“I’m Still Alive”–Pearl Jam

Y’all!!! Thanks to the couple of people who have checked in on me recently. I know it is weird when you have been reading some random person’s blog forever and then they disappear. You are like, did they die? How would I ever even find out? It’s very strange, this internet life. Rest assured, as of yet I am not dead, and I will try to remain in this state for some time, as we continue surfing our way into apocalypse.

I have been becoming a different person, or trying to, insofar as we can ever change who we are/what we were born into. I really have stopped thinking about my “work,” my research etc., which I was completely obsessed with for so many years. I think back on how unhealthy my relationship with my job was, how cowed and fearful I was about getting tenure, how stupidly I lived my life while trying to get that book out. Not sleeping not eating, allowing myself to go through mental health spirals, neglecting everything, directing everything inward, thinking only of myself, etc. I totally participated in my own mental exploitation and it was dumb of me. I’ve started reading Fred Moten and I sat in on this amazing talk he and Stefano Harney gave about how we should all (meaning academics) stop doing our jobs and it made a huge impression on me. “Find the work, in your job, and just do that,” meaning basically don’t read the emails from the Dean, don’t spend time on the self-reporting paperwork, don’t submit to the “diversity and inclusion” committee survey, don’t participate in the bullshit. Find the work, which is probably for most of us teaching, but even within teaching, find the real work, which is not grading and assessment but something else, the thing that drew you here to this imperfect, deeply complicit and corrupt institutional pathway in the first place. I’m trying to do that.

But I am spending most of my time doing work unrelated to my job at all, except in the sense that I’d been reading all this anarchist theory and now I am trying to live those things in practice to the extent I am able. I joined an affinity group and we are working on abolition projects in our town. Currently I am in charge of researching participatory budgeting and creating a budget survey for our community. It’s fascinating. We are requesting public records and police logs and different group members with different skill sets are doing different things with it all. Sitting in on excruciating city council meetings, delivering furious speeches to the city council. We are learning so much shocking info about how our town works. For example we learned that our public schools rely on unpaid jail labor for a lot of their grounds maintenance. Neat! If you have the time and inclination to get involved in this kind of work in your community I highly recommend it.

We also joined a mutual aid group that does food distribution in a nearby town. Every week we pick up leftover produce from all the little local farms, bring it to a central spot, throw it all into bags, and give it out to whoever wants it. It’s so much fun and feels so good. Mutual aid is amazing and easy and everyone loves it. I’ve been reading and thinking about mutual aid for so long and only the current uprising made me realize, wait, oh, this is something you DO, not just something you theorize about. I don’t understand what was in my mind all these years, why I just read and thought and didn’t do. Anyway I am trying to change this orientation in my life. This food distro stuff is also eye-opening work, just seeing the massive, massive amount of food that is actually available and that, if we didn’t drive around and pick it up, would simply go into the compost. And if this is the amount of waste at this tiny local level, imagine larger farming operations, how much wasted food there is.

I think a lot of people think of the revolution in terms of scarcity, in terms of all of us who have scraped together some wealth and some luxury having to give it all up in order to scrabble in the dirt with everyone else. But I think of it in terms of unlocking all the abundance that is already here and readily available, and simply sharing it with everyone instead of letting like 6 guys hoard it all. There is so much food out there. There is so much space, so much housing. There are so many people who want to be teachers, doctors, counselors, farmers, artists, shepherds, potters, tech dudes, to do all the things we need to make our lives fun and worthwhile. We have everything we need and (thank you Karl Marx) we also have the tools we need to continue making more and more abundance. It’s not about giving up our hard-earned shit, it’s about breaking everything wide open and sharing what’s already a wildly profuse amount of wealth and good things. This food we give out each week, nobody bought it, nobody had to raise money for it, it wasn’t hard to get, and it isn’t hard to give it away. Nobody has to present a pay stub proving how poor they are. Nobody has to do x number of volunteer hours in order to become eligible for x number of free bags of food. It’s not charity, because charity is paternalistic and fucking sucks. It’s mutual aid. It’s us taking care of ourselves. If you want a bag of food, come and get it; if you have something to offer your community, do it, and if not, that’s fine too, because you just existing as a person is contribution enough. We had some extra time, so we went and collected this food and had fun doing it; here you go. A few weeks ago someone who got food from us saw that we needed another big table, and so she went home and got one she wasn’t using, and gave it to us. That’s mutual aid! I’m meeting so many people I would never have met if I hadn’t started doing this. And I’m learning about food networks and forging solidarities and also getting the opportunity to do a lot of internal work I wouldn’t get to do if I stayed in my normal demographic lane. Intersectionality is a key value of anarchism. Working together with common cause but without the expectation that differences will be resolved; solidarity without the need to anxiously avoid antagonisms. At the last distro event, for example: I had a moment of being clumsy with pronouns; then later some younger comrades were unintentionally ageist to me and it hurt my feelings; then later due to white privilege I didn’t notice until too late an awkward racist question a community member asked one of my comrades. There was also a moment when I tried to talk about something that was actually too arcane and boring for who I was talking to, which is part of being older but also obviously has to do with being in academia, and I think this is a type of difference also; we have different interests and that’s fine, we don’t have to force our interests on anyone else; my younger comrades sometimes talk about stuff I find deeply boring and that is not just fine but as it should be; I don’t need to be involved in every convo and vice versa. There were all these points of conflict and stress and acknowledgment of our different lives, identities, experiences, and places in the network; and yet the entire day we laughed and slung watermelons around together and supported each other in those moments of conflict and (I believe, I hope) ended up feeling invigorated and powerful and happy to be together. Periodically throughout the day different people suddenly go “isn’t this amazing?” and everyone says YES. That is the world I want to live in, and this work lets us create that world for a minute together. It could all be like this, all the time, if we made it so.

It’s interesting to hear the questions people ask when they come to our distro area. Who paid for all this? No one. How did you get this job? This isn’t a job. Do you need to see my license? No. Can I have extra corn instead of beets, is that okay? You can simply take whatever you want, and as much as you want. Are these peppers spicy? I actually don’t know.

