I wasn't going to be able to come to the cabin today--I had been told yesterday that they would be re-paving the road in for three days in the middle of the week, and next week, I have Indy Jones tickets, and the week after that, I'm going to California with my family (to Oceanside, where my mom once had a beach house, but she ended up having to sell it once she couldn't afford it anymore [sadly, she sold it for way less than she bought it for, since the housing bubble had burst]). So, I knew I'd not be doing the cabin thing, but I still met my cousin for lunch, as we often do on Wednesday afternoons.
But my brother texted me today to tell me that the re-paving was moved to next week, so I quickly headed back home, and tried to get everything done so I could do my cabin trip after all.
Today's the longest day of the year, but the sun is still getting low in the sky, and I haven't accomplished much of anything while here today (I edited audio for an hour, but it doesn't feel like it).
Yesterday, I took my nephew to see ACROSS THE SPIDER-VERSE, and really marveled at how well-constructed it was, how emotional and rewarding it was on a second viewing (which is not always the case), and remarked to myself on the way to my cousin's house just how untalented it made me feel, since I had sat down to record more of my 2020 story "Winter Break" the night before, and found almost none of it to be working. Am I so limited in talent that something I worked on, created from my imagination, fell so short of what I meant for it to do?
Of course, my cousin spent a minute or two telling me how dumb the SUPER MARIO BROS. movie was, and that--I believe--has been the biggest hit of the whole year. You never know what people will cotton to (I sat down with my nephews the other night to watch a movie and they chose THE ZOOKEEPER--a movie whose trailer was so stupid I lost an entire grade's worth of knowledge after watching it--and I thought, "Huh, this is pretty good. I wonder if this got better or worse reviews than PAUL BLART: MALL COP. And I discovered it was absolutely excoriated by critics (except for Ebert, for some reason), and just for fun, I looked up Kevin James's career, and saw that the last movie he starred in was years ago, one I'd never heard of before . . . and it has a ZERO in Rotten Tomatoes.
That's sad.
Is that sad?
The next day, I watched THE LOST CITY, which I recall being a pretty big hit a year or so back, and had a clever trailer, where Sandra Bullock asked Brad Pitt why he was so handsome, and he said, "My dad was a weatherman."
*Unfortunately, THE LOST CITY was thoroughly mediocre, and I kept being surprised by how weak the dialogue was, like it was all ad-libbed, , but the filmmakers kept saying, "No, no, we'll make it work in post." There was one kind of brilliant, unexpected moment early on in the film, which was pretty cool, admittedly . . . and then they ended the film by undoing that moment, as a giant eff-you to me, who wasted his time watching it.
Normally, I would feel better about myself after watching this, because I'd say, "No, no, I can do better than this. I will do better than this, this I vow," but then I remembered that this flick did very, very well at the box office (indeed, I had to put my name on a waiting list at the library to check out the DVD), so now I'm back to feeling like a failure. Buh.
I did a lot of work while I was here, and when the sun was getting low, I didn't feel like I had blown it--wasted my time--and that feels good.
There's good and bad in this world, son. Take an umbrella.
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