Stalker Movie

Monica's last tension-ridden entry has staged my recollection of those old black and white suspense films I have always loved...especially the pre-1947 psychological thrillers. There's nothing better than a quiet evening... Picture this: Home alone, 9:00 pm movie begins... 10:00 pm waiting to see if the psychotic, serial killer is yet to strike again... 10:02 pm the scene is swallowed up in a seriously-darkened street--staged with the character portrait of a mindless sad sack; a gallery of wealthy, eyelash batting women in a facade of famously-worn, black dresses and mounded hair; a room filled with a colossal variety of vintage collectibles. 10:15 pm Reality Check: I look around and see that I'm sitting on the tip of grannie's ol', musty-smelling chair, engaged in the climax of the movie as... (dramatic music playing in the background intensifies the silhouette of the man holding the knife--could he come through the TV screen?!) 10:15 pm ...the film intensifies --the pelting rain hovers over a hunched figure as he makes his way down Inkwell Alley. His over-sized trench disguises his feeble frame... and suddenly, the moment I've been waiting for ...he sees her; he watches as she opens her vintage purse only to find... (click on the The Drama Button.) 10:17 pm Oh dear! Vertigo sets in...startled... 10:17 1/2 pm PHONE RINGS: Yes, Grannie, I have fed the fish. Yes, Grannie, the door is locked... Yes Grannie...what? I can't hear you... Grannie? Are you there.... click Grannie? HELLO?! Vertigo sets in...AGAIN... 10:19 pm LIGHTS GO OUT. KNOCK AT DOOR. Vertigo sets in...AGAIN... 10:20 pm russle, russle...making way to door. PEEK... OH, it's the pizza man!

Black and White

Inward reflection is one of the most daunting propositions; the thing you'll find could be dark, a manifestation of your evil side; it could be pathological, a harbinger of depression, psychotic manipulation or a ravenous narcissism; or it could simply be something nebulous, an unexplainable blur waiting in the chaotic networking of your brain, sitting on an untapped nerve ending that has yet to be provoked...and once it is, Lord knows what will happen, what you'll become.

This my friends is why I haven 't blogged in a few day or written in my book, developed my characters. It has been a struggle to write the simple restaurant overview that my editor needs me to pen for the August issue. It's days like these that I wish I were smart enough to be a mathematician or a biologist. I was chatting with a co-worker today whose husband works at a nuclear plant--his specialty is foam. Yes foam. Supposedly whatever you want to know about foam, just ask this guy. "He could write about foam all day long,"she laughed. He knows it intimately, its properties, its likes and dislikes, its uses, its importance, its role in an ever evolving technological whirlpool.

Sometimes I think the black and white nature of science--of everything from number to foam--is what makes working with it easier than working with a blank canvas or a loosely developed novel. You don't fret for hours on end about whether a certain word, color, sentence or design concept will evoke a certain feeling in enough people. You just get the facts down and you delight not in the subjective details but in the fact that it's right.

I just noticed that I'm wearing solely black and white today. A subliminal cry for direction, clarity, organization, relief from the chaotic networking in my brain.

image courtesy of http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2160/2034196282_c516b9d2a6.jpg