This Afternoon In Drama

Fire On The Mountain

I always hated the Grateful Dead song "Fire On The Mountain" because I'd long associated it with the "hippies" at my high school strumming on their guitars and drumming on self-made ceramic jugs atop the lunch tables near the soda machines while I was trying to eat my frozen yogurt cup and preliminarily tackle that night's math homework in peace.

Today I hate it because there really is a fire on the mountain above us, and I can't stop thinking about all the animals that must be running for their lives!  The animals.  It kills me.  The foothills are being evacuated and many people have farm animals up there, so a herd of baby goats, a brood of roosters (I looked up the list of what you call various animals when they come in groups, and apparently this is the one you want for these guys), a trio of dogs, and, temporarily, a horse have come down here to escape.

The baby goats are incredibly emotionally needy, which believe me, is a much, much cuter quality on a baby goat than it is on a person.

Dreams Can Come True. It Can Happen To You.

Sleep has gotten more sound for me this year.  There were only two incidents of sleep-rage, once when I repeatedly air punched in the direction of my adored dog, missing her by a foot but breaking my heart into a million pieces when Brent told me about it the next morning.  Speaking of Brent, he asked that I stop sleeping with the green Komachi knife next to my pillow for his sake.  I told him, "You have two kidneys."  I do have to say that now, when I watch the Dateline episodes on people who accidentally kill loved ones while claiming to still be asleep, I'm much more willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.  I'm also much more suspicious when Brent encourages me to drink Gatorade.

I've written about my Tylenol PM and Benadryl eras of fitful sleep, but back before I even had problems with insomnia, there were two hallucinatory, drug-free nighttime episodes that became indelibly marked in my mind.  One occurred when I was three or four.  A group of vampires visited my bedroom around midnight and stayed at my tea party table until dawn.  I want to say it sucked, but then I run into problems with punning.  The second occurred the year I was a visiting student at Berkeley.  While ostensibly awake and lying in bed in the dark, I saw a small, hairy, naked man run across the length of my studio, then squat in the corner next to my rabbit cage.  I saw him.  He was very clear.  According to my own tested perception, I was completely awake.  I got out of bed and stared at the man.  Then I turned on the light, and he disappeared.

The image of this little ape man stayed with me because I'd been so alert and because I'd gotten such a good look at him-- I've had many vivid nightmares over my lifetime, but none of them have ever crossed over into complete wakefulness.  None of them have ever been so sure.  I was still so bothered by having seen the man almost ten years later that I wrote a short story about a girl who's visited by the guy in her apartment.  From it:

"The light coming through the verticals illuminated the outline of a man crouching at the foot of my bed.  I knew he was a man because of the shape of his body and head.  But then, after my eyes adjusted, I only knew he was "male."  I saw all the hair against the light.  I could see the tips.  He was covered in it like a bear.

He was facing away from me, and I could see the place on his body where his legs split into his ass.  That's how I knew he was naked..."

The other day Brent was, as he is wont to do, nerding out and reading science articles online, and from across the room he said, "Holy shit, this article about sleep paralysis perfectly describes what happened to me when I was a teenager.  One time I woke up to see this guy crouching next to my bed where my nightstand used to be, so I freaked out and knew I had to destroy him.  And I was screaming, so my parents came in and turned on the light, and I was holding pieces of my nightstand, which I'd torn apart with my bare hands.  But here's the really weird thing," he said, carrying his laptop over to me.  "There's an old painting accompanying the article, and the guy in it is THE SAME GUY THAT WAS STANDING IN THE PLACE OF MY NIGHTSTAND."

He put down his computer in front of me, and I looked.  And then I yelled, "Hoooooly shit!  THAT'S THE SAME GUY WHO WAS SQUATTING IN THE CORNER OF MY STUDIO NEXT TO THE RABBIT CAGE."

We stared at the guy in the painting, so familiar to both of us, and then we began to wonder about how if the same guy was painted by an artist centuries ago, then maybe he's familiar to millions and millions of people.  And if this is the case, then would that mean that either he is something programmed into our brains, a collective image triggered by a deceptive cusp between unconsciousness or consciousness, or that he's some kind of age-old phenomena, that he's the foundation of the bogeyman, the Sandman, someone ridiculous who you're not supposed to believe in past childhood and who becomes the basis for a fantastical Nic Cage conspiracy film?  The depiction of him in the painting above is so uncanny for both me and Brent that it seems wasteful to write it off as coincidence, so I'm actually using the blog to find out if anybody else is like, "Heyyyyyyy, I know that guy too!"  On a side note, I never saw the horse.

Per Brent's request, I did put away the Komachi, which I think was a good move considering that both both Brent and Christmas are hairy and I wouldn't ever want to confuse them with the sleep guy in the middle of the night.  But neither of us ever saw him again, so maybe he only comes to you once in your life, and then you just think about the sighting for the rest of it.

I'd Like To Move On To Fall Now

I've religiously watched The Bachelor/Bachelorette canon since the first season when I squinted at the TV and asked about Alex Michel, "Him?  Really?"  I continue to stick with the series even as it follows its identical rainbow of moments over and over again-- the talk of journeys, the drunken pool dive at that first cocktail party, the ongoing, willful delusion of contestants that it's the bachelor or bachelorette who arranges that picnic date atop the glacier and not the producers-- and I'm repeatedly asked by people who religiously watch all the other reality shows, "Why?"  

