blogquote #1

As if in the hard, somber labyrinth of necessity I had discovered liberty herself playing happily in a corner. And I played with her.

Nikos Kazantzakis

Carol's Tea Room

I may write a longer post about this one day, or actually prepare something to submit for publication, but for now I want to get to the essence of last weekend’s trip to Virginia to see my parents. It was a weekend filled with basketball, it being sort of a holy week in local college sport, the ACC men’s basketball tournament. The tournament is always a hard-fought battle with usually a great deal of upsets, under-dogs, and lead-changes. Tyler Hansbrough, North Carolina’s center, was required to wear a plexi-glass face mask due to a broken nose he had suffered in the last game of the regular season with Duke, and Carolina’s games were overshadowed by the discomfort Hansbrough was enduring, made worse by opposing players trying to “innocently” jar the mask. I spent much of the weekend saying things like, “c’mon, play some D for once,” “Okay, take your time, find a good shot,” and “O my God, you left him WIDE OPEN.” There must be something in human nature that craves tension and release, because at the time there was a great deal of mental agony, but now, looking back it was great fun. Plus my team took the tournament.

Note: before I get into the main point of this post I want to say something about the teams I root for in the ACC. Since I have not attended a school that is in the ACC I have to go with family tradition. My father graduated from the University of Virginia, and while my mother probably taught me how to say useful words like momma and dada during my infancy, it is equally possible that my dad taught me how say the UVA nonsense phrase, “wahoo wah.” So, as tradition goes, Virginia ranks high because of early nurturing. BUT, in the eighties my sister attended UNC, and was a senior when the great Michael Jordon, (anybody heard of him?) was a freshman and the team won the national title. This was so exciting that team loyalty shifted, reinforced by the fact that my sister would allow me to visit her at college and get drunk on three cheap beers and pass out. BUT, soon it was time for my other sister to go to college, and where did she choose? Virginia. She also endured visits from me, and my loyalty again was jeopardized. So here’s how it stands today. I am a Carolina fan until they play Virginia, but because Carolina has had so much success, I usually find myself rooting for UVA. The equation works in complete reverse come football season.

Note #2: When I am in a particularly foul mood I will write about what I think of Duke. I’ll just take this moment to reiterate that they lost in the first round of the national tournament last night. Heh, heh, heh. (to any admissions faculty at this outstanding institution of higher learning who may happen upon this post, my sentiment is solely segregated to Duke basketball.)

So I’ve already written a page and I’m nowhere close to getting to the point. But maybe that last bit will set up the next. On Sunday, before the final game, my father took me out to brunch at a restaurant in Charlottesville. It was warm enough to sit outside, and we had a good meal. My father got to talking about what Charlottesville was like when he was in school, and a name came up that I had heard a few times but could not remember the story behind. It was actually the name of an establishment known as Carol’s Tea Room. Daddy claimed it was a popular watering-hole for students at the University, and there was a well-worn saying on campus that went (paraphrase) “Carol’s Tea Room: where there’s no Carol, no tea, and no room.” He claimed that there was a fetid little creek behind the bar where the students would hold rubber duck races.

The liquor laws at the time required that an establishment that served alcohol must serve food as well, and as Carol’s Tea Room wasn’t in business to be a restaurant they came up with an ingenious plan. Everyday they cooked a hard-boiled egg, and whoever they were serving alcohol to, they would present with the single egg, thus adhering to the law. The plan worked famously until a patron, unfamiliar with the tradition, unknowingly ate the egg.

During the time my father was an undergraduate, Carol’s Tea Room threw a party for the graduate students who had just finished their term. The party was rowdy, and at the required closing time of 2:00am the celebration kept right on rolling, not ending until around 4:00 when it was raided by the police. The proprietor of Carol’s was in danger of having his establishment shut down due to this gross violation of the liquor laws, so he called the man who could best argue to keep a bar open, my grandfather. The judge knew that closing Carol’s for good would cause a riot, so at my grandfather’s suggestion, he suspended Carol’s right to sell alcohol during the three months that the University was out for the summer. In the fall Carol’s resumed business as usual.

