Tuesday night, after a long long day of shooting, we got back from dinner around 11pm. I talked to Pusser in the lobby until words stopped making sense and began the long stagger of exhaustion to my room. I was the kind of tired that’s like a quarter-hit of acid – disorienting for sure, but with a mild hallucinatory tint – which probably explains why it was so unnerving to round the corner and find my eyes locked with those of a heavyset man holding what appeared to be a wine cooler. “HI!”, he chirped, grinning in a way that was not entirely normal. Next to him hunched a hollow-cheeked, sallow-skinned woman wrapped in a blanket, and between them sat no less than ten half-finished bottles of Miller light. I took in the scene at half-speed, gaze sliding from one to the other to the center, and as I maneuvered myself past them, the woman suddenly came to life. With the slow-moving stance of a carnival doll, her head swiveled in my direction, her glass eyes rolled towards the ceiling, and she said:

“Everything you want is in a box to your left.”

I was suddenly gripped by the sensation that I’d slipped into an alternate dimension. Like, maybe this woman was a seer from beyond, and her words bore the answer to all the riddles of life. I looked to my left, looked to my right, and the lights seemed to flicker and dim. Waves of vertigo distorted the lines of the hallway, my lips curved outward, and just before I could muster the strength to speak, the man’s arm jerked out, bottle aloft. “It was a song she was singing”, he told me. “Just before you got here.”

oh. ok. right on. and I unlocked the door to my room.

Seriously, I’m so glad I finally got some sleep last night. Otherwise, today might have found me humming lullabies to pink elephants somewhere on the banks of the Red River. Like wow.