Your brother will be first

His little finger stuck every day
through cracks in the bars
will grow sleek and round,
his hollow face swell

like the moon. He will stop dreaming
about fear in the woods without food.
He will lean toward the maw
of the oven as it opens

every afternoon, sighing
better and better smells.

- excerpt from The Witch Has Told You A Story, Ava Leavell Haymon

Of course, monsters will always lack etiquette
or toes. That's why towns
bully them into abandoned cul-de-sacs.

- Nathan Anderson, Monster-Life

Okay, so I'm still thinking about fictional writing

I am lucky enough to have friends who force me to watch special features on DVDs. For example, Cloverfield, which had me thinking weird paranoid thoughts I as I drove the treacherous, drunkard-infested streets of Madison on my way to my Capital City crash space. What if University Square fell on me! What if that lightpole was covered in spiders! What if that freshman's head exploded onto the wall behind her for no obvious reason except maybe that the Army had shot her/spiders were bursting from her brain sac!

Anyway, the guys who invented the Cloverfield monster were so excited about how much it changed everything for them that they could imagine it as this big bumbling baby animal that doesn't understand anything and is very confused about land and is rather blameless but even more frightening because it can't be reasoned with. That this, in some ways, made the whole movie happen, even though we the viewers couldn't necessarily see the difference between what they, the film monster makers, imagined, and a malicious intelligence that just couldn't get off the damn island.

Conversations like that get me very excited. The creator of anything has such power over those who view it, if they do their job well in not telling you everything. Confessions get boring - I'd rather read a grocery list full of seemingly unrelated items. Backtrack - sometimes confessions are very interesting. But the best part about Cloverfield was also kind of the most infuriating: at pretty much every turn you're left still not knowing what the hell is going on. Just like the protagonists! Isn't that awful? Aren't you glad you didn't die not knowing anything useful? Because a lot of people sure did!

On another note, this botched execution in Ohio made me very angry and I'm going to say some things when I'm less sleepy and don't have to wake up for 231221 catch-up coffees with friends.