Day Off

Today is my day off, even though I’m still working. The window is open in my office and outside the sky is still light. Its not entirely warm outside, but its pleasant enough so that I'm thinking I might join a friend for a Frisbee session before it gets too dark. Last summer I was in the park everyday, tossing around a disk, circling the edges on my bike, frolicking in the grass, laying in the sun. thinking back now it seems like such a fun and innocent age, but it was only 8 months ago, I bet I still have some tshirts with stains from then.

Weather [whether?] or not I do hit the park, it’s my day off and my shoulders are looser and my attitude is more at ease. I could sit on the couch and read a book and not feel as If I were missing anything. I could watch television, a repeat even, and yawn during the commercials and daydream during the show and not have a care in the world. The day belongs to me, I can do with it what I will.
My last day off me and the lady went to a movie. We had a few to choose from, because its been an entire season since we have gone to the movies, and settled on Zodiac, a new flick from David Fincher [of Se7ev and Fight Club fame] about the infamous Zodiac Killer that terrorized the bay area in the late 60s and early 70s. I vaguely remember my mother saying something about him when I was still a toddler. Not to me, but to a friend, over a cigarette and a coffee, at our apartment in San Francisco. She didn’t seemed frightened though, and because if that, I never grew concerned of him. Just another nutcase on the loose. The city is full of them.

The movie itself isn’t a cat and mouse chase. It is suspenseful, yes, but it isn’t fast paced. Its slow and deliberate, building on the excruciating tediousness of police work in the age before email and fax machines, cell phones and the internet. The waiting by the phone for someone to call. The waiting by the mailbox for some documents sent 2 days earlier. The busy signals. The human error. Its about these men. Obsessed with a serial killer that taunts them with letters to the newspaper, daring to be caught. A serial killer that takes credit for murders he didn’t commit. A serial killer that is too elusive for evidence, especially when that evidence has to pass through so many different hands, going from department to department, being copied and scratched on, soiled by so many hands. Its about these men, a cop, a newspaper cartoonist, and a journalist, unraveling through all of it. It’s a very good movie. I would see it if I were you. But you can wait until its on dvd.

One of the options we didn’t go for was the movie 300. It looks ok, like a ten dollar spectacle for sure, but I couldn’t bear the testosterone of it all. Too many men fighting. Too many chiseled pecs. Too much yelling. Too much revenge. I will see it eventually, and quite possibly in a theater, but the world wont end if I don’t.

Childeren of Men was a close second choice, were Zodiac to be out of our way or sold out, because its be on my must-see list for such a long time. I have a thing for movies set in a bleak future grounded in modern, plausible worlds. But that itself fell into the “inconvenient” category, so was bumped down on the list to “maybe another day” realms. Third choice was Pans Labyrinth, but for some reason, maybe because it was third on the list, it never got any serious consideration.

But anyway. Now I'm listening to house music. I'm mentally preparing for Miami. I just downloaded [legally!] a bunch of singles and I'm finding a groove. A deep, tribal, west coast groove. I download music to spin now. My main soldier bought Serato for me on a long term loan. Now I have an entire mp3 collection with me when I play. It was very generous of him. I figure now there is going to be a sack of balls in my mouth in the near future. Cest la vie. Cest la vie.