Welcome to 4 East: Two Admissions

Early this past March, an incident at work really shook me to the core. My immune system, already weakened by alcohol, seemed to completely vanish at this point, and I became ill with a flu virus. The doctor could not or would not do anything for that, but I felt terrible and didn’t want to feel that way, so I began “self-medicating” to an alarming degree, basically just drinking myself to sleep, waking long enough to do my chores and take care of my cats before drinking myself to sleep again.

As the flu began to subside and I began to get my strength back, I began to realize that all this drinking was certainly Not Helping, and it was probably making things worse. So I quit Cold Turkey, just like that – and that was my biggest mistake yet. Within twelve hours I had another fever, was dry-heaving uncontrollably, and my hands were shaking almost cartoonishly. I knew what the solution was: I got myself a bottle and within three drinks was feeling much better.

On, I believe, the second Monday of March I had an appointment with my usual therapist. She declared that, as she was not licensed as a substance abuse councilor, this would be our last meeting until I could get alcohol out of the picture. I didn’t quite understand this: I was able to separate alcohol from the other issues – why couldn’t she? But she was insistent.

With some helpful  brow-beating from one of my more assertive co-workers, my therapist made an appointment for me with a Substance Abuse RN at Seton. Which I showed up for drunk. D_____ was very good about it, but she also saw what needed to be done, and very much against my wishes I was loaded into an ambulance and taken off to the Thayer Hospital Emergency Room.

It was a busy afternoon. There was a young girl there that I'd seen at Seton who was also waiting to be admitted. I was put through the pre-registration process, and led to an inner waiting room where I could lie down.

I waited. And waited. More than an hour passed. Nothing was happening. No one was getting in. After who knows how much time had passed I finally went back out into the main waiting room and called my friend S_____, asking if he would give me a lift over to my car at Seton so that I could just go home.

While I was waiting in the doorway for him to arrive, a nurse came up behind me and asked what was happening. I told her that this was completely ridiculous, I'd been waiting for however long, and the other girl had been waiting for over two hours. She went away and reappeared with a form for me to sign, saying that I was walking away against medical advice.

I signed it, then ventured outside. The girl from Seton was sitting on the steps out there, smoking a cigarette. We both complained about not being able to get in. She showed me her forearms. She had slashed them almost to ribbons.

We wished each other luck and I went around to the back of the building to see if S____ had come in that way. No soap. As I came back around into the  Emergency Room parking lot, S_____'s wife C______ and I spotted each other at about the same time. She came up to me and asked what was going on. I said, "This is crazy, no one is getting through, if they won't help me, I can just go home and after a couple of drinks I'll feel fine."

At this point S______ came up to us. He said, "I don't feel comfortable letting you go home."

C_____ went into the ER reception hall declaring that she would read them the riot act, and S_____ took me by the arm and turned me back in the direction of the Entrance. As we came up inside the building, the girl I'd been talking to saw me and cried out, "They just called your name!" The nurse was standing right there waiting for me. S_____ passed me off, and I was taken in to where I disappeared off the face of the Earth for five days.

*

On my release, I immediately relapsed. We'll get into the whys and hows of that in another post.

Just three days later, the following Tuesday, I had another appointment with D_____ for which I again showed up drunk. She explained that I would not be able to go into the IOP if I had any alcohol in my system, or had any signs of withdrawal.

I went home, and was a Good Boy, and did not drink. Well, in true Alcoholic Thinking I finished up what was left in my only bottle (I rarely ever had more than one in the house at any time), but after THAT I did not drink. I thought everything would be hunky-dory. I'd be sober and get into the program the next evening where I would begin to get the help that I finally was realizing that I needed.

But by early the next morning I was again suffering heavy signs of withdrawal, as before. I placed a frantic call to D_____ (though I could hardly push the buttons on the phone without making a mistake, and had to make three tries to get it right), who had not yet arrived at work, but who called me back after a couple of anxious hours around ten AM.

She said, "Doug, what's going on?

I told her and said, "I don't think they're going to let me into the program tonight!"

She said, "They're not."

I said "I'm afraid. I don't know what to do."

She said, "I strongly urge you to go back and re-admit yourself to Rehab."

I was faced with a choice. I could blow off the IOP completely, just go out to the store, get myself another bottle, and feel artificially fine within three drinks. Continue the cycle. Or I could take D_____’s advice.

I didn't want to take her advice. I didn't want to go back there, to leave my kitties and my home and trouble my friends yet again with their care. D_____ said, "You're not going to be any good to them dead."

So there was that. And there were a couple of other things about my admission the previous week that led me to believe that this could be different from the so-called (failed) "Detox" that I endured two years previously, shortly after the death of my my mother. I knew that there were programs, and group sessions, and one person in particular that I could talk to.

And so, by my own free will, I re-admitted myself to 4 East, determined this time to just put myself into their hands and listen and do what I was told. My friend S______, who lives just down the block, gave me a ride over and waited with me until they called me in for pre-regiatration.

When that was done, I used the phone to call one of my oldest and dearest friends, H______. He said, "I'm proud of you, you're doing the right thing. I'll pass the word on."

I started to cry and he said, "Don't cry about it, you're doing the right thing."

And I knew that. It wasn't why I was crying. I was crying because by taking this action voluntarily, I was finally admitting to myself and everyone who knew me just exactly what and who I was.

-- Freder.

Dawn of the Braindead

The view from my desk,

It's impolitic to type this, and I've kept my typing fingers quiet on the subject until now, but today was Day Four of Book Rush, and they were out in force, wave after wave of them, the Born Yesterdays and the Never Had A Clues and the Think I Know Much More Than I Actually Do's.

Yes, it's true: most college students really do have all the brains of a tapeworm.

I can cut the freshmen some slack. They're on their own, probably for the first time, probably feeling overwhelmed. I can sympathize. But the upperclassmen -- they have no excuse! They've done this before.

The most common question I get asked, roughly on the order of a couple hundred times a day during book rush, is "Can I buy my books down here or do I have to go upstairs?" Even the parents sometimes ask that one.

I want to know what it is about my workspace that reminds them even vaguely of a cashier's station. Could it be the chest-high wall surrounding me that so discourages that kind of activity? Could it be the total absence of those cheery cash register sounds? Could it be the barricade of notebooks currently stacked in front of the space, making it virtually impossible for anyone to get close enough to conduct a transaction?

The ones I like the best are the ones who don't even ask. They just come up here and stare at me expectantly, then cautiously raise their books and try to hand them over.

Hmm. Yes, I see you have books. Pretty ones. Nice.

I like to let them stew a little bit before I ask, "Can I help you?"

They have to go upstairs anyway to get out of here, so what's the big deal?

Beside me here is the Emergency Exit. It's got two Big Red Signs right at eye level that read, "EMERGENCY EXIT ONLY -- ALARM WILL SOUND." Just in case, there are two more signs just above the handbar that say the same thing in big red letters. Yet on the first day of Book Rush, no less than three  students and one adult went barreling through that door, yes, setting off the alarm. It is a really loud and annoying alarm by the way. In order to make it stop I have to walk around the front of the booth, stand directly under that noise, and key it off. Did I mention that it gets louder and louder the longer it screams?

And someone did it again today. I was right in the middle of going through a pre-order box with another student. I'm afraid they knew that I was pissed. It's kind of hard to hide in the initial wake of jumping right out of your skin.

