I recently came across some interesting facts in a critically acclaimed science journal.
Okay, I was reading just a regular article.
All right, I was reading the IMDB trivia facts for the film “Armageddon.”

The internet, in all it’s infinite horrors, somehow led me to this page. I’ve never seen Armageddon, but now I sort of want to because the trivia revealed a fascinating fact I had never considered: NASA has detailed procedures for if an astronaut loses their shit in space.

Of course they would.
Why should this surprise me? They are the ultimate boy scouts, prepared for everything.
And here’s something that also shouldn’t surprise me: The procedure involves duct tape.
Of course it would.

The wrists and ankles of the “crazed” astronaut should be bound with duct tape and then tied down with a bungee chord. Last thing you want bouncing off the walls is a crazed astronaut. If necessary, tranquilizers will be administered either by pill or injection.

This information was made especially public after that lady astronaut strapped on a diaper and drove thousands of miles to try and maybe murder another lady who was possible competition for another astronaut. It’s like I always say, mo shuttle launches mo problems.

But I find it especially relevant after all the recent Mars talk. NASA talks about possibly getting there by 2030. In recent weeks NASA revealed plans for in-flight food. Rich billionaires want to fund their own private missions. Some even think it could be done within the next five years. The private companies want to send two people (preferably older and married) for 500 days. NASA’s trip would take around 2.5 years. Some scientists want volunteers to take a one-way trip.

One of the first conversations I had with my now-boyfriend was regarding the couple that might be sent on a 500 day mission around Mars. I was (and still am) convinced it will be a psychological and emotional disaster. And in my own sick and twisted way, this makes me hope it happens. I’m serious, call Donald Trump, this will be the highest-grossing reality show EVER. But my man had the opposite take; he sees it going fine. Pleasant even. They have psychological screenings and special trainings. I believe his exact words were, “it’ll be heartwarming…sort of like a Stockholm syndrome RomCom.”

There are plenty of scientists who argue for the successful outcome of sending an older, married, couple into space for 500 days. The most convincing piece I read on the matter looks at couples who have withstood serious isolation together.

But that’s different. They weren’t confined to a closet. For 500 days. Without external stimulation or any possible means of escape.  The whole idea is fascinatingly horrific to me. PLUS what if the person “getting space crazy” is the one who ties up the other person with duct tape!? With only two people who knows what would happen with all the duct tape. People gota sleep sometime…

SEEKING ASTRONAUTS: YOUNG SINGLES NEED NOT APPLY

Wanted: Older couple for round-trip (fingers crossed) trip to Mars.

Accommodations: While there is no room for pressurized suits there will be approx 3,000 lbs of dehydrated food as well as 60 lbs of toilet paper. There should be a window. And no, it absolutely cannot be opened.

Perks: Scientists are currently working on a system that will convert urine into drinking water.

Funding: Provided by a lot of eccentric billionaires. Denis Tito, the first space “tourist” who paid $20 million to spend time on the space station, told the BBC News that “If a bunch of billionaires have committed the approx $1-2bn required, then we could see history being made in under five years.” Piece – o -cake, Tito. Also, how fun is it to say “bunch of billionaires”?

Straight to the baby-maker: Radiation is a problem, so ideally you’re older. And already made babies. And don’t want any more.

Biosphere 4?: You’ll probably want to read up on the Biosphere projects. People sealed in an independent eco-system for two years. Things got….interesting. And they had 3 acres.

Romance: The whole world waits with bated breath to finally see video footage of two people trying to bone in zero gravity. I’m making popcorn as we speak.

A view of the French countryside from a mountainous village.

Traveling abroad will make you brave in ways you never thought you’d be. I won’t eat salad, strawberries, or shrimp, but today I tried foie gras, fig bread, and scallops. I’ve been known to wake people up in the middle of the night to have them come kill spiders for me, but I’ve personally dispatched a few dozen since being here (there was a hatching in my bathroom). I don’t like even hugging people I’m not close to, but I didn’t flinch through eight rounds of cheek kissing (faire la bise), even though two of the people I was meeting were boys in their late teens. (It was a large family; apparently in France you get big financial incentives for having three or more children.)

