48 Hours of Flu-Vision

A play by play with pho, gunshots, and movie reviews

I lived in a treehouse once.

Couch nap.

I swear the mail came. I swear there was a package.

Nothing.

Bed nap.

Order pho. Who makes soup for themselves when they are this sick?

I always make soup when Aaron gets sick. Always. I make the soup my mom taught me that her mom taught her. There’s not much I do to carry on our lineage, but this is one thing. I wonder how many generations back made this soup. The great-grandmother who was rich enough as a child to have a person designated as her hair brusher? Or her mother, my double great? Was she too rich for soup making?

It’s a simple chicken soup with a little Italian influence. Nourishing and warm.

The money didn’t make it across the ocean.

Aaron makes me soup, too. But he’s across the country.

Acid Man. One of those quiet, atmospheric, sad movies I love best. A father-daughter love story in the Oregon woods. The father, Lloyd, who seems to have become a little unwound, left his family and his life as an engineer when his kids were in middle school. His daughter, who hasn’t seen him in at least a decade, finds him——ostensibly to check up on him but also because she’s scared to become him. He’s been in the woods with his dog communicating with the local aliens.

Dianna Agron plays Maggie and Thomas Haden Church plays Lloyd, her dad. The complexity and heaviness of their relationship is mirrored in Lloyd’s weird episodes of “losing time.” He freezes mid-conversation, stares blankly. It’s not a perfect movie, but it’s a good slice of big-sky emotion. There are fireworks.

It’s heartbreaking to watch it dawning on her——that he might be too far gone to save. It’s heartbreaking because I watched it happen to my dad. The movie reminds me of my dad, actually, though he was nothing like Lloyd except maybe they both had quiet natures.

Sleep.

Chills.

Hot shower.

Spring rolls, fried tofu.

A Letter for the King, bad fantasy. I only watch 15 minutes, but spend all night, every hour, waking up with new plot points in my head.

My brain so concerned about this child-knight, who is about to risk life and limb to save his mom first, kingdom second. There is a prophecy. My brain tells me that I have to get him to safety.

Another hot shower.

Teeth chattering.

Five blankets, two sweaters. Socks.

Someone in a reflective vest comes to the door but doesn’t knock. In my daze, I think they’ve stolen the mail.

There is no mail in the box. No imagined package.

I throw a ball for Stella-dog, underhanded, and still manage to tweak my already-sore elbow.

Sweating, chills.

Chills, sweating.

Project Runway, season 18. 10 minutes in and already it’s not the same without Heidi and Tim.

Joker, 15 minutes. Looking forward to finishing this. It was a little heavy for my state of mind. I watched a half hour of No. 2, Folie a Deux, on an airplane recently until I realized I’d rather see the first one first.

My favorite Joker is Dave McKean’s from Arkham Asylum

You know those people who can read a book series out of order? Who say “it doesn’t matter” to the plots of the individual books? Nope.

Dungeons & Dragons, 15 minutes. Bad. Though I do like Chris Pine. And I’ll say this: I know nothing about Dungeons & Dragons. Maybe it’s good for fans.

The Martha Stewart documentary is decent. She drops a few good tidbits. The documentary definitely saw her conviction as a witch hunt.

Waiting for my falafel platter.

Luna is staring at the ceiling like there’s something up there. She has these big brown eyes that really look human. Like in the medieval dog painting.

If, in fact, there is something like reincarnation, is it a win to come back as a dog? I was thinking how it would be great if Trump came back, and kept coming back, as a cow’s asshole. All those flies.

Poolman. Ate my platter, tried to watch Chris Pine’s directorial debut and got through 54 minutes. The cast alone made me stick it out that long——Annette Bening, Danny DeVito, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Chris Pine. I wanted to love it. But it was just on the other side of wacky quirkiness. Like the far side. The center did not hold.

A Real Pain. I did not like this movie, but I finished it. I really meant to like it. Wanted to. I surface-liked it, I guess. But, in the end, Kieran Culkin just played a dick who gets away with saying terrible shit because...well I’m not sure? Eisenberg had that pressure-cooker-rumbling-under-the-surface thing that he does and is good at. The movie is about two cousins, Benji and Peter, who go to Poland after their grandma dies to explore their family history. They go with a tour group, and Benji constantly says and does shitty things that everyone forgives him for because he’s “deep” or something. But he’s really just being shitty. He isn’t kind to his cousin when it comes down to it; he’s selfish; he says whatever comes into his head without mitigation. I didn’t find his character to be complex in a charming way. Nor was there any kind of arc.

At one point in the movie Peter explains why he takes medication: My sadness is not exceptional, he says. This is true. We all feel sadness.

But there’s a flip side. We can’t bury our sadness away either. Cause that’s a pressure cooker gone nuclear.

Maybe the point is that identifying too strongly with your sadness makes you a monster and not identifying enough with it makes you afraid to live.

Lots of coughing.

Thirty-eight gunshots two streets away.

How we become inured to gunshots is something else. The dogs don’t even lift their heads. But, listen, 38 shots is brazen. Not normal by any stretch. Still, the fact that I’m just casually thinking about it is fucked up.

The flu is progressing like a well-worn recipe. It’s comforting to have something recognizable, to be able to say, “Oh, this’ll find its way out of me in 3-4 days, and it’ll look like this.”

Today will be the kind of day where I’ll feel guilty if I don’t try and do some work.

Except now I’ve had to take a muscle relaxer because the neck was cramping up——probably from sleeping on two thick pillows all week in order to, you know, breathe.

Thank you and good night.