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atamascolily · 5 years ago

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lily liveblogs “terminator: dark fate”, part 2

“It’s raining men (and women)”.... hallelujah? Or not, as the case may be.

(For those just joining us, part one is here)

I was kinda hoping they would run the credits after the title, but I guess filmmakers... don't do that anymore, because we all have short attention spans these days?? Some of that is George Lucas's fault, I know, but tbh I kinda enjoy the creative ways in which filmmakers USED that space occupied by the opening credits... like how The Karate Kid uses it for Daniel and Lucille's road trip between Jersey and California, how it establishes how many friends Daniel had, the importance of his bike, and the whole "putting the car in neutral" and rolling it to get the engine going AND the motif/promise of the pool... all in a minute or two. Magical. I kinda miss that compared to earlier films.

Anyway, highway at night in what the screen tells me is Mexico City 22 years later. Okay, then. There's ice... and then lightning crackling on the road edge, which can only mean one thing -- a visitor from the future!!

There's a woman making out with her boyfriend underneath the highway, and she says "Oh, my god," and the boyfriend thinks it's all his doing, LOL. Sorry, dude, not today.

THE SPHERE IS IN THE MIDDLE OF THE HIGHWAY OVERPASS, HOLY FUCK, WHO SET THOSE COORDINATES?? It's a good thing the spheres destroy everything around them, or else this movie would be very, very short.

As it is, Grace falls naked from a great height, banging on supports as she goes down. Ow. Great way of showing she's not quite human.

Of course the watching girl goes over to help while her boyfriend sits there slack-jawed until she shames him into going along. They pick her up and carry her towards their car, only for the police to show up and demand to know what's going on. They think that they're drug dealers (?) and don't believe that she fell from a bridge.

"I love it when it rains naked ladies," says the cop, which is movie-speak for, "I'm an asshole about to get my ass kicked and the audience is going to cheer while it happens".

He grabs her, and Grace sees his gun, and goes for it. Yup, he's down. She's got some sort of augmented vision like the Terminator though anyone who's seen the trailer knows already she's on the side of good.

Grace takes out all the cops completely naked, and I love how this scene is filmed because it's so not focused on anything sexual and it's not sexualized at all, at least for the male gaze that I can tell. It's just... a naked woman kicking ass without obsessing over the fact that she's naked, and it's so goddamn refreshing.

The boyfriend thinks she's amazing. His girlfriend walks over and hugs him. Grace strides up to him and compares her bare foot to his boot. "Don't thank me yet," she says in a deadpan.

Cut to Grace wearing his clothes driving away in his car as the boyfriend stands around in his boxers and yells for her to go to hell. And I like this because it's so much more effective this way to leave the details in the reader's head and show us the results. The girlfriend steers him away, and he starts blaming her, for getting them involved in the first place. Fuck you, dude. I hope she dumps him that night, too.

Cut to Dani in the street somewhere, carrying flowers and chatting with a tamale vendor. We learn from this that she always has flowers -- an association with life and spirit, and not letting the grind get you down. I approve.

Dani has a brother, Diego, who wants to be a pop star, and a father whom she reminds to go to the doctor. Caretaker of the family! Of course they have a dog, named Taco. I'm sure this will be relevant later. I hope Taco survives. Diego tries to chat up a neighbor named Julia, and I'm sure this will all end tragically. I hope she survives.

Dani and Diego leave just in time... for another naked person to drop from the sky in a glowing electric sphere! What are the odd??!

Okay, I don't remember the spheres forming ice in previous films, but it's a cool detail that it makes all the laundry on the lines freeze and shatter... so it's gotta be SUPER COLD. Like, liquid-nitrogen levels of cold.

Like Grace's sphere, this one drops its inhabitant off in mid-air, but the Terminator is able to do a beautiful leap and land on his feet like a cat. He looks like a marble sculpture here - beautiful, smooth, polished, muscled grace. Hot damn. There is absolutely no emotion on his face as he stands up, and even without the music cues, you know right away something is wrong.

