Rubber-Suited Baby Buggy Bumpers

Had this insane stress-dream this morning: Steve, Cal, Mom and I (!) had gone on holiday, staying at a vaguely crappy hotel--the sort of place where everything is simultaneously over-designed and slightly dirty, as though "room service" is definitely optional. (Maybe this was me subconsciously remembering that hotel in Brighton which, in place of a mint on the pillow, gave us a dead fly.) At any rate: We needed to leave, and I was stuck with packing everything up, only to find we'd brought a ridiculous amount of stuff I genuinely couldn't remember packing in the first place...hordes of stuffed animals, thousand of loose documents, piles of framed artwork done by other people who'd stayed in the same room, and extra bedding for everybody. Three bags' worth of videotapes, too, some of which I do now recall having owned, at one point--Tarkovsky's Stalker, for example. And all of this was being done under some sort of threatening time constraint, with the threat in question left creepily open: We'd miss our flight, we'd lose our deposit, we'd lose our souls, we'd all get killed. I think I was pretty close to being done when I woke up, but I guess we'll never know.

Maybe this is related somehow to the fact that Apple decided to "update" the iPad last night, a process which took literal hours to accomplish, mainly because it wiped itself completely halfway through and then told me it hadn't been able to store the Pad's settings due to "an unknown error". Thankfully, this turned out to be bullshit, but...frustrating, to say the least.

On a better note, CityTV decided to run a sneak preview of FX Canada, which allowed me to watch the pilot of American Horror Story. And that is--my sort of weird, all over. I see the fingerprints of a lot of different haunted house narratives in there, all run through a slightly camp L.A. noir filter, as befits the guy who created Nip/Tuck and Glee. (Rubber fetish suit! Tennessee Williams character run rampant! Man with a half-melted face! Giant baby!) I also really enjoy the idea of the house as a rallying point for dead people who aren't obviously phantoms--something slightly more concrete than a ghost but not quite a zombie, living a cyclical, miserable, dumbfounded existence in permanent orbit 'round an endless line of owners-turned-murder-suicides, who then join their ranks and turn on whoever's next. So yeah, sold, though I doubt we'll be upgrading our cable service just to see it in real-time. Waiting for the DVDs sounds far more satisfying.

Meanwhile, I continue onwards with the book, as well as starting to watch Ingmar Bergmann's Vargstimmen, aka The Hour of the Wolf. Thus far it's very odd and genuinely unsettling, as advertised. My current down-time reading material is The Isle of Blood, which is a very sad story, on a bunch of different levels. Rick Yancey, I'm not sure you have the best interests of your underaged target market in mind.

All right, that's maybe enough to jolt myself awake by degrees. Back to it...