In other ways, traveling abroad will make you a coward. Everything makes me nervous. I practice the most basic phrases in my head three or four times before attempting to say them, and I still sometimes chicken out and ask if they speak English. Never before have I realized how much English makes me comfortable, how much I depend on being able to speak and understand easily.

I haven’t done any writing yet since arriving. Truth be told, I haven’t written regularly in a while. Every time I try, I reread it and hate it. I think, if it bores me, it will certainly bore others. I’m hoping a change of scenery will help with what I can only describe as a mix of writers block and low writing self-esteem. I saw Carcassonne yesterday, and the Mediterranean, and there were a few moments, while my feet were in the water, or while I was walking the walls of the city, when I thought I might have something to say, something worthwhile. I haven’t tried writing it yet, though. There’s a part of me that wonders why I should stay inside writing when there’s a whole country out there to explore.

So far, these emotions have been battling it out. I’m not sure yet which will win, who I’ll be: a confident explorer who laughs off her language (and culture) mistakes, or a scared introvert who stays home writing and eating pizza. Time will tell. I’ve got twenty-four days left.

1. Misinform When You Can

You may start by asking a suggestive question: “Did you see that man’s gun?” This trick works by adding information to complete a description—we saw the man, and according to this question, he had a gun; ergo, he had a gun. This type of memory-planting is a favorite of Law and Order. Also works well for gaslighting.

1. Inflate Imagination

Imagining an event from long ago increases the belief the event occurred. If you remember to a younger sibling, say, the time he left a stuffed animal at the diner and cried so hard we had turn around the car and drive an hour back to get it, he’ll start to imagine the event and believe it happened.

But you can also tap into adult confusions—something as mundane as thinking about paying the gas bill may make you believe that you did.

1. Trace the Fuzziness

We create memories in two ways: “verbatim traces,” which recall events, and “gist traces,” which recall the meaning of what happened. Children often don’t extrapolate meaning from experiences; they tend to have more accurate memories of events. Adults on the other hand tend to recall their interpretations of events—making them more susceptible to meddling false memories.

1. Fiddle with Happiness

When we are happy, we pay less attention to details and tend to remember things in broad terms.

1. Exploit Inference (Bias) Errors

Our memories have holes in them, so we toss details that seem to fit into the gaps. The details we add come from our current knowledge, beliefs, and biases. Those geeks from high school? Pimpled, drinking Faygo, talking about D&D.

Save me, Hurley

The Mega Millions lottery in North Carolina has reached $475,000,000. Some of my coworkers started a pool for tickets. I bought my own, separate from the pool. While in line at the Quik Mart, I couldn’t help but sing, “If I had a million dollars I could buy your love.” If I had a million dollars, I would buy a billboard on I-40 & paint a short poem across the space, or maybe I would just put my favorite line from a Terrance Hayes poem, “Enough sky and a trail.”  I would buy a treadmill & then I would take it to a field & destroy it like that scene in Office Space. If I had a million dollars, I would pay off my brother’s student loans, but not my own. All that money & yet, I would still feel the happiest on an open road in my 2007 Dodge Caliber, all the windows down.  I still wouldn’t call my father. If I had a million dollars I would fly to Russia specifically  to  Moscow, because it’s Moscow. I still wouldn’t send birthday cards on time, if at all. I would hope the money wasn’t cursed like Hurley was cursed with 1.56 million dollars on the show Lost. Like Hurley, I would hope the money wouldn’t drive me insane or drive away everyone close to me.

Photo by Leandro Senna, courtesy of www.leandrosenna.com

The designer/artist Leandro Senna says of the project:

Inspired by Bob Dylan’s ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ video, where he flips cards with the lyrics as the song plays, I decided to recreate those cards with handmade type. I ended up doing all the lyrics, and not just some of the words, as Dylan did.

There are 66 cards done in one month during my spare time using only pencil, black tint pens and brushes. The challenge was not to use the computer, no retouching was allowed. Getting a letter wrong meant starting the page over. There are some intentional misspellings and puns on the original song video, so I tried to keep that in a certain way.

Here’s the link to see closeup photos of each individual card, and here’s the link to see the video of these cards flipped through with the song overlaid. Which cards are your favorites?

And of course, if you need a fix, here’s the original video clip with Dylan.

Click here to view the embedded video.

