Can't sleep. Oh well. I don't feel like starting a new book, nor do I think my brain would retain any of the wu li/physics thing, so...may as well let the internal chatter try and write itself out for a while. That's the whole function of this journal thing anyhow: get it outta my head, a present to the internet. weird that folks can read it, but there's only a handful of you, and i'm so bad at phone conversation lately, who knows? maybe it'll help that "out of touch" feeling that tends to dominate at least the first ten minutes or so of said phone conversations.

watched Nixon tonight. tristan tells me it's post-jfk-and-natural-born-killers, and diagnoses the editing as "trippy." i disagree, but that's a good point about it being post-jfk/nbk. it has the feel of both of them. a hollywood drama cracking at the seems, "the darkness reaching for the darkness" coming in flashes of clarity/distortion, holding the facade at all costs. the form meticulously mirrors the story itself. i'm fascinated by the scene in china: fucking imagine that conversation, nixon and mao. do they keep any sort of transcripts of these things? anyway, it was a pretty good movie.

then i found a bag with our forgotten fortune cookies from two days ago, so I opened one. All progress is based upon a universal desire to live beyond one's income. Now there's a cookie fortune! I complain that usually cookie fortunes aren't even fortunes -- they're weird little axioms and nonsensical proverbs or general assessments, e.g. you're lucky/handsome/wise/etc. But this one's so fucking snide I think I'm cool with it. As you can tell by what's occupying my mind to begin with, I'm in no state to work out the veracity of such a claim, but for some reason I take to heart all evidence of intelligent consciousness in the fortune cookie industry. I mean, what a vehicle...I almost don't even want to think what I'd do if I was the fortune cookie mogul for all the exciting possibilities. The very idea of ending your meal with a tasty, crunchy pocket of mystery goodness (how do they bake the cookies with the paper intact?) that you break open to reveal your very own new randomly selected fortune, which you will then eat/toss...that's pure genius hilarity in action. And then you get to make up whatever "fortune" you want? Get people in this goofy greasy food-coma and then give em an edible, readable toy and then bam! straight to the brain core with whatever you can fit on a tiny strip of paper in lucky red ink? And what I heard is that there is a fortune cookie mogul...there's one guy who has a monopoly on the fortune cookie industry and has written all the fortunes himself for years, and he's old and retiring, and is having a contest to write the best cookie fortunes and take over his job.

or so rumor has it. i swear someone told me this, but i can't remember who for the life of me. oh well. it all sounds distinctly willy-wonka now that i think about it.

hokay. time to give sleepin another whirl.