Phil and Ope

I've been thinking a lot these days about hard luck and dumb luck and lack of luck. I've been thinking about God, and how I sometimes wished I believed in one, because I think God could make sense out of most of the pain and hard luck we find ourselves fused to. Ask anyone, or just trust me, unemployment/lack of money, caring for an ill relative, battling yet another round of depression and having difficulty finding any sense of direction in life really incurs a bit of wear and tear on the old heart. It scuffs your sanity a little.

Lately, I've been a tangle of endless tears and raw, exposed nerves. I've become the most overly emotional person I could dream up. I am moved, sometimes deeply, watching Oprah, her generosity touches me(go, sister.) I get angry, really grindingly angry at the guests on Dr. Phil who provoke his no-nonsense commentary, I find myself inwardly cheering when he calls someone arrogant or selfish to their face(such honesty! such integrity! such bluntness!) I get weepy listening to one of my favourite bands, Explosions in the Sky, so much so that sometimes, I have to turn them off because the words of the book I'm reading start swimming and blurring and I can't warm the shivers on my arms.

And I fall in love, harder and faster than anyone I know.

It don't take much to warm me to you. Look me in the eyes and ask me how my day's going. Blush or stammer a bit(show me there are more of us out there.) Make me laugh, it only takes one good laugh, I know, I'm easy that way. Love dogs better than cats. Love music more than talking academic about music. Have beautiful hands. Look like you're keeping a really good secret. Be just a little sweet, no matter how many hard edges you've accumulated.

While I presently have many love interests(with such slight criterium, how could I not have an army of infatuations?), my latest love is a first for me. I've fallen for someone famous. This doesn't happen to me. I consider myself immune to the carefully manufactured and groomed charms of celebrity types. I'm fairly pragmatic when it comes to love, I don't usually allow myself much time to moon over some poor sod who doesn't appreciate me, or who is wrong, wrong, wrong for me in any relevant way. I like believing there's a perpetual supply of gentle, real men to keep company with. What's the point of wanting someone who you only want to change? Or wanting someone you'll never meet? And yet, there's a big, slobbery romantic in me, wanting to squash all my boring logic like a bug.

I met my current love, David Gordon Green, on the dvd commentary of one of his movies(hahaha it's like we were on a date or something!) I liked his voice right off the bat. He's a writer/director, and has this lovely and slight southern drawl. Even more delightful are those sharp bursts of prose issued in that slight drawl, a man who speaks like he writes or writes like he speaks. And what he speaks and writes and sees is the fragility and resilience of human beings and the environments they occupy. He sees beauty in things decrepit, rusted and worn down. He sees the reason in slowing down a moment, way, way down, and taking it in before you blink it into another moment. I proceeded to rent all his movies, and listen to all the commentaries, and in the span of a week and a half, I felt like I had an idea about what maybe 1/100th of this fellow was about.(even within my grandest delusions, I know what I know and what I don't know) And that fraction was enough to throw myself into a series of make-believe scenarios that alternate between being excruciatingly embarrassing and thoroughly enjoyable.

"So, tell me," Oprah asks, "how did you meet?" David and I are sitting on one of her plush couches, a studio full of breath-holding women(and a few captive men) awaiting what is inevitably going to be some kind of romantic response;
"Well," I start, and David jumps in"She wrote this screenplay and sent it to me. My agent was like, 'David, you have to read this.' And I fell in love with her words. I had to meet her." The way he says it, with such sincerity, makes it sound like he had no choice. I am blushing and trembling a little, there is a collective murmur among the audience. We're holding hands. I pipe up; "I just knew, Oprah, from the first time I heard him speak on the dvd, that I'd found something, someone real." Oprah looks at the audience. "Can y'all believe this? It's like the movies!" We all have a good laugh at this. Her teeth are very white.

"Listen," Dr. Phil says, "you have to stop feeding these unhealthy fantasies. They're inhibiting your ability to create real ideas about relationships." Tears are welling in my eyes, damnit, I've put on liquid eyeliner for the show, which will run in ugly, black streams if I don't steady my wobbly chin. Focus on the moustache. Look for crumbs in the moustache. "But Dr. Phil, I don't want to abandon hope. It's all I've got." He looks at the audience and back at me. "You have to realize life isn't like it is in the movies. This isn't a movie, and you have to stop enabling yourself to live with a poorly planned life map. C'mon now. You have to get real." Everyone nods solemnly at me.

I know. I know!

I know already that I have to find a job, that I have to find some way to keep myself from falling away at the seams, that life isn't fair. I know there's a Second and Third World who are hungrier than I'll ever be, that good people get sick just like not-so-good people. That places like Guantanamo Bay exist, as does child porn, spousal abuse, drug addiction. Sometimes birds just fall out of their nests. And I don't know why. I don't have a God to explain it, and luck is just too arbitrary to base a faith on.

So maybe my current state of hyper-emoting is a coping mechanism, a way of dealing with the senselessness that pervades daily life. My being touched, angry, weepy, is a release. And my love of being in love with love, (Hollywood style, on an indie budget) is a relic of childhood that I'm holding on to like a ratty toy, to remind me of more innocent days. Whatever it is, is it so bad? Is it unhealthy to feel everything so vividly, to hope so ferociously, to play pretend so boundlessly? Because I need to right now, to support and distract me from the storm cloud that follows me like a shadow overhead, threatening eruption. I'm entering new and scary territory in my life right now. I've become a person who knows better, but doesn't really care. And I tell myself that as long as I've got friends who get me, music to sound out my moods, and the hope of David Gordon Green, I'll muddle my way through lofty pipedreams and harder days to come.

It doesn't get more real than this.