that chrome, mirrors.

tourists are such fucking idiots. go up a hill and they all start braking, and then everyone stops dead. for no particular reason things will just slow down. mainly cuz tourists overreact at every tiny little bump in the road because they have kids in the back, and they feel like they don't wanna kill their kids -- FUCKER!!! [shouting at some slowass minivan i was passing] -- so then, they brake, randomly.

167 from San Francisco.

fucking tourists brake over everything! it's like a fucking chain reaction! you see one light up, the one behind it lights up, and on and on and pretty soon they're stopped fucking dead!

car parked by the side of the road with its blinkers flashing and everyone brakes for it. FUCK! the hell is wrong with them?

they just decided to stop in the middle of the fucking freeway again!

holy shit, huge crash on the other side -- like, fucking scorched, fire everywhere. i wonder what happened. no wonder we're slowing down, everyone's staring at the carnage. 'course i'm staring too, i have to admit it. holy shit.

car in front of me is an idiot, he keeps stepping on the brakes for no fuckin reason.

car in front of me, kinda two cars ahead, is trying to pass all these fucking trucks? but instead of passing at 80mph, he's going at 70, so he's taking fucking FOREVER. why don't you get out of the way so i can go ahead?

43 miles to the 152 junction, 156 to SF.

34 miles to the junction, 146 to SF, and this piece of shit car in front of me braking for no reason.

every other mile there's like a family pulled over being towed or whatever 'cause they're too fucking stupid to drive on the I-5.

137 miles to SF.

10:13 and i'm on the road again... took another little rest-stop at the rest-stop just before 152, and pretty soon i'll be off the 5 onto 152, and hopefully 2-3 hrs after that before i get home.

another big clot of cars passed and i'm kinda in the relaxed area afterwards. hopefully this'll last a while. kinda not racing like crazy this time, going 75mph, and hopefully it'll stay open.

vista point right now. but every time i'm here, it's dark. so i've never seen what's over there, because you can only get to it from the northbound side, and every single time i get here it's night. one of these days, i will come here by day and see what it's all about.

126 miles to SF.

a little bit of peace. i'm up in the hills already, still on the I-5, and i can see the stars overhead. 10:30pm.

about ready to leave the I-5 now, for 152. spent, what, a total of... when did i get on this road? 5pm? spent a total of 5.5 hrs on this road. you have to take out the 2 hrs of so i spent taking pitstops. about 3.5 hrs on this road, which is about right. so now i'm getting off, 152 to the west, and then 101, and home.

--

CA-152 West:

it's actually pretty empty tonight. that's nice. a lot freer breathing.

love this song: solid sessions' janeiro. friend of mine gave it to me. kinda reminded her of this scene i just played -- night driving, drove out to the countryside, made love in the front seat. and there was a sense of distance to the scene, which i suppose is what this song reflects. by day this place i'm driving through is beautiful. at night you can't see much, just shadows of mtns, stars. still beautiful, though. sorta desolate. this is a good drive.

stars overhead are very, very bright. oh, this is a great drive. 2 on 2 highway. here it's pretty empty. i really wanna stop somewhere and look at the stars. they're brilliant. i can see orion, shooting his bow. and there's so many other stars out there, because there's no light around for miles and miles. this is pure driving pleasure.

top of this thing now, coastal range. going down now. scenic route, but all i can see are the stars overhead -- but that's worth a look anyway.

everyone's going like 90mph, buncha mad dogs in these mtns.

2 lane highway through the garlic fields (laughs).

now i see in front of me the valley between the coastal range and the diablo range. 2-lane highway through farmlands and lots of trees, a very bay-area type of farm. not the sprawling plains of the central valley, but a more cloistered farmland.

shit, almost back to civilization! 101 just ahead!

--

101 North:

11:07, i'm on the 101 north. pretty familiar turf to me. i think i'll set it at 85mph and just let it ride. friday was, how many days ago? 4 days ago? came down this very road. feels like no time passed at all, feels like i never went anywhere. feels like this is just one of those vent-drives i have when i drive down to salinas or wherever i might go, and just come back again. but in the middle i've been down to the desert, been down to through valley. been to a place where it's a hundred degrees during the day. 60 degrees here, right now, at night. very different. hard to swallow, the idea that i've been so far from home and come all the way back again. this is the final stretch. i'm almost there. i'm very fucking tired. i don't know if i'll do this again -- oh, hell, of course i will.

i'm in san jose city limits, 11:17. usually, on my vent-drives, this is where i go, aw man, because this is where i turn back. this is probably the first time i've come up this road and went hell yeah, finally.

now i can see the glow of the bay area, lighting up the sky. after the whole evening running in darkness, it's a welcome sight.

sooner or later you make the realization that every mile you take is one closer to home, whether you're heading forward or back.

101 north, San Francisco: something about that sign is beautiful.

52 miles to SF.

unbelievable, i just opened the window and it's cold outside.

full circle: i've gone all the way through my mp3s and started again. think i'm not gonna complain about SF being hot for a LONG time. nothing can be hotter than palm springs.

11:39. i wanna make it home before midnight.

11:43, and i'm getting off the freeway. goodbye, 101. going home to san fran.

everything looks very familiar. almost there.

[listening to frou frou, shh] this song reminds me of getting 198 getting on the 5, trying to figure out wtf they're saying. stopping at a rest station to eat a bit, keep listening after, still don't get it. don't ask me about it. is it about sex? i think everything's about sex.

going home: the only thing on my mind now. going home.

now, i'm about to get off the main road. so it looks like... this trip takes me 1.5 tanks of gas each way. start out full, refuel at buttonwillow when i'm at 1/4 tank left. by the time i get to palm springs i'm at 1/4 tank again. coming back up, refuel at palm springs, again at buttonwillow.

all right, turning onto [my street]! everything looks the way i left it. okay, lemme park.

amazingly, my favorite parking spot is actually open, so that's very nice.

i am home! 11:49. i have driven a grand total of 974.5 miles. song right now is frou frou, shh. so now i'm just gonna close things up, go home. so here's me, signing off until the next long roadtrip, whenever that might be.