Comparative Predation

I surprised myself by finding something derivative out of Sebold's metaphysical triumph over trauma in The Lovely Bones. If you like dark parlor games, consider Stanley Tucci as George Harvey against Michael Rooker as Henry, against Hopkins as Hannibal. That is your job spastic, might saith twitter, might saith the hapless surfer, or those who chance posted with me prior to community banishment. My rebuttal is distillation takes time, and my facial ligaments are in pain.

For me to watch a film twice in rapid succession means the transcendent caught my interior suction cups, and decided me to track Sebold even though I cannot do it her way, find my way through the thorns to loss of my own ego. My escape as a writer is to burrow into the agony, with or without substance aid, like Thomas More in his hair shirt, willing to accept the assassin. But my challenge to the Sebold victory is this: Would a mouse be owed the same consideration? It is the snicker bar on the evolutionary scale, killed swiftly, killed slowly, high pitched squeal as its spine is snapped on a glue trap, or pummeled and then eaten by Joey, speared by his brother. What does the fabric of space give the insect, krill, or plankton, for that matter? Why did I pay for my pet's ashes if I am a non-believer? There is also Aaron Eckhart's work, scathing and stark, which I thought of during the morning hours before Sandy's landfall, but evaded me in the initial post draft. In the company of men is a different genre, a masterpiece of social manner, critically acclaimed, then buried by the public, but it is a vehicle willing to be honest in its illustration that blind justice, fortune, are projections about how the primate moral code works, possibly no more than a facade; yet Sebold strikes something a mass audience needs, just as I needed Joey's remains, my deceased, now part of all minimalist dead pet theatre.

Even if we keep it on the human scale, is the serial predator simply an evolutionary outcome our self-domestication refuses to accept, or is it disease, as we attribute it in clinical terms? A footnote on which I'll have to catch up. Tucci's performance here nearly matches his more physically magnetic role in Big Night.

Requiem(s)

I just finished my fourth Gerstel, a non-alcoholic beer, in lieu of coffee, and no one will note or any discernible difference. I will have to edit my posts about my sister at some point, but she and I are estranged over money; (and this remains the case in the onset of winter 2012, my sister obliterating that her lack of support accentuated my distress) with my half-brother it is different; he and I are now estranged over his basement in North Carolina, (though the gulf has widened) which was never my best option to begin with, but was not Presby, the parent company I live under, and I pushed the envelope, not on Facebook, but still, in a virtual matrix, and I am feeling sorry about it, just like a real human being would. This happens with families with nursing home eligibles like myself, and I was hoping it wouldn't, laughing at my interior picture of twitter or LiveJournal falling over themselves to rush to my rescue, buying me the study of Andre Dubus, perhaps, in some Cinderella ending, despite my lack of requisite and docile loveliness required for such closure.

I was trying to stay awake to review In The Company of Men again, once more for free on Antenna TV, with that amusing retroactive golden age voice over, but even if I pushed, unwisely, to do so, my somnolent state of being probably couldn't keep up with Aaron Eckhart, who I find to be a wickedly sexual satirist. I have resisted discussing Stacy Edwards' supporting character, whose deafness makes Eckhart's satirical skill a delicious pain, within the usual paradigm, but this black comedy defies such paradigms. Sometimes I have to allow films to saturate, much like photosynthesis.

Despite the fact that I'm on deadline, I'll see you tonight, assurances in the technology being what they are, though I do not know which hat I'll be wearing.  Self-contradictions being what it is, I am both more vulnerable and far worse than I let on, though I cannot know how many reading these entries divines this fact.