#the place beyond the pines really was such a good 1 hr movie. smile

[skunkes]

just saw u mention lars and the real girl, are u watching ryan gosling movies and do u have a fav so far? ive seen all of them lol and i love hearing ppls favs

I am! Or I was as I havent found right time to keep watching with a buddy (i like watching with others)

my fave so far IS lars and the real girl. Its the only one i watched by myself before watching it again with my friend. I couldn't wait anymore because I felt it would be right up my alley and it was. And it is. Its on my list of favorite movies now.

It's such a sweet movie that keeps making me feel all Squeezed because of how nice it is in all the details.

Pastor at the beginning saying loving each other is the most important thing, Lars saying Bianca told him she was put on this earth to help people, things like Lars telling Bianca that Gus is going to help her with her seatbelt while finishing things up. "She wants everyone to see her as normal and not feel bad for her".

The baby blanket, the teddy bear cpr scene. I love it i love it i love it. I need to own it. I keep starting it over and over and over again. It makes me feel so sad. But in a good way? Ive already written How in like 2 other posts so i wont do that here. But it's. Relatable.

(And also he's so Round and 26 Years Old in that movie and I need him. Just for the record. He's so cute.)

[iamnotthedog]

CHICAGO: OCTOBER 24, 2012

I want to touch a glacier. I want to feel its weight under me. I want to press my hands to it and have the water running under my skin remind me in the most tangible way possible that everything is impermanent. I want to see it disappearing with my own eyes. I want to stare into its blinding whiteness and feel its resolve.

I need to get back to the Olympic Peninsula.1  I need to drive along its shores, sit on its beaches, hike through its mountains, wander aimlessly under its trees. I need to experience it the same way I did during that summer of 2001. There is something about that area of the country that has stuck with me since that summer—something that won’t stop haunting me until I see it again.

I woke up again last night, right around five o’clock in the morning, and I ended up just wandering around our little apartment and the enclosed, rat-infested square of grass outside, smoking cigarettes and thinking about things until the sun came up. As for what woke me up, it was a dream—a dream I��ve had several times now.

In the dream, I wake up on a Greyhound bus in the Pacific Northwest. The bus is slowly rolling northward along the Puget Sound, through the mountainous region on the eastern edge of the Olympic Peninsula. The land flattens out as we reached the Strait of Juan de Fuca, with towering pine trees jutting up into a claustrophobic gray sky. It isn’t raining, but the air is wet with the perennial haze forever associated with that area of the country.

We pull into a Burger King parking lot, it’s giant, lustrous hamburger glowing through the mist.

The bus driver calls out: “Half hour!”

I rub my hands over my face and through my hair, and slip on my Converse. I step off of the bus and into the moisture and look down at the rain-glossed lines on the pavement as my fellow passengers file sleepily into the obnoxious fluorescent light. As I stand there, lethargic and confused, I become overwhelmed with a feeling of familiarity, like the hand that grabs the back of your mind and gives a squeeze when you smell a place you haven’t been for years. I lift my eyes from the parking lot to the restaurant, and then to the foothills gradually bowing into looming mountains beyond. There is a dirt path on the left side of the building that trails off into the woods. The path curves around the back of the restaurant, past chained rear doors and barrels stuffed with broken cardboard and wax boxes. The smell of burgers and fries and American cheese lingers somewhere near the center of the noxious smell emanating from a few dumpsters. The path then veers to the left, points straight through the swaying, ethereal pines for about twenty paces, and comes to a hill. On the hill stands a log cabin with a large front porch. A weathered upright piano sits on the right side of the porch. The front door is open.

Ten steps up the hill, two steps up to the porch, and I stand at the threshold. A rock wells up in my heart and slowly slides its way up into my esophagus. I am scared, but not too scared to turn back. I rap on the open door and step in.

The room is small and lit by a single light fixture in the center of the ceiling. To my left, a dark and empty doorway, straight ahead a dresser on which sits a wooden bowl and a framed picture of a young boy. To my right, lying face down on a small bed, is a naked woman, the ivory skin of her delicate neck, shoulders, back, ass, thighs, the backs of her knees, her calves, the bottoms of her feet all fully exposed. Her arms rest under a puffy white pillow that supports her head of curly brown hair. Her head moves slightly on the pillow, and then she pushes herself up on her elbows and turns to look at me.

Her face is like the picture in a movie theater when the reel on a film projector slows—I see multiple faces—each sliding by, one by one. The woman is everyone I’ve ever known. I feel an overwhelming feeling of comfort and acceptance, and let out a breath that seems to come from outside—it starts in the roots of the trees, is pulled up through the branches, and falls with the rain. I see that all happen as I breathe. I suddenly want to lie with this woman and feel her skin against mine. I want to melt into her.

The woman smiles—her multiple faces smile, each with their different wrinkles and lines, the different shapes of their eyes, the different curves of their lips—but she doesn’t say a word. I take another breath, preparing to speak, but this breath comes from inside the room, and brings with it the stink of reality.

