Christopher Walken said “Improvising is wonderful” and he also
said “You cannot improvise unless you know what you are doing.”
I am improvising but I don’t know what I’m doing
which is unwise according to Christopher Walken.
I dreamed about a desert and woke up thinking about the Buddhist
monk on fire in Seven Psychopaths and Christopher Walken’s
monologue. While lying in my bed I thought it would be cool if my life was
also just the imagination of someone dying
somewhere back in time, maybe someone with an appetite
for reckless adventure, someone hunting
for treasure and the truth in a crimson rocked chasm
with only a knife and a wild grin, someone dying slowly
in desert sands, snake venom coursing through his veins
with silent aggression. The sky whitens and he imagines a hundred
years into the future, and I am that future, maybe, a vision
of hopelessness, absurdity, a whole lot of nothing.
Christopher Walken also said “I am scared of everything. I think it’s
only sensible to be that way,” which is sad and makes me
feel despondent but also validated. I don’t want to be scared, though
maybe I’m only alive because I am.
The desert in my dream was scorching and I woke up sweating. I think
it was Death Valley: a dream that was part memory, part fantasy. But if
my life is the reckless treasure hunter’s imagination then it isn’t really my
memory. I’m just fiction, may as well be in a cave somewhere in
ancient Greece with a fire at my feet and chains around my wrists, eyes
wide and pale from years in darkness. And you may as well
all be there with me. Christopher Walken too. He’d be acting
whimsical, charismatic and effortlessly engaging. So much so
that we’d forget we were chained up in a cave. We’d just listen
to him, smiling and nodding, agreeing, minds blown.
But if we are all just the imagination of a reckless treasure hunter
who’s dying of snake poison, staring at the white sky, refusing to let
his grin be vanquished, then the cave I’m picturing is not my
original thought either, but something the treasure hunter
imagines I’d be thinking about. He imagines all of
this: you, me, Christopher Walken, the rest of it. If he told people
what he was thinking people would say
he was crazy. But he is the last person in a world of sand, forgotten
treasure and snakes. No people to tell, no one to convince, nothing
to lose. Crazy can’t exist in a world where there is
nothing comparable. Snakes don’t count because a snake is just
a snake without personality or non-instinctive thoughts (no offence to snakes).
The reckless treasure hunter thinks this so I think this.
Then he dies feeling sane and satisfied…
The Aftermath:
All of us disappear. The stars spin for a while, planets align, and the desert
blackens. The reckless treasure hunter’s body turns to sand. Flowers grow
from that sand, blue flowers, and Christopher Walken’s voice
can be heard faintly, ominously, saying “We all gotta dream, don’t we?”