What else? Ummmm since covid started I haven’t really been able to read or write. I struggle even to read a novel. I read the Twitter accounts of journalists on the ground in Portland, and I read, like, Jezebel. Early in covid I did somehow manage to read a bunch of books about anchorites that were totally riveting. Anchorites! Nuns that chose to be walled up in a tomb and live in there, doing nothing but praying, until they died and got buried in the floor of the tomb and a new nun would move in on top of them. There were a lot of people who did this! And they occupied a weird position, not quite part of the church hierarchy/not quite part of society. They were declared legally dead and a requiem mass was said over them while they lay in their own grave, inside the tomb. In some of the tombs, the little slit window into the church is positioned so that in order to hear mass you’d have to kneel in your own grave. It’s fucking GOTH. And what I learned is that Hildegard of Bingen was an anchorite for TWENTY YEARS! I somehow never knew this about her?! She was dead and lived in a tomb. And then in her 40s she got a vision from God telling her to found a new nunnery, and she petitioned the bishop to let her out, and after some reluctance he agreed, so they took down the wall of her tomb and said she could be alive again, and she crossed the river and started the new nunnery and became a famous scientist among other things (the list of species of fish in the Rhine River that she compiled remained the authoritative list until 1926), and scandalized the local gentry by putting on biblical plays in which her nuns wore jewelry and let their hair down (there is a letter she wrote replying to the criticism of this practice, in which she says that the Bible says that only married women should hide their beauty, not virgins). Did I tell you all this already? I can’t remember when last I wrote here. Anyway it’s fucking crazy and amazing and I love it, the death nuns of medieval Europe, who cultivated “the holy idleness” necessary for true communion with God. I’ve been thinking a lot about idle time and how it is anathema to capitalism, not only because it is time during which we could be generating surplus value for our employers, but also because–as we see is the case during covid!–it’s time during which we get the headspace to look around and be like, wait a second, this is all bullshit!!!! FUCK THIS I’m not going back to fucking work! So I love this idea of “holy idleness.” Specifically an idleness that seems mostly to have appealed to women. Not having to get married and raise children! Instead you want to sit and read and think about Jesus. Go for it, dude.

My heart totally pounds when I imagine Hildegard leaving her tomb after 20 years. Walking through the streets of the town, smelling the smells, seeing the sights. Seeing crowds! Seeing horses. Hearing a profusion of voices, hearing somebody sing a song, seeing a juggler, seeing a blacksmith, seeing children running, hearing a lute, seeing the river. Being amongst the bodies of men, instead of only women. Seeing the sky! The last time she experienced these things she was twelve years old. What was it like?????

Other than that brief amateur research immersion I have barely read a single thing. I read a book about rape, feminism, and the carceral state that was great (The Feminist and the Sex Offender). I read the introduction to The Ecology of Freedom. I read some essays. I read an essay about classical music and white supremacy a friend of mine wrote. I read some anarchist collections and an amazing essay by John Zerzan about how tonality is the sound of hierarchy. I read some collections of Black radical thought and the introduction of a book about the word “comrade.” I read some Adorno. But mostly I am not reading. It makes me feel sad and confused but I don’t know how to force my mind back into that space of quiet concentration. I don’t know if it is laziness or something else, or multiple things including laziness.

Oh yesterday I did successfully read this really mesmerizing thing Wallace Shawn wrote in the 90s that recreates the internal monologue of a rich liberal slowly having a shattering revelation about class and capitalism and his own indefensible yet also irreconcilable position within it, and it’s all metaphorized as him being violently sick on the floor of a luxury hotel in “a poor country” where he’s a tourist. You’re supposed to read it out loud as a performance piece to small groups of people in your home. Ha! Here it is, it’s pretty great: http://www.wischik.com/lu/senses/fever.html

I will say that a few years ago a friend of ours was in the cheap seats at the Met and at intermission Wallace Shawn came all the way up all the stairs past all the tiered levels to the very top (worst) one, zeroed in on our friend, and said he had to leave early and did our friend want his fancy tickets. So our friend and his girlfriend got to watch the second half of the opera in the best seats in the house and they said it was incredible. I don’t know what this story symbolizes or signifies except that Wallace Shawn, insofar as the restrictions of his class position allowed, seems like he was a pretty nice guy. I love thinking of him climbing all those stairs and looking for the shittiest looking person he could find, and it was our friend.

His description of the revelation he has about commodity fetishism while reading Capital naked in bed is pretty great. You can tell he really has read Capital because he mentions how the first three chapters are impossible to read but then it gets so good because Marx unleashes his rage. That is everyone’s experience of Capital, very authentic.

I read the three Wolf Hall books several times in a row, that was part of my covid self-care and it was pretty effective. Those books are simply divine. I have also been playing a new video game that I hate. And re-reading Le Guin short stories. It sounds like I am reading a lot I guess but compared with my “normal” reading amount it is hardly anything and it stresses me out. But maybe that is ok.

I also had my best year yet in terms of food preservation, I will say. I feel so proud and smug when I look upon my works. It starts in June and I finished by mid August. Here is what I have done:
– picked 6 quarts of strawberries and made like 14 jars of jam
– 5 pints rhubarb sauce
– 6 quarts peaches
– 14 pints cucumber pickles (I did have an epic failure here because I actually GREW all the cucumbers I needed to make this many pickles, and I did it, and I made the pickles, and then I realized I’d grown the wrong kind of cucumber, and so the pickles were so mushy nobody could eat them, so I had to start over with purchased cukes, and I am just sick about the waste of time and materials and just generally what a dipshit I am)
– 19 pints of salsa
– an assortment of weirdo pickles, like “cucomelons,” I have no idea
– 3 little jars of very fancy blackberry preserves (you can make whiskey smashes with the syrup once you open a jar)
– and of course the king of preservation season: 55 quarts of heirloom tomatoes. Last year I did 44 quarts and it didn’t quite get us through the whole year, so this time I did 55 and we’ll see how far it gets us. Y’all I get 20 pounds of heirloom tomatoes for 20 bucks. A buck a pound?! What a steal. And I think I ended up canning 150 pounds or something? Anyway, a lot.

Then in the freezer:
– 5 batches of dried tomatoes
– 10 “pizza portions” of corn
– enough zucchini, poblanos, and corn to make one batch of calabacitas, which I will save for a day in the deadest of winter when we are feeling our worst
– 20 cubes of pesto; 20 cubes of basil
– 3 quarts of blueberries
– 5 portions of cherry tomatoes for use in “pizza casserole”
– 20 jalapeños
– I think some other stuff I’m forgetting

Feeling pretty good about it. We’ll see how it goes. Our apple tree still did not produce apples even after an expensive professional pruning; we think now maybe it is the drought. So no apple report. We will do cider again this year but we’ll have to buy it from the orchard.

We also joined a community gardening/food security network that will get ramped up in the spring. I hope to learn how to garden finally.

