Reality is too much to soak in all the time now. Art and fiction breaks are mandatory. How is everybody finding their calm places these days? I’m open to movie, series, and music ideas. Don’t suggest I watch Tiger King, though. I absolutely refuse to hop on that cultural bandwagon. Not since I heard there was animal abuse contained in it. Give me something less horrifying. It doesn’t even have to be spectacular. Just diverting. I can barely remember half of the things we have watched in the last month, and that’s fine. They got me to turn off the news for a few hours.
A few days ago (or months ago, in perceived time), we watched the top promoted series on our Netflix menu. I think it was called Letter for the King. It was okay. We giggled several times, recognizing it for what it was: a high school Dungeons and Dragons campaign. I enjoyed it for the two nights we binged on it. I suspect it was offered to us because we had watched Locke and Key the week before. (Also entertaining, but didn’t stick in my mind for long—it took me an hour to remember what it was we watched, as I planned what to write tonight.)
I kept trying to convince myself to open a streaming music app, to play the latest suggestions it came up with for this week. I put it off. I probably should have used music to make myself feel better at some point today. I found myself getting bitter and angry often over the last 36-72 hours. It doesn’t feel good. I’ve been trying to play games with friends, and half the time I just want to give up and walk away from it. It’s nothing my friends have done wrong. I am just hitting that stage of grief.
This evening, reality and fiction collided. I learned two days ago that the original 1994 miniseries of Stephen King’s The Stand was free in its entirety on YouTube. It is there in a six-hour lump, no commercials. We made it two thirds of the way through it. It seems so weird, going from thirty years of sounding like doom and gloom wackos predicting that Captain Tripps would come someday, to rewatching this show, critiquing where they got it wrong, and burying sadness where they got it right. The part that bugs me most is the timeline. It took five days to go from release of the pathogen in a lab to a pandemic that is 95% lethal. Within a month, the whole group of good guy survivors had gathered in Boulder. A month after that and they were already plotting spy missions on the baddies, including sending one guy I would consider vulnerable to Las Vegas, apparently on foot. Does anyone realize just how far it is from Boulder to Vegas? They want him to do this in less than a month! Any one of these folks want to give him a ride? I will find out tomorrow whether they’re just going to give him a zippy bag full of GORP and wave as he walks away, or drive him at least as far as the Eisenhower tunnel.
No comments:
Post a Comment