inlikeflynn

last night I stayed in and cooked up some vegetables and watched several episodes of The West Wing (including The Portland Trip, the episode in which Josh goes toe to toe with a gay conservative senator over why he would want to be a member of a party that hates him). I watched until I fell asleep on the couch, which is an incredibly stupid place for someone who is taking a steroidal anti-inflammatory for severe back pain to fall asleep, but it also has the advantage of being one of the places I find myself dreaming more vividly and with better recall.

sam neill and peter o'toole play a gay elizabethan aristotle and socrates in a BBC miniseries (probably written by Russell T. Davies) who tell a story of a boy who falls in love with his best friend's brother and chooses to follow them in a voyage across the atlantic from the new world to the old one. in the end he leaps from his balcony into the sea by the harbor, swims out to the rowboat, and begins helping them tear heavy staples out of the mooring line with ragged fingertips and his teeth. I suppose because that's something that must be done before a trans-oceanic row in a tiny boat.

mother is of course visibly upset and complains to father that he's just a boy and that he'll die and that the whole trip is absurd, and having had some conscious time to reflect on it, I do agree. father says something like "what is unsatisfactory about a child who sheds the last vestiges of boyhood chasing after something so noble as love?"

and outside the story I turn to sam neill who is aristotle and I ask him why I can't write like that when I'm awake. and he says "idealistic prose comes so easily because it's easy to be idealistic. it's harder to be eloquent and say that life is unfair and sweaty and violent and confusing and gray and some of us may not make it out alive, but keep on trying to be happy."

and then he turns to peter o'toole and they make eyes at each other and kurt vonnegut is there, although I don't remember where or why, and the credits roll over a long shot of old driftwood.



today I have exploration on my mind. once I've satisfied myself that there's nothing more pressing and constructive to be done with my time, I think I'll venture out into LA and get myself lost. and then tonight I'll hit the town looking dapper, which is what I intended to do last night before aaron sorkin took over. ideally, I'd take this with me, but it's some time yet before I can safely afford it. so it's me and my trusty sony cybershot out in the big city taking pictures for my mum, who has been so patiently awaiting a cable from the frontier with news of the fate of her son.