Snippitts of Illusions

Strange week. I met a woman from Texas who took my picture. I met a guy from California who sells costume jewelry to the stars. I saw my friend Ron get married, and hung out with people I haven't seen in a while. I tried to explain my theological stand point in a delicate non-offensive way to a friend who means well, but definitely feels as if I'm down the wrong path. I become increasingly more and more grumpy and moody, and I'm not sure why.

posted by F.G. Shaw @ 4:31 AM 0 comments

A man died up here last week. He was found in an abandoned house with a gunshot wound. I don't know why he was killed. I can't pretend to understand the suffering his family was going through. And I don't know the trauma the police investigating the crime are putting themselves through in order to find answers. All I know is two things: this man is dead, and I knew who he was. I didn't know him mind you. I didn't know his name untill a kid brought a missing sign to hang up in the store, but I had talked to him. He was a customer at my old job. A frequent customer. He'd come in during the morning, get something to drink and snack on. Then be on his way. I'm an outsider in this situation, and I'm not sad for it. I don't like the pain of loss, but I've learned to cope with said pain.

Death is funny. It creeps up on some people so you can see it happening to them as you're conversing. As you're watching. It was this way with my grandmother who died a couple of years ago. It can come quickly, when you're not expecting, the way it did with my father 8 years ago. There is a loss of not just a person, but of self. One of the people that you love, that help define who you are as an individual is no longer able to do that. The hole exsists for everyone who knew them. This is why we grieve. We grieve for what the departed meant in our own life.

Whether it happens suddenly or slowly it happens. It could happen to me tommorrow. I'm ok with that. It could happen to you tommorrow. I'm not nearly as ok with that. What frightens me more than my own death, far more, is the death of those I love the most. Not because I fear eternal damnation, that just seems silly to me. No I fear thier deaths because of the hole it will cause in my life. Selfish. Yes. But honest as I could possibly be.

A man died up here last week and although I didn't know him I saw the grief in the young mans eyes who gave me the sign to hang up in the window. I heard the barely controlled voice, pleading and almost broken ask me if I would. Even though I didn't know him his death, unlike so many others who've died that I haven't known, did affect me. It made me think.

posted by F.G. Shaw @ 2:56 AM 0 comments

Yesterday I did something unprecedented for me and say three movies in the theatre. All of them summer movies. I don't usually catch more than say one movie a month, but I had the day off and a little money in my pocket so I caught two matinees in the afternoon, and a 12:30 show last night. Two of the movies were what everyone was probably seeing this weekend: Pirates of the Carribean and LXG. I liked both of them. They both had good things and bad things, but mostly, they were entertaining. I'm the sort of film goer who can get really excited about a movie and yet still keep a low expectation of it. I try to be realistic. I knew that niether of these movies would be some deep tour de force in film making. Yet both did have some wonderful film making elements. The good points of both movies was the eye candy. The filming and visual effects. One expects this from a summer film. There were also some enjoyable plot elements from both, and some good acting, particularlly by Johnny Depp as Jack Sparrow. There were things that weren't so great. Pirates was way too long, it drew itself out and while eventually getting to the point it seemed to take it's sweet time doing so, rehashing some of the same stuff. Don't get me wrong it was cool stuff to rehash, it was still the same and lost it's effectiveness the second time around. LXG could have had another half hour honestly, there were a couple of characters that needed more developing in my opinion. One was Tom Sawyer. If you going to include him in as an extra character (he's not in the original comic books) then flesh him out. We know what his childhood was like, but why did he become a secret agent? Also make him his age, at least as old as Sean Connery's character, Allan Quartermain. All the other charcters had the original stories that they were written into to give them the leg to stand on. Except for the Invisible man, which they explain in the story, and Dorian Gray, to my knowledge he is the only one who is rigidly and firmly dead at the end of his novel, the others have a mysterious dissapearances and open loopholes to allow them into the LXG from thier literary past.
The final movie I saw also did not dissapoint, 28 Days Later. A horror movie that took an old genre and put on it a slightly different twist. I really like this movie because it was different. It was more subtle than your typical Hollywood summer movie, but did it's job effectively. There was a slight dissapointment though, I like going away from horror movies feeling uneasy, this one I didn't, but maybe it's just me.
I enjoyed my day at the movies yesterday. I wasn't dissapointed, but like I said, I try to go into these movies with a reasonable expectation of what to expect. That's all anyone can ask really. I set my bar low enough that most movies exceed what I thought they would be, and those that don't usually come with in range of the bar itself.

Enjoy the movies you see this summer. And remember don't let the Hollywood hype give you an unreasonable expectation of the movies to be watched.

posted by F.G. Shaw @ 5:55 PM 0 comments