Service on the internet is pretty slow this morning.
Such weather—three straight days of hundred degree temps and, then, a 90 and, now it's 72 degrees, overcast with a nice drizzle to make things wonderful. Saturday, Mertie and I went to see Woody Allen's latest flick, "Vicky Christina Barcelona". Bardem is in it and he's really something (going from psychopathic killer in "No Country For Old Men" to intense Latin lover) as well as Penelope Cruz and Scarlett Johannson. A marvelously complicated love triangle repeated in several combinations of three. Like shooting craps with five dice, three dice. Mertie and I loved it.
It's strange having this WiFi loaded computer with me this morning. I feel different. The pattern of reading and noting things down in my handwritten journal is all smashed to smithereens. And I notice how much I've changed when I try to write something creatively, like the review above. All the emotional tangles that used to inform and connect my words have disappeared. I'm completely well as far as my past darknesses are concerned. My mental kinks are ironed out and so, also, is my writing. When I was young, I was so filled with emotions that my mind couldn't sit still. When I wrote something, my mind grabbed ideas and images from everywhere at once. Not that this was particularly successful, but it was the way my brain worked. Now it's so different. I hardly feel connected to what I put down on this computer. Most of the time, I'm at peace and not driven by emotions to odd behaviors. This is either the aging process or it's the work I did all those years with John paying off. Or, it's having this computer which completely changes the initial impulse to write, distances it from the connection my hand/eye used to have when a pencil or pen is involved.
I don't know what to feel about the current mental situation. I'm so at peace. Last week I told my doctor, Sugarman, that I've never felt so healthy, mentally—and physically for the most part—that I think about death all the time, I mean, in the sense that I don't want my life, as it is now, to end. I recall the days when I thought I'd be dead by thirty years of age. Then, that turned into the time I crashed my car on purpose at around age 31 or 32 and tried to end my life in sort of a accidental way. Never mind the details, but I didn't send my car head on into a bridge abuttment or anything like that. I wouldn't be here. It was more of going around a curve too fast so that I rolled and crashed. Now, here I am today, sort of untroubled by deeply painful confusion and fears and feeling a little detached and not certain I like it.
Scarlett Johansson plays a women who doesn't know what she wants but who does know what she doesn't want. My words exactly when I was in my late 20s and early 30s. I'm sure I even said those exact words or some words very close to them. I must admit, though, to wondering just who I am these days. I'm not driven by anything. And when my emotions aren't telling me what to do, I don't always know what I am supposed to do.
AT THE MOVIES
Before I run on I need to exclaim some disgust with fellow movie goers' tastes in commercials. And stop there. The current onscreen ad about lollipops being used to tear off a man's body hair is stolen from "The 40 Year Old Virgin" and the ladies behind me still thought it was funny, chortling away. Also the vomiting baby stock broker disgusts me, but psychology has taught ad men that a baby's face draws attention like a pile of money. People who don't know this are, to me, suckers. Which brings me to an old thought of mine about how sad it is that in order not to be manipulated by the advertising of psychological con men and hucksters, we have to turn off so many psychological entrance points that influence other people that we are not able to interact with people who don't know when they're being manipulated and, frankly, probably don't even care about it like I do.
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