Sunday August 17, 2014

A lot of activity at 7-11 this morning. That’s mainly because it’s Sunday. For most people, it is their only day off, so people get up early and go out to do things. Plus, there are people still awake from a Saturday night at the clubs. I’m not sure how late this 7-11 is open, but from the disaster area around me, it might be open 24 hours a day. It looks like there was a bit of a war last night. They’re busy putting all the chairs and benches on top of the tables so that they can sweep and mop.

Spoilers:

 

I saw the movie Mr. Nobody. At first, I wasn’t sure if it was a good movie or pretentious dreck. Now I’m was pretty sure about my opinion: It’s pretentious dreck.

At the same time, it’s a movie worth knowing about. (A lot of spoilers ahead. So if you are going to watch the movie, don’t read this. Just sayin…) It’s just so weird. It’s like someone gave a hundred million dollars to an artsy film student and told him to go nuts. Oddly enough, while I was watching it, I kept thinking it felt European. It had a European sensibility to it – a certain tone that tastes very odd to the American palate. Europeans might declare it a masterpiece while Americans would just find it boring and pointless. Afterwards, I learned that it was heavily European in its production. I think it might have been made in Belgium. There was some Canadian influence as well – from Quebec. I saw that the software SoftImage was used in its production.

Not sure what else to say about it. The production values were very high with amazing special effects. But the story was completely unengaging. And the narrator of the story was a 118-year-old man – Jared Leto in old man makeup. And I hate that. I dislike old people in movies in general, but when they dress up a young person in an inch of makeup, I instantly get bored. The basic idea (once you slog through three and a half hours of pseudo-philosophical pseudo-scientific drivel) is that a young boy has to choose whether to go with his mother or his father when they get divorced. He refuses to choose, and his life branches from that point down multiple paths – as if he is imagining what would happen depending on the choices he makes. There are all kinds of references to string theory, multiple-worlds theory, the butterfly effect, the big bang, the big crunch, the nature of time, and all that kind of stuff. If you’d never seen this stuff before, perhaps your mind would be blown. But it was all major old news for me. They even showed high speed film of dead animals and fruit rotting. But they showed it backwards. We’ve all seen this a million times, so my mind was not blown.

Watching the movie was a weird experience. I’d just be sitting there thinking that this was some experimental art film from some starving artist. Then suddenly you’d get a very sophisticated special effects sequence of a spaceship going to a colony on Mars. The budget for that one special effect alone could probably fund thirty budget independent movies. It felt so weird that such an amateurish story had such a huge budget. As I said, the images were often quite cool. My favorite was a sequence that showed helicopters flying in massive squares of the ocean and dropping them into empty spaces – as if they were assembling the ocean like a puzzle. At the end, when time starts to go backwards, you see them dismantling the ocean in the same way. (It all looked and felt like surrealistic works of art – much like how most of my dreams look and feel.)

I should say that it wasn’t all bad news. There were some striking characters, some good acting, and some memorable scenes. I have a strong memory of many of those scenes. The problem was that those scenes and characters never linked up in any meaningful way for me. And it was really depressing. I think when you added it all up, this guy had 27 different timelines and every single one involved nothing but misery, tragedy, death, and sadness. You’d think that out of all those possible outcomes, he’d get one happy life. But not, apparently, in Europe.

There was a lot of SlaughterHouse 5 in the movie, too, as the main character would suddenly switch timelines or go backward or forward in time and find himself in a completely new life – married to a different woman, living somewhere different, and with different children and a different job, and he’d have to figure out where he was and who he was. It sounds like it should have been a lot of fun, but I was just bored throughout.

The one part that really engaged me was when in one timeline, the main character had a job as a host of a science TV show. He would talk about different scientific theories, and I found that interesting. There was one short segment in which he talked about how viruses reproduce in an asexual way – by simply splitting in half and making copies of themselves. This is a very fast way to reproduce and gives them a huge advantage. And other forms of life replied with what he called “a powerful weapon” – sexual reproduction. It is much slower, but by mixing the DNA of two very different individuals, you get a stronger life form that can fight back against the viruses. It was all presented as an all-out war between life forms – our methods of reproduction being a type of arms race to see who will survive in the end. I’m not sure that I’ve ever heard it presented in quite that way and in quite those words.

