Saturday Night feverless...

Sitting on the couch, being the wild individual I’m want to be whenever Saturday rolls around. Wife is out gallivanting with friends downtown and I’m left to my devices for a few hours. This, unfortunately, is not the clanging sound of an opening jail cell as it is for so many other married men. Nay, tis but the call of the dodo bird, the Tasmanian wolf, and the carrier pigeon. What’s that you say? None of these animals exist anymore on this earth? Quite right. And therefore their collective call is nothing but silence. Pure, sweet, unfettered quiet. Not that Whit brings about chaos and noise when she’s here, but she’s far more active than I and while conscious requires either a stereo or a TV be on at all times. I, on the other hand, tend to seek a quiet corner in which to think when the opportunity presents itself, and tonight is rife with opportunity.

Thus, I’ve been thinking about many things. Surprisingly enough none of them are the newsworthy items one would expect to see me commenting on, so if you’re in my neighborhood of the web looking for topicality, turn back now and save yourself some neurons. I’ve been cleaning out my mental closets in preparation for Key West next week. You see, whenever I take a trip to what I like to call “Home” (not just the Keys, really any place where land meets ocean in a tropical or sub-tropical climate) I like to do so with as little baggage as possible – mentally speaking. I’m of the opinion that our world doesn’t afford us the quiet time necessary to properly process the amount of information we’re bombarded with each day. As such I find it nice to purge my brain of the detritus as often as possible. Anyone who finds themselves unable to cope with things around them should try this from time to time. If it sounds too sketchy to say you sit around in a low lit room with no noise except your own breathing, just do what Asian martial arts masters have been doing since 4000 B.C.: Call it meditation.

Items of interest:

Let’s see, what do I have to tell that anyone would care about.

Nope, sorry, I got nothin’.

Oh, I did see an interesting movie last night on recommendation from one of Whit’s friends. It’s called “Ginger Snaps”. A cute little tail about two sisters, one 15 one 16 in Ontario who are obsessed with death and suicide until the older one is attacked and bitten by a werewolf and begins to change into one herself. Much of the movie is campy, not surprisingly, in the way you would expect a teen aged horror flick would be. But there are things about this movie I found wonderful. While the cast was limited as far as the Hollywood ‘A’ list is concerned (the only actor I recognized was Mimi Rogers, who convincingly played the girls’ clueless mother), the actors did an admirable job of pulling off some scenes that, in many movies, can prove impossible to do convincingly.

One particular example is the high school scene. Unlike most of the films we see these days where everyone in the school is a ‘type’ and each stereotype is duly represented in some sick homage to diversity, this movie shows kids as they are: Awkward, unsophisticated and driven by simple ideas and urges. (If it sounds like I’m insulting high school aged children I’m not, I’m not that far out of high school and I still remember myself at that age.) High school aged kids work on a much different level as adults and as such aren’t given to the well thought out soliloquies delivered by the cast of Dawson’s Creek on a weekly basis. I appreciate it when a writer and director have the forethought to write a 15 year old like a 15 year old. Simple, I know, but rare in most movies.

Another thing I appreciate are the horror scenes. Though the effects budget for this movie probably rivaled the daily sales figures at an all you can eat steak house in Bombay, they made the most of the actor’s ability to be scared by something I could have made in camp when I was ten. Call it trite, but when an actor can suspend their own reality enough to convincingly convey not only terror but the confusion that comes with seeing something like a werewolf for the first time enough to suspend my belief that the paper mache ‘monster’ is actually real, I’m impressed.

All in all, the movie was fun. The ending was a bit weak, but you can’t have everything.

Well, my buddy Ron White is on the television (which is no longer muted) and I feel the urge to eat popcorn and laugh at some really funny stuff, so I bid you all good night.



Capt.