윤

(I suppose it could’ve been worse.)

Bumped it up the Netflix queue when I saw the wait was over. My Pioneer didn’t last but 45 minutes into it before it started hoppin’ & skippin’ again, but we continued downstairs—and that’s all I have in the way of extraneous information. Avatar seems like a Disney cartoon in comparison. Here we have a similar-enough fairy tale of a human being transcending himself by becoming one of them (ever notice that this is usually the most implausible part of science fiction), only without any fairies or the tail. Or ten times the budget.

I cannot believe they’re finally on DVD! Not the originals that fucked me up with their depiction of characters in varying degrees of anthropomorphism making out at the end, but the truly fucked-up Saturday morning version that used to ease my transition into the waking world. Batman history must owe something to Bat-Bat. And Ring-a-Ding the mystery-solving great dane and his team of ethnically-diverse ghost detectives, oh my dear lord. Honestly, I don’t remember cartoons making me laugh before this.

Now I’m making up my own words. I was in a buffet-style cafeteria (and always without enough money for what I want), and couldn’t for the life of me remember what it meant. Later I’d learn that it was French, and related to “criminal”?

Have I mentioned already how I’ve been dreaming so much that I wake up like I’ve walked out of the Dark Knight? Well, a version of Dark Knight where the perspective switches between Batman’s and mine, all sorts of details are wrong and the story unravels in a direction somewhat if not completely unlike that of the original. This weekend I came up with no less than three episodes of House and an alternate ending to the Prisoner, apparently filmed later in the Seventies—must be my mind blurring those two decades again, from memories of reunion shows like this one—where No. Six is shot dead by the shopkeeper!

So Sunday afternoon I multi-tasked in the six-episode universally-panned miniseries from last year, and yes, I hated it. Bad enough they’d even hint that the “93” character was Patrick McGoohan’s (I get it, 9-3=6), but there were so many of them, who could keep track, much less care? Life in the twenty-first century is so far one long jail sentence imposed to keep us free from terrorism, and another Matrix is the best they could come up with? I’ve mellowed, though, and might actually agree to the suggestion that the series be remade every now and then, if only to shake things up, to remind us the world hasn’t changed, much, and if we’re to measure progress with a penny-farthing, it’s gotten worse.

I hope someday he’ll find this entry (among those that I’m less inclined to share) and understand the nomenclature, whatever the final result. His mother, despite her initial protest, surprised me by using it to refer to him no less than twice last night, but apparently a co-worker brought up Chuck’s word “trauma” again. My stance remains if that’s his greatest obstacle to socialization, he’s set; in some future classroom of Liams and Mayas, how would a John or Mary fare?

Not that 老婆 has made such a suggestion, but hers have gone from Kaden to Connor to, most recently, Valerian—which does, to its credit, contain her entire name; it would, however, deprive him of his own initial, and he’d almost certainly never be called by the full version unless civilization were to revert to a glorious era of swords and sorcery—the fact that it has in shorter than the month since we’ve known tells me they’re alternates, not ideas. Xavier came to me while running that weekend before seeing the doctor, after giving up trying to convince a person I’d met in an office that there was more to Avery than labels. Harve conjures the image of a balding White man; Harvey, one with half a face. Linus would combine both our families, without the subtlety of an anagram, and has polled better, but feels out of time. If not so much as Valerian.

But still, there’s three months left to decide. If experience tells us anything, it’ll be a nail-biter. Son, please know that my intention was never to make you the mere product of a jumble game, but if the rule is for you to be stuck with my last name, then you should be given one that allows you to be someone else yet always reminds you of the wonderful woman who did make you.

Update (January 27, 2009): Grandma’s been thinking of one on her own, and suggested 杰威 (jié​wēi). Sheil made the connection that it combines our names.​ Of course my knowledge of Chinese is laughable, probably worse than yours by the time you can read this, so my contribution’s naught, while your mom wants to use the alternate 傑 character to offset your overbearing zodiac.

Had not one, but two dreams over the weekend recommending I be more frightened of heights. (My midnight screenings have been positively exhausting for a week now, and while only a layman might psychoanalyze them as compensation for lack of real-world stimuli, I’m tempted to seek some seasonal or otherwise environmental pattern.) It was stairs again in the first, 老婆 having gone ahead at an unfamiliar airport and a thousand-foot almost vertical flight taking me out of the terminal. At the top a moving walkway ramped down to an attached shopping mall, but I didn’t think I’d find her in the mostly empty high-end stores. This morning I was participating in another Indiana Jones movie—which, interestingly enough, would be in the news I read afterward—where a cargo truck was stored on a platform high above the ground. Being inside it and seeing the heroes on their horses far below was quite an intimidating sight, perhaps because of my precarious position. Parked there also was a late-model white Dodge Avenger or the like, which struck me as an anachronism but I explained away by the modern setting of this latest sequel. Not correct, of course.

Far cry from the hushed archives where I read the original stories (well, Arsène Lupin ones featuring Holmlock Shears), but the spectacle-like pacing kept me from fidgeting—much. If they’re remaking the Prisoner and putting the Beatles in Rock Band, why not sell Holmes and Watson as the Adam and Steve of buddy flicks? Can’t help but snicker how much their new relationship owes to House and Wilson’s, and Linda’s right, Hugh Laurie’d make a fabulous Moriarty. Unless he had to get naked, too.

I really must dream of Walden Pond or something to that effect, because these action movies are wreaking havoc on my ocular muscles. This morning I was a prisoner of Korean gangsters, and for their amusement they cuffed me and another woman to a single car on an indoor roller coaster. (Must be from the park in the movie 老婆 Netflixed last night.) She wasn’t in on it and expected a mere thrill ride; I knew different. It was a death machine, a spectacle being filmed for their perverse pleasure, so leaned into her lap to avoid the saw blades that surely decapitated her after the last dip. They must’ve assumed I suffered the same fate because they let down their guard while releasing us, and I sprung into action, making a run for it while incapacitating any of them in my path. My cries for help were meant to reach someone in the audience, perhaps, but I knocked their heads quite ably until I was gunned down by the boss hiding in a children’s tower.

But it wasn’t over for me. Or for them, I was determined. My “soul” rose and made its way through the crowd. I could tell living from dead (the many whom I left in that state) by whether or not they were hovering off the ground—and promptly turned black and vanished into the ether, as was their fate—and of course, if they could see me. One person with her feet planted could, a young girl with curly blonde hair. Apparently this meant that she was of a kind who was also receptive to possession, so I entered her body and took over. A quick peek to confirm, then I would use her to get close to my killer and exact revenge, but thought it was much too qualified as a keeper for a satisfying lesbian life to risk damage and left to find another, disposable host.