My question is, "If you can't read, what the hell are you doing in college?"

There's also the phenomenon, not limited to the students, of turning easy, simple questions into a novel by Dostoyevsky. "Once upon a time there was this and that and the other thing and my grandmother's second cousin on her father's side recommended a book to me, it's a red book with spots and it's about an inch think, I don't know what it's about or what the title is or who the author is, but it's for some class, I don't know the course number." All bookstore people are familiar with this. The challenge is to filter out the extraneous and figure out what the person is really asking for. This can be made extra-difficult when they speak in a halting, roundabout way, or if they speak in a monotone, or in a whisper, or as if they have a mouthful of marbles. In short, the way most students speak.

My favorite Idiotic Question so far this semester is: "I bought this book at Amazon but it hasn't arrived yet. Is there any way I can just borrow this one for two weeks?"

It wins for being a Double Play: not only is it a Very Deeply Idiotic Question Indeed, but it shows that the student really was raised in a barn and has no moral compass whatever.

This morning another student made a point of bragging out loud that she got a lot of her books "for cheap on Amazon."

Our textbook program is structured to break even, not to make a profit. I wish that we could put a sign up to that effect, broadcast it to the students. The bookstore is not ripping you off. There's no doubt that textbooks are a Racket, but it's the publishers and wholesalers behind it, not us. Amazon is selling the books at a lower price than we have to pay for them. Who knows how they make a profit?

The students stand on the stairway and have conversations, blocking the way for people who need to get through.

They walk sloooowwwly  two and three abreast, blocking the halls. 

The personal hygiene of many of them is definitely in question.  It's hard to answer student questions when you're holding your breath.

We bore ourselves silly making the same speeches over and over, trying to drill into their thick heads, "Keep your receipt! You can't return anything without your receipt!" And yet today, just four days in, a student came up to me and said: "I need to return my books and I don't have my receipt."

Enjoy the books, Chumley.

They don't moan or drool or eat human flesh, but sometimes it seems as if they are intent on devouring one's Immortal Soul.

Like today.

Go forth, students! Go forth and PLEASE don't multiply.

-- Freder.

Grrrrrrrr!

Y'ever have one of those days when you're feeling just plain cranky and mean for no reason at all and you want to punch someone in the mouth just because they're standing there taking up space in your life? That's where I am today.

In E.C. Segar's great Thimble Theater comic strip, whenever Bluto or Popeye or anyone else is in this kind of a mood and spoiling for a fight, they walk around with a scowl on their face, and "GRRR!' GRRR!" sounds fly out of them. I can't afford to scowl or grrr at the customers, but I sure want to.

Rule number one in Customer service: Never Punch Out a Customer.

Patches (my cranky quat in the picture above) has long known herself to be the Queen of the Universe, and whenever I pick her up and hug her and smooch on her and she's not in the mood to be hugged and smooched on, she will grrrrr quite loudly. If that doesn't work, hatpins sprout from her paws, and if that doesn't work her whole body explodes in my face and she vanishes in a puff of smoke.

I wish I could do that stuff.

It's probably why Wolverine is the most popular of the "all new all different" X-Men. Rub him the wrong way and ka-SHINNNG! out come the claws, and who's going to argue with you when you can stick three foot-long razors under their chin at a moment's notice?

I often think that, as super-powers go, the Radio Shadow's mysterious power to cloud men's minds so they cannot see him is a little bit under-rated. Think of how useful that could be when performance review time comes around, or when people come up to you with looks on their faces that say, "I'm going to ask you a completely idiotic question that you've answered a hundred times already this week."

A lot of you already know that the Radio Shadow was different from the Pulp Magazine Shadow, although they were ostensibly the same character. About the only things they had in common were a fondness for night work and a tendency to laugh their heads off at things that aren't funny. The Pulp Magazine Shadow didn't have any super power at all. What he did have were two ginormous .45 automatics that he never hesitated to use. Piss off The Shadow and you could end up pushing up the daisies.

I guess there are a lot of characters in fiction and the movies who we love because they don't take crap from anyone. Humphrey Bogart played most of them. Edward G. Robinson played the rest. I don't count Actual Monsters like Dracula or the Wolf Man, although you want to stay on their good side, too.

People seem to know when I am feeling cranky and then go out of their way to push my buttons. This is not surprising, as most neurotypicals are trained to sense the invisible Target signs that often superimpose themselves over the backs and faces of people like me. I no more than got off the phone with a person who spoke like they had a mouthful of marbles, when a woman came up to me and asked a question -- in a whisper. This isn't a church, lady -- it's a bookstore. Speak up or feel my wrath!!

No, what really gets me is that most inanimate objects seem to know, too. The books and boxes and bits of furniture all seem to be in communication with each other. They begin throwing themselves into my path or refusing to stay where they are put. This causes me to get flustered and frustrated in addition to being cranky, which in turn causes me to become even clumsier. The next thing I know, the whole closet shelf is coming down on my head. If you ever walk by and hear me swearing like a sailor at some inanimate object, now you know why.

I guess it's not a good thing, overall, to be this cranky -- but it's better than some other emotions I could be feeling.

-- Freder.

Joy and Anger

I was overjoyed tonight that TCM would be running a completely new-to-me movie by one of my favorite vintage stars, Eddie Cantor; but, especially now that the movie is over, I'm incensed at the manner in which it was presented. This could have been a great opportunity to introduce Cantor to a populace that largely doesn't remember him. But not once, not even in passing, were his many talents discussed. Not once was it mentioned that he was one of the greatest performers of his age.

Instead, TCM played the Race card, and shit all over the movie (actually taking scenes out of context and ignoring the whole underlying structure of the picture) as being a demeaning portrayal of Arabs by Hollywood.

Say what? I didn't see any Arabs in this movie.

Yet Robert Osborne kowtowed to his guest, Dr. Jack Shaheen (an Arab man who really should be finding better things to do with his time) and took seriously comments that didn't even deserve to see airtime.

For instance: Shaheen described a scene where Cantor witnesses a crowd of Arabs kneeling to pray. Quoth Shaheen: "And Eddie Cantor rolls his eyes!"

Well, I watched the whole movie and I watched that particular scene closely, and guess what? That's not what happens.

We'll talk about that later.

Y'know what? If you want to rail against racism in the movies, find yourself a movie that's really racist -- like D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation, which some of you may recall I hated on big time when TCM ran it a while back: this is a movie that is absolutely vile, yet TCM treated it with reverence. Why? Because it's D.W. Griffith -- Griffith the God of the Movies, Griffith the bigoted little sod. But show a movie by Eddie Cantor -- who I truly believe was not a bigot -- and because no one remembers him, that makes it okay to shit all over his work.

It's true that Cantor makes it easy for the soft-headed to take offense. In every single one of his movies, Cantor puts on blackface and does a contemporized version of a Minstrel number. His movies need big dance scenes and big, exotic locales, so they went from Mexico to Spain to Egypt and, yes, Arabia: but always in a highly stylized, Holloywoodized context, and often in the context of a dream.

Yes, a dream. Dr. Jack Shaheen kept his tone mellow and a relaxed, a pleasant look on his features, but it was clear that he was getting upset about a movie that does not even purport to represent Arabs in any way.

