Seriously, you should. I know that I am given to hyperbole on occasion, but this just might be the most real, most human movie ever made by an American director. I don't want to overreach myself since I don't have an encyclopedic knowledge of movies from all over the world, but if this movie doesn't speak to you about life in a way that makes you hurt, I would be greatly, greatly surprised.
If anyone has seen it and wants to post their thoughts as comments, and we could have sort of a book club style discussion of it, I would love to, because I have tons of thoughts about it rolling around in my head after having seen it, but I can't sit and formulate them right now, and I don't know that anyone would be interested in reading them without having seen the movie.
So, in conclusion, go see it. You won't be sorry, or if you are sorry it will be for all of the right reasons, I think.
12.04.2008
Pecan Trees
She liked best to kiss me under the pecan trees that bordered the east side of her parents' property, when the long winter was just starting to blow in with the evenings. She'd put her hands around inside my jacket, beneath my shirt, leaning in to get out of the wind (if there was some) and sometimes tucking her hands in just below my belt in the back, making the ache I was already feeling for her just a little bit harder to bear.
We'd walk out most nights that I came over for dinner, or to study, or just to hang out and watch bad movies with her younger brother or something. I don't know why he always got to pick; maybe it was just that he was far more interested in the movies once they started than we were, and I guess it was in our best interest for him to be as engrossed as possible...I still can't flip past a scene from the Police Academy series on a Saturday afternoon without feeling a twinge, without missing her just a little bit.
We'd watch for as long as we could stand it, hands moving softly and slowly as we could manage so as not to call attention to where they were and what they were doing. Then she'd excuse herself for a moment-just to find her folks and let them know that we were going to "take a walk"-and we'd head out to cover the quarter mile or so, fooling no one who had even the faintest memory of their teenage years about what we wanted to be alone to do, but unable to be bothered about caring. It was innocent, after all; that's why her folks never objected, why my mom would have a smile in her voice as I called for the fourth afternoon in a row to let her know that I was going to abandon her for the evening once again.
All of this is in retrospect, of course; at the time we felt that we had the wool over everyone's eyes, that our time together was somehow stolen right from under the noses of everyone that we imagined would disapprove for some reason. The saying is that youth is wasted on the young, but that's not quite right...I'd say that a lack of excess introspection is happily granted to young people, that they may neither analyze every urge nor feel the need to rationalize every decision. The phrase "romanticizing one's biology" would never even have occurred to me as I held her head against my frantically pounding chest, there in that orchard, and I'm thankful for that small kindness every time I think back on it.
It seemed like an eternity, back then, but really it was just the fall of my junior year into the spring, and then she left in the summer to go to college while I fell briefly and passionately for a succession of other girls at my high school. She didn't come back that first winter break; I think her parents were more surprised than I was, but I was the most deeply hurt. I'd find myself staring at pecan trees whenever I ran across them, lost not in thinking about her, but in feeling the things I had felt about her, about myself when I was with her, about how good life was, about how beautiful the leaves were on the ground at her feet.
I didn't exactly "grow up" after that, I guess, but I grew to be different (like we all do) and I moved on (like the lucky ones get to) and now I am where I am, and my life is what it is; and if I have some moments in an orchard to become lost in when I need to remember the times when I could truly forget about the world, instead of a new sitcom or the bottom of a bottle, then I count myself among the truly lucky...to have known such a girl, and to have walked with her under the pecan trees, when I was young.
We'd walk out most nights that I came over for dinner, or to study, or just to hang out and watch bad movies with her younger brother or something. I don't know why he always got to pick; maybe it was just that he was far more interested in the movies once they started than we were, and I guess it was in our best interest for him to be as engrossed as possible...I still can't flip past a scene from the Police Academy series on a Saturday afternoon without feeling a twinge, without missing her just a little bit.
We'd watch for as long as we could stand it, hands moving softly and slowly as we could manage so as not to call attention to where they were and what they were doing. Then she'd excuse herself for a moment-just to find her folks and let them know that we were going to "take a walk"-and we'd head out to cover the quarter mile or so, fooling no one who had even the faintest memory of their teenage years about what we wanted to be alone to do, but unable to be bothered about caring. It was innocent, after all; that's why her folks never objected, why my mom would have a smile in her voice as I called for the fourth afternoon in a row to let her know that I was going to abandon her for the evening once again.
