4:06 minutes (1.88 MB)Day 1- The Mcfluffer Today was a crock of mish-mashes and pish posh. It all started at the Reservoir. I walked down Chestnut Hill ave. clopping along at my own pace and admiring the haircuts of various passersby. It was early, and the sun cast shapes of orange light over the street, warming the damp morning air. The local Yak herd gathered along the edge of the Reservoir, their gentle heads lowered to the water’s edge for a morning drink. Everything seemed to glow. A mullet passed by, followed by a handlebar mustache, and just as everything seemed perfect, I accidentally stepped on a small dog’s back. At the moment of impact, I heard a terrible sound from below, and my foot repelled with such reflex that I pulled my right groin muscle. The owner was not happy with me and neither was her dog, but I apologized far too many times and continued down the street, a slight limp in my step. When I reached the bottom of the stairs at the T stop I immediately noticed the presence of a putrid odor. Up ahead were the shapes of two figures that I guessed were probably a couple of huge dogs. They were lying down next to something and swatting their huge tails intermittently. I noticed something that looked like a human arm between the rails of the T line, and an announcement popped on from an overhead speaker. “Due to the presence of hostile track lions, we advise all patrons of the MBTA to please be on your toes and keep your head on a swivel at all times. Thank you for riding the T.” I was back at the top of the staircase as the Spanish version of the announcement came on. The bus back to the B line guzzled up Comm. Ave. A kid sitting to my right asked me if the word “pun” was an acronym for “play on words.” I asked him, wouldn’t that be pow? And he said oh yeah, and remained quiet for the rest of the ride.

3:57 minutes (1.81 MB)Day 2-Bird Bath At 9:30 this morning I woke up and drank an entire pot of coffee, right from the pot. In the shower I had to sit down to wash my hair. When the last of the soap and shampoo had been rinsed I sat there for a while and let my mind wander as the steam drifted around me. I thought about my favorite reality TV show and how I hoped Kimmy would win the next challenge because she was just so cool and she hadn’t done well last week in the “give the squirming chimpanzee a haircut” challenge worth 30 moneydollar points. She had cut the back of her monkey’s head and been disqualified and therefore forced to take out the trash back at the condo, a job that signified “you better step it up next week if you want to be America’s next jammin’ hairstylist”. She just wasn’t focused on that squirming monkey, but it wasn’t her fault because Tad, her boyfriend back home was being really weird on the phone and like half missing her and half not even caring about what she was saying which really got me mad because Kimmy deserves better than that. Then the water stated to get too hot, so I got out. Now dry and dressed and still feeling the caffeine I headed out my apartment door to the staircase where I heard the echo of two people having a conversation. I walked to the top of the staircase where I noticed that it wasn’t there anymore. In its place, lodged in the wall of the building was an enormous smoldering rock and two men were leaning out of their doorway staring at it. One of them poked it with the handle end of a mop. He chipped off a piece of the boulder and it slid down into the vast expanse of twisted wood and charred debris, tapping off of the sides of planks and posts until it landed with a thud four stories down. I asked them what happened and they both shrugged, and the guy with the mop went back to poking.

5:05 minutes (1.17 MB)Day 3-Fast Ball Today I got a job at the City Zoo. I got a pretty good position as “African plains supervisor/Small group tour guide” by faking my age, place of birth, workplace history, and a list of qualifications on my resume. A hefty stack of index cards with interesting facts and terms sat on my lap during the interview, which went very well. My boss Mark told me I started immediately and that my first tour group would be arriving in two hours. Until then I was to check on the animals, and jot down notes and ideas about how we may better the presentation and safety of their replica environments. We shook hands as I stuffed my index cards into my pants and he told me “welcome to the team.” I was now a 28 year old from South Africa with a degree in Zoology and Environmental and Geographical Science from the University of Cape Town. I left Mark’s office, changed into my Zooniform and headed out to the plains. Passing the Penguin Pit, I stopped by the Information Kiosk and grabbed a park map and some pamphlets. I read about feeding times and the new baby Giraffe named Sox whose delivery, the pamphlet writers had quipped, was as perfect as Curt Shilling’s. I was imagining a baby Giraffe throwing a 90mph fastball when I felt a sharp pain on my ankle. I looked down and a kid was biting me. I shook him off my leg and he started running so I chased him into some bushes where he disappeared. I looked around and no one had seemed to notice so I checked my map and made toward the hyenas.