There's a woman staring at him when he turns around. And now he looks friendly... earnest, helpful. "Good morning," he says in Spanish as he reaches out to touch the jacket she has in her hand, and it spills up out of his skin HOLY FUCK THAT IS CREEPY AND AMAZING at the same time.

The woman FREAKS OUT and he SMILES at her ever so slightly, and--

Cut to a busy city street. Unlike the highway where Grace appeared, this in the middle of the city, with lots of apartment buildings and traffic. Dani and Diego are on a bus.

Cut to Dani's father answering a knock on the door while Taco the dog barks hysterically. I know, I know, I'm so sorry, Taco. There's the Terminator, and he's so charming and earnest in his plaid jacket, looking for Dani. He claims to be a friend. Her father is shocked. "That's strange. Her friends call her Dani..."

"Dani?" repeats the Terminator. "Yes, of course." AND HE SMILES... fuck. A TERMINATOR THAT CAN MIMIC HUMAN FACIAL EXPRESSIONS AND SHOW EMOTIONS I AM NOT PREPARED FOR THIS.

(but it actually makes PERFECT SENSE for reasons that will be explained later [kinda] in the film!!!!)

Cut to a factory. Arius Motors. Dani and Diego going in to work as cars swing by on the line. There are robot arms and it's all very timely and metaphorical. Somebody goes by on a bicycle INSIDE THE FACTORY and I have no idea how that works, but okay.

Diego's station has been replaced by "a new guy,"--an orange robot arm. Dani asks the supervisor what's going on and he says, "The future," and the manager wants to see Diego in his office. Dani goes in his place, the supervisor says no, Dani pulls out her hair tie, and goes anyway. THIS IS WHY SHE'S THE LEADER OF THE MOTHERFUCKING RESISTANCE, Y'ALL, she’s ALREADY taking no shit from robots.

Dani's father shows up at the factory claiming his kids forgot their lunch and can he come in? Poor dad is definitely dead. I hope Taco at least survived, but I doubt it. Meanwhile Grace is approaching and just leaps over the turnstile like it's no big deal and I LOVE IT. Then she follows a security guard into a corner and mugs him for his uniform and it's all so goddamn quick.

The security guard tells "Dad" that he can't come in without a helmet and vest, which is bullshit, because most of the employees don't wear them, but whatever. Grace keeps walking. How the fuck did she dress so fast, but she looks great. She's got a jacket awkwardly covering her gun, and it's not subtle, but no one seems to notice.

Dani is arguing with the boss, who is... American? At least he's speaking English. She's trying to keep her brother's job, but he's all "well, he's not as good as you are," and Dani is Not Having It. She threatens to tell them that machines are coming for ALL the jobs, and god, I love her so much because EVEN WITHOUT TERMINATORS MESSING UP HER LIFE, SHE WAS GONNA GO PLACES.

"Dad" goes to Dani's station and she isn't there, but he talks to Diego. (I don't know how he knows so much, but I'm sure it wasn't pretty.) The Terminator makes that lame excuse about bringing lunches, and Diego is confused, because Dani already took care of that--

Then Dani shows up and the lunch morphs into a gun, and I'm not sure how they did that, because wasn't the morphing stuff not supposed to MAKE GUNS--ok, maybe he took the security guard's gun and morphed the lunch OVER it as a cover with his polyalloy bits--but FUCK this dude is SCARY--and points the gun at Dani as she and Diego stare--only to have his head blown open as Grace fires.

Grace keeps shooting as Dani screams, and grabs Dani before she can get to "Dad". Grace is way better at explaining things than Kyle Reese: "That is NOT your father. That was a machine that sent here to kill you. " It helps that the Terminator has lots of metal bits exposed at this point, and rapidly shifting back to normal. Come with me or you're dead in the next thirty seconds!"

Dani doesn't buy this, but she runs as Grace shepherds both her and Diego away.

And that back arch as the Terminator sits up and regenerates back to his "original" persona--which, I'll note, he DIDN't steal from anyone in our present; it was the one he came with UNLIKE the T-1000 in T2--and it's scary as hell. And even watching him run, and leap--it's not human. It's a predator disguised in human form. Well done, filmmakers.

