skonen_blades

The more clarity I achieve, the stupider I know I am. It’s not that there’s a door unlocking inside me or that I’m falling deeper and deeper through the levels of my own life. I don’t have visitations from flowery growths of suspense and handlings. I have sharp turns in well-lit tunnels that bring me to new chapters. I have ‘top-down’ moments where I feel as if I’m lifted up above my own life and for a few moments, I can see the whole shape of it, see it for what it really is. It’s in these moments where I feel super lucid but also like I’m dreaming hard. I see the track. I see where I am. I don’t see how long I’ve got but I feel like I get an accurate check on how I’m doing. It goes a lot deeper than any old report card.

I’m experiencing things that so many humans have experienced before yet I feel alone. I think that’s the fulcrum for the seesaw of humanity. I know Audrey is unique. I know Sonja is unique. I know I am unique. But I know that our struggles and delights with each other as a family would be familiar to any other family on the planet and to families before Christ. Will be familiar to families centuries from now, maybe. My joy at seeing my daughter laugh is mine and mine alone yet is it also a father’s joy, every father’s joy. I feel common and included all at the same time. I feel lonely and special all at the same time. This is the duality, I think, of existence.

Waves. Fire. Branches. Always repeating and never repeating. So too with humans.



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The word equator has two meanings. It is both the longest straight line that one can draw around this planet and at the same time it is a word meaning ‘a thing we all have in common.’

I remember finding the center of you with a theatrical release. I remember being deep inside, trying to find easter eggs. I mapped every divot of your body but I took care to never touch you. The marks on your surface made you skip. Your scratches made you unplayable.

Cut by directors trying to make you into an original vision, you were my unrated European bootleg with fifteen minutes of never-before-seen footage. I was a rapt member of your audience through a ladder of ratings leading all the way up to ex.

I seek out burned copies of you but it’s never the same. The only special features they have are interactive menus and ads for themselves edited to make them look better than they are. Trailer trash with voiceovers from long absent fathers talking about ‘one man’.

This is a director’s commentary. You are the deleted scenes in my life. I watch the second disc of the two-disc set because it’s all I’m left with. I watch the ‘making of’ documentary. I watch the cast and crew bios. I watch the extras. I search in vain for the original.

An equator’s radius is the circumference of a circle that encompasses a world. That is what memories of you have become. It’s the edge of a circle that tangents intersect.

I long for the original.

I want to press play.




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