I like to imagine they were collecting my grandmother’s memories. It was New Year’s Eve and I was walking home from whatever party I’d gone to — I don’t really remember it well. I was walking home and I heard a clatter from the dumpster to my right and there, frozen and staring back at me, were two racoons. We stood there for a while. The neighborhood was silent.  The racoons held objects in their paws. When I got home I simply wrote in my journal: ran into a couple racoons at the dumpster. Maybe they have grandma. 

I don’t remember this past New Year’s Eve very well. I know someone lit illegal fireworks in the street. I know someone had me eat a certain number of grapes since it’s supposed to be good luck in Spain. I think.
And it’s not that I’d had too much to drink. It’s just that a lot of my memories blur together. They blend and fade and soon I’m holding them like a broken-in pair of Levis and I have no idea where I got them in the first place. I don’t remember a lot of my childhood. Friends remind me of shared events that are completely absent from my memory. I know I’ve traveled to different countries, been to endless museums, but I could not tell you stories from these adventures.

My terrible memory never really concerned me until my grandmother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. Now I fixate. I obsess. I try to journal every day. I no longer journal for the reasons I used to. Growing up I would write about boys and love and insecurities in order to self-indulge and work through emotions. Now I journal to record. For future reference. I often myself worrying about “losing” a memory. When I lapse in my journaling I feel guilty and disappointed in myself.

I’m not exactly sure where or how racoons live. I picture hollowed logs, mossy and moist. Or a burrow in a field. Maybe they peek out from a knot in a tree or they build nests in rock walls. I  have no idea and have consciously decided not to research it too much.
Because where they live, wherever it is that is deep and dark in nature, that’s where I picture my grandmother’s memories. Stashed in piles. Like jewels and shiny objects the racoons couldn’t resist.

My grandmother’s childhood in New Mexico, the year during the depression when her and her family lived in an abandoned movie theater, is shaped like a scratched pocket watch. The immobile hands are the mattress that sat on the floor of the projection room, shared by my grandmother and her two sisters.

The clarinet she played in the school band looks like a silver necklace.

The white hat she wore when she married my grandfather is a gold button.

Her oil paints, her paintbrushes, the turpentine, easels, palettes, and canvases, sit in the corner like a pile of marbles.

The songs she would play on her organ and the songs she would sing with her church choir all look like tinsel you might see on a Christmas Tree.

And these racoons hoard her memories. Every night they sneak in and by morning they’ve stolen a few more items.
I don’t usually assign symbolism to the animals I encounter in life, but for some reason my New Year’s Eve racoons felt significant. Because for months now I return to them when I think about the things we lose. How Alzheimer’s is like having a thief take up residence in your brain. A classic case of breaking and entering. It’s a bandit with a mask and it steals from you.

But I think I get it.  Because so far my year has been defined by a fear of losing the things I cherish most. And because I want to do the same. I want to steal all those memories. I want to hoard my own. I want to break into the people I love, ransack the place, and begin my own little card catalog of memories. An archive. I want to put a button in an envelope and mail it to you and I want you to know that means I love you.

Seriously, what was this movie about? All I remember was that the air conditioner kills himself at the start of the movie.

In my dreams/daydreams/wandering thoughts, I often find myself in situations where a gang member/werewolf/ex-boyfriend/Republican attacks and I have to defend myself and all the people in whatever room/hallway/beach I happen to be in.

So I kick some ass. With all the fake ghetto karate skills and magical powers I am willing to attribute to my dream self. I save babies from burning buildings. I defend my colleagues and friends from armies of invading aliens.

I am awesome. In my dreams, that is.

The sad truth is, however, in reality I live in a cave. I see a handsy drunk man coming my way, and I hide in the bathroom and sit fully clothed on the toilet for a good five minutes. An old lady tells me that I’m getting fat and will never get married, and I laugh awkwardly and wait until I get home to tell off the ghost of her in front of my cats.

The truth is, most days I’m not even certain what my voice sounds like, and the last time someone did mildly attack me, I cried.

I spend a lot of time thinking about what it means to be brave. It seems to me that we are often defining bravery in terms of action. We perform “acts” of valor and we “stand up” to bullies and we “fight” for what we believe in. It’s all very active, which concerns me because I don’t consider myself a very active person, at least not physically. I can barely motivate myself to go to the gym and run in place for half an hour.

