Jeff Phillips's Blog, page 19

Ghost in the Bathroom

I dreamed that I was on some road trip, stopped off at an old hotel to take a wizz. I followed the signs to the lobby bathroom, which took me into an old wing which used to a hospital. The lights were out. I flicked them on and saw some old florescence trickle on down one side of a long room, with old beds and gurneys. I hustled to the far end where a trough ran the wall. I unzipped, yet was startled by my periphery - an old man in a hospital gown stood at the end of his bed, smoking a cigarillo. We made eye contact. His eyes were a deep black. I shivered from a wave of chills that over took me. I had no doubt that he was a phantom as he appeared out of nowhere. I could no longer pee in such conditions. I took off sprinting down the left side of the room, between the wall and a long curtain. I peeked out at one point, about where the old man phantom would be, and he had moved in closer, about to reach for me through the curtain...
I awoke at this point, chilled out of my mind. My girlfriend informed me that I had been whimpering moments before in my sleep. Damn ghosts.

Drippy Mornin'

This morning had that tinge of apocalyptic ambiance. Very dark this morning, with the clouds and the rain, and still catching up to the daily savings time shift which puts us at an orbit making the bright and early, black sky and early. Had a troublesome time awaking this morning, I was still in the half dreaming state as I was leaving the house for work. Still dark. Because of the clouds. And the coming rain.
The bus I was riding scraped the shit out of a stop sign while making a turn. At every stop, panicked latecomers charged at the doors as they were about to closing. Cruising through an intersection we were nearly side swiped by a screaming fire engine.
I've started carrying around an old pocket watch, as sort of a good luck charm. I like the feel of it in my pocket. The battery has long since burned out. I suppose I could get a new battery inserted. But I'm not really interested in its ability to tell me the time of day. I just like the feel of it. I like fiddling with it. And I appreciate that it gives me subtle permission to dismiss the tyranny of ticking time. Time seems to slip, slip so quickly these days. Anxiety seems to show up and linger as the end of each week, the end of each month zooms along. This time-still pocket watch reminds me to chill the fuck out.

ITB 6

We put up a new episode of Inside the Barrel last week. We had some fun conversations with Ted Tremper, a comedian, and winner of a Vimeo Award for his webseries "Breakups." We also have a short sketch on there I wrote called "Bikers and Cars" which plays with the seeming rivalry between hipsters who bike about town and the people who drive. Definitely something I see both sides of, and I do applaud anyone who rides their bike, I know I'd like to ride mine more about town, but I've encounter much too many bikers who believe they are above any rules of the road. So this piece was inspired by that. I also wrote and we recorded a sketch called "Furrocious" about a father/son hunting trip, and the son reveals he's a "furry." It felt funny as we recorded it but editing found it didn't work as a comedic piece the way it played out, so I'm back to the writing table with that one.

Spontaneous Prose - 1/22/11

Twisted skeletal remains dance in vibration from earthly shudders, just dominating the visual field. My eyes can't but harness the real activity as the life of these dusty bones makes fear crawl into my spine like a thousand tasty snails. Oozing. Sliming their way into my occipital lobe and I only hear their language. The language of sudden change, the lifespan of a summer, of dirt and mold and rain. The blood doesn't phase me when I taste it in my mouth. The iron dab on the taste buds is a much needed snap back to reality, the earth is quaking like a dynamic emperor on bad beer. The cave tap dances on my head with little grains of ore as they pass down into the air which is always being stirred and thrashed, making a malt of musty grime that cakes my eyes, now taking the laughing skeleton of a tired, abandoned miner, fade away from my awareness.

The fever is just a fever, an OS code of an ill advising virus, fucking around with my gene structure. Telling my DNA that it is archaic, of a making not ready for the rugged. I shouldn't have tasted the waters from the underground river that trickled, that looked black in the glow of my lantern, that sucked me in to quench my thirst like a magnetic siren body, tugging at me with unpronounced pheromones.

Living organisms have a right to take what they need. Just as I have right to crawl out into the Autumn light, the setting of dusk as the earth stopped. And to lie there and cry for help until it arrives, pawing away at branches, through the woods, ready to pull my body back to the village and maybe siphon some life back into it, maybe my own life force, maybe that of a demon who was wading in the dark pool and slid down my tongue as I lapped away. There he punches at my belly in a-rythmic sweeps against the freeforall of plate tectonics.