Oh I also started making all our yogurt. It’s absurdly easy. I’m actually so appalled at how many years I spent buying plastic containers of yogurt over and over again. It’s so easy to make it yourself! And it’s so good. And the other day I seized victory from the jaws of defeat: I made yogurt, put it in its little warming cooler to sit for 24 hours, then FORGOT ABOUT IT, and only remembered the NEXT day, and was like oh fuck, but guess what, it was the best I’ve made so far. I’ve learned a valuable lesson! I feel like the monk who accidentally invented champagne. “Brothers, I am tasting stars!”

We got our porch rebuilt because it was rotting and a huge hole had opened up that had become a liability for the mailman. It was such a pain and porches are so stupid even though they are great. But they just really rot all to hell. Why aren’t they all made of concrete, as in Texas?? It’s like the only thing Texas gets right, aside from Mexican food, which isn’t even from Texas except in the sense that Texas rightfully belongs to Mexico in the first place. Those big sprawling concrete patios of childhood, out there in a thunderstorm playing parcheesi. The salad days.

Early in the revolution Gary was diverting a lot of his anxiety and feelings of uselessness into obsessing over the totally baseless idea that our house was infested with termites. He did stuff like get up in the middle of the night and start prowling around the basement with a flashlight. He was really going into a weird Howard Hughes place in his mind or something. During this fugue state he bought an extremely expensive new side door off Home Depot’s website, and it got delivered on a big wooden pallet and sat in our driveway for awhile while he fretted and agonized over it. Then one night we had a tornado warning, and I went and looked outside and it actually did feel like tornado weather (again my Texas childhood coming in handy, as when I envision the ideal porch) so we decided we should probably move this heavy loose door into the shed just in case. We went out there and got set up to move it. Gary was so careful and nice and patient about it, as he has lived with me a long time and knows my ways. “It is very very heavy, okay? Make sure your feet are stable. You pick up that end and we’ll move it towards me okay? Are you sure you’re ready? It’s VERY HEAVY, are you sure you’ve got it?” I kept being like “yes, yes I’m fine, I’ve got it.” So he said one two three and we lifted it up and I IMMEDIATELY fell all the way down, dropped the door, fell full length on top of it and face-planted into the glass, and crushed my whole arm and hand in between my body and it. It hurt SO bad. And also me falling shoved Andrew hard into our neighbor’s car. And we dropped the door. It all happened in less than 2 seconds, him saying one two three and me falling was like, almost simultaneous. And I was lying there in the driveway under the creepy green tornado sky and I was like, I literally think I broke my wrist. The door was fine! I was so lucky the glass didn’t break when my face hit it, can you imagine. Anyway we moved it into the shed and then there wasn’t a tornado anyway. And TO THIS DAY (this was weeks ago) my hand hurts and the spot between my fourth and fifth knuckles is totally numb and throbs, and I can’t put that hand on my hip because that angle hurts it. who knows what happened in there? It’s all part of this wonderful life process of learning. Anyway the punchline is it was the wrong sized door to begin with so we had to rent a truck in order to return it to Home Depot because they wouldn’t pick it up. It was a true fiasco start to finish. And then we got involved in all this mutual aid stuff and Gary’s obsession with termites fizzled. We never had termites at all.

I got tenure and am now on sabbatical, which is the reason I have all this time to spend not thinking about my job, which is giving me the space to try to become a different person. Which I realize is a great unresolvable irony, my very job giving me the incredible luxury of time off from my job to think about ways to subversively not-do my job. I get it, believe me. Anyway it’s really incredible, reflecting on my life and what a different person I am now than I was 10 or even 5 years ago. By the time I got my tenure decision I literally wasn’t even thinking about it anymore. I got the email and was like oh cool. Yes, by that point I was confident I would get it (although with covid, who knows) and I don’t intend at all to diminish the anguish of those waiting for tenure because it truly sucks and is grueling. But still, my feelings upon actually getting it are not even vaguely comparable to how I thought I’d feel. I used to fantasize about it and yearn for it, and feel like my life would totally change once I got it. And now, because of covid and also the revolution, I feel like…I don’t even know if there will be a university a year or two years from now. And actually, maybe that would be fine. I don’t mean that in a flippant way at all. I love my job and a world in which the university ceased to exist would almost undoubtedly be a very stressful world for me and probably everyone else to navigate. But… I used to think I would be nothing without this job, that it defined who I was in a very deep and real way, and now I don’t feel that way anymore. I like my job and I like the lifestyle it enables me to have and I care about certain aspects of it very much. But also I am a whole multi-faceted person with all kinds of things I am interested in and probably would be good or okay at doing, and there is all kinds of work to be done out there and anyway lately I’ve been feeling like I’m kind of trying to annihilate myself, in a positive way. Trying to become no one. Trying to simply exist as a creature in the world, without so much ego wrapped up in everything. Trying to harness the socially useful powers of the Leo and violently repress the self-serving ones. I might shave my head and get a tattoo to mark this moment of transformation.

Basically I feel like I am having a very positive midlife crisis, one that’s being shaped by the synchronicity of the political theory I’ve been reading for the past several years and the actual revolution that was sparked this summer. We’ll see what happens. But also I don’t matter at all so it doesn’t matter.

I do wake up in the night sometimes, sleepless with terror and dread about the coming Times. Or clenched up with anxiety about weird specific things, like How Will We Kill Our Dog If The Apocalypse Comes or What If My Parents Get Covid or I Will Never See My Brother Again And I Don’t Know How To Live With That If It’s True or or or any number of other things, just like most of you I am sure, these sleepless nights, these apocalyptic scenarios, all of California is on fire, everyone in Florida is dead, it is now totally legal to mass murder people as long as you are a white supremacist…….