Here's the plot: Eddie is riding the rails to Hollywood because he's a big movie fan. After an opening song that presents the only real message that any Eddie Cantor movie ever aspired to present ("Laugh Your Cares Away"), he falls out of the train and must take Shank's Mare through the desert. He stumbles upon a movie set (that's right, a movie set) and at first thinks he is in Arabia. But it's just Hollywood, making a live-action version of Ali Baba and his Forty Thieves.

Lucky guy, he snags a bit part in the movie. But just when it's his big chance, he takes an overdoes of a sedative (he was run over by actors on horses in the middle of a scene), and falls into a deep slumber.

You read me right. The whole movie is a dream. A drug-induced dream of an impressionable boy-man who's captivated by a fantasy.

Furthermore, as should be obvious to the plainest idiot, the picture's sense of humor isn't aimed at Arabia -- it's aimed at American politics. Casting it into the context of a foreign land is just a way of providing a launching ground for jokes about the New Deal and the American political system.

At one key point, Eddie convinces the Sultan to resign as Sultan and run for President. A very funny American-style campaign ensues in Arabic drag -- this is just exactly the same sort of thing that Gilligan's Island used to do all the time. Eddie gets out there and stumps hard for the Sultan -- only to find that his songs are so popular that the people want to elect him President instead.

Remember, it's a dream.

Well, the Sultan threatens to have Eddie boiled in oil if he wins the election. So, naturally, Eddie goes out and stumps against himself. But even that backfires. "He's got a sense of humor, let's make him President!"

And here's where the scene comes in that Dr. Jack Shaheen found so awfully offensive. It doesn't go like what he says at all.

Eddie's trying so hard to get people not to vote for him. . . when suddenly (in what I thought was a really lovely and respectful shot) the call to prayer is made. The people fall to their knees and begin to pray. There's nothing disrespectful about the shot.

Suddenly, no one is listening to Eddie. He rolls his eyes. It's not the eye-roll of somebody mocking a people at their prayer. It is the eye-roll of somebody saying to himself, "I can't win!" And it's a beautiful joke, really, because it has two meanings: I can't win because they are going to boil me in oil if I do, and I can't win because the call to prayer was made when I needed to make them hate me.

Anyone who takes offense to this can not be a friend of mine.

Ali Baba Goes to Town is a great example of Eddie Cantor's work; I enjoyed it immensely. I think it's almost as good as Kid Millions, my personal favorite of the Cantor Hoover (that's, I say that's a joke, son!) and one that presented another dream-trip to a foreign land. There's even a cameo from Raymond Scott and his Orchestra, playing one of his signature tunes. I was thoroughly entertained from beginning to end and delighted to check off one more movie on my bucket list.

But TCM had to go and play the race card.

It got worse. The next item on TCM's menu was Popeye Meets Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves -- by any standard one of the greatest cartoons ever made. Dr. Jack Shaheen went to particular lengths to drain every last ounce of joy out of it, calling it "deeply offensive."

I'm going to say this only once:

You cannot change the past to suit the political needs of the present, and you cannot corrupt something from the past that is completely innocent and wholly delightful to make racial hay in the here and now.

Dear Dr. Jack Shaheen: You do not need Eddie Cantor and Popeye to make Arabs (and especially Arab men) distasteful to me. You're doing a real good job all by yourself. Jerk.

-- Freder.

Statement of Principles

The thing that sometimes troubles me about sometimes typing some of the things that I sometimes type on this blog, is that I sometimes worry that some people will think: "So what makes your feelings so special?! So what's so unusual about you?!"

Because that's not why I type it. I type it because I think a lot of people must feel this way, because I can't possibly be alone, and maybe by typing it I can do some good for myself, and maybe sometimes someone else will see it and think, "That's just how I feel."

So -- if I have a mission for this blog, it's to reassure me that I am not alone, and to reassure others that they are not alone.

I've just been watching a heckova lot of British television tonight, and so the Asperger's part of me that wants to mimic everything I see wants to refer to my father as "me da'".

Anyway.

Me da' wrote back to me tonight, based on two previous posts: "I worry that you are still so far from healed"


Yah, so do I. But that just puts me in the same boat as millions of other people. 


I've heard it said, here or there, "We're put here to suffer." 


There's a lot to think about in those five words, especially when, dating back to Biblical times, there's always a class of people who emphatically are Not Suffering while the rest of us writhe.


Answers? I don't have any.


Apropos to nothing, last night I spent nearly $90 on 100 daffodil bulbs. I will make good use of them. In the garden? No! They will go all over my lawn. I will have daffodils next spring. Can't afford it, but, damn it, it's a Quality of Life issue.


Tamam Shud!


-- Freder.

Meeting the Challenge

Patches, the Hypersensitive Quat. Yes, this is really kind of what it feels like.

This morning the Anxiety was more like an amlulance wail than a smoke alarm, which was confusing, because I didn't have to be in to work until 11:30, and so I was able to sleep in. Usually those mornings are the better ones. On the other hand, the quality of my sleep this morning wasn't very good. In and out of consciousness, half asleep, half awake, crazy dreams that made no cognitive sense, you know the drill. Perhaps that had something to do with it.

Whatever the reason, I could feel it on my back like a physical thing. Knowing what it is (at last) helps to deal with it on an intellectual level -- but nothing dulls the hypersensitivity itself -- except alcohol, and I'm not going there.

I've started to make some changes, though. I've gone back to shaving and showering at night, instead of straight out of bed in the morning. As soon as I read back the post in which I described the effects of morning showers on me, I felt like I was living the old joke:

-- Doctor, it hurts when I do this!

-- Well, don't do that.

It means that I have to take more frequent showers, but this morning I was able to remind myself of the benefits: today would definitely been one of those where my morning shower felt like assault & battery. I patted myself on the back for that one, and thanked whatever it is we're thanking when we thank the Powers that Be.

I'm making the time to read; not every day, but that's the goal. Much more so than any other activity, including watching a good movie, this is calming, aids in decompression, soothes the spirit and fills up the empty places. Reading is a pleasure that I had mostly forgotten over the last six years and longer. The books piled up, but there was never the time for them. I've determined that has to change.

And, just today, I've begun making lists. In my current job, the only way I have been able to survive for the last four years has been to write everything down, make lists of every task that needs to be accomplished, sometimes with details of how to do it. If I didn't have these lists in front of me, work would be hopeless. If it's not on a physical sheet of paper, it falls out of my mind and doesn't get done. I really botched up a special order for a customer last month because I neglected to write anything down while I was on the phone with her. I ordered the book, but as soon as I'd done that some other thing popped up that needed my attention, and the mental note was gone the way of the Dodo. When the book arrived, we thought it was stock and it got shelved. No paper trail is the easiest way for me to get into big trouble.

And I found that, here in my new life, some of the same things were going on. I'd spend heaven knows how much time every day spinning my wheels, trying to think, for the third or fourth or fifth time, what it was I wanted to get accomplished.

Today at work, before my short shift ended, I took some scrap paper, made my first list for home, and tucked it into my pocket.

I've only checked off one and a half things so far, but it's more likely I'll get there if I don't have to waste time re-thinking the same stuff over and over.

