There are seven counts of suicide in the Bible, never is it condemned.

1982 (a silent movie):

Atari distribute a game called Pole Position.

Success is attributed to the appeal of driving an Indy car around the Fuji speedway, but the game has a certain built in solipsism. The situation is a dream of sorts, the movement of the car illusory: the vehicle remains stationary as the surroundings move around it.

Our point of entry is stillness. By pressing the gas pedal, rather than thrust ourselves forward, we force the world past us.

This is where I have to start.
There are other things I must tell you. They all begin with stillness.

This is a silent movie.
The above paragraphs are a specific filter placed over the lens.
The lens belongs to an imaginary camera.
(much of my apparatus is imaginary)

The filter has no name aside from the words I have arranged in the above paragraphs.
You must be the projectionist.
I will likely fall in love with you.

1982:

Dorothy, a precocious, biblical child, spends her first night in the city. Accustomed to black skies, she mistakes the glow of neon lights for a blood moon. Apocalypse. The Book of Revelation. She informs her babysitter of the prophecy. You laugh.

As she lies awake, her mother is killed in a stationary gold sedan when the airbag inflates erroneously and her skull is crushed against the passenger window.

The baby sitter waits in the living room.

There are several stories here. They concern stillness, astronomy and loss.
These are the three words I wrote with a paint roller on the redbrick of your infancy.

Instances of beauty are convenient accidents.
I cannot resist them.
Loss derives from stillness.

1982:

Galileo shoots himself in the chest with an air rifle. The pellet misses his heart.

By the time you force the door to his apartment, he has bled to death over a period of several days: propped on the couch, staring into the television where a woman explains how to make a lighthouse from yarn and shampoo bottles.

Love stories are essentially astronomy.
They are observations of satellites, bodies caught in attraction.
Words like orbit and velocity are not satisfactory.
Only this peculiar gravity.

1982:

Galileo has the gas pedal.
You should take the wheel.

In the mid twentieth century, one man voluntarily exposed his body to hundreds of impact experiments before finally inventing the first crash test dummy.

Dorothy read this in the Bible.

In Pole Position, even the slightest collision causes the car to explode in the same fractal pattern.

In the 5th century, St. Augustine declared suicide a sin so severe it would keep a soul from heaven.

Game Over.

Galileo was a con man from Omaha, Nebraska.

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The Copernican Revolution. The Wizard of Oz. A couple of documentaries I saw on PBS. Everyone’s favorite teacher when we were 11. Noah’s Ark. A painting I found in a dumpster. The amusement arcade on Mumbles Pier through the 1980s. My gift is a bastard.