Insert badly over-used "Flying Circus" reference here.

This week was movie-light for me, mostly because I've been playing Guild Wars a lot. (It is as good, if not better than, the beta made it seem). I saw Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb today, but spotlighting it would be stupidly pointless. If you haven't seen it, go out and see it. It's a classic for a reason. The "Behind the scenes" featurette was also pretty good.

Because Dr. Strangelove was the only movie I saw this week (and because I don't feel like half-assing a review of something I saw months ago), I will instead post a shortish semi-stream-of-consciousness piece I wrote a while ago. I'll probably have another review next week (perhaps of a certain new movie), so don't worry about this becoming a recurring theme. Anyway:

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As I was running along the brick wall (full of cracks and absolutely perfectly straight lines of grought sticking out) at full speed (precariously close to the wall, might I add), I came to a startling revelation.

And I will not tell you what it is.

This is the sort of revelation that means nothing to anyone, not even me, but still affects my life profoundly. Indebtedly.

That revelation was chiefly why I was running along the brick wall (filled with cracks and perfectly geometric lines of grought poking out) at full speed (dangeresquely close to the wall, I might arithmatate). For, you see, my revelation was of the sort that it is, to be frank, personal and personal only. But of course, revelations, even of the persona variety, are meant to be shared. No sense in being selfish, after all. So few revelations to go around, after all.

So I shared it with the one person whom I thought would appreciate the profundity of it all. She did not, as my flight clearly suggests. Her volume button was depressed and I fear the neighbors telephoned the watch. So I ran and run and am running along that brick wall with such handsome and punctual lines.

My name is Jonathan Evergreen, Jack to many, Jackass to many more. My life is lived in shards. Like this one, for example. Shard 27B-6. Terrifying, isn’t it? Yes.

In the previous shard, 27B-5, I was walking my dog. Yes, more movement. Not along an angular brick wall, as I am now. No! my dog was on a stroll and I was accompanying him through a blue part of town. The homes were dressed in lightest robins egg, the streets were the color of exulted violet, and the city towers that stretched high into the sky to puncture the clouds themselves, those were the hue of blue that one only sees in a blood-stained carpet bombarded with the light of a sparrow’s wing in the sunrise.

Oh, it was so very very blue.

And I walked my blissfully color-blind dog walking down Blue Lane until he reached the intersection of Blue Lane and Blue Drive at which point we made a sharp right turn by way of the left hand side of the street, Blue Drive, sending us out an alley and into a tiny bookstore that happily allowed pets.

The bookstore was titled, appropriately enough, Blue Drive Hats. They sold mass-production paperbacks that had the built-in feature of being hat-like. I entered the clanging door, not really knowing what to expect, for although I had seen many paperback books before and many hats before, I had never yet seen a paperback book hat store in a blue street, which it indeed was.

Clangity bomp. Noisey sound the bells on the door make when opened. A small steel diode fell from a lofty place on the ceiling when I opened the door, landed on a small lever, and fired, via air cannon, a sliver-thin book-hat into my forehead where it buried itself, momentarily, until I thought about pain and it fell out of its own accord. Catching it, I read its phrase in one swift stroke – I seem to have lost it since thus – and that was enough to trigger what you might call an epiphany, but I call it revelation.

Nothing earth-shattering about the intensely personal revelation. It’s just something everyone should know, which is why I cannot tell you anything about it, except that its very simple while, at the same time, staring you right in the face.

My dog got away from me, exulted at the smell of bookish hat, a hat you can read. I would have chased him through the store, only to find him sniffing the tail end of an exhaust pipe somewhere in the Periodicals section except that a sign dropped from the roof displaying the only rule of the comely shop: “Never eat instant soup in a bar with monkeys.” Seemed reasonable enough, so I thought I’d try following it. It could be hard, however, as I intend fully to go to quite a few bars in my life, just as soon as I begin going to bars, and I think it highly likely that those bars will serve instant soup, particularly with monkeys.

It’s nice to see a store concerned about my morality. Finite.