i read another story from "olive kitteredge" today, this one about an old couple who appear content in their waning years... but for whom there is some secret infidelity (what is it with her and old people who cheat on each other?). i know, it's a common theme, mortality leads one to search for renewal and a passing distraction... i feel it myself, even though the better part of me knows better. or maybe (and maybe this is more to the point) i don't get into trouble because i'm so boring and lazy... i think that's true. i wouldn't know what to do with myself if i were to cheat. it just seems like so much work. and for what?
i don't think i'm capable of falling in love or in distraction any more. maybe most of that has burnt out of me (i don't think that's entirely true... or else i wouldn't talk about it so much). but, yes, again, maybe i'm too pragmatic or stupid or something, but most of those zepellins get shot down way before they can cross too far into my horizons... and they explode quietly, noiselessly, in fact. deflating clouds of nothing.
i think there is a cynicism within me that has put a scab over most of my feelings. a manhole cover. and because of it, i'm incapable of truly appreciating things... most of what i "feel" is a slightly regurgitated, watered down version of the real thing... a pale abstraction... i think maybe for me that's what the restlessness is about? but then again, it is just the same thing, a need to make things alive, again, and forever.
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i also read a bit into "girl in the shape of a cloud" or something like that. another great book, another great writer. i'm at this point where the mother, the middle "girl" in what is turning out to be a triad, has come down with lung cancer... and her daughter's reluctant adoption of the role of "caretaker" for the family... of bridging unbridgeable gaps... the mother, in perhaps one of her more lucid moments, speaks of the "non" fairy-tale romance of herself and the girl's father... perhaps more to humanize him, and to help the girl appreciate him...
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david mamet talks about structuring the plot. he uses this idea of the three uses of a knife. in act i, the man cuts his bread so that he has something to eat to give him strength to work and earn enough to win the girl. in act ii, the man uses the knife to shave his beard so he looks decent enough to win the affections of the girl. and in act iii, he catches the girl in bed with another man, so uses the knife to cut out her lying heart.
i'm not sure where my "play" is going. i never intended it to be a "play," but perhaps it is as good a format as any. i had an idea of the ending, just as david mamet's hero does... but drama demands a kind of shift or switch, or at least a reimagining of the ending. it can't be a smooth journey, or else why would we need to hear about it? i'm just writing each act as it comes along... but maybe i'm just getting myself more and more lost...
over the week, ideas sort of come into my head. i don't really pursue them, but it seems as though clouds, like stormclouds, are coagulating and assembling- perhaps to form something terrifyingly lightning infused... or else, at the very least, something dark and obscuring.
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okay, the air is getting cold. i think i'm going to get a blanket. see you.
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