If Asperger Syndrome is in part about making order out of chaos, the best thing I can do is try to live more "mindfully." I'm sure that I won't make it all the time, that there will be lapses. But the past year has been all about putting one foot in front of the other, and that I can mostly do -- even on a godawful morning like the one I had today.

-- Freder.

Here's to Stillness

I have much less to blog about now that life is becoming, thank goodness, less "interesting" -- as in the old Eastern curse "May you live in interesting times." Even though my disease sometimes causes me to dread what may be lurking, unknown, in the months ahead, it feels good to metaphorically bury the last twelve months. I'm going to try not to look back on it for at least a while.

This means my blog posts will most likely grow fewer and farther between as my focus shifts somewhat to things like reading and working on the new website. I'll still be here when I feel like Mister Ed and have something to say, but I'm not going to add to the internet's White Noise by just typing in search of a subject.

But I'll make an exception today.

*

The rain this week didn't just slant the skies with non-stop gloom: it created jungles of grass in the yards along W_______ Avenue, and probably frustrated the hell out of homeowners who care about this sort of thing. I hadn't mowed my yard in two weeks, so I can sense my neighbors seething and obsessing about the grass -- The grass! The GRASS!! It's two inches high! Must -- mow -- NOW!

Whatever the reason, on this Sunday morning when it would have been my pleasure to sleep in, instead the pent-up compulsion to mow that must have been building up in my neighbors over the past few days caused them to fire up their mowers on both sides of me at the ungodly hour of 8:30 in the morning, which in turn caused me to drag myself, rumpled and fuzzy-headed, to the computer and fire off an Indignant, venting post.

With no other option, I fed my cats and surrendered to the suburban mores and went out there to tackle my own lawn.

It seems so awkward and phony to smile widely, wave loudly back at my neighbors just because that's what they do to me. Especially when I am thinking such dark thoughts about them and their lawnmowers, usually something about throwing them under one. It's a part of the life-long game of "Let's Pretend" that I've had to play.

Another thing: Both couples on the two sides of me seem to spend a lot of time sitting on their porches or standing in their yards, talking to each other.

It seems to me that, if this is normal, it's probably the reason why I've never been able to sustain a relationship.

What can they find to say to each other? What can they be talking about for an hour? What language are they speaking?

I've always been pretty quiet and in my relationships I have been the listener. I never know what to say; if I do I never feel at ease saying it. First, I have to determine what she's really saying, or, if her words are clear to me, what she really means. Then I have to decide how I feel about it. Then I have to think about how to frame it back into understandable words. This can take a while. Sometimes, she has gotten indignant by then, and is saying something like, "Why can't you tell me what you're thinking?"

Well, I'm trying, but you're making it harder by stressing me out with your impatience for a quick response.

Oftentimes, whether I am with women or with my small circle of friends, the conversation moves on without me. I'm always finding the perfect words when the time for them has come and gone.

Shortly before she dumped me, my next-to-last girlfriend Lorna complained to me about our relationship. I could see that she was really upset, but I didn't know what to say to her about it. She said, "All we ever do is go to the movies and have sex!" -- as if that was a bad thing.

To me, she was describing the perfect relationship!

Looking at the normal couples that now bookend me on two sides, I begin to understand for the first time. Oh -- you have to be relaxed with each other, and you have to talk.

But those are the two things that I'm desperately bad at.

Looks like it's me and the quats, and my books and DVDs, for the indefinite future.

-- Freder.

The Further Adventures of That Wacky Aspie Guy

I haven't posted lately because I've been , , , well, busy on the one hand and mentally at sea on the other. But something happened just now that's too idiotic not to type, so I'll start there and work my way backward.

I had a premonition about watching The Wrestler that I should have taken to heart. It's well-done and fascinating, and, good lord, Mickey Rourke looking like he's been dragged through a cactus-infested desert behind a Jeep. But I had to turn it off when the staple gun and the dinner fork and the barbed wire came out. Who thinks of this stuff? Who are those people in the crowd who can watch it as entertainment?

That wasn't the idiotic thing.

With the telly shut down as quickly as I could possibly shut it down, I meandered into the kitchen and decided there was no way I was going to hand-wash all those dishes. I loaded up the dishwasher, and went to put the detergent in. . .

. . . and it only halfway filled up the cup before it ran out.

So, I grabbed my bottle of Ivory, squeezed some into the cup, closed the lid, and squeezed some more into the "pre-wash" slot.

As with all of my Finest Moments, I have to type: "You can see it coming, can't you?"

I should get a tm on that line.

I went into the bathroom, and while I was in there the dishwasher suddenly got really quiet.

By the time I came out, water and soap suds were boiling out around the door, looking just like something out of The Blob, flooding the length of my kitchen floor.

Long story short: After two more attempts and two clean-ups and lots of begging with the powers that be for mercy, I got it going again with, to coin a cliche, No Soap. It's happily chugging away as I type this.

On Monday night, I found a ginormous box sitting on my deck. I thought: What the  -- ?? I didn't order another computer while I was drunk, did I?

It was my three lilac trees from White Flower Farm. My first inclination was to wait and plant them on Saturday. Then I thought -- Nah! I've got light!

I planted all three of them around the house, and named them Monica, Nicki and Kristine.

Bet you can't guess, and I'm not going to tell you.

While I was planting Monica, someone from the house of Kaspar the Mad Aryan Gardener crept up on me from behind. It was the woman of the house, R____, who as it turns out works in the Health Center at the same college where I plug away my days. Of all my neighbors, I like her the best: having the common workplace gives us something to talk about, and she was just right: not Forcibly Friendly, if you get my drift, and knew when to end the chatter. She was happy that I have outside cats, and she likes all the stuff in my yard, so that was a plus, too.

The Old Me would have imagined that she flirted with me, just a little bit. Now I understand that this is a delusion of Asperger's Syndrome: we misinterpret the signs, and when a woman is just being Ordinarily Friendly (something we have a hard time understanding in the first place) we mistake it for Interest and Openness to Something More.

Are you out there, L____? Sorry. Sorry. Sorry.

On Monday at work, I was just coming to terms with how deeply swamped I was under Purchase Orders and a six-page newsletter that needs to be done, like, now (and which, as it turns out, my Student Worker had only been pretending to work on for me), when my boss came by and handed me a sixteen page order of sale books, hundreds of titles that each need an item card before I can do the PO, and they're going to be here by the end of the week.

They call it Job Security, I guess.

My father and his wife are back from Nevada, and for Sunday I invited them over to my house for dinner. During the two weekdays after I invited them, I looked closely at the house and came to understand what a Horrific Pit it was. I thought about putting them off until next week, but then I looked at the calendar at work and realized that the next solid month is going to be Hell Time. So on Sunday I bit the bullet and gave this place a beating to make it look halfway presentable.

I don't know if anyone else has Anxiety Attacks while cleaning, but I sure did this time. The vacuum cleaner was acting up, I kept tripping over myself, I was agitated about this, that and the other thing, had to keep telling myself to calm down, calm down, but it didn't work.

The actual dinner came off all right, and maybe a little bit better than all right. It was good having them at my place rather than the other way 'round; I felt like I had a degree of control over the situation that I never feel when I have to go eat lunch with them. I cooked chicken and corn on the cob and spinach, and it all turned out well. M_ seemed a little perturbed with some of my methods (like, you have to put salt on corn before you cook it; it brings out the sweetness), but I was able to shrug it off -- my house, my dinner, my cooking. I've been subjected to Salmon (which I hate) at your place -- now it's Your Turn!

