Wednesday, October 10, 2007

I'll Have What She's Having

This is the greatest thing I've read all day:
No, I’m talking about the pain I feel every day when I sit here and read stories in the press that don’t jibe with what my own eyes and ears tell me, or when I see the press completely fall in line with a narrative (”Bush wants little children to get sick and die”) that is intellectually insulting and untruthful, and never ask a politician, “hey, why are you suggesting that 25 year olds are ‘children,’ and how can you say he’s cutting the program when he’s trying to add 4 million poor kids to it” why doesn’t someone like Russert ever say stuff like that to anyone? Why have journalism and politics and the academy all sunken into a kind of vague slog whereby every piece of reality and history is laid onto a stagnant wadi of settled muck that we all have to haul ourselves through, every day, until we’re all so tired of it and looking for a way out of it or a stupid distraction that we - everyday - allow more and more to be lain on the muck and absorbed and distorted and finally disregarded because one can’t possibly keep track of everything. The sheer volume of added muckery each day overwhelms and thus the native hue of resolution is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought and enterprises of great pith and moment with this regard their currents turn awry…and lose the name…of action. I love Hamlet. God, I wish I could write like that. I wish I could just write at all. I wish I could drown in such words.

Nevermind. It doesn’t matter. It just doesn’t matter. As Bill Murray advised in Meatballs: “it just doesn’t matter. It just doesn’t matter. Even if we win! Even if we play so far above our heads that our noses bleed for a week to ten days - even if God in heaven above comes down and points his hand at our side of the field - even if every man woman and child held hands together and prayed for us to win it just wouldn’t matter because all the really good looking girls would still go out with the guys from Camp Mohawk because they’ve got all the money! It just doesn’t matter if we win or we lose. It just doesn’t matter!”

Heh. MacBeth and Meatballs, do you see the crap that rolls around in my head at any given moment and how the sublime lies immediately akin to the ridiculous and it all crashes together into a roiling cacophony that leaves me stupid and paralyzed and thus conscience makes cowards of us all? Am I an unholy mess of a girl or what? “An unholy mess of a girl,” one of my favorite lines from The Philadelphia Story. James Stewart, Katharine Hepburn, Cary Grant why don’t they make movies like that anymore? With actors that likable? Ah, well…it just doesn’t matter.

She's right. Muscle relaxers are niiiiiice.

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