1. I continue to recover my health. Breathing is easier. I am coughing and rattling some, but less frequently. I continue to fall asleep for short stretches. I use up about one handkerchief a day, but the blowing isn't constant nor is the sneezing.
I paid our bills, a task I'd been putting off until I felt better and I've taken both cars to Silver Valley Tire to have the wheels retorqued after having snow tires put on them.
2. This illness has affected my taste buds. I'm not experiencing tastelessness, but everything, from coffee to salmon patties to broccoli to the soups we've been eating all have a funny taste to them. So, today, I made a batch of pasta sauce so Debbie I could have spaghetti for dinner and, to me, the sauce tasted a little bit funny. Debbie didn't mention the sauce tasting a little odd to her, so I'm thinking that I'm having a short period of time during this illness when everything has, for lack of a better description, a little taste of infection.
3. I rewatched one of my favorite movies, Cutter's Way (1981), this evening. It's dark, a neonoir murder story rich with any number of ways to understand it. I lean toward the existential. The three main characters, Richard Bone, a supremely handsome gigolo and drifter played by Jeff Bridges, Alex Cutter, a one-eyed maimed and alcoholic veteran of the Viet Nam War, played by John Heard, and Maureen "Mo" Cutter, Alex's alcoholic wife played by Lisa Eichhorn live together in a state of ennui. They are bored, listless, aimless. Everything changes when Richard Bone's car dies in an alley and then another car drives into the alley and an occupant of that car dumps a teenage murder victim into a garbage can.
When Alex hears Richard Bone's story, he becomes obsessed with pinning the murder on a Santa Barbara oil magnate, J. J. Cord.
An existential crisis grows. The question of who committed the murders became much less interesting to me than what this terrible murder does to peel back layers of each character's inward insulation and tests them as to how they will act (or not act) in their pursuit of exposing the murderer.
I'll leave it that except to say that the casting in this movie is brilliant. It's by far, to me, the best work John Heard ever did over his expansive acting career. Jeff Bridges plays the vacuous Richard Bone perfectly. I don't think I've ever seen a more thoroughly convincing portrayal of ennui, alcoholism, loneliness, cynicism, longing, resignation, and confinement than Lisa Eichhorn's bringing of Mo Cutter to life.
This is not an uplifting movie, but it so exquisitely explores these lost and unmoored characters that it develops a rare and disturbing beauty, a troubling insight into purposeless existence.
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