I like how they show Grace's augmented senses here, and how she has the extra warning to shove Dani and Diego out of the way when the Terminator goes flying for her. He slices her cap off with arms that are suddenly sword-knives, and she swings a mallet at him, knocking him flat--and flinging him into a wall when she hits him again. She is really fucking strong, and I've never seen a woman be this strong before and it's AMAZING.

She hits him on the head over and over again, and then he starts crawling up the mallet towards her and it's so creepy HOLY FUCK and then he sends her sprawling and pops the mallet back out of his head OH MY GOD.

Grace starts using a piece of car siding as shield because she lost her weapon, keeping herself between the Terminator and Dani at all times.

Diego crushes him with a machine--I SEE WHAT YOU DID THERE, FILMMAKERS, NICE CALLBACK. Unfortunately, it doesn't take, but it does give them some breathing room. Meanwhile, Grace is tired and out of breath, and visibly overheating. The perfect time to introduce herself to Dani!

Grace explains the situation on the run, and throws Diego into the truck they steal outside when he hesitates. I gotta hand it to her, she's doing this whole thing pretty well.

Diego sees her arm. "Are you a machine too?" "No I'm human, like you!" They don't believe her. "No, I'm augmented." THIS IS GOING TO BE A THEME, OH MY GOD. More on this later. Grace can argue with them AND hotwire the truck at the same time. #goals.

They bust out of the factory. The police immediately go after them, not sure how that worked, and Grace says "Oh, shit," seconds before the Terminator (now revealed as the Rev-9) busts through the wall with a truck and a... snowplow? I guess it's for moving stone and metal bits around the factory? Whatever. It's a lot. The police cars go flying.

Somehow Grace manages to drive AND explain backstory at the same time, which I admire, because I can barely talk and drive at the same time.

There's a lot of civilian casualties, mostly due to the Rev-9 snowplowing everything. They end up going backwards up the highway off-ramp and onto the highway. The Rev-9 busts through more things and loses the snowplow. It's a bad day to be driving in Mexico City, let's just say that much.

Grace gets the first "FUCK!" of the movie, as the check engine light of the truck comes on, so Dani gets to drive while Grace makes improvised weapons out of rebar. Oh, wait, Dani can't drive, so Diego gets to do it. (Hahaha, I guess Dani's going to learn how to drive soon because METAPHOR)

Graces eases off her jacket so she can blow off steam and leaps into the back of the truck, yelling for Dani to put her seatbelt on OH MY GOD THIS MOVIE. I love it.

She targets the Rev-9 and throws. He doesn't even flinch at the first one and catches the second one. She stabs him several times through and then he grabs the rebar and moves the polymetallic alloy portion of himself onto the front of the truck while the metallic Terminator skeleton drives.

[COMBINING THOSE TWO PARTS IS REALLY CREEPY AND ALSO THE BEST DECISION THEY COULD HAVE MADE 10/10 APPROVED]

It looks like the skeleton is laughing at Grace, but I think that's just his resting bitch face, lol.

Grace changes tactics and shoots for the tires. The Rev-9 jumps and throws a rebar back at her and Grace deflects it so it misses Dani. Then the truck is dragging the Rev-9's protoplasm while the other half crashes and Grace has to fend him off. Rev-9 takes this opportunity and slashes at the tires with his sword-hands. Grace kicks him off and he gets run over, but it won't take. Diego crashes the truck as the tire blows and Grace rolls and takes a bad fall onto the pavement. The Rev-9's skeleton crawls out of the flames.

DANI WORE HER SEATBELT SO SHE'S FINE WHILE DIEGO DIDN'T AND IS INJURED OH MY GOD THIS MOVIE THE DETAILS FUUUUUUCCCKKKK. Like, Grace knew Dani had to wear her seatbelt BECAUSE SHE'S FROM THE FUTURE AND OLDER!DANI TOLD HER TO DO IT! And younger!Dani DID IT! OH my GOD! (either that or they really are just that drift compatible)

Oh, no, Diego has rebar through him, he's not going to survive AAAAAAAAH no whhhhhhyyyyy

Meanwhile, some poor motorist tries to help the Rev-9 and is murdered for his troubles. sigh.

