Down the Rabbit Hole

I go further down the rabbit hole.  It must get worse before it gets better.  Maybe I've passed the halfway point where it is better to continue on than to run around and try to go back.  It is a long journey, I think, not a weekend's outing. 

So I've locked the doors and pulled the shades yet again, and I've turned down all invitations.  I have HD and movies and more books than I can read.  I'm glad the lens on my camera is broken.  There will be no more shooting for a while.  

Last night, I watched a movie that has not been available until recently, "Harry and Tonto."  I saw it in college and it has been a touchstone for me, for it is a movie I had recommended it to my father who went to see it.  My father did not go to movies and so I was shocked that he went to see this one.  Perhaps he went because Art Carney was in it.  I don't know.  But his reaction was not what I expected.  

I am often disappointed by movies I watched in college and thought were great.  Most do not hold up.  I was fully prepared to turn off "Harry and Tonto" if it wasn't what I remembered.  It wasn't, perhaps, but I didn't turn it off.  If nothing else, it is a nice portrait of the era in many ways.  I could feel what it meant to be alive then.  The country was different physically and spiritually.  It was not young, the country.  It was old and worn, much like Harry.  Yet there was a nascent spirit that was about to give birth to something else.  You could feel that it was coming though you couldn't imagine how it was going to turn out.  The destruction of the past (Harry's apartment building), the forced outing, the broken families, the fractured sense of community are presented with subtlety.  

And there were simple things I've forgotten.  Hitchhiking.  Harry takes a fifteen year old runaway along with him, introduces her to his grandson who has been taking hallucinogens and helps them run away to a commune in Boulder.  Giving them his car, he takes to the road by thumb himself.  He gets picked up by a hooker in a convertible, goes to Vegas, gets drunk and thrown in jail, meets old men selling herbal remedies and an Indian shaman.  It all seemed so normal.  And it was real.  Soon after seeing the film, I had most of those experiences myself. 

There are surprising parts to the movie as well such as a used car salesman who takes strychnine in order to get an erection in the pre-viagra days and Harry having trouble getting through airport screening not much different than today's.   

I've written this so badly and I can't go back to fix it.  These are notes for real writing, I think, and not writing itself.  

I just wanted to say I watched the movie last night.  It is available to stream on Netflix, but I don't think you will be as enamored as I.  

Oh, and my father was angrier at me than he had ever been at me.  My father and mother had been divorced for five years, part of which I lived with him.  Now he lived alone in a small duplex and I was in another town.  I wanted my father to have adventures, to take to the road, to start over somehow.  But he was angry.  All he saw was an old man with a cat, I guess.  We never think we are old, maybe.  

 

Though last night, watching a movie I had last seen in college, lying on the couch in the dark at midnight alone, I saw the damned thing through different lenses.  And I was sure I was.