Sunday might have been easier if I had done a lick of work on Saturday. But, after five months of pushing, driving, pushing, driving, I think that I hit the wall on Saturday.

I tried to write a post about this and deleted it. The sixteenth of this month marks a solid year that I have been Coping and Dealing, Coping and Dealing, Coping and Dealing.

I'm burned out. It's the reason why I'm in denial about the car, it's the reason why, when I walked into the Studio on Saturday afternoon to work on it, I just avoided bursting into tears and said to myself, out loud, I can't do it, I can't do it.

I said, "What I really want is to just go out on the porch, flop on the couch, and spend the afternoon reading."

Pause. Then I thought, "So, let's do it."

It wasn't all reading. I dozed a lot, too.

-- Freder.

Sensory Overload

You're looking at a photo of the Living Room in the old house, taken after my mother's death, but before the auctioneers came to pillage, plunder, and destroy.

The whole house was like that, almost.

This is going to seem choppy and disjointed, but it's going somewhere, really, it is.

For the Store, I ordered Temple Grandin's latest book, The Way I See It: A Personal Look at Autism and Asperperger's. I was all over it as soon as I could decently do so (i.e., as soon as I was not on camera).

This may be the next step that my reading will take. Where the reading that I'm doing now is all still in the area of diagnosis and description, this is focused on living, and is overwhelmingly positive.

But for now, I'm still in the realm of basic learning. The Guide, as I've written here before, is eerily descriptive of my life. I keep seeing scenes from my own childhood, and explanations for my behaviour as an adult.

I've written about mornings in the old house before. I've written that I had to get up earlier and earlier in order to beat my mother into the kitchen, so that I could get my morning chores done before she came into the room.

It's true that this was made necessary because the house was so impossibly claustrophobic, so fully packed with Stuff, that it was hard enough to get from the sink to the refrigerator to the front door, hard enough to sponge the floor, when I just had to step over her chair. But when she was sitting in the chair, and I had to climb over her in order to get everything cleaned (sort of) and everyone fed -- well, that was just plain Too Much.

But there was more to it than that. I needed some quiet time, some alone time, some peace and solitude in the morning, in order to gather myself somewhat before I had to start Being Social.

And yes, I was drinking as a coping mechanism then -- I needed to get a couple of shots of vodka and orange juice into my system in order to cope with the assault that was about to come, the Daily Bludgeoning that is life as I know it.

As soon as my mother struggled into the room and sat down, the television came on. Some mornings, this was like a brutal slap across the face. The volume was always too loud, the insipid Morning Shows that she wanted to watch were intolerable to me with their huge casts of Preening Idiots all yammering to each other at the same time about Nothing At All. For some while, the local CBS affiliate ran Guiding Light in the morning, and that was barely tolerable, because it had a discernible storyline; but once Guiding Light was cancelled, morning television was just a daily ramming of nails into my forehead.

For my mother, it was her connection to the outside world, the only connection that she had. For me, it was an almost unbearable onslaught of White Noise. In my mother's world, the television was on 24/7, there was never any quiet, and I coped by retreating to my own end of the house, and by learning to block it all out when I could not escape.

The combined task of doing my morning chores, filtering out the noise of the television, and interacting with her in what I hoped was a meaningful way was, many mornings, more than I could cope with, an emotionally exhausting Chinese Water Torture without the actual cachet of Asian Spies gloating over me while I suffered.

I learned to fear the distant sound of her canes in the front hallway. Clack, clack-clack. Oh, god, I would think, she's coming., Have to hurry up and get this done.

And so I kept getting up earlier and earlier, in order to beat her there and get some of the basic things done, so that I would have a few less things to deal with when she came in.

The problem was, as soon as she found out how early I was getting up, she'd come in that much earlier, in order to be with me. She was desperate for some social contact, and I was desperate for some peace.

One morning I absolutely snarled at her: How freakin' early do I have to get up to beat you in here?!

She balanced herself on her crutches, and said, "I didn't know it was a contest."

I was wiping the floor under the cat food dish clean with paper towels. I think that I bowed my head and just sighed. I thought, she doesn't get it, she doesn't understand, but I didn't have the words to say that to her.

The next thing I knew, she was turning in place and struggling back out of the room.

"Well, for god's sake, don't go now that you're here!" I said.

"I'm going," she said.

Are you wearing shoes right now? Cross your legs, look at the soles, notice the Heel.

That's what I felt like.

And yet there was another part of me. The part of me that closed my eyes and closed my ears when the television came on and splashed over me like a bucket of ice-cold water every morning, the part of me that shouted inside Oh my god! Oh my god! Why does she have to have that so freakin' loud?!

As my mother laboured her way painfully back down the stairs, through the narrow and claustrophobic front hall, to sit on the padded stool in her own room, in front of her own television, most likely resentful, most likely not understanding why her son was "being so mean to her," -- as she said to me several times -- there was the part of me that gathered myself in silence, and sighed, and inwardly said:

-- Thank God. Thank God. Thank God.

-- Freder.

Don't Dance on this Grave

So -- Osama Bin Laden is dead, and I am disgusted with the way some of my fellow Americans are acting.

Death is never a good thing, never something to celebrate, not even when it happens to someone as bad as Bin Laden.

By dancing in the streets and chanting "USA! USA!" you are only fanning the fire of hatred. By being jubilant you are only demonstrating your own ignorance. By celebrating, you are only showing that you don't abide by the tenets of the religion you profess to believe in.

The Bible is pretty specific about this: Love your enemies, and pray for your persecutors. Thou shalt not kill. It doesn't say, Thou shalt not kill, except for the Bad Guys.

If nothing else, think of what we could have learned from the man about his operation had he lived.

I'm against the death penalty and I feel the same way when people stand outside a state penitentiary and celebrate when someone is put to death. I don't care what he did. We are taught that vengeance is not ours, but we sure as hell don't practice it, and some hard-core Bible Thumpers are some of the worst offenders.

It seems to me that all this stuff should be obvious. We are rightly upset and outraged when our enemies celebrate the deaths of our fallen soldiers or drag their bodies through the streets. It's just common sense that if our cause is just, we ought not to behave in the same way.

Grow up, get a conscience, get a clue, and stop singing Ding Dong The Witch is Dead. The war isn't over. There's still more than enough Death to go around.

-- Freder.

Revenge is Sour

Yup, you guessed it... I got sucked into another TCM Programming Vortex tonight.

The Outlaw Josie Wales is a movie that came out in what I'd laughingly refer to as "My Heyday," and one that I never saw at the time. So this was like filling in a gap.

On the one hand, I had to admire the craftsmanship. This is a really well-made picture, kudos to Mr. Eastwood, who took over directing in hard circumstances. Just to compare apples to apples, The Outlaw Josie Wales is far more skillfully made, written and acted than anything I ever saw by Sergio Leone, whom everyone seems to like but whom I think is a nasty, grotty little sleazeball.

In particular among the cast, Chief Dan George is a delight to watch, Eastwood should get down on his knees and thank god for that man.

But, as you might have guessed by now, I have a problem.

