Maybe I’ve been lazy, simply moving words around to pass the time, but today I woke up and simply looked at Gloria Grahame. Take a moment. Right? Just goes to show you the debilitating effects of a routine. Hitchhike to…

The shadows in Plato’s allegorical cave are meant to represent a reflected reality half-perceived by the unenlightened, but tell me Plato, how can you look at the shadow of Gloria Grahame’s hand slashed across the front of her silk dress…

His pedantic quoting of the planet’s literature having fallen on deaf ears, the tiny upside-down alien on Gloria’s right shoulder (his antenna now retracting in a crisis of confidence) is becoming desperate, and potentially dangerous: “We have arrived on this…

Is this the 1/24th of a second he fell in love with her, grinning like a schoolboy, or was he always in love with her, a moment being the only way we know to remember?

A little-known Hollywood fact: Humphrey Bogart had an extraordinarily odd left pinkie, sharply hooked as if for trout. To rephrase Nietzsche: when nothing matters, everything matters.⠀

Flashback to 1993 and a restaurant in downtown Richmond called Bogart’s. She lit a cigarette, still conceivable in the last decade of Bogie’s century, and said we should really talk sometime, really talk, not like this, before falling silent to…

You begin to understand meditation, and living in the moment. You realize that a moment, properly inhabited, is too brief for thought. And yet it seems you cannot properly inhabit even 1/24th of a second. Your shirt is too tight.…

These days I often think of that William Carlos Williams poem:⠀⠀so much depends⠀upon⠀⠀a red wheel⠀barrow⠀⠀glazed with rain⠀water⠀⠀beside the white⠀chickens⠀⠀So much depends upon the loose cigarette I’ve just discovered between Bogart’s thumb and forefinger. Will it rise mouthwards to mirror Gloria’s…

His hand returns to his lighter, like a talisman you clutch to ward off the vampires, some welcome familiarity faced with this curled-lip bloodthirsty blonde. She is the future to which you belong, but for once let time move slow.

From the novel: “’You’re pretty sure of yourself, aren’t you, Dix?’⠀ ⠀ ‘Never before.’⠀ ⠀ Her eyes opened full again and laughter echoed through her. ‘Oh brother!’ she breathed.⠀ ⠀ He didn’t answer her, only with the look in his…