I'll Find You, Too, Loch Ness Monster, Ya Bastard

Up till 3 a.m. again last night, when, on the verge of what I thought was a breakthrough, everything went to hell again. Defeat. Abject despair. How many more notebooks can I fill with my observations before I simply give up, too worn out to go on? Yet I will go on. Too much is depending on it.

I had just bought a new tape rewinder the night before, a PictureBaby RW-7, and once again loaded my trusty VHS cassette of eight hours of baseball bloopers, ready for another predictable, unproductive spin. That tape has been through hell and high water; the notebooks bear witness to its hundreds of full-length rewinds and fast forwards. And I swear on my father's name, the great physicist Bjorn Intmuth, that after the tape had snapped to 8:00:00, and then, predictably and meaninglessly, 8:00:02, there was a full half second of further motion inside the deck. My three Sennheiser microphones should have recorded the sound---had I remembered to plug them in. Hours worth of work lost because of my own incompetence.

This is the year, my friends. This is the year my findings bear fruit. They called me mad when I first postulated the existence of videotape beyond the final fast forward point, but I tell you as I sit here now bathed in the dawn light, I am not mad. Helmuttson may mock me at symposium after symposium, but I have a file full of testimonies from people around the globe reporting their first-hand brushes with one, two, sometimes even five seconds of tape where no one has ever dared dream it would be. Who can explain Ripschipp's claim that upon taping half of The Prisoner marathon, he swore he heard the tape stop recording not at the eight hour and two second mark, but at 8:09? Is Ripschipp, with his many degrees and honorary chairs at Princeton and Brown, a drunkard or a hick? Hardly. He never found those extra seven seconds, but I believe he was scared off the trail by his own lack of passion. And is there not an absurdly convenient pattern to the denials of the Maxell Corporation when I confront them with the results of my lab work? Have we not, my friends, become simply too numbed by the rigors of daily living to let our imaginations yearn for what might be?

I shall rest today---six hours of sleep, a shower, a hot meal brought to me by elderly Mrs. Luffstavson, God bless her soul---and then I must return to my efforts anew. I seek nothing less than the Holy Grail of science, and seekers of that prize can know no true pause. The SLP tapes shall be set aside for now and I will go back for a few weeks to my SP collection of Italian zombie movies from the nineteen eighties to re-test certain hypotheses which have become fuzzy in my brain due to overwork and overstress. How I wish Dr. Frankenstein were with me to assist my work. There was an uncritical man. Clean, too!