I chased Dante around the house just now, and when he got tired he sat down and I fluffed up his fur with my hands. And I said to him, “Baby don’t worry. I’m gonna get us a house out west, and I’m gonna put you inside of it. And I’m gonna hang out with you all the time because we’re good friends.”
My friend Ayesha was here last night with her friend, and she told her friend: “This is Dante. He’s not Ryan’s son. They’re just friends.”
I thought it was nice that she knew that.
Before I showed up around Christmastime, no one had lived in this house for almost 700 days. I have mentioned this a lot but that is so strange to me. It’s a god darn time capsule the size of a condominium. I mean despite the fact that my grandmother lives half a mile away, she is probably never going to see any of this stuff again. I’ve found Austrian passports from the 1920s, pictures just as old . . . lord, she has her mother’s old walking stick, which has little metal pins on it from all the countries she traveled to. She has postcards from Austria from the ’60s and ’70s. She’s kept every birthday card anyone has ever sent her. What do you do with this stuff?
She told me I can keep the coffee table and two side tables she had hand-carved in Peru many decades ago. I gotta figure out how to ship them eventually but oh lord I will take care of those forever. I have also set aside many of my grandfather’s old books, which he put little red checkmarks in the margins next to passages he liked. He had very neat handwriting. In the first few pages he always wrote “BURKS / [whatever year he bought the book].” I don’t know, that’s cool.
Anyway I wake up every day expecting to find her in the kitchen. It’s really sad. This is probably going to be the last time I ever see the place like it always was. My mother is moving in next month and she’s going to change it all around. Man.
I have a confession to make, which is that I have been living off of cabbage for three days
You know what, I have no idea where my grandparents’ old house is. They moved to Tennessee when I was 14 or 15, and so for all those years I had been going to their house and had been there many many times. But I couldn’t tell you if it was north or south or east or west or anything. I have no idea what road it’s on, what county it’s in, what the nearest town is. And it was only 30 minutes from my childhood home! I think about this every time I’m driving around in this area. Where is that place?!
My dad remembers this story, and I remember it too. We went to their house for Thanksgiving one year . . . I was 8 or 9. My brother and both my sisters were in the car too. My parents got in a fight on the ride home. God knows what they were arguing about. They were always arguing. Anyway my mother pulled the car over about a mile from my grandparents’ house, and she said, “Get out.” Keep in mind this was 15 or 20 miles from our house! And not only that, but I had been paying attention to this particular argument, and my dad’s only crime (if you can even call it that) was that he was stoic and quiet. It was Thanksgiving day, we had just eaten at his parents’ house, and he was worn out from years of this stuff. So when she told him to get out, he got out. Like on the side of the road in a heavily forested nowhere nothing. The sun was setting. It was dark out. My mother slammed on the accelerator and we went home. I thought that was really fucked up.
I waited by the living room window for hours and hours. Eventually, later that night, I saw him walking up the driveway in the dark. He came inside and I hugged him and told him I didn’t think he’d done anything wrong. He said he knew that, but he also knew the only way he was going to get any peace was if he walked all that way home. He said he needed time to think anyway.
Many years later, when I was 24, I was dating a woman who I liked a whole lot, and who is a great person, but lord have mercy, it was never going to work out. She got upset with me because she had taken me to a party, and all her friends were there. I think she perceived that I had outshined her or something (which is ridiculous), because I was telling jokes and people were talking to me instead of her. She had shown up in a rotten mood and had stayed that way, so I guess no one really tried to talk to her. On the ride home she was very angry with me and was chewing me out. I didn’t say anything. We were near the UT campus. She told me to get out of the car and I did. We were beneath an overpass. I walked the whole way home. I remembered that day with my father.
Still don’t know where my grandparents’ house is though.
how does this creature exist
My best buddos in Oakland sent me cookies and cards and presents!!!!
