We are done. Obliterated. Barely functional. Our mind is like an underground trash fire that will burn for five-thousand years, but in a good way.

We feel like we are watching ourselves when we witness a team collapse the enormous white orbs which had been floating above the Missouri Theatre balcony. They deflated the enormous white orbs, understanding they were not disposable, and would be back next year.

Outside of Sparky’s, at 2:45pm, we listened to a banjo player and tried to count how many people we could see up and down Ninth Street. This is the kind of mind-sapped idea that we have after three days of films, music, art, and parties. We couldn’t count the people, so we went to the biscuit truck and asked how many biscuits they had sold in the past three days. A man in the biscuit truck said “over a thousand biscuits,” and we aren’t sure if that’s a lot of biscuits, or a little. Judging by the way he said it, we think that a thousand biscuits is a lot of biscuits.

Everyone was talking about Tickled. As it turns out, watching Tickled is a lot like getting tickled. At first getting tickled is good, but it quickly becomes both good and horrifying, and yet it’s hard to stop laughing. Word on the street is there are actual professional ticklers about, on the streets of Columbia, and we try to spot them. We think, for a while, about the traits of a tickler. We build a tickler profile: extremely wealthy, serious, and male.

Random, overheard fest-goer quote: “You would think I oughta see films this good at home, you know, where I got like a hundred channels, but they’re all showing CRAP!”

Deborah Stratman came with her beautiful, experimental film Illinois Parables. It puts us in a whirling tornado, a nuclear reactor, and a hot-air balloon. It looks like a water-strider made of hilled earth viewed from two-thousand feet in 16mm film. She refers to what she does as, “sculpting pressures.” Then she says, “most of the experience of a film happens later, up here,” and points to her head. We think about what this means for the next twelve months, and wonder if we will have enough time to truly experience the memory of this festival before the next one begins. We wonder if we could have somehow made a comprehensive documentary of True/False which would supplement our memory of the True/False film festival itself, and which we could watch in the comfort of our home, unthinkingly, eating popcorn on our couch.

But we go to Buskers Last Stand in the pleasantly packed Missouri Theatre lobby. Yes Ma’am plays and then Les Trois Coups plays and the mass of people forms around the new people playing. This happens again and again. And then the volunteers link arms, produce megaphones, and cheerfully force us all out of the theatre while informing us the festival has concluded. But the festival has not concluded. We are talking about films, standing our ground, until the line of volunteers meets us and we are strained out the front door.

We bounce through a volunteer party, where we’ve rewarded our 1,004 volunteers with croissant sandwiches, open bars, and big-shot, out-of-town rappers Champagne Jerry. We get sprayed with champagne. We see our favorite drag-queen again.

Then we go to Toasted at Cafe Berlin in the middle of the night. This is supposed to last for four hours. Many of us here are awaiting midnight shuttles back to where we came from. We fly to many different time zones, and it will take us many hours, and we will bring the festival home to our villages. The M.C. Charley Lyne produces an autobiography of Miley Cyrus and begins to read. Then come the directors, one-by-one, talking candidly about their films.

It feels like nobody wants this thing to end.

True/False 2016 Daily Digest: Sunday, March 6, 2016