deja vu

Just watched "Rififi". It was a fun movie, in the biggest most meaningful way. French, 1955. But the director and screenwriter, Dusan, was a blacklisted American from Hollywood, and won that year's Best Director for it at Cannes.

Anyway, I did have distinct deja vu with the "Rififi" song and dance number, and also at the very end when Tony is racing little Tonio back to Paris and his mother, staving off death as he slowly succumbs to his gun wounds, his eyes rolling, his pedal foot oozing dark blood, the camera waving, his point of view, more on the trees he are driving under, little Tonio in his cowboy outfit, standing and laughing all over the convertible, at the end pointing his toy gun at the back of his godfather's head.

I might have seen both scenes in some film noir retrospective or documentary.


I also had severe deja vu this week reading Mamet's "The Water Engine".

Feeling better

Really feel that sometime this week, maybe a couple days ago, my mind did that 'flip' from depression to -- if not manic, at least then, well... -- not depressed.

It is like those couple times when I have started on psychotropic prescriptions: the enervating Thoughts were still there, but the attendant Emotions just weren't. There had been a tipping point.

Not sure what or when the tipping point was. We are looking at some above-freezing temps here for the first time in over a week -- seems like a warm up, but really just the average temps for this point in the year, lol. I got through this past week at work our monthly three day training - which always gets me nervous. But this week for the first time I did not cater lunches, per Erie County and budget changes, so that was a huger load off than I anticipated it would be. We also had the first ever Professional Development Training last Saturday and on top of all the usual I ended up having to sit at the front desk at 844 Delaware all day, just reading and webbing. And my car is proving itself dependable through the constant cold; and the problem with the driver side door lock, at least, was fixed with half a can of WD40. But I am still not locking it, not trusting it.

I also am writing more and more, discovering Mamet, both plays and essays of his, and ordering loads of books from the library.

My eating and coffee drinking habits are still as bad as they have been this winter though. But I am having fun enjoying time chatting and playing with G. -- still unsure if she is the young woman in the pics she sent me, she has still not been willing to exchange phone numbers nor has she gotten a mic. So she is still a quantum entity, could go either way, truly the - wonderfully intelligent - 20 year old women she says she is, or not.

So anyway, the Switch got flipped inside my head. I am okay with being less than perfect, I am okay with be human and faulted an very occasionally unwise. It is a relief that I know I should just enjoy while it is here.

Sadness (and food)

Stopped by Elmwood Taco and Subs last night after work.

There was a guy there, I've seem him at a restaurant there before, in the last couple months, but I forgot where.

For some reason, he breaks my heart.

Early to mid thirties, maybe not slender, but a healthy slim build. Maybe an inch taller than me. The set of his face, unintentionally hard, roughened by teen acne by the looks of it, and waxy, along with his somewhat stiff gait and posture, points to some congenital situation. My initial thought was pre-natal alcohol syndrome, but I don't think that is what it is specifically. But something like that. His light brown eyes are angled. His hair is sandy and hinting at impending loss, and he has a fashionally inept sandy moustache; he looks like a guy from 1988 still stuck in pre-New Wave 1980. His clothes are unremarkable.

As when I saw him before, he had a tray mounded with food. A big box of flat waffle-cut french fries, what must have been two entres; I just glanced at it. A couple of the free newspapers on the little table waiting to be read while he drank and ate.

But something about him is so fucking sad. He certainly looks intelligent, perhaps even a failed intellectual, one trapped in his blue collar family past in this past-trapped blue collar city. I am finding it beyond my understanding or awareness to understand Why he draws this devastatingly sad empathy or hopefuly compassion out of me. But he does.

Maybe I see myself in him. A sympathetic resonance. A quiet awkward man - but a Good Man - growing old alone, burying my loneliness and sadness and remorse in piles of food. Eating alone, and it being perfectly normal and acceptable to me when it would be untenable to most people - to Most People. Awkward in his body. Almost there, like where I should be, but never quite.

You walk by some people, as they sit behind restaurant windows, eating alone. And some make you feel nothing - there are people to whom a meal by themselves is a relief after a day of constant dealing with customers or students. But some others... you can feel their sadness, for some even their burying their sadness and grief for life with food, whether they are shoveling it in or delicately savoring. Trapped behind the window. Trapped in their seat at the tiny table. Trapped by their body's demands even if not properly met. Trapped by this snow and cold. Trapped by this little city decaying shoved up against the boundaried river.

Another Mamet quote -- on being an "observer"

From the essay "On Paul Ickovic's Photographs" in Writing in Restaurants :

I have always felt that people look on me as an outcast -- that simple request for a cup of coffee elicits a slight tightening around the eyes.

