Filed under: Uncategorized
Wathcing: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
My Grandmother had dementia.
It’s a strange thing, the human mind. It can do the most extraordinary things when it’s functional. But when it fails, the results are as catastrophic as they are drawn out. It started over a decade ago. I was young, naieve, didn’t know any better. I’m told she’d been slowly showing signs for a steady year or so, but I didn’t seem to notice. Gran was Gran. And then she broke her arm. How she did it, I’m not entirely sure. I never asked. It was too real for my young mind to comprehend at the time I guess. She was becoming frustrated. Short tempered. Violently forgetful. Unable to remember why she was in a cast, she picked at it and pulled it off. The hospital reset it, but she pulled it off again. The hospital reset it once more, but this time put the cast up to her shoulder, so she’d be unable to get it off. She was like a dog with an Elizabethan collar on. Not able to reason why she was in the predicament, but unable to satiate the throbbing urge her misfiring mind was sending to rid herself of her limbs’ plastery imprisonment.
Grandad was very much a product of the old school. A staunchly stiff upper lip, combined with the stubborness of an unyielding mule. These were the very traits that didn’t allow him to drop one iota of the thick Scottish accent he was born with, despite living in Australia for the vast majority of his life. His bravado carried over to Gran, whom he was convinced was going to one day get better, as if suddenly waking up from a bad dream. But slowly, he subconsciously would allow minor changes into the house that best suited her sliding state. The bathrooms became railed and chaired. The backyard opened up and flattened to a degree, the side access firmly corderned off. The bed split in two, driving space between matching mattresses. Then the Nurse started coming infrequently. Paying the odd visit to maintain vitals, adjust dosages, give instructions on supplements. Despite long waiting lists, miraculously, placement for respite opened up, and off she went for one day a week. Two days a week. Sometimes less. Sometimes more.
And then one night, after the better part of a cask of red wine, he tore a muscle in his back and cracked his head open. As he lay bedridden, being tended to in the same way he tended to her, she was placed in the Masonic home full time.
At first, the visits were somewhat frequent. About as frequent as they were when she was healthy. The recognition was there, but it was slow and laborious. It wore her out physically and emotionally. I grew to dread the visits. The high security ward she now lived in was like a waiting room for the inevitable. It was a prison with minimal external stimuli. You needed a passcode to get in, and one to get back out. But it wasn’t really a passcode, it was the town’s postcode. Apparently they didn’t expect that any resident would have the cognition to remember that. The common room smelled of urine and the disinfectant used to get rid of that urine. The visits became less and less frequent. Mother’s day. Birthdays. Easter. Eventually it became Christmas only. On Christmas Day the orderlies would dress the residents up in their finery. Ladies in modest wool-blend dresses. Gentlemen in ill-fitting suits. All sitting at a formal table, staring blankly across the room. One old man sat lonesome in the corner, dressed in his formal Army jacket that was adorned with countless medals earned in a battle he’d long forgot. His bottom lip would flap open and shut as he perpetually pat his head, never stopping, never speeding up, never slowing down; a total model of regimented consistency. Eventually, the visits stopped altogether. I was given the option of just sitting in the car in the carpark, and I always took it. I don’t remember the last time I saw her.
My Grandmother died late last year. The call came through at about 9pm. I think it was a Thursday. My Dad had had too much to drink to safely drive himself in, so I was enlisted. It was warm outside. Warm and clear. A regular October night. Whilst her husband and her three children gathered around her bedside and learned of the looming end, I sat in the carpark and read a book . 20 minutes later Dad emerged, suggesting I go home without him, which I did. I went home, and I went to bed. And I slept. In the early morning, my Mum gently woke me up to tell me that she had died about an hour prior. I nodded my head in acknowledgement and then I went back to sleep. When I eventually woke up and rose, I sat and thought about it. I felt nothing. I didn’t feel emotional, or philosophical, or in any way perturbed. Instead, I went to work. I didn’t say anything. I didn’t make a fuss. I just worked. A friend of the family bumped into me and offerred a sympathetic hand, which I shook and softly smiled as I verbally spun cliche and rhetoric. I didn’t go home after I finished. I put on a Halloween costume and went drinking with my friends. I hijacked the stereo. I told stories laced with hyperbole. I inappropriately put my arm around a girl that I probably shouldn’t have, (but not for any particular macho “get your hands off my woman” way) and I seethed awkward words with High School classmates that I really didn’t care for. That night, I slept in an armchair.
