Did we have frustrations like this back when we were just using notebooks and pens?

By ‘notebooks’ I mean, that low tech thing with spiral bound sheaves of paper in it, not a laptop computer.

My computer freezing up has become a nightly occurrence, which is why, before I tried to turn on RadioParadise.com tonight so I could work on this particular blog page while listening to music, I closed several windows. Ah, but then I hit the link for RP and went off to the bathroom. And my computer, realizing I wasn’t watching it at the moment, took the opportunity to strap on the old 14” and ram it right up my… well… anyway… I came back and found my screen completely frozen, yet again. And had to reboot, yet again. And lost everything I’d done on this page, yet again. As Homer would say, WOO hoo.

Ah… RP is playing “Hey, St. Peter”, one of my favorite one hit wonders.

Dean Esmay sent me the following link to one of his archive pages. Dean is a puzzle to me; a clearly intelligent, articulate and tolerant man who, nonetheless, sincerely believes Dubya legitimately won the 2000 election (his reasoning seems to be, Dubya cheated better) and who declares that, right now, he’ll almost certainly vote Republican in the 2004 elections. To my mind, you’d have to pore over the annals of American history with an electron microscope… hell, you’d have to go through the entire population with a sifter, for that matter… to find someone less worthwhile as an American President than Dubya. Whatever it is we want in the most powerful human being in the world, Dubya simply seems to me to lack in drifts and piles. He has no courage, he has no intellectual drive, he has no accomplishments, he has absolutely no morality or essential character… he’s a hollow, empty shell, a posturing figurehead. He’s probably a lousy husband, and judging from the way his kids behave, a piss poor parent. I simply cannot fathom how anyone could have voted for him once, and certainly, based on the astonishing gangbanging the American economy and individual civil liberties have taken under his non-guidance, I cannot even remotely grasp how anyone who voted for him once could possibly vote for him again.

Mind you, I’m increasingly, despairingly, confident he’ll win re-election. Howard Dean isn’t going to beat him, and even if some Democrat manages to, it won’t matter… I sincerely believe the Republicans… well… the wealthy conservative elite… have enough power in their vile, short sighted, moneygrubbing hands now that they will simply not tolerate ever losing another Presidential election. I mean it. I don’t think that’s a paranoid nightmare, either. These guys are in the driver’s seat, and short of an armed insurrection (and, alas, conservatives tend to have a lot more guns than liberals) they aren’t getting out again.

Yeah, laugh at me. Then count the votes with me a year from this November and see what happens.

Er… anyway… leaving all that behind, you should check out the link. Dean’s written an interesting little memoir detailing how he got to where he is, in respect to his current religious beliefs. How he got to where he is in respect to his current political beliefs I do not know, although I suspect it must have something to do with his drinking way too much cough syrup this morning. But that’s probably just me.

Hey, I kid Dean. I think I’m allowed.

Nothing happened today, really. (Tuesday, remember. I post these things in the early a.m. of whatever the date on them is, and then go to bed.) Weather apparently permitted, so they closed off the pool today until Thursday in order to paint it… well, not the pool itself, which is mainly water, but the area around the pool.

Having the pool closed is a mixed blessing. It’s bad because, obviously, I can’t go swimming, and I like swimming. It’s also bad because if the pool is closed there are no babes in bikinis out by the pool for me to ogle, which is the closest thing I have these days to an actual sex life… hell, an actual social life, for that matter.

On the other hand, it’s good, because I don’t have to see everyone in the world interacting happily with everyone else in the world except me. Which makes me crazy when I do.

