The future is now. Not really. What’s real is that the future is an illusion I’m chasing,  a ballon resting on water out of my reach and all my splashing around is only pushing the ballooon further away.  The splashing, displacement, fustration & fun is what’s real.  True.  There’s no arrival, just work.  So this better be work I can and want to do.

Demo this morning.  Sleep deprived.  Only remembered after ordering lunch (post chai latte) that I promised myself I would eat better, do my damndest to lost weight, no more excuses.  Damn it. Just a couple more potato chips, that’s all, promise.  We’ll see about tonight. Off to M’s haus.  I should bring wine.  Cheese goes with that.  I should really eat a vegetable today.

This is now.  Really. The reality of the sun, a mundane yellow settling over the streets of Burbank.  And that’s just the truth.  If this place ever had any natural color – and I’m skeptical – it’s just about all washed away now.  This is normal.  This is what Burbank is in every membory I have, even counting that time it snowed (!!) last February.  Not just bright but flared out & painful to the unshaded eye.

It’s only convenient to drive around here.  Anywhere you’re headed next is inconvenient for walking – and mass transit? in Burbank? You may as well walk the whole way.  It’s just a few major streets perpendicular to each other where all the activity is.  Though you wouldn’t know it from the utterly dull brick or stucco facades.  Off the major arteries are sleepy residences, single family dwellings manicured with pride or at least neighborly pressure.  Were it not for these studios and pet furniture stores, martial arts dojos, microscopic strip malls which uniformly feature a smoke shop, doughnut shop and Subway, and the occasional Mexican restaurant, Burbank would just be a very expensive bedroom community.  Don’t be silly, you may say, there’s NBC, there’s Disney….  Yeah, looking over the 134 freeway like they’re waiting for their turn to merge onto traffic and head off to more exciting digs.

But no worries, Burbank was Burbank-ing it up long before I was born and I expect it to carry on long after I shuffle along.

That the’s the real thing.  The thing that isn’t defined by existing now, but defines now by existing. The hard concrete that only matters because of a history that promises a future.  You can’t bet on much, particularly anything as fickle or self-cannibalizing as the entertainment industry.  Well, okay, obviously you can, but you’d have to be an idiot to do it.  I should know.  But my point is simply that if there’s one phenomenon you can always bank on it’s the human need to dream out loud and furthermore the need, the compulsion to pull those dreams out of the context of imagination and future and create them here in the present, in reality where we can beat ourselves senseless on them.

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The above was written Monday August 1, 2011, at about noon.  I’ve edited it a little but haven’t updated it.  So you’ll just have to suffer with not knowing if I ever ate another vegetable.