Behind me, I hear the opening of a door, and the words “Hello, Dan.”

I turn and find myself face-to-face with Don. He is much older. An old man, in fact. All pale, wrinkled skin and grey hair. He is wearing nothing but a bath towel around his waist. For some reason, he frightens the hell out of me.

“Welcome,” he says. He pats me on the back and smiles, and I relax a bit. Maybe I’m not about to be brutally murdered, after all. Don’s smile says, “I’m here. You’re here. We’ve aged. Time happens. I have nothing to hide.”

He brushes past me and sits next to the woman on the bed. I look at her again, bending over at the waist to really get a good look at her face, or faces. Is she my mother?

Don’s voice suddenly sounds very scholarly and serious. “You are not Oedipus.”

He laughs.

I step back, away from the bed, and watch Don as he kneels on the wood floor and grabs a newspaper from under the bed. Standing and holding it out to me, he points to a picture. It’s a school portrait of a young man I knew in high school, or multiple young men I knew in high school—again, the faces flicker and roll by—all of them acquaintances I never had real conversations with, but ate lunch with in the cafeteria, sat next to in classrooms, ran with on the track around the football field.

“So much potential,” Don says, pulling the newspaper back before I can see what the article is about. I look down at the woman on the bed, who appears to have fallen asleep.

“I don’t know,” I reply.

Don tosses the newspaper on the dresser and says, “They’re all ghosts.” He turns his back to me and opens the dresser drawer. “Nothing is permanent.” I notice for the first time that the portrait in the frame on the dresser is of me, as a little boy. I’ve got a blonde bowl cut, and those big plastic-framed glasses, bigger than my face. To my right, on the bed, the woman has rolled over in her sleep. At my back, a breeze comes through the door that I had carelessly left open, bringing the smell of rain. The breeze rustles the pines and causes water to fall on the roof of the porch in loud, thwacking drops. There is a rumble of distant thunder. Don has a t-shirt and underwear in one hand, rolled up socks under his arm, and a pair of khakis with the belt still looped around the waist in his other hand. He shuffles into the bathroom and I see the blurry reflection of his face on the steamy bathroom mirror above the sink before he shuts the door behind him.

I look down at the woman on the bed one more time: the curve of her back, the lift of her exposed hip. Then I step out of the cabin onto the porch through the open door. 

Standing there on the porch, I look out through the mist. Everything in my immediate view seems to be in motion. Just beyond the grassy hill sloping down to the dark woods, towering pine trees sway back and forth. Just beyond the rocking pine trees is a gigantic mountain, bluish-white. It is a glacier—a solid sheet of ice—but even it isn’t unmoving. It is heaving eastward, away from the cabin, away from the Pacific Northwest and back over the Great Plains towards Illinois, heaving like the ocean, it’s glassy-but-opaque, moonlit surface curling, then receding, curling, then receding.

The whole scene makes me a little seasick, so I turn away from all that and sit at the piano. It smells of wet wood, an almost woolly smell, and the more keys I press, the stronger the smell becomes. Most of the keys work, but a few stick when pressed, and others press together two at a time, like fingers bound together in a splint.

Don emerges from the cabin in his standard uniform—a buttoned-up, subtly-striped white shirt over a white t-shirt, tucked into khaki pants with a black belt and black leather shoes. Everything worn and faded, like he hasn’t bought anything new for years. His hair is parted on his left and swooped over his tall forehead to the right. His eyes are glistening behind the thick lenses of his wire-framed glasses.

“How long have you been here?” I ask him. But he doesn’t reply. I plunk out “London Bridge is Falling Down” on the piano, and take a long drag of a cigarette. Where the cigarette came from, I’m not exactly sure, but it burns my lungs and makes me cough—I always cough, every time, then I start to wake from the dream.

“You shouldn’t smoke,” Don says.

I can feel myself slipping away, and I don’t really want to. I want to stay right there, on that porch. I want to talk to him, and find out who that woman on the bed is.

“Your grandfather died of emphysema.”

For some reason, this comment makes him smile.

 The Olympic Mountains, which lie right in the wild and unpopulated center of the Olympic Peninsula, are one of the few places left on Earth that are still home to hundreds of glaciers. It can’t be certain how true that statement is today, though—as the Earth’s climate warms, glaciers melt, and comparing aerial photos taken from the late 1970s to 2009, researchers found that glacier surface area in the Olympic Mountains decreased by almost a third. Anderson Glacier—one of the only glaciers in the park accessible by trail—is one-tenth of the size it was in 1927. Mountains of ice that have shaped the Olympic Mountains for thousands of years are disappearing in mere decades, and bears, elk, cougars, steelhead and salmon—every living thing down to the tiny ice worms found only in glacial ice—are suffering as a result. ↩︎