This picture is all done up in Civil War costume -- but (we'll leave elements of the ending out of this) at its heart and for the main part of its runtime, this is a Revenge picture, pure and simple.

And here's the thing: in order to justify the actions of the hero, which are pretty danged horrible, the villains of the piece have to be presented as being absolutely depraved.

I don't like it.

I don't like that the actors do such a good job of being depraved and, apparently, don't have any trouble sleeping at night.

I don't like watching it, and I don't like being made to feel as if I'm morally complicit because I'm watching, as "entertainment," acts that go beyond the realm of violence, into humiliation and degradation.

I know that stuff like this actually happened. In a documentary context, I could watch and not feel like I was being manipulated, used and abused.

And -- what do you say about a director who asks his GIRLFRIEND to participate in some of the scenes that Sondra Locke endures here?

There are some redeeming scenes. Wales's confrontation with the Comanche chief that saves lives all around -- that's a great scene. And the ending, with Wales and the Southern officer more or less coming to terms rather than blasting their way to one or the other's death -- that is Exactly Right.

But in nearly every other aspect, The Outlaw Josie Wales caters to, not to say glorifies, not to say revels in the conventions of the very nasty Revenge genre. And it's frustrating to see so much talent being thrown in the direction of Plain Ugliness.

-- Freder.

Things that Make you go "GAH!"

As an alumni of C____ College, Cicely von Zeigesar came to speak and read from her books this week.

She has her fans among the student body, although, as it was pointed out to me by one of my student workers staffing the event, they all tend to look like the people on the covers of her books.

I wrote about von Z. a couple of weeks back just to say that the kind of people she writes about are exactly the kind of people that the movie Heathers so gleefully kills off! Which is kind of harsh -- sometimes I think all they really need is a good spanking.

It turns out that she never thought about becoming a writer and that Gossip Girl just dropped into her lap, was not even technically created by her. .Again, as reported to me by my student informant, the way von Z. tells it is that she was working in a cushy job at an Agency or a Syndicate where her duties were basically to do nothing all day. Until the time when an editor came out of his or her office, handed her a sheet of paper and said, "Write up an eight-page outline about these characters and send it to Little, Brown." At that time, there was "nothing on the market written for or about rich kids in the city," and this was the beginning of a loose concept to -- I'm already starting to gag -- fill that void.

von Z. had never written anything professionally before, and didn't know how to make anything up, so she sat down and wrote about the people she went to school with.

The publisher loved the presentation. The editor said, "Great, we'll hire a writer and start cranking them out." The publisher said, "No, we want the person who wrote the presentation to do it."

And another rich and famous "author" is born.

Do I need to tell you how galling this is to someone who worked for years to pursue a writing career and got nowhere?

She was literally at the right place at the right time. God waved his magic wand, said, "The world needs a series about arrogant, rich brats," and there you are!

But there is something worse I have to tell, and surprise! von Z. is actually the victim.

I am told by two separate students that the English Department, the very people who presumably invited von Z. to speak, have been publicly mocking her to their students both in the days before the event and during the event itself.

One professor was quoted as telling her entire class how awful the Gossip Girl books are and what a joke von Z. is. Which may be true -- in which case, why did you invite her? Presumably no one was holding a gun to your head.

During the event, while von Z. was talking (and talking and talking -- this was to be a co-reading, but von Z. took up the whole time), the English Department, I am told, sat behind her where they could not be seen, and snickered, and gestured, and mocked her literally behind her back.

I don't care how bad the books are, this is just bad form and not something that a college professor should stoop to. If nothing else, the woman is an Alum and as such the Professors should act as an example to the current students.

I'm sure that they are just as jealous of von Z. as I am, and that this is how it manifested itself. But for my part, I reserve the right to post honestly about her on my personal blog, but when she came to the store to sign books for me I damn sure took a respectful tone. It's what you do.

Robert B. Parker was another egregiously untalented writer who happened to be an alum of this college. I had the displeasure of typesetting some of his books when I worked in the production department of Thorndike Press. His novels were labor intensive because every one of them consisted of about a hundred and eighty-seven chapters of two pages each. I sell his books here, and I'm not a fan, and I tell people so, but that's the way I say it: "I'm not a fan." To go into detail and make fun of his work to another alum or anyone associated with the college would be inappropriate.

Rule number one: a professional person should behave like one. No matter what we think about her work, von Z. handled herself with grace (even inviting one of my students to visit her office in New York this summer) and the English professors could take a lesson from that.

-- Freder.

A Common Theme

 

At the beginning of the DVD commentary for The City of Lost Children, Jean-Pierre Jeunet comes right out and says "This opening scene is perhaps a little confusing," and Ron "Hellboy" Perlman, who plays a major role in the film, chimes in with: "You think? And the middle and the end, too!"

It is confusing, but that's one of the things I like about the picture. The City of Lost Children forces the audience to pay attention and become an active participant in the story. Everything makes perfect sense in the end, but Jeunet and his then-collaborator Marc Caro don't spell much out: the audience must make some connections on its own.

In a separate interview, Jeunet expresses dissatisfaction with the film. "It has not enough story," he says, and reveals that the design and visuals were created first, forcing them to come up with a story to match. The only place where this is really evident is in the element of the oddball fanatic group known as The Cyclops: that the real villains of the piece are using them to kidnap street children barely justifies the amount of screen time spent on them. 

Perlman plays a type common to nearly all of Jeunet's movies: all grown up on the outside, but still a child on the inside. Even when he adopts two street urchins, he refers to them as "Little Brother" and "Little Sister." The Strong Man in a street fair, Perlman's character One is drawn into the story when his "Little Brother" is kidnapped by the Cyclops, literally ripped from his arms, and sold to a vile old man who lives on an oil rig and tries to regain his rapidly waning youth by stealing the dreams of the kidnapped children. 

As a two-person rescue team, One and his newfound "Little Sister" Miette (charmingly played by the young Judith Vittet) almost make a complete person: He provides the brawn and she provides the brains. 

Visually, it's pure Steampunk, although I'm not certain that word had been coined yet in 1995. But its theme is all Peter Pan, although Jeunet seems to be giving the opposite moral:  childhood should be clung to and coveted, because once it's gone you can't get it back, even by injecting yourself into a child's dreams. One remains marvelously pure and untarnished by the movie's end, while Miette defeats the villain by making the impossible journey.

Marc Caro was the designer and co-director. That the collaboration between Jeunet and Caro effectively ended here (Caro started out as co-director on Alien: Ressurection, then dropped out) is probably the best thing that could have happened to Jeunet. City of Lost Children is a wonderful movie of its type, but if he had continued to work with Caro, Jeunet could never have grown as director, and would never have given us his masterpieces, Amelie and A Very Long Engagement. Both films have the visual style and playfulness that's already present in City of Lost Children, but both also have the added elements of Romance, and Juenet's careful layering of plot and event.

*

I did not expect to be so strongly affected by D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation that I had to switch it off shortly into its runtime.  But then, neither had I expected the picture to be so myopically non-objective, so fawningly supportive of the Confederacy and all that it stood for.

The opening scenes depict a glowing, rosy dream of the Southern Aristocracy, a staunch declaration that it was a Better World, balanced in perfect harmony, the belles and the Southern gents swirling about in a glow of opulence and happiness while the merry Darkies danced their joyous Coon Dances, because they were so happy, so very honored and privileged, to be the chained and whipped and raped slaves of such Delightful People. Why, they even came out into the streets and cheered when the Gay Boys rode off to war, waving their hats and rattling their sabers, to defend the Nigger Right to being Enslaved.