After brunch, my father took me on a drive that was my grandfather’s favorite drive around Charlottesville. We first stopped by the house Daddy grew up in, a slightly rambling white clapboard bungalow on Dairy Road with a large front yard and a gigantic magnolia tree. The road was filled with houses, but my father said that when he was a child the surrounding area was an expansive dairy farm. As we drove out of town I tried to imagine the countryside of my father’s youth. Even with the dreaded McMansions dotting the landscape, I could get an idea of why my grandfather loved this drive. The rolling hillside put in relief by a backdrop of the Blue Ridge Mountains on a clear late winter day combined with effortless stories of childhood from my Dad was such a welcome diversion.

We passed a large horse stable with a track and exercise areas and a large green hanger-like structure. My father claimed that this was an airfield when he was a kid, and that he and his sister would come out on a Sunday and watch the airplanes take off. During the war, the children were required to be able to identify enemy aircraft in the sky, and this is how, when I was a child, my father could glance at an airplane picture book and casually name every aircraft from the WWII era. He told me how the home defense people had flown a Japanese Zero across the country to see if anyone would spot it. No one did.

As we drove by other horse farms, Daddy told of his experience with horse riding as a child. He was given a horse named Arizona to ride. He said that even though Arizona was the broadest-butt, gentlest old horse that the stable owned he still managed to fall off and get a concussion.

We turned around in the Olivet Presbyterian Church. It was here, at a church picnic, that my father found out that the Japanese had surrendered. The fact that the U.S. had won the war in the Pacific was compounded with the fact that my father had won that day “the only thing he’d ever won in his life,” a chocolate cake. He claimed he was at the picnic because of two sisters that drew his attention. This congenial image was marred somewhat when he told me that both sisters committed suicide.

We arrived home for tip-off of the final game of the tournament. I spent the rest of my visit rocking back and forth with my hands in a position of prayer muttering things like, “make this shot, please make this shot.” Carolina won the game after an exciting back and forth contest, and I readied myself to go home after the final buzzer.

I drove my truck down 29 and tried to remember some of the stories my father had told me. I think I’ve captured some of them here, but I’m sure more will come to me later. My father is an historian, and this occupation lends itself well to personal remembrances. When he and my aunt get together their meeting is usually filled with such recall of what life was like as children. If you can get past the hundreds of cousins with strange names that enter their stories, sometimes, with the help of that beautiful accent inherent to Northern Virginia, you can feel what it was like then; hear the noise of a prop-plane taking off, the voice of an announcer excitedly proclaiming that the war is over, or the revelry, the loud joyous shouts and clinking beer glasses, the triumph, of Carol’s Tea Room.

The Next Best Seller

I have a great idea for a novel or short story. I’m just going to put it out there and maybe someone who can write will steal it, because it looks like I won’t have time to write it any time soon. But I think it’s a good idea. It’s possible that it is similar to the themes of other stories, but I would still like to pursue it one day.

The idea came to me yesterday after I had finished playing a computer game. It’s one of those games where jewels fall down and you have to line them up and they disappear until all the squares are filled up with gold. It’s very addictive. I had a meeting with one of the students in the class I’m T.A.ing and I noticed that as I was listening to her, my mind was automatically lining up the open windows and shut windows of the building across from us. I realized that my brain was still playing the game. This is probably an old school psychological phenomenon with a name and everything, but I’ve never experienced it this prominently before. I used to feel like I was still riding a rollercoaster the night after a trip to the amusement park, when I would shut my eyes and feel as if I was about to go over that first big slope. Later that night I noticed my brain wanting to line up the chairs in the classroom I was in. I probably should keep playing this game down to a minimum.

Last night, as I was trying to sleep, little jewel-like skeletons lined up and winked out in my head. I started thinking how fun it would be to write a novel about a guy who becomes possessed by a computer game. (I know, yawn, it’s been done—but not by me!) The game, as he plays it, would allow him to become a hyper-genius, solving complicated quantum physics problems while finding a way to end food-shortages and invent an infinitely sustainable energy source. The only problem is no one will listen to him, and he can only maintain the brain power while he is actually playing the game. So, as he plays the game, he has to dictate complicated theorems and theories to the only person who he has a relationship with, his mother-in-law, he being a widower. She is a very smart woman, with a great deal of life-experience and common sense, but she can only take down so much. Plus, she blames him for the death of her daughter who died of ovarian cancer after he refused to allow her to have her ovaries removed because of his desire to create an heir. This atmosphere creates tension, needless to say, and a sarcastic and witty banter will define their working relationship. Finally, when all of the theories are put together, the possessed man takes the entire package to MIT to submit to the physics department. But they will have nothing to do with him because he isn’t a tenured professor at major university.

