mallorys_camera | Borderline Flashes, 56 Up and Dream Portals

The heat, the shortage of work at a time when I have extra bills to pay, the excessively high levels of bullshit on both sides of the political spectrum in the wake of the Trayvon Martin verdict, put me in a very bad mood yesterday. I could feel myself getting all borderline-y – one of the hazards of having been brought up by a single mother with borderline personality disorder. I don't want to model myself after her, but of course to some extent it's inevitable: What other role models have I had after all?

I just tell myself, Temporary, temporary, temporary.

Three weeks from now, my life evolves into something quite different. Better? Worse? That I don't know. I think it will be good, however, to have a schedule set by external necessities. I think I'll feel more… tethered.

I watched 56 Up last night, the most recent episode of Michael Apted's ongoing documentary about the lives of 14 individuals who were seven years old in 1964 when Apted began filming them. It's Apted's attempt to prove or disprove the truth of that old Jesuit maxim: Give me a child when he is seven years old, and I will give you the man.

It's one of the great documentary film experiments of all time, and I imagine it will be studied for many centuries to come – by the cockroaches or whatever sentient beings inherit the earth after Man succeeds in extinguishing himself. A moving record of the small triumphs and heartbreaks of a group of people you would never have heard of had Apted not aimed his camera in their direction. The good news? A surprising number of them seem genuinely happy in middle age. Neil, the one I worried about the most, the bright kid who spent much of his 20s and 30s being homeless and drifting from squat to squat, has reinvented himself in his 50s as a local politician.

Neil would never have had the opportunity to do that in the U.S., of course, because the social safety net that allowed him to survive in the UK doesn't exist here. Neil would have died in his 30s in the U.S., I'm afraid. Bad thing? Good thing? I don't really know. My own extreme prejudice is that every life is meaningful because every life tells a unique story, and I'm obsessed with narrative. But in the larger scheme of things, I understand that it scarcely matters who lives and dies unless the larger collective attaches a narrative to that life – as in the case of Trayvon Martin.

I had a rather remarkable dream last night:

At the moment of death, there's a kind of portal through which people can slip into those moments of their lives that were… changed… by the Butterly Effect. If you are close enough to those people when they're breathing their last breath, you can slip too.

A group of scientists had worked out the mathematical formulas behind this phenomenon and had taken over this retirement home in a tiny town in the Oklahoma Panhandle, Ground Zero for the Dust Bowl. They were trying to slip back in time to do retroactive terraforming so that the Great Desolation – climate change, erosion of soil, genetically modified foods, blah, blah, blah – would not take place.

Part of the process involved choosing people who – unbeknownst to themselves – had actually had lives that could have changed the outcome were it not for one little thing…

Dream was set up very much like the great Polish movie The Saragossa Manuscript. Dying perps who'd traveled back in time to that one seed moment where their realities diverged always woke up under a tree, sitting at a picnic table, watching a funeral in the distance. Whose funeral changed from narrative to narrative.

Would make a good science fiction short story.