Cats & Dogs

It is pissing down pouring down rain. It has rained so much in the last forty-eight hours that I'm looking for the Ark. I'm telling ya! We kept waking up last night as the wind shook the house. The electricity came and went. It's been a howling time. And then today, I decided to go see a movie. In this torrential downpour. Not too bright this kid sometimes.

I have eight billion things to do, but this lethargy has got quite a grip on me, so Mario suggested a movie. I was going to see the Secret Life of Bees but I didn't want to sit through fifteen minutes of commercials so I went to see Changeling which was just starting. I thought it was a movie about a woman whose son disappears. It is ostensibly about the woman, but the boy disappears because a serial killer takes him. The movie is based on a famous Los Angeles serial killer case from 1928—a case I knew nothing about because I LOATHE movies or books about those kinds of things. So here I was trying to assuage my depression and I'm sitting alone in a movie theater trying to cover my ears and eyes while some guy is wielding an axe: on children, no less! I was going to leave, but I kept waiting for redemption because I didn't want to go out into the dark and the rain by myself after seeing that. But nothing redeeming happened.

I don't think I've seen a single Clint Eastwood movie I actually liked. Did not like Unforgiven. HATED Million Dollar Baby. I recognize his films are well made, but I'm often bored or, more often, I just don't like the viewpoint all these films seem to have: Life is really shitty and people behave really badly. Period. This all may be true, but I want something different from films and books. I want more than reality. How to explain it? I want beauty. I'm thinking of the movie El Norte, about Mayan peasants coming to the United State illegally. Terrible things happen in that movie. But I remember the heartbreaking aching beauty of it all. Yes, we suffer and we die, but we also live and there are moments when we live in beauty. And the movie had touches of magical realism.

You might think then that I like Pan's Labyrinth because it had some of that Latin American magical realism too. I hated Pan's Labyrinth. Yes, I did. I didn't believe the mythology; it didn't seem true to me. It didn't feel as though it was rooted in real folklore. There is a difference in what someone makes up from their leetle brain and when someone creates a story that has roots in mythology and folklore. For instance, Hans Christian Anderson completely made up The Little Mermaid, I think. Little Mermaid seems silly, to me. Like a Hollywood romance. The Little Mermaid wants to give up the sea and live with her guy. No! In folklore, the women are longing to get back to the sea or the forest, the mountains. Or they find restoration in the forest, like Silver Hands does. Her hands actually grow back once she's been in the wild long enough. And the Swan Maiden and the Selkie go back into the sky and the sea respectively once they've regained their stolen power.

Even if the mythology of the movie was rooted in "real" folklore, I didn't believe it.

And it seemed like the director of Pan's Labyrinth was a little too into torture. That always turns me off. Then again, I liked Hellboy II, which was directed by the same director as Pan's Labyrinth. I've always been a sucker for Ron Perlman.

I babble.

I'm leading a teen discussion of my book Broken Moon tomorrow at the Battle Ground library. Then on Friday I'm teaching Faery Shamanism at PCC. Should be interesting. And then this weekend I'm going to a workshop on grief. Learning how to express and let go of grief as a community. Here's hoping the rain stops soon or I'm going to have to learn how to grieve being cold, wet, and miserable.

Hasta la vista, babies.