All of this is in retrospect, of course; at the time we felt that we had the wool over everyone's eyes, that our time together was somehow stolen right from under the noses of everyone that we imagined would disapprove for some reason. The saying is that youth is wasted on the young, but that's not quite right...I'd say that a lack of excess introspection is happily granted to young people, that they may neither analyze every urge nor feel the need to rationalize every decision. The phrase "romanticizing one's biology" would never even have occurred to me as I held her head against my frantically pounding chest, there in that orchard, and I'm thankful for that small kindness every time I think back on it.
It seemed like an eternity, back then, but really it was just the fall of my junior year into the spring, and then she left in the summer to go to college while I fell briefly and passionately for a succession of other girls at my high school. She didn't come back that first winter break; I think her parents were more surprised than I was, but I was the most deeply hurt. I'd find myself staring at pecan trees whenever I ran across them, lost not in thinking about her, but in feeling the things I had felt about her, about myself when I was with her, about how good life was, about how beautiful the leaves were on the ground at her feet.
I didn't exactly "grow up" after that, I guess, but I grew to be different (like we all do) and I moved on (like the lucky ones get to) and now I am where I am, and my life is what it is; and if I have some moments in an orchard to become lost in when I need to remember the times when I could truly forget about the world, instead of a new sitcom or the bottom of a bottle, then I count myself among the truly lucky...to have known such a girl, and to have walked with her under the pecan trees, when I was young.
12.02.2008
Myrna
I hadn't seen her since eighth grade graduation, but it would have been impossible for me not to recognize her. I was on Microsoft's site getting stock photos of office workers, then using GIMP to put them into photos of historical disasters...it was Thursday, that's what I do on Thursdays. Fucking Thursdays.
Anyway, it wasn't that she looked the same, because her face clearly showed every second of the twenty plus years that had passed. It was the expression on her face; I suppose she was aiming for "caught while glancing up from my laptop as I ponder some really important business decision" or something like that, but what I saw was "purposefully looking as though I don't know that you're looking at me", simply because that was the expression she had been wearing for, oh, I don't know, a year and a half STRAIGHT every time I looked at her in junior high.
I was never sure whether she managed to keep that look 24/7, or if she had some kind of freakish radar that allowed her to assume it just before my eyes moved her direction, hiding whatever she had been thinking behind the perpetual cool of put-on indifference.
I guess it doesn't really matter in the long run; we all create our own reality, and thus we have to live in it, no matter the cost. If you're too scared to let someone know you're vulnerable to them, you're safe...but safety can be very, very overrated.
I put her in the Whitman tower shooting; I guess the lighting matched the best on some of those photos, and I wasn't really up for a challenging night after the shock of having run across her again after all of those years. Her facial expression didn't really fit in, I guess, but it didn't matter very much in the finished product. I didn't have her taking a bullet or anything, after all, and there may have been people at that scene so lost in themselves that they still managed to maintain an assumed expression in the face of the chaos and the panic, who can say.
I put it up on my blog, and it got some of the most positive comments yet, actually. Maybe she'll run across it some day on the web, some random cross posting when she becomes famous as a model where some total noob posts it and asks, "WTF??? How old is thsi chick anywai???? lol" or something like that. Or maybe it will just take its place among all the other lost memories in the ether, random thoughts and moments from lives that don't even exist anymore (given enough time) in our new collective virtual eternity where we all get starring roles.
And, yes, I have done myself in a picture, but you'll just have to stumble across that one yourself.
Anyway, it wasn't that she looked the same, because her face clearly showed every second of the twenty plus years that had passed. It was the expression on her face; I suppose she was aiming for "caught while glancing up from my laptop as I ponder some really important business decision" or something like that, but what I saw was "purposefully looking as though I don't know that you're looking at me", simply because that was the expression she had been wearing for, oh, I don't know, a year and a half STRAIGHT every time I looked at her in junior high.
I was never sure whether she managed to keep that look 24/7, or if she had some kind of freakish radar that allowed her to assume it just before my eyes moved her direction, hiding whatever she had been thinking behind the perpetual cool of put-on indifference.
I guess it doesn't really matter in the long run; we all create our own reality, and thus we have to live in it, no matter the cost. If you're too scared to let someone know you're vulnerable to them, you're safe...but safety can be very, very overrated.
