Monday 16 November 1998

The future is now and now is breakfast at where else, The Hurst. My favorite waitresses are here, they are all, every single one of them likely to make me fall in love with them with the slightest provocation. I was reading over what I wrote yesterday over breakfast, and I'm kind of horrified, really, but fortunately this is just a pen on paper and not going directly to the world wide web or anything crazy like that. I imagine that anyone might think I've gone pretty far around the bend, and I'm not so sure myself. I just have to straighten out my brain here a little—it's getting pretty mixed up. As much as people are really the most important thing in your life, and your friends are the most important people, the exception to that is that the cinema is the most important thing to me, and my love for the cinema is really bigger than my love for all humanity and even any individual. That's really a position contradictory to what I really feel, but any conviction without a contradiction probably is a piece of crap anyway. The truth is in the contradictions, and it's all crap, including this, but out of that is what's real and what I really care about. Someone put on Leonard Cohen, and that reminds me that music is also my biggest love of my life, even above the cinema. Well maybe not above the cinema. And then there's—well, just art in general. It's really art that is what is able to make you love people to the highest intensity possible. And I don't believe that all love is the same, or that all people are equal in that love. All people are definitely not the same in their capacity to hate, so why would they be with love? It's not a universal thing, and it's not anything to take for granted. It takes constant work, really hard work, because all the good stuff goes away without work and everything becomes dull, slightly dirty, blunt, and slow. I really want to keep everything at a sharp edge, hot and sharp and intense, and if I can do that maybe I can go on.