And then God laid down a series of hideous curses upon ujournal. And I was forced, like so many of my friends, to make the exodus to live journal. And here I am.

Maybe, if the ujournal comes up and running again, I can transfer my old posts to the promised land. Until then…

Last Friday I went to the silent film festival in Chicago and saw Nosferatu. It was a large, single room theatre, of the old variety – statues, curtains, burgundy, and a ceiling painted and lit like the night sky. No one yells “Wazzzzzzzzz-up!” in the middle of a silent picture. They are quiet…but then they laugh and clap when they’re supposed to (like a live performance). They are reverent, as if something religious is happening…and maybe it is. The people on the screen are long since dead, black and white phantoms flicker-flashing in silver screen purgatory – and we’re sitting there, drinking PEPSI, eating overpriced popcorn, practicing a requiem for overdramatic actors long gone.

On Monday, I met a surrealist artist at the Goose Island Brewery. Turns out our cultural and pop-cultural tastes are pretty close. We talked Poe, silent films, comic books, and other things besides. She liked my writing and now wants to do the artwork for my thesis project (my epic poem). We talked about that – about a lost angel named Syth, a place of lost souls named Sheol, a voodoo priestess who will be renamed, and the dark muse she summons named Crow. She liked the images. Said she had wanted to do something based on stained glass windows, with a medieval look. I’m excited.

And excited is good to be. Better than scarred or nervous or apathetic. Because this will be my last year in the Grad program and I need to get going on my thesis. It’s starting to come into view. I can see a sorry sort of angel, an old voodoo mambo, and a black bird. I saw these figures before. That’s not new. But now I see them in stained glass.