super 8 fantasy

i'll be living alone soon enough, so i'm going through all of my things and throwing away as much as i possibly can. i want to toss out whatever i can and clean everything so that all of it will be easy to rearrange when the spare room is empty and it's time to shift things around. earlier today my friend and i walked my dinette set over to a place that accepts donations for a program called "furnish the future" for homeless people who are getting their lives together. it felt good to not just leave it on the sidewalk. i hope its a blessing to someone.

i know that spring cleaning is traditionally the thing to do right about now, but i'm such a packrat that i need this kind of motivation every month. strangely, i've found all kinds of things. so far, the most interesting is the super 8 cameras and projector that i'd acquired some time ago, after reading a book about super 8 films. i'd completely forgotten about them. they aren't rusted over, either. they work and they are beautiful. it's got me thinking about super 8 filmmaking all over again. and i haven't given any of that serious thought since carrie passed away. me, the one that was so insistent on learning how to write movies, i finished college as a screenwriting major. and carrie fanned those flames into a bonfire -- with long talks into the night about our ideas and how we could realistically make them happen. she started her production company and got everything off the ground with one short film after another and she was starting to delve into music videos. if it weren't for the lung cancer, i'm sure that she would have pulled it off.

so now i'm looking at all this equipment and i'm thinking about carrie and i'm restless again. i'm remembering our conversations, the treatments i'd written, the partially written screenplay that i showed her. she was so encouraging, so positive, so sure that i'd do something wonderful. there was an idea i had for a documentary about my surname, which is german. i've never met any white people with this name. i thought it would be interesting to go to germany and meet my relatives, by way of a plantation in south georgia that's supposedly named after all of us, and trace a part of my family history. it wouldn't be a two hour saga. more like 30 minutes, maybe. when i mentioned it to a german filmmaker friend of mine, he thought it was a great idea. he even thought that i could get funding from germany. it seemed so farfetched at the time -- the kind of thing we'd sit around and talk about, after a big meal and some introspective conversation -- but totally do-able. and then the world rushed in, carrie went away and i went off to do other things. but that idea wouldn't leave me alone. and now it's back.

the more i dig, the more cameras i find.

well. i can't sit around with a good idea in my hands for long. i have to do something. and all of a sudden, it's not so impossible. actually, it sounds like a lot of fun.