I didn't pen this missive - but I wish I had.

I just watched "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind".

It just occured to me, as I sit down to pen this (pen? pen isn't a verb anymore. We don't pen. We scribble. We scrawl. Maybe we jot. But we don't pen. When we get to those lengths now, we type. How much less attractive a word is 'type' than pen? Pen is so fluid. So cozey. It's a curled-up-by-the-fire-and-thinking-of-you word. Type is so disconnected. Formal. It's a straightbacked-in-an-office-chair-banging-out-memos-on-a-machine word. In the interests of full disclosure: I'm typing this. Whether I'd like to pen it or not, I can't).

For a person everybody thought (thinks?) was deep, I sure get a lot of my inspiration from popular culture. Or sub-pop-culture. Or something.

Anyway.

I just saw this movie. And it's great. Let me rephrase that.

It's got incredibly "high production value". Thats my new favorite phrase to describe media I can respect for it's innate quality, despite my attraction to it or lack thereof (Titanic has high production value. I hated Titanic.) But on top of that high production value. . .it's so real.

The one major leap of faith I had to take was to buy into the procedure. As soon as I had reawakened my long-dead imagination and bought in (and the procedure itself seems so real, down to the finely crafted ways the 'technicians' fuck it up) to that one component, the rest of the movie falls into place on it's own.

As if one of those yellow flat-sided globes we had as kids were suspended, and spinning, and the people who wrote, directed, and starred were quielty tossing those little shapes through the holes, and each one non-challantly falls on through and is trapped inside. Triangle. Square. Star. Hexagon! Everything falls into place.

It's so real. So disgusting. So true. The pettiness. The faux-hate. The love. The random moments of honesty and kindness that should make up our day-to-day and instead make up the highlights we savour. The way we kill ourselves to keep ourselves from loving, and love just to keep from killing ourselves. The way the people who will try as hard as they can to get back together, to stay together, aren't really all that great for each other. They're human. They're messed up. They will never be the perfect couple that everybody thinks they would be if they just got over their issues. Because nobody ever gets around to giving up their issues.

But we love to use our issues as excuses for the reasons we can't be the people we should be.

But she's so needy. But I'm so traumatized from all those terrible things that happened to me. But I'll never be strong enough. But I'll never be pretty enough. But I'm not honest. But she drinks so much more than me. But we'll never sort it out.

But you never tried.

You only resigned yourself to pretending to try.

Is that the final story of humanity? That we'll keep groping in the dark for an answer that is always just beyond our grasp, never realizing that the answer is the acceptance that everything that makes us up is within our grasp. But that doesn't make sense, because where does God factor in to a world where humanity can be its own salvation?

Have I written God out of my mind in my desperation for an answer that lies inside me? Do I need to take responsibility so badly that I take responsibilities for us all that we cannot shoulder? Have I degenerated once again into asking pointless, unanswerable questions instead of musing and writing something worth reading? It looks like it.

I am become one of Rossum's Children. Upset by Humanity's failure I will try to spurn a revolution, and the new generation shall overthrow the old.