Your leaking thatched hut during the restoration of a pre-Enlightenment state.

 

Hello, my name is Judas Gutenberg and this is my blaag (pronounced as you would the vomit noise "hyroop-bleuach").



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   two days in one
Wednesday, June 4 2003

Dreary weather continues as it has for weeks. For a couple days every now and then we'll get a little sun. But most days are cloudy, occasionally rainy, and temperatures never rise above the mid-60s. It's a bad first introduction to the climate of Upstate New York, but I heard on All Things Considered the other day that these conditions are widespread throughout the East Coast and extend well into the South.
It was a good day for sitting around on the couch in the windowless Map Room watching movies. Together Gretchen and I watched videotaped episodes of Six Feet Under and The Wire dating from last Sunday. That Six Feet Under episode was so powerful and I'm such a pussy that I found myself crying on the second viewing.
Later we saw a DVD of Basket Case, one of my favorite low-budget horror flicks. It's about the travails of a young man and his horribly-deformed former siamese-twin as they try to exact revenge against the doctors who separated them. The acting was so atrocious that Gretchen found it almost unwatchable, but to me the quality of the acting reflected a reasonable sacrifice in the service of budgetary constraints. That said, some enterprising hero should remake this film with a bigger budget and a slightly better sense of humor.
Later on we watched Monster's Ball, another fine (though not especially comic) DVD via Netflix. I don't know if I've ever seen a movie that developed its premise with such an unrelenting string of tragedy. Another odd thing about this movie: all the vehicles driven by the characters are gratuitously filthy. (Meanwhile back here in reality, American cars on the highways and byways continue to gleam like nowhere else on Earth.)
For some odd reason, the day actually felt like two different days, one followed by the other with a possible forgotten night of deep slumber sandwiched in between. There was something about the ambiguous light coming in through the windows from the grey day outside and all of that time spent watching long and involved dramas in a windowless room that profoundly muddled my sense of the flow of time.

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