Grace has to pull Dani over the body of her dying brother seconds before the Rev-9 smashes into the car and everything explodes in fire. Dani tries to run to Diego and Grace holds her back. Grace makes Dani run.

All of the Rev-9's protoplasm is oozing back towards the skeleton in liquid dark smears on the ground and it's so creepy FUUUUCCKKKK

Oh god HE WALKS THROUGH THE METAL HIGHWAY GUARD LIKE IT'S NO BIG DEAL HOW CREEPY CAN YOU GET FUUUUCCKKK

And then the skeleton starts throwing rebar at them from the other SIDE fuuuuckk. this movie so isn't subtle, because there's the machine part and the human-looking part, and they're both working together as one, and this is a METAPHOR, we're meant to see the Rev-9 and Grace as FOILS to each other AAHHHHHH and the Rev-9 is also a SYMBOL OF WHAT HUMANITY CAN BECOME IF IT MELDS WITH AI, AHHHHHHH

Can I just note here that the skeleton part DOES NOT HAVE A ROUND HEAD THERE IS IN FACT A GAP WHERE ITS BRAIN SHOULD BE AAAAAAA

"When they start to kill me, run," Grace says to Dani. But... AN SUV pulls up, knocks the skeleton flat on its ass as the human part of the REV-9 just stares in dull, placid confusion.

next up: my fave returns!

#terminator #terminator: dark fate

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cohesionarts · 8 years ago

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This just in from Cohesion Arts

New Post has been published on http://cohesionarts.com/2017/01/02/whered-paul-go/

Where'd Paul Go??

I can’t really know if anybody besides me has been asking that question, but if you’re one of the regulars around here (the numbers may not be legion, but I know they are sincere…) you may have been wondering why the frequency of posts to this site dropped off dramatically in the second half of last year (2016).

At least, I hope somebody noticed, and even if nobody did notice, I’m going to attempt to explain the absence.

So, where did Paul go?

He sorta went into hiding for awhile. His innate tendency to be reclusive and withdrawn when things “go all pear-shaped” got the better of him for several months.

Or, rather, maybe, he just had the wind kicked out of him, and he’s been trying to catch his breath.

Or maybe he’s been thrown into the middle of a lake and is treading water, trying to figure which shore to swim to.

Yeah, that’s it. Treading water.

Chalk it all up to disruption on a personally cosmic scale.

– – – – – – –

I remember exactly when the fabric of my universe started to tear: April 29, 2016.

Ann and I were in Portland, Oregon. She got back in the car and said,

“They want me to start August 1st.”

At that moment, the Big Bang Theory went into full reverse and my Universe started to implode….

We were in Portland to visit “the kids” – that would be Ann’s two sons, James and Robert (they are by no means “kids” – I can never remember their exact ages but it’s somewhere in the vicinity of 40 years old), her daughter-in-law – Robert’s wife, Melissa – and, more notably, Robert and Melissa’s baby daughter, Ann’s first – and quite possibly her only – grandchild, Juniper Rae.

Juniper Rae

We’d gone to Portland ostensibly for Juniper’s first birthday. She was born in May of 2015, and we’d both flown up to Portland for that; Ann had gotten there within hours of the baby’s arrival, I followed a week later. Photos here.

Now we were back for the first birthday, and Major Changes were afoot. They’d started in earnest the previously fall, but really the fuse started burning toward an inexorable explosion as soon as Melissa’s pregnancy was announced back in the summer of 2014.

The fuse started burning with that announcement, but the first cherry bomb didn’t go off until a year later, when Ann let me know that sooner or later she was moving to Oregon. And that I could come… if I wanted. It was all about being a grandparent. Which concept I might not have been sufficiently enthusiastic about, owing in part perhaps to the fact that I’d never met the prerequisite of being an actual parent myself.

“I’m going to find a job and I might just pack up and move,” she said, back in November of 2015. “If you’d like to come with me that’s great. If you don’t, that’s fine, too.”

Juniper was about 6 months old when Ann threw down that gauntlet.

Now here we were in Portland roughly another six months later, and the prophecy was coming true.

