Slumdog jilted

Isn't it ironic? I mean after my previous post, and then after spending much of the day working up arguments against the Obama bashers in the family, who just can't quit. I guess Fox TV just can't quit either. Then this perfected film about the standard projected theme.  Hollywood Bollywood (is that how you spell it?) Schmalliwood. Are they all the same? Are we looking in the mirror here toward our own future, where the slums of Mumbai look so terribly much like the dystopic dreams of our environmentalist avant garde. And the poverty there a cruel caricature of the Bush direction for the grand old homeland?

I simply don't understand which film has made it so big in this country. I think I can't actually touch what everyone else is watching. Is this feelgoodism? Are we so jaded with our own love stories? Surely we have hung back from this extreme such that it had to be made in the land of the outsourced call centers? Did we even outsource our earnest dreams because to be quite this parodic is, like picking crops, beneath us? Or is this film the very opposite to Foster Wallace earnesty, and is it meant to be viewed ironically? Perhaps I'm simply the only one to view it?

Is it brilliant or incredibly crass, or like what happened with Love Story way back when, does someone need to be politely excused from Yale before he embarrasses us all? I genuinely don't know how to watch this film. My daughter loved it, and as I shall when my ticker quits, I remained mum, not wanting to upset anyone. Because I'm probably just out of touch. I wasn't around when this particular style calmed down. Imagine waking up to platform shoes without what led up to them. Or is it just now OK, in political incorrect fashion, to condescend. Or do I have that completely backwards?

Needless to say, though there is much power in the projected "reality" depicted, the plot is pure bombast, no? (OK, so I looked the word up.  I mean I wiki'd it, and find that the fabric referred to -fustian - covers - I mean the irony will never end - jeans.  I guess as in blue jeans. So bombast has to cover aspirations to worker casual turned hot advert for enough money for a trainer? This is way way too cool!). So, is it fustian prose I aspire to? Do people write that shit? I mean using 'fustian', say, under control rather than as a reach for prosodic power just beyond control? I'll bet David Foster Wallace could have. Virtuousity in anything is as close to witness of miracle as I ever need to come. 

I aim for clarity, believe it or not. Virtuousity never was my forte. (that's a funny line right there)

So, the formula is simple enough. You have to come by this love thing honestly, and then you have to value it more than the most extreme kind of life affirmation apart from it, and then if you put them together you just simply pop. Or something. The ever after Jesus thing.

So why, in this land of no parody - I'm talking here about the people that are able, and I'm not one of them, to distinguish Saturday Night Live from televangelism in structural form - . . . I think I've already written, ad nauseum, about my great confusion, when coming off one hermetic episode or another in my extreme youth, upon coming across What Was on Television at the time.  I truly mistook the televangelism for parody, and was bizarrely shocked that Saturday Night Live could do that on TV.  We're talking way back around the time of Archie Bunker, though I could be off by a few decades. I have yet to recover.  Rip Van Winkle shocked is what I'm talking about here.

But hasn't this just simply got to be the end of something? Aren't we finished with the projection of life, and isn't it time for the living? 

I, of course, have moved beyond hope for that one true love, and displace all socializing onto this blog, since what once passed for feelings has become so impacted that it would take the proverbial icepick to move my innards (hence these gaseous emissions).

But there's nobody out there.  Not a single soul that I can touch where it counts. And I don't think that I'm receding within. I'm really really trying to find a way to say this thing, though it may already be past time. I'm not looking for friends here. I have plenty, though I mostly hide from them. (I don't want to be a burden?)

So my silly life's plot is at least as outrageous as any other plot acceptable for projection. I'm holding out. I'm looking for true contact. I need a reader. Just one would do. I'm not trying to be coy. 

Officially speaking, I liked Revolutionary Road much better. But they are at the same historic moment, about the same historic thing. This tragicomic finding of the thing itself when you let go of it. This giving up on the prospect ever to be other than in the audience for life. I stagger out after some kind of Michelangelo Antonioni festival, maybe it was called the Little Carnegie at the time, way back in the 70's, before I ever even sat through Pink Flamingos. Divine. Eat shit. I stagger out (those Antonioni movies were really slow moving) and figure it can't go any further than this. I stagger out, and now just like on the boat way back when, except that I'm burning lots more fossil fuel about it, I just can't get warm. The furnace won't keep up with the huge differential, uninsulated, between inside and out.

This vision of Mumbai's slums a vision of humanity's failure. Of humanity as karmic stiving so that maybe someday someone's child will be delivered into Nirvana.  The same story of technological climbing out of the shit which just might find us loving our brothers and sisters. Some day soon, John Boy.

I don't understand why there needs to be so much evangelization of fear. Why we hope that our secret service secretly breaks the law to protect us from unenlightened zealots. Why we have so little faith in the humanity we already know and understand. 

Humanity is the coming together of man with man for something other than terror, right? Humanity is reaching out from the winner's circle. Humanity is so not about winners and losers. And sadly, purity of soul and spirit will not grant eternal life of the sort left behind when we leave the theater. But that's what people think Jesus was talking about. 

Not!

We are furless, and hearth will warm only when cooperatively clothed and sheltered. We are naked, and our teeth (happily, my broken one which cuts my tongue will be crowned Monday, insurance or no!) don't do so well against living flesh. We were apparently made to be human, no? (another one right there - I watched the redneck comedy thing once)

My own little hydroponic heating system, washing my cells in rusted sea water not so different from the sulferous metalic tasting stuff I now can handpump so gridfree from my well, still pumps out heat to my extremities. And my lonely mind does reach out across skinned and skinless boundaries. A little bit educated. (A little bit redundant.) A little bit capable with the indrawn syllables of conspiring humanity. And very much certain that eternal life is that which transcends the innering of thought and feeling made possible only by definition of my personal limits of life span and skin which defines me as only me. Eternal life is just the love which powers this self thing beyond itself. I think there is nothing so trivial.

But the moment is now. Eternally.

Oh dear, this is not profound at all.