One thing I have been thinking A LOT about is the idea of detaching Hope from Optimism. I read a book about this and it has made a huge and lasting impression (Hope and Grief in the Anthropocene, it’s on Routledge and very expensive, unfortunately, I got it for free because I contributed to an edited volume for them, weird perk). She argues that hope is a practice, and optimism is a feeling, and we need to work to separate the two inside ourselves, and that to do so would mean we would have to confront grief. Before we can talk about cleaning up a river, we have to look the fact of “ecocide” full in its face, and say, this is what we have done, and the grief of it is depthless and will never end so long as we live, and we will have to find ways to live within that grief and address the river in a different way through that acknowledgment. Meaning, if in order to do things based on hope for the future we must also feel optimism–the happy belief that our actions will be successful–it keeps us from seeing the full extent of the problem and thus what really would have to happen for a solution to be found. Because if we can only do work if we can be certain it will have a positive outcome, it means we will only do the easy work. The problem of climate change is such that it could only be addressed by the world as we know it coming to an end. Society would have to change in the most drastic ways imaginable. Every single one of our lives would have to be utterly, shatteringly transformed; our outlooks and worldviews and ways of living would have to utterly change. But that is too hard to imagine and too scary and hard to draw up an Excel spreadsheet demonstrating so instead we are like “oh boy, if we simply vote in a carbon tax we will have addressed climate change!” Because that is manageable and seems doable, whereas within our current discursive framework anything that is NOT manageable or doable is just not on the table. And if that is the case, then the full extent of the problem can never be named. And this is why this author argues that liberals, as well as conservatives, are climate change deniers. Because they refuse to face the grief of our murdered world, the world they too have murdered. Because they deny the full scope of the situation, instead fixating on small tweaks to the existing system, and calling anyone who tries to pull back the curtain a fanatic, a dreamer. Our job is to stop living in denial, acknowledge that the murderous devastation is irreversible and morally evil, and yet work tirelessly to change things regardless. Optimism is a trap, in other words, a trap the system uses to keep things from changing. Anyway it’s a great book. It’s about Australia.

Hope is a practice! This is the thing I reflect on a lot lately. Hope is actions and works and things you do, not a blobby feeling you try to cling to because you’re scared of a world without it. You make it, you don’t feel it, and you make it simply by doing the actions that insist that it is real. That’s it.

So this stuff wakes me up at night, but also things like, uhhhh, should I get my teeth cleaned

Oh, I also joined the Wobblies! How fun, why did it take me so long. Everyone should join!

We have been watching a huge array of diverse movies. We watch a movie every single night. Everything from The Act of Killing to Encino Man; a documentary about Tibetan women to all of Lucretia Martel’s movies; Parasite and Single White Female; all of Ruben Ostlund’s movies in a row followed by Batman Forever; Mrs. Doubtfire followed by Mati Diop’s Atlantics; etc. We went on a kick of watching movies from childhood we haven’t seen since, and it’s fascinating to see which ones hold up and which ones don’t. Wayne’s World DOES NOT hold up; Bill and Ted DOES. Shockingly, Weekend at Bernie’s holds up to the max. Just laughing very authentically at Weekend at Bernie’s! Who knew?! We watched both the 1945 and the 1985 adaptations of Brewster’s Millions (both very weird movies–Max Weber stuff about money and work, very confusing). We watched Passenger 57, extremely good. After painting our bathroom in the Miami Vice palette we watched a bunch of episodes of Miami Vice and it is just a shockingly insane show, I somehow missed it due to growing up without a television so it was all new to me and I was actually truly shocked by it. Every single person involved in that show just absolutely had to be on cocaine the entire time. It is COMPLETELY incoherent, its narratives make absolutely no sense, there is no connection between scenes, nothing that happens makes any kind of sense. I mean at a very concrete, literal level. I have honestly never seen anything like it and it is unimaginable to me that it was such a popular mainstream show. It is weirder than the weirdest experimental film I have ever seen, in certain respects. We watched Ivan the Terrible, which I uncontrollably slept through. We watched Major League and enjoyed it so much that the next night we watched Major League 2, one of the worst movies I have ever seen in my life (“it was worse than Miami Vice, which at least was crazy”). Lately we are watching episodes of On Cinema followed by episodes of this German drama called “DARK” that is Twin Peaks plus Stranger Things plus Lost, in Germany. The music is REALLY good and one of the main guys looks like Mads Mikkelsen but I’m pretty sure he isn’t.

My hair is very long and I look like a witch. I try to do yoga every day but I never do. I am cooking a lot. We get all our food from these two local farm pickups and it’s very fun. I make: bread, pizza, “pizza cake” (stale bread recipe); calabacitas; enchiladas; cool summer pastas; pesto; boring stir fries to use up all the leftovers. I made some pies. I made Gary a yellow sheet cake for his birthday. I made cherry muffins and took them to our neighbor and she said they cured her gout.

Our snoopy dog is good. He is old and lumpy and sleep all day as usual. He’s a great pal.

All is well; nothing is well; everything is beautiful; the world is ending; watch Weekend at Bernie’s and you won’t regret it

solidarity and love to you all!!!!

Posted in Opinion | 6 Comments

Midsommar ok!!!!

MIDSOMMARRRRRRRRRRRR

I thought it was brilliant!! It was about several interesting things, I thought (LOL). I don’t have a good outline for putting my thoughts together so I guess they will just be all over the place. For starters don’t you think it was basically the ultimate “culture clash” movie? It explored cultural encounter in such a brutal way. I guess it wasn’t just culture clash, it was specifically a critique of American globalization–the way rich Westerners get to travel around the world scooping up bits and pieces of other cultures they find interesting, and how despite the fact that these encounters are always described as amazing and beautiful and “the people are so friendly over there” and such it’s actually a really dehumanizing act. Seeing other human beings as sites to visit and take home something from. The Americans in the film were excited to encounter this strange other culture and they did it in such an acquisitive way, a way that wasn’t about people at all, wasn’t about being together in different ways on the earth. I was really into the moment when they first arrive at the village when the Anthropology student (not the boyfriend, the other one, I can’t remember a single character name) meets the village leader who tells them something about some custom they’re about to do, and the guy is like “oh yeah, don’t the such-and-such people of Sweden have that same custom?” Like as though he’s just chatting abstractly about “culture” to someone else “interested in culture,” rather than to a dude who is living his damn life not thinking of it as “interesting culture to compare academically with other cultures.” And so the village elder just looks at him in confusion. I loved that. And of course the bickering of the two students over who “gets” this culture–it’s mine, I called it I have dibs! The more overt signaling of how disgusting these people’s attitudes toward other human beings are (mirrored in the boyfriend’s lack of feelings for his own girlfriend)

