AlexPGP's Corner

I always find it deeply weird that Poughkeepsie’s Social Services Dept is housed in this white marble, Renaissance revival building.

The building is so decorative!

And Social Services are so... utilitarian.

Of course, Poughkeepsie is just filled with things that are deeply weird.

Nobody ever notices because nobody ever looks up from their cell phones.

###

So, I went running right after I met with Samir yesterday. Early-ish in other words. On the Walkway, not on the grounds of the Vanderbilt estate.

And a weird thing happened.

I mean – not an unprecedented thing, it’s happened before. But one second, I was running from the trees onto the bridge and the next, I was running from the bridge into the trees.

I had totally stopped thinking!

And I ran fast, too. Well. Fast for me. Which is probably super-slow for most people, but hey! I’m old.

It’s good for me to stop thinking.

My mind has just been going round and round and round the past few days. My thoughts are like socks in the drier. Mismatched socks.

###

Dinner with the Prospective Squeeze Wednesday night. He is very good looking: Your basic Sam Elliott template with a touch of George Clooney and a Mephistophelean beard. And we had a pleasant time and agreed to go touring the local slave graveyards together at some unspecified future time. (My idea of a Hot Date! Which is probably why my phone is not ringing off the hook.) He walked me to my car in the rain. We embraced.

I couldn’t help feeling nervous, though, the whole time we were together.

Like I was a disappointment in some way.

Not a major disappointment. But somehow, I wasn’t pretty enough. Or I wasn’t conventionally liberal enough. I knew I was smart enough because at some point in the conversation, he leaned back on his side of the booth and chuckled, “You’re really smart, aren’t you?” So maybe I’m too smart?

This whole dating thing is just a colossal drag.

I can’t tell if I’m attracted to him – I mean, he is attractive, I do like him, but no little ember has yet announced, Yoo-hoo! I’m burn-ning! Nothing is threatening to catch fire.

Could it catch fire?

Oh, I don’t know. These days I suspect I’m made of asbestos.

###

Also, I’m supposed to be going to Connecticut tomorrow for a house party at Nathan’s. Nathan and his fiancée are actually flying Max in for the occasion! Nathan and John visited Max in Alaska last summer and that kicked the friendship back into high gear. Nathan and Max were official BFFs all through middle school and high school, and Max spent a lot of time with Nathan over at Nathan’s mother’s house – although I suspect a lot of that had to do with the fact that Celeste let Max get drunk and stoned over there, which I did not permit at my house.

Celeste always had this group of high school boys hanging out at her house. She palled around with them, which I found a little creepy. Kind of like the Denis Hopper character in The River’s Edge.

When I finally found out about Celeste’s permissiveness, I was furious and confronted her about it.

“They’re gonna do it anyway,” Celeste said. “I’m giving them a safe place to do it.”

“It’s illegal, Celeste,” I said. “In case you haven’t noticed, we’re not in San Francisco. Monterey is a bastion of punitive conservatism. If one of the kids talks – and by the way, that’s how I found out about it: One of the kids wrote about it on a public Internet forum – you could be looking at serious charges. If they figured John was involved too, he could get disbarred.”

I did not add, Plus there’s no fuckin’ way I’m gonna let you imperil Max’s chances of getting hit by a dope charge so he can’t get into a really, really good college – not after all the sacrifices I’ve made.

And, yes. This is the same Celeste who approached me about ghostwriting her Taliesen memoir. About which I haven’t heard anything in weeks. Ball in her court etc. I think the memoir has real commercial potential, but I’m not gonna invest the slightest bit of energy in any project unless I get some assurance that it’s being taken seriously by all participants.

I don’t dislike Celeste, but I do think she’s a complete flake. And I always have to fight off the temptation to slap complete flakes.

Celeste will be at the party, too. As I imagine John will be. After the demise of John’s second marriage, John and Celeste started living together again although I don’t think they’re a couple; I think it’s more that John has this ginourmous house, and Celeste needed a place to live.