There’s this new family that has moved into building C, or at least, I’ve never seen them before, so I assume they just moved in. They have three very blonde daughters. One is adult and doesn’t seem to live with them, I guess she was just visiting for the holiday weekend. The other is around 9, I gather. The middle one seems to be about 15, and watching her at the pool is like watching this weird social macrocosm, because she is never, ever alone… whenever I see her, she has a constant array of boys approximately her age in orbit around her. Some of her Eternal Posse of Suitors are somewhat younger than she is, a few are a bit older... but within minutes of her appearing outside (she generally has her kid sister in tow) these males will coaelesce out of the very ether, like someone very foolish just cast a ‘pimpznplayaz’ summoning spell, or something. And she just revels in the constant attention and never ending adolescent male dominance displays; she just basks in the shit.

If you think I’m deeply, deeply envious of her, I suppose you’d be right. It’s not that I want the attention of adolescent boys (I don’t think I’m that depraved… hmmmm… ::probing internal psyche:: nooooo… not yet, anyway…), it’s just that I have never in my life been the sort of person that other people flock to or cluster around or compete wildly for the attention of.

See, now RP is playing B.B. King and that’s just a little too goddam eclectic for me. What, they didn’t have any Queen or Tom Petty handy?

Anyway, while of course I am deeply, bitterly envious of the effortless manner in which this nubile lass manages to simply make positive attention providers condense from the empty air itself whenever she appears (unless her father is with her, as he is on some occasions; I notice then that for some reason, the boys simply do not appear at all, although I suspect they lurk furtively on the visual perimeter, silently loathing the protective patriarch with unbridled pubescent passion and wishing him fervently in hell, or at least, somewhere fucking else, from beneath deeply scowling brows), I also find it really amusing to watch.

I never took part in those kind of adolescent displays of rut when I was that age, and I told myself it was because it was just so stupid and demeaning, and, well, yeah it is. But the real reason is, I hate all competitions, especially competitions for the attentions of a hot chick, because I always, always lose, and that just sucks.

I learned early that hot chicks do not really like sensitive guys, or nice guys, or sweet guys, or creative, artistic guys, or whatever the hell it is that I am or was at that time that was not ever in any way The Guy The Hot Chick Wants, and no matter what Jean Grey opines in the latest X-Men flick, chicks do not flirt with the bad guy and marry the good guy. They hump the socks off the bad guy and then weep and wail and sob on the shoulder of the good guy about how mean the bad guy is… and then they kiss the good guy on the cheek and go back and hump the socks off the bad guy again. And my problem is, violent adolescent geek power fantasies aside, I’m just not a bad guy, and am never going to be.

There's simply no percentage, mating ritual wise, in being a good guy. Alas, in me, it's not voluntary; it's hardwired.

Of course, the fact that I’ve opted out of all mating competitions rigorously in my life is no doubt one big factor in why I’m currently (and apparently eternally) single. However, when I consider just how much more humiliation and rejection my life could have contained (and it’s encompassed quite enough of both, thank you very much), well, I can’t say I feel I made an error in judgement. I know you can’t win if you don’t play, but if all you’re ever going to do is lose, there’s little point in even showing up at the stadium.

Geez, I didn’t think I was in a bad mood when I set down to write this thing.

There was nothing in the mail today but the usual junk flyers and coupons. I stopped looking forward to the mail quite a while ago… once I got email, in fact… but now, with Unemployment checks and possible reader’s copies of books from my editor at Joe Bob Briggs (assuming he hasn’t fired me and not told me; you know, I’ve never heard a word as to whether the two reviews I’ve written so far ever got posted, or where, or if anyone has ever read them?) and maybe a Buffy tape or DVD from Scott or Jenny (you never know) showing up sometime, well, I find myself waiting for three o’clock to roll around with some eagerness these days… and since I’m not working anyway, legal holidays are just annoying (they mean more people hanging around the apartment complex, which is always aggravating, and no damned mail).

The Postal Service should simply employ enough people to cover holiday shifts. We should get mail 7/365. In a perfect world, I mean.

I’m still slogging through Come Twilight by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro. It’s interesting… St. Germain goes through 600 years of chaotic Spanish history from around 400 AD to 1000 AD… but I just don’t read much these days.