Prior to flying out to Portland for Juni’s birthday, Ann had started making… arrangements. Ann is a nurse, and for the past nearly two decades she has worked for a multinational corporation, a health care company that has offices and clinics all over the country. Prior to our trip to Portland, she started scanning the company’s bulletin boards to see what sort of opportunities she could find in the Portland area.

Sure enough, there was a new clinic opening in a Portland suburb, and Ann arranged an interview.

We flew to Portland on Thursday, April 28. The next morning I dropped her off for her interview and went off to a Starbucks nearby. She sent me a text when the interview was over, I went back to pick her up, she got back in the car and said “they want me to start on August 1.”

Cue the Big Bang Theory, only set it in reverse….

I have lived in Nashville (OK, I’m technically in Pegram, in the next county over, but who’s counting?) since February, 1994. It’ll be 23 years I’ve lived here come next Valentines Day.

That’s more than twice as long as I’ve lived anywhere in my whole life. When I was a kid I lived in Rumson, New Jersey, from age 0 until I was almost 12, when my mother and (new) step father moved us to a suburb in New Jersey that was closer to his office in New York. I also lived in Hawaii from 1980 until 1994, though the last two years of that residency was spent mostly in Los Angeles, going back and forth to Maui.

(Insert obscure Pop Culture reference here:

They even brought a neon sign!

In Hawaii, I lived near a line in an Eagles song:

You can leave it all behind and sail to Lahaina Just like the missionaries did so many years ago They even brought a neon sign ‘Jesus is Coming’, Brought the white man’s burden down, brought the white man’s reign

Yeah, that’s what I did in 1980. And I drove by that neon sign almost every day.)

So by any calculus, I’ve lived here in Middle Tennessee longer than I’ve lived anywhere. When people ask me “where you from” I will make a big deal about being from ‘Springsteen Country – Monmouth County, New Jersey.” But then I will tell them, “but I’ve lived in Nashville longer than I’ve lived anywhere, so I’m from here now….”

At the time Ann was living in Austin. We’d met at a music festival in Texas the previous spring, and we maintained a “long distance relationship” until January of 1998, when she pulled up stakes and moved to Tennessee – to be with me.

Her nursing career had begun only a couple of years before. She was divorced (twice, but we don’t have to go into the second one) from the father of her two sons, who were in their early 20s and living with her and doing to school in Austin. When she decided to move to Nashville, she set ‘the boys’ out on their own and put her house up for rent. Then she put everything she owned in a U-Haul and with a friend made the trek from Texas to Tennessee.

The apartment I was living in at the time was tiny, and mostly filled with the CDs for songs.com – the online music service I’d started two years earlier. So Ann got her own apartment in the same complex where I lived in Bellevue, and for the next 18 months or so, we “lived together in separate apartments…”

In the spring of 1999 we bought a house together. When I’d first come to Nashville in 1994 real estate was still quite affordable, but by the time we started looking around in 1999 prices within Nashville / Davidson County were already inflating out of reach (never mind how much farther they’ve gotten out of reach since). So we found a charming little ‘ersatz Cape Cod’ on an acre of land on a quiet cul-de-sac in Pegram, one exit off I-40 west of the last exit in Davidson County.

We put both or our names on the deed, and moved in together in May of 1999.

I sold that Internet music business later that year. At the very peak of the Internet Bubble Gaylord Entertainment came knocking and offered us stupid money for a tiny business. My partners (Tom Kimmel and Michael Camp) and I pondered the proposition for about 15 seconds and said “OK.” We closed the deal in December ’99, and the first call I made after banking the proceeds was to the bank that held our mortgage, which I paid off.

Perhaps due to some family history (my father died when I was 7), I’ve never been one for making or pursuing goals in life. But the one dream/fantasy/goal I’d ever had as to live in a paid-for house. I notched that one at the end of 1999. By the time that happened, Ann and I had already been living there for about six months.

Ann and I got married in September, 2000. We went on a two-week honeymoon to England and Germany. We got rained on at Ludlow Castle in the Cotswolds, and went through crazy King Ludwig II’s Fantasyland Castle in Bavaria. Then we returned to hour shared house in Pegram and settled in “for the duration.”