I watched another episode of VICE on HBO from Season 1. (I don’t think there has been a Season 2 yet.) The first segment was about the rise in gang violence in Chicago. It was interesting because I’m quite aware that violent crime has been going down steadily in the United States over the last two decades (despite what the mainstream media portrays). This comes up all the time in podcasts like Planet Money, Radiolab, and Freakonomics. Chicago is the one exception, and VICE sent a dude there to investigate why this would be. The reasons for this rise in violence in Chicago were not that interesting to me. What was interesting was simply seeing the footage of the interviews with all the gang members responsible for this violence. They were all men, all young, and all black. I just find it so weird to hear them talk. Their English is like a foreign language. It’s “black” English, I suppose, and I wonder where that comes from. It certainly has nothing to do with being black. When they switch to interviewing black lawyers, they speak in the same basic American accent as everyone else. They speak “proper” English. But these young men come across as from another country.

The other segment of this VICE episode was about the oil industry in Nigeria. I’d seen documentaries about this before, and it’s fascinating stuff. Nigeria produces a lot of oil, and they have long pipelines going across the country. Illegal gangs will cut into the pipelines and siphon off quantities of oil and then refine it themselves at primitive refineries. They try to patch up the pipes afterwards, but they do a bad job and there are large oil spills all over the country as the oil pipes leak where they were cut. It’s kind of crazy because you’d think it would be easy to stop the oil pirates. Send up a helicopter with armed soldiers and go get them. But it isn’t that easy. Apparently, there are so many oil pirates and there is so much territory to cover that they can’t stop it. I imagine corruption has a lot to do with it, too. Crazy stuff. It would be like having oil pirates cutting into the pipelines across Canada. It seems insane and impossible. And it would be in Canada. You can’t have primitive refineries out in the bush sending massive plumes of black clouds into the sky. They’d be spotted instantly and shut down. But not in Nigeria. There are crazy places in the world and crazy things going on there.

A big gypsy family just went by the 7-11 twice. They’re very friendly and smiley people, I’ll say that. They banged on the window right beside me and made hand-to-mouth gestures to indicate they were hungry. I just smiled at them and waved at the table and shrugged my shoulders to indicate that I was just typing and drinking coffee. What do they expect me to do? They laughed and continued on. But they went right around the block and came back a second time and banged on the window again.

On a happy note, the pain in my jaw has gone down quite a bit. Whatever the infection was, it appears to be receding. There is still a lot of pain, but it is not so hard to open my mouth. In the last few days, it was even hard to open my mouth to put in food. I started thinking about things like lockjaw.

And, oddly enough, the ghost image in my left eye is not as pronounced. It’s odd because the nature of the ghost image has not changed one tiny bit in all the weeks (months?) before this. Even when my eye didn’t feel quite as tired or sore, the ghost image was always the same. For example, the second letter “I” I saw on my keyboard was the exact same distance away from the original letter “I” and it was just as light or dark. This morning, while typing away, I suddenly noticed I wasn’t having as much trouble seeing the keys or the display. In the past, I would have a lot of trouble as I drank my coffee. It was weird until I figured out what was going on. As I lifted the cup of coffee up to take a drink with my right hand, the cup would cover my right eye. Suddenly, the whole world went blurry and I wouldn’t be able to see the keyboard. I realized it was because my brain was no longer getting the signal from my right eye. It now only had the signal from my left eye, and I couldn’t see anything. This morning, as I drank my coffee, I realized I could still see the keyboard when the coffee cup covered my right eye. I did some tests, and though the ghost image is still there, the ghost image is much closer to the original image. I still see two letter I’s, but they are much closer together. They are even overlapping. I can even see what I’m typing with my left eye alone. That’s strange, but very good news. The doctor did say that if I had had a stroke and there was pressure being applied to the optical portion of my brain, that pressure might go down over time and my vision might go back to normal. Perhaps that is what is happening. The ghost image is still there and still very clear, but it isn’t as far away from the original image. It is like they lined up just a little bit. It makes a big difference. My left eye is still much weaker than my right eye. There is some tiny writing on my coffee cup. I can read it easily with my right eye, but not with my left. The ghost image is much stronger when looking at those tiny letters. I can clearly see two of each letter. But on my NEO keyboard with the larger letters, the separation is much less distinct. People must think I’m a bit nuts because I sit here constantly closing one eye and then the other and looking around and squinting at things.

Tags: Canada, DNA, job, Philippines Bike Trip 2013, United States, VICE