In summary: maintenance, movies, motivation, and Tex-Mex. A spoiler or two alluded to but not explicit.
I.
Last week the maintenance dude showed up because, evidently, a water heater was leaking (outside?) and after tracing it to us and checking (inside, above the washer) he concluded that ours was the guilty party. So he fixed it.
Fast-forward to Monday.
Now our water heater was leaking … inside. In the ‘closet’ where it lived above the washer. Where Ms. S. had to put down some towels to soak up the water.
And so this morning, once I had the time, I stopped by the apartment complex main office and told the ladies on call what I’ve just told you. Not long thereafter, as Ms. S. was still sleeping off the graveyard shift, maintenance showed up, looked at his previous handiwork, and to make a long story short — too late! — informed me that he’d have to return with a new water heater.
But that’s okay, I informed him, as Ms. S. and I would be out all afternoon (and I locked up the cats so they could not get out), but that’s another story.
II.
Excerpted from an important communication:
We need to see “Looper”, “Argo”, “Seven Psychopaths”, and…. (if you haven’t watched the preview, WATCH IT NOW) “The Man with the Iron Fist”.
[…]
I’m feeling really… trapped? I just work and rehearse and exercise. I feel frustrated by my lack of EXPLORATION. Yes, I used caps to emphasis how SERIOUS I am. However, this weekend at Kentuck will help a bit. I feel like being outside, looking at crafts, being around old hippies will fix my souuuul for a few hours.
I know I won’t get a full 8 hours of sleep, but I don’t want to look back on my life when I’m 72 and see that I haven’t had fun. I can always catch up on my sleep. But fun? I can’t catch fun once it passes.
III.
To the movies we went. There was a time in a different city — a town, really — when we went to quite a few summer movies. Then we returned to this city and saw a few. But there is only one local theater, and its selection is usually abysmal. Cue: Netflix and the like.
But sometimes they have the right movies playing at the right time, and so we took in both “Seven Psychopaths” and “Looper,” as per Ms. S.’s missive. I knew of both, I knew of the cast of each, and I knew both had received good (or, in the case of “Looper”) some very good reviews, but I’d avoided spoilers, or even plot descriptions beyond the most general. And so I went in to “Seven Psychopaths” with few expectations.
I had seen the director’s earlier film, “In Bruges,” which I loved, and still love. This is a somewhat different beast. That one had its ticks and its knowing winks (including but not limited to the heavy Harry Potter presence), but I could take it as a mostly straight examination of its material. “Seven Psychopaths” is meta in a way not dissimilar to a movie like “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang” or novels like Ursula Hegi’s “Intrusions.” Perhaps appropriately a trailer for the film adaptation of David Mitchell’s “Cloud Atlas” ran before this (and the second) film. Movies about movies and writing and so on.
These are the types of works that ironically do two things. Buy keying us in to the genre conventions they follow they remind us how un-free their characters are. All their “choices” are bound up with conventions and expectations. At the same time they do something Ms. S. wanted … needed: Exploration. They acknowledge their limits, ponder them, and contemplate alternatives and subversions. ‘Martin’ wants to write a screenplay about seven psychopaths … but he abhors violence and considers a Buddhist psychopath … scratch that: Amish. No: Quaker … and so on.
We took a break — for lunch — and returned a couple hours later for “Looper.”
It’s vaguely science fiction … which is the realm of exploration. Call it speculative fiction, if you will. Others will compare and contrast “science fiction” (or even sci-fi) and “fantasy,” elements of logic and science, magic and naturalism, etc., but what I like about good science fiction (and even some bad) vis-a-vis regular fiction, is its exploratory streak, its willingness to “go there,” and it’s what at times bothers and bores me so much about other narratives. So many works of fiction — comics, television series, novels, short stories, and so on — are inherently conservative: they work to return in some way to where they started. Maintain characters or social situations. Evolution is accepted but ret-conned to a natural development; revolution is avoided or put off. Changes of at best temporary, more often illusory. That’s why I loved the ending to the 3rd Terminator film when I saw it in theaters in Budapest in 2003. They ended the world as we knew it; it was fatalistic, but they were willing to go there, no reprieve, avoidance, or return to the status quo. Good science fiction takes its premise seriously — “what if …?” — and lets it lead, even to uncomfortable places.
“Looper” shares some of that. It has a premise or two, the ‘givens’ you just have to accept, such as telekinesis and limited time travel. Then it has a setup: crime lords in the future dump bodies they want to get rid of in the past, where they are killed and disposed of by said ‘loopers.’ So far so good. The entire world — the year 2044 — as it is portrayed to us, is quite dystopian, with a rural setting that is hardly idyllic and an urban landscape with no hope. And our characters, often scheming but never intellectual, fight to keep the scraps they have; they fight to maintain the status quo. Until the end, when the younger version of a character offs himself to eliminate the entrenched older version. Those time traveling loopers have no exploration: they know what’s coming in a limited sense. The wonder of the future is absent. To the extent it is restored at the end it is a possibility, not a promise, along the chance that things could go just as wrong or worse than they did in the already hinted at further future.
IV.
On occasion we would eat out, usually at a “regular” location. Perhaps during a predetermined once a week planned event. The Ms. S. put together a list of restaurants in town she wanted to visit before we moved, and a schedule … it did not survive long into budgetary and scheduling realities. And when you hit the road, take a trip, and so on, you are within a genre (e.g. “the road trip movie,” “the mallrat flick,” etc.) and stopping by the family diner along the highway is not an act of free will, but rather a genre inevitability.
So there was something nice about having ‘free’ time between two scheduled movies, no particular place we needed to be, and no restaurant predetermined. All we did was get on a main drag, drive, and pull in at a place that caught our attention, one that neither of us had eaten at before but which Ms. S. had heard of.
“Fernando’s Mexican Grill” (Northport) had great service and adequate food, with the meat-based fare evidently more flavorful than the vegetarian. $2.99 margaritas are a plus. I haven’t been this excited by a chile relleno in some time. Then it was back to the movies.
V.
The cats had a rough day.
Ms. S. ascribes her own love of order to being a Virgo; I chuckle and nod gently. But the paradox in Ms. S.’s being is clear enough: she does not like the status quo and she wants things to be different, but she hates change.
I realized today that our dear indoor cats are also creatures of habit averse to change.
They are not chased day by day by predators, nor do they hunt irregular and capricious prey. Theirs is not a life of uncertainty, but rather one of several fixed meals a day and the regularity of my schedule and Ms. S.’s. They are not fond of strangers, this much is true, but more than the strangers it’s the strangeness and interruption that bothers them.
Even hours after the disruptions — maintenance dude’s water heater replacement — of the day cat A shivered and twitched a bit when held, and was wary of returning to her bowl of food.
It’s not that the cats are an allegory for our lives, though there are lessons there to be learned.
At least with the cats I have an easy way to make it all better: catnip.