At the funeral, the casket arrived not in a hearse, but in the back of a delivery van. In full view of the just arriving family. Or, at least so I’m told. I didn’t go. I was 200 kilometres away at the time sitting a University exam on Literary Theory. I wasn’t upset about not going. To be perfectly honest, I was somewhat glad. My Dad apparently gave a very poignant eulogy. I read the transcript and smiled. It was about as perfect as it could’ve been.
I don’t remember everything about Gran, just a few specific things. Her laugh. Her laugh was boisterous and full, yet at the same time sardonic and pained. It was comforting, in a weird way. I remember her cooking. Not everything, just some select “trademark” dishes; her shortbread, her soup that had lima beans in it, and her spring rolls. She was forever doing complex jigsaw puzzles. Each time she finished one, Grandad would frame it and hang it on the wall. There’s barely a scrap of free wallpaper in their living room. I’m assured that she was a fiercely intelligent woman, but I never saw that. I’m scared of meeting a similar demise one day. I’m scared of losing my own cognition, and the ability to do things like commit this to paper (or screen). But most of all I’m scared of one day being the subject of a similar train of thought from a loved one, one laced with long faded memories and disjointed emotion. But if that remains unavoidable, then the least I can do is simply to love and to be loved in return. To just live a day, each day, every day.
I think she would like that.
Watching: Ghost World
Right now, as it stands, I’m bored.
VERY bored.
Not in the sense that I can’t think of anything to consume the next 10 minutes or so. I mean bored in the sense that everything that I immerse myself in on a daily basis is slowly grinding away at me. Everything is too nice. Too usual. Too reliable. There are some of you that may view a certain degree of reliability is a good thing. Which it is, in some cases. Reliability in a family sedan, for example, is fantastic. Reliability in the mail service or television programming is even better. Reliability in my current life, however, is shitting me up the wall.
Not only is this reliability a constant grating against my enthusiasm towards getting out of bed each day, but it’s also got the unpleasant side-effect of allowing that sick, sadistic bastard known as uncertainty in. It’s like a fucking picket line inside my head. Hundreds of suit clad, button-down, cookie-cutter drones marching in silent formation, gingerly clasping signs that read “How long will this last?” “When is this going to end?” “Where do we go from here?”. And it gets to a certain stage where you suddenly hit breaking point, and discover that the only way out of this mess is literally outwards. Take the point upon which you are standing, spin around a few times and point your finger straight ahead. The direction you stop on is your way out. It’s anywhere but where you are right now.
I reached that point the other day. I stopped dead in my tracks, dropped the bags I was holding, closed my eyes and made a grand visual statement of defiance by blindly chosing my way out. Ironically, my wandering finger ended up pointing straight at a wall. I laughed a little aloud in spite of myself and then I died a little on the inside. So with that failing firmly tucked under my belt, I tried to settle my nerves by watching Ghost World. Not because Steve Buscemi’s contiunally compounding levels of awesome, or for the cheap perv on Thora Birch and Scarlett Johannson for that matter. I put it on simply because Dave Sheriden’s “Doug” is pretty much the most spectacularly hilarious minor character in the history of modern cinema. However, the added bonus this time around came in the form of Enid’s wistful fantasy about leaving; about packing your bags, leaving town, not telling anyone, and creating a completely new life and identity for yourself in wherever-it-is that you find yourself winding up.
