Directed by Howard Brookner
Loneliness moans across the continent like fog horns over still oily water of tidal rivers.
I’ve been thinking about William Burroughs lately. Probably because of all the cockroaches in my house — that I find belly up in the kitchen every morning. [I’d love to rewatch Cronenberg’s take on Naked Lunch. Alas, I have not been able to find it streaming.] Burroughs is a man that held a key to another realm. One of my favorite parts of this film is when, standing in front of his childhood home in St. Louis, he recalls the story of an "old Irish crone” teaching him the art of toad calling. I bet that old crone sprinkled some Irish fairy dust on that little boy’s head too.
There was a time in the not too distant past when I spent so much time walking in the woods that they began to fall away from me. A sort of psychedelic disintegration without the psychedelics. The pine trees began to talk to me. I believe that this happened because I had withdrawn so deeply from society, spending so much time walking in the woods of my childhood, that I unwittingly walked through a portal to another realm. These episodes lasted only for brief moments and I think about them often. That’s how it is with glimpses, I suppose.