So there was that. But then also the movie raised questions I don’t know how to answer, about cultural relativity. When they all witness the old people’s deaths, the different reactions of the outsiders are so interesting and it all raises questions that to me are disturbing and pretty urgent. Our main girl is horrified by it, it triggers her dead-family-trauma, but then her instinctive impulse to flee is tempered by the Anthro dudes who somehow have taken it in stride, they somehow aren’t disturbed by what just happened. They’re amazed but they immediately fold it into their academic understanding of culture; they perform their anthropology methodologies on it, immediately working to understand the ritual in its historical and cultural context. But this act totally evacuates not only moral judgment (which is the point–anthropologists aren’t supposed to “judge” the cultures they observe really) but also PERSONAL response (which is maybe less forgivable/more disturbing). It seems like what’s really disturbing about the Anthro dudes is that they don’t CARE. Their bodies don’t shudder; they aren’t concerned about the old people’s inner experiences; they won’t have nightmares about this moment. So it’s complicated–on the one hand, the terrible Anthro bros are RIGHT, right? You don’t go traipsing over into somebody else’s culture and then start screaming about how it’s evil. And yet our hero is also right to FEEL FEELINGS about what she sees, and to be overwhelmed and upset by these things that are so outside her enculturated understanding of right and wrong. Also, the two British characters are right to immediately start screaming and crying and saying you people are monsters, and to trying to leave. All those reactions are correct, in their own ways, and yet you see in the film how inadequate each one of them is, how none of them take the full consideration of human life/experience/culture into account. And you’re left wondering: what would be the BEST reaction? What possible reaction could you have, other than the three we were shown? So in that way I also thought the movie was about the irreconcilability of difference, which is something Ive been interested in lately because I’ve been reading all this anarchist theory and anarchism is all about a kind of radical inclusion that doesn’t try to prevent or ignore “antagonisms,” in the words of one cool book I read. And it’s hard to think this way. It’s hard to develop a politics that truly, genuinely, includes EVERYONE. Because some shit just IS irreconcilable: I put it to you that none of us could encounter that village in a way that didn’t somehow invoke an irreconcilable difference in feelings or judgment. And yet, the village exists, and we exist. What to do? Midsommar to me was at least partially about this. There maybe IS no way to appropriately contextualize or experience this crazy village; it’s just itself, doing its own thing, and what you think of it doesn’t matter, and yet here you are, too.

Along these lines I was especially interested in how the village/villagers were depicted. I think the main source of why this movie felt so “disturbing” to people was that the villagers were not evil, but that insistently-reiterated fact doesn’t gibe with the things we see them doing (ritual human sacrifice). The villagers were fun and nice, full of love and joy, full of enjoyment for one another and of pleasure in getting to live in a beautiful place together. The “horrible” stuff they do as part of their religion ISN’T HORRIBLE TO THEM, it’s beautiful and thrilling and deep. I loved all the moments that showed us this. The crazy sex ritual where they drug the boyfriend and make him impregnate that girl in front of all the naked women—for him, he’s having a truly horrifying, traumatic nightmare experience; but for HER she’s having one of the most special, exciting moments in her life! She’s so happy, and all the women are so happy for her–the mom kneeling down and taking her hand and singing to her, it’s such a beautiful, beautiful moment. Getting to be a part of this special ritual, that will only happen to a girl one time in her life! Meanwhile the dude is basically having the worst acid trip anyone has ever had on this earth and his brain breaks apart. How to reconcile both those experiences of that moment, both of which were very authentic and “correct” given who the individuals involved are?

(yes there are issues of consent of course, the Americans did not “consent” to becoming the ritual sacrifices of this weird Norwegian cult. I’m leaving that aside I guess)

It’s interesting that both Hereditary and Midsommar are about roughly similar kinds of culture clash. In Hereditary it’s a group of pagan devil worshipers doing human sacrifice; in Midsommar it’s a group of pagans (not sure if they worship the devil explicitly) doing human sacrifice. And they have SUCH SIMILAR ENDINGS, where the harried and confused son/main girl finally SUBMIT to the madness of the pagan cult, and just kind of accept it and go along with it and get subsumed into it, and there’s this huge sense of RELIEF in that final moment, ahhhh it’s OVER. But the feel of the two films is powerfully different. It feels like Hereditary is about evil, but Midsommar is not, and the quality of why/how they are each disturbing films is very different to me. We talked about it after and we decided part of this difference is that the Satanists in Hereditary want evil things–money and power–and they are murdering and torturing people in order to attain those worldly goals; and also that THEY have come into OUR place, our culture, where they aren’t wanted. The Midsommar people don’t want money and power, and they haven’t gone out into the world infiltrating other cultures; it seems important that the Americans/Brits came to THEM, as part of their fun tourist attitude. The villagers are just there, doing what they do. They’re just what Gary called later “a garden-variety pagan fertility cult,” the kind of culture that was a dime-a-dozen a few thousand years ago, all over the world. And reading about this kind of culture in ancient history doesn’t seem to bother us so much. That’s what they believed, and everyone involved in the society was on the same page with it, so it wasn’t horrible. The idea that what is “horrible” is relative, whatever the majority agrees upon–I think that is a hard thing to grapple with and yet it is true. The Midsommar situation only becomes “a problem” or “disturbing” when put into juxtaposition with modern Western values or whatever. The old people who die in the beginning are fine with it and their death–after your initial shock of course–actually maybe doesn’t seem that horrible. It’s the outsiders who are not part of this cultural situation who make it into a nightmare. They don’t want to live this way.

And yet, the way the Americans DO live is portrayed as so empty and shallow. The boyfriend character was so great for this and I thought that actor portrayed him so well. The guy who seems like a nice normal guy but actually inside his heart he is a howling void of emptiness, there’s nothing inside of him. I was laughing with my cousin because we were going so deep interpreting this movie but then we had a moment where we were both just like GOD he was SUCH A SHITTY BOYFRIEND, and like I love that that’s also what this movie was somehow about: the ways dudes can be the worst fucking boyfriend on the earth. Hahahaha and her ultimate reconciliation of that coming in the form of having him murdered! Jesus. But yeah, so, the film also forces us to be like, huh, is the way you people live really all that moral and wonderful compared to these weird villagers? Is your inner life so deep, your spiritual experience so rich, that you can really stand in judgment of what these people do?

So basically I felt like overall the movie was really about feelings, specifically crying. It was about feeling feelings together, fully living together in the full awareness of life in all its beauty AND terror, and how modern life in the sense that we all live it totally precludes that possibility, and how that is actually what is horrifying. I think maybe what we experience as “disturbing” with this film is the fact that deep down we’re kind of on the side of the villagers; their life seems better, realer (and the American characters are such pieces of shit), and we can’t really see them as evil even though they are doing these horrifying things. But yeah, feeling feelings and honestly facing life TOGETHER, not alone. The main girl didn’t have anyone who would do the work of being with her in the face of her intense emotions. She had no one who would cry with her, no one she could really cry with. The mirroring of the first horrible crying scene, in the sterile apartment in the snow with the bad boyfriend / vs. the amazing cathartic scene of screaming and crying and grieving with all the women on the floor of the dormitory (and also how insistent the film was about showing us the whole village ritualistically crying/screaming together), I found that juxtaposition incredibly meaningful and powerful. This is a village of people who can withstand feelings and don’t turn away from them; even the most brutal thing of all, DEATH, is something they face honestly together, turning it into a site of joyfulness and honor. The thing the town witch or whoever she is says after the old people die is TRUE–isn’t it better to live 76 years and then die on your own terms, brilliantly, in the bosom of your respectful family who honors you? Than to crumble into nothing slowly, in a hospital bed, looked at by nurses who don’t care about you, cycled into somebody’s spreadsheet somewhere, shitting your pants etc.? There IS something so powerful about that first death scene, the old woman is clearly feeling such intense, profound feelings, making those powerful runes with her arms, communing with the fucking spirits that made the earth and control the tides, then facing death actively, bravely, in front of everyone. It was fucking awesome.