So, with that in mind, I have been toying with the idea of following suit. Packing up, leaving, without telling a soul. Disappearing for a while. Starting anew. But naturally there are a few snags in that plan, namely the fact that doing something like that will inevitably cause people to worry/panic/call the police/film an episode of CI Australia hosted by Steve Lieberman. So I have decided to do the honourable thing and leave enough information on here to put people’s minds at ease.
My new name is going to be Rex. I haven’t decided on a surname just yet. It’ll probably be a little Jewish though. Surnames sound more dynamic with some manner of Jewsian inflecton, I find. I’ll be living in one of three cities: The Hague, Salzburg, or Brussels. This is for two reasons: Firstly, I figure if I’m going to disappear for a while, it might as well be somewhere European-ish. Narrow streets. Gothic archetecture. Bleak skylines. If I’m going to hideout somewhere for a while, I want to be in surroundings that feel close and confined. Because, after all, who the fuck hides out in the open? Secondly, it’ll be these cities because going straight to the major city of a given country has not only been done to death, but it’s too fucking obvious. If I did that, I might as well leave a note. And what’s the point of that?
If you really feel the need to track me down, you’ll probably be able to catch me in the early morning, around 7 or 8. Just as the city begins to start the new day. I’ll probably be walking down a long narrow street that runs from my modest abode (situated above an on-again/off-again antiques retailer. The proprietor is a kindly old man who only opens his store in the early Spring when he needs to hoard some extra Euros to travel to his son’s villa on the southside of France in the summertime) to an early morning market to purchase some daily essentials like bread, the papers, whimsical banter and fresh, (lamentably) un-pasteurised milk. Around about the time that I put some of my wages down on the counter, I’ll encounter (see what I did there?) a middle aged man by the name of Pierre. A French national, he left his homeland after an unfortunate incident at his former accounting firm which involved some severe mishandling of the Anderson account, which was a source of great international concern for the board of directors. Nowadays he spends his days strolling about the neighbourhood, running a low-key cobblers concern out of his converted garage. He tells me that he prefers to do his work at night time, however I suspect that he merely has no business thanks to his gruff demeanour and patronising attitudes regarding proper personal shoe care. But I don’t tell him this, because I find him amusing in a cynical sort of way. That, and he’s one of the few people in this particular district who can speak fluent English, as my stubbornness has not allowed me to pick up much of the local tongue thus far, which has made things quite difficult indeed.
As I’m struggling to maintain a firm grasp on my newly procured wares, Pierre will smile at me and wave, greeting me with a tone laced with friendly spite.
“Good morning, Rex! I see you’ve switched to wholemeal bread. White too good for you now?”
“Good morning, Pierre. Quite the opposite. The white bread sold here doesn’t have the same hold and texture that the wholemeal does. It’s a sensation you just can’t replicate anywhere else.”
“In that case, perhaps I will recoup that promise of a sandwich that I won off you over the result of last weekends football game.”
“Don’t you have shoes you should be fixing?”
At that point, Pierre will just sneer at me. I have, unwittingly, touched a nerve.
“I jest, Pierre. Come on over. I have a pair of Italian loafers that need new soles.”
“Ahh, but Rex! They are not the genuine item. Merely cheap knock-offs.”
“How do you figure that, Pierre?”
“You are eating store-bought wholemeal bread and drinking un-pasteurised milk. There is no way you could afford the quality of a genuine Italian loafer with your meager earnings.”
I laugh a little aloud in spite of myself, and then I die a little on the inside.
And then I make Pierre a sandwich and listen to him ramble on about snooty French-style fiscal solvency for the next 30 minutes, before he leaves without so much as a thank you. And to make matters worse, the sonofagoat charged me €15 to put new soles on my “cheap” loafers. Soles that were too stiff across the arch, and too soft around the heel, for that matter.
And they squeak.
All the time.
I fucking hate you, Pierre.
Watching: Fight Club
I could (and my embarrassing admission is that I have) write forever and a day about various aspects of Fight Club, and how they relate or reflect upon various aspects of modern society; overt sexuality and the modern physical relationship, violence, hypermasculinity and the growing prevalence of it therein despite the overall feminising of the modern male (100 pages of controversy, right there).
