Personal Potpourri

I* have to pick a friend up at the airport today around 11:30 AM. I made the mistake of drinking too much cinnamon flavored coffee in the late hours and could not get any sleep. Since I’ve been trying to shape up in the past few months I wanted to get up early enough to exercise before leaving to pick up my friend. I knew that this would be a night of some pained sleep as it is just starting to get warm and my body abhors heat. So I opted to put the caffeine (e before I on that one) to good use and decided to exercise around 5:15 this morning. I found VAST to be quite good music as it has chanting and the angry industrial peace of mind that welcomes the day quite well.
As I mentioned above I recently began a scheme of eating and exercise geared towards helping me deal with hot environments (a most inconvenient problem these days). That is to say I wish to lose some fat and so far so good. I’ve noticed that exercising has become a fun thing for me as long as I have plenty of good music to listen to I don’t mind an hour of “jumping about” in the basement and the portability of these new players is quite convenient. Some good music I’ve been listening to has been Boards of Canada, Plaid, Depeche Mode (I liked their new one on the 2nd listen), and some assortment of New Wave and IDM.
In this “jumping about” I suffer one paranoia, not too bad considering how neurotic I am. About a year ago when I was in somewhat “less good” shape I found that after an day of exercise my left testicle had a dull ache. Thinking (hoping that is err . . . Praying at one point (sort of I would not consider myself a religious person but I am no atheist either; I don’t do faith and either position requires it) okay so not praying) that it would pass I payed it no mind. Anywho it went on for a week and after a sleepless night filled with the continued dull ache and fears of testicular torsion, see: episode 9 of The Venture Brothers , or Cancer (all the while being quite ashamed of myself since being a pre-med at one point I should have a greater immunity towards hypochondria but when it’s my boyz . . .) I went to see my doctor. I told her my story in a nutshell (I thought it was funny after a sleepless night kind of like it’s funny again after a sleepless night) and she could not find anything (palpation was not fun. When I get convicted of a thought crime and they take me off to room 101 they will go straight for the nuts) obvious. Her conclusion was that I must have gotten some kind of infection. I got antibiotics and that seemed to solve the problem. So spontaneous infection caused by who knows what ? This is what a neurotic OCD case like me likes; an inexplicable pain that might have been cured by the placebo effect. So cut to a few weeks ago after having just dropped my friend off at the airport (this was the last time he went down to LA to visit friends and explore some MySpace romance, this is his second trip, for the same reasons, who knows maybe he’s found a love connection) I went to get myself a new belt since I had gone down the appropriate amount of weight to require one. I get the new belt and when I get home as I go to take off the little plastic label my clumsy ass allows the stiff new belt to thwap (yeah funny colorful letters shot out like it was Batman) me with the buckle right . . . you guessed it on the left testicle. This was all I needed to enter a near catatonic state for about 15 minutes (not from the pain mind you that wasn’t too bad but from the terror I guess I now have a full blown phobia). Okay so it’s been weeks since this event and no real problem. It’s an occasional thing a few minutes of the dull ache like a friendly reminder. But of what? I like my “jumping around” and I would hate to have to quit that. Maybe I need to get off more often but I find that much like Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull this act depletes me of the testosterone that is vital for me to muster the violence of spirit to exercise. So what then? It is common sense that we fuck to ensure the survival of the species (I’ve always outsourced the survival of the species to other people) I find it an 11 on the irony scale if I need to fuck to ensure the survival of me and my paranoid mind seems a bit stuck on that one (wishful thinking yeah right). Masturbation should handle this I guess but that would still result in this end of violence that I need, to get back into shape. And hell self improvement is masturbation right?

