A Thought, Therefore I Am ... Awake

Why am I up at this time? Neil Young, that's why.

Those who know me are aware that I regularly have a song stuck in my head. How they know this is that I subject them to the song by posting it on Facebook -- no matter how awesome or awful it may be -- to exorcise it out of my own head. It works, too. After I post it ... and then force myself to listen to it about a dozen times in a row ... the song begins to slowly fade out.

Most days I wake up with a song already playing in there, like I have a crazed brain dj who spins just the loops of certain parts of songs over and over to get my attention, except when I start paying attention I don't usually find a message; rather, I just find that at some point I must've heard or said a snippet of, say, some ABBA ditty (like, "Knowing me, knowing you") and my good old brain dj thinks it was a request.*

Occasionally, my brain dj is so adamant that I hear a song, s/he wakes me up in the middle of the night to play it for me ... like tonight. This time, I got really lucky, because it was Neil Young's "Only Love Can Break Your Heart" ... and given that I have a huge soft spot for Mr. Young, I cannot be angry that he or my rabid brain dj woke me up at the crazy hour of 2:15 AM on a Tuesday night ... or I guess it's Wednesday morning now. 

To get myself back to sleep quicker, I decided that I should slip over to my computer and pull up said stuck song in an attempt to exorcise it early ... or at least get the lyrics right, so I'm not going around all day singing:

I have a friend I've never seen. He hides his head inside a tree.**

The first video that Google presents to me in my search is one that has been put together with very old black and white footage of a wedding, so not only is the song mesmerizing, so are the images. I am, of course, immediately entranced... 

Then at about 2:15 into the video, something jars me out of that trance. It appears to be a boy jumping up on the left side of the frame so that he can get on camera as it's slowly panning the crowd. Time telephone!

No, I'm not dream blogging. I'll explain...

See, I once made a little movie using found home movies that I'd purchased off of Ebay ... well, mostly made up of found movies. At the very end, however, I also inserted a segment of all of my own home movies from growing up, edited just to be the parts with me -- turned out to only be a total running time of just 10 minutes worth of film, if you can believe it ... and I was an only child! Sheesh! Where was I again? Oh yeah...

To be practical, I compressed that 10 minutes into just 2 minutes by speeding it up; to be artsy and weird, I presented it all in reverse chronological order. It made sense when I was editing the film (running on very little sleep and nothing to eat but bison summer sausages and Diet Cokes for 8 weeks straight), as I was trying to find the origin of a thought ... a thought shooting a home movie, a thought being a woman, a thought on the responsibility of collecting long-dead strangers' personal things, etc.

The main thought that I was pursuing -- the film itself -- actually was born in a moment when I was just a Wee-Creature ... heck, I was merely a She-Tadpole. 

An actual picture of actual me from around that actual time.
Yes, that really is me. Whaddiya mean, "What happened?"

I couldn't have been more than 6 or 7 years old, when my father was doing his annual "film the Christmas decorations for posterity sake-- Dammit, the kid's in the shot! I'll just tell her to hold the dog to make her useful" thing. (Yes, the reason there was only 10 minutes of film of me was that there were 45 minutes of film reels of furniture, Xmas trees, parades, and other "important" stuff. Again, I was his only child.)

In that moment that I was supposed to be helping to feature the dog and Xmas tree like some sort of PRICE IS RIGHT model, tadpole me got a thought:

What if there was a way to send a message to yourself in the future through a movie camera? What if the lens could act like some sort of time telephone, and if I can look into it while I'm thinking that thought, I can project that same thought to myself in the future ... like 21 or something old like that? 

The only problem was, my dad wasn't interested in shooting me in that moment. He needed to capture that new Santa house my mom created in her ceramics class ... capture it good, for posterity's sake! I had to take matters into my own hands ... or in this case, feet.

I began jumping up to get my eyes in line with the lens. If you're watching my film FOUND, around 7:17 you see just a spazzy blur bouncing up and down for about 3 seconds, totally messing up the shot of the lovely red ceramic Santa house atop the giant console television set.***

The good news is the time telephone worked! The thought got through, and I made the experimental art documentary short that made me the nillionaire I am today!

The strange news that jarred me alert over an image of a jumping boy in an old home movie that reminded me of my own jumping self in my home movies was the uncanny moment not 6 hours earlier, when I was telling a friend about that little film of mine for the first time because the subject of copyright law came up ... a topic I happen to know a little something about firsthand. And I'm not bitter in the slightest. Nope.****

Wow. I stayed awake for an extra hour to essentially write an ode to coinkydinks.

Yeah, I basically live for this shit.

*A quite lovely former co-worker of mine told me that this song or phrase looping is actually a brain defect and is related to schizophrenia. That information only looped in my head for about 3 weeks before it finally dissipated.

**It's actually, "He hides his head inside a dream." Good thing I caught that.

***If you know where my film is to watch for that, good for you! If you don't, I'm not posting it here for you to track me down on Facebook in order to "friend" and/or date me, just because you've been stalking my blog. Not again.

****Copyleft, people. Google it.