What? No mention of Bill Murray or Rats?

I very nearly took up running this week. It was really a close call.

To be honest I know I should do it. Really, I should. But who the hell wants to crawl out of bed around six a.m. to get in, let's say, half an hour of running and get home, shower, and get the kids ready for the day?

I have the tendency to set the alarm early and then hit snooze for around an hour or so at nine minute increments. I clearly do not have the discipline to take up running.

This crucial self-knowledge is mixed, however, with the belief that running is perhaps one of the more effective methods for burning calories and therefore reducing my stubborn weight.

On a completely unrelated note, I simply cannot get Death Cab for Cutie's "I Will Follow You into the Dark" out of my head.

Thank you, NetFlix, from whom all blessings flow.

Dig on this.

In keeping with the Bill Murray theme, my wife and I watched Broken Flowers via our netflix supply line last night. It's Bill Murray playing that character he's perfected: detached, ironic, deadpan aging man unsure of his direction in life and behaving more as an observer than as an active participant in the world around him. It's also by Jim Jarmusch, which means you don't get a clear beginning, middle, and end with the handy Hollywood resolution. In fact, you get so little resolution that you marvel that it's an American film at all (then you see that it won the Grand Prix at Cannes in 2005 and suddenly things make more sense).

The plot is set in motion when Don Johnston (Bill Murray), a confirmed bachelor successfully retired from the computer industry and seemingly resolved to spend the rest of his days lying on his sofa watching television, receives a mysterious letter purporting to be from a former girlfriend twenty years in the past, in which the writer claims that they had a son together who at 19 years is now on a quest to find his father. The letter is brought to his attention by his current girlfriend (Julie Delphy), as she dumps him and walks out the door. His detective fiction loving neighbor, Winston, takes charge and dictates Johnston's actions that drive the movie forward. At Winston's urging, Johnston compiles a list of his girlfriends from that time, and Winston locates the four living ones (and the one dead one) and dispatches Johnston on a quest to visit each of the four and "look for clues" as to who wrote the letter.

It's brilliant. He visits each, with each encounter getting more uncomfortable and confrontational, culminating in his visit to Penny (Tilda Swinton). The cast of former flames is pretty impressive: Sharon Stone, Frances Conroy, Jessica Lange, and Tilda Swinton all in relatively short but emotionally charged roles (Julie Delphy, whose character dumps him at the beginning of the movie, is on screen for perhaps one minute).

The camera keeps playing tricks with the viewer, though, inserting repetitive images (for example, Johnston's drives to and from each encounter involve the road changing from interstate, to secondary highway, to backroad and vice versa) and ambiguous visual clues (he's been told to look for pink, since the letter writer used pink stationery: all of his ex-flames have several pink items around them).

By the end of the film, I was left thinking of The Crying of Lot 49 and some of the more interesting movies of the last decade that play with memory and perception, like Memento or Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Although, more like the Pynchon novel than like the films, because in the end, you haven't unraveled anything.

Rats.

Seriously, how the fck does this happen?

Now on to other things...


I can't get rats off my mind. First, it's my bad dreams. Then it's reality, with Rove resigning and then shitbags like Novak and of all people Grover Norquist, Mr. "Sure I'll Launder Your Money, Mr. Abramoff", waxing pathetic over their King Rat Rove. You just can't get away from the rodents in this city.


On the good side of it all, the Post had an interesting article today about how the French have taken to Disney's Ratatouille, a movie I haven't seen yet, but which my wife and son pronounced excellent. Rodents are always much cleverer, cleaner, and cuter when they're animated.


In real life, on the other hand, when they aren't in high positions on the right wing of our government, they're burrowing holes in backyards and rooting around in trash bins making a general mess of everything.


And you can smell them.


Especially when the ground is wet, there's a distinct smell to dirt that has seen frequent rat activity, which I suppose is where the phrase, "I smell a rat," came from. It's a loathsome smell, and right now I'm smelling it in my backyard. I'm not happy.