Still this is quite an aporiome (my word of the day which I’m of course using in jest). Perhaps the cure is one of those mates that people are always yammering about? I don’t know last week it was nice out here and I was alone at the family compound so I put on some Bossa Nova, Nicola Conte, and basked in the heavenly sunshine. This was all well and good and it was one of the few days that was truly able to relax in kind of awhile (sort of like how most jokes are a chuckle and very few are the more profound and enjoyable crack up). I could not help but feel that this greatness would be nicer if I had someone to share it with. Now the Existentialist in me knows that “hell is other people” and so I got over this romantic notion right quickly and proceeded to relax but still for a few moments I was hit by the cliche of lonesomeness. Who knows maybe the cure for my physical pain is the inane/innante distraction of other people. Now if my science background tells me anything helpful in this area it would say that the kind of mate that will be enticed by me should like my stink and after just finishing exercising, I can say that this stink most closely matches that of warm relish like the kind on a hotdog at a baseball game or carnivale. Perhaps I will remain alone forever; not self pity callback/segue.
Speaking of masturbation. I was watching Seasame Street which is a sublime program. The letter of the day was “M” so Maya Angelou was talking with Elmo about all sorts of “M” words like mangoes (which can improve sexual performance like in that Seinfeld episode). I think much of my nostalgic feelings were initially inspired during my formative years while watching Seasame Street and Mr Roger’s Neighborhood. The little bits where they would show a person building something or baking a cake set to jazz no doubt are reasons for why I enjoy listening to jazz and baking cakes. I’m still not sure why I like movies so much beyond the childhood joy of spectacle that is still with me.
Speaking of movies I just watched a few and here’s what I thought of them:
Prozac Nation– based on a book by some music journalist I thought I might find some guilty ammusement in this story bu
t it was sort of a one note thing that got boring and concluded too cleanly.
X-Men 3: The Last Stand – how about no stand. If you don’t have a good story that continues the cool stories of the comic rather than just killing people off (lame . . . super-lame) so as to focus on the “stars” then don’t make a movie. I’m not gonna jump on the hate Brett Ratner bandwagon, he’s a competent director and that was not the problem with the movie. The problem was the story. What makes X-men stories cool is that usually due to the large number of characters you get compelling A,B, C stories it’s an ensemble thing and X3 failed to achieve this even though the ground work had been done in the first two movies; I was just disappointed with this one.
Ocean’s Twelve – the cast is there, the director is there (everything looked really good and Soderbergh had some fun with the zoom lens in what was clearly a throw back to films of the 70’s), hell they even got David Holmes back to do the sound but the story well it didn’t even seem to care about being there towards the end. Part of what I enjoyed about the first remake was that tounge in cheek approach to the material I mean there was some self referential comedy and play on the “stars” and that was fine but in OT it takes over the damn movie and not in a clever “meta” way. The story the complexities just sort of unravel there at the end so we can get to where we need to be George Clooney in full smug wins again horray. Hopefully lucky number Ocean’s Thirteen will be better.
Stardust Memories – speaking of clever “meta” this Woody Allen movie plays on that angle way before Adaptation got there I think it was even considered “experimental” to the vulgarians back when it was made in 1980. I enjoyed this one. It had all of the trappings of Allen’s films mainly him being overwhelmed by the world and not being able to decide which actress he wants to bang. However, there was something fun in the way he told the story one that I think was a bit more personal than many of the other Allen flicks. I think this personal element lended a certain truth to the artist’s difficulty cliche and made it worth watching for my money.
I also watched The Man Who Would Be King and it was a bit strange but a good one. And Alexander which is connected to The Man Who Would Be King sort of. Alexander seemed compressed and temporally nonlinear for no good reason. As such I took the film as being more about a boy trying to reconcile his love for his antagonist parents rather than a story about Greater things, so it was gets a “meh” from me.
Looking towards the not too distant future I am pretty stoked about Superman Returns. After seeing the first teaser trailer set to the old John Williams score and featuring Brando’s Jor-El I figured they had this continuation (not redo mind you this is not Batman Begins it is more like Superman 3; I guess you have to pretend that Superman III and IV don’t exist, kind of like you’ll have to do for Alien 4 if they ever manage to Resurrect that franchise). Still my cynical side knows that modern popular flicks need modern appeal to draw in the kids and more recent ads for the film featuring the cool looking visual effects set to modern crappy rock music makes me a bit leary. But the man child that I am holds out hope that it’ll be super-awesome. And this is one man-child that thanks to the purchase of Superman The Animated Series (Season 3 finally with Darkseid and one of the coolest end title cards ever see Apokolips Now! )and Justice League DVDs has two free tickets for the flick. So I’ll go see it for free since not to would be Un-American and I will be convicted of thought crimes not sedition. Still, having two tickets means I could take a friend, possibly make it a date? Fuck that! What sort of cheap bastard takes someone on a date using a coupon and to a freakin’ kids movie? Besides I could use the ticket myself to see the movie a 2nd time for free! Greed now that is the American way . . . forget about truth and justice.

*am kind of tired as I write this and I’m doing so to keep myself awake and because this evening after watching Ben Stein talk to a Senate Comittee about retirement plans on C-Span (I tell you what I think I’ll take Meat Wad’s advice and get myself an IRA so I don’t get burned by the capital gains) I was reminded that my Jerry Doyle post was dated. I don’t usually fill my blog with personal crap but figured it could be somewhat apt and well funny as I have hidden many puns and references in the minutia of the text I expect you reader[s] will have fun trying to find them all! If you do, you win a bonafide “No-Prize” true believer. Now it’s off to the cold swimming pool to cure me of this heat.