Without funding, the man turns to the only resource he has to sell his ideas, the internet. A Russian oligarch stumbles across the man’s website and twists the arm of a physics professor at Moscow U. to verify the research. The professor confirms the authenticity of the work and the oligarch sells the entire package to the Putin government. It is here where I get stuck.

I have to apologize for this post. It is mainly subconscious throw-up. I felt like I was starting to take myself too seriously and needed to get something ridiculous out there to clear my head. I’m feeling better now, thanks.

Miranda Essay

I'm lazy today so I'm going to post an essay I wrote for a class. But I do believe these things. If you read this, what do you think about search and siezure and legislating morality?

The film Search and Seizure highlighted the ongoing debate over the right to privacy and the effect of the Fourth Amendment on the legal system and the citizens of the U.S. The film acknowledged how far the constitution goes in protecting our individual privacy, while underscoring the importance of limiting, or abolishing, what James Madison called “arbitrary government action” against U.S. citizens. Without the intervention of the U.S. Supreme Court on the matter of unlawful search and seizure, an expansion of the Fourth Amendment, it is my belief that police would hold too much power when administering procedure and investigating a crime. The danger for the individual citizen is that there would not have to be probable cause or evidence of a crime to for that person’s privacy to be violated. For example, if I am making pancakes in my skivvies one Saturday morning and a police officer who thought he saw me smoking a funny cigarette the night before decides he can break down my door and start going through my sock drawer, my privacy has been violated. Search and seizure prevents these sorts of embarrassing predicaments.

On a more serious note, search and seizure limits the police from detaining or profiling suspects based solely on behavior or suspicious action. It also puts limits on how police can approach a suspect’s residence. The footage from the TV show Dragnet was a good example. The episode before the 1961 all inclusive ruling on search and seizure showed the cops hiding in the suspects own house in order to arrest him. The post 1961 episode showed the cops having to acquire a warrant from a magistrate to make a search on a suspect’s home. For the scriptwriters, the ruling meant a few extra lines of dialogue, but for real police officers and citizens the ruling means that there is a stop-gap, or a third party, to ensure that the search is warranted. The police officers in the film seemed to agree that the extra couple of hours that it takes to acquire a warrant are necessary to ensure that some policemen don’t play the role of judge at the scene of an investigation. In this way I believe that the search and seizure rule, however frustrating for police officers, is necessary to provide protection against rights violations by the justice system.

According to Lawrence Friedman, “vice has a way of bouncing back.” According to his history of American law in the 20th century, the legal system attempted to regulate issues of morality, largely unsuccessfully, for the better part of the century. Laws such as the Mann act tried to limit the actions of those whom the government thought were violating morality, and these laws were either met by exceptional cases being brought before the Supreme Court or an unconcerned public ignoring the laws. The elites, those who had access to channels of power, claimed that the values of the country were at stake, but Friedman suggests that underneath the fear of real dangers, such as venereal disease and dangerous drugs, there was a fear of foreign ideologies which threatened the old protestant value system. Immigration, urbanization, and technology were transforming the nation, and the backlash against immoral behavior, Friedman claims, was a result of American elites resisting change.

Personally I believe that regulating morality is practically impossible. There are some acts that are heinous, such as child molestation, which should be prosecuted to the fullest, but, when the act is victimless, it is difficult for me to justify prosecution when it seems that human behavior will never be deterred from some acts. Friedman claims that anti-prostitution advocates claimed that prostitution was a form of slavery, and I suppose that a prostitute can be seen as a victim in many circumstances, but for an occupation that is known as “the oldest profession,” how can anyone reasonably think that they would be able to stop the practice? It seems more rational to provide health care services to prevent disease and counseling to offer other alternatives.