5:05 minutes (1.17 MB)Day 4- Pietro At 11 in the morning the shadow people come into my room and start to try to wake me up. They have a process. First they creep around the room as the shadows of horrible creatures and disfigured unmentionables. One of them, who I will call Pietro for the sake of this documentation, makes the same shadow every time: a boy with his head blown off crawling around while shadow blood pours out from his shadow neck wound. They ghost around the room a while and if I haven’t shown any signs of being roused, they then move on to “disturbing noises” and start oohing and awing and making shrill screams that I’m used to by now and ignore while pretending to sleep. The truth is, I’m always up by 11 anyway but I like to give them a hard time. When they’re tired of making scary noises, they start trashing my room. This usually starts with the knocking of books off of my desk and will eventually lead to Pietro, or some other shadow personality breaking something. This is when I wake up pretending to be all scared and disturbed to give them at least some satisfaction and they make a getaway out the window. The truth is they’re all a bunch of assholes, but I feel bad for them because they have no one else to scare as they are very bad at it.

7:42 minutes (1.77 MB)continued from part one A man wearing plain clothes and plain white shoes stands in the middle of a grassy field. The camera pans across the desolate landscape of trees and flowers peacefully blowing in the wind. The man looks upward to the skies and, being alone in a strange place without anything to do, lets out an enraged scream, the camera directly over his gaping mouth. A pedestal slowly rises from the ground donning a pair of sweet new Atmosphere Jumpers— the red ones. He picks them up and looks at them. He puts them on and suddenly he is decked out in awesome name brands. He jumps, blasting off into the air and lands, cracking the pavement in the middle of a street court, basketball in hand. Everyone looks at him and looks at his shoes and they are like, “oh fuck.” A montage of the guy slam dunking the ball whilst hurting his opponents by jumping into them and juking them badly takes place and he wins the game against five dudes with regular shoes on. He steps on one of them who is writhing on the ground with a broken nose, and the camera zooms in on the shoe and freeze frames as the words “Just Get Em” appear. The screen cuts to black and Eddy puts up his index finger like, “that’s one”.

8:01 minutes (1.84 MB)The leaves on the trees changed color so quickly I can’t seem to remember a time when they had been alive. Some splotchy yellow ones follow along behind me in the wind, softly bludgeoning my back as if to say, “look, turn around and see how beautiful we have become in our death!” I enjoy this feeling, so I pop a Phoxy and do a little re-experiencing. Walking alongside a row of old cedar trees, I notice a big improvement in the picture quality of the new digital info paint they’ve started slapping up around town. I can see Grant Filmore’s face in ExtremeHD like half a football field away. He’s suggesting Phoxolothene 1 as, “it’s the fastest leading 5-minute memory relief tablet on the planet or anywhere else for that matter,” and with this I agree. I really like the information clip, Grant’s retro blazer is clearly from Patriotic Hawk where I buy my jeans, so I wait for it to end and pop a Phoxy for some re-experiencing. Phoxy is my favorite product this year, great for a quick forget or a re-experience. Basically it releases some kind of neuro transmitters into the brain that do something to some glands or something. I’m not really sure how it works, but the stuff works great. My friend Eddy got me into it. He started using his parents’ one night back in freshman year after his dad roughed him up a little. He came over with it and asked me to tell him we’d been playing football and he took one. Occasionally Eddy takes more Phoxy than they say you should on the info clips. The night of the B&B wireless parade he took 20 minutes worth and ended up stumbling around trying to remember where he was. He was really scared and he kept screaming at people who would look at him and he was all disoriented. Eventually I got him to calm down, but not before he had given me a bloody nose and called me dad like a lot of times. Actually just thinking about that time gives me…well, one more won’t hurt.

