“It is believed she is insane.” The New York Times, August 11, 1899.
Another page from the sad little questionnaire I wrote to Santa at age 7. The page I posted last year.
“This is the problem: Many years ago I sat one day, in a sad enough mood, on the slopes of the Laurenziberg. I went over the wishes that I wanted to realize in life. I found that the most important or the most delightful was the wish to attain a view of life (and—this was necessarily bound up with it—to convince others of it in writing) in which life, while still retaining its natural full-bodied rise and fall, would simultaneously be recognized no less clearly as a nothing, a dream, a dim hovering. A beautiful wish, perhaps, if I had wished it rightly. Considered as a wish, somewhat as if one were to hammer together a table with painful and methodical technical efficiency, and simultaneously do nothing at all, and not in such a way that people could say: “Hammering a table together is nothing to him,” but rather: “Hammering a table together is really hammering a table together to him, but at the same time it is nothing,” whereby certainly the hammering would have become still bolder, still surer, still more real, and, if you will, still more senseless.”
— Franz Kafka in his diary, 1920
Review of ‘Drive’ (spoiler warning)
I want to talk about this movie. Prior to seeing it, I knew nothing about it other than 1) Ryan Goosebumps is in it and 2) It involves fast cars.
Ok. Have you ever played Grand Theft Auto IV? You know all the interim scenes, between Nico’s missions, when scary ugly mafia people are fighting and then you finally get to the missions and you’re like “Oh shit, I’m about to have to fucking kill some people!” and then you kill some people, and then you just drive around for hours afterwards wrecking things because it feels good? That was this movie, set to an ’80s Chromatics-style soundtrack (The whole time I was thinking, “This is Chromatics, I recognize this, I’m not old yet”).
Then there’s the love story, which is what floored me about this movie. When he kisses her in the elevator (right before he bashes that dude’s skull in), I thought I was going to cry. That’s it! That kiss! They nailed it! It’s all about the last (or first) time you might love someone and you have to give it your all! Holy shit!
Then there’s the blood. Lots and lots of blood. Poor Christina Hendricks, man. She’s so insanely hot, how could you possibly kill her? But oh, they did. They killed her real hard. Lots of people were killed.
Go see it. It will make you want to…drive around with Ryan Gosling and cry? That’s about it.
(And that “A Real Hero” song is so good that I almost hate it.)
“Life is so only-once, so single-chancish! It all depends on your arranging and synchronising it so that when opportunity knocks you’re right there waiting with your hand on the doorknob.”
—
Sylvia Plath, from The Journals
This was my “senior quote” in the high school yearbook. She would have been 79 today. (I still think she’s right.)
I’m 30 today. I’m celebrating in Mississippi. My mom and I got into an argument this morning because she said I waited too long to start a 401(k). I got irrationally upset, mostly because she’s right, but also because I don’t give a fuck about 401(k)s. Of course, of course there would be a fight about a retirement plan on my 30th birthday.
I got in the car barefoot and barreled down the interstate trying not to cry, and also trying to find something on the radio that wasn’t about Jesus. I shoved a piece of taffy in my mouth that I bought at the state fair last night. Luckily I’d left the box in the car.
“Ironic” by Alanis Morrissette came on and I held up my new robot phone to the speaker to see if it would respond.
“I didn’t quite get that.”
I don’t either, but I feel better now. We had lunch like nothing happened.