Another farce is the “War on Drugs”. It isn’t working. All it has done is make the inter-city a war zone and hobbled the efforts made by the leaders of the civil rights movement. The war alienates inter-city youth, and leaves many feeling that they are enemies in their own country. I’m not saying that a playground drug-dealer isn’t a scumbag; I just believe that the war on drugs has created a large sub-culture who believe that survival means criminal activity. Under this mentality it is no wonder that the youth lashes out angrily, looking to embrace their outlaw status in a country, it often seems, that deems them outlaws at birth. If we are winning this war, and I remember when Reagan declared it back in the eighties, why are we building more prisons, arresting more inter-city youth, and seeing more and more evidence of the prominence of drugs in our culture, i.e. Anna Nicole Smith etc? The war on drugs has only created a huge industry based on prosecution and incarceration.

I see large problems with regulating issues of morality; in fact I believe the practice of regulating morality often leads to real criminal activity, much like prohibition lead to the rise of gang violence during the 20s and 30s. I am not advocating the legalization of prostitution or drugs, but some form of decriminalization should be considered to stem the destructive by-products of these activities’ stigmatization.

Closet Cleaning

Now that I’m done with my job and am on spring break I have been trying to keep myself busy. At the moment I am listening to Yonder Mountain String Band and relearning to type, something I have to do every time I start a new paper or post. I’m trying to write this post from the recliner in the living room, and it is proving to be difficult because the arms of the chair are raising my own arms up and preventing the usual downward momentum I get at a desk. I may have to move, but the comfort of the recliner is causing me to stay put for the moment.

About a week ago I decided, now that I have more free time, to get around to some pressing domestic issues that foreign engagements have caused me to neglect. When I really got the chance to take in all of the projects around the house that are screaming for attention I was very tempted to set up camp on the couch and conduct a Food Network marathon over the week. But I gave myself a pep talk, and half a pot of strong coffee, and got down to it. I tried to look at it as a quest, and in a way it was, because the first task was to clean up the upstairs closet with the goal of finding a complete set of James Fennimore Cooper that I inherited from my grandmother. I had boxed these up and put them into storage during an anti-old-stuff campaign a couple of years back.

But I knew that in our house, the box of books wouldn’t just be sitting conveniently inside the closet door. It’s probable that I hadn’t opened the closet door in about a year, or if I had I just shut my eyes and threw in an old artifact that I was tired of having in our living space. As I looked at the tangled mass of dysfunctional Christmas lights, window fans, air conditioners, bagged up clothes meant to go the Goodwill, and box upon box of books, I sighed and tried to find a starting point.

The first order of business was to remove the bean-bag chair. Along with many books, I also inherited this huge white bean-bag from my grandmother, or I didn’t really inherit it, it just fell to me when it lost its novelty for everyone else in my family. I used to play video games in it but after a while the disdainful looks it received from Margaret caused me to shove it in the closet. Now it needed to be pulled out before any real headway could be made, so I grabbed it up and started pulling it through door, but, it wouldn’t fit! The desire to get the chair through the door was receiving heavy competition from the wonderment over how I had gotten it there in the first place. Meanwhile, as I tugged and pulled and tried to reposition it, the chair was hemorrhaging tiny white foam balls. They were going everywhere. Was this how the entire project was going to go?

I decided to get back to the bean-bag chair later. I put it in corner, out of the way for the most part, and started to pull things out of the closet. After about ten minutes the guest bedroom was full and the closet's contents were strewn (I love that word) out into the hall, little white foam balls following behind like snow flurries. The closet still looked full.

Our house is a two-story bungalow with a severely sloped roof, and this particular closet contains the largest degree of slope in its design. I’m six foot one, and can walk into the closet standing upright, but any forward movement has to be incrementally achieved with a progressively back-straining stoop. I’ve heard all of my life that you must lift heavy objects with your knees (which is the most unnatural thing to try to do) and I believe this is what I was attempting when I slammed my head into the ceiling—the first time.

I won’t go into the language or the tone of my invective; I’ll just say that it was enough to wake Margaret up.

Margaret has about three things she says when she first wakes up. The first one is invariably “What time is it?” We have a clock radio with the biggest digital readout I could find, but still, she wants to hear it from me. The next one is, “Where are you going?” although I’m usually not going anywhere except downstairs, she seems to believe, in her half-awake state, that I’m going on a trans-Atlantic journey or something. The final thing she says is, “did you get me a paper?” Sometimes I can answer this in the affirmative.

