as the owner of many black t-shirts over the years, i can tell you that if a girl ever says something like this to you, you can be sure you’ll never see that t-shirt again . . . trust me lol
(however: it wouldn’t bother me if jennifer connelly (my girlfriend (pictured)) stole my shirt . . .)
For the last week I have not been able to fall sleep before seven or eight in the morning. My intention was to start going to bed at four at the very latest, and here I am, stretched nearly four hours beyond that. Needless to say . . . this is not sustainable! And so it is that I have once again found myself relying upon dreaded Trazodone, the Chemical Sandman and the gateway to Deep Darkness, which my psychiatrist gave me some time ago now “in case of emergencies” . . . I try everything before I resort to Trazodone because it is absolutely the Nuclear Option. This stuff essentially puts you in a coma. On the label it says I can take a quarter of a pill up to two whole pills depending on the severity of my insomnia. A quarter of a pill is enough to send me under for twelve hours of ice-cold sleep . . . if I took two pills, I’d wake up in my forties.
Yesterday (at seven in the morning) I gave up and broke off a piece of a Trazodone pill out of pure desperation. There is a vague sorrow you feel when you use it, as if wielding a dark instrument . . . the sleep it grants you is a sort of handshake with the devil. But yesterday I just could not keep my eyes closed, and the sun was blazing outside my darkened windows, so I swallowed the curse. It immediately vaporized me. I must have passed out within five minutes. I then had a series of frightening dreams that seemed to last for a decade. Upon waking I recalled them. I won’t bore you with a post about my long dark dreams . . . but I will say that in the Final Dream— the one I can see most vividly in my mind, as it had occurred just before opening my eyes— I was hiding in a closet in a vast estate. I was in the basement of this white mansion, peeking out from behind a wall of clothes. I could see out into the hallway, where a dozen or so spirits were marching in line and holding little lanterns. In the dream I knew they were evil spirits . . . or at least they seemed ill-omened to me. They wore white masks and the spirits were different sizes, some of them as small as children. They resembled those creeps from the Dutchman’s Lodge:
They were going through the house and presumably killing or possessing all the people in it. Or anyway, I could hear people screaming and it weren’t in rapturous joy. In my dream I felt a real fear of death. My skin was numb and I had broken out into a cold sweat. The spirits were speaking to each other in a language that, as far as I know, does not exist . . . and their odd mannerisms and the ethereal glow from their lanterns made them terrifying to behold. The sight of a spirit is more or less proof of an afterlife, and knowing that Bad Spirits exist means they probably came from a Bad Place, and if they are able to harm you or even consume your soul, then it stands to reason that they can take you with them back to the Bad Place. In other words: a fate worse than death. Such was my fear!
I wish I had more to say about it, but as soon as their dreary procession passed by and they had gone down the hall a bit, I quietly stepped out of the closet and casually walked toward the door which led to the stairs and then to the outside world. Just as I got to the stairs, they sensed my presence and began chasing me. I bolted up the stairs and out the front door. It was dusk and the sky was covered in grey clouds. The driveway was littered with cars as if I’d been at some kind of party. I could hear screaming inside the house. I tried to run, but a force stopped me . . . I felt the icy hand of something unnatural reach out and touch a part of me, and I supposed my life was over.
And then I woke up.
I was drenched in cold sweat, just like in the dream. I lay there on the couch for probably another hour . . . I really did have this intense feeling that I had died, and upon waking, had to slowly acclimate to the fact that I was still alive . . . or am I dead and merely dreaming I am alive? And had I, while asleep in death, dreamed of another death? Anyway . . . now as I am about to go to sleep once again, I feel a dread that I will be visited by these pale freaks which are summoned by godless Trazodone. I suppose that even without that stuff, they’ve been let loose. The memory of them persists in my mind AND THUS they are real. But are the spirits confined to dreams? Or can they walk with me in wakefulness??
AND THEN I REMEMBER, AS ALWAYS . . .
moon lovers representation
yeah dude!!!
For the last three nights, I have watched three movies purely because they star Jennifer Connelly (the most beautiful woman in the world and also my girlfriend). Two of them were not great: MULHOLLAND FALLS and INVENTING THE ABBOTTS—the latter being crushingly boring and lugubrious . . . and also Jennifer Connelly exits the movie literally a half hour. She drops the movie’s best line in its most interesting scene and is then written out of the story. The narrator even announces it, like: “And then she was gone forever. And we never knew why.” So now I was stuck with this sort of bland 50s period piece with Joaquin Phoenix and Liv Tyler, both trying their best to get out from under a total slog of a movie. Bless them. J-Con shows up again for about two minutes towards the end of the movie, says five or six lines, and vanishes again. I felt ripped off.
Meanwhile, MULHOLLAND FALLS, which is also a 50s period piece, is slightly more interesting on account of it’s an “LA detectives investigating a murder uncover a vast government conspiracy” neo noir and not some corny ass coming-of-age story. Even then, JC only shows up in flashbacks in MULHOLLAND FALLS . . . Meanwhile Nick Nolte completely carries the weight of the movie on his shoulders like Atlas. Without him there is no movie. For ol Nick’s sake, I stuck with it till the credits. (I also hoped in vain that Nick Nolte’s character would have a last-minute dream sequence flashback about her again . . . but no: the movie just sputters out and then you brush your teeth and go to sleep as the sun rises behind your blackout curtains.)
