Tyler Weaver's Blog, page 16

Revisitation: BLADE RUNNER

Thematic tangent this Christmas break of rewatching (me) / watching for the first time (K) the pillars of late 20th century sci-fi (she had never seen the original STAR WARS trilogy and I still can't bring myself to ruin her enjoyment of the world with the prequels):

BLADE RUNNER, for K's first time ever and for my first time, seen not as a possible future but as an alternate past, one not so different from the one we've unleashed on ourselves – though still a literal possibility, just postponed few years/decades: where advertising and the promise of a better life lies; where fires burn and smoke rises and the perpetual night is accompanied by a perpetual downpour; where technology promised to make our lives easier and freer has become an existential threat to freedom of mind... Home again, home again, jiggety-jig.

Hadn't seen it in years, think the last time was at the Brattle Theatre in Cambridge, MA roundabout the release of the Final Cut, mid-late naughties. Most prominent memory: the rush for the bathrooms following the end credits, the endless rain of LA 2019 proving too much for the collective bladders of a packed house gazing at the screen in rapt attention.

Not sure what tonight's film will be. Might change it up completely and go with IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE to assuage the present lack of WKW in my life.

(RIP Syd Mead / RIP Rutger Hauer, “tears in the rain.”)

Listening: SOLASTALGIA, by Rafael Anton Irisarri; ALONE AT THE VANGUARD, by Fred Hersch.

ThoughtBuffet 03jan2020

Nothing in particular is standing out and/or warranting a full dissection splayed across the digital operating table of the mindlab of I so a thoughtbuffet shall ensue.

Item one: Finally picked up a Boom 3 Bluetooth speaker and I'm already in love. Have Apple Music streaming through my Watch and, while the WatchOS interface is byzantine and nightmarish, I'm making it work – but seriously, Apple, would it be that difficult to add "Recently Added" to the WatchOS Library (not as an out-of-order Playlist) and have the albums in descending order as you do on the iOS iteration?

Item two: I've returned to Micro.blog. Had hoped to find a suitable way to incorporate smaller bits and bobs here but couldn't make it work. Contrary – and such is the way these every day postings go; I'm not going to hide my waffling about – to my posting of 01jan2020, I do want to be at least somewhat present in the digital world, but on my own terms, and in full ownership of the self-created content – be it novels or dog pictures – I share, crossposted from Micro to Twitter (though I haven't found a way to crosspost to Insta but that's ok); Micro, if nothing else, provides a record of provenance for said content – without the appending / offending link to blog posts here, a look I'm not at all fond of. For now, a useful redundancy which I pay for and, as part of the deal, own my short-burst data.

Item three: halfway, I think, through MAFIA III. General impression: an enjoyable romp with an intriguing story and great music that could have been so much more had the developers spent more of their budget on ironing out the bugs and kinks than on music licensing.

Item four: finished Don Winslow's THE FORCE last night and it's one of the best cop sagas I've read, a frenetic back and forth from character to violence to comedy to tragedy: in other words, profoundly human. A must-read.

Item five: I’m into the second manual of the STRANGER THINGS Lego set and have only just found Winona Ryder’s missing head. Victory.

Listening: BLACK CORNER DEN, by Atrium Carcieri and Cities Last Broadcast; CONVERSIONS, by Jacob Kirkegaard; DEUS SIVE NATURA, by Creation VI.

Notes on Stoic Green Lantern Hostage Negotiation / Disease Management Techniques

While I haven't written 2019 by mistake I have left out the day of the week (yesterday) and failed to spell out the month (today) but I'll get it figured out; it's all good though, because, according to an excellent piece in The Atlantic, the 2010s never really got started.

My thinking this morning is perhaps morose but oh well it's what I'm thinking and what I'm thinking is that, when someone survives a near-death experience, or, rather, more specifically, when they survive something that should, by all logic and reason, have killed them – my own brush with diabetic ketoacidosis in 2016 that heralded the surprise news that I had Type One Diabetes and the present saga /contract negotiation with survival facing my wife's family which I guess is my family too but the whole in-law thing still, after five and a half years of marriage, confuses me (nor have I been able to remember which lights certain light switches turn on so there's precedent) – that there is now, post-survival, a cost of that survival, both a literal, physical cost – in my case, $74.29 a month for CGM sensors (doctor's orders; I was happy with my fingersticking and blood sacrifice with a ten dollar reader and $9.99-for-50 strips but hey), and regular hostage negotiations with insulin manufacturers, the ransom of which rises with each refill – and a figurative, mental – though no less real – one: the question of what one is willing to do without, the question of how to make this new iteration of life worth both costs, each day requiring a new, reinforced answer to the question of why one survived what they survived.