Well, Mr. Griffith. Of course those were Halcyon Days. Your people drifted like junkies in a dream world of Privilege and wisteria -- that they built on the backs of an enslaved people. 

I'll never watch another Griffith picture again. It's one of those terrible contradictions of life that the man who so revolutionized an industry that changed the way the world lived and the way people think about themselves turns out to be a deluded, chest-thumping bigot at heart.

-- Freder.

Period, End of Story.

Dear Dad;

I'd bet folding money that you're going to see this, which is why I'm posting it here instead of putting it in an email to you.

I guess that what I've been trying to say in my recent angry posts is actually quite simple.

I'm not your confidante and you're not mine. For once in your life, respect somebody else's wishes and stay out of things where you are not needed or wanted.

There. Now I'm done with this subject.

-- Freder.

Thanks but No Thanks

I just sent this email to Dear Olde Dad, in response to yet another demand for money, yet another request that the full results of the second auction be disclosed to him:


Joann's office will soon issue you a check (if they haven't already) for the items you inserted into the auction (which in retrospect I shouldn't have allowed you to do. Just a bad idea all around, but I was still in a state of shock, and the whole auction process was an Act of Violence being perpetrated on me at a time when I was not ready for it -- I couldn't think straight). 

But as for the auction results, Joann and Sue and Carole and I are all in agreement that it does not fall into your Circle of Concern, and we will not disclose this information to you. Get over it.

Like you, Claudia cannot stop haranguing the estate for money, and Sue tells me that, somehow, she has a pretty accurate notion of what is in the pot. 

It seems that in the whole family, I am the only one among us who is not interested in reducing Mom's life to a dollars and cents amount.

I  should never have taken money from you -- not that, honestly, I was given much of a choice. I do love the house, but if this didn't pan out, something else would have, and it wouldn't have come at such a cost.

Some Lessons Never Get Learned

Heathers, the 1989 black comedy about murder and high school, has aged well. The cinema has grown markedly more savage since then, but also, curiously, more provincial and shallow.

Compare Heathers with its modern counterparts, notably the Gossip Girl series (created by Cicely von Ziegesar, an alum of the college where I make my living -- don't blame me!) which portrays unashamedly and with straight faces the shallow lives of the very kind of insufferable kids that Heathers is intent on blowing away. With titles like Because I'm Worth It and Only In Your Dreams, the Gossip Girl series glorifies the sense of superiority and privilege that Heathers quite rightly savages.  Some of those kids should watch Heathers. Nobody deserves to be murdered, but a slap across the face might do them some good.

Heathers is not perfect -- there are individual lines and scenes that hit the floor with a desperate klunk. But taken as a whole it is kind of inspired, and especially today its deeply radical streak is as welcome as fresh Spring air. This is a picture that could not be made today, although the world needs it more than ever. It succeeds in part because it makes you laugh at some appalling things, and then throws cold water on you, asking "Why are you laughing? This isn't funny."

Indeed, for a comedy the subject matter is deeply serious. High school bullying is nothing to laugh about, as the filmmakers are very well aware. Heathers is deeply exploitative in the sense that it takes its audiences back to school and reminds them of how badly this behavior hurts its victims. It preys on your own memories of the despicable people you knew back then, and who made themselves known to you in evil ways. You're not sorry to see Heather #1 and the jocks die. At the same time, the murders are both funny and terrifying. Heathers walks a razor-thin line with great skill.

While we're on the subject, it always amazes me when people are surprised by things like Columbine and other school shootings. I want to say to the parents, Actions have consequences, and your kids are helping to create the stresses that cause these things to happen. You and your kids are, perhaps, not as guilty as the actual shooters, but are conspirators nonetheless, carrying part of the responsibility and the blame.

But kids don't change. I see random acts of cruelty all the time at my workplace, usually on the Digest of Civil Discourse, which is rarely civil or discursive. On the other hand, the atmosphere here is better than it used to be. Instead of just devising a plan of action to take in the event of a shooting (which they have done) the college has been pro-active and banned all fraternities and sororities from the campus. It's made the place much safer and kinder overall.

Still, we produce alums like Cicely von Ziegesar, a real-life Heather whose books, at least on the cultural level, are swinging the pendulum right back into the most dangerous territory of all: youthful arrogance.

-- Freder.

Spooks Run Wild, and the Five Thousand Blows. . .

Yep, that's Gomez Addams himself, the great John Astin as a Wild West spirit called The Judge.

I have deeply mixed feelings about Peter Jackson, as a director and as a man. Sometimes he seems to be two different people.

I'd never heard of him before the announcement that Lord of the Rings was not only being made, but was well under way. And yet some of the actors interviewed claimed that one of the main reasons they took the job was "to work with Peter Jackson." So I knew I had to look into this.

And I was really appalled by what I found. Meet the Feebles, Bad Taste, Braindead. . . the more I learned the more nervous I was about Rings. This man was not a director. This man was a Pornographer of Gore. How in hell did he get the job?

Of course the Rings movies came out, and were, largely, magnificent. But from there, with Hollywood in the palm of his hands, he started making one bone-headed decision after another. King Kong is clearly a movie that did not need to be remade (again!), and Jackson's version is an appalling waste of money.

Overlong by at least an hour, weighted down by ponderous pretentiousness and some really dim-witted plot points added into the mix, bludgeoning its audience senseless with gross shocks (even restoring a scene that was cut from the original film for good reason) and one braindead action setpiece after another, Jackson's Kong is the movie equivalent of a frontal lobotomy performed without anesthesia. Other than the obvious stylistic similarities, it's hard to believe that Kong was directed by the same man who made the Lord of the Rings movies. Again, what happened here?

My guess is that New Line assigned a very strong team of producers to the Rings project, who kept Jackson's excesses under tight control, whereas on Kong, Universal were so dazzled by Jackson's reputation that they cut him loose. And just look at what happened!

All of this is a long preamble leading to my viewing the other night of The Frighteners, the first of Jackson's earlier movies that I've been able to see (and quite possibly the last!). Was he as tightly controlled on this one? I'm not sure, but the movie is just about almost pretty good, and to put it in a nutshell, I'd say that it showcases Jackson's best and worst qualities in about equal measure.

It's too long, it has too many characters, it goes off on odd tangents at times when it should be narrowing the focus. At times it is borderline tasteless, with vulgar dirty jokes and sudden instances of gore that's just intense enough to be inappropriate for this kind of movie (it is, after all a romantic horror comedy).

In addition to the lapses in taste there are also lapses in consistency and judgement. And behind it all there's the same quaint, goofy Hollywood cosmology of Heaven and Hell that I'm finding more and more tiresome.

But --

Jackson gets really good performances out of his cast, especially Michael J. Fox, the very charming Trini Alvarado (whatever happened to her?) and the always-wonderful John Astin as one of Fox's Pet Ghosts.  Indeed, the results he gets from his actors seems to be a constant across all of his pictures.

There's also real charm on display here, not just in the romance element, but in Fox's friendship with his three Ghost Pals and the whole set-up in the racket they have going together.

