A Snapshot of a What Has to Be a Marriage

So after a movie at the Arclight Hollywood, Lenspeaks and I escalated and ambled into the in-house eatery. It was pretty empty tonight unlike most Saturdays, no doubt due to televised games and Halloween Pre-parties so I had a clear view of the table next to us. In between bites of my salad and sips of sparkling white wine, I glanced over to a scene out of Citizen Kane, the one of the anti-hero and his wife sharing a silent dinner of cold contempt--before the table got longer and longer. I had the impression my non-celluloid couple were well to do, something about his crisp blazer and starched open at the neck shirt and the way she ate the grapes from her cheese plate spoke "slumming from Bel Air". They said not a word for at least the twenty or more minutes I observed them. He dipped his chips in salsa with a smirk and she posited her hair behind her ear non-chalantly with one hand, while switching to a nibble of an unseemingly large and drooping piece of brie--no cracker required.

Then, there was communication of sorts . He had been drinking coffee. She deliberately reached over to his side where he had placed his mug and swooped it to herself, cupping it with both hands but not yet drinking it. His body was now at an angle so that he no longer was facing her. She seemed disappointed by the sweetener selection but resigned to one.

And then, he gestured with two well manicured fingers a sign that it was time to leave, the check having been settled by him alone, a traditionalist he must be. And they left, in single file, ample space between them.

Surely, these two have separate bedrooms. Or will.

Another Change of Direction

In this blog, anyway. I don't do much changing of direction in my regular life, alas. Not complainin' really. An observation.

Which brings me to: still feel I haven't a real focus in these pages. I started out, probably more on a political-philosophical note. Went toward the religious. And then was sort of wandering around in these entries. What am I trying to do here?

Maybe I should not try so hard, as if I am competing with the hoarde of writers out there, most probably better than I am. Try to just be without goal here. Just to write. Just to write. Not a journal precisely, because that sort of writing requires privacy, and heck we know THIS isn't private. But to what?

Observe and then write. Observe and then write, write what comes to me without agenda. It doesn't have to be urgent. Or profound. Just little recordations of life around me, that is probably life around everyone. So. There you are. There I am. We shall see what the future entries bring. I shall be uncharacteristically zen about it, and maybe something or another will intrigue a reader along the way.

Cellular Narcissists Among Us

Cell phones are an inevitable. We can't go back. We probably shouldn't want to, for every society must advance if it is to survive, and thrive. What they also are, however, is another opportunity for people with sad self images to seek the attention they crave, even if that attention is cultivated by irritating others.

We all have experienced it. At the beginning of a play, or any public event, the audience is reminded to shut off their devices. And at a critical denouement, off goes a phone. You figure the person will rush to silence it for surely he is embarrassed. But no. It goes on. It goes on. It goes on.

I have seen it even in a Church. As a Catholic, there is the moment when the priest raises the unconsecrated host and with Grace and intermediary prayer, there is the Transubstantiation, the God made Man is there, Present. And a cell rings. Tatata tatata tatata da! Over and over.
The ultimate human desecration of the Transcendent. Is there any shame? Or does the person bring his phone again, the next week. Neither man, nor God, will inhibit the incoming call.

Why do I think of our cellular narcissists today? I was in Barnes and Noble rummaging in the newly relocated biography section, by the Starbuck's Cafe. A man was talking as loudly as he possibly could. I assumed there was a live body next to him receiving the monologue, but no, he was on the phone. He was regaling the other side of the line with his business dealings, and surely making sure that others knew of his self-perceived success. Lately, I find the noise of our society is bothering me more and more, and with that bother comes an anger at how readily all of us surrounding a man like this, walking up and down and shouting his self for all to apprehend, are dismisssed so that he may absorb all life around him to satisfy a hole within. All sorts of remonstrations bounced in my head I wished to offer him, but I knew he would never receive them as fair critiques.

But of course, this is just a nit of a bigger problem of the generation in which there is an I but no thou, in which morality is a laugh and breaching the social contract is a given since the rights of the me always take precedence over the rights of the other.

On the way to work the other day, I saw a man, neatly dressed, on the corner of Vermont and Beverly Boulevard here in Los Angeles, preaching repentance, in Spanish. People were avoiding him. A crazy man, no doubt. As crazy as John the Baptist, eh? How did I get from the cell phone to the end times? I don't know. Just feels like one of those signs of a culture in decay. Not the phone itself of course, but how we are in relation to it and each other.