One more thing about movies: I really like those things. I usually watch one movie a day. I’ll start it in the bathtub (yeah), and then make food and finish it then. Sometimes I’ll start a movie at 2 a.m. and then attempt to fall asleep when it’s over. See I don’t sleep much, so if it seems like I watch a ton of movies it’s because I’ve got the time. And also as stupid as this sounds, I’m usually . . . uh . . . paying very close attention to everything that’s happening, for whatever that’s worth. Other times I just turn out and let it wash over me so I don’t have to think about how terrible the world can be.
Yeah.
Anyway what I wanted to say is that when people come over they usually want to watch a movie with me. Or I’ll say, “Oh man, oh baby, let’s watch a real cool movie.” And in the last year I have noticed there is a 50/50 chance someone will utter one of the following sentences:
“I haven’t seen, like, any movies at all.”
~or~
“Maaaaaan I never watch movies because I don’t have the attention span for it.”
OK so . . . whoa. I mean that’s cool, man. I’ve just heard a LOT of people say these things—sometimes both of these things! It’s interesting is all. YEeeaaAAHHH.
Uh: I obsessively catalog every book I read and every movie I watch. (I have a separate list of movies that I see in theaters, which is mostly a really depressing list, and which I will probably never look at again because I don’t want to relive the shame this spiritually-bankrupt century has poisoned me with. Hah!!!!)
Anyway I divide my lists into years. It’s just a text file on my computer with “BOOKS” and “MOVIES” written in bold and I make a bulleted list beneath them. It’s real cool to look at sometimes. I like looking at it. Yeah!
Here is my movie list for 2015, which is not complete. I watched probably two or three times as many movies as this, but I’m not including things I’ve seen a billion times (‘Blade Runner,’ ‘The Master,’ ‘Akira,’ ‘The Prestige,’ and so on), because I watched all of them four or five times each over the course of the year, usually at 4 a.m., usually they were on in the background, usually I was drunk and miserable and alone and so on—and thus the movie was essentially the audio / visual equivalent of wrapping yourself in a warm blanket.
I also did not include dumb stuff I watched. I watched a lot of dumb stuff. It was interesting dumb stuff but I omitted it anyway. Most of the things on this list, I would say 80–85% of it, I had already seen. But I was watching them again because they are, uh, considered “classics” and I was in some ways studying them I guess. I was pretty loose about what I watched . . . I would start off with a director (Stanley Kubrick, Francis Ford Coppola, Paul Thomas Anderson), and then if an actor kept popping up, like Gene “Jacket” Hackman or Jack Nicholson, I would just watch movies with them in it, most of which were filmed in the ’70s.
Gonna go ahead and say it right now: I don’t like ‘Giant,’ I don’t like ‘Magnolia,’ I don’t like ‘Full Metal Jacket.’
Most of these are real good. Sometimes they were so good I watched them multiple times, first by myself and then again with real cool people. I have noted this below!
HERE IT IS:
I am doing it differently for 2016. I am sticking with directors and for the most part going in chronological order. So instead of just blindly adding movies to a list, I already have all the movies listed and I’ll strikethrough them after I’ve watched them. I am going to rewatch things I’ve already seen, even if I’ve seen them a lot, and even if I watched them in 2015 (like ‘The Shining,’ which I have seen probably eleven or twelve times). I reckon I want to see how these things fit into The Bigger Picture.
(Akira Kurosawa, for instance, has like literally 30 movies. I don’t think I’ve seen even half of them but I will watch them all. I can’t wait!!!!!)
Listen: I plan to go it alone, because I always go it alone. But if you are in my city, and if you want to participate in this holy ritual, then by all means, come and get some. I will feed you and give you whatever hot and cold beverages you desire. You can sleep on my bed and I will sleep on the floor. Unless you want to share my bed, which I have no problem with. I have shared my bed with many people. It’s a nice thing. I have a super thick queen-size mattress and I’m not a blanket hog. Anyway I’m serious, so keep that in mind. We will watch real cool stuff and have us a real good time.
Yeah baby. Yeah. ☆ミ
