1. I took a drive down to Molly and Hiram's to deliver a couple of child car seats. I start my dog/house sitting gig at the Diaz's on Saturday and wanted to make sure I understood what I needed to do to help out. I got it all straight and had some solid conversation with Molly.
2. That U-Haul-like truck, with graffiti painted on the side, open in the back, about half full of carpet remnants? Yeah, the one that had pieces of carpet falling out the back on the Beltway? I got around it before I was forced to tangle with any of the rogue pieces of carpet intermittently littering the freeway.
3. I watched Calvary this evening, a movie in which Brendan Gleeson plays Father James, a priest who listens, in the confessional, to a man who was sexually abused and assaulted as a boy threaten to kill him the following Sunday, not because he's a bad priest, but because he's a good priest. The movie then examines the week of the priest's life leading up to the day when we find out whether the abused man will actually carry out his threat. The story is existential as Father James confronts whether his life and vocation has purpose or meaning and the movie, I thought, followed, roughly, the structure of the medieval morality plays where the central figure faces the the evils of life embodied in individual characters. My rough estimation is that as Father James approaches his possible death, he confronts,in the village where he lives, embodiments of Self-destruction, Greed, Arrogance/Pride, Lust, Cowardice, Drunkenness, Anger, and Murder. The characters who embody these qualities mock Father James' vocation and test his compassion, the strength of his priestly resolve, and his courage. Like the old morality plays, this movie, in its structure and approach, feels artificial, but, to me, not in a bad way. Its artificiality compresses and magnifies the trials this good priest faces into a seven day structure and draws upon a very old style of story telling to tell a most contemporary and unsettling story.
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