It's not easy.

And there are days, as I mentioned yesterday where neither cost feels worth it, where I struggle to find the answer, where the thankless battle against the incurable seems to be one thankless battle too many. It's on those days that finding the value in my days is that much more imperative, no matter how small the light; it's where the necessity of living in the moment comes into visceral relief. Sometimes - more often than I'd like to admit but here I am anyhow – it's a simple matter of being too damn stubborn to give up.

I tend to turn to Epictetus in these moments...

"Disease is an impediment to the body but not to the will, unless the will itself chooses. Lameness is an impediment to the leg, but not to the will. And add this reflection on the occasion of everything that happens; for you will find it an impediment to something else, but not to yourself." – Epictetus, ENCHIRIDION, IX.

... and to Hal Jordan in GREEN LANTERN REBIRTH when he came back to life after his evil bug-possesed turn and subsequent Spectre-izaton, "Plenty of damn will" or something like that; beware my power, Green Latern's light.

There's probably a better ending to this maundering but I can't think of one so I'll just end said maundering here. Breakfast awaits.

Where I can be found for the next decade or at least the next month or the next week or the next day maybe whatever.

Note: I'm training myself to use sentence case in titles here if for no other reason than the look is growing on me. And since these pieces are called The Informalities, maybe the informality of sentence case works better.

Update to yesterday: I spoke too soon; but there is, at least, an end in sight. Might be a ways off – and the destination may be something of a disappointment drill (as my grandmother would've said), but it's nonetheless visible over the horizon. So there's that.

And here’s this:

I've long tried to find a way to make social media work for me and I've decided that it – that search – is a waste of energy, a thought loop that gets triggered whenever I start questioning The Work and/or wallowing in the perception of my general isolation out here.

Reality: feelings of isolation increases with social media use.

If I've learned anything over the last few years of managing a chronic illness, a task that requires me to find reasons to carry on with life four times a day (in my darker moments, I question why I wasn't allowed to die on that table), it's that life's too short to be someone I'm not; I wasted a tremendous amount of my life being what others needed me to be (or, rather, what I perceived others needed/wanted me to be), corporeal and/or digital, and I've nothing to show for it. It wasn't worth it.

No, all I can do now is what I enjoy, what gives me a modicum of pleasure and artistic satisfaction. For now, that's limited to posting here, my Micro.blog, and in the weekly newsletter, doing my thing, whatever the hell that is…

Happy New Year; if nothing else, 2020 arises from my hand with more fluidity than 2019.

Listening: PASSAGEWAYS, by Forest Management.

Farewell, 2019; may the backhoe hit you in the ass on your way out…

... and not miss and crash into my face which, given your character – you did, after all, enter the timestream by knocking out the neighborhood's power in true fire-wielding, spark-flying fashion thanks to a tree branch downed in the climate-change infused wind before, mere weeks later, sending a backhoe into our lives and into my father-in-law's Ford Escape – and my father-in-law – a saga still unfolding – would be an-all-too-appropriate middle finger / fuck you / sayonara. 

(Allow me to return the symbolic favor, 2019.)

But I don't believe in new years or new decades bringing anything (nor in years or in decades in review; I can barely remember yesterday) beyond a numeric representation of another day, another turning of the clock over upon itself, another revolution of the automatic revolving doors through which we can only hope to time our approach with reasonable acuity so as to make it through its glass partions before it bites us in said ass.

My only hope is that I continue to fortify myself against myself, learning to accept the things outside of my control, keeping what works, and being merciless about the necessary jettisoning of what doesn't; a lack of backhoes would also be nice, but I'm not counting on it.

Listening: AFTER DARK, by Forest Management.

Formative Golden Age Nightstand

A wind advisory, again. Batten down The Morkies and The Jorkies.

