The skies are gray, but a drive from St. Louis this week through the windswept fields and windmill farms of Illinois was pleasant, as was the cinnamon-scented fellow at the front desk of a River North hotel in Chicago, who welcomed us to town.
Wanting answers, we create reductions: I am. She was. The administration will.
If you have ever cared for an addict, you know the desperate feeling of no easy solutions. Science has no inoculation or cure, so treatment is a combination of lengthy and often expensive behavioral and pharmacologic therapies that still depend on “the individual’s desire to change,” as LAM puts it.
How do we get a home biome? By breathing the petrichor, I suppose, breaking out from poison ivy year after year, tasting the dirt and water on our lips, scraping our skin on scrambles, getting local minerals and bacteria in our bloodstream, leaving our sweat on the rocks. Maybe the cells we leave, and what we take with us, give us quantum pairing with these places.
Of course, living alone has few rules—one of its upsides usually—and nobody said you have to be that quiet.
Paul Thomas Anderson’s films always have dark humor, but I have to think he may have felt a greater need to signal satire back then, which plays a little unevenly now.
I looked and looked. It was like looking at another part of myself.
Why is it only certain characters among my friends—the recovered addict who got rich off disaster services, the photographer who did federal time on a RICO conviction, the former scout and paratrooper with traumatic brain injury—tell me they love me? My polite friends, the “normal” ones, the ones with long, seemingly solid marriages and steady white-collar jobs and no priors, do not say such things, despite often having been in my life longer or more directly.
In the best of times it is impossible to know other people fully. Even if we wish to act in good faith, it is hard to express to others who we think we are—and we may not know who we are.
It is a redundancy to say heroism must be shown in inopportune times. The current administration recently put 59 million acres of national forestland at greater risk in an opening salvo of a commodity-mindset war against the environment.
One of the reasons I like the term “novelistic” for these sorts of documentaries is that it stresses how they deal in the mysteries of creation, its meaning, and its emotion. Joel has a song from 1977 called “Vienna,” with the refrain, “When will you realize / Vienna waits for you.”