[later addition: I was pondering the brutal death of the old man, getting his head smashed by his neighbors with a mallet, which is so upsetting to watch. I think maybe there’s something here about social responsibility–his kinsmen don’t turn away from his death, his suffering, they take responsibility for it. If he fails to die, it is their job to help him succeed, even though to the outsiders watching it looks so brutal. But is it really more brutal than, for example, dumping your parents in a nursing home and visiting them once a month, and feeling guilty and alienated and awful about it all? Again there’s something powerful about this community’s ability to face things together and to not just try to ignore or shove aside or make invisible the aspects of life that are uncomfortable or hard. Maybe?]

So those are my thoughts. What did I miss?? I thought that main actor was so brilliant. Florence Pugh?? I’m not going to google it even though it would take less time than it took to type this sentence. I really loved her. Everyone in the movie was good but that main couple really killed it. I also loved the friend who was from the village–I loved the moment at the end when he was congratulated for following his instincts and bringing them such good outsiders to offer as sacrifices, and he was genuinely so happy and proud. Hahahaha. And god the maypole scene. What a tremendous scene. And did you notice HOW FUCKING GOOD THE MUSIC WAS IN THAT GODDAMN MOVIE?????????????? The whole time I was also assuming the same person who did Hereditary did this one, because they are both so good and in similar ways, but they are two different people. The dude who did Midsommar has worked with Bjork and, like, sludge metal bands, so that makes sense, but also specifically what I loved about the score was how much amateur singing was on it. The singing of people who are not professional singers. If you watch that movie and pay attention to the music you will find it does major major work in the world-building. God it was so good. I really think that director is a genius. Every single shot in both these films is so precise and perfect (although Gary takes major issue with the opening establishing shot in Midsommar, which he says “ruined” the entire film for him, although he also says the film was otherwise “perfect,” so take that as you will). Isn’t it fun to get to discover a brand new filmmaker who you are like “I will see anything that dude makes”???–did you know that Hereditary was LITERALLY HIS FIRST FILM? He hit the ground running!!!!!!!

other answers to your questions:
– I got the new Dyson cordless vacuum and it is still a game-changer and I love it
– We are able to watch mummy movies because we got internet in the house after 3 years!! The town finally delivered on its promise to create a town-wide broadband internet network that would be regulated as a public utility. So it costs like 1/3 what Comcast costs and is great. It’s been totally fine having internet in the house again–I think those 3 years re-set my internet habits and now it’s not a source of distraction for me. My computer is 90% a workplace and 10% emails/reading the Onion and that seems fine.
– We have seen several more mummy movies since I last spoke to you, all of them are terrible except THE GHOUL, a Boris Karloff film made the year after the original mummy, which is not technically even about mummies at all but has lots of signifiers of the genre. It’s very very good. The rest of them are trash. We plowed through two of the Brendan Fraser mummies and then couldn’t continue because they were sapping our will to live.
– We cleansed our palate with maybe the two best zombie films I have ever seen: one is Korean and is called TRAIN TO BUSAN and it literally made us both physically cry; the other is, surprisingly, the sequel to 28 Days Later, which mark my words is much much much better than the original. Who knew??? It also made us cry. Both these movies are utterly bleak and misanthropic and basically about the sorrow of trying to continue struggling to be together and help each other in the face of the growing awareness that it’s all over and the world has ended. There is some father/daughter melodrama in Train to Busan that will make your heart explode. Like really that movie is actually a cliche plot about a father who works too much and only thinks of himself and doesn’t really care about his child, and through hardship he comes to learn the value of other people and of social responsibility and his intense incredible profound love for his child is reawakened–but because late capitalism is so powerfully dehumanizing it literally takes a zombie apocalypse for him to have these revelations, and of course the revelations come too late, because it’s too late for us all. God I cried

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TOM CRUISE MUMMY

It is so funny to come back here after so long solely because I wanted to write about the Tom Cruise mummy movie but that’s what I’m doing!!!!

A couple of years ago we decided to get really into Halloween. It feels like a pretty pure holiday: it’s Of My Cultural Heritage (motley anglo-euro peasantry) but, somewhat uniquely amongst that heritage, it doesn’t seem to be rooted in anything particularly evil or settler-colonial (although I’m ready to stand corrected on this, as I have done no research). I like that it’s ancient and pagan but also fun-loving. I like the tiny glimmer of anarchy that’s still present in the concept of trick-or-treating. I like the funny children dressed up as Ninja Turtles. I like scary movies, I like making a jack-o-lantern. And it is the holiday that is the great doorway into autumn, the best season.

So when we moved to Olde New England, the land of Halloween, we decided to really embrace it and go to haunted hay rides and shit. That aspect hasn’t paid off yet and actually I don’t want to do a haunted house because that isn’t a version of Being Scared that I enjoy (I don’t enjoy the jump-scare). But, we have gotten into fall festivals and making cider and trying to make things jolly for the trick-or-treaters, even though starting last year our stupid town has instituted this thing where instead of trick-or-treating everyone just walks down main street and receives promotional candy handed out by businesses. God every time I think “maybe we’re gonna be okay,” my fellow humans do something that makes me feel like the biggest fucking alien. Parents say it’s “safer” than trick-or-treating. LORD ON EARTH

We also have gotten into setting ourselves movie projects for the Halloween season. Last year we watched every John Carpenter movie in chronological order. This year our intention is to watch all the mummy movies. I was just saying, you never see a mummy in a movie anymore, but it seemed like in the 40s it was a big deal. The Universal Horror Cycle and all that (“Universal” meaning the film studio; I am not saying these monsters are “universal” in the sense that all cultures have them!! Hahaha). Then we started wondering what precisely is the nature of the terror the mummy invokes? And what makes some monsters stick around in culture and some fade away? As you no doubt are aware I’m so interested in monster movies because I think they show us our truest grossest fears, just like superhero movies show us our truest grossest fantasy (which is that we actually love fascism and yearn for it).

