May 93 – Multimedia Gulch, San Francisco

Multimedia is causing a frenzy at SF State University’s downtown campus. The halls are buzzing in the hub of this latest craze.

I enroll in an Interactive Writing class – a non-linear game-like approach to storytelling. Sounds simple enough. New York has publishing. LA has filmmaking. Silicon Valley has technology. SF wants to cross-breed and cultivate this new industry in the city’s cradle south of Market Street, coined as…multimedia gulch.

My dad says, ”I think this is it for you Chris.” I believe him. Everyone wants a “this is it.” As Dennis Hopper once said in Premiere mag about the movie “Colors” he directed, – “Yeh man. Bob (Duvall) needs a hit. I need a hit. Hey man, we all need a hit.”

Grunt work weighs on me. No one’s asking you to be passionate about shelving books or making sandwiches or bagging groceries. Sometimes you just do what you can to keep the lights on.

—

When the lights dim and you look at the stars, do you see action? The motion? Can you capture time? I don’t think so. All you get is light speed, warp speed and a zillion things zooming past you.

Maybe you get lost in time during space travel or age a hundred years. Perhaps you encounter another planet of creatures with whom you can communicate. And maybe you lose all sense of place because everything out there is relative, and everything in here (thumps chest) is absolute. That’s the freakin’ universe!

And yet all we stumble through and see is the day-to-day, barely what’s in front of us. Do we really examine other cultures, other species, other worlds? No, we’re cooped up in this self-absorbed futility. A wasteland of limited knowledge and experience. We’re not explorers. We’ll never find extraterrestrials. They will find us, before we have a clue what hit us.

Come what may.

23 – Seeking a Hit