Writing projects mostly revolve, currently, around this blog and material for The Website Which Must Not Be Named.

And my life could be more boring, I suppose, but only if I were dead. And I long ago learned (during Basic Training, in fact) that boredom ain’t so bad. Things could be worse: you could be low crawling on elbows, stomach, and upper thighs across concrete with a rifle in your arms, over embedded logs and under strands of barbed wire, while some homicidal idiot fires an M-60 machine gun three feet over your head. (They actually make you do that in Infantry Basic Training, they call it the ‘infiltration course’, and the specific range instructions are simple: if you stand up, you’re gonna die. Don’t stand up.)

If you found that brief reference interesting, check out my military memoir, where I detail what I can remember of my Basic Training, and how I was without a doubt the worst military recruit in the history of the world, and nonetheless, somehow, managed to graduate.

The Young Dubliners sound kind of cool. Kind of like Horslips.

Ah, and you just can’t go wrong with Talking Heads.

Okay, I’m going, I’m going.

”You find yourself in the middle of something.”

A character named Monroe Kelly said that, in one of my all time favorite movies, Congo. Monroe is portrayed with dashing flair by, of all people, Ernie Hudson (yeah, the black Ghostbuster) and he comes off as sort of a ruthless, black version of Indiana Jones with a wonderful Oxford accent. He casually projects an amorally charismatic competence and you can tell thirty seconds after he first shows up that here you have a really fascinating and three dimensional character.

Fascinating and three dimensional characters are one element that makes Congo a great adventure film, although for reasons I’ve never understood, the movie took a real shellacking from the critics when it came out and seems to be generally despised by the few movie buffs nowadays who even know what the hell it is. I think it’s a great little cinematic gem… certainly nothing that’s ever going to win an Academy Award (it’s not pretentious enough by half), but an excellent and very nearly perfectly made little jungle adventure story with a high tech edge for all that.

A guy I know once told me that he considered a movie to be a good movie if he enjoyed it while he was watching it. I think that’s an inarguable definition; in fact, it’s so fundamental as to be very nearly Zen. However, where my one time buddy (he swiped my girlfriend and married her, dude, he’s not a friend any more, okay?) generally enjoyed any film that made noises while it flickered up on the screen in front of his gaping, completely non-discriminating gaze, I have slightly higher standards. (In movies. He and I seem to have very similar tastes in women. In fact, for a while there, it seemed like I had a karmic duty to meet women, try to date them, and then let Gary swipe them from me. But I digress...) I consider a movie to be a good movie if I enjoy it while I’m watching it, too (well, usually… Lost In Space is a truly terrible movie, but I enjoy it and watch it on videotape every once in a while anyway), but as a general rule, for me to enjoy a film, it has to contain three out of four elements:

Interesting characterizations, atmosphere, intrigue, and internal consistency/fairness.

Very few movies have all four, and for the most part, three out of four is fine. I love Nobody’s Fool, for example, and you can’t possibly say that film has intrigue (by which I mean, something mysterious going on during it that the audience is expected to figure out, or that the director tries to keep hidden until all is revealed by a sudden plot twist). And a lack of internal consistency can ruin a film for me even if it has the other three. For example, I can’t stand Return of the Jedi, or any of the STAR WARS movies that have been made since, because they all proceed from the extremely flawed, stupid, and unfair continuity established in Jedi… namely, that Luke and Lea are siblings, and Darth Vader is their father. This violates the internal consistency/fairness requirement; after all, if Darth Vader can talk to his son from several light years away using the Force, he should certainly get a tingle telling him his long lost daughter is standing two feet away spitting insults at him ten minutes into the first movie. And, excuse me, but exactly what idiot hid Annigan Skywalker’s daughter in the household of a prominent Senator that Annigan was going to be spending time with pretty much every day for the rest of his life, and then took his son and stranded him at the ass end of the universe? How did that work?

