1. I got out the crock pot and filled it with water, carrot greens, celery bits, carrot pieces, some crushed garlic cloves, a chopped onion, bay leaves, Old Bay seasoning, thyme, and a bag of crab shells and bits of meat I've had in the freezer since February. Before long, the smell of crab stock filled the house and visions of chowder danced in my head.
2. I bought a bag of 90 flossers today and put a bunch of them in a plastic sandwich bag to carry with me and, following the dentist's directions, every time I ate anything, I flossed my teeth. The dentist told me that my new crowns will take to my mouth much better if I vigilantly, even obsessively, keep bits of food out from between my teeth. Just what I need: a new obsession.
3. This evening I put on the movie, Panic in Needle Park (1971), a dispiriting movie featuring Al Pacino as Bobby, a two bit junkie, and Kitty Winn as Helen, who has left Fort Wayne, Indiana, come to New York City, and joins Bobby as an addict and begins to hook to finance her habit. Filmed in the style of cinema verite, the movie is a bleak look at the world of heroin and prostitution, mostly in New York City's Upper West Side: the desperation, alienation, delusion, betrayals, violence, and longing for love. When Kitty and Bobby go to, I think, Staten Island and purchase a puppy, I turned off the movie. I didn't have the strength as bed time neared to see a puppy brought into this world. I'll finish the movie during the day so, if something bad happens to the dog, I'll have time to recover and I won't witness it just before I go to sleep.
My decision to turn off this movie and come back to it during the day marks a shift in my movie viewing habits. When I was younger, I sought out dark movies and thrived on the darkness in plays like A Long Day's Journey Into Night or King Lear and would sometimes watch two or three such movies in a single day. The other day, up at the Lounge, Cas asked me if I'd seen Major League and I almost asked him, as a way of making fun of myself, if it featured its characters' descent into darkness and the punishing nature of the world because I haven't seen Major League largely because, when it was released, I didn't watch many movies as a means of escape or to just be entertained.
That's changed now. I used to think I had to watch dark movies exploring alienation and death if I wanted to understand what life was really about. At that stage of my life, I was a very serious man. I still don't watch much broad humor, but, I am much more attracted to movies that affirm the better qualities in human life and that portray characters who once were dead to life coming alive and awakening to their own vitality and goodness. Back in the old days at LCC, I built my Literature of Comedy course around just such stories, poems, plays, and movies.
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