4:41 minutes (1.88 MB)Today I went for a walk in the park. I strolled alongside a stone wall, and then over the bridge, passing accordion players and children in hats and parents and lovers and people paying for hot cider with nickels, until eventually I found a fitting observation point from where the foliage seemed to explode. I sat down against the trunk of a massive weeping tree. Literally, the thing was crying. I asked him, “what’s the matter?” and he sniffled and replied in a low guttural voice, “I’m going to die again.” Looking back on it, my immediate thought process was one of insensitivity. Judging by his size, the weeping tree was clearly pretty old and had clearly undergone its seasonal life cycle more than a few times to have become so mighty. I could only help but wonder what the fuss was about. So I asked him something like, “well you’ll be alive again in the spring, right?” to which he responded, “yea,” and I added, “so what’s all the fuss about, haven’t you done this before? I don’t see any other trees crying.” Then he asked me if I had ever seen snow. I said, “sure, I’ve seen lots of it,” and he asked me how old I was. I said 19 and he started crying again in his deep weeping tree voice, which sounded like a busted refrigerator humming in the hull of a creaky wooden ship . I tried to calm him down and he eventually did, and told me that he was 278 and he hadn’t seen a flake in 20 years. He told me that snow was the most beautiful thing in the world, and that he used to actually look forward to his yearly death, just so he could feel it on his branches for a few days or hours or minutes. Since it had been staying warmer later, he told me, the snow always came after he died, and he was afraid that he’d never feel it ever again.

7:53 minutes (1.81 MB)Today I had a few drinks with Kent, a homeless guy I’ve known for a while, at the Alahambra. The Alahambra is meant to resemble an on old western town bar, the kind you see Clint Eastwood gritting his teeth in in movies. They’ve got swinging wooden doors and a piano machine that plays old favorites like “Old River” and “Mountain Path” and “Don’t Drink the Water From the Old River by the Mountain Path”. The seats are designed to be exceptionally uncomfortable, just like the kind in the wild west and the place reeks like whisky and wood. It’s authentic all right. Today I’m feeling pretty good so I tell Kent I’ve raised his drink maximum from three to seven on account of I just got my pay check yesterday. Kent says some words that I can’t quite understand and then “thanks damnit,” and I smile at him and he smiles back. He smelled of booze before we got in the place and I suspect he is already hammered. Kent thinks he is a cowboy and that’s why I take him to the Alahambra. He’s wearing cowboy boots that he stole from a thrift store and a ripped button down shirt. Might as well get him pass out drunk I think to myself, it’s going to be cold tonight. After half an hour at the Alahambra I’ve had a couple beers and Kent has had four whiskey and soda’s. He is telling me a story about something that recently happened in his life, but he’s pausing and repeating himself and switching the tense so much I can barely follow him. “God damn kids right? So there’s the alley. They’re in the alley, they come up in and I’m there just sitting like cause I was just minding my business, right? So they came in, and they come took my hat.” “They took your hat?”

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10:53 minutes (1.88 MB)Today I needed to have a tooth removed. Through the mixing up of phone numbers and miscommunication with his receptionist, I ended up making an appointment with my childhood dentist, Dr. Vezina, or, as he would have us call him when we were kids, Dr. Funteeth. I wedge myself into one of the waiting room chairs and look at the wallpaper, the patterns of cute bears holding balloons and cute bears in uniforms and cute bears sadistically crushing smaller bears?— no, and cute bears holding smaller, slightly cuter bears. I wonder, what is the kind of person who’s job is to develop cute new ideas for kid friendly wall paper, and what might he or she be doing, wherever they are, at this very moment. I imagine he or she must be doing or watching other things do really cute stuff to give them new cute ideas. Perhaps somewhere an overweight woman has dressed her dog as peter pan and is repeatedly giving him the “roll over” command while eating adorable looking gingerbread cookies. Perhaps somewhere else an effeminate man who is losing his hair stands in his kitchen, looking at himself in a mirror while painting unicorns on his body with glitter paint. Perhaps somewhere else, even further away, a man looks up into the sun, directly into it, seriously damaging his retinas while imagining how cute it might look with a smiley face.