Staccato Thoughts # 1

At work my brain tends to wander then fixate in a weird meditative loop on certain almost random things. I suspect they are things that have subtle, interesting, elusive psychological currents running beneath that my mind works to untangle. Lately at work I've been spending lots of time sculpting/reconstructing a huge intricate Mayan frieze, and I find my mind will fixate on a theme or scene from a film or lyrics to a song and I'll just churn it over in my brain for hours. Usually they are things I haven't seen or thought about in years, but suddenly present themselves center stage in my thoughts while I work. I thought I should start keeping track of those thoughts to see if when collected in mass there is any design or pattern in them. Of course this is of no interest to anyone other than myself, but I have always viewed my blog as a personal archive of the things I would want to look back on in the years ahead. So if you're misguided enough to be reading this as a form of entertainment, then I'm sorry for all the neurotic nonsense you have to endure.



First I kept finding myself thinking about certain scenes from Indecent Proposal. I saw the film once many years ago and didn't especially care for it, but I kept thinking about the lawyer character from it and how we are introduced to his ruthlessness. First when he fields the call about the proposal in front of clients who are looking for an especially cut throat lawyer. Also later when Robert Redford admires his thoroughness in having the heart attack stipulation in the sex contract, and again later when he suddenly becomes interested in Woody Harrelson's regrets when he senses he can get Woody's money and suddenly leaps off the treadmill. Why am I so invested in this character? I have no idea. But I thought about him for at least a couple hours.

These beautiful Fever Ray lyrics haunted my mind:

Dangling feet from window frame
will I ever ever reach the floor?
More, give me more, give me more
Crushed and filled with all I found
underneath and inside just to come around
More, give me more, give me more

I kept thinking about this I Love Lucy episode where the gang goes to France and everybody buys the same painting from a conman artist for each other. Of course much hilarity ensues when they all reveal their presents later.

I thought for a while about the scene in Kill Bill where Uma Thermon's character isn't ninja enough to get that one guy and he stops her from fighting him by asking if she wants to be buried with a knife (or was it a flashlight?). There was something oddly respectful about that, and interesting in the psychology in how that got her to stop resisting him.

Got fixated on the Elliot Smith lyrics:

"You got a look in your eye when you're saying goodbye like you want to say hi"

Imagined a showdown conversation with a woman from my nearish past who did me wrong. I almost never berate people because nine times out of ten I regret it later. Unlike when I say something nice about someone, and I usually feel good about it later. Still in my mind I imagined what I would say to her if I gave voice to my frustrations:

I have just enough sympathy left for you to feel bad that your good looks are probably going to ruin your life
it seems you've decided to learn from them that there is no accountability and that you can take whatever you want from whomever has it
but though the ripples seem benign and you're sailing safely water tight and buoyed
at some point probably in the far future you'll look back and realize you payed for those short term gains at far too high a price
and those ripples returned as waves that smashed and splintered you leaving the resounding crash of thunder in your ears
...but maybe it won't.
Maybe the universe doesn't keep as tight a spreadsheet as I think
and you can slip through unharmed and never earn what you get or get what you deserve.
I wonder which will be worse for you?


More Elliot Smith lyrics:

everybody knows
everybody knows
you only live a day
but it's brilliant anyway

Flaming Lips Lyrics:

one more robot want's to be
something more than a machine