We started talking about werewolf for example. WHERE DID THE WEREWOLF GO? It was such a standard of 1950s movie culture. And it’s a great monster! Very compelling, scary, full of pathos. Werewolf is obviously about Freudian stuff, the beast within, the fear that actually deep inside you are a ravening wolf/the fear that your neighbors are actually ravening wolves. Sex and murder being poorly tamped down by the flimsy shreds of civilization. Suddenly I had a revelation about what happened to the werewolf in contemporary culture: it turned into the SERIAL KILLER. I think serial killer movies replaced werewolf movies. The beast within! The horror in contemplating the idea that the local baker, the school teacher, your boyfriend, could actually be a psychotic monster and nobody knows it. He goes about his normal life, goes to his job, and then at the full moon he becomes a raving beast of violence and pointless horror. So now we have the serial killer, which is much scarier than the werewolf, so we don’t need the werewolf anymore.

Anyway I don’t need to go into all my thoughts about the various standard monsters of film history and what happened to all of them. Because the point is: MUMMY

Mummy madness has swept the Euro world several times. In the nineteenth century it was an expression of colonialism and Romantic exoticism and there are all these creepy 1840s novels about British archeologists unwrapping hot female mummies and having sex with them (okay I say “all these” but actually I can only think of one. Oh, two. But still). In the 20s everybody got mummy madness because of the discovery of King Tut’s tomb. Those are actually the only two examples of historical mummy madness I know about; I wonder if there was one in the 80s that accompanied that traveling Ramses exhibit? Did you go to that? I sure as hell did; my entire town drove to Denver just to see it. I remember looking at the mummy and feeling both disappointed and totally awestruck, an odd and unusual affective combination I have not felt many times in my life, now that I think about it. I wonder if that was where I first started thinking about becoming the half-assed semi-historian I am today?

Maybe Ramses-fever generated those Brendan Frasier 90s mummy movies? Which I have never seen. Actually I’m realizing there are tons of mummy movies and it didn’t really disappear as a monster. But I’m not so sure it has to do with exoticism anymore, exactly, or colonialism, although those are still sort of obvious themes of the mummy trope. I will need to watch a lot more before I have any interesting thoughts (if ever).

Anyway we’ve now watched the original Boris Karloff mummy and then the third mummy movie (we accidentally skipped the second)–apparently after the Karloff mummy in 1932 they made roughly seventeen thousand mummy movies across the 40s, all starring Lon Chaney’s SON, which seems depressing (for him). All of them have between a 10%-15% on rotten tomatoes and they have increasingly unintentionally hilarious titles, the reading aloud of which suddenly showed me what that one Mr. Show joke is about. They are all called like “THE MUMMY’S HAND” “THE RETURN OF THE MUMMY’S HAND” “THE RETURN OF THE CURSE OF THE MUMMY’S HAND” “THE RETURN OF THE MUMMY’S TOMB, WHERE HIS HAND WAS EARLIER,” every single one has a poster on which a mummy carries a swooning babe in his arms while men point and shout, and all of them are, judging by the one we have watched so far, totally hilarious. The one we just watched opens on an old archeologist sitting in his comfortable New England home regaling his family with stories of his exploits in Egypt. He’s smoking a pipe and everyone is wearing fancy clothes and drinking tea, just sitting down of an evening for one of father’s great stories. He starts telling his tale and the movie keeps awkwardly cutting back and forth in flashback, and the story is the most insane thing you can imagine, it’s like “well, that’s when the mummy opened his eyes! Well you can imagine how startled we were when he strangled Henry, by jove,” and then his sister laughs rudely and LITERALLY SAYS “oh Charles stop boring everyone with your long stories” and just affectively and narratively it makes NO sense, the story he is telling is the furthest possible thing from “boring,” it’s about a fucking 5,000 year old mummy coming to life and murdering his partner, like, no ma’am, this isn’t just some musty-old anecdote I’m zoning out during. But everyone is acting like it’s sort of a normal after-dinner thing to have happen. “Wow wasn’t dad’s story wild?” “yes it’s wonderful to think of all the adventures he’s had, I almost can’t believe it! See you tomorrow.” The way he tells the story is so conversational and so bizarre. “Well we lost the mummy that day, it’s certainly odd to think that he’s still out there somewhere, walking around murdering people. Well, goodnight dear”

Anyway lets cut to the chase, last night we watched the 2017 Tom Cruise mummy movie that was an enormous, enormous flop but that had a truly great trailer that we accidentally saw two years ago and have talked about ever since.

TOM CRUISE MUMMY was supposed to inaugurate Universal’s version of the Marvel movie franchise—it was the first entry in what was to become a reboot of the Universal horror sequence from the 30s-40s, and they had already slated out the upcoming movies and who would play which monster: Frankenstein (Javier Bardem–apparently they actually MADE this movie (Bride of Frankenstein), then shelved it when Tom Cruise Mummy was such a flop!!! Don’t you think Bardem would be SUCH a good Creature, omg Universal RELEASE THE BARDEM FRANKENSTEIN), Invisible Man (Johnny Depp, probably only because he looks just like Claude Rains, which is annoying (Gary: “Depp does NOT have the voice for that role”)), Dracula (I forget who was going to play him), Wolf Man (I also forget), Jekyll and Hyde (Russell Crowe), and mummy (sort of Tom Cruise). Oh and that fish guy I guess. Swamp Man? I don’t know those movies. The guy who looks like the dinosaur who kills Newman in Jurassic Park. Anyway can you imagine this rebooted Universal Universe? Where like Frankenstein’s Creature and Fish Man team up with Dracula to fight ISIS or something??? This is literally what they were trying to do. God I am SOBBING about this never happening. And it’s ALL TOM CRUISE’S FAULT!!!!!