A few months ago, I ran into an old college classmate that I hadn’t seen in a while, and when I told him that I got my MFA in poetry, he said “Oh wow. That’s brave.” And he wasn’t being sarcastic either (I think). And I don’t know whether he thought it was brave because I chose to get a graduate degree in something unconventional, or because that unconventional thing doesn’t pay the bills, or because it’s something that he himself would never dream of doing. I had no idea what to say in response, and I’m pretty sure I mumbled something and quickly changed the subject.

And this is the part of the post where I’m meant to say something like, And then I woke up the next morning and realized he was right, I AM brave. And then I jumped on a horse and galloped off to find a mountain to stand at the top of and sing.

But that’s not what happened. It’s been months and I still think, more often than not, I’m kind of a coward.  (And I don’t sing in public – I’ve never actually done karaoke and the thought of doing it makes me vomit in my mouth a little.)

It’s not that I don’t think writing poetry/fiction/creative nonfiction is a type of bravery, because I do. And I think admitting to other people that you are a poet/writer and that no, you don’t write hallmark cards/vampire novels/erotica is braver still. But I also think that bravery is a complicated thing and that there are levels.

What I’ve really learned in the past few months is that, more often than not, when I’m meditating about bravery, what I’m really talking about is fear. What I’m really concerned about is not whether I’m hero-material, but whether I’m letting fear hold me back from becoming a braver version of myself – a better version of myself.

And I don’t have an answer to that. It would be false to say that I feel brave when I write poetry because (when it’s going well) I actually feel a sort of nothingness laced with energy as the poem takes on an emotional life of its own. It’s true though that (outside of my crazy and fantastical dreams) the act of writing is the one time I don’t feel like a coward. And maybe that’s enough.

There’s a tendency for the poems to the treat the subject within the temporal context, in the passing of time. A moment of glimpsed beauty may read like an “I Saw You” advertisement in the weekly alternative paper, where someone made eye contact at the supermarket seeks out a similar moment in the classifieds—it’s a moment packed with potential but ultimately lost to the speaker.

The only way to hold onto that moment is to recreate it in text, forever hinting at the opportunity. Ancient Japanese poetry concerned itself with the social context of poetry rather than the social subjects. Only in the late ninth century, when the Kokinshu poems were being written did poetry go from being a “social gesture,” bound to the moment of its creation, to an art form.

In this way, the poems remind me of photography. What breaks a photograph out of being bound to its moment of creation, especially now that everyone has a camera in a pocket or purse? How often do we frame shots that will be greater than “social gestures,” records of where we are, who we are with, or what we are consuming uploaded to our Facebook timelines?

One of the things that the students and I spoke about quite a bit this year was how to assess photography, how to tell if a shot was composed with intent, if it’s technically good or accidentally amazing, and whether we can judge the creativity involved in taking the photo.

I likened it to creative nonfiction, a genre we had already discussed. Even though it’s a record, and the photo is a (perceived) nonfictional fact, it is composed in a way that’s very similar to an essay. Let me say that again: it’s composed. Framed. Something may not appear in the photo but be hinted at, eternally hiding outside of the cropped area. There’s an angle. It may show the subject as dominant or submissive, or canted and locked askew in our memories. A light has to shine upon it, or in other words: it must be illuminated. It should transcend fact.

But they’re accustomed to the social gestures and the cool Instagram hues, the automation of nostalgia forced upon the audience.

I suppose that the aim of the amateur photographer is to take this leap, sacrificing the act of record-keeping to gain a more emotive significance. The most powerful images, after all, transcend the moment of their creation. Perhaps next year, I will have them work with tanka, to ask not whether a marmoset could take the photo, but whether it would still be poignant in a thousand years.

i imagine that the reason most of us were in line that day was because we’d seen primer (shane carruth’s first film, and half of this double feature), and had been collectively holding our huge nerd breath waiting for him to release another movie.  if you haven’t seen primer, i honestly cannot recommend it enough.  in fact, i love it so much that, for those of you who care first & foremost about plot surprises, i’m going to “ruin” it for you: the main characters build a time machine.  and you might be surprised by how far you go into that 77-minute film before that little fact is revealed.  but primer is about time travelling in much the same way that moby-dick is about whale hunting.