I'm also not happy that in the last two traps I've put out I haven't caught rats, but birds. I don't like catching birds, so after those incidents I declared a moratorium on rat trap deployment. My neighbor says you need to use a milk crate to cover the trap and then you'll only get rats. I don't know. I'm thinking the best solution is to rent a bobcat and dig up the entire backyard, pour concrete barriers about four feet deep around the perimeter of the yard, erect fencing with mesh so close not even a rat could slip through, and then sit back and enjoy my bunker.


Seriously, though, the backyard is in bad shape. It's overgrown with weeds (which partially explains the rat situation) and since it's been a drought, I've had to get under the deck frequently to access the water hose, meaning I haven't exactly been fastidious with replacing my anti-rat panels that are normally in place to prevent rats from hiding out under the deck.


And now I'm obsessing. I'm turning into Carl the Groundskeeper.

Auf Wiedersehen, Karl Rove

So Karl has decided to call it quits. Like a rat streaming off a sinking ship, Rove is working hard to distance himself from the final months of a forlorn presidency. Will his success as an evil genius of campaigning overcome his ignominy as the "architect" of failed policies and dirty tricks? My guess is yes, and his services will be in high demand and handsomely rewarded, because he knows his Machiavelli very well. It's probably safer for him anyway to sit on the sidelines while his former boss, wandering ever more frequently in the realm of the unreal world, implodes.

Already, I see Karl spinning strategies to deal with the Democratic nominee for President, whomever that may end up being. Attack ads with vague allusions to "America's mongrel future" should Obama be nominated; attack ads with vague allusions to "Hillary's homosexual agenda" should she be nominated. Etc.

Let's see if the Rove exit sparks a mass exodus of rats trying to save their careers...

Rodents are attacking my brain.

I'm dreaming of rats and mice far too much for my liking. Earlier this week, I had a dream in which the wall between our neighbors' house and ours was missing several flights of bricks in the basement and I could see several mice scrambling to get up out of the ditch between the basements. They kept slipping back down into the ditch, but it was only a matter of time...

More disturbing was last night's dream, in which I was walking along a dam made of sticks (much like a beaver dam) and several drowned rats and mice were in the water at the breast of the dam. However, on closer inspection, many of the mice weren't actually dead and were instead beginning to recover and then even worse the rats were starting to recover. I tried to smash one with a shovel, but it got away.

Man I hate rats.

Open casting call for extras in an anti-meth public service spot.

We spent tonight down on ye olde Ocean City pier, or at least the pier end of the boardwalk. Now even as a kid I never really liked the area around the pier, but as an adult I can say I thoroughly despise it. The rides and games are tremendously overpriced ($5 to throw 3 darts at balloons), and then there are the people who hang out down there...

Seriously, tatoos on the neck, half-turned baseball caps, and thin thin facial hair should more or less be enough to land you a bit part in some crime show as "meth addict #2," except there would be so many of your fellow derelicts competing for the role.

And then you have the twelve year old girls wearing more paint than a Van Gogh and looking like they're trying to land the Jodie Foster role in a remake of Taxi Driver. I can only hope that when my daughter reaches that age, we'll have instilled in her a healthy self-respect and ability to sneer at the crowd. Or at least the ability to sneer.

More stories as I get them.

Another day at the beach

So this week I've been enjoying a fine week in the city by the sea, Ocean City, Maryland. You take the good with the bad, of course, so along with the sand, sun, and surf, you put up with, for lack of a better term, the redneck showcase that is OCMD.

Whether it's the multitude of Confederate flag themed t-shirts both in the shops and on the backs of the boardwalkers or the constant parade of jackasses hawking tobacco loogies out of their jacked up pickups, you can't avoid them.

I suppose you could say I'm being elitist, if of course you define anti-racist, anti-sexist attitudes as elitist. Oh well. Seriously, though, the preponderance of racist, sexist merchandise speaks to the market for such trinkets, and that in turn indicates that we've much work to do as a society before we're ready to put the Civil Rights movement behind us, despite what this Supreme Court claims.