I put her in the Whitman tower shooting; I guess the lighting matched the best on some of those photos, and I wasn't really up for a challenging night after the shock of having run across her again after all of those years. Her facial expression didn't really fit in, I guess, but it didn't matter very much in the finished product. I didn't have her taking a bullet or anything, after all, and there may have been people at that scene so lost in themselves that they still managed to maintain an assumed expression in the face of the chaos and the panic, who can say.
I put it up on my blog, and it got some of the most positive comments yet, actually. Maybe she'll run across it some day on the web, some random cross posting when she becomes famous as a model where some total noob posts it and asks, "WTF??? How old is thsi chick anywai???? lol" or something like that. Or maybe it will just take its place among all the other lost memories in the ether, random thoughts and moments from lives that don't even exist anymore (given enough time) in our new collective virtual eternity where we all get starring roles.
And, yes, I have done myself in a picture, but you'll just have to stumble across that one yourself.
12.01.2008
Eyes
I didn't know how long I'd been looking into her eyes, then...in my apartment, with her in the middle of the living room and me in what passed for a formal dining room, I guess. I shook my head (it felt like I had been shaking it for a while, like windshield wipers for early morning fog), and it seemed as though she had just said something, or was waiting for me to say something, which is mostly the same thing, right?
They were black, and flat, her eyes, and her voice too when I guess she got tired of waiting for me to talk. "Why are you so obsessed with pictures?" she said, and I looked down at my digital camera then, pointed it at her and pressed the button again. "You won't find anything that you couldn't find right here, right now, that you couldn't remember yourself if you could just keep yourself here in the moment, you know..."
The eyes were the same flat black, but the voice was now coming from an impossibly low register, and I felt it wind its way up the long bones of my legs and into my stomach, my back...I was hearing Morse code now, reading her lips and interpreting seismographic scribblings instead of listening. It was easier, more intuitive...more intimate.
She didn't step forward but somehow she was in front of me now with her hand around the back of my neck, sending short electric shocks down to amplify the dying echoes of her voice below. I still couldn't put a word together as she pulled my head forward and burned the side of my face with her hair; I still can't remember whether I was even afraid.
-------
"So...you moving or something? Documenting stuff for your landlord?"
Nathan was sitting on the couch, paging through the shots on my camera again without asking, of course. There was football on the TV--college, I think--maybe USC or something like that.
"All these empty shots of the living room?" he continued, in the face of my blank silence. "Aren't you supposed to do that before you move in, though? Like on rental cars?"
"No...that's the girl I was telling you about, you know, that I've been going out with? That I met at the show?"
"What, that girl Veronica?"
"No, man, that was forever ago...I met this girl at the...well...shit, I can't remember who was playing, but it was down at Antone's, Thursday night?"
"Dude, that was two nights ago! You're not 'going out' with her...so she came back to your place that night?"
"It couldn't have...I mean...yeah, she...but it's been longer than...I mean, you met her the other day, right?"
"I haven't seen you since the other night, and you didn't answer any texts yesterday, either. Damn, what'd you do, skip work to stay here with her? No wonder you're still so out of it!"
"No, she...well, she left sometime, I can't remember really. No, here, let me show you this one picture; you can see her eyes really clear, you'll remember her then."
But the pictures were just of the living room, like he said...no girl, no eyes, just weird distortions of the flash in some of the pictures that almost made it look like there was someone's shadow across the floor. I guess it was hard to see on the small LCD screen, but when we uploaded them to my computer it was the same thing...zoom in to 800 percent and you still got nothing but pixellated emptiness.
He wouldn't let it go, kept asking me what she looked like, what she was like. All I had to give him were the eyes, and the voice, and the way she had of asking questions that made you feel like she had just finished putting the answers inside you a few minutes ago, just to peel them back out. Because I wasn't obsessed with taking pictures of her, and I don't have trouble being 'in the moment' or whatever, but when she was asking...well, it was all different then.
-------
"Mom?"
My mother had an annoying habit of immediately starting an elaborate story about someone from the neighborhood that I only vaguely remembered as soon as she got me on the phone, and I couldn't take it this time, I really couldn't. I had felt my way out of the dark bedroom to the bar, somehow knowing that I couldn't turn on any lights, somehow remembering (for once) exactly where I had left my cell phone. I noticed then that she wasn't telling a story (she wasn't saying anything, actually), and then I saw on the microwave that it was 4 in the morning, and I was lost for a few moments trying to work out if she was an hour ahead or an hour behind--as if it would matter--and then I was spilling out the recurring dreams of the girl and Nathan and her eyes and him sitting on the couch and his endless questions and always returning to the blood, always so much blood so everywhere...
