2003-03-10 12:50 p.m.
no come down

Fast and furious is the pace, ghost town is the place.

The law firm's almost dead quiet today...ironic since I'm working on a script about disembodied spirits, the comic I'm rushing to get together for San Diego in July.

I'm fighting off all temptations to rent and watch the first season of Six Feet Under, because I think it's just going to color what I'm working on (both are about dealing with death, just from differing sides of the etheric veil). Even so, I took a page from good television: keep the story on track, flesh it out as hard as need to, but keep it about PEOPLE, and that's where it's been going in my head, so I'm happy.

The conceit can never outweigh the story or its importance to the characters.

I'm amazed I'm functional today. Spent a hilariously tiring day-and-a-half with L in Beantown, seeing friends, eating great food (had a butternut squash, goat cheese, sage and carmelized onion pizza for one meal, Ethiopian food for the other), looking over glass flowers at Harvard and comic art at a gallery.

All the while, all the while, just bathing in the warmth that is connecting energy. It's nothing specific...we just always have something to talk about, always catch the other smiling for no reason, always have a warm hand to share a pocket with.

I have no idea what it is to be fascinated by shapes and structure the way she seems to be, but it's fun to watch her zeal. She spent an hour finding the bits of flowers that she wanted to remember and copied them into her sketchbook.

The winter is flying by, thawing out, and it feels like my turn finally came up on fortune's wheel back in October, when I met this one. She's such a keeper, as Joe Momma would say.

While L was sketching, I stood and talked with Gar about the piecemeal nature of the human psyche and how it all went back to the dinosaur eggs in the next room. (If you think about it, all of the elements of the reptile brain are present in the human or primate, if vestigial or less pronounced, and newspapers tend to refer to remorseless killers as reptilian...is it such a far-fetched idea that some people rely on the reptile brain more than their mammal one?)