carruth used a plot device to incredible effect with primer—and not just because it was a cool idea.  the story (in all it’s glorious, near-incomprehensible complexity) nicely complemented the true focus of the film: his characters.  i saw a thoughtfulness and attention to human interaction in primer that is far too rare in american movies these days.  and since carruth wrote/directed/scored/produced/acted/everything-elsed his new film, upstream color, just as he did for primer, well… we were all pretty goddamn giddy to be standing in line after a decade of waiting.

i did my damnedest to approach upstream color as open-mindedly as i could.  but, you know, i’m still human.  so for the first third of the movie, i got a little transfixed by a character with some decidedly questionable morals.  this is maybe related to the fact that i’m currently working on a short story featuring a shady dude, or maybe related to the fact that so often in movies the bad guy is more interesting than the hero.  so, it took me perhaps a little longer than other viewers to hone in on the heart of the movie: a woman named kris (played by amy seimetz) and her struggle to get any kind of solid ground underneath her feet.

i’m being intentionally vague about what kris stuggles with.  partly because that’s kinda how the movie operates, and partly because i’m not sure the specifics of it actually matter.  in a Q&A after the upstream color screening, carruth dropped a word that was like a magic key for me in thinking about the movie: identity.  to be honest, i sorta tuned out most everything he said after that, because i was back in my own head, trying to revisit everything i’d just seen through the prism of “identity.”  and i clearly wasn’t alone: my friends & i decided to skip another viewing of primer in favor of retreating to a nearby bar so we could talk about what the fuck we’d just seen.

upstream color doesn’t have a ton of dialogue.  it does have a mysterious (and thankfully not totally explicated) plotline involving pigs & worms & flowers & thoreau’s walden.  and it has characters forced to rebuild their lives, and their understanding of who they are, despite having already been high-functioning humans for a few decades.  beyond that, i think much is up for discussion.  one guy in the theater saw the movie as an adam and eve origin story remix, told as a revenge tale à la quentin tarantino.  i think the friends i saw the movie with preferred to see the story as that of a woman who was manipulated and taken advantage of (horribly so) by powers beyond her control/understanding.  i think kris may well have constructed an elaborate and totally fictionalized scheme to explain to herself how her life got so far off track.  but ultimately, i don’t know how much of that matters.

for this movie’s characters, it seems like the “what do we do now?” is far more important than the “how did we get there?” (though, perhaps, these things are inextricably related on some level). whether the difficulties kris is forced to deal with are a result of (malicious?) external forces or of her own doing—i think—are unclear (but i also suspect carruth envisioned the former rather than the latter).  what is clear is that she’s not clear.  one could spend alot of time trying to suss out exactly what happened to kris (or was done to her).  but the questions i had immediately after seeing the movie were totally unrelated to that.  i was just lost too deep in a state of wonder to formulate questions outloud that night while i had the filmmaker right there in front of me.  so, i wrote my questions down & tried to discover some semblance of what shane might have said had i not been too stunned to talk to him.

here then, are some things that carruth said (or were said about him), and some other things that i said (but not to him, ever):

A: shane was writing fiction (short stories in college, then a novel), but realized he was only describing things you could see—no internal monologue, no characters’ feelings, no “voice of god”—and that what he was really writing was screenplays.  ”if someone were to ask me if i wanted to see a movie about a college graduate that has an affair with an older woman, i would say, ‘no thank you, absolutely not. i’m not interested in that as a plot.’  and yet the graduate is one of my favorite movies.  because it has nothing to do with plot; it’s how the information is conveyed.”  —interview with bullseye

Q: i think you said once that you tried to write short stories before deciding to make movies.  what was it that ultimately drove you to make that switch?

A: “[amy seimetz] let me see her film, sun don’t shine [which she edited and directed], and it’s this wonderful film, and i got about ten minutes into it, and more or less decided this was over.  if she will entertain this idea, i have to bring her to town and put her in this film.  because she just got “narrative.”  …there was such a confidence in her work, that it was just clear that we were going to eliminate 90% of extraneous conversations because she was just going to get it…  i picked her up at the airport…and that night we were shooting the first scene, and just kept shooting for days and days and days.  i actually don’t have any recollection of what informing her was like… [in reference to a scene in which kris has to perform menial tasks] i don’t know if i ever gave her anything strong as far as direction.  i think she knew she would be a shell of a person…”   —interview with the treatment

Q: i thought so much of upstream color ’s impact hinged on the performance of amy seimetz.  since there’s not really tons of dialogue in it, what was that working/creative relationship like with her?  how did the process of making this movie (which is ostensibly about constructing one’s own personal narrative) inform that?

