07.05.04 - 11:45 a.m.

I took my parents to the airport yesterday for their vacation. I'm picking them up in two weeks. There was considerable speculation that the president's visit would seriously disrupt my parents' flight. Last time he was at the capitol, they closed the interstate and Greenbrier Street, the only street leading up to the airport. We didn't have any problems, though. Greenbrier Street was lined with cops and the Charleston street department set up barriers on all the feeder streets to Greenbrier so that you couldn't turn onto (or off of) those streets. I have no idea why they did that.

Anyway, it was a damn sleepy Sunday morning, and they had an extra two hours to sit around at the airport. I didn't stay to wait with them. Instead - since I was in Charleston anyway - I WENT SHOPPING. Woo! For a lawn mower.

...among other things.

I didn't actually buy a lawn mower. I just went and walked around Lowe's and wrote down prices. I was going to do that at Sears and Home Depot, too, but I didn't feel like driving all the way to Barboursville for Home Depot, and I more or less saw the prices on the mowers at Sears when I went there looking for new towels.

Oh, yes. I didn't confine myself to immediate and practical necessities. I went crazy, in a middle-aged mother of three sort of way. Snort. Well, I studied the Sunday ads, and several things jumped out at me. Towels and sheets on sale, at Sears and J.C. Penney's. I decided I wanted a new set of each, and there were pretty cheap. Except I didn't know what color I'm going to do my bathroom, so instead of picking one color, I picked four different, super-bright colors: lime green, strippa pink, bright caribbean blue, and butter yellow for the towels. For the sheets, I just got a nice neutral color. I was going to buy a higher-end set, but these felt as nice as the higher-end set, and I'll wait until I paint my bedroom to pick out the sheet colors. I think I want yellow and red. Pretty yellow and red! Except, when I was at the mall, I saw this gorgeous bedding set from the Bombay Company in gray greens with sparkly bits and beading and embroidery and so on. Holy mother of god: those colors are me.

So, that's all I planned to get, but then I saw a Chicago Cutlery knife set on sale, 1/2 price. My knives are cheap $20 knives from K-mart, purchased years ago. I'm not moving them now, I'm throwing them away. I can't wait to use my new knives. I also found a new, hard anodized non-stick cooking set. It was less than half-price, and came with a $20 rebate offer, so... yeah. Rebate me! I picked up a new phone and some new small appliances, a coffee pot, hand mixer, and mmm. Something else. Toaster! Then I stopped and picked up some new clothes, on a huge sale. I mean, I got a new pair of nice microfiber pants for work - grayish - for $7. Yeesh. The blouses, etc. were a little more, but I also picked up some opaque gray tights for $2 a piece. I'm not sure that I have anything with which to wear them, but I'll find something. That is seriously cheap.

So, after this orgy of consumerism and materialism, I had a (very few) people over. I wonder about someone like me who still has parties at her parents' house when they're gone. I'm kidding! It wasn't a party. I just made pina coladas (and, I would like to say, having made my own, that they are easy and there is absolutely no reason for anyone in the whole wide world to buy the mix. The ingredients are minor and cheaper to buy separately than it is to buy the mix.) and we had pizzaria uno pizza. I've decided that I much prefer individual pizzas to their larger versions of the same. There's more of the crispy crust that I love.

Now I'm sitting here, having fixed breakfast and cleaned up from breakfast, waiting for the laundry to dry because I will have to go completely naked if it doesn't. Because I have nothing clean to wear other than the clothes I bought yesterday and my nightgown. AKA - no clean underwear. I'm drinking coffee and listening to the White Stripes and contemplating the bizarre Swedish movie I saw last night: Songs from the Second Floor.

Okay, the thing is, I have a high tolerance for the bizarre, particularly the arty-farty bizarre in the european manner. One of the blurbs on the cover said that this was "Ingmar Bergman meets Monty Python," which sounded freakin' promising to me. It's not the movie you start watching at 11 p.m. when you're pretty tired and just want something to grab you, though. Absolutely not.

This absolutely bizarre series of tableaux, set in this gray, ugly, nameless city populated by dour-faced men and women, in a state of what is apparently near-economic collapse, where business acumen is worshipped above all else, and nothing makes any sense once the business climate collapses. There is an endless traffic jam through the city, and a parade of businessmen and women as flagellants, a la the crazy medieval sect that arose during the plague years and went around scourging themselves to end the plague. See - though? If you didn't know about the flagellants, that visual (which is the center of one scene, and keeps showing up in others) would lack some of its resonance.

So: traffic jam, flagellants, what else? One of my favorite scenes: an employee who hasn't missed a day in fourteen years shows up to work and is fired. He holds onto his boss's leg as the boss tries to slide down this long hallway lined with doors. The man keeps wailing this pathetic little mantra. Eventually, he lets go and the boss walks the rest of the way. All the doors in the hallway close at once.

There's a businessman who burns down his furniture store, who is haunted by the ghost of Sven, a man to whom he owed money, and then gathers more ghosts. Some kid killed by the Germans in Russia, who never said "I'm sorry" to his sister. The ghost of a blindfolded girl - the "flower of youth" thrown off a cliff onto sharp rocks as sacrifice by the old men and women. He periodically visits his deeply depressed son in the mental hospital, and believes that his son - an adult, the older of two - drove himself crazy by writing poetry. The younger of the two recites these strange imperatives. Blessed be the one who sits down. They feel bizarre the first time you hear them, but a few - like that one - gain resonance, repeated through the course of the vignettes.

I didn't like the movie last night, especially didn't like the first half, but the longer it sits in my mind, the more strange connections I see, the more I like it. The people testing the rocks onto which the girl is going to be thrown. The old man discussing fate. The general in his barred-bed, rattling the bars while the military leaders come and read him a speech about life and roads and journeys and history and traditions. The old man gives them a Nazi salute. Later, in the middle of the night, he is still rattling the bars, calling out for help.

There are another pair of men escaping: rich men, lovers maybe? The fat guy and the balding redhead. The fat guy carries around his favorite golf club covered in a pale blue crocheted cover even to lunch or dinner. They make it to the airport, or bus station, at some point, and engage in this slow motion race - the most visually astonishing and arresting scene, I think - with dozens of other people with luggage carts loaded so high and so full that they can barely move. Hence, the slow motion race. The fat man's golf clubs fall off the top of the pile and spill onto the ground. They are ahead, but stopping to clean up the golf clubs - so slowly, so slow - and others start to catch up. Someone nearby - just behind them - calls out encouragement. They have a strange conversation.

The most sensual scene: the furniture salesman's second son stands behind his wife. She has a recorder in her mouth, and is blowing, but he's the one playing the notes, his arms around her shoulders, crouched just over her, fingers on the instruments, this lovely, eerie tune rising. People will care about poetry again, he tells his brother, later. Two other inmates in the asylum talk nearby, about how the older brother's problem is that he doesn't have a head for business.

...and so on. I want to better assimilate the film. I want to watch it again, but I don't have time right now. I'm supposed to be moving, and I'm not sure what I'll get if I watch it again. More connections, more of the mystery, but will it make me like it better than I (quite unexpectedly) like it now? I don't know: solving the mystery might take away some of the delightful puzzle, the seeding, the way it settles in your mind and sort of starts to recede and little throw-away tableaux start to take root, gain in meaning and stature, become invested, infested with resonance. Man. Gorgeous.