Once again proving that “everything is permanent… for as long as it lasts.”

Here is where, in the first draft of this reminiscence, I started to go into some detail about how Ann and I had moved in to the house together and the considerable (and costly!) improvements we made over the years. How the deal with Gaylord Entertainment went south within a year, and how I’ve been trying to figure out what I’m going to do when I grow up ever since.

How I went into a form of hiding in the days and weeks after Ann departed.

But that’s all a lot more detail than I need to go into for the purposes of this testimonial. Maybe another time…

Instead, we return to Portland in April and May. Ann and I stayed there about a week. Juni had her first birthday party, attended by children and their parents from Rob and Melissa’s community of friends. I took pictures.

And the wheels started turning toward Ann’s departure. I say “Ann’s departure” because from the moment she got back in the car, it was obvious that she was moving to Portland… and I was not. At least, not yet….

We came back to Nashville, and almost immediately, Ann started pulling things together and packing things up. Over the ensuing several weeks, things that we had shared for years started disappearing. Things like the steak knives we’d used since 1999. She stopped feeding the birds in the backyard. It was always little things, but it was little things that added up to a big thing.

If you’ve read this far, I think you get the gist.

Ann packed up her Subaru SUV and drove off with her friend Evelyn (Thelma and Louise!!) and left for Portland on July 20.

http://cohesionarts.com/art/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/IMG_0805-1.m4v

Amid all the other cosmic/global upheavals of the past 12 months, I have been going through my own fundamental disruption and realignment.

I have been to Portland three times in the 5-1/2 months since Ann moved there. She has yet to visit Nashville.

And I have been, for the most part, creatively inert. I haven’t written much, I haven’t taken any pictures, I haven’t played much guitar. I’ve posted only a few things to this blog, and there hasn’t been a “Weekly Digest” since the week before the election. What little output I have made has been pretty much confined to Facebook – which lends it self to short, quick, snarky diatribes that don’t require a whole lot of actual thought.

Maybe I’ve been quiet because it’s hard to keep creative energy flowing when all the energy you have is just going into riding the waves of an emotional roller coaster, when it takes all your strength to just hold yourself together when it feels like the world around you is falling apart. Like I told my therapist recently, “I’m exhausted.”

For as long as it has been – too long, really – since my business blew up in 2000, I have fully expected that I would find something to do that would spring from my own creative energy. First I wrote a book and got it published. Thinking I’d found my new calling as a “biographer of obscure 20th century scientists” I went on to write another. That turned into six years going down a rabbit hole in which there was no fucking rabbit.

After that, I turned my attention to photography, and even my therapist thought I was “on to something” when I first started creating the “Portals of Stone” from my trip to the UK in the spring of 2013. I started exhibiting at a gallery in the Arcade. I tried to own my identity as “an artist.” But mostly what I got was a first-hand education in how truly difficult that is.

Long and short of it, really nothing I’ve undertaken over the past 15 years has come to fruition anything like that company I started back in 1995. I’ve spent all that time as “an entrepreneur between startups” or “an author between books.” Or a photographer wandering among medieval ruins, looking for continuity in time and space…

But once I was living alone, I finally found a partial answer to the question I’ve been asking myself at 4:00AM every morning for the past 15 years, “what will I do when I grow up?”

I finally broke down and got a real “job.”

For the past four months, I have been working for Apple, at their store in the Green Hills Mall in Nashville, where I am a “product specialist.” It’s a glorified title for a retail salesperson, but I rather like the work and I seem well-suited for it.

I really have prided myself, over the course of my life generally, but of the past decade-and-half specifically, for never having worked for any giant corporations. The two previous exceptions where a brief stint as a securities peddler for the Maui branch of a Wall Street brokerage, and then my 10 months as an ‘executive’ for Gaylord Entertainment.

Neither of those situations was a particularly good fit. The Wall Street thing dissolved when I decided instead to go to Los Angeles and study music. At Gaylord, I was “the New York Jewish bull in Gaylord’s Southern Christian China shop.”

