Blazingly Strange

Last night, we began watching a 2007 film that I think I watched when it first came out; No Country for Old Men. It’s the sort of gritty film the Coen brothers are known for and the kind of film that, according to Wikipedia, “revisits the themes of fate, conscience, and circumstance” that I find so intriguing. I had been thinking for days about finding and watching the film, but we stopped watching in mid-film last night because I was not feeling well. We’ll finish it tonight…soon, anyway. And I might look for opportunities to stream some other Coen brothers films, like Blood Simple, Fargo, and Miller’s Crossing. Maybe I just need a break from a steady diet of Scandinavian Nordic noir films, though the departure from one genre to the other is not especially wide.

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If I were considerably younger, I might invest my youthful energy in promoting and supporting a rebellion against what is now clearly a fascist dictatorship fueled by a narcissistic cult of power-hungry sociopaths and psychopaths. Sadly, though, my youth is long gone. Left to me now are just rage, righteous cunning, and little left to lose. Those attributes blossom late in one’s life when the wisdom of experience confronts the opportunity to do battle with injustice and cruelty. Old age may rob a person of the ability to engage in hand-to-hand revolt, but it provides a planning platform that might be employed to vanquish authoritarian despotism. There is little realistic hope that the actions or leadership of just one person, though, could pave the way for triumph. A large-scale elder resistance, committed to victory at all costs, would be necessary to offer suggestions about strategies and to encourage and support action by a youthful insurgency. Perhaps an existing organization might form a secret division, devoted to defiance? The Grey Berets?

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A few years ago, I met a guy who told me he wanted to write some fiction, based loosely on his experiences as an architect, based in Japan, for an international hotel company. He and I talked several times about writing, but as far as I know he never delved into it the way I hoped he would. The stories he told about his experiences in Japan fascinated me. If memory serves me, I think he had met his ex-wife while living in Japan. I met him when he joined his sister as part of a group in which I participated that regularly attended a local wine dinner. He and I had a fair amount in common and I looked forward to getting to know him better and to discussing writing with him. Unfortunately, during a routine colonoscopy his colon was punctured; he landed in the hospital for quite a while as a result. During that hospital stay, he experienced problems with pulmonary fibrosis; the problems stayed with him and grew far worse after he was discharged. I saw him only once or twice after his hospital discharge; he died several months later. My limited interactions with Paul were among hundreds I have had with various people over the years that could serve as the springboard for fiction stories. A story that grows out of my brief exposure to Paul might feature an American architect who moves to Japan and becomes enamored with Japanese cuisine. Another story, based on a married woman with whom I worked while I lived in Chicago, could focus on her (whose name escapes me) traumatic experiences dealing with a diagnosis of breast cancer at the same time she began a series of affairs with married men. For reasons unknown, she confided in me about her dalliances. I moved away from Chicago before breast cancer claimed her life a year or so later. Yet another character could be based on a woman who tries to hide her low self-esteem by adopting the offensive persona of a non-stop braggard whose behavior suggests her contempt for almost everyone around her…who she considers to be less intelligent and far less interesting than she perceives herself to be. Her name, by the way, is Veronika. All of these modified real-life characters could launch many more fictional people. If I follow my usual path in writing about them, though, I will not reveal much about any of them; broad and shallow is, unfortunately, my style…a river two miles wide and two inches deep.

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Kung-Fu Watkins collected a salary from Bayview County, which employed him as a 911 operator. In his spare time, Kung-Fu volunteered at a rescue center for abandoned standard poodles. When not working or volunteering, he either slept, watched silent movies, or drank shots of jagermeister at the Pliant Steel Bar. Kung-Fu’s wife, Madelaine Patel, had spent sixteen years as a flight attendant for Cloud’s Edge Airlines before she was dismissed for “erratic behavior” in an airport restaurant in Berlin. Though the “erratic behavior” was not specified, it was widely assumed to have involved what a patron had captured on a video camera: Madelaine, stark naked at the restaurant’s hostess stand while slurring the words to Everybody Knows. After that incident, she found a part-time job as a housecleaner for the Throbbing Thrills Motel and Lounge, a licensed pleasure palace on property owned by the Bayview County Country Club. Both Kung-Fu’s and Madelaine’s brief and pointless lives came to a meaningless end on that bright and sunny afternoon when the Bayview County Emergency Services Director accidentally triggered a nuclear explosion that vaporized the county.