You're in the mountains, the sun shines, snow silvers, your government will change this Thursday. A new day in America? I have no idea. But I wake up, put on a nice shirt, bury it under layer upon layer of fleece and down, walk out of the place and look up at that sparkly powder in the sky toward the slopes, the moisture that dazzles and disappears by early afternoon, I know it's gonna be a nice day. Nice.

I'm simple. I'm from the South. I had it imbued in me by anecdote, religion, tough experience. You make yourself useful in the worst and best of times. You're an optimist or you die. You're hopeful and support the hopes of those who support you, or you die. You use your god-given intelligence and wit, or you die. Or you are dead already. We all will die. Something doesn't work? Fix it, change it, alter it. Do something good for the town. Paint the water tower. Join the volunteer fire department. You can't save the house, save the chimney. Whatever makes you weary, turn it around. Convert it to your needs. These are the best breaths of your life. Take a deep one now. Even the most devious of cinematic naïfs and dupes have put it on the line and up on that screen. Even if it's bunkum. Baby, it's cold inside.

But it's like any other day when you're as alert as a pup with tail in air and nose to the breeze. Someone will smile at you on Main Street, you will never, ever, never see them again. Wondrous. You only seem them for one second and they don't see you at all. Before a month goes by? You'll think of that one. A brief instant in a movie no ordinary citizen has seen before will remind you of a tenderness that will become a bruise. Your own memory will ache you until you get to the bed you dress at home. That intimate concordance, you won't concede tearing up, anyone asks, you won't convulsively confess, but your eyes will see more clearly after the wet and quickly settle into your bettered consciousness.

There are things to fear, to be sure. That's in the air, generalized unease. I want to share a specific aural image of the recurring disorientation that was 2008, in the form of a recollection of something that happened to me years and years and years ago. A rude, loud sound that wouldn't go away. It's a personal story. Bear with me… Imagine this moment. The road, rutted and mud-walled, reaches to dark infinity, a horizon slimly lit by distant towns (not cities), then above that, a sliver of cool blue light that underlines a mile, two, of black bareness until, above our heads, the dome of Kentucky sky pulses faintly of stars' dead distant light, and for some inane, unexamined reason, headlights finished, we are careening, we three teens, in the garage's shop pickup with heedless speed, wheels jouncing, jousting with the runnels that may have been made by wagon wheels a century sooner for all we knew, bolting from nowhere to the middle of nowhere when the formidable rustbucket of a tool chest of random tools, of ratchets and wrenches, of bolts and lugs and spare parts and enigmatic gizmos takes a liking to one abrupt dodge and lurch and elects that that now long-gone moment is the one in which to levitate for what was only a second, two, but in memory, despite rust held together only by other rust, bolsters of Bondo, flaky crust of corrosion, a wealth of estimable, grandfathered rust, levitated—held—then fell behind the 1940s Ford with a pestilential crash and roar, the suddenness of which seemed to shift its 250 pounds of miscellaneous junk into sudden silence, a thud that is a roar and a roar that ends and is terror for its cessation alone.

Junk tossed for yards about. And silence. The metaphor knocks again and again just past 2008, with politics, economics, daily insult to common sense and the rational brain. What happens when bottom falls out of bottom? (CRASH). Sarah Palin. (CRASH). Newspaper bankruptcies, jobs-turned-sinecures gone for good? (CRASH). The suddenness of it all… But, as Jonah Nolan, Christopher Nolan and the Joker might well inquire, why so serious?

But why not so serious? Stories are worth it. Storytelling is worth it. The uncertain future gleams with possibility, a distant yet attainable shining horizon in the night sky of a dark time that will surely evolve into a time more focused, more productive: better; even good. The battle is not against "evil" or "the other," but against slovenly despair and shadowy doubt and dogmatic fear. The battle is against indolence and inattention. Celebrate the good, overlook the broken, castigate the banal or patently insincere. You can't find five grand things in five days? Ain't looking. You're not. Honestly.

When the 2009 preview catalog fell out of the mailbox, as it does late each December, I sped through in one sitting, hoping, hoping against hope, guessing at the alchemical possibilities of whatever brace of talent is listed against a typically opaque swatch of plot synopsis and catalogue copy. Filmmakers seem to just get down to it. The commentary on life and commerce in a narrative form ought come within hailing distance of metaphor. Whether good or bad or naïve or jaded, there's still the hope of expressive possibility in their efforts.

What's the ideal version of a festival like Sundance? A meeting of like minds. Eddies of reunion. Smiles of recognition. Hugs of hope. A dozen good friends, pause for 20 minutes or half an hour: espresso, schemes, wine, reminiscence. A conspiracy of your sort. The making of a gang. The passing along of secrets, good ones, the nurturing kind. This would be the smile from ones you know.

It's not even about the intellectual desire and expectation for a sudden eruption of transformative intelligence in a dire era awaiting the next: it's looking, it's seeing. It's freedom, man. Hear Dennis Hopper's intonations if you like: It's freedom, man. A conspiracy of your people.

I take something to heart that Lance Hammer told me this year as we talked about the future of a movie he'd loosed into the world called Ballast, and he offered an idea of that freedom in sixty seconds. I like what he says. The sentiment boils down to mine precisely: The future is all you have and if you waste it, you're a fool. That's just me. This is Mr. Hammer's edifying version: