A story of giants.

Here, to smoke, have coffee. And if you do it together it's fantastic. Or to draw: you know, you take a pencil and you make a dark line, then you make a light line and together it's a good line. Or when your hands are cold, you rub them together.

I have been inundating myself with films, because of course. There has been your Twin Peaks, my Days of Heaven, Eyes Wide Shut, Synecdoche, New York, and on, like Wings of Desire and Paris, Texas. They make threads that weave between. Some short while ago I was watching a television programme, or perhaps a movie, though actually not at all--but I remember watching, in myself, a line of thought about voice and suffocation that ran through and beyond this programme on the screen. Some images of a contentment that glares, one that keeps a steady demand of the depth and frequency of conversation with another person--a demand whose results are the inverse of depth and frequency. Surprised by the violence of casualness. There, it is absolute. The way that a person waits until the very end of a phone call to give their least, their meager apology to the greatest trouble. And all the time conducting a beastly happiness, a slanderous facade that works to sing all the louder when it realizes that its feet stand in acid and rot. I do not know what that might feel like to understand it, I do not think I could know. I do not know what it is like to eschew the account of all that is present, and to demand ignorance. I have been watching these films that are somehow all strung together, and I realized this morning, while watching one of them, that it is in the way that these people walk through their scenes. Their walks are among what has been peeled off, but still prodding and clenching the spot that is left there, true steps in decisions of honesty. I was thinking also of the violence in certain paradoxes, ones that offer an opportunity for conversation when, long before, the offering has already been made impossible and refused to be mutually overcome. Yeah, I thought. Yes, I said. Tonight I will watch Bottle Rocket.

I used to make long speeches to you after you left. I used to talk to you all the time, even though I was alone. I walked around for months talking to you.