So anyway it was a big deal and Universal was all smug about it—they even created an alternate Universal logo that shows before the movie: DARK UNIVERSE, like it’s going to be this whole “universal universe” akin to the Marvel universe (keep in mind, while I am very interested in the original Universal horror cycle, I am not interested in these contempo Marvel movies so this is just what I have gathered from living in culture and maybe seeing Iron Man once a thousand years ago). Anyway it’s so awkward to watch because it does all this Marvel-style ham-fisted signaling, like “wink wink, this is the cool headquarters of the secret international monster-hunting club that is going to be at the heart of this upcoming franchise of films! Here’s the conference table where the Mummy and Invisible Man will have their humorous planning sessions”

So basically the movie opens with some comical hijinks in war-torn Iraq where Tom Cruise and Jake Johnson are soldiers who loot treasure from the towns they help destroy. This is played solely for laughs. Then they uncover an Egyptian tomb (“an Egyptian tomb! We’re in the ‘Persian’ Gulf, Tom Cruise, didn’t you notice? Do you understand the significance of this discovery” and he’s like “BORING”). Down in the tomb the real archeologist who is also the love interest is narrating everything she sees, and it’s so bonkers, it’s a pool of mercury with all these pulleys and chains holding something down in it (“this isn’t a tomb……………………………….ITS A PRISON”) and then Tom Cruise is just like “huh” and shoots his gun at this 5,000 year old pulley and makes the whole works explode and anyway it pulls up a mummy in a sarcophagus. Tom Cruise looks at the golden eyes of the sarcophagus and is suddenly hit with a vision of ancient Egypt and the sexy mummy lady (whose origin story we saw at the beginning of the film) kisses him and calls him her chosen one and says thank you for rescuing me. And he’s like “whoa”

then they take the sarcophagus on an airplane and then a flock of crows destroys the airplane and there is a genuinely SPECTACULAR plane crash scene (this was the trailer we saw that so inspired us 2 years ago) where Tom Cruise and Love Interest are falling up and sideways as the plane rolls and it’s so amazing, we kept yelling AWESOME during it, I wish the whole movie had just been that. Later there is almost as good a scene involving Tom Cruise falling out of a rolling ambulance that then flies over his head. “WHAT A STUNT”–Gary

Anyway Tom Cruise DIES.

He dies at the end of Act I! Like, immediately! He dies in the plane crash! After heroically giving the only parachute to Love Interest and shoving her out. He wakes up inside a body bag in the morgue, with a tag on his toe. And he’s like “weird.” And Love Interest comes in to identify the body and is like “weird!!!!” And then they go to a bar and do shots and she’s like “I just don’t understand how you survived that crazy plane crash” and he comically shrugs in that Tom Cruise way where it’s like “whaddya expect.” Oh Jake Johnson is a comical zombie at this point who only Tom Cruise can see, he got bit by a scarab beetle. He’s kind of like Clarence, in It’s A Wonderful Life, but a hideous zombie. Kind of a great role for Johnson, really.

But the point is that within the first 30 minutes of the movie, Tom Cruise FUCKING DIES, and when he wakes up, it turns out that he is the REINCARNATION OF SETH, THE EGYPTIAN GOD OF DEATH. This is true, a real film a human person wrote.

So this movie is about Tom Cruise becoming an ancient Egyptian god. That is the “superhero” concept Universal was pitching with this film. It’s way, way too intense for what’s supposed to be kind of an adventure romp a la Iron Man. I do not find “The Egyptian God of the Underworld” to be a compelling “superhero” character, frankly. Just gimme a normal mummy, or Batman or something! Jesus.

So then he’s just struggling against his evil Seth-side for the rest of the film. He gets taken to the cool headquarters of the international monster-hunting club, which is run by Russell Crowe, who is Jekyll and Hyde. Crowe delivers some incoherent monologues about evil and saving humanity and fighting against evil and stuff (sidenote: it’s honestly so offensive to me that “Mr. Hyde” is always played working class, while Dr. Jekyll is posh. Crowe here does like a cockney accent when he turns into Hyde, the evil guy. “Poor people can’t control their animal urges lol”). He mentions sacrificing Tom Cruise but it’s unclear what this would accomplish. They have the sexy lady mummy (who (before getting her life force back by sucking it out of various people) briefly was a very cool CGI zombie type thing lurking around in the ancient cathedrals of Great Britain sucking the faces off of various bobbies who come upon her like “oy! who goes th—AAHHHHHH”) chained up and are pumping mercury into her veins because it’s the only way to keep her power contained. She talks to Tom Cruise telepathically and to Love Interest in normal English (“your language is simple”), basically saying that she is going to kill every person on the earth. Love Interest is like “oh no” but maybe is also jealous because mummy lady is clearly putting out some pretty intense mystical sex vibes at Tom Cruise, who after all is her 5,000 year old ordained life partner. Then they run away and all the windows in London turn into sand and it looks pretty cool honestly. They go down into the tunnel and have to fight hundreds of zombie skeletons of Crusade Knights (don’t ask) and anyway Love Interest dies, and because he is the God of Death Tom Cruise brings her back to life and then is like “I must find a cure, I know not what I am” and goes and rides horses out into Egypt and the signaling for a sequel is SO over-the-top.

Oh I forgot to mention that the flashbacks to ancient Egypt are SO bad, they look like low-budget perfume ads from the 90s. They look like a Depeche Mode video. It is like somebody had a $100 gift card to the prom dress store at the mall and that’s where they got the costumes.

In conclusion it was really great and I loved it. I think next we are going to watch all the Brendan Frasier mummies, which I did not see when they came out. But I mean, so far one thing we have learned is that mummy is actually not a very compelling monster, and you kind of have to go through weird narrative contortions to make it interesting–for example, in the Boris Karloff original, he’s only a mummy for like 5 minutes! Then he becomes just a regular guy, walking around going to the British Museum and attending dinner parties. Because what can you really do with a regular mummy? Proper mummy is really just a zombie in bandages and there’s only one of them, and there’s only so much tension you can generate with it, as evidenced by the Lon Chaney Jr. one we watched, where it becomes harder and harder for the film to explain why the townspeople can’t catch the mummy, who basically just shambles extremely slowly down Main Street over and over and manages to murder people who just stand there staring at him and going “it’s the mummy!” So I guess all the sexy lady mummy stuff and Tom Cruise being an Egyptian god maybe come out of this basic narrative problem? I’m not sure. I’m really not sure what could lead somebody to write the plot of the film we just watched.

We were talking about the Marvel franchise and how disgusting it is and Gary at one point very sincerely burst out with “I can’t believe that Robert Downey Jr. took all that amazing charisma that God gave him, and just loaned it out to the stupidest shit on earth, and now we’re stuck with it forever” and I thought it was sweet how genuinely aggrieved he was by RDJ wasting the beautiful gift the Lord gave him freely at birth

Other stuff:
I canned 42 quarts of tomatoes and learned how to make pasta
my book came out
the mailman thinks Franklin’s name is “Kevin”
I got my first mammogram
finally got some Adirondack chairs
Midsommar was so good, who knew it would be among other things a critique of academic anthropology?? I loved it so much
we painted our kitchen purple
Gary works at a bookstore
I finally bought an extremely fancy cordless vacuum after thinking about it for two years and it is one of the best decisions I have ever made and now I truly am #livinforty

Posted in Opinion | 6 Comments