But instead, I’m going with something much simpler. Because:
a) It’s just after 1:30am, it’s still hot and my brain is slowing down with each passing minute, and;
b) No one wants to fucking read that shit anyway.
I’m lifting two quotes directly from the movie to start things off here:
“You buy furniture. You tell yourself: this is the last sofa I’ll ever need. No matter what else happens, I’ve got the sofa issue handled.”
“The things you own end up owning you.”
So, about a year and a half ago, my house burned down. Not completely, but enough to render the place uninhabitable and destroy/ruin nearly all the contents therein, save for a few minor material items (like my copy of Rainbow – On Stage, thank fucking christ). My housemate more or less lost everything she owned. But, thankfully, no one was hurt, which was a fucking miracle given the location of the fire and the layout of the house, but I digress…
At the risk of sounding preachy, a sudden catastrophic event in your personal situation like that is a very strange thing to experience. It’s the kind of experience that makes you re-evaluate your entire existence in 2 seconds. A lot of single word assessments of the situation flash through your head in rapid time. Most of these are swears. And for this one, glorious, shining moment, you become somewhat enlightened. The absolute necessities of a modern existence shine through, like they’d been muted for all these years. In a second, as you let your eyes roll over the charred remains of what you, no more than a day ago, had called “home”, you wonder how you managed to get this far with all that excessive crap weighing you down. You realise that you don’t need fancy shit to get by in life. You just need a heartbeat, and a functioning consciousness.
Unfortunately, that wonderful moment is soon shattered thanks to the “magnificent” “capitalist” structure that those who weren’t lucky enough to be nearly burned alive have set up for you. And so you have to trudge through your former house and bring yourself face to face with exactly how much fucking stuff you just lost. And it is a lot.
I’m not a very materialistic person. I don’t take a lot of photos. I don’t really horde that much stuff. Sentimentality in inanimate objects really isn’t my bag, you could say. I’m a bit more inclined towards personal memory and nostalgia, more than anything. I don’t have a photo, or a t-shirt, or a commemorative anything that reminds me of a time gone by. I just have a memory of a feeling. A warm, prickly sensation in the back of my head that accompanies brief moments of reminiscence. The sensation of feeling alive. That’s what I treasure the most. Those are the things that I hold dearest to me.
Now, with all that self-indulgent nonsense being said, I lost my couch in that fire. And I fucking loved that couch. I’ve missed the shit out of that couch every damn day since I lost it.
It sounds strange, I know. But that couch was amazing. I got it and two armchairs for $120 total, and they were the most comfortable things I’ve ever laid eyes or ass on. The arms were wide and not too high. The back was full and firm, but with enough give so you could just fucking melt into the damn thing. They were so good that an afternoon siesta quickly became part of my daily routine. I’d trudge home from Uni, and nap my way through the M*A*S*H* rerun right until the end of Deal or No Deal/the start of the evening news. They were so good that I, on more than one occasion, ditched going out on a Friday or Saturday night in favour of the wood heater, 12 beers, endless Sopranos episodes and a good, long couch session. And it was AWESOME. Come to think of it, the comfort levels of that couch probably directly contributed to my marks slipping in certain Uni classes, but that’s irrelevant…
I realise by saying this that I’ve more or less completely contradicted myself. But what you have to understand is that, on some level, I think that couch represented more than just physical comfort to me. A surrogate blanket, I think/feel/fear. Much akin to a “pre-Tyler” Jack, my modern life comforts provided me with a sanctuary from outside stress. A convenient refuge where I could sit and become a zombie for a few hours, and not worry about anything beyond the walls of the room. Where everything becomes far away. A copy, of a copy, of a copy.