The cave is doomed for curious losers. No treasure is worth biological, geological and spiritual possession. Bring a canteen if you go down there.

Post Privilege

This is a Wood Sugars short film we did for the National Film Challenge, where we were given Fri-Sun to write, shoot, edit a 5-7min short film, using a prescribed prop, character name, occupation, and line of dialogue. Here is a trailer for what we came up with. Please watch the full version of Post Privilege on Wood Sugars Film.
I think its definitely worth setting deadlines for a project and doing it. Might not be our perfect opus but at least we knocked out a new visual story and had the learning experience to accompany it.

Diary Diary

I've been away from this blog for awhile, been pretty active with the Wood Sugars, producing, writing for, performing in a variety show podcast called Inside the Barrel. We're gearing up for some short films we're about to shoot. We're adapting a fun play by Keely Flynn into a film, so that's definitely a good challenge to reshape for the screen and cut down on some of the time constraints we're faced with, a lot of great banter dialogue that we want to keep in there. It's my first experience adapting a stage piece for the screen.
I think I mentioned some time ago that I was reworking a novel manuscript of mine. I've seen begun playing with it in screenplay form. When I wrote the manuscript originally, I wrote it very stream of conscious so some sections easily become tangential and sloppy, and took on the challenge of completing it in a month, sitting down and doing it. It proved to be a great exercise in character creation and point of view. There are some chapters in which I'm quite proud of the language, although as a whole, I don't find it publishable, which is sad on one end, I put a lot of work into writing a novel. But the story itself I'm still excited with and have restructured, redeveloped and got it to a point where its ready to be done again.
I've felt a lot of creative fluidity with the screenplay format recently, for some odd reason. I think it stems from the thrill of writing scenes, and having a form that can hatch performances. I've found it quite rewarding to see actors bring my writing to life, from writing podcast sketches, from the Bosto workshop with XIII Pocket, and in writing Post Privilege with Wood Sugars for the National Film Challenge. I wanted to write more scripts, its exciting to build that text for a group of various artisans (actors, cinematographers, composers, etc) to bring to life, and so in reworking my novel manuscript, it started to come to life again in writing for an audio/visual medium. So I'm about half through the feature length film script which I've molded into a new medium, which I'm finding is strengthening this particular story.
Anyway, I'm probably going to be jotting more stuff down on this blog going forward. I feel like my brain needs it, to spew thoughts on various creative projects, maybe vent, maybe rave about certain excitements. And another excuse to write when I feel like my brain is too drained at the end of the day to do justice to any current story projects. Kinda like a diary, a public diary, which is fine. I have a diary book by my bed but my handwriting sucks and my cat keeps stealing my pens to play floor hockey.

Stage/Bridge

It has been awhile since I last posted here! My apologies for my posts have been few & far between. I have been busy though. First off, we have a lot going on with our Wood Sugars site between podcasts & columns. So a lot of my writing energies have towards the podcast & my weekly column The EGP: The Economic Gho$t Po$t which is a blend of fiction (ghost stories) with economic analysis. Both the paranormal & economics have fixated me for sometime & I thought it would be fun to combine them in...

coupla shorts up

I've got a new short story up on our Wood Sugars web page called "Church Decaf."
Hank Laird & his wife, ever the hospitable couple, invite the new Pastor in town over to their house for supper. What Hank had hoped to be a friendly meal will soon haunt him into the following day. Hank, however, achieves one of his intentions behind the welcoming meal…he now knows Pastor Dale a little bit better…Never before has "decaf" proved to be so potent a beverage.

Coffee brewed…& fellowship crucified...

SHOUT!

I had a dream last night in which I was on a business trip, on some leadership building retreat of sorts at a resort. A large group of us were gathered around the outdoor pool for the first day of this conference. Of course the session began with a round of introductions coupled with "something interesting about yourself." I was picked to introduce myself first. I began with my name. The people on the far end of the pool could not hear me over the wind. So I had to SHOUT my name over the wick...

Smoke Break in dreamy

I smoked my first cigarette in years in a dream I had last night. It was a work dream. I recently began working as a sales rep for a merchant processing company. Not a bad job at all actually. I get a desk. M-F 9-5pm, 1 hour lunch. Anyway in my dream I was making sales calls and a blizzard was hitting Chicago. We were stuck in the office over night, which motivated me to take part in a quick smoke outside, in the impending wash of white. I thought I'd be brave and venture into a nearby CVS to...