But really, who knows?

###

All this week, I kept thinking, I should be booking hotel rooms or something.

But I kept putting it off.

And then this morning I realized there’s a very real possibility that Max will not be at the party since apparently carriers are canceling flights out of SFO left and right due to poor visibility in the wake of the Napa and Sonoma fires.

So it’s a good thing I didn’t commit $$$$ since if Max can’t come, there’s no real reason for me to go.

It’s a weird kind of agoraphobia I seem to be developing. I’ll leave my house. But I get panicky at the thought of going very far. Though I generally have fun after I talk myself through the initial reluctance.

Dreamed of fire.

When I woke up, I could still smell the smoke.

Half a cup of coffee later, I read that huge swathes of Northern California are ablaze. Areas that for one reason or another are mapped upon my heart.

Quelle coinkydink.

###

Humans are story-making animals. Everything that happens to us is filled with portents, foreshadowings, mirrors, echoes, doppelgangers, signs.

Every experience is a discrete event.

But stories net certain experiences out of the continuous background flow of existence, marking them as coincidence, circumstance, happenstance, cause and effect.

Tell a different story, and you’d net an entirely different set of experiences.

Dreams take place outside of storylines. They’re like spontaneously created works of art that capture feelings and experiences and archetypes in relation to other feelings and experiences and archetypes but not necessarily as narrative. Storylines aren’t imposed upon dreams; rather, dreams arrange experiences to capture what’s striking or beautiful or even useful about them.

###

For years and years and years, Barbara Angell was one of the most frequent visitors to my dreams.

Barbara was my best friend in nursing school, a breathtakingly beautiful girl with great wings of honey-colored hair, which she was constantly raking back from her ice-blue eyes – her signature gesture.

Barbara looked like what I imagined Tess of the D’Urbevilles might look like and like Tess, Barbara was the scion of a once proud and rich family, pioneer to those parts. Unlike the Durbeyfields, the Angels had managed to hang on to a few pieces of property – the wondrous and strange Petrified Forest right outside Calistoga and a huge decaying mansion in Santa Rosa. I vividly remember my first visit to that mansion, its driveway cluttered with rusting Mercedes – kind of the way dead washing machines litter the paths outside Ozark shacks – an enormous cracked swimming pool filled with bilious water.

I thought of Barbara when I read about the fires. I imagine the Santa Rosa mansion is long gone, but when I saw her two years ago, she told me she was still struggling to hold on to the Petrified Forest.

###

Everything is very grey, humid, and wet today. Remnants of Hurricane Nate, we’re told. My, that storm moved quickly up the coast! Seems like only yesterday it was taking out Biloxi.

Long phone conversation with Jeanna; shorter one with Max.

“So, did you get married?” I asked Jeanna.

“No-o-o-o…”

“Thank Gawd,” I said.

I’m pretty sure if she’d said yes, I would have hung up the phone.

RTT texting furiously: He hates that job!

I feel for him, but there’s really nothing I can do. Except give him a car, which I hope to be able to be in a position to do soon but which I can’t do today.

RTT’s situation is the result of making bad decisions. But as someone who can look back at many bad decisions over the course of a lifetime, I can say with confidence that it’s never helpful when someone points that trend out to you. So I hold my tongue. Say inspirational things like, “I have faith in you!”

###

A stranger who apparently reads this journal felt like she had permission to comment on a recent entry in the rudest way yesterday.

I used to think I wanted to meet you, she wrote. But now I think you’re scary. But I still like reading your journal. Hope you don’t mind.

And I thought, Why, you sanctimonious, passive-aggressive worm.

I mean: Whyever would somebody write something like that? My journal is not the comments page of the Daily Mail.

Quite a few people read this journal. I track the stats; I know your ISP numbers!

