The other night I had the weirdest dream. In it, I was walking around in some old 1960s Italian film, lots of heavy imagery floating around. But actually, there was none: It was pitch black, tone-less. I was strolling through an absolutely dark playground at what I would have to assume was night. I could only hear the sound of my expensive leather shoes as they moved along the pavement.

from here.

How did I know it was a playground since it was so dark, since I could see so little? I don’t know. The feeling of it, I guess. The sound of rusty chains as the wind gently blew the swings back and forth. The absence of laughter. Just a feeling.

But then I could hear the steps another. I stopped and looked around. I could see nothing, of course. And his footsteps stopped too. For too long of a moment, there was absolute silence.

from here.

And when I started walking again, so did he. His footsteps matching mine perfectly. I stopped again after a moment and so did he. I waited. Then just a few feet away from me, his face was illuminated by a lighter as he lit a cigarette dangling from his lips.

“I didn’t see you there,” I said, or something equally stupid.

“No shit,” he said.

“Yeah,” I said, ignoring it. “Dark out tonight, huh?”

“That’s because all the stars were eaten out of the sky,” he told me. He said it so slowly, rhythmically, nonchalantly, like it was this normal thing. Or worse: that this horrible thing had happened years and years earlier and he accepted it. Like there was no more words to be wasted on this. I wanted to question him about it but then I woke up.

from here.

The world felt weird to me then. I saw everything in half light wherever I went, and viewed everything from a weird angle, which put a sinister lean on just about wherever I went. It reminded me of the implied post-nuclear imagery in Antonioni’s L’Eclisse:

Obviously the dream kind of hung with me a good portion of the next day, just lingering over me. Not so much like a rainy cloud like you would see in a cartoon or anything like that, but more like an unanswered question. But there was no question there, so certainly there could be no answer, right?

The why’s behind how I blog are like that, in a way. It’s how my mind works: Constantly looking for connections between different things that probably should not be connected. It doesn’t always – or usually – make sense to others, but then again, I don’t ask it too. I just ask that it makes sense to me, somehow (even if I do secretly worry about others getting it too).

Let’s just say that I was so thankful when the idea of synchronicity came into my world. It made me feel like maybe, just maybe, I wasn’t crazy.

Later that day, the day after the dream, I ran into my good friend Conrad Noir. He had this half excited, half puzzled look on his face. “Hey,” he said when he saw me. “I brought back that book you let me borrow. I just read it. I…”

“What book?” I asked. And he showed it to me:

Black Hole by Charles Burns. “Oh,” I said and smiled. He asked me why I was smiling but I didn’t answer.

Yesterday at work, Conrad and I were bullshitting through our day with one of our co-workers. The co-worker had just watched the trailer to the new Michael Jai White film, Black Dynamite. If you haven’t seen it, just know that it’s pure wonderful ridiculous, and I highly recommend you watch it. Go do so now. I’ll be here when you get back.

We were sitting around, talking about it like stupid little fanboys, just like we are, and laughing about how a movie like this excites more than a hundred million Tarantino projects like Inglorious Basterds.

“Some day,” Conrad said to us, “I really want to make a blaxpoitation movie. Like the blackest, meanest blaxpoitation movie ever. I just don’t know what I’d call it.”

I’ve got a great title for you, I told him. On my face I wore the same smile that I had on when he brought me the book the day before. “What?” he asked. My smile grew larger, produced teeth, and I said, “The Black Blackness.”

from here.

We had a good laugh about that, ha ha ha, and joked about how perhaps BizarrObama could make an appearance in there somewhere. Ha ha ha. But when the laughter died down a little, I was left there thinking to myself about things…

But that’s a story for another time. I don’t want to bore you with philosophical pondering into the abyss and useless questions like…

…nah, that’s not for me. Not right now, at least. Instead, I have thinking to do. Maybe posting this is the answer, but maybe it isn’t. Just like… maybe I should sit here reading about dark stars and looking at pictures of black holes online or maybe I should go put some extra dreamy shoegaze on my headphones and go outside to wait for the stars to come out?

Either way, you should go read Black Hole by Charles Burns. Eventually it’ll be made into a movie, which at one point was going to be directed by either the French guy who gave us Haute Tension or by David Fincher with a script by Neil Gaiman. But you want to read it now, trust me. Just imagine how great their film would’ve been had it not fallen into a black hole of it’s own.

Perhaps it’s a perspective thing. Perhaps I was half right before?

Perhaps not everything has to make sense.