Most of the way through the first volume of the BATMAN ARCHIVES and finding no small amount of delight in the crudeness of these formative, gun-toting, villain-slaying stories of the character – Finger, Kane, et. al, playing catch-up with Dick Tracy's venerable rogue's gallery (and ripping off The Blank (1937) in DETECTIVE COMICS #34 (1939)), still searching in the dark for the forces of worthwhile antagonism: the antagonists define the protagonist as much as the protagonist defines the protagonist.

Some of those quickly-dispatched (mercifully, in some cases) done-in-ones would've made for fascinating characters had they had a chance to develop: the mask-wearing patron of the artist whose clients died soon after their immortality in portraiture; the vampiric Monk – in Bats's first globe-trotting adventure; the angry (insert cookie-cutter mask-wearing rich guy here); Carl Kruger, wannabe dictator of the world (the otherwise forgotten villain in the foundational DETECTIVE COMICS #33); and the first of his recurring villains, Clayface and Hugo Strange.

(Worth noting, maybe, that I have - and have always had - an odd affinity for the cookie cutter masked villain. Maybe it's the promise of depth that was always squandered in those grand Republic movie serials.)

A wish that Azzarello's First Wave Bat series had worked out; it would've made for a fascinating alternate vision of the character; think I'll revisit Matt Wagner's BATMAN AND THE MONSTER MEN and BATMAN AND THE MAD MONK stories at some point: fantastic modern interpretations of mostly cast-aside formative villains – aformentioned Hugo Strange and The Monk (it'd be nice if Hugo Strange would feature more prevalently in modern Bat-lore, beyond ARKHAM CITY).

Listening: THE UNINTENTIONAL SEA, by Rafael Anton Irisarri; ASH & ICE, by The Kills (though I love both, if it comes down to the Yeah Yeah Yeahs or The Kills, I’ll take The Kills every time).

EarBliss 22-28dec2019

The week is done; regular ramblings return tomorrow. Happy Sunday.

Drifting, Encore

The final holiday gathering, the final stone in the Infamily Gauntlet, abbreviated though it may be, descends. Fingersnap won't work – the only way out is through (though it's almost always more enjoyable in reality than my brain lets it be for the three months leading up to it):

“... for trying to please the brain is like trying to drink through your ears.”

— Alan Watts, THE WISDOM OF INSECURITY, p. 62

Thought pinballing about through the gutter of my mindstream this morning: for much of my adult life, or at least since I ran away and joined the circus — and dropped out once I realized I wasn't cut out for the life of a lion tamer but was only using my mediocre skillset in taming goats as a pretext to run away —I've spent an inordinate amount of time adrift in my dinghy paddling after a moving ship, the HMS NewandImproved, loathing myself for never being able to catch it.

Current approach a relief, then: instead of chasing the HMS NewandImproved, best to let it drift into the horizon and wish it the best while I outfit my dinghy with reinforcements and make said dinghy a floating city of myself, able to recognize islands worth investigating and visiting time and again but to keep enough of myself for myself that I'm able to appreciate the value of those certain islands, no matter how exhausting the occasional port of call might be.

Once more, then, unto the breach of this gauntlet's final docking of the year.

Listening: L'INCORONAZIONE DI POPPEA, by Biosphere; ORIGIN—EP, by Kelly Moran.

New desk friend

On the restorative capacity of antique malls

They are the only malls that interest me: to scour their aisles and booths of the odd and the strange and the beautiful with no inclination of what we're looking for – sometimes, like yesterday, accompanied by a friendly, one-eyed tour-guide calico – in a general faith that we'll know it when we find it, maybe, is one of our favorite things to do on those rare nowadays when we have a chance to actually be a married couple, to go somewhere together not predicated upon being in close proximity to another doctor's appointment or within quick, back-road ass-hauling driving distance should another life-altering event and/or mental bomb — planted by those unable to shut the fuck up for thirty seconds — be triggered as soon as we deign to cross the county line. Marriage counseling via antique mall: it works wonders. 

Thinking of going to IKEA next week to get another three-cubed shelf to close myself off in my little corner of the Sanctum when I'm back here but I'm worried that that place might undo the work of the antique mall and that it might be a better idea to wall myself off behind concrete with a bucket and an insulin pen should I wish to vanish but then again, maybe it'll provide another excuse to visit another antique mall – not that we need one: we just need the time.

P.S. Remind me to never again underestimate the value of good lighting in the writing cave; my eyes are thanking me.