On this morning it was “What the hell is going on?” or “What the hell are you doing?” or “Oh my God, you aren’t doing that now are you?” or something to that effect. She had already tripped over a bag of Goodwill clothes on her way to the bathroom, and all of the usual wake-up niceties were dispensed with as she took in the debris of my project.

She could probably tell that I had bitten off more than I could chew, so she gave me some advice that I immediately dismissed, she told me to take it slowly and take one box at a time; all of the boxes and items were causing me to feel overwhelmed. She was right, but in my urgency to build Rome before 11:30am I had convinced myself that everything had to happen quickly, so that I could continue on to the next project. We tend to forget sometimes that home ownership is a long haul, and as opposed to having the day neatly wrapped up by rush hour (as we do in the working world) the household projects often take longer. As long as we don’t act as if the King of Siam were coming over to inspect our use of closet space (or worse, my mother) we can take a more relaxed approach to the task.

As Margaret made her way toward work, her advice started to sink in. I had located the books I was looking for, piled the Goodwill items into my truck, arranged the boxes in a way that you could find things in the closet, and swept up most of the little white “beans” off the floor of the closet, guest bedroom and hall.

While I was in the far reaches of the closet, I came across a box of old photographs that had somehow never made it into albums. There were literally hundreds of photographs going back to Africa and through our trips to Scotland. There were pictures of my friends lined up behind all of our guitars, and of the construction site in Costa Rica, of old friends and pets, and our house before we had it painted, and Margaret and I taking a walk in Yadkin County. I abandoned the closet for about half an hour as I let these images transport me around my recall, marveling at how skinny I once was and how transient life used to be. I shook off (for the most part) initial vestiges of melancholia and steeled myself for the home stretch, placing the photos, within easy reach, inside the closet door.

I’ve moved on to other projects now. In the hopes of having a “Wall of Books” in my office I have been clearing the way for a new bookshelf that I will get this weekend. The Cooper collection will go in it, and as I begin to envision this I’m trying to remember exactly where in the closet I put them. Another excavation might be necessary.

And, still, I just can’t figure out how in the hell I got that bean-bag chair in that closet.

The Speller is the Feller

This morning I went back and read yesterday’s blog. While I was congratulating myself on my keen insight and wit, I noticed glaring discrepancies in the text. I had written the word attended when I meant to write attendant, and I had written the word possible when I meant to write possibly, to give two examples. I’m someone who should know the value of proofreading, being an English major at a writing intensive school, but its amazing that I only caught these mistakes after the third or forth proof. The biggest mistake I made was misspelling Prince Philip’s name. This wouldn’t have been so bad if I had done it once, but I used his name four or five times, the final time being the punch line of the piece. I just spent the past couple of minutes correcting this in my post.

I’ve become so reliant on spell-check that I rarely use a dictionary for spelling anymore. I was a terrible speller at school, and when I grew up I took comfort in the fact that Thomas Jefferson and Winston Churchill were both reportedly poor spellers. Didn’t Winston Churchill say something like “I never trust a man who spells a word the same way twice.”? Probably not, but I’m not good with quotes either. Of course for Jefferson, in the eighteenth-century, there was still no coherent standardized form for spelling, so he gets a pass.

I’m hoping I get better about spelling, but I feel that the crutch of spell-check is hindering me by doing the work for me. I could, if I was hyper-disciplined, turn spell-check off and keep an OED in readiness next to my right hand, but I’m not ready yet to make that kind of commitment. Sometimes I mangle a word so badly that spell-check gives me a very discouraging, grayed-out, “no-suggestions.” Then I do have to turn to my dictionary. But what do you do when you can’t even figure out what letter the word starts with? That’s a terrible thing to have to admit, but since I’m in confessional mode we might as well go all the way. In the last post I used the word alliteration. Now I’ve seen this word written on black-boards (and dry-erase boards) since the ninth grade, but for some reason I was positive it began with an i. Even when spell-check tried to convince me I was wasn’t persuaded. I actually looked it up to see if the first suggestion they gave me was the same word I meant. It was, and I felt like an imbecile.