With sadness I was prepared to hate THE ROCKETEER, which had come out when I was a kid, and which was the last time I had seen it. But I love those 90s studio attempts to bring back characters from pulpy 1930s serials like THE PHANTOM and THE SHADOW. (Sorry Tim and Kerwin, but you’re wrong about THE PHANTOM. McCune and I agree THE SHADOW is superior . . . I mean, the villain is a psychotic descendant of Genghis Khan???) None of them did very well, including THE ROCKETEER, which of the three seemed to be all but forgotten. SO IMAGINE MY SURPRISE when I quickly began to realize the movie actually rules! It’s so pure and uncynical. I don’t know how you could hate it. There is a sort of wholesomeness or innocence to it. Minus this part: when’s the last time Disney-financed movie had a swastika in it? I was pretty blown away to see a war zeppelin with one splashed across the side, for god’s sake. And of course the villains are Nazis—the easiest group of people to vilify, and thus the perfect villains. Just ask Dr. Jones!!!
It would be criminal if I did not mention here that the true villain is actually (post-James Bond) Timothy Dalton playing a cartoonishly sinister Errol Flynn type character. He’s incredible in it and obviously having fun chewing the scenery until it is confetti. Dude rules. Anytime he shows up on screen, you know you’re about to have a Real Good Time. Uh! And my hero Howard Hughes is also a character?? In the movie, he and his science boys have invented the jet pack worn by The Rocketeer. Which the Nazis are desperately trying to steal so they can build an army of Nazi Rocketeers to fly over the Atlantic Ocean and invade and conquer the United States. Like come on. This is just cool pulpy genre stuff.
Though yeah: as with MULHOLLAND FALLS, here Jennifer Connelly was obviously cast because she has that sort of Hollywood Golden Age look to her. Like Marlene Dietrich, there is a sort of movie magic when their faces are lit from certain angles. Sorry! It’s true. And JC always plays these sweet characters too. Anyway, I love her. She’s my girlfriend, after all. She can elevate a bad movie whenever she’s in a scene. You almost forget the movie is bad until she leaves again.
On the topic of good movies Jennifer Connely is in: you gotta watch THE HOT SPOT, which Dennis Hopper directed. It’s one of my favorite genres: Mysterious dude rolls into town, gets into some trouble, gets out of trouble again, leaves town. Sometimes there’s the femme fatale and the sweet girl next door. The protagonist should be with the latter but of course he gets mixed up with the former. In THE HOT SPOT, she (JenCon) plays the girl next door. Anyway, there are a million movies that follow this formula and I will gladly watch even the worst of them.
AN ASIDE: If you want another “mysterious drifter-interloper” movie like that, seek out RED ROCK WEST starring a young Nicolas Cage. The villain here is . . . Dennis Hopper himself. And the movie opens like this:
Yeah man . . .
Though yeah, if for some reason you want to see Jennifer Connelly’s birthday cake, here she is showing it to Don Johnson at Hamilton Pool outside Austin, which I used to visit when I lived there:
I have to keep going with the Jennifer Connelly saga. I have no choice now. Only problem is that she’s in a lot of bad movies and I think I’ve already gotten through the best of them. She really needs to get a new agent. But I think the next one I’ll watch that she’s in is NOAH, as in the biblical Noah who builds an ark before everyone else on planet earth is wiped out by a massive flood . . . Listen, I’m going to have to be baked out of my fucking mind for that one. Monty told me it’s psychedelic and insane. When I was checking the quality of the blu-ray rip I torrented, I accidentally saw a scene where Russell Crowe as Noah is fighting a massive rock monster with his bare hands. Why would this be happening? I guess I’ll find out tomorrow night. This movie is absolutely going to be breathtakingly stupid but also amazing. To quote Roger Ebert, this is the type of trash that glows in the dark. And of course my girlfriend Jenn C. plays Noah’s wife . . .
I don’t know what else to say except Hell Yeah.
By watching all these movies, as my brain revealed itself to itself, I realized that Jennifer Connelly is the Ground Zero Ryancore Girl. In the same way you forever fall in love with the first goth girl you see at the mall as a teenager, JC was the original and formative Movie Crush I have had since I was a kid . . . along with Winona Ryder and Uma Thurman. That Pulp Fiction bob, man. I’m powerless to it. I mean, this is pretty much every Tinder date I’ve ever been on:
(lol)
And surely this must have contributed to my otherwise unexplainable thing for redheads (well I guess she’s strawberry blonde but close enough):
In this way, Jennifer Connelly also lodged herself in my adolescent mind. Maybe because of LABYRINTH? Well, what can you do about it. Your first celebrity crush is a permanent brand. She has dark hair and green eyes and nice eyebrows and she’s beautiful in that timeless sort of way. I dig it. I will always dig it. Maybe this admission is a little embarrassing, but I accept this about myself. Like the fella said:
Finally, I shall conclude this post thusly. And by that I mean this is what Jennifer Connelly said when asked about me:
Now that I have sufficiently outed myself as some weird Jennifer Connelly fanboy: Good-night!!! ☆彡
far out lol
sigh~
