Still Almost Victorious

The gym, that didn’t happen.  Work, accomplished early against the week’s looming deluge?  No.  Wasn’t meant to be.  “Star Wars:  The Last Jedi”?  This happened.  Somehow I was able to get the draft proposal I said I’d do, off to folks on time and then, we had to go.  Lacing up my shoes I noticed we had other more egregious dawdlers.  My younger one was driving things and she was frantic that we’d be late.

My wife graciously dropped my little one, my step son and I off at the theatre.  She’d go park.  I assumed we’d be walking in mid-Skellig-stroll but fortunately the start time was turned out to be fifteen minutes later than we expected.  A lady in a black tee shirt opened another register and cutting quickly I clarified with the oblivious mom who presumed to ignore the rest of us in line, that I’d be engaging the gal behind the counter, first, if you don’t mind? 

My daughter bought the four movie tickets with her membership card.  I had no idea how she properly secured any such membership.  She explained quickly that she’d gotten it with her mother, with her friends.  “Everyone has one.” No matter.  She had points.  We have tickets.  We got sweetened popcorn, which is all they offer and my daughter got a bag of what looked like fried dough twists that seemed far worse, somehow, than sweetened popcorn and I told her as much. 

The movie, well . . .  I felt as though I were being experimented on by a studio surgeon whose objective was to keep me at pre-climax, maximum tension for as long as he or she possibly could, narrative be damned.  How much more interesting it might have been if good and evil were more convincingly obscured, but as it is, the dark side is still almost victorious.  But they just can’t quite snuff out the light of hope of the resistance.  And you notice how utterly bankrupt and hollow that seems, like amateurish propaganda.  The old things you love: light sabres, the millennium falcon, the x-wing fighters are all back.  Along with terrible things you used to hate are available for the two-minute-hate, and as the next, final, battle commences and you are asked, one last time to please, please, for the Force, for your ten-year-old self, suspend disbelief.  I couldn’t begin to. 

Sunday, 01/07/17