My Last Blog as a Single Man

Wow. Just typing that feels strange.

As most of you know, this Sunday the 29th I am getting married. Alicia and I have been together for a very long time and in some ways it feels like just giving a title to what has existed for 7 years. In other ways, however, it feels like a step in a new direction and feels nothing like just another day.

I mean, I have several friends that are married and they haven't been replaced with alien shape-shifters or anything (that I can see, anyways). It's still weird, though.

I've seen a lot of stuff in these 26 years. Great bands, great music, sad times, fun times, okay times, my expulsion from school, beginning my college career... 5 cars and trucks, two residences, Bobby Bland, a million guitars, a million shows, awesome girlfriends, crazy girlfriends, Portishead self-titled, hundreds of records, hundreds of books.... losing my grandmother, losing Nick...

When I look back, I've experienced so many of these things (minus the ex-girlfriends, lol) with Alicia by my side. The span of our relationship is truly massive. When I met her I was still playing Sound Idea every Sunday. We started dating just as she left High School. She's almost done with her Masters. Insane.

We both have accomplished so much in this time. She earned her BA and worked for a year as a legal assistant before heading back to school for her MFA. She wrote an excellent novel and sold it. I closed my Dad's business, started my own, sold that one and went back to school for Audio Engineering. We bought a new truck and moved out together. All in all, a lot of water under the bridge.

I could go on about all of our stuff but I won't. This reason I am writing this is to work out how I feel about getting married, but I've found I don't really need to. The wisest thing ever said to me about marriage came from my friend Eric. I was telling him that when you really think about it getting married is a really intense experience, and if you over-think it you can get really freaked out. He just told me that whenever he sees a ring on someones finger he always thinks what an honor it is to have someone decide that they want to spend the rest of their life with you; that they feel they could be with you forever, no doubt about it. I guess that's the best way to look at it. You're not losing yourself, you're gaining another. Whether 'another' means a symbiotic life form that replaces your mind with it's own? That's for another day...

Catching up on them films...

For some reason or another lately, I’ve been all about seeing any and all movies that are within my reach. I guess you could classify this behavior into two categories:

Shit I Should Have Seen By Now: Everyone has a host of films that they know they should have already seen but for some reason have not. At least I do. When movies come out I am either really excited about them or could care less, which dictates my action. I either see them in the theatre, in the case of the former, or wait for DVD or don’t do anything when it comes to the latter. Hi ho.

The other case is that they came out before I was able to buy movies and just either never had access to them or didn’t care to see them based on hype or poor trailers.

Shit I Just Want To See: I hold a lot of things against movies that I shouldn’t. The color of the box. The font of the title. Cheesy cover art. The actors in them. Choice of Producers or Directors.  All kinds of stuff.

                But I guess the old adage is there for a reason and you can’t just judge a film by the box it comes in. So I just pop these guys in when I’m doing something else, usually Internet related.

“Just Watching Away”

                I’m certainly seeing a ton of movies through this process. I was thinking about trying to review each one but that is rather tiresome and time-consuming. I may just list each one, though, and a quick description (in as few words as possible) of what I thought. That sounds do-able.

                So let’s see, here is what I’ve got so far that I can remember, of course it helps that most of them are stacked on top of my TV…

 

‘Village of the Damned’: Heh. One of the only JC films I hadn’t seen yet. Pretty bad. Just kill the kids!!!

‘The Aviator’: Badass. LDC is cool in this one.

‘Ghost Dog’: Forrest Whitaker is my dog! Seriously. This one felt semi-foreign in the pacing and setting. Nice.

‘Godsend’: Kind of a head-scratcher. Well made but a little far-fetched. I’m a Greg Kinnear fan. Who isn’t?

‘The Proposition’: Nick Cave’s opus. Badass screenplay. Badass music. Badass acting. Badass cinematography. Badass movie.

‘Magnolia’: of all of the great performances in this one, Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s was my favorite. Though he didn’t get a lot of screen time, he has easily the most moving scenes.

‘American Gangster’: Huge fan. Deserves the hype. Solid performances, solid shots and story.

‘Summer of Sam’: Good news and bad news. Good news: Does a good job of capturing the scariness of mob mentality in escalation. Bad news: Other than that, this movie sucks.