There's a core mystery that's actually quite compelling throughout -- until the final act, when Jackson frankly sets aside suspense in favor of an abundant overflowing of modern horror tropes.

And Jackson's instincts about framing shots and combining live footage with special effects are, as always, right bang on.

I watched this picture from beginning to end without once stirring from my chair -- that hasn't happened in a while. The positives and the negatives almost exactly balance each other out, giving you a movie that's, you know, somewhere in the middle: good enough that you don't regret spending the time on it, not that you'd particularly care to sit through it again anytime soon.

And it did answer the question that so baffled me years ago and again at the beginning to this post, why would actors want to work with Jackson? Because he will bring out the best performance from you, and make you look good, even if you're wearing piles of fright make-up.

*

On a completely unrelated note, today the blog went over 5,000 hits. That may not seem like much to you, but it's flat-out astonishing to me. Many thanks to all of you who spend time here. . . except you, dad!

-- Freder.

"Stalking" the Wild Asparagus

I actually got a big kick out of saying to my friend BC during the mid-stages of the move, "I have a stalker!" It was kind of fun, certainly a boost to my ego. Our mutual friend W___ once had a stalker, and now I had one of my very own.

Now the story can be told, because I have fallen from favor.

It began when a Facebook friend, a former co-worker, sent me a message saying something along the lines of, "Will you 'friend' my friend J____ if I set it up? She's been reading your posts on my page and thinks you're fantabulous."

I had to wonder how anybody could find me fantabulous based on the pathetic and self-absorbed writings that I post here, and I wondered about that, but I was too flattered to say no. 

On January 6, the day that the movers failed to show up for their scheduled appointment, she posted "nice to meet you" on my Facebook page, although of course, "meet" is kind of an oxymoron under the circumstances. That same day she sent a longish personal message through Facebook that read, in part:

"I have read your blogs just up to Christmas, barely getting a glimpse into the most recent events of a total stranger that, dare I say, could be my tortured soul mate.

"I'll read more later, but I want you to know that your words strike a cord with me. I've gathered but fragments from infinity but they are enough for me to know that we have shared some similar life events at least at some point."

This sent up a couple of red flags. The purple prose, the misspelling of "chord," the whole "soul mate" thing. But again, I was flattered and allowed that to override the concerns. I'm as interested in possibilities as anyone.

I looked at her profile, but it was hard to get a handle on her. There was little personal information there, and she seemed to be using pictures of totally different women for her changing profile shots.

Soon the hits on my blog went through the roof as J_____ began to read backwards through the whole thing. I figured she must be a glutton for punishment. On January 7 we had this exchange:

J: I am up to mid-October!

Me: You have my deepest sympathy.

J: No! It's great. It's tormenting yes, but I love your heartfelt expressions and passion, even though its dark.


OK. I decided that misery loves company. Following my post about the Miss Bianca books by Margery Sharp, I got this from her:


J: You fancy Miss Bianca, do ya?


Me: What self-respecting, red-blooded mouse wouldn't?


J: A female one. She would be jealous.


This was the biggest red flag so far, but I didn't have time to consider it. That very same day, she sent me another personal message:


uh, jeez... um, normally I am shy, well OK, always at first but I am forcing myself (cause I am driving myself crazy by not doing it) to say that I like you and ask if you maybe, possibly, would you consider, perhaps meeting me for coffee or alcohol or something, sometime? 

~J___ 

Hit the send button J___, it ain't gonna kill you, just hit the send button J___, I know you think rejection is so negative but hit the send button J___, you never know if you don't try. OK, hitting the send button.

My answer to her was, "Sure, when things calm down. I want to get the move done and the house somewhat in order before moving on down the road!"

My original friend, the co-worker who referred J___ to me, didn't help matters by throwing gas on the fire. One day, J___ posted on my page: "Good Morning."

And the other woman replied: "Why do you post this on his Facebook page when you could just roll over in bed and tell him in person?"

I typed: "Uhhhm, no."

J___ typed: "I was at least going to play along with her."

Soon after this, J___ started a blog of her own, and went on Facebook begging all of her friends to follow it. I did so, because I wanted to know more about her. After a few weeks of posts, it became evident that this was no "soul mate" of mine. I quietly decided to just not follow through on the whole "meeting for coffee" thing.

On January 27 she sent another personal message with the header "Hi" asking, on the surface, if I had settled in yet. Of course what she was really asking was whether or not I was ready for that date.

At that time I was up to my eyeballs in the move, and she should have known it, as a regular reader of this blog. But, increasingly, her reality was taking precedence over the reality of her professed "soul mate."

This week, for the very first time, I had breathing room. This week, for the first time, I was able to take advantage of living in town and spend some time with my friends at a local pub.

But when I blogged about it, the shit with my stalker friend really hit the fan!

Her response to the post was, all lower case, "sucks when you get up the nerve to ask someone out and they shoot you down, doesn't it?"

This was clearly not an innocent comment, but a shot across the bow. I didn't want to get into a big public Facebook argument, so I simply replied: "Eh. It's all good."

And got this response:

"eeboy."

I wanted to tell her where to get off, but suddenly found that I couldn't. She had un-friended me! I could feel the frost through the computer screen!

I went to her blog and typed, approximately, the following. It's not exact, I'm sure:

"You and I both know that I didn't shoot you down. This week was the very first chance I had to do something, and I chose to go out with old friends. I have that right. In response you have a hissy fit on facebook and unfriend me. Behavior like that makes me not want to follow through. Sorry."

The second to last sentence was more than a little bit disingenuous, I admit. I had already not decided to follow through, I was just leaping on this incident to put an end to this once and for all. But the first part of the message came right from the gut.

I don't know this woman from any other person on the street, yet she was acting like she had a claim on me. This was borne out by the reply I got on Facebook, under the header (again all lower case) "sorry we never met":

really Doug, I am. I tried hard to befriend you because I thought we had a lot in common, I think things happen for a reason and I thought maybe we would be better knowing each other than not. I liked you and it was hard for me to take that step- I wasn't having a "hissy fit" about you wanting to date someone else- God knows that is your right, it just sort of hurt my feelings that you blogged about how regrettable it is that you couldn't get with C______ and you never even gave me a chance. 

So basically, that kind of behavior doesn't make me want to follow through. Sorry.

It made me angry, but it also made me laugh. Did she not read the post? "Regret" is her word, not mine. I had a great time that night with friends both old and new, and I believe the post makes it clear that I have no regrets whatever associated with C______.

There's a deleted scene on the DVD of Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan. Sacha Baron Cohen, in character as Borat, hires a masseuse, a guy, and then tries to get comedy out of the situation. Late in the massage, he rolls over onto his back and, under the towel, it's revealed that Borat has sustained an erection. Borat pleads with the masseuse to finish him off. "You got this to happen, now you finish!"

The poor man keeps on working methodically on Cohen's leg, and says, "I didn't do that to you. You did that to you."

I realized that, all along, it was danged silly to be flattered by the attentions of this person. Her interest in me didn't have anything to do with me. It was all in her head.

My hands are not clean in this regard. I've done that to women in my day, including one of the women I had dinner with the other night, so I guess it's just payback to have it happen to me. One-sided interest is a bad deal for everyone involved.

I hope J___ finds her soulmate, but I'm danged glad it's not me.

--Freder