Queen and David Bowie - Under Pressure

Tursi came by to visit.

Now, I've known he was going to for a while. I knew the date and everything. So why is it that even though I knew that, by the time he showed up I still had to shift boxes around (from when I moved in a month ago) to make room for him to drop his stuff and have a place to sleep? Christ I suck.

And, nice guy that he is, he found my place and then wandered around the neighbourhood for who knows how long to give me an opportunity to sleep. Which I'd skipped doing ostensibly to clear the rubble in my place up for him. :P

We decided to go out and see a movie. And we left earlier so we could get something to eat. And smack my ass and call me Charlie, but would you believe that all the restaurants in the world were closed?

I mean, with the bulk of the population in a celebrating mood, wouldn't you think that some of those teeming masses might feel the need to nosh? Apparently not, if you're a restaurant manager.

So we took the train downtown and ended up getting hotdogs from a cart. ;)

Blasted back to the theatre and saw The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou.

Now, I wasn't at my best. At the time the movie started, I'd been awake for about 26 hours. This isn't a big deal, as I always seem to be awake for unlikely lengths of time, but I wonder if it takes the edge off of my sense of humour.

The movie was quirky to be sure, but not in an engaging way. I even remember saying to Tursi that it seemed as though this movie was a strange clone of The Royal Tennebaums. And what do I find when we looked it up back home? Same director/writer. Ba-zing!

And Mr. Cranky called it The Royal Tennebaums set on a boat. That's pretty close to what it was. Watchable, but not quite as good.

Now... I haven't had much in the way of social contact for a lonnnnng time. And I wasn't Mr. Party even then. So couple that with lack of sleep and I have this memory of walking along with Tursi after the movie describing a situation near a loading dock at night involving a pile of shit and a blood-filled condom.

It would appear that my social skills have deteriorated to the point where I just sort of fire off whatever is crossing my front-most synaptic bridge and hope it works as conversation. I hope Tursi wasn't too disappointed in me. :P

When we got home, he introduced me to Naruto. More on that in a moment.

Last year he introduced me to Ebichu. Now, I wasn't sure about this one at the time. We watched a few episodes and I took the rest of what he had, but they just didn't grab me. Until I watched them again. And again.

Damn they're funny! A sexually-confused housecleaning hamster - not a concept that slotted into my mind initially well. But I dig it now.

Naruto is different. I liked it from the start. Apparently there are several episodes, damn it. I thought I'd sort of weaned myself off of series' when I got Cowboy Bebop out of my system. Apparently not.

So I'll have to start grabbing the episodes, either on my own or from Tursi when he gets back home. Addiction sucks, but it's entertaining.

<---- anime fiend. After I said that I was too tired to remain awake, we went to bed. And then I think I talked for an hour solid, digressing more and more. I distinctly remember him telling me that he once jumped pretty solidly on his brother's head though. I'm still laughing at the thought. :) But I also felt kind of bad about the visit. I felt like I didn't offer enough, and I felt the usual guilty semi-nostalgia that such a visit entails. Like the people I knew have somehow progressed and I haven't. Like they're all privvy to some secret or aspect of life that not only don't I have, I don't even realize I'm missing it. But really I think that's the discontinuity between how life was when we were together all the time, and how people change over time. After he left, I read a bit. About two pages into my reading I found something that actually sort of expressed the feeling, so I'm going to reprint it here. This is from a guy that's been away from home for a lifetime. It simply wasn't practical for him to return, but the memory of the region was something he thought of often:

"Back and forth he oscillated, between familiarity and alienation, memory and forgetfulness. But ever more lonely. In one cafe he ordered cassis, and at the first sip he remembered sitting in that very cafe, at that very same table. Across from Eve. Proust had been perfectly correct to identify taste as the principal agent of involuntary memory, for one's long-term memories settled or at least were organized in the amygdala, just over the area in the brain concerned with taste and smell - and so smells were intensely intertwined with memories, and also with the emotional network of the limbic system, twisting through both areas; thus the neurological sequence, smell triggering memory, triggering nostalgia. Nostalgia, the intense ache for one's past, desire for one's past - not because it had been so wonderful but simply because it had been, and now was gone. He recalled Eve's face, talking in this crowed room across from him. But not what she had said, or why there were there. Of course not. Simply an isolated moment, a cactus needle, an image seen as if by lightning bolt, the gone; and no knowing the rest of it, no matter how hard he tried to recollect. And they were all like that, his memories; that was what memories were when they got old enough, flashes in the dark, incoherent, almost meaningless, and yet sometimes filled with a vague ache."

Lest you be wondering, I'm very glad I saw Tursi. I always am. And I hope to continue seeing him. In fact, I hope that our lives intersect in the future more like how they used to, so that it doesn't take a specific effort to hang out.

And since I have to get ready for work now, I'll cut this ramble short, since it feels less representational and more messy than my usual blog vomits.

New Year's resolution: to be worthy.