And I imagine quite a few people read it thinking, What a train wreck, because I’m candid when I describe my life. I mean, I'm not running for public office or trying to get a job in Silicone Valley.

In fact, that’s probably why they read it: Everyone luvs train wrecks, right? It reassures them their own rails are still safely chugging down the track.

If I were a male writing about sexual misadventures, it would be considered picaresque.

But since I’m a female, ohhhhhhh! It’s scary.

People can think what they like, of course.

But that doesn’t mean they get to tell me what they're thinking.

Go fuck yourself, you pusillanimous nonentity, I wrote back to the stranger.

God! What a loser.

The original Blade Runner is one of my favorite movies. It is quite unlike the Philip K. Dick novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? from which it was loosely adapted: Dick writes chatty novels; I think because he’s interested in the integration of bizarre technologies into everyday life and the effect they have on ordinary people.

But everyday lives and ordinary people don’t really work as cinematic subjects. Ridley Scott had the brilliant idea to transform the novel’s plot into a noir narrative. Thus Blade Runner is one of the few films that’s much, much better than its source material.

Blade Runner not only defined a visual vocabulary that moviegoers would see over and over again, it also fused a new dimension onto the Frankenstein myth, which – let’s face it – had begun to fray a bit around the edges. The key issue is no longer that Man is attempting to compete with God in the creation of new life; the key issue is that Man is creating a line of slaves. Prometheus’s sin is not that he steals fire but that he roasts a pig over it.

I’d heard they were doing a Blade Runner sequel – they! [insert smiley] – but was somewhat surprised to see it playing this weekend at my local movie house. (Believe it or not, you can actually see first-run movies at the Roosevelt Hyde Park theater for five bucks! It’s very cheap! The people who run the theater must own the property the theater is on.)

So I went.

Sorry to say, though, Blade Runner 2049 is a big pile of steaming meh.

Which is not to say that it’s not worth seeing, particularly if you like odd imagery. The art direction is very fine.



The plot, though, is more or less incomprehensible.

Ryan Gosling plays a replicant named K. (Ding! Ding! Ding! Kafka allusion!) K is a blade runner i.e. a cop whose job is to hunt down renegade replicants, and somehow he gets caught up investigating the mysterious case of a replicant who 30 or so years before actually gave birth, and implanted memories make him think he is the progeny. He runs around eluding various Big Baaads including Jared Leto who’s wearing weird contact lenses –

(Dear God,
Please lock Jared Leto in a little box so he can never make a movie again.
Thank you!
Your pal,
Patrizia)

-- and Robin Wright who still thinks she’s Clair Underwood and a strange female replicant who defies all the laws of replicancy by harming humans – though we’re never told why she can defy the laws of replicancy, and not harming humans is one of the immutable assumptions of this particular universe.

Two hours or so into the movie – make sure you grab a comfortable seat because you are going to feel each and every one of those 120 minutes – we go to Radioactive Las Vegas!

We’re supposed to know it’s Las Vegas because there’s all this gargantuan statuary of naked women in the orange radioactive dust except that I don’t remember gargantuan statues of naked women anywhere in the vicinity of Las Vegas. Did I miss something somewhere? I so often do.

Harrison Ford – Deckard! (Swoon) – lives in Radioactive Las Vegas. (Can I just say that well into his 70s, Harrison Ford remains a fine-looking man?)

Harrison Ford entertains himself by watching holograms of Elvis Presley. Sorry, Denis Villeneuve, but Deckard is so obviously not an Elvis fan.

Harrison Ford has a dog! And it says something about Blade Runner 2049 that the dog was the only character I was truly interested in. (Wait! Is the dog a replicant? They have replicant dogs? How can I get a replicant dog? Etcetera, etcetera.)

There was an obvious attempt to set up franchise lust in the last ten minutes of the film, but I hope future producers can resist it. Blade Runner 2049 is bombing at the box office. And there’s a reason for it. That should make resistance easier.