Altered States, Apocalyptic Light and Suchlike

I took M up to Celo this afternoon, after a long grey stormy Sunday of doing essentially nothing. We did go out for breakfast at the Silver Dollar, where I swear they put valium in their coffee; nothing else, after all, could excuse the taste, or the fact that after leaving A there to doze in the booth while I dashed up to the ATM (the Silver Dollar takes nothing but cash for it's incredibly cheap cholesterol laden breakfasts,) dropped M off (where else but the Sword and Grail) and came back to duly pay the check, we came home and passed out for almost 3 hours. Then there was the drive up to Celo, and the discovery halfway there that, oh, by the way, M was supposed to have graph paper and sundry other school supplies by tomorrow, which necessitated a stop at the Roses Discount, worthy of it's own sweet blog post enumerating the many useful and less items that can be purchased therein, and then we left the Roses and walked outdoors into sky. The sky and the light was apocalyptic, so that we had to stop and just stand there for a moment, and try to take a picture, but you can't take a picture of light like that. Or possibly you can, if you have a good camera and have actually read the manual, and know about stuff like shutter speeds and lens apertures.

At any rate, it was glowing everywhere, the kind of light I've been trying to capture for days now, the kind of light that I saw briefly up in Sapphire but didn't have time to take a picture of the moss laden dead tree that was being illuminated into neon. Do you know the kind of light I mean? It's the kind of light that is coming from all over, the kind of light that if suddenly, a big door opened over that sudden neon tree, and Elvis, Mary Magdalene, three Munchkins and ET came jouncing out in a big pink Mary Kay cosmetics convertible cadillac, you wouldn't blink an eye, you'd just say, yeah, it's that kind of afternoon.

Back to Asheville, through intermittent rain, the kind that makes you have to fuck with the windshield wiper speeds through the whole drive, annoying, but I have fallen in love with the rental car (the defrost works so fast! It moves so smoothly! I passed someone on an uphill grade! The CD player, oh gods, the CD player!) so it's okay. I came home, made lentils and left again to go see Mirrormask.

Mirrormask was brilliant. Art movie, kids movie, adult movie, okay, it has some flaws, but not many, and it's visually stunning. Drawings and surreality, nods to Dali & Bosch, fish swimming through a mutable sepia city, masks and black lipstick - really, if you haven't seen it, do so immediately. I walked out of there and got into my lovely little rental car, turned it on & later vintage XTC started blasting loudly into my otherwise silent bubble, which fit weirdly and perfectly with the movie and the mood. Everything was an amazing movie. The streets were shining black, the black and unmarked and silent car ahead of me went through a puddle with cinematic precision: each drop of water slow, backlit, and technicolor. The highway was deserted and glowing and the Smoky Park Highway bridge has never looked so smoky, so park, so highway, or god, so taken out of a 1950s futuristic fever dream. The sky is a purplish smoking orange, the air is so clear it's water, and everything looks like a painting, like a perfect dream of paintings.