Unfortunately for me, the sudden removal of this safety net from my life has not yet delivered me to true, full enlightenment. That only lasts a few brief moments. This is partly because, much like the fiction that bore it in this case, true enlightenment is merely a wonderful idea. And it’s also partly because I don’t have a cocksure Brad Pitt running around in my head, manifesting himself physically as my destructive-but-focused life guru. Easy come, easy go.
Oh, I’ll search high and low for another couch that mimics the one I lost. But I doubt very much that I’ll find one. Because that couch is very much like the memories that I have, in that it is simply that. An image, and an idea entrenched in my own fucked up head. A comforting period in my life that ended the day the circular saw callously split the smoke-ruined couch corpse into three neat pieces, because we were far too lazy to drag it through the house in one whole piece, only to toss it casually into a large industrial dumpster on the street. So unless by some miracle time travel is invented (I’m looking at you, Guy Pearce), my ass is apparently doomed to go unfulfilled by way of cushion for the rest of its natural life.
My couch is dead. Long live my couch.
Watching: Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist
Now, I realise that an abject, gratuitous pouring-of-heart-thoughts may not be the greatest way to kick off a blog. However, owing to the fact that I’m currently halfway through watching this movie for the 5th time in the past 7 days, there’s no surprise to find that there’s very little else on my mind. And now all I can do is sit here watching as the drunk bess Caroline reaches into a toilet full of vomit, thinking to myself: “Have movies ruined me?”
It’s a strange thought, I know. Has my readily apparent over-dependence on modern mainstream storytelling created a need for “Hollywood validation” (for lack of a better term) for my everyday world? This kind of ridiculous thinking is especially deadly to a person who, as corny and run-of-the-mill as it sounds, is not only perpetually single, but prone to bouts of selfish despair and loneliness in some of his more weaker moments. At this point I would like you all to take out your tiny violins and call me a wahmbulance. Sometimes, I think that I need to feel as silly as I think I am.
(Writer’s Sidenote: Currently the incredibly fucking cheesy Beatles hand-holding scene is on. Each time I watch this, I love the film as a whole a little more, but hate this fucking scene a little more as well. It’s ridiculous trying to validate the end result of this one night blossoming romance with a cookie cutter pretence such as romanticised hand holding, when one of the end results regardless of prior pretensual (I am aware that this isn’t a word. Fight me.) efforts, is validation through sexual satisfaction? Cutting room. Utilise.)
BUT. The thing is this. I’ve found myself viewing things in slightly cinematic fashion, mainly as a form of escapism. I idealise certain qualities of characters, and search in vein for a real life counterpoint to them. Am I completely fucking .crazy? Probably. There’s no question that this process is more or less romanticism. At least I think it is… And truth be told, there’s also a greater element of me searching for my own personal counterpoints within the traits of fictional characters. Because then it makes things that I see in myself more common, more accessible, and more normal, to a degree.
Now by my own admission, my personality is made up of about 10% cynicism, 10% alcoholism, and 80% pop culture obsession. I’m ok with this, because I have friends who are quite the same. We’ve had entire lengthy conversations where nothing but movie or TV quotes were used. The only benefit this has to me as a person, is that I’m completely unashamed of the things that I like, in terms of mainstream entertainment. In my world, no pleasure is ever guilty. With that in mind, I give you this SHOCKING ADMISSION (!!!): I am hopelessly addicted to campy, male-oriented romance movies. Addicted. Can’t get enough. Ever. Those horrid, cheesy emotional payoffs you get late in the third act where boy-finally-gets-girl and they go off skipping through a terribly overgrown meadow whilst an inexplicably placed ferris wheel wistfully turns in the background? Those are like crack to me. If you could boil those down into a liquid form, I’d probably shoot it straight into my eye. And this is coming from a guy who’s total-cigarettes-smoked tally remains at less than one, even now in my 23rd year in the game. So naturally it’s easy to assume that I more or less “fall for” every screen girl who shows even the most minuscule quirk that deviates from normality. It’s a curse. I’m not ashamed of this. It just means that, for the sake of other so-called “actual” people, most of my movie watching is done alone.
