Floontz Video Journal: Kerfuffle After-Party
Channel: floontz
Date: 2021-10-08

First video journal. Screening party. My second film. 
“How are you doing?” Bender asked throughout the night. 
“Anxious.” 
“Still?” 
I hadn’t split from an intense fixation piecing together a documentary in more than a month. Before that, I couldn't shuffle more than 100 meters without doubling over in sharp, shooting pain. My social skills were worse than the drought. To amplify the panic, I'd chugged ultra-sleek, high-end coffee fed into test tubes by Bender in an alcove of his elephant blue kitchen moments before we departed for the event. Elephant blue, like the LED flower crown I gave him to wear. Mine was yellow.  
“Did you make those yourself?” a stoned creative genius inquired as I hyperventilated in the smoking section after the screening. 
“No. The idea came to me. And Amazon delivered.” 
There was no use for me after that, so I took it upon myself to film an ensuing in-depth conversation about kung fu, a topic I knew nothing about (but wished I did), before winding my way past the backyard focal point: a bubbling, cerulean hot tub beneath a string-lit sycamore tree. It led to the second floor balcony where a cluster of screeners discussed trauma, “it’s like putting makeup on a wound if you don’t dress it with self-forgiveness first,” an outfitted cowboy said. 
On to the third floor, the top floor, where a pink-and-blue hued living room opened up to a kitchen loaded with vegan catering, the highlight, a platter of artichoke sandwiches with moist, exceptional bread. I took a seat next to cross-legged Kai, also curious about the LED flower crowns: “is that a regular thing you do?” 
“It’s recent,” I said. I enjoyed the idea of a halo's illumination. It attracted. Repelled. 
A synchronistic cross-hatch continued for hours on end, pairings of people with something strangely specific in common—mine wasn’t the ins and outs of niche kung fu cinema, but El Dorado—a small town 20 minutes beyond Santa Fe. It was the town I wound up in when I couldn’t get to Taos as early as planned. As it turned out, Kai lived there too. 
“You know the train tracks?”
Did I know the train tracks. The tracks were my only taste of the outside world for two months. They were the destination of my walks, my runs, my only escape from taking my journals from handwritten scribbles to 800 typed pages. I was alone in that sprawling oasis. My only companions were Saturn and Jupiter as they advanced toward each other until they were fully aligned. I’d never spoken about the train tracks to anyone else. 
Back down to the 2nd floor for Sarah and Andrew's impromptu acro session. Across from them, a muscular man sprawled out on the brown leather couch, assessing the angles and immersed in the shapes, the contortions, the fabric, the way the dress stretched and caressed the body. He hunched forward, nodded approval, rooting for them both. Andrew sweated, composed. Sarah stretched, surrendered. Everyone swerved another round of individual orbits. 
“This is art. This is what I came here for,” he said. 
He wasn’t there for the animation that took two years to make. He was there for the real, live, once-in-a-lifetime experience Andrew trained for since birth. There was something for everyone. If it wasn’t the animation or the acro, the aesthetics or the bread, it was the cacao, the heart opener, the human connection.

video journal by floontz
edited by Bonelli 
music by Brian Bender
shot at PORTALS