A: “something happened in the production of this film that i’m more open to the idea of something intangible/subconcious happening in the writing & exploration.  there is some reservoir of info that can be tapped—without necesarily knowing how you’re tapping it. i have seen enough evidence of that to know that it’s a real thing,  even though i maybe don’t want it to be a real thing.  i’d like to feel like everything is concrete & well thought-out, but the reality is, is that there things in the film, and i had internalized the story so well, and the group of us as filmmakers had internalized the story so well that we started to make choices that we had to make under duress, so they wound up being so appropriate, that i’m sort of amazed by that.”  —interview with bullseye

Q: a former professor of mine describes the writing process as searching for characters in “thin spaces“—people who have just the right amount of pressure on them.  i see characters like that in both primer and upstream color.  is searching for characters in thin places part of your writing process?  or where do your stories begin?  and how, if at all, was your writing process different when coming up with a story for a movie vs. short fiction?

A: “the idea that all of these characters are receiving, or are being affected by something that they can’t necessarily know about is where i wanted to use the word ‘upstream.’  if something is coming from that place, you’re going to actively go after it and look for the source, you don’t know the source, you just receive it… in the last third of this film what you see kris do (going upstream) is essentially a version of heart of darkness.  —interview with the treatment

Q: the title upstream color has a literal meaning in the story (i.e., the true source of  those flowers), but it seems much more significant than that.

A: “i’m curious how far toward an ‘album’ we can get with narrative.  when you put an album on, you get a sense of whether this is something you’re going to key into or not, but you’re not going to know everything you’re going to know about it—you decide whether you’d like to listen to it again.”  —interview with the treatment

Q: it seems to me that short stories are inherently much better suited for adaptation to film than novels are.  and yet it seems like hollywood is far more preoccupied with adapting novels.  having been (briefly) “inside” that system, do you think that’s true?  why?

in case you still want to gorge on all things carruth (like i did), there are plenty of other nice articles & profiles & interviews:

• the atlantic tries to put carruth in the context of other great filmmakers & artists
• an interview with i09 gets all up in the upstream characters and carruth’s influences
• wired did a profile reaching back to carruth’s roots
• grantland got to know carruth over some a drink or two (i.e., a real whole lot of scotch)
• an indiewire interview reveals how upstream is kinda like a romance movie
• slashfilm’s interview is kinda awesome in how all over the place it is
• slate just comes right out & asks carruth “what happened?”

but the truly important thing is that, as of last tuesday, upstream color is available through video on-demand, digital download, and old-timey dvd/blu-rays.  you should do the right thing & see it as soon as humanly possible.

Yet winter is hardly a better time to write. I have to bundle myself against the cold and drive to the mountains to snowshoe, else the sinkhole of depression give way. Without those weekend sun-chasing afternoons, I’d lie in bed eating cheap, frozen pizza and watching reruns of The Office. Without motion, my mind and drive are far gone.

I feel so good in motion that I often wonder why I make time for the catapulting thoughts, why I bother to write at all. Is crowding out other things I love in order to have time to write worth it?  I ask why write too often, and I always find a different answer. This time I go back to a source, to the earliest surviving poem of any form of the English language. I return to Caedmon’s Song. It begins:

Now we shall praise heaven-kingdom’s Guardian,

the creator’s might, and his mind-thought,

the words of the Glory-father.

There is praise embedded in the roots of language, and it occurs to me that I write because I do not sing. I have no choir to lift me, no chorus to match the seasons or ease my grief. What I do have is the craft of my own song. I trace my roots through time, through language, and through the shifting identities of migration.  My past is spread far across the globe.

It is only in this moment, in this song, that I find unity between the world and myself. And of the restlessness of my body, my bone locker as Caedmon would have called it, I think, writing makes my thoughts more solid. The words I want to write, as they find a rhythm in my head, become a cadence. Without a body, I would have no vessel, and without the mind, I would have no reason to run.