Anyway, Congo actually has all four things I look for… interesting characters everywhere you look, slabs and tons and piles of atmosphere, a reasonable amount of intrigue, political and otherwise, and it’s fair to its own internally established melodramatic rules, as well. Every plot twist and development is perfectly logical, if occasionally surprising, and I always really enjoy watching it unfold. It’s a B movie, sure; just an action adventure popcorn drama with a lot of second tier actors in it. But it’s always interesting, often exciting, occasionally hilarious, and once in a while, even remarkably charming. There’s one particular minor scene where, in the middle of Africa, which the film has clearly established as this chaotic, violent place where the political landscape is often murderously unstable and life is horribly cheap and everything seems lovely but entirely alien to its audience's sensibilities… suddenly, the African bearers start singing “California Dreamin’”… and it always makes me smile, to have that sudden, brilliantly poignant little reminder that, alien and distant though this place seems, the world is really a very small place and we are all really united as a global community, after all. If only by our love of the Mamas & The Papas.

Congo features Dylan Walsh as Dr. Peter Elliott, a primatologist trying to return his trained ape Amy (who, with the aid of a computerized vocal prosthesis that works off sign language, can actually talk) to the wild where she was captured as an infant. Elliott is the prototypical isolated, naïve scholar, utterly bewildered by the treacherous currents he finds himself suddenly up to his neck in. Things are bad enough, although he doesn’t know it, when his expedition is first funded by Tim Curry’s slyly portrayed Herkimer Homolka, an untrustworthy man with a secret purpose of his own for helping Amy get home. And the intrigue gets even thicker when the expedition is later taken over by Dr. Karen Ross, a telecommunications specialist with a shady CIA background who desperately needs to get to the Congo for reasons of her own. When this small band, each with their own overlapping but distinct agendas, hooks up with Monroe Kelly in the middle of an African revolution, well, as the moron newspaper reviewers like to say (over and over again) it’s a non stop thrill ride of fun, fun, fun.

What I especially like about Congo is that it’s an unabashedly pulp era adventure nominally updated with modern high tech trappings. Killer gorillas guarding King Solomon’s Mines in the middle of a lost jungle city on the slopes of an active volcano, all lie in wait as a team of mismatched adventurers races against time to accomplish their very disparate goals… all of these elements building to an exciting and spectacular climax and a final resolution I, personally, find extremely satisfying. Yeah, yeah, there could have been more sex (casting Laura Linney in a PG rated film is just a waste of beautiful skin) and yes, I admit, the ‘they find the fabulous ancient city full of treasure only to watch it be destroyed by a natural disaster’ ending is pretty hokey… but it’s also a classic pulp ending, and you gotta love the classics.

And unlike crap like the Mummy movies, Congo doesn’t contort physics completely out of sane recognition or suddenly pull impossible plot devices out of its celluloid ass to move its heroes a little further on down the storyline every ten minutes. Throw in a couple of charming and uncredited cameos by great character actors like Delroy Linndo (as a hilariously avaricious African military commander) and Joe Pantoliano(as a devious and sneaky African expediter) and you’ve got, in my opinion, one of the great jungle adventure films of all time.

Touring around the internet trying desperately to find the name of a particular actor (Joe Pantoliano, who isn’t listed in the damned credits; I finally found him on an NYPD BLUE episode guide), I came across several reviews of Congo, and all of them confirmed what I’d remembered.. this film don’t get no respect. One repetitive meme is ‘one of those movies that’s so bad it’s almost good’, and another phrase I saw a lot was ‘a movie that doesn’t seem to know whether it should take itself seriously or not’. Frankly, these people are morons, and I assume they’re all currently at the movie theaters staring in slack jawed, spittle chinned wonder at The Matrix: Reloaded, and one can only hope there is a just and merciful God and none of these idiots will be allowed into my afterlife (or if they are, they’re only there to clean my toilets). Congo is an excellent modern day pulp adventure and a helluva well made movie, and anyone who doesn’t agree with me can lick my eyebrows.