My sister Lindsay helped me out yesterday by posing as Prince Philip in her comment. She spelled the name correctly which sent me frantically searching the internet to check on the correct spelling of the name. Spell-check hadn’t helped me here for some reason, possibly because there may be two spellings for the name. But, annoyingly, the name doesn’t follow a rule I thought I learned in school about how a vowel is short if it is followed by a double consonant, like in apple. We don’t pronounce the name Philip Fie-lipp. So I thought it stood to reason that if the first i is short then it must be followed by two ls. So much for reason. I should have paid more attention to the credits of the movie before I wrote my clever little post.

I suppose these are things that a writer has to live with every day. I know phenomenally good spellers, people who can rattle off words like endometriosis without missing a beat. It must be a wonderful thing. I’m going to keep working on my spelling, along with the speed of my hunt-and-peck typing and my inappropriate use of punctuation. It seems to me a bit like a carpenter who doesn’t know how to use sandpaper.

For fun, I kept a list of all the words that I misspelled during the writing of this post. Some of them are typos, committed in the rush of typing, but many of them are examples of how bad it’s become.

congradualted
congratuling
riting
reportedy
spellin
This one is kind of funny, because this is probably how I would say it, bein’ from the South.
greyed
thay
wors
imbilcile
leafned
consanebt
innapprpriate


Tommorrow, I might write a post about all of the typos in this post.

Modern-postism (or Hypocracy Now!)

I really don’t have a topic today, but I know that it’s been a long time since I’ve posted so a long rambler of a post might be in order.

I recently left my job of three years. They just couldn’t work with me on my school schedule anymore. It was a good job while it lasted, a means to an end, and I had only planned to stay there until I graduate in December. It was a cooking gig, pretty mindless until the illogic of supervisors—in over their heads and running scared—started affecting my balance of work and study. I won’t make the mistake I made in my early twenties, to forsake school for a crappy job. I’m on the home stretch, and if it means oatmeal and library books for the next eight weeks, so be it.

There, that’s out of my system. On a cheerier note I’ve been catching up on movies and reading. I’m re-reading Kesey’s One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest. I feel like I’m catching a great deal more than I did the first time around. McMurphy is inspiring me (the constant narcissist in me must relate everything to my own situation) and I had forgotten how Kesey’s protagonist comes on strong, falters, rallies, and eventually is beaten by the system to be chewed up by Chief’s Combine. McMurphy—a great tragic hero, new in style and language, the American war vet, precursor or possible participant in Hell’s Angels ethos—meets his end in a very ancient way, beaten by the inherently Combine-like structure of society.

Okay, so maybe One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest isn’t the best novel to be reading at this moment. But I tend to find inspiration in these types of novels (remember Chief, the one who had them all fooled, escapes) and for a novel that was published in 1962 the character of McMurphy sits in the foreground of a period I am still very much fascinated with, the 1960s. There is hope in this novel which resonates further than the tangible details of its sad ending. The novel seems to predict the rise and fall of youth movements for the next decade.

Away from what I’m reading. There are many great blogs out there about literature and writing, and I am a hopeless bandwagon-jumper, not to mention cliché over-user, so I’ve noticed that I’m tending to try to write as eloquently as some of my fellow blogospherites about what I’ve read. Mixed-results, but I’ll keep trying.

So, on to movies. Because of my previous limited schedule I was unable to see some of the movies that sounded so good but either never made it to my bucolic part of the globe or only played for half a day until the newest Hillary Duff bumped them from the theater. Justin Timberlake is a movie star now—Yikes! And they say he isn’t half bad, Aaaaargggg!

Anyway, the shortage of good films that make you stop and go hmmm a number of times the following day was irritating me. It really began with me viewing the Academy Awards on Sunday night. Of all the films up for best picture I had only seen one, Little Miss Sunshine. The fact that I had no context what-so-ever by which to judge these films left me feeling inadequate, judgment (of all things) being my favorite pastime. So I found myself rooting for Little Miss Sunshine in every category it was nominated for. But I still felt that I had missed so much in the year regarding film, and I took the only recourse I could think of—I blamed Margaret.

“We never go see movies anymore. Why don’t we? I mean we saw Independence Day in the theater. We saw Jurassic Park III in the theater. And now we don’t even see the good movies.”

Maybe that’s why we stopped; I kept dragging her to these films. I remember vividly the first Lord of the Rings movie entering its third hour and Margaret putting her head on my shoulder and sighing as if she had just resigned herself to hell.

