LIFE & DEATH, ETC.
The bloodline had been poisoned a few centuries earlier. Suicides were a casual afterthought. It took until the early twenty-first century for a family member to attempt meditation. Much less contemplation. Uncivilized inter-generational wars went on behind closed doors, shouting matches were a weekly occurrence, and human emotions were ignored for as long as inhumanly possible. The corner bar was a temple, or a sanctified sanctuary at the very least. Rumor was, there was a backroom where they hooked up regulars to intravenously inject a shot of beer with a whiskey chaser into bulging veins. Unspoken advice freely given: “Don’t wander too far into the forest of your mind. Minds are troublesome things. You’ll find out soon enough.” If a reader snuck inside the house by accident they were hidden in the basement and fed a diet of burnt toast and falsehoods. One of the of the things you know saved your life was movies, first on TV, then neighbor’s TVs, and the big-screen movie theater down the street. Eventually the bohemian art space where experimental and European films were shown. Meeting friends who understood the mind-altering majesty of movies. Later, you realized movies were sometimes like life, and life was sometimes like the movies. You understood the school system was like a bird with a broken wing. It wasn’t offering wings to fly as high as you knew you could go. Without yet knowing the word, being an autodidact was to be your path. Dr. Seuss led you to Charles Bukowski, Kurt Vonnegut, Marcus Aurelius, Diane Wakowski, Mark Twain, Sylvia Plath, Henry Miller, and Dorothy Parker – and you recognized these writers as members of the tribe you’d already joined. Learning mind-wandering, nighttime daydreaming, and tuning into what society’s rule-breakers were up to kept you going. Understanding books are art, the same as movies on Technicolor big screens and paintings on museum walls. Seeing with clarity, how art in all forms was an escape hatch as well as the glue holding the world together.
one of the things you know saved your life was movies, you realize sometimes life is like the movies and the school system like a bird with a broken wing, not offering wings to fly as high as we want! These ideas are so brilliant and I'm loving the ode to films and poets.