‘Ronin’: Ever eat a really expensive piece of chocolate and instead of saying “wow. This is really good!” you say something akin to “hmmm. Tastes expensive…”? This film is really good in that way that really good films are. Long, solid, and heavily…”classic”. If that makes any sense…

‘Hard Candy’: Ellen Page: Awesome. Patrick Wilson: Awesome. Hard Candy: Twisted Awesome.

‘Live Free or Die Hard’: Not as crazy as ‘With a Vengeance’, but pretty cool. I can’t see Justin Long and not want to shove my PC using fist up his ass, though. Vista sucks? True. But guess what? Safari sucks, so there!

‘Red Eye’: Okay. I like Cillian Murphy a lot. Had some thrills. Those were thanks to Murphy. I wrote a haiku to more fully describe my feelings about the one:

Movies about planes

Just after 9/11

Are dated and weak

‘Hollow Man’: Ha ha ha ha ha. The very definition of diminishing returns. There are about 4-5 scenes that I liked and they were mercifully scattered throughout the film. The rest  was stupid. I had an extended conversation with Dallas about how I could remake this thing soooooooo much scarier. Set the tone to be kind of clean and dark, like ‘Flatliners’. Expand on the processes’ effect on the mind of Kevin Bacon’s character… don’t get me started.

‘Pulse’: Jeremy walked in the house, saw this movie sitting on my TV, and immediately started talking shit about it. I’ll admit, I didn’t have the highest expectations for it and it certainly belongs in the “Just wanted to see it” department. It was alright. I thought it was pretty weak in execution but average in concept. Let’s just say I didn’t stop the movie halfway through and piss on the DVD.

’28 Weeks Later’: As good as the first one. Some of the large aerial scenes were a tad CG looking. Besides that, great! I’m all about the Rage virus mythology. Gives the dead a reason to run without making George’s zombies do it.

‘They’: I’m actually still watching this one. It seems pretty cool so far. It reminds me a lot of what Lisey’s Story by Stephen King would be like were it made into a movie.

Clearing the Air...

Ahhh. I was thinking about it the other day and I realized that I haven't written a blog since I got out of the hospital. There is a very good reason for this. You see, one of my first goals when I was recovering from my ordeal was to write a detailed accounting of the entire experience. I believed that it would be therapeutic, allowing me to come to terms with the fact that I was about 6 hours from dying.

In practice however, it was very disturbing. As I wrote I began feeling more and more tense about the whole thing. Instead of helping me wrap my mind around the event, I found myself beginning to panic. About 15 minutes into it I had to stop writing. I just couldn't continue any longer. I shut my laptop and just sat there.

Those of you who know me have heard the story by now. I make light of it, with all the right serious undertones and all, but that's just on the surface. Below that I am deeply troubled by it. In some way the experience was liberating and awe inspiring. In other way, however, I don't know if I've recovered fully yet.

I don't know if I can fully explain the impact. A lot of people have near death experiences; I'm nothing special. I guess the part that really gets me is that, unlike something external like a car wreck, my death was almost caused by my own body failing. I guess everything aligned just right to cause what happened, but it's the prospect of my own body shutting down that really disturbs me. I was 6 hours away from dying because my kidneys shut down on their own from dehydration. No giant 10 car pileup, no flaming plane crash, no mugging gone bad. Just a virus. A virus and three days in hell. 

I was engaged. I had just joined a great band. I had a slew of great family and friends. I was 26 years old. I was in college.

And I could have died. Just like that. 

In some ways I am happy it happened. I had once again become a slave to my anxiety, convinced that something was somehow physically wrong with me. I had missed some school due to my panic attacks, which were growing more and more frequent. I was very unfocused in my life, just kind of floating around, letting things happen to me instead of actively participating in life. I was certainly heading down a bad path. 

The whole kidney affair put my life in focus. After three days hooked up to all kinds of machinery and having every kind of medical test possible done, I am able to say that, besides being a fatass, I am otherwise healthy. This helped to allay my growing concerns that I was ill somehow and gave me a lot of the medical answers I was looking for.

Anywho, coming back to the present, I realized that I had to somehow conquer my fear of writing this stuff down so I could begin to blog again without feeling my heart leap into my throat at the thought.

I just want to say that I love you guys. Each and everyone of you, closer or more distant, are very important to me. With everything being so busy we don't see enough of each other as we should. Trying to change that fact drastically is a fools game. Everyone has their own life to live and that is a beautiful thing.

When I think about the prospect of death I don't fear the unknown. I cry for the end of my life with all of you. We are truly fortunate to be here. Take care of yourselves.