I've tried to explain that I sit in continual fascination of what people experience as falling in love.  In return I often get the argument that these people who go on these shows are not an accurate cross-section of the population, but I don't think that's fair at all.  I just think they're disappointing to viewers, including myself, who hope that our falling in love is more interesting and varied than what goes down amidst the handing out of the roses.  Probably those of us who roll our eyes at the journey talk have a different, yet similarly static set of romantic tics.  We may want to puke at latest bachelorette Jillian's dolphin squeal and incredible fondness for doing the jump-and-legs-around-waist-wrap, but at the same time, I recognize my own hair-behind-ear-tuck and melancholic blinking at the ceiling.  I have my own really stupid moves that feel profound and lovable in front of eyes that I want to perceive them that way.

I'd been reading a number of cast interviews for the film (500) Days Of Summer in which leads Zooey Deschanel and Joseph Gordon-Levitt spoke excitedly about how they'd made a romantic comedy that depicted the truths about falling in love neglected by, say, a Katherine Heigl blockbuster.  They talked about how they felt they'd made something very honest out of a genre historically dripping with bullshit.  Reviewers also talked about honesty.  Before Brent and I went to see the movie last night, I read an article on Entertainment Weekly's website that argued even if you were to take away the non-linear twist of the film, then the force of its recognition held fast, the feeling persisted that you were finally encountering a relationship on film that captured, as never before, something about being young and falling in love.  Or maybe just being young, into music, and falling in love.

I can't remember the last time I loathed the first act of a movie more.  I mean, there's no doubt it's happened on a more heinous level, and this isn't a bad review of the movie, but I think what I was responding so negatively to was not only the general tweeness of a film set to Zooey Deschanel's big blue eyes, but also the suggestion I'd already received through its promotion that this was a film that really peered at love and had something more down-to-earth to say about it.  I feel like I have to make a disclosure here that at one time I was half acquainted with the director because he was my ex-boyfriend's friend and colleague, and at the director's birthday party his very nice extended family tried to feed me my first intestine-cased sausage ever, the sausage being a favorite family recipe, but still I couldn't get a bite down.  And I felt a little bad about that at the time, same as I now feel a little bad saying that I couldn't get down the first thirty minutes of what was undoubtedly the passion project of someone who was once very hospitable to me.  

That out of the way, I'm thinking the beginning of the film had me so unhappy because it was a Katherine Heigl blockbuster if Katherine Heigl were as quirky in her romantic comedies as she seems to be in real life.  The supporting buddy actors surrounding Joseph Gordon-Levitt were the guys that surround Gerard Butler except weirder looking, indie faces that had been cast as, to use Brent's description, secret jocks.  So I guess the sum of what I was left feeling was that this movie was a romantic comedy gone hipster-- which is as viable a direction for that genre to go in as any-- but just because there was dialogue about a band I have on my iTunes instead of a dialogue set to a band that my mom would ask, "Who's that?  I like this!"  if she were to hear them on the radio, didn't make the endeavor any more emotionally honest, and I squirmed to have it presented as such.

As the movie got first ridiculously happier and then sadder, I liked it better.  I liked when it gave itself over to emotional manipulation, particularly during a split-screen scene that showed the difference between romantic expectation and actuality, because instead of trying to depict an actuality of a romance, it dealt with the imagined scope of romance in the romantic's head.   Then the film was about a character and not a way of life that was somehow supposed to cut quicker to the quick than Heigl's movie set at a Sacramento news station...by being set at a Los Angeles loft-based greeting card company (!) with a staff of full-time writers (!) worked by an assistant who has the time and money to achieve her desired aesthetic effect via custom wallpaper in an apartment so very charmingly accessorized and lived in, despite her having moved into it just a couple months before.  I'm not saying I take issue with movies being movies, with the whole enterprise being a fast, churning wheel of fantastical construction, same as those Bachelorette dates atop glaciers.  I'm not saying it's a good idea to ever go to a movie looking for something real, and I'm not even going to put that word in quotes.  It's that last night I felt so much worse about a movie that thinks it isn't using the same raw materials to do its meeting cute when the spokes have been wrapped in Zooey Deschanel's ponytail ribbons and Pixies karaoke.

On all seasons of the Bachelor/Bachelorette, the situations are the biggest constructs ever (last season you had Jillian and her date rolling around on vintage cars at the Peterson Automotive Museum for an "impromptu"-- and there the quotes are needed-- photo sesh), but for me these have been far more probing looks into the act of falling in love.  Critics say that what goes on on those shows isn't falling in love, and they may be right if you're going to gage the experience by the relationship it generally leaves behind.  But I'm less concerned with the sustainability of the relationship or, more to the point, the foundation of the affection, because even if that love is based upon thirty other people vying for the person you think you want, and then that longing evaporates once you get the chance to notice that the others are gone (the helicopter rides too), the fantasy of what you thought was happening to you is no less relevant.  That Days works so hard in its set-up to roll its eyes at one fantasy while substituting another that's, really, no less eye-roll worthy, made its portrayal of falling in love into an as irrelevant a statement on romance itself as I've seen on any screen lately.