Off to the Granite Town

Last night was a night away from home.  I went and saw Arrival.  Nice take on the science fiction genre. They’re here is the mantra of this film but it is not a phrase of horror exactly.  I think most of the theatre left scratching their head.  Arrival had a Terrance Malick feel to it but with a more accessible overall nature.

When we got back to the room here in the Forrest City we watched an old John Wayne film, the Shootist.  It was fun to see this again.  Good acting from John Wayne and Lauren Bacall.  The movie was really a solid mediation on mortality and fame.  Geesh you think John Wayne was trying to say something as he was approaching his death from lung cancer?

About midnight I headed off to sleep.  My dreams were odd.  That is not to say that my dreams ever follow a normal path.  The first dream that I had was of writing a children’s’ book. It was about four hedgehogs who were heading down to a frozen pond to play hockey. It was a warm fuzzy tale of team work and overcoming adversity. They were of course playing their arch rivals the weasels.

Must be because I am in Canada, eh?

The other dream that I remember, and I know there were many more that I do not have even the traces of to cogently put down, was about reading over my senior yearbook.  Of course, it was not really my high school senior yearbook but some phantasm yearbook that my mind concocted.  As I looked through the pictures the AV club shot looked like something out of a Fritz Lang silent movie with odd and painful looking gear. I kept thinking if I knew then what I know about now about life and about the people in these shots how differently I would have behaved.

My thought is that this dream was occasioned by seeing The Shootist.  There is a part where Lauren Bacall is trying to get the gunfighter Wayne is playing to meet with her minister.  Wayne says something along the line that his church is the mountains and the sky of the high country and that he is pretty content with who he is and what he has done.  Content is not the right term.  He is accepting of those things, yes that seems more like what was communicated by the words, the stance and the tone.

Yeah, maybe I would have behaved differently if I knew some of the facts of human behavior I have learned over the years, but nobody gets that chance do they?

In a short time, I will be headed off to the tiny town of St. Mary’s and then a little bit later I will head on to Stratford.  Backroads Ontario away from people and lustful consumerism, that is where I need to be today.