But as giant corporations go, Apple is a good one – at least from the perspective of a rank-and-file employee at one of their retail stores. The environment is stimulating and supportive; the hours are flexible and predicated as much on my own schedule as theirs. Since I get to spend the hours there talking about products that I use personally, that I know almost inside and out, it’s just the most natural fit I was ever going to find. And given what else was going on in my life when I applied for the job, I am grateful that they looked at my resume (…”What, you haven’t really had a job for 15 years?…) and said “OK.”

So for the past few months, I have been spending most of my waking hours seeking an unexpected refuge in the form of a conventional “day job” that I actually look forward to going to every day. As challenging as some of the customer interactions can be sometimes (“…Whaddya mean you don’t know your password��???”), it’s always a bit of a let down when it’s time to leave. And I really like the person I turn into when I go out on the floor.

So a lot of my time and energy over the past 4 months has gone into adapting to a very different reality from everything that went before.

– – – – –

Earlier today I opened WordPress for the first time in weeks (months?) and posted two items. And I’ve been writing this gem all day. It’s literally the first time I have spent a whole day in my own creative space in several months.

So maybe there is something to this “dawning of a new year” business, even if it does mean that Donald-Fucking-Trump is going to be President for the next four years (or until we nuclear-annihilate ourselves, which ever comes first).

It feels like the fog is lifting. That maybe there’s some light at the end of this tunnel, though I suspect there could be more tunnel before I actually get to the light.

This will do for now.

But that’s where Paul went.

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cohesionarts · 8 years ago

Text

This just in from Cohesion Arts

New Post has been published on http://cohesionarts.com/2017/01/02/whered-paul-go/

Where'd Paul Go??

I can’t really know if anybody besides me has been asking that question, but if you’re one of the regulars around here (the numbers may not be legion, but the affection is sincere…) you may have been wondering why the frequency of posts to this site dropped off dramatically in the second half of last year (2016).

At least, I hope somebody noticed, and even if nobody did notice, I’m going to attempt to explain the absence.

So, where did Paul go?

He sorta went into hiding for awhile. His innate tendency to be reclusive and withdrawn when things “go all pear-shaped” got the better of him for several months.

Or, rather, maybe, he just had the wind kicked out of him, and he’s been trying to catch his breath.

Or maybe he’s been thrown into the middle of a lake and is treading water, trying to figure which shore to swim to.

Yeah, that’s it. Treading water.

Chalk it all up to disruption on a personally cosmic scale.

– – – – – – –

I remember exactly when the fabric of my universe started to tear: April 29, 2016.

Ann and I were in Portland, Oregon. She got back in the car and said,

“They want me to start August 1st.”

At that moment, the Big Bang Theory went into full reverse and my Universe started to implode….

Juniper Rae

The fuse started burning with that announcement, but the first cherry bomb didn’t go off until a year later, when Ann let me know that sooner or later she was moving to Oregon. And that I could come… if I wanted. It was all about being a grandparent. Which concept I might have been insufficiently enthusiastic about, owing in part to never having met the prerequisite of being an actual parent myself.

“I’m going to find a job and I might just pack up and move,” she said, back in November of 2015. “If you’d like to come with me that’s great. If you don’t, that’s fine, too.”

Juniper was about 6 months old when Ann threw down that gauntlet.

Now here we were in Portland six months later, and the prophecy was coming true.

Prior to flying out to Portland for Juni’s birthday, Ann had started making… arrangements. Ann is a nurse, and for the past nearly two decades she has worked for a multinational health care company that has offices and clinics all over the country. Prior to our trip to Portland, she started scanning the company’s bulletin boards to see what sort of opportunities she could find in the Portland area.

Sure enough, there was a new clinic opening in a Portland suburb, and Ann arranged an interview.

Cue the Big Bang Theory, only set it in reverse….

I have lived in Nashville (OK, I’m technically in Pegram, in the next county over, but who’s counting?) since February, 1994. It’ll be 23 years I’ve lived here come next Valentines Day.

(Insert obscure Pop Culture reference here:

They even brought a neon sign!

In Hawaii, I lived near a line in an Eagles song:

Yeah, that’s what I did in 1980. And I drove by that neon sign almost every day.)

