Eating soup in a computer lab on campus. It’s very delicious. Today’s Grad club special, carrot something. It looks like orangish-yellow porridge. Actually it looks like cat vomit. Not so delicious now. I bought it along with red Powerade and a stale donut. Brain dead and sluggish. Last night’s half-of-a-sleeping pill lingers. I’m eating in here and not in the bar because I feel and look like shit today. I’m wearing a big ugly, grey and beige sweater, my hair is a total haphazard mess and my stubble is at a very unflattering phase. Been eating terrible lately. I should fix that. It will fix my mood too I bet. Why do I feel like such a slug when I should be in a frenzy to meet deadlines? So far this post is sufficiently hum drum, matching my mood quite well. Maybe the cure to my funk is as simple as some caffeine and music. Curtis Mayfield wasn’t getting the job done earlier. I need something more upbeat. All right. Yawn yawn yawn. Twenty more minutes left on my self-allocated break. Let’s see. A Procrastination exercise, My top five movie moments that come to mind right now:

(1) Return Of The Living Dead. About 5 minutes in. Frank and Freddie are down in the basement of the medical supply warehouse and checking out the military canisters. Freddie says, “Hey Frank these don’t leak do they?” Frank retorts, “Hell no! These were made by the US army!” Then he slaps one, it starts leaking and that cool as hell 80s techno punk music comes on as the display case on the canister cracks and the zombie face starts melting and goes all liquidy and the scene follows the smoke and shit as it cycles through the building.

(2) The treetop scene from The Sword in the Stone where Merlin and the boy are chipmunks and are being harassed by the females. Or the moat scene where they’re fish and learning how to swim and there’s that huge pike. Or the wizard battle. That was a good movie.

(3) The conclusion of Seven.

(4) Another pretty obscure one from an 80s horror movie, House, a scene that has Norm from Cheers playing a fat neighbor of this writer who’s living in a haunted house while trying to write a book. The writer knows that at the same time every night this monster comes down his chimney to do bad stuff. So he invites Norm over for beers and aid under the guise of catching and killing a rabid raccoon that comes out of his chimney every night. So he sets a mildly drunk and skeptical Norm up with this giant harpoon and gives him safety glasses and they camp out in front of the chimney watching the clock tick down to monster time. Just take my word for it, it’s a good one. An excellent mix of suspense and comedy.

(5) High Fidelity. When the Zen guru played by Tim Robbins comes into the record store to tell John Cusak’s character to stop stalking him and his estranged girlfriend and the sequence of possible courses of action that are subsequently cycled through in his mind. Especially the last one where he’s helped out by Jack Black and the passivist, mellow employee to team up to beat the shit out of the guru. When the skinny guy rips the air conditioner out of the wall I totally lose it.