I have always felt like an outsider; and I am sure that the suspicion that I perceive is the suspicion that I provoke by my great yearning to belong.

I would like to live a life free of constant self-examination -- a life which may be ruled by the processes of guilt, remorse, hope and anxiety, but one in which those processes themselves are not foremost in the mind.

I would like to belong to a world dedicated to creating, preserving, achieving, or simply getting by. But the world of the outsider, in which I have chosen to live, and in which I have trained myself to live, is based on none of those things. It is based on observation.

~ ~ ~

But for myself, I do not think this has been a choice on my part.

It is just the way I am constructed.

The ampersand

Does anyone else find ampersands (&) depressing?

CHOOSE

Having problems writing The Detective's Secretary.

I'm going to it every day. Still. Typing a few lines, maybe just two. Just random images, pretty much.

I have to make the commitment.

When I was making music, crafting my tunes, a few years back, there was always a specific moment when I COMMITTED. I chose This melody line over That one. Squeezed my eyes shut for a moment, and opened them again. And that moment was a release, as much as the moment when I hit the Upload button and sent them to my webpage for the world to hear them. To hear me.

But I only found my voice when I COMMITTED.

That moment when I made that simple decision. When I chose the one direction over the other. And cut that path, made that path real against all others, that would only ever exist in my mind. In other words, they never really existed. Even though I think they existed, maybe even saw them stretched out into the brush out from my feet.

I had the same problem with "Text".

I must close my teeth and grit my eyes and just fucking be a man and CHOOSE.

Side effects?

Wondering if my current haziness and dullness and little memory frustrations might be a side effect of the Crestor...

Just found out a few days ago that one of its known side effect is memory issues and the irritability that sometimes comes with it. An ABC News video about an older woman who was having problems with memory -- severe problems, like not knowing her granddaughter's name, or where she herself lives -- that of course made her family and her doctors think she was suffering from Alzheimer's onset. But it was just the Crestor.

They took her off Crestor, and her memory and faculties returned.

Yesterday, I ran into John who works here as I was coming back in around 4:00 and he was leaving. I thought he was Robert who does the first morning of our DCW training, who had indeed been there yesterday. I stopped John, asked him how things went today. Thinking I was asking Robert about the training. I almost asked him to get me his payment voucher asap, but for some reason -- luckily! -- I refrained. Maybe part of me knew he was actually John (of course part of me knew he was actually John!). I spent a few more moments explaining to John that I wasn't feeling well -- I had left work about 11:00, after having been there before 8:00 to set up the training, and coming back to clean up; if it had been a normal day I would have not come in at all, sick. But by 4:00, having lain down for a couple hours and otherwise padded around the apartment, I was feeling okay. and today I feel fine.

My explaining to Robert I had not been feeling well yesterday made sense, of course; but not to John. Who now I realize was looking at me a bit wide eyed. After a minute, he told me he was getting going. Only after he walked out into the parking lot to brush the snow off his car -- was it when I saw his gait was normal, Bob having a congenital limp? -- did my heart sink and it dawned on me that he was John and not who I had thought he was.

Now, apologizing and explaining to him would just be making the whole thing worse.

And as I walked in and went up the stairs, I called Trudy "Trish", a character in a play I am writing.

Damn! I really have to do some serious looking into Crestor side effects. Again, maybe my frsutrations lately at not being able to think of the bon mot I know I know, and my haziness and blurring between sleepy and dreamtime thoughts and images and what really happens in my currently dull life, is not just SAD or depression or malaise. Which would explain it away well enough.

And fortunately, I have not been aware of any side effects from any of the medications I have been taking since April (Crestor, Lisiniprol, Coreg, aspirin, vitamin D).

more on Mamet

Finished Mamet's booklength essay "3 Uses of the Knife" last night.

Stunned by it. He describes that the basic structure of narrative -- the 3-act play; "boy finds girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl"; the build-up, the middle movement, the crescendo and eventual (inevitable) resolution of a symphony -- are all reflective of how our mind is wired to see events progress, how our lifespan unfolds in our innate philosophical consciousness.

And that in True artistic drama, there is no resolution. Our lives are Manichean in the constant struggle, or see-saw, between our light and our dark. Maybe a moment of peace at the end of the drama, but that is only because that imaginary struggle has ended and we can take a breath. But the walk through the troubled and troubling universe goes on. Because no matter what we want, no matter how we want the relief of resolution, we know in those moments of biting sun-bright clarity that that is not the way Life, the universe, truly works.


Sorry to say, but Mamet here has stirred me more than a decade's worth of President Ikeda's essays and speeches.