When I had finished turning my desire to see movies into an issue of “We never go anywhere anymore,” Margaret gave me her best “What does this have to do with me you silly man?” look, and said “Well, let’s go see a movie.” I said alright, and felt a little disappointed that the argument hadn’t stuck.

We decided on The Queen. I wanted to see Pan’s Labyrinth which I’ve heard so many good things about, but I knew this would be risking it. We went to a matinee at the new monolithic multi-plex (writing about movies lends itself well to alliteration) which is the size of the Greenville airport. Really, I kept expecting to hear a loudspeaker announcing that The Queen would be departing from gate 123 in approximately 40 minutes. I looked around for little golf carts darting movie patrons to the concession stand as I ate my overpriced, undercooked cheese-dog that a hang-dog counter attendent had begrudgingly sold me. We were actually early for a movie. Up is down, down is up.

We loved the film. I especially liked James Cromwell’s portrayal of Prince Philip, possibly because he reminded me of the stuffy, tweedy, blustery, horse-obsessed cousins and uncles on my mother’s side. Lovable stuffy, tweedy, blustery, horse-obsessed cousins and uncles, I might add (note the disclaimer).

The film had enough royal gossip and pageantry to please Margaret and enough politics to keep me happy, and it’s so great to watch a film with someone you know is enjoying it equally. By the end, we were laughing at every word out of Philip’s mouth, (we have an inside joke about the tweedy cousins, and Margaret caught on right away) and the film, in-and-of-itself, was a good tonic. We chatted about the film all the way to Blockbuster. I rented three more films, The Departed, Half-Nelson, and For Your Consideration.

I watched For Your Consideration and Half-Nelson that evening, saving the Scorsese for last. I was able to get about half-way through The Departed, but by that time I was burned out on my celluloid orgy and I kept falling asleep. So, the next morning, I asked Margaret, who was holding her sacred chalice of coffee, if she had finished watching the movie. She said she had. I asked if she liked it. She said: “It was alright—they all die in the end.” …Aaaaargggg!

She took a sip of her coffee. She had just revealed the end of a good movie to me and she hadn’t yet realized what she had done, probably didn’t care either. Now, in the past couple of years, I’ve made great strides in the area of self-control. I’ve learned, for the most part, that I don’t have to be right all the time, I don’t need to win every argument. I’ve become a more forgiving, kinder, gentler me. Great strides; but this took a great deal of will power not to have my ears turn into steam exhausts. I literally felt my head swelling up with putrification, ready to spew vile vitriol across our humble living room and make the dog slink into the kitchen. But I caught myself. I thought of Prince Philip. He would have been incensed at this outrage, and his pomposity over the matter would have made him look appropriately pre-historic. I held my rage, silently blew the anger at the opposite wall, glanced at Margaret, who was innocently slurping her coffee and soy, and started to laugh.

The thing is it doesn’t matter if you know that they all die at the end (and actually they don’t). I watched the movie from beginning to end the next night and there is so much going on with this film that plot and conclusion are almost arbitrary elements. I might write a paper or post about the film, which, against my will, is moving up the ladder of my movie list. It is certainly the best movie I’ve seen this year. I didn’t want it to be, I wanted to disagree with the Academy, to feel superior—old habits die hard, but the Academy of Motion Pictures and I agree, this is a great movie.

Yesterday morning we were in the living room and Margaret was doing the payroll. I was eating a big bowl of oatmeal. I tried to get a conversation going about the pros and cons of oatmeal in general. It was met by impatient glances and monosyllabic responses. I made an off-hand remark about something in The Departed and she looked up and said “yea, that was weird.” Before long we were having an analytic conversation about how the blood splattered and pooled in the violent parts of the film. Just like old times, sitting around pondering Joe Pesci’s performance in Goodfellas. There’s nothing like a hyper-violent motion picture to put the spice back into a relationship.

Later, as she was getting ready for work, I found yet another subject to gripe about, I don’t even remember what. As she put on eyeliner or whatever, she made comments to the effect that I shouldn’t complain so much.

“But why?” I asked. “Why shouldn’t I complain about things that bother me?”

“Because you sound like Prince Philip.” She said.

Ouch.