An idea for a blog entry came into my head. It bubbled up to the surface of consciousness early this morning, perhaps while I was fighting off my second migraine in twenty-four hours. I didn't grab a notebook quickly enough and the idea disappeared.
No matter, I thought. It will come back. Somewhere later in the day it will surface again and I'll jot it down.
I went downtown. Took the Metra. I like taking the the Metra and walking across the Loop -- from the river to Michigan Avenue, from Madison down to Harrison. Sometimes I'll just walk along and take in the city. I like the city, have come to terms with it in ways that I have not been able to come to terms with other parts of my life. A city is a wild, beautiful, untamed thing. It's worth taking in.
Other times, I'll work out scenes for stories. Like today: I worked on two scenes. One I'll need in one of my future saur stories, between Doc and Axel. Very dramatic scene and will not give it away now, though I'll hint that I also had Holst's "Mars" music from "The Planets" orchestral suite in my head at the same time, along with a little tag, a cue, from some James Horner score -- dramatic stuff.
The other idea had to do with maybe a brief story or anecdote about a silent director, sitting in his big house with a beautiful, mysterious woman (who would have to look like some sort of combination between Louise Brooks and Clara Bow -- if such a combo is even possible without setting the universe on fire). Anyway, the film director explains to the mysterious lady how he has insured his immortality by preserving prints of all his films and securing them in a vault downstairs. "Future generations will know my work."
The mysterious woman is skeptical, asks to see the vault, and the director gladly obliges.
She takes a cigar, lights it, starts a fire. The contents of the vault is destroyed. Every last frame, every last image, lost. The director is in agony -- all his work, over a twenty year career, is now in ashes. Unless the studios have other prints (and we know most of the studios cleaned out their vaults with regularity once they considered the films stored therein were past their "sell by" date, and that no one would ever want to see them again) all of his work will be added to that list of "lost films" so many scholars of our day have devoted themselves to seeking out and rediscovering.
"There," says the mysterious woman, "now you will be immortal." For instead of having the films saved and ready for the perusal of every jaded scholar, all of the director's work now belongs to the medium of imagination, ever elusive, ever yearned for, ever an echo of eternity.
So I get to campus, log on in the computer lab, get through my e-mail and . . .
Zzzzzz-anggg! Another migraine. The words in my head will not adhere to each other enough to form sentences. Every keystroke drives a railroad spike through a space above my right eyeball.
All day yesterday, I fought with migraine, and finally won. What the hell's going on now?
I think it's that blog post idea -- the one I forgot early this morning. Out of frustration, it exploded somewhere in my skull. Unforgiving, unforgetting.
I file this post as a compensation, and penance. I won't let another lost idea blow up in my skull again, promise.
And by the way -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Supermarine_Southampton.jpg . . . That's a pic of a Supermarine Southhampton, pride of the British Royal Navy circa 1925. I'm going to need that if I include a scene from my fictional character's first screenplay for "The Call of Cthulhu" (from "The Cthulhu Orthodontist") -- Doc Savage meets H. P. Lovecraft meets the great aunt of Emma Peel. A film that can only exist in the imagination and is therefore immortal.
Time to head back to the Metra Station.
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