So by any calculus, I’ve lived here in Middle Tennessee longer than I’ve lived anywhere. When people ask me “where are you from” I will make a big deal about being from ‘Springsteen Country – Monmouth County, New Jersey.” But then I will tell them, “but I’ve lived in Nashville longer than I’ve lived anywhere, so I’m from here now….”

Her nursing career had begun only a couple of years before. She was divorced (twice, but we don’t have to go into the second one) from the father of her two sons, who were in their early 20s and living with her and going to school in Austin. When she decided to move to Nashville, she set ‘the boys’ out on their own and put her house up for rent. Then she put everything she owned in a U-Haul and with a friend made the trek from Texas to Tennessee.

In the spring of 1999 we bought a house together. When I’d first come to Nashville in 1994, real estate was still quite affordable, but by the time we started looking around in 1999 prices within Nashville / Davidson County were already inflating out of reach (never mind how much farther they’ve gotten out of reach since). So we found a charming little ‘ersatz Cape Cod’ on an acre of land on a quiet cul-de-sac in Pegram, one exit off I-40, west of the last exit in Davidson County.

We put both or our names on the deed, and moved in together in May of 1999.

I went to work as a mid-level executive for Gaylord, still running my old company but now leashed to the prerogatives of young and stupid Corporate Overlords. I watched as the whole thing ground slowly into digital dust.

Ann and I got married in September, 2000 and went on a two-week honeymoon to England and Germany. We got rained on at Ludlow Castle in the Cotswolds, and went through crazy King Ludwig II’s Fantasyland Castle in Bavaria. Then we returned to our shared house in Pegram and settled in “for the duration.”

Once again proving that “everything is permanent… for as long as it lasts.”

Here is where, in the first draft of this reminiscence, I started to go into some detail about how Ann and I had moved in to the house together and the considerable (and costly!) improvements we made over the years. How the deal with Gaylord Entertainment went off the rails the day after we returned from our honeymoon, and how I’ve been trying to figure out what I’m going to do when I grow up ever since.

But that’s all a lot more detail than I need to go into now. Maybe another time…

If you’ve read this far, I think you get the gist.

Ann packed up her Subaru SUV and drove off with her friend Evelyn (Thelma and Louise!!) and left for Portland on July 20.

http://cohesionarts.com/art/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/IMG_0805-1.m4v

And so, amid all the other cosmic/global upheavals of the past 12 months, I have been going through my own fundamental disruption and realignment.

I have been to Portland three times in the 5-1/2 months since Ann moved there. She has yet to visit Nashville.

Long and short of it, nothing I’ve undertaken over the past 15 years has come to fruition anything like that company I started back in 1995. I’ve spent all that time as “an entrepreneur between startups” or “an author between books.” Or a photographer wandering among medieval ruins, looking for continuity in time and space…

But once I was living alone, I finally found a partial answer to the question I’ve been asking myself at 4:00AM every morning for the past 15 years, “what will I do when I grow up?”

I finally broke down and got a “real job.”

Neither of those situations was a particularly good fit. The Wall-Street-in-Hawaii thing dissolved when I decided instead to go to Los Angeles and study music. At Gaylord, I was “the New York Jewish bull in Gaylord’s Southern Christian China shop.”

So for the past few months, I have been spending most of my waking hours finding an unexpected refuge in the form of a conventional “day job” that I actually look forward to going to every day. As challenging as some of the customer interactions can be sometimes (“…Whaddya mean you don’t know your password…???”), it’s always a bit of a let down when it’s time to leave. And I really like the person I turn into when I go out on the floor.

So a lot of my time and energy over the past 4 months has gone into adapting to a very different reality from everything that went before.

Yesterday, I opened WordPress for the first time in weeks (months?) and posted two items. I spent the rest of the day writing this gem. It’s literally the first time I have spent a whole day in my own creative space in several months.

It feels like the fog is lifting. Like I’m finally starting to come out of a self-induced creative coma.

Maybe there’s some light at the end of this tunnel – though I suspect there could be more tunnel before I actually get to the light.

This will do for now.

Anyway, that’s where Paul went.

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