MONDAY, 3 JANUARY, 2000, PHILADELPHIA

Scene from David Lynch’s unmade movie: Quiet Monday morning on the quiet campus of a Pennsylvania college. I leave my building to go to the coffee bar. Sit outside and have a cigarette first. It is unseasonably warm for January. No gloves necessary. Quietly smoking, cleaning fingernails, looking about lazily, la-di-dah, la-di-dah. Suddenly a dog appears. It does not walk onto screen. It simply appears. Ridiculous shaggy thing. It is staring at a potted plant. Another dog joins us in our field of vision to the left. It is smaller, also ridiculously fluffy, and filthy. It has a collar on with a name tag. It stands quietly regarding another potted plant. A cloud passes in front of the sun. The atmosphere changes, forshadowing strange Lynchian things to come. A small, unseen child gurgles and goos from offscreen. A tired looking woman exits the bank. She stops mid stride to stare intently at a pillar. Very perplexed. She stays that way for over a minute. Two dogs and a woman have become objects in this weird still-life. A man opens the door to the coffee bar. He is despondent, moving slowly. Typical slow movements for a Monday morning. Something happens in his head. Or perhaps he notices the overly static scene of the dogs and the woman. As he goes through the second door of the foyer of the coffee bar, he changes gears and flies into a panic. Throwing open the second door, he sprints with alarming speed through the entire building. The wall is glass. We can see him running for his life, or to put out a fire, all along the long corridor. We can hear very faint, muffled footfalls through the glass. The woman comes to some conclusion (we assume) about the pillar, and continues on towards her destination. Suddenly in the bench opposite us a girl is sitting, eating an apple. We did not see her approach either. The crunch from her apple is the only sound we hear in this quiet courtyard and it is amplified and reverberated against the marble walls of the building. Not being able to stand for any more of this subversive imagery, I put out my cigarette and go to purchase some much-needed coffee… Is the 21st century going to be this surreal all the time? Will there, I shudder to ask, be midgets eventually?