This brings me to the focus of this particular post; one Kat Dennings.
It needs to be said specifically that I’m not only talking about Kat Dennings the actress in this instance, but rather Norah Silverberg the character as well. Just to clarify this for my own sake, this is (hopefully) not some thinly veiled stalker-ish piece where if you read between the lines there’s blind proposals left, right and centre. I’m just not that guy. Though that being said, if by some divine miracle you happen to be reading this, Kat… Sup?
I’ve been sitting here watching this movie, this Nick and Norah story over and over. And a horrifying thought crossed my mind: Norah is my ideal girl. There, casually gliding across a flickering screen, in all her fictitious glory, is exactly the type of girl I’d like to meet. Casual. Smart. Street-wise. Attractive, but not in a lowbrow, conventional, “Check out my fucking tits” way. And a complete and utter musical elitist. That’s a tick in every box in my world. I know that I want nothing more than a girl who’s comfortable in plaid, and utterly capable in kicking my sorry ass in a debate over the merits of label-driven 80s pop whilst a Devendra Banhart LP spins casually in the background. And yet here is this girl, existing only in a series of sequential frames. And that got me to (surprise surprise) thinking. Is this it for me? Am I a doomed man, trapped within his own idealistic-yet-deluded fantasies of character? I’d love to say that this is the first time I’ve had this conundrum, but sadly, looking back, that’s just not the case. The thought has more than once crossed my mind that my head may never be fully satisfied with any real life figure because they’ll never have the independence of Laura, the quirkiness of Clementine, the pure innocence of Sam, or the out-and-out knee trembling attractiveness of Summer (Assuming. Movie’s not out yet. It’ll probably emotionally cave my head in when it drops in July *CHEAP PLUG!!!*). And I realise that by adopting a defeatist position like this, I’m condemning myself to a stubborn existence of dark rooms, flickering screens, and buttering my own popcorn (lol). But deep down, there’s a sick, twisted, sadistic part of me that is not only ok with this, but seems intent on seeing that I do indeed bring this cruel, solitary fate upon myself. If for nothing else than as punishment for being so selfish as to allow such ridiculous thought processes in the first place.
Now naturally, this is all just abject, ridiculous overthinking on my behalf. I think, on some level, that that degree of innocent hopeless cinematic romance can’t exist. It’s simply far too cheesy for anyone to take seriously in a real life setting. But on the other hand, perhaps I’m simply far too jaded for my own good. I do assure you all though that during the daylight hours, I’m not a complete nutcase, this I promise you. I like to think that I’m actually a little level-headed, and the fact that I’m able to this honest with my own craziness somehow gives me a more grounded perspective of normality than others. Though that’s obviously very much debatable, and probably just me filibustering my way to some horrible, mutated version of validation for the self. Outside of my 3am brain cell (lolol), I’m probably a normal dude who will eventually find a normal girl, who possesses qualities beyond anything the cinema could ever portray. It’ll be better. Because it’ll be real.
But the future-Missus will have to wear a wedding dress made of celluloid. That’s simply non-negotiable.
Filed under: Life
So, here’s the thing. What you see before you is probably going to be nothing more than a glorified notebook, in which I will spew all kinds of twisted, skewed logic for your bemused amusement.
Why am I doing this? Because it’s currently 1:07am, I’m hungover, and navigating over to wordpress and registering a new blog and fumbling around in Photoshop making a banner was a shitload easier than walking across to the other side of the room to get an actual notebook and a pen.
Also, the train of my thoughts runs really, really fast.
And I hate hand cramps.
I haaaate them.
The kicker here is that, in a blind attempt by my vanity to create something that mildly stands out from other pages, my so-called thoughts will inevitibly be related to movies, film and ideas, plot elements, themes, actors therein.
See, when you combine too many movies and chronically overthinking every little thing in your personal life, things tend to run together after a while.
So that’s it. Nothing more. Nothing less.
It’s not special. It’s just my life at 24 frames per second.