Mamet describes religion as relaxing into an appeasement of the Manichean dichotomy, of letting the mind settle into a crevice riven into the middle of the landscape.

Ikeda talks from the perspective of purity; Mamet talks from the place right here, the middle of the city, his people the middle of the last century's full-on hatred and murder. But I need some of that right now. I need to move away from the cleanness, the unattainable imaginary purity of religiosity. The addiction of it. I need to admit, and admit with my life, my actions, the bitter and the sweet grisly grunginess of real life as a human.

A day to feel shitty

It's 1:45 on a day off afternoon. And I feel like shit. I did work Saturday because we had a training class and someone had to be onsite for security. But in the mid of winter, cloudy, windy, "brisk" as they say. Not even snow, not even really white bright snow on the ground -- if any day, a day to feel shitty. I spent almost two hours, I think, chatting with G.. Which was fine, great, but I ended up not getting to morning gongyo til after 10:30 when I got up before 7:00. But then I got a call from Barbara, who wanted to spend 45 minutes discussing work. Then Alain next door grabbed me; he is applying for a job at 844 Delaware, and we ended up talking about... my work. (He did though, tell me he thinks of me not just as a neighbor, not just as a friend, but as a brother. I am rather shocked by that.)

So, technically only three more hours of my holiday weekend. Oh well...

What do I want to do today?

What do I want to do today?

Write.

Not eat meat.

Go to the old SGI Community Center at 4:00 to help the move; I probably cannot join in the physical moving with the other men, but at least to "support", as we say, and to see the new Community Center now all but completed.

I woke up at 3:00 this morning, the ThinkBright channel was running a documentary on Film Noir. Inspired me to - right then - pop open the DarkRoom program (an emulation of the 1980's simple word processor screens) and write up a few lines, of an argument between Ron and Trish in my "The Detective's Secretary" play.

All I want to do it write.

But something is feeling missing, at least when I imagine it. Or someone. It just seems so frighteningly empty. I want there to be a woman padding around the place, or at least away at work, when I write. I want a dog curled up next to the desk near my feet. I want the phone to be ringing, interrupting me, my agent or a producer. I want a laptop to carry under my arm into The Spot, to sit there in public in the doldrums of the afternoon. I want to be waiting for an email of a plane ticket from a theater in Charlotte so I can be there for final rehearsals and opening night.

This is the kind of life many men lead.

The life they create for themselves.

I do not know why I can't just get off my ass, turn off the distractions -- the television, the PalTalk rooms, the food -- for four fucking hours and just start creating this life for myself. (See below, about such a sea change.)

Mamet talks about the fecundity of the "midlife crisis"

David Mamet, from "3 Uses of the Knife" --

Tolstoy wrote that if you don't undergo this reexamination, this revision, in your thirties, the rest of your life will be intellectually sterile. We correctly identify the advent of this phenomenon as a "midlife crisis" and strive to live through it so that we can return to our previously less troubled situation -- believing that this state stands between us and any possibility of happiness or success.

To the contrary, however, this state is the beginning of a great opportunity. Tolstoy suggested that it was the opportunity to change the myth by which one lives; to rethink everything; to ask, "What is the nature of the world?"


[with minor changes to clarify, at least from the way my mind reads this.]

That feeling of abandonment

My therapist, Maureen, tells me that people who score as high as I do on abandonment schema almost always are intensely into a relationship, and when one comes to a crashing trauma-causing end, they jump into a new one immediately, like by the next weekend.

She has never known of someone scoring as high as I do who does not act this way.

But, I am so intense about abandonment from a relationship it is like I refuse to be in one. Absolute avoidance. It feels like my time with Marilyn -- less than four years, never lived together: my only LTR -- was just a blip or burr in a smooth record.

But even my online "relationships" -- an oxymoron, if you ask me -- for me are fraught with freaky abandonment fears. It is the nature of such interactions, even the most intense and personal and emotional ones, that someone online will one day-- disappear.

Just like that. Poof. Nothing but the archived chats. no warning. Just no communication. And most of the time your only contact with them is online, through one paired IM profile and email account. Don't know if they were really married and their partner found out. Or if they made the decision that this was no longer something they wanted to pursue. Or if their computer died, and by the months later when they could finally afford to get a new one, their feelings had just died. Or if the service deleted their account and they can't remember your IM name off the top of their head. Or if they had a stroke. Or if they got murdered in a botched bank robber.

So yes, even though I do not have "real" relationships, I still get rattled to the point of barely functioning, of being a nervous wreck, when someone doesn't pop online for a few days. A brisk white noise of the cold emptiness of the universe.