I felt my dry tongue stick to my lips, felt my parched throat working to make the sounds, and I realized that I had been whispering into the phone for hours, it had to have been hours. I took the phone from my ear and saw the dead blank screen, then the battery somehow over on the coffee table now, and her standing behind the couch as I guess I'd always known she had been, twirling Nathan's hair around her finger carelessly as she watched me again, waiting for her chance to speak.
"You didn't have to kill him, you know...there are other ways for these things to turn out. You're letting your imagination run away with you; you think you're something now that you are not yet, you feel the beginnings of hunger and you imagine that you're starving to death. You're too much inside your own head, even now, even faced with such an enormous reality as this...I think that you will overcome it with time, but for now, come to bed, it's time to sleep." Her words not a request, but not needing to be a command, her eyes showing the slightest spark of life as she took her hand from Nathan's hair and sucked half-congealed blood from her fingers.
-------
It was 1:30 before I woke up, shivering though the blankets were piled high on the bed. She lay as dead next to me, every inch of her covered by the blankets, limbs splayed out at the unnatural angles of dinosaur fossils, of the victims in mall shootings. It was hard to move now, for me...somehow there was too much light to think clearly, but I didn't have to think so clearly anymore, not for very long anyway.
I found my camping gear at the back of the closet, jumbled together in the chaos of the careless unpacking of an exhausted weekend. The silver canister of white kerosene for the cookstove sounded about half full as I shook it, but as I poured it over the bed and the girl with the eyes and Nathan pushed onto the bed beside her it seemed more like a gallon than perhaps a quart, spilling endlessly and filling the room in an instant with the smell of disaster. I had been afraid that all the activity would rouse her, but the juxtaposition with Nathan's body actually made her look more dead, somehow, not less...now that rigor mortis had passed he looked strangely peaceful under the dried blood, while her open eyes clearly spoke of an eternity of unrest, of perpetual yearning. She was right to live in every moment, I guess; it was the only option she had anyway, in the endless moments, an everlasting supply, somehow stringing together into much, much less than a life.
It took about a minute for the bed to be completely engulfed once I set it ablaze, and as I walked to the windows to open the blinds I wasn't sure if the flames were burning hotter and faster as they reached her or not...I dunno, maybe it was just my imagination again. I heard the screaming start, though...maybe it was me, maybe it was her from the fire and the sunlight in her eyes and the sudden realization of her fatal mistake; maybe it was the fire alarm. All I knew was the fire and the freedom that it promised, now, and maybe a cleansing too, and so I did the only thing that was left to me to do--I lay back down beside her, just to see if I could look one last time into her eyes, those eyes in all of that flame.
They were black, and flat, her eyes, and her voice too when I guess she got tired of waiting for me to talk. "Why are you so obsessed with pictures?" she said, and I looked down at my digital camera then, pointed it at her and pressed the button again. "You won't find anything that you couldn't find right here, right now, that you couldn't remember yourself if you could just keep yourself here in the moment, you know..."
The eyes were the same flat black, but the voice was now coming from an impossibly low register, and I felt it wind its way up the long bones of my legs and into my stomach, my back...I was hearing Morse code now, reading her lips and interpreting seismographic scribblings instead of listening. It was easier, more intuitive...more intimate.
She didn't step forward but somehow she was in front of me now with her hand around the back of my neck, sending short electric shocks down to amplify the dying echoes of her voice below. I still couldn't put a word together as she pulled my head forward and burned the side of my face with her hair; I still can't remember whether I was even afraid.
-------
"So...you moving or something? Documenting stuff for your landlord?"
Nathan was sitting on the couch, paging through the shots on my camera again without asking, of course. There was football on the TV--college, I think--maybe USC or something like that.
"All these empty shots of the living room?" he continued, in the face of my blank silence. "Aren't you supposed to do that before you move in, though? Like on rental cars?"
"No...that's the girl I was telling you about, you know, that I've been going out with? That I met at the show?"
"What, that girl Veronica?"
"No, man, that was forever ago...I met this girl at the...well...shit, I can't remember who was playing, but it was down at Antone's, Thursday night?"
"Dude, that was two nights ago! You're not 'going out' with her...so she came back to your place that night?"
"It couldn't have...I mean...yeah, she...but it's been longer than...I mean, you met her the other day, right?"
"I haven't seen you since the other night, and you didn't answer any texts yesterday, either. Damn, what'd you do, skip work to stay here with her? No wonder you're still so out of it!"
"No, she...well, she left sometime, I can't remember really. No, here, let me show you this one picture; you can see her eyes really clear, you'll remember her then."
But the pictures were just of the living room, like he said...no girl, no eyes, just weird distortions of the flash in some of the pictures that almost made it look like there was someone's shadow across the floor. I guess it was hard to see on the small LCD screen, but when we uploaded them to my computer it was the same thing...zoom in to 800 percent and you still got nothing but pixellated emptiness.
He wouldn't let it go, kept asking me what she looked like, what she was like. All I had to give him were the eyes, and the voice, and the way she had of asking questions that made you feel like she had just finished putting the answers inside you a few minutes ago, just to peel them back out. Because I wasn't obsessed with taking pictures of her, and I don't have trouble being 'in the moment' or whatever, but when she was asking...well, it was all different then.
-------
"Mom?"
My mother had an annoying habit of immediately starting an elaborate story about someone from the neighborhood that I only vaguely remembered as soon as she got me on the phone, and I couldn't take it this time, I really couldn't. I had felt my way out of the dark bedroom to the bar, somehow knowing that I couldn't turn on any lights, somehow remembering (for once) exactly where I had left my cell phone. I noticed then that she wasn't telling a story (she wasn't saying anything, actually), and then I saw on the microwave that it was 4 in the morning, and I was lost for a few moments trying to work out if she was an hour ahead or an hour behind--as if it would matter--and then I was spilling out the recurring dreams of the girl and Nathan and her eyes and him sitting on the couch and his endless questions and always returning to the blood, always so much blood so everywhere...
I felt my dry tongue stick to my lips, felt my parched throat working to make the sounds, and I realized that I had been whispering into the phone for hours, it had to have been hours. I took the phone from my ear and saw the dead blank screen, then the battery somehow over on the coffee table now, and her standing behind the couch as I guess I'd always known she had been, twirling Nathan's hair around her finger carelessly as she watched me again, waiting for her chance to speak.
"You didn't have to kill him, you know...there are other ways for these things to turn out. You're letting your imagination run away with you; you think you're something now that you are not yet, you feel the beginnings of hunger and you imagine that you're starving to death. You're too much inside your own head, even now, even faced with such an enormous reality as this...I think that you will overcome it with time, but for now, come to bed, it's time to sleep." Her words not a request, but not needing to be a command, her eyes showing the slightest spark of life as she took her hand from Nathan's hair and sucked half-congealed blood from her fingers.
-------
It was 1:30 before I woke up, shivering though the blankets were piled high on the bed. She lay as dead next to me, every inch of her covered by the blankets, limbs splayed out at the unnatural angles of dinosaur fossils, of the victims in mall shootings. It was hard to move now, for me...somehow there was too much light to think clearly, but I didn't have to think so clearly anymore, not for very long anyway.
I found my camping gear at the back of the closet, jumbled together in the chaos of the careless unpacking of an exhausted weekend. The silver canister of white kerosene for the cookstove sounded about half full as I shook it, but as I poured it over the bed and the girl with the eyes and Nathan pushed onto the bed beside her it seemed more like a gallon than perhaps a quart, spilling endlessly and filling the room in an instant with the smell of disaster. I had been afraid that all the activity would rouse her, but the juxtaposition with Nathan's body actually made her look more dead, somehow, not less...now that rigor mortis had passed he looked strangely peaceful under the dried blood, while her open eyes clearly spoke of an eternity of unrest, of perpetual yearning. She was right to live in every moment, I guess; it was the only option she had anyway, in the endless moments, an everlasting supply, somehow stringing together into much, much less than a life.
It took about a minute for the bed to be completely engulfed once I set it ablaze, and as I walked to the windows to open the blinds I wasn't sure if the flames were burning hotter and faster as they reached her or not...I dunno, maybe it was just my imagination again. I heard the screaming start, though...maybe it was me, maybe it was her from the fire and the sunlight in her eyes and the sudden realization of her fatal mistake; maybe it was the fire alarm. All I knew was the fire and the freedom that it promised, now, and maybe a cleansing too, and so I did the only thing that was left to me to